Thoughts on Art Tap Out, Failed State and Gender Outlaws the Next Generation
Posted on March 26, 2010 by azdelslade
This has already been such a crazy year, and its going to continue to be packed with things I’m excited about! This month Elle and I published a new transreal story on version.org, and showed our work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego last night!
I’m also incredibly happy to share that I’m going to have a piece of writing included in Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman’s new book Gender Outlaws, the Next Generation. I’m really so honored to be in this book. Kate was a huge inspiration to me and her ideas continue to prove to be both radical and deeply important. I’m just ecstatic and can’t wait to have this book in my hands. There also a ton of other amazing authors that I’m so, so happy to be alongside in this book, which will hopefully be out in August.
In April, we have a lot going on as well. Elle and I will be giving a talk at the Failed State conference discussing the Transborder Immigrant Tool and our upcoming project virus.circus.
Then, the next day, Elle and I will be doing a short performance at Amy Adler’s studio in Los Angeles as part of Queer Pile Up organized by Darin Klein and Suzanne Wright. I can’t wait to join the whole beautiful queer milieu!
Art Tap Out was fun, even if it was a bit scary and tough at times, thanks to the straight up transphobia of one audience member who started with “I’m from a consvervative state…”. Really, it was great. I was happy that the discussion really demonstrated in a way that our piece, technésexual, elicited strong feelings from the audience. The most frustrating thing was that the sound was so poor and the video was compressed from HD to SD. The sound was played through such poor speakers that the main part of the sound, the heartbeat, was almost inaudible, when during the live performance it should be pounding loud enough that you feel it. Seriously, if you were there last night, watch the video on vimeo with decent headphones or speakers and you’ll have a totally different experience. My favorite part about the night was when the critic tried to say that live nude bodies have no emotional emotional impact anymore, but then refused to take his clothes off after Edward urged him to from the audience. Then another audience member called out “your reluctance just proves the power of the gesture!” Or maybe my favorite part was when he was insisting that the audience was just going to go home and forget about the whole thing, and then the bell rang to end the performance and the audience refused to go home and insisted that they could stay and keep discussing the piece. Nice. Hopefully someone has some video from last night, but I’ll try to post some photos as well.
Photo by Omar Pimienta
wish i could have made it to see you perform live – but this article certain helps to bring it a little closer – really nice work & thnx for sharing.
Yeah, i wish i was there too! seems like it was a lot of fun/excitement. really good to read about all your upcoming work! the book and the shows. I’m glad you+elle been on the move so much, showing and talking in all different sorts of venus. Go Go GO!
Oh how I WISH you two were there! As Lu said “they were out for blood”, or at least a lot of them were. But there definitely emerged an argument within the audience, with some people passionately defending our work and some people seriously dissing it.
And Holly, it wasn’t a live performance of technésexual, we just showed a video of it and discussed it as part of David White’s Art Tap Out. I really have to applaud David for his brilliant idea to bring the public into the discussion about art, because in a lot of ways it was incredibly effective.
“…live nude bodies have no emotional emotional impact anymore”
If you hadn’t taken what I said out of context (or at least listened entirely to the point I was making), yes nude bodies in a museum or even gallery context (which was my point) no longer have any emotional impact anymore on an audience. The sanctity of the institution coopts any “bad boy” or “political” envelope pushing. I would even go as far to say that it is all rather redundant and uninspiring – simply unoriginal, no matter how many bells & whistles you add to it.
Thanks for replying Kevin, I’m happy to keep the discussion going.
We’re definitely not trying to be “bad boys” at all. I do understand that your point was more about the safety of the museum context than just the question of nudity. Yet I still think that you’re failing to see the complexity of the politics of the piece. For one, as I said in the discussion, it’s not just a question of live nude bodies, but live sex acts, which are still a limit condition in many contexts, from academia to techno culture to the art world, as we have experienced in numerous ways. Your discussion about our piece demonstrated how people try to claim that sex is other than art, when you said “isn’t it just sex?” And as we said, it’s not just sex, it’s performance art, its new media art and its developing a new medium, mixed reality performance art. It’s clearly in dialog with a number of artistic traditions from feminist art to performance and new media to the long, long history of sex in art, from picasso’s sex worker models to egon schiele’s erotic drawings.
As for the politics of the piece, I definitely think that the open transphobia hostility from the audience demonstrated clearly the way that the politics of the piece are challenging to people.
I also feel that to say that the biometrics and networked aspects of the performance are bells and whistles is just to continue your reductive thinking about the piece instead of seeing it for the expansive theoretical/artistic project that it is and instead of grasping the contemporary dialogs about networked performance and the evolution of performance art through the creatino of new interfaces for creating sound, as one audience member pointed out so eloquently.
Lastly, I wanted to say that night before the ball rang that your critique about our piece being self-indulgent and exhibitionist is a very old critique that has been made against feminist artists for forty years, so perhaps you should familiarize yourself more with those old debates. It was generally frustrating throughout the night how people continued to use old simplistic arguments about sexual content in art against both Suzanne and us instead of engaging in an informed discussion about decades old efforts to reclaim female sexuality as a form of empowerment.
I’d love to hear from more people about the piece, so join in and lets continue the dialog!
Here is what I think.
The way a lot of people think about art is stuck on ‘ What is art? ‘ — and by extention of that logic ‘ Is it art? ‘ or ‘How is it art? ‘. What was up for discussion concerning technésexual were the qualtiy of its eroticness, the ability to arouse (emotional impact), redundancy, originality, inspiration etc…. With each side pushing these qualities one way or the other in order to fit it into the arguement of ‘ What is art? How is it art? ‘.
As Micha was saying “Your discussion about our piece demonstrated how people try to claim that sex is other than art, when you said “isn’t it just sex?” And as we said, it’s not just sex, it’s performance art, its new media art and its developing a new medium, mixed reality performance art.” So when the man in the room said that ” I’m from a conservative state……….. I don’t find it arousing. ” His logic would of been something close to the line of “I am aware of the fact that people can hear my accent and by extention all the connations that go with it, but I will say that I don’t find it arousing (replace with any qualifier) because it is about sex and art. So if I don’t find it arousing then it can’t function as an artwork. “.
The majority of the discussion was stuck in that logic, going back and forth. It never significantly touched on technésexual AS art, that is to say how art lends itself to technésexual or how everyone in that room USES art.
I sense we’re in for a long discussion here without much understanding. But first things first, and sorry to keep correcting misconceptions, but Art TapOut was not David White’s brainchild, nor was it his unique and sole idea. The concept was originated by me, proposed to David, and refined through a long standing mutual collaboration (with him) to bring art back into the public realm through dialog. I’m grateful that we are both able to continue this process.
It’s a collaborative idea like the rest of the event and most things agitprop. I feel what works well with ATO is the the significant contributions made by everybody, audience included. It always amazes me how the audience responds, some positive, some negative but it does seem that people really want to engage and talk about art and think critically about interesting/challenging work when given the right context. More thoughts here:
http://agitpropspace.org/2010/03/art-tap-out-3-mcasd-afterthoughts-from-the-ref/
I missed the performance/discussion but watched the video done at Duke. I’ve spent time in Second Life, as a Resident and a researcher, and I’ve been a performing artist. Micha’s work with the platform and the trans- theme really does eclipse what most people (and artists) are able to critique thoughtfully. It’s new media. And with new media comes first, what Janet Murray coined, “additive forms.” Additive forms use the grammars, the thinking and critiques of traditional forms to work with and understand the new media. Micha’s already working within the new media as “expressive forms” and thus formulating new grammars and thinking.
She’s doing something conceptually ground-breaking and historically relevant. First, she manifests Haraway’s cyborg and Butler’s gender performance via a contemporary technology that IS all about being cyborg and performing identity. While online communities since their inception in the late 70s have always been soocio-techno platforms for identity performance, with each new technology comes novel forms of performances. Indeed, embodying a fully customizable avatar in Second Life should be seen as a new form of personhood. There’s plenty of research on identity in online communities to look at on this.
Second, she then takes it a step farther by exposing the trans-ness of material and virtual selves through doing transgender and sex in the meat space and the virtual space. The politic of this is clear to me because in the virtual realm, identity is fluid, but experience is real because “experience can be nothing but real” (Markham, 1998). It is however removed from body politics enough to warrant some discourse around it. I think this is what Micha and Elle did with exposing the materiality of their political bodies. They created a space to examine contemporary bodies trangressing conventional bodies.
http://online.wsj.com/video/badu-new-amerykah-part-two/14AE615F-FE00-4AB7-977D-50C2FA5CA8DB.html
Thank you j for posting the Badu video link. This is my point exactly. Nudity and sex in the public or private domain is barely shocking and hardly progressive these days. I will give Badu props though, for taking it to the streets and not shooting the video in a gallery or museum.
http://forbezdvd.com/cod.php?v=MTE0ND
or another video by PopEater
Oh, Kevin. I did not state a rational for posting her video. And in that I understand your response to not reflect my intentions. So, I will take this as an opportunity to clarify.
While the media hyped it up (Badu), expressing the Huston mayor’s negative response, stating that no children were present during the impromptu shooting etc. her message was completely removed from the public discourse. I would strongly disagree that the naked gesture of a feminist, black woman walking down the street of her hometown is “hardly progressive” . I believe that disregarding the impact of female bodies and queer bodies reclaiming themselves in public spaces based on a shock value criteria is deeply diverging from a feminist discourse. Placing the body politics into a marginal subtext. @ Kevin Is this your intention? to not engage in discourse about feminist and queer body politics?