YAYOI KUSAMA'S SELF-OBLITERATION (1967)

Happy Holidays everyone (anyone? Not sure how often this thing gets read, haha). Despite the holiday season, my interest in weird video art marches on. Today’s post is not particularly holiday-esque by my standards – although if this blend of orgies, 1960s psychedelia, and phallus-shaped objects is at all indicative of your holiday, I commend you – but it strikes me that I can’t really continue without discussing Yayoi Kusama. Kusama’s entire body of work definitely has a large, highly influential place in the body-as-fluid framework I’m attempting to explore; indeed, I feel as if her work, alongside Schneemann’s Fuses (discussed earlier) act somewhat as two originary nodes to the theories I’m attempting to explore. Both were mentioned frequently throughout Jonathan Katz’s lecture “Art, Sex, and the 1960s: Body Politics,” which was a large inspiration for this blog. And additionally if this was a different project – aka, had I more time! – I would need to delve deeply into the literature surrounding countercultural body/performance art developed in the 1960s, as the political/philosophical/cultural heritage provided by that era is extremely important and fascinating! 

Still from the film - Kusama and her polka-dots

            So, Yayoi Kusama’s Self Obliteration was made in 1967 – and it ultimately acts as a productive way of showcasing a wide variety of her installations and sculptures while she (and others) perform throughout them. Many of her infamous works make appearances in the film, from the soft sculpture boats to My Flower Bed, and the final third of the film is an extended orgiastic scene where several performers play with and paint each other’s naked bodies in her infinitely mirrored Kusama’s Peep Show – Endless Love Show space. Other footage from the film includes Kusama wandering through a forest and into a river, covering all humans/creatures/plants/even the surface of the water itself, with her signature polka dots, along with scenes of the New York skyline also being obliterated with polka dots. In Kusama’s landscape, all is rendered uniform and connected through the utopian power of the polka dot. 

Kusama and My Flower Bed

 Kusama’s well-known biography/mythology centers around her battles with mental illness. As Jo Applin has mentioned in her new book from the Afterall One Work series on Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (a great quick holiday read) – Kusama has indicated that she suffers from extreme hallucinosis, dissociation disorder, and intense anxiety. The oft-quoted passage by Kusama discussing her experiences of ‘self-obliteration’ or ‘self-dissolution’ as a result of anxiety or hallucination is as follows:

I often suffered episodes of severe neurosis. I would cover a canvas with nets, then continue painting them on the table, on the floor and finally on my own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand to infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room. (Quoted in Applin, pg 4)

So, Kusama’s performance/sculptural/installation based practice is an effort to recapture these feelings of dissolution and the loss of self. For Kusama, this vision of her body dissolving into the surrounding space is easily translatable into a 1960s-era radical political framework, as it emphasizes connectivity and unity over capitalist values of individuation and singularity. The ideologies she deliberately self-constructs around her artistic practice ring loud and clear in the tones of a 1960s free-love ethos, emphasizing the “oceanic bliss in that moment of feeling lost to one’s surroundings” (66, from Applin). Her orgy happenings (the orgy scene in Self-Obliteration is just one of many) are equally meant to coax out a sense of interconnectedness in her performers, which could ultimately extend outwards to viewers as well: “The spectators and performers seemed to melt into one, filling the studio with an indescribable sense of rapture” (quoted in Applin again, 66). Yet despite the positivities of rapture and bliss emphasized by Kusama herself, Applin rightly indicates that Kusama’s work itself is profoundly ambivalent in several ways. This is something I’d like to push further here.

Kusama in Endless Love Show

            Is self-dissolution or envisioning the body as liquid necessarily a positive thing? Up until now it’s been an idea I’ve been ardently searching for: assuming that it’s a framework that creates helpful or valuable connotations for envisioning political or colonial complicity in new ways, or for imagining of what sex/love could look like between two consenting bodies. It seems strangely ironic that, in given what could be the most blatantly “positive” or utopic example of a liquidy body I could find, the idea suddenly seems somewhat threatening or alienating. Applin discusses this strange ambivalence in the final pages of her book (I wish she would have elaborated on it further!), emphasizing that the lines between confinement and utopian freedom become blurred in Kusama’s strange enclosed (claustrophobic?) spaces, like Phalli’s Field and Endless Love Show (pictured in the film). These indeterminate mirrored environments leave their inhabitants to be constantly reminded of their own positions in relation to the space that surrounds them and the other bodies and objects they share it with. The lines between subject and object, viewer and viewed, performer and spectator become really blurry in this context – and is this always a positive or enlightening thing? Standing in the Infinity Mirror Room and seeing my body from every imaginable angle at once – both infinitively multiplied across space but also strangely enclosed and confined – could be both a narcissist’s dream and a nightmare for anyone with body image issues; or, for the vast majority of us who oscillate between both narcissism and self-loathing on a daily basis, this could undoubtedly be an extremely disorienting and ambiguous experience. Perhaps Kusama’s ‘utopia’ isn’t as firmly delineated as her  posturing would have us believe. 

still from orgy scene

            Likewise, while her film culminates in what is perhaps the ultimate group expression of the 1960s sexual-revolution imaginings – the performed orgy in the Endless Love Show space – the transformative power placed upon group/public sex (and the nostalgia for the remembrance of group or public sex) is a utopic vision that could be complicated as well. I’ve recently been reading a fair bit about queer utopias and nostalgia surrounding gay male subcultures in the pre-AIDS era, an age of sexual possibility and connectiveness that is now lost and mourned by the likes of Douglas Crimp and others (see his infamous essay “Mourning and Militancy” from 1989). Now, I don’t want to overly collapse the politics of identity that are happening here – undeniably some of the nostalgia surrounding gay male sex clubs/bathhouses was related to the reclaiming of space for a sexuality otherwise unacceptable in public society, of finding a marginal community – yet I think both contexts speak to the desires for transformation through connection, of dissolving the self into something larger, of finding coherence with your community, of a body becoming fluid and merging with its environment. Kusama’s ethos definitely speaks to those desires, yet just as her work also contains unavoidable kernels of ambivalence, others have critiqued the utopic nostalgia for pre-AIDS era gay sex for its erasures. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” from 1987, Leo Bersani has argued against romanticizing pre-AIDS era bathhouses – and the group sex they contain – as utopian, ideal, perfectly democratic spaces: “Anyone who has ever spent one night in a gay bathhouse knows that it is (or was) one of the most ruthlessly ranked, hierarchized, and competitive environments imaginable” (206). Yet in his more recent essay, “Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories,” from 2009, José Esteban Muñoz has acknowledged Bersani’s criticisms, yet maintains that constructing utopias is a helpful political act: “utopia offers us a critique of the present, of what is, by casting a picture of what can and perhaps will be” (35).  While I cannot overstate the differences between Kusama’s context and the politics of gay male subcultures, pre- and post-AIDS crisis, I think these texts provide an interesting parallel interpretation for my reading of Kusama’s project.

creating polka dots across the surface of water

            Kusama’s environments are undeniably utopian ones – where rapture and “oceanic bliss” (a good liquidy phrase there) through the dissolution of the self are emphasized – yet like any utopia, these spaces ultimately reveal their imperfections and ambivalences. Can an utter dissolution of the self ever occur? What would it look like? Who would have access to it/ask for it, who would it be denied to, and who might be coerced or coaxed into its throes? Would it truly be as blissful as Kusama imagined, or could it induce anxiety or fear? These questions may seem silly, yet I think they offer a helpful framework for dealing with the kinds of visions of the body discussed here. Ultimately, instead of considering the actual parameters of this kind of utopic bodily self-dissolution, and rephrasing the question that Muñoz has posed, we could otherwise ask ourselves: what kind of political, social, or cultural ramifications or possibilities do these utopic imaginings offer up? Instead of invalidating my entire project, complicating the ‘liquid body’ theme in this way helps to further solidify its use. It allows me to read Kusama’s body of work both for its utopian ideals, and for the spaces in which these blissful notions fall short. 

            So that’s where I’ll end for today. Forgive my rambly post! It’s the holidays, my brain is somewhat addled with red wine and Christmas cookies – but I find Kusama’s work really interesting and I hope I’ve been able to work through some of my thoughts in a productive way here (it’s helped me, anyway!)

Some of my sources:

Yayoi Kusama’s Self Obliteration on UBUweb:

http://www.ubu.com/film/kusama_obliteration.html

 Yayoi Kusama’s Self Obliteration on Youtube (part 1), parts 2 and 3 to be found in related videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h0hExzfS5Q

Applin, Jo. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (London: Afterall Books, 2012).

Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, Winter 1987): 197-222.

Muñoz, José Esteban Muñoz. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

REBECCA BELMORE / FOUNTAIN (2005)

Belmore - Fountain 2005

 So, I’ll begin with a question. How can we visualize complicity and connectedness in a postcolonial world? As I think my example of Teresa Margolles made clear, water and liquidy forces can provide an apt method of rendering obvious the ways both power and disadvantage flow, simmer, and cycle between nations, communities, and people – the ways in which we are all interconnected through a global postcolonial system that privileges the rights of some nations/bodies over others. I’d like to turn to another example that also speaks to the same themes: Rebecca Belmore’s video/installation piece Fountain, which was displayed in the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Belmore is an extremely prolific Anishinaabe-Canadian artist (one of my personal favourites!) based in Vancouver. Her work frequently deals with the legacies of colonialism in Canada and the – extremely fraught – relationships that have existed between settler and First Nations communities since the country was supposedly “discovered.” In 2005 Belmore became the first Aboriginal woman to represent Canada at the biennale (I think the first Aboriginal male was Edward Poitras in 1995, thanks Wikipedia) and her piece was wonderfully appropriate for Venice, the globalized ‘art fair’ context, and for my own purposes here. 

            So first – I’ll describe the video (and full disclosure here, I’ve only seen what’s available on Belmore’s website, I wish I could have seen this in person!). The video opens to a fairly bleak, grey beach, and we can hear a plane flying overheard. As the camera rolls towards the water, a giant fire erupts upon a pile of driftwood to the right, the bright orange flames seeming all the more intense and hazardous against their dull gray surroundings. The image then cuts to Belmore submerged in the water, fully clothed, grunting and coughing as she struggles to shore, dragging a beat-up bucket with her. Her labour here is emphasized: she pushes herself forward but keeps falling back, sputtering and gasping for air. Finally she grows calm and manages to pull herself from the water, carrying her full bucket across the beach until she reaches the camera, throwing its contents into the faces of us viewers. The water from the bucket has magically transfigured into blood, and it coats the screen. Belmore remains visible behind this red liquidy curtain, and she slowly regains her breath as she stares coldly out at us. In Venice, this video was projected on a wall of cascading water. 

image of the video being projected on the wall of cascading water at the Canadian Pavilion

            Well, what I find fascinating about this video work is how Belmore makes use of water as a signifier for the breadth of colonialism. In the context of Venice specifically, a city referred to by Lee-Ann Martin in her essay on Belmore’s Fountain as “part of the colonial story […] a conduit for European world views,” it is water that connects this European port – its ideologies, its economies, its exchanges of power – with the rest of the world. It’s all too easy to argue that the issues of First Nations identity and representation that Belmore frequently tackles in her work are too specific, too rooted in a Canadian context to create much of a resonance in a worldwide, globalized art market. Yet as Martin’s essay argues, water (and its counterpart, blood) signifies the deeply rooted connectedness and mutual complicities and responsibilities shared across continents, across histories, in the legacies of colonialism:

 The blood in Fountain is a powerful metaphor for the burden of First Nations history. Here, as throughout Belmore’s art, she flings responsibility for the cycles of bloodshed found within the history of colonialism in the Americas back to their European source. Through her actions, an Anishnabe woman from northwestern Ontario recognizes the blood of all people who suffer because of others’ greed for power. 

Water becomes blood, and the visitors to the Venice Biennale – who are undoubtedly taking advantage of the uneven distributions of privilege and wealth that have provided them with the opportunity to travel to such an affluent, touristic, globalized art fair – are met with the remnants of these repeated violences as they are thrown back in our faces. Additionally, fountains are often symbols of wealth, prosperity, or the display of power. In this way, Belmore’s unorthodox “fountain” works to subvert many of the ideals this monumentalist form of architecture/sculpture often attempt to uphold: replacing the values of coherency and stability favoured by public manifestations of colonial power for a liquidy, messy vision of mutual responsibility in the face of a shared history of violence that literally disrupts our clear vision of the present. 

            Martin’s essay elaborates on these ideas very well (I’ve linked it below here so you can have a read if you’re so inclined) but the one thing I found interesting that she didn’t elaborate on was Belmore’s obvious labour. Belmore is clearly struggling in her attempts to collect the water in her bucket – she gasps, wheezes, and grunts as she wrestles it to shore, in danger of being overtaken by the current herself. It’s impossible to watch this video without being engaged on a bodily level with the work she is undertaking. I find this significant. For me, this level of visible labour speaks to the intense amount of work required to render these cycles of complicity obvious. It’s all to easy to just lie back and let the current overtake you, as uneven relations of power across gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race, class, etc. continue on as normalized and unquestioned. They are woven into the fabric of everyday social relations and are either so ubiquitous that they go unnoticed, or their consequences are too far away that we are unable to see their effects. It takes work to render these processes visible, it requires a violent, disruptive action to wake us up to their problematic influences – for Belmore, they literally need to be thrown in our faces. In this way, I find Fountain an amazingly interesting video work. Not only does it coerce a sense of self-reflexivity in the visitors to the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but it uses water and other liquidy forces to build an alternative cartography of colonialism that favours the messy and the complex over the overdetermined and simplistic narratives supplied by traditional forms of history-making. 

 Fountain as displayed on Belmore's website -

http://www.rebeccabelmore.com/exhibit/Fountain.html 

Lee-Ann Martin's essay, The Waters of Venice - 

http://www.rebeccabelmore.com/the-waters-of-venice.html 

Youtube clip of the Canadian Pavilion display (not great quality but you get the picture) -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAz8QT2kYQc 

ANN HAMILTON / FACE TO FACE (2001) / and other mouths

Ann Hamilton - face-to-face

I’m late on my posting! For that I apologize. It’s a busy time of year – finals are well underway, I’m one term paper down with another due in less than a week. What better way to procrastinate than to look at some great liquidy art, hmm?

During our amazing ‘Team Liquid Intelligence’ field trip to visit with Fiona Annis a few weeks ago to learn about her use of the 19^th century wet-plate collodion technique, at one point we found ourselves talking about non-traditional pinhole cameras, and I was reminded of a photographic project by Ann Hamilton. Hamilton is an American-born artist who is well known for her highly complex installations that frequently explore issues of language and memory as they interact with the human body (her very well-known installation tropos, which included a room full of horse hair, has always been a particular favourite of mine). Starting in 2001, Hamilton has been working on a project called Face to Face, wherein she uses her own mouth as a pinhole camera. The resulting images of faces and landscapes – again, I’m digressing from video, but I’ll get to that in a moment, and these pictures are just too great not to pass up! – are strangely distorted, the curvature of her lips forming a shape that almost resembles an eye. 

Like the processes we observed at Annis’ studio – where images were printed onto aluminum sheets after being coated with a thin layer of the wet-plate collodion mixture – Hamilton’s Face to Face project is another liquidy format of photography. In a sense, we could consider her project as a fundamentally synesthetic one. Hamilton’s website describes the project as “making the orifice of language into the orifice of sight.” The orifices, even the gestures associated with speech and language (opening, closing the mouth) instead work to generate images. The ways in which we sensorially negotiate with the world become confused and Hamilton, in a way, is able to indicate how sensorial processes are never as firmly delineated as we would like them to be. The way we register engagements between people – between Hamilton and the subjects of her photographs – becomes complicated as well. What could otherwise be understood as a meaningful gaze between two bodies (between photographer and photographed, or two subjects ‘making eye contact’ as a standard form of social interaction) becomes distorted when our trace for seeing is relocated into another part of the body. What does it mean to see with your mouth, anyway? 

The project also toys with the boundaries of the body in a really interesting way. I find the idea that a photograph could generate in the warm, wet space of someone’s mouth to be both a beautiful and bizarre concept. The mouth as a space is a strangely liminal place to begin with, halfway between inside and outside, it acts as the frontier to our bodies and the gateway for a haphazard assortment of social and biological necessities (many of which, of course, overlap in distinct and interesting ways), from speech to nourishment to sex to breathing. Allowing the mouth to communicate in an unusual way, to create a trace of its own experience/perspectives (if you could call them that, I’m not sure), works to decenter the body, blurring the distinctions between inside and outside and allowing the space that exists between them to become productive in its own right. 

Ann Hamilton with her pinhole camera

            Or perhaps, this work is less about subverting bodily functions than exaggerating what they already achieve. Our flesh is already something like an interface with which we negotiate with the wide variety of physical and sensorial data that surrounds us. By registering the traces of this engagement (of Hamilton’s face-to-face interactions with her subjects) the Face to Face project is capturing and exaggerating the modes through which our bodies engage with space (and other bodies) on a daily basis. When looking at her photographs, I’m reminded of another mouth-related piece of video work that similarly renders excessive the communicational capacities of that orifice. 

Vito Acconci - Open Book

            Vito Acconci’s Open Book (1974) is both compelling and humorous, and repulsive and disconcerting. As his gaping mouth slurs through a series of pleading phrases – “I'll accept you, I won't shut down, I won't shut you out.... I’m open to you, I'm open to everything.... This is not a trap, we can go inside, yes, come inside....” – his words distort, his tongue rolls around awkwardly, and we can hear the saliva welling up in his mouth. Rendering the communicational capacities of the body excessive and strange, I think there’s an odd similarity between Acconci’s video and Hamilton’s photographs. Both consider how the mouth (and consequently, the body) record and distort information, and the ways in which these modes of communication are always fundamentally embodied. Both projects imagine the borders of the body as a fluid interface that we use to both assert ourselves in the surrounding space, but which also leaves our bodies open and vulnerable to that space pressing back, leaving its imprints on us in turn – like ghostly, distorted images nestled in Hamilton’s mouth.

Ann Hamilton’s website, info for Face to Face

http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/prints/face_to_face.html

Ann Hamilton on art21

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/ann-hamilton

Vito Acconci – Open Book on Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYQAcHsgIwY