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.

CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN / FUSES (1965)

          

      For me, Carolee Schneemann’s 16mm film Fuses (1964-1967) is the ideal place to begin this project. It’s a remarkably complex film around which many of my ideas of liquidy bodies have crystallized. It acted as the introductory example of work to the Jonathan Katz lecture I discussed in the last post, and I was recently lucky enough to see a remastered version of the film at a screening of Erotic Experimental Films of the 60s at the Centre Segal, curated by one of McGill’s own English professors, Ara Osterwell. In an uncharacteristically delineated manner, I’d like to break down the different ways that “liquidy intelligences” operate in this film. It’s not a structure I intend to follow with every post, but since the watery influences are so multilayered in Fuses, I believe it will be a good exercise to get my juices flowing, so to speak (pardon the pun, and expect plenty more to come…) 

1.    Fluid Sexual Bodies

Fuses depicts Schneemann having sex in the afternoon with her then partner, the composer James Tenney, as observed by their cat, Kitch. The content is disjointed, without a deliberate narrative, and their bodies collapse and flow into each other in a series of overlaid images. As Katz indicated, this frenetic treatment of filmic content was an effort to merge male and female genitalia together, to dissolve the distinctions between separate bodies during the act of heterosexual intercourse. There is something beautifully intimate about this film – self-shot by Schneemann, the only participants in the entire endeavour are those depicted on screen: Schneemann, her lover, her cat. A typical subject/object binarism does not apply here: Schneemann is at once filmmaker and filmed body, and nor is their sexual relationship about the objectification of one body for the pleasure of another: as Schneemann has written about the project on her own website:

I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt-- the intimacy of the lovemaking... And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense-- as one feels during lovemaking... It is different from any pornographic work that you've ever seen-- that's why people are still looking at it! And there's no objectification or fetishization of the woman.

2.    Flowing Vision

Which brings me to my next point: Fuses supports a mode of vision that is fundamentally decentered and affectively charged. If typical heterosexual pornography is based upon the clear visualization of sex; a voyeuristic pleasure in seeing the (typically penetrative) act in its entirety, Schneemann’s deliberately obscured and feverish images seem to imply the bodily experience of sexual desire over a clear/logical/’dry’ visual representation of its actions. This fluid form of seeing could reflect what Laura U. Marks (in her amazing book The Skin of the Film, which I will be undoubtedly referring to throughout this project) has imagined as a “haptic” mode of visuality: a multi-sensory – almost synesthetic – form of seeing developed by experimental film and video artists, which collapses the distance between viewer and viewed, allowing the eye to graze across the screen like a caress:

Haptic images are erotic in that they construct an intersubjective relationship between beholder and image. The viewer is called upon to fill in the gaps in the image, to engage with the traces the image leaves. By interacting up close with an image, close enough that figure and ground comingle, the viewer relinquishes her own sense of separatedness from the image – not to know it, but to give herself up to her desire for it. (The Skin of the Film, 183).

If a typically optical (or dry/static/mechanical, to borrow from Jeff Wall’s dichotomy) mode of seeing is one that maintains a separation between viewer and viewed, Schneemann’s radically fluid form of vision could threaten to engulf the viewer entirely, problematizing our seemingly coherent and concrete position as separate from that which we gaze upon. What could it mean, as a viewer, to be seduced/dissolved/subsumed into Schneemann’s Fuses? Could a complete dissolution ever occur, or does that remain a fantasy, a fleeting sensation? 

3.    The Liquid Capacities of Film

Lastly, in Fuses Schneemann has exerted a liquidy influence over the materiality of the film itself. Having repeatedly burnt, scratched, collaged, and layered abstract impressions and colours across the celluloid, Schneemann’s film seems to crackle, ooze, and undulate across the screen. Her film is by no means a static medium – its liquidy, entropic degradation is emphasized as a deliberate feature of Schneemann’s endeavour. It strikes me that her film treatment is all too appropriate for her subject matter: both the desire/intimacy she depicts and the damaged film she employs are equally fragile and frenzied, creating rich, embodied, yet precarious forms of engagement that seem to collapse sensory experiences typically understood as separate into a complex mass of feeling: I see the overlaid images/feel the film’s scratched textures/smell its burnt chemical processes, just as I see Schneemann and Tenney’s intertwined bodies/feel their caresses/hear their whispers and moans. The links I’m providing here don’t really do it justice, but watching Fuses in its entirety is a remarkably decentering, intimate, and alluring experience. A bit racy – but the perfect place to start my project!

Links:

Fuses on Ubuweb –

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

 Fuses on Youtube – I’m including this shorter clip as well because the quality is significantly better than the Ubuweb version – although it has some obnoxious music added, feel free to mute it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ltARZTPbV4

Discussion of Fuses on Schneemann’s own website:

http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/fuses.html

Info on that screening I went to at the Centre Segal –

http://www.segalcentre.org/whats-on/upcoming-events/cinema/crossover/erotic-experimental-cinema-of-the-sixties/