ABSTRACT Title of Disertation: MARY COBLE: PERFORMANCE ART AND POLITICS OF AN ARCHIVE Savneet Talwar, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Disertation directed by: Profesor Nancy L Struna Department of American Studies This disertation explores the relationships among performance art, the archive and intersubjectivity. Using methods of critical ethnography, visual and textual analysis, I examine the archive of performance art, and the discourses of the body, especialy in the work of performance artist Mary Coble. I explore the ways in which performance art disrupts the ideological discourses of the institutional archive, especialy those surrounding the body and constructing normative sexual and civic identities. The institutional archive has served as a guardian of memory that makes it the creator of knowledge. Performance artists work within the conceptual space of an archive as a way to make visible the ideological systems of power; this they do through renactments and re- presentations, in efect creating a counter-archive of political and gendered memorial spaces. I question how performance artists, critiquing the visual hegemony of the white, male dominated art world, confront isues of identity and diference, including ones of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship. I am interested in how ?knowledge? is situated in the embodied experiences of the performer, researcher, artist, community and its participants. In this sense the archive is not simply a site of documentation and knowledge retrieval, but also as a locus of the felings and emotions that produce knowledge and meaning. MARY COBLE: PERFORMANCE ART AND POLITICS OF AN ARCHIVE by Savneet Talwar Disertation submited to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, Colege Park in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degre of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Advisory Commite: Profesor Nancy L. Struna, Chair Profesor John Caughey Asociate Profesor Katie King Asistant Profesor Jefrey McCune Profesor Martha Nel Smith ? Copyright by Savneet Talwar 2010 ii The disertation document that follows has had referenced material removed in respect for the owner?s copyright. A complete version of this document, which includes said referenced material, resides in the University of Maryland, Colege Park?s library collection. iii For Jefrey? for sharing your love of contemporary art and supporting me every step of the way in my doctoral studies. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank the department of American Studies for the critical scholarship that opened avenues for my research in performance art. First and foremost, I want to thank performance artist Mary Coble for her generous spirit in sharing her artistic research and works of art. I wish to thank my advisor, Dr. Nancy L. Struna, whose profesional and moral support was a guiding force in pushing me to engage with the complexity of my disertation. I owe a great deal to Dr. John Caughey in inspiring me to engage and observe the finer details of everyday life. I am also grateful to Dr. Jefrey McCune for introducing me to performance studies. My gratitude goes to Dr. Martha Nel Smith and Dr. Katie King for being on my commite. Finaly, I would like to thank the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, especialy Dean Lisa Wainwright, for giving me the release time to complete my disertation. v TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures-------------------------------------vi Chapter One: Introduction------------------------------1 Chapter Two: Contemporary Performance Art: Mary Coble----------18 Chapter Thre: Archive of Performance Art-------------------44 Chapter Four: Performance Art and the Politics of the Archive: A Theoretical Framework---------------------------------------86 Chapter Five: Intersubjectivity: Disrupting Viewing Practices --------119 Chapter Six: Conclusion -------------------------------144 Figures -----------------------------------------151 Bibliography --------------------------------------183 vi LIST OF FIGURES Fig.1.1 Yves Klein, The Leap into the Void, 1960 151 Fig. 2.1 Mary Coble, Note to Self, 2005 152 Fig. 2.2 Mary Coble, Note to Self, 2005 152 Fig. 2.3 Mary Coble, Note to Self, 2005 153 Fig. 2.4 Mary Coble, Notes to Self, 2005 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC 153 Fig. 2.5 Mary Coble, Drag Kings, 2004 154 Fig. 2.6 Mary Coble, Drag King, 2005 154 Fig. 2.7 Mary Coble, Asphyxiation of Genderfication: Blurring Boundaries, 2004 155 Fig.2.8 Mary Coble, Asphyxiation of Genderfication: Blurring Boundaries, 2004 155 Fig.2.9 Mary Coble, Asphyxiation of Genderfication: Blurring Boundaries, 2004 156 Fig. 2.10 Volcano DelGrace, Elvis Herselvis & Harriet Dodge, San Francisco, 1998 156 Fig. 2.11 Mary Coble, Boy and Girl, 2004 157 Fig. 2.12 Mary Coble, Boy and Girl, 2004 157 Fig.2.13 Mary Coble, Binding Ritual, Daily Routine, 2004, Video Projection 158 Fig. 3.1 Yves Klein, Anthropometries of the Blue Period, 1960 159 vii Fig.3.2 Manzoni, Living Sculptures, 1961 160 Fig. 3.3 Carole Schneeman, Eye Body, 1963 160 Fig. 3.4 Carole Schneeman, Meat Joy, 1964 161 Fig. 3.5 Carole Schneeman, Interior Scroll, 1975 161 Fig. 3.6 Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964 162 Fig.3.7 Gilbert and George, The Singing Sculpture, 1969 162 Fig.3.8 Vito Aconci, Seed Bed, 1971 163 Fig. 3.9 Gunter- Bruss, 1960 163 Fig.3.10 Marina Abramovi?, Lips of Thomas, 1975 164 Fig. 3.11 Marina Abramovi?, Lips of Thomas, 1975 164 Fig.3.12 Marina Abramovi?, Art Must be Beautiful, Artist Must be Beautiful, 1975 165 Fig. 3.13 Chris Burden, Shoot, 1971 165 Fig. 3.14 Howardena Pindel, Fre White and 21, 1980 166 Fig. 3.15 Lorraine O?Grady, Milie Bourgeoisie Noire, 1980-1983 166 Fig. 3.16 Keith Hering, Silence = Death, 1989 166 Fig.3.17 Andres Serano, Pis Christ, 1989 167 Fig.3.18 Robert Mapplethrope, Ajito, 1981 167 Fig.3.19 Felix Gonzales-Torres, Untitled, 1991 168 Fig.3.20 David Wojnarowicz, Silence=Death, 1990 168 Fig.3.21 Catherine Opie, Self Portrait, 1993 169 Fig.3.22 Catherine Opie, Dyke, 1992 169 Fig. 4.1 Francis Galton, ?Composite-Fotografie?, 1903 170 vii Fig. 4.2 Bertilon poster of physical features, Mus?e des Collections Historiques de la Pr?fecture de Police, 1879 170 Fig. 4.3 Du Bois Archive, Two African American women, half-length portrait, facing each other, 1899-1900 171 Fig. 4.4 Du Bois Archive - African American man, half-length portrait, facing right, 1899-1900 171 Fig. 4.5 Du Bois Archive- 5 female Negro officers of Women's League, Newport, R.I., 1899-1900 172 Fig.4.6 Du Bois Archive - Oficers of Tobaco Trade Union, Petersburg, VA.1899 172 Fig. 4.7 Elenor Antin, Reflections of my Life with Diaghilev, 1975-1978 173 Fig. 4.8 Eleanor Antin, Carving a Traditional Sculpture,1972 173 Fig. 4.9 Eadweard Muybridge, Dancing Females, 1887 174 Fig. 4.10 Carie Mea Wems, House, Field, Yard, Kitchen, 1995 175 Fig. 4.11 Carie Mae Wems, Kitchen Table Series, 1990 176 Fig. 4.12 Lorna Simpson, Coifure, 1991 176 Fig. 4.13 Mary Coble, Aversion, 2007 177 Fig. 4.14 Mary Coble, Aversion, 2007 177 Fig. 4.15 Mary Coble, Aversion, 2007 178 Fig. 4.16 Mary Coble, Aversion, 2007 178 Fig. 5.1 Mary Coble, Marker, 2006 179 Fig. 5.2 Mary Coble, Marker, 2006 179 ix Fig. 5.3 Mary Coble, Marker, 2006 180 Fig. 5.4 Mary Coble, Marker, 2006 180 Fig. 5.5 Mary Coble, Blood Script, 2008 181 Fig. 5.6 Mary Coble, Blood Script, 2008 181 Fig. 5.7 Mary Coble, Blood Script, 2008 182 1 CHAPTER ONE Introduction In this disertation I explore the relationships among performance art, the archive and intersubjectivity. Using methods of visual and textual analysis, as wel as critical ethnography, I focus my project within two main categories. The first category is the archive of performance art, which centers on discourses of the body. Here, I am ainly concerned with the work of performance artist Mary Coble. The second category entails isues surrounding the documentation of performance art; they include the archive and its circulation as they relate to the life of a performance beyond the event itself. My main concern in both areas is the role of intersubjectivity; I wish to explore how the audience and performer collaborate in making or disrupting meaning within the social dimensions of performances, ones that confront isues of identity and diference, especialy gender and sexuality. Although I examine race, clas and citizenship, my project does not engage with an intersectional analysis. Researcher My interest in Coble?s performance art emerged from the ways in which she uses her body as a medium to renact and re-present isues surrounding the cultural construction of queernes, in turn, chalenging her position of marginality as a White lesbian. Her early performances, for me, unveil then disrupt the proces by which gender and sexuality are culturaly viewed, conflating and complicating memory and subjectivity on an embodied level. In the role of viewer, I found myself chalenged on a personal and intelectual level. In my 2 twenty plus years of transatlantic displacement, from India to the United States, I have negotiated my own identity, its representation and performance. Having lived betwen the margins and in the state imposed by hyphenated identity categories, I am al too familiar with the negotiation of identity on an everyday basis, as wel as the need for subversive acts to disrupt socialy imposed roles and categories. I embarked on this project as an outsider, as a heterosexual woman, but as someone who grasps the chalenges of resisting dominant representations of subjectivity. Although Mary Coble?s art chalenged my own asumptions and understanding of gender construction and sexual desire, I remain specificaly interested in isues of identity and cultural performance in her work. In particular, I am concerned with how Coble?s self-reflexivity offers a platform for expresing her stigmatization, which is not only connected to gender, but also to her embodied experiences at the intersections of language, politics, individual fredom, desire, culture, reproduction, identity, truth, censorship, teror and violence in everyday life. 1 In redefining the meaning of her subjective experience, Coble uses, in her performances, strategies of renactment and re- presentation to complicate the concept of ?queer?, engaging, as she does, with isues surrounding gender and sexuality, the power of language, emotions and embodiment. Artist Influenced by her desire to articulate her identity as a White lesbian and to confront the isues that afect the members of her community, Coble?s early 1 Michael Warner in Fear of a quer Planet: Quer Politics and Social Theory, (Mineapolis: University of Minesota Pres, 193) argues the ned for locating quer critique in the social sphere and quer experiences of daily life. 3 performances are based in identity politics (Asphyxiation of Genderfication: Blurring Boundaries, Note to Self and Aversion). Working from her everyday experiences of disenfranchisement, she uses her body as a visual and textual palimpsest to question the embodied cultural norms surrounding the construction of gender and sexuality. Her use of the body, text, cutting, pain and blood, references the performances that in the 1960s and 1970s were instrumental in disrupting the regulatory regimes of power that sought to normalize categories of social diference. Coble continues to use the early performance strategies in her later work (Marker and Blood Script) to examine the use of everyday language and hate speech, and to argue for embodiment of felings and oppresion in everyday life. Moving beyond identity-based formations, she complicates the performativity of ?injurious speech acts? 2 that produce not only felings of shame, pain and guilt, but also that of fear. Of particular interest to my project are the ways in which Coble draws on her lesbian identity as a researcher, archivist and artist to conceptualize her performances and to move from notions of ?homosexual? identity construction to queering concepts of social and cultural formations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and citizenship. This project follows the narative arc of Coble?s performances and the means by which each one becomes the point of departure for her next work of art. The research and artistic strategies Coble employs, reveal the ways in which her embodied autobiography and commitment to human rights become an important concern in 2 Judith Butler, ?Burning Acts: Injurious Spech,? Roundtable, 3, (196) 19- 21, argues for hate spech and its power to deny rights and liberties protected by Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. She questions the performativity and impact of such hate spech enacted by citizen- subjects, especialy towards minority groups. 4 her work, culminating in the complex dynamics betwen language and embodiment as ilustrated in Blood Script. On the level of identity-based movements, Coble?s performances can be open to criticism as performances specificaly for queer spectators. In the past, identity-based groups have been sen as confirming and expanding the views of several disenfranchised populations, especialy in relationship to voting rights, civil rights and equality. More recently, ethnic, racial, women?s, gay and lesbian groups have come under atack in ?debates over multiculturalism, identity politics and political correctnes.? 3 Although it is important for queer artists to addres the criticism that they are preaching to the converted, the dismisal of their work on such grounds undermines the social movements that engender their works. 4 In this project, I ilustrate how performance art lends itself as a powerful strategy to counteract popular and dominant ideologies and provide ?alternative viewpoints and practices stifled or dismised in the broader reaches of contemporary American culture.? 5 Critics may remain skeptical of identity-based and community-based work, but I am interested in how performance artists draw from their personal and social experiences to theorize the body, ofering a more nuanced understanding of the social and cultural archives for American studies. Such an approach not only enriches our understanding of marginalization, diference and subjectivity, but also offers an embodied theorization of emotions and felings in the proces of meaning making for the artist, researcher, and 3 Linda Martin Alcof, Michael Hames-Gracia, Satya P. Mohanty & Paula M.L.Moya eds. Identity Politics Reconsidered (New York: Palgrave Macmilian, 206), 2. 4 David Rom?n. Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Cultures and the Performing arts (Durham: Duke University Pres, 205). 5 Roman (205),39. 5 community beyond the body of spectators. Performance art has long centered on theorization of the body, arguing for the temporality and materiality of the body as a subject of political discourse. I, however, ask how performance art offers alternative sites to understand the role of cultural resistance, embodiment, language, memory and felings in producing knowledge and disrupting meaning. Audience/Intersubjectivity/Embodiment In order to consider emotions and afect in performance art, the participation of the audience becomes a central consideration. In esence, the performance, staged or spontaneous, functions in relationship to its spectators to evoke intersubjectivity. Emotions, Neurologist Antonio Damasio argues, are complementary to rational thought, and that to understand the relationship betwen cognition and emotion one has to consider afect as wel. He, though, notes that emotions are the key to understanding homeostasis, the afective equilibrium of the body. 6 Emotions are not something that emerge into our consciounes, rather emotions are an ongoing proces of response that helps to regulate the body in relationship to social and cultural experiences. In this sense embodiment refers to memory and how the body is shaped by social and cultural experiences. Positive or negative emotions mediate in the collaboration that occurs betwen the performer and the audience. Exploring the intersection betwen the humanities, social sciences, biology and psychology, Elspeth Probyn takes up the role of shame, arguing that shame is both an emotion and an afect. Although shame has been a powerful and 6 Antonio Damasio, ?Descartes? Error: Emotions, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 194). 6 potentialy destructive way to patrol normativity and organize bodies socialy, internalized shame directly relates to the emotional and afective components of pain and fear, inhabited socialy, as made explicit by Coble in her performances. Drawing from her personal and social experiences of shame, fear, pain and violence, she complicates identity beyond the presupposed categories of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship; identity, her work reveals, is informed by emotions. Within this context Coble?s performances evoke a visceraly intersubjective response as it relates to how emotions register the proximity of others. Performance art situates embodiment, felings and emotions at the center of subjectivity, rather than at its periphery. I thus examine the role of emotions and the afect of proximity when bodies interact with each other. How do emotions highlight the social nature of the body and our relationships to others? What roles do pain, fear and shame play in intersubjectivity? My concern with intersubjectivity relates both to meaning making and meaning disruption. Coble?s performances have ben received with enthusiasm, but on several occasions her performances have also evoked a sense of repulsion and anger. Several audience members interviewed for this project characterized Coble?s performances as a political intervention. Some also expresed the sense of being caught betwen the dialectics of the performance and felings of pain and fear on behalf of the performer. Yet several participants also expresed a sense of deep empathy with and connection to Coble through her performances. In this sense, performance art not only offers an exchange betwen the spectators 7 and the performer, offering a new site for sociality and identification to promote agency, but also evokes negative afect as a means of disrupting public spheres and intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity in this sense is not a neat, linear proces of meaning making, rather it involves the mesines of subjectivity as it relates to the emotions and afect that destabilize the construction of knowledge and the authorial function of the archive. To this end, my project engages with the question of how performance art disrupts the ideological discourses of the institutional archive, especialy those surrounding the body. How do strategies of re-presentation and re-enactment create counter archives? Finaly, what role do felings and emotions play in producing or disrupting knowledge and meaning? Research Method and Theoretical Frames In addition to visual and textual analysis, my study looks at the historical and contemporary archives of performance art. Drawing on ethnographic methods of inquiry, I argue for complicating the experiences of a culture within the structure and history of performance art. While I lean towards performance ethnography to highlight the importance of ?embodied practice,? the body as ?site of knowing? 7 and ?how culture is done in the body,? 8 I also draw on life history methods and critical ethnography practices. 7 Dwight Conquergod. ?Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,? Comunications Monograph, 58 (191) 179-194, 180. 8 Joni Jones. ?Performance Ethnography: The Role of Embodiment in Cultural Authenticity,? Theater Topics, 12 (202), 1-15, 7. 8 Although principaly based on the performances of one artist, my project is multi-layered. I began by interviewing Mary Coble, seking to find her motivations and the conceptual basis of her performances, I have remained concerned with how she collaborates with her audiences in constructing her performances. I began by collecting my ethnographic data with several audience members who had witnesed her performances. In addition, I was also able to interview, in Chicago, two individuals who had viewed Coble?s performances via webcam. As I became more involved with Coble?s art and my work on it, I have leaned towards a combination of ethnographic methods that can acommodate the multiple layers of my research: the artist, performer, audience/spectators, performance and myself as the researcher. 9 A mixed method of ethnographic inquiry alowed me to focus on how bodies interacted in public spheres, as wel as on my role as a scholar in representing Coble?s performances in scholarly setings. Furthermore, my participation as a co-presenter at Ohio University offered me the chance to have direct aces to the varied and even contradictory points of views of the spectators. The experience has alowed me to be part of a live performance that deepened my understanding of intersubjectivity. Finaly, my collaboration with Coble has been central in writing the disertation, especialy in keeping myself in check when representing her and the responses of 9 It has ben dificult to delineate one ethnographic model for my project. Historicaly, performance ethnography emerges from the cultural performances of the 1960s and 1970s. It is not til the 1980s it becomes recognized as a distinct method. In similar ways John Caughey (206) in probing the cultural dimensions of everyday life argues that life history projects work in complex and powerful ways to understand how culture works. Jim Thomas (193), a critical ethnographer argues for postmodernism as a cultural critique chalenging the arbitrary nature of cultural images, signs and their codes. In his view a postmodernist influenced ethnography confronts the centrality of cultural images, their representation and how they are culturaly produced and consumed. 9 the viewers. During the course of my research, it became extremely important that I represent Coble?s works of art and performances as acurately as possible in my disertation. Also, to move beyond the limits of spoken language, I often paraphrased the responses of the interviewes to acurately portray the ideas that were being expresed. I began by transcribing my oral and visual data. Using an inductive approach, I examined the interviews for repeated themes. In addition, I also viewed the videos and documents of Coble?s performances, along with researching blogs, newspaper articles and reviews of her performances. I examine my data to explore the relationships among performance art, the archive and intersubjectivity to ?open the space betwen analysis and action, and to pull the pin on the binary opposition betwen theory and practice.? 10 Performance studies has critiqued the privileging of text over embodied experiences, arguing that there has been an entrenched hierarchy that values intelectual labor over manual labor. Conquergood cals for collapsing the opposition in order to revitalize the connection betwen ?artistic acomplishment, analysis and articulation with communities; betwen practical knowledge (knowing who), propositional knowledge (knowing that), and political savvy (knowing who, when and where).? 11 Working from Foucault?s concept of ?subjugated knowledge,? 12 Conquergood chalenges the academic position on how knowledge is produced, arguing for an active, intimate and hands-on participation that moves beyond text and textuality and engages with al forms of cognitive exchange and social 10 Conquergod (202),146. 11 Conquergod (202), 153. 12 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, 1972). 10 interaction. 13 Conquergood?s ?knowledge? is situated in the embodied experiences of the performer, artist, researcher, community and its participants, rather than in some universal sphere that pretends to transcend location. Performance Art and Documentation Drawing from a wide range of interdisciplinary fields?performance studies, feminism, gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, cultural theory, post modernism and post structuralism?my project explores the role of performance as a transgresive practice. The terms ?performance,? ?performer,? ?performing,? ?performativity,? ?enactment,? and ?re-presentation? have been used by theorists to describe the ebb and flow of everyday life. 14 The common noun ?performance? has been defined criticaly as an ?act of intervention, a method of resistance, a form of criticism, a way of revealing agency.? 15 The ?performative,? in contrast, ?foreground[s] the intersection of politics, institutional sites, and embodied experience. In this way, performance is a form of agency, a way of bringing culture and the person into play.? 16 Judith Butler, influenced by the work of J.L. Austin and Jacques Derida, employs the term ?performance? as one embedded within language. 17 For her, performativity refers to the ?power of discourse to reproduce the phenomena that it regulates and 13 Se also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, 194). 14 Barbara Kirshenblat-Gimblet, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (Berkley: University of California Pres, 198). 15 Norman K. Denzin. Performance Ethnography: Critical pedagogy and the Politics of Culture (London: Sage Publications, 204), 9. 16 Denzin (204). 17 Judith Butler, Bodies That Mater: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (London: Routledge,193). 11 constrains.? 18 Butler further argues that the performance contests gendered identities, thus creating a space for queer politics of resistance 19 . In a performative utterance, the speaking subject is already spoken for. In this sense performance and performativity intersect with the speaking subject, a subject with a gendered and racialized body. 20 Performance is the doing of ?certain embodied acts, in specific sites, witnesed by others.? 21 It is ?the doing? and a ?thing done,? betwen the past and present, presence and absence, consciousnes and memory. Performance is a way to invoke the continuum of history and make it possible to expose and interogate cultural inscriptions and to offer alternative possibilities for change. 22 Although I draw from performance studies, I argue for performance beyond the live event and the ways in which the documentation and artifacts of the live performance serve its afterlife. The use of documentation, though, raises methodological isues. A concern central to the study of performance art is the place of documentation, whether photographs, videos or some other form. Peggy Phelan, a proponent of performance as a medium, argues that the authenticity of the performance derives from the medium (performance) and not what is being documented. In the following chapters, I discuss performances based on interviews with the artist, participants, critics, members of the audience, as wel as 18 Butler (193), 2. 19 Butler (193). 20 Katharine Langelier, ?Personal naratives: Perspectives on theory and research,? Text and Performance Quarterly, 9 (1989), 243-276. 21 Elin Diamond, Performance and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 196), 1. 22 Diamond (196). 12 my own experience. One further body of evidence comprises of photographs and videos of performances, both creations mediated through the sensibility of the photographer or videographer, in other words, someone other than the performer (though the artist may make the final choice of which become public). Amelia Jones has responded to those who criticized her history of performance on the grounds of her not having actualy witnesed the works she writes about. Jones answers the criticism by arguing for the evidentiary value that documentation has for scholars and their research. She argues that since it is impossible for scholars to be present at al performance events, the archival documents form the necesary basis for writing history. Although Jones admits the centrality of the live event?the real medium of performance art?she also embraces documentation as the ?photographic, textual, oral, and/or film traces? 23 of the performative act. Jones contends that, in any event, most subjective experiences reveal that ?there is no possibility of an unmediated relationship to any kind of cultural product, including body art.? 24 Jones?s stance suggests that the only meaningful stance in relationship to experience is one of scholarly detachment, for which documents such as videos and photographs become a perfect resource. Confronting the isue, Philip Auslander expands on the notion of documentation in performance art from two categories, ?documentary? and ?theatrical.? He argues that there is an asumption that the documentation of performance provides a record, through which one reconstructs the event. 23 Amelia Jones, ?Presences? in Absentia: Experiencing Performance in Documentation,? Art Journal, 56,4 (196), 1-18. Jones argues for the problematics of presence and the writing about performance from documents. 24 Jones (196), 12. 13 Auslander and Jones both chalenge the ?ontological priority of the live performance.? 25 They argue that the documentation and performance are mutualy dependent. The performance is original only in its documentation and, while the photograph and video are proof of the event?s having taken place, the documentation needs the performance ?as an ontological ?anchor? of its indexicality.? 26 Several artists stage performances solely to be photographed, in what is termed ?performance photography,? which Auslander cals ?theatrical.? In this context the document would have no prior existence as a performed event presented to an audience. ?The space of the document (whether visual or audiovisual) thus becomes the only space in which the performance occurs; . . . the image we se thus records as event that never took place except in the photograph itself.? 27 In fact, one of the earliest images credited to performance photography is Yves Klein?s iconic Leap into the Void (1960) (fig. 1.1), which captures the artist jumping from an apartment building. This image, restaged in two parts, was re-performed for its documentation, ten months after Klein?s first, undocumented leap. The initial image was shot as a group of Klein?s friends stood below to catch him on a tarpaulin after he leaped from the window. The second was of the empty stret where the leap was staged. Later the two images were collaged into one. Klein?s photograph, in turn, helped shape future generations of artists, particularly in the lengths to which an artist would go in testing limits. After Klein came Chris Burden (Shoot), Carole Schneemann 25 Philip Auslander, ?The Performativity of the Performance Document,? Performance Art Journal, 84 (206), 1-10,2. 26 Ibid 27 Ibid 14 (Interior Scroll) and Marina Abramovi? (Lips of Thomas), whose performances centered on violent and invasive acts. Like Klein, al thre recorded their performances in images that are, unlike Klein?s, unmanipulated. Burden?s record of Shoot looks amateurish and home-made in a way that supports its candid value (cf. Chapter Thre). Going beyond Jones?s stance or that of Auslander, I would argue that most contemporary performance artists now consider documentation as an important and strategic aspect of their practice. The performance does not disappear, but serves ?to do things in the future? 28 as part of a secondary archive of documents and artifacts. For contemporary artists the camera and new media technology are important tools in creating their art. Darsie Alexander uses the term ?reluctant witnes,? in relationship to the role of documentation and performance in the early 1960s. She notes that ?a range of artistic investigations into the concept of art, phenomenon, site, performative presences, and proces radicaly changed the terms of art and the role of photography within its newly formed boundaries.? 29 Performance, as a new art form, forced artists to consider the significance and power of the camera for the documentation of their work, as wel as to communicate their work with the larger public. The case of Mary Coble is one of an artist who began as a photographer and then turned to performance as her principal medium. She has carefully crafted the documentary record of her work. 28 Jose Mu?oz in ?Quer Punks, and the Utopian Performative,? in The SAGE Handbok of Performance Studies, eds. D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 206)9-20, cites J.L. Austin to complicate the role of photographs and performance in the work of Kevin McCarty, further explored in Chapter 5. 29 Darsie Alexander. ?Reluctant Witnes: Photography and the Documentation of the 1960s and 1970s Art,? in Work Ethic, ed. Helen Moleworth (Philadelphia: Pensylvania State University Pres, 203),53. 15 In the following chapters, I wil take the performance archive and its afterlife as subjects for study as important as the live event. Performance Art, Archive and Intersubjectivity Artists have produced compeling works to problematize the nature and meaning of the archive that is ?how we create, store and circulate pictures and information.? 30 While no single definition of the archive is able to convey its complexities, performance artists have pushed the boundaries in investigating it as a conceptual and physical space to trouble the memories that are preserved and how history is writen. While some artists use historical documents to ilustrate its performative functions, others explore contemporary media footage to bring atention to archival structures that shape contemporary social and political meaning. Using diverse methods of imagined biographies, photomontages, film, video and photographs, performance artists reappropriate, reconfigure, reinterpret and reinterogate the archive to offer alternative meanings of images. 31 To this end, my project is not only concerned with how performance artists draw from the archive as a conceptual and physical space, but also what such discourse means in relationship to intersubjectivity for the spectators who atend such performances. To understand and enrich our understanding of intersubjectivity it is esential to consider, as noted above, the role of emotions evoked through performance art as one that may produce meaning, create awarenes, or act as a disruption of viewers? normative asumptions. The role of 30 Okwui Enwezor. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (New York: International Center of Photography, 208). 31 Enwezor (208). 16 the performer in this regard is to complicate the distance betwen the sign and the signified, the viewer and the viewed, by renacting the social dramas of embodied culture to articulate the constructednes of the material body. The next chapter begins with the performance art of Mary Coble (Chapter two). I examine her first two projects (Asphyxiation of Genderfication: Blurring Boundaries and Note to Self) to highlight the role of the artist as archivist and to situate the concept of the archive in relationship to performance art. I argue that Coble?s performances chalenge the spectator to rethink isues surrounding performance of identity, memory, history and loss. Using her body as archive, Coble takes up the loss of memory and the exclusionary history of official archives. To fully engage with discourses of the body, the archive and intersubjectivity in performance art, I ofer, in Chapter thre, a brief history of performance and the theoretical frameworks through which its practitioners have questioned the politics of the body. Of central importance are the work of feminist performance artists and their critique of the visual hegemony of the white, male-dominated art world. In Chapter four, I question the traditional framework of the archive beyond a concrete space or repository of historical records. Delving into a critical analysis of photography and its impact on archival theory, I am interested in the nature and meaning of the archive. Examining Coble?s performance Aversions, I ilustrate how Coble, along with other performance artists, investigates the archive as a conceptual space to contest its authorial function. In Chapter five, I examine Mary Coble?s performances 17 Marker and Blood Script to ask, in part, what sorts of isues arise in the reception and circulation of the performance art through an unmediated archive. Examining performance art and intersubjectivity, I explore the ways in which performance art is a transgresive practice that engages its spectators in public spheres. Finaly, in Chapter six, I offer my concluding thoughts to contextualize new frameworks and questions that arise out of this project. Focusing on embodiment, Coble?s performances complicate queer epistemology in opening alternatives readings of the archive as it relates to isues of power and the ?body as archive.? 18 CHAPTER TWO Contemporary Performance Art: Introducing Mary Coble On Friday, September 2, 2005, Mary Coble performed Note to Self. The performance was given at Connor Contemporary Art, then at the old Dupont Circle location in Washington, D.C. A smal rectangular space, the galery was on the second floor acesed from the stret by a staircase with one turn. Coble sat, dresed only in her underwear, with her back turned to the audience as tatoo artist Leah Kym systematicaly inscribed names on her back. Kym?s hands, covered in blue latex gloves, worked eficiently as onlookers quietly watched from a distance. Kym and Coble had previously collaborated on the piece ?Boy? and ?Girl?, for which they had worked out a method of tatooing words on Coble?s body. Kym would use extra heavy gauge needles but no ink. As the blood rose after the repeated puncturing of the skin, the name would appear and a negative imprint was then made of it. The performance of Note to Self lasted twelve hours, running late into the night and the next day, as Kym tatooed 438 names on Coble?s body. Kym recals being exhausted by the efort. One visitor that evening remembers hearing the buzz of the tatoo gun imediately upon entering the door to the galery. 32 The tatoo artist began at the base of Coble?s neck and proceded down the back of her body until nearly every surface was covered (fig.2.1). As each name was inscribed, the blood was then transfered to a 2 x 3? piece of blotter paper (fig.2.2). The blood prints were then pinned to the wal of the galery (fig. 2.3). Kym reported on the absolute silence of those inside the 32 March 17, 209: Interview ith Karyn Miler. 19 galery, 33 and a spectator on the diferent reactions of the witneses, both horor and inspiration. 34 During the evening, one viewer, moved by Coble?s performance, left a bouquet of flowers and a note that read, ?remembering our dead.? 35 Because only first names were used, audience members saw ?their own names plus those of their lovers, friends and family members appear? on Coble?s body. 36 The galery was closed to visitors at 8:00 p.m., but the entire performance, which ran to 5:00 a.m., was webcast. Clare Brit, a college friend of Coble?s, logged on-line from Chicago to watch. She vividly remembers the strong impact the performance had on her, especialy the pain she imagined Coble enduring as each name was inscribed on her body. 37 Others logged on from as far away as Israel and Australia. For the viewer the most memorable aspect of the performance is the artist?s body in pain. In the galery the viewers watched quietly but intently as the buzzing tatoo gun repeatedly marked Coble?s skin. The performance was, in fact, the culmination of considerable research. Drawing on the limited archive of hate crimes commited against gays and lesbians, Coble spent countles hours doing preliminary work, compiling a list of hate crime victims. Although she received some information from the Southern Poverty Law Center and The Human Rights Commision, she soon realized that neither the federal nor state governments mandated the reporting of hate crimes. Additionaly, her research uncovered the fact that over 75% of such crimes go unreported and never become 33 March 16, 209: Interview ith Leah Kym. 34 Gramar.polic, htp:/gramarpolice.net/archives/00759.php (September 14, 205). 35 Susan Ros. ?Jorge, Jose Jr., Joseph, Joseph, Joseph,? NY Arts Magazine (205). 36 Ros (205). 37 February 26, 209: Interview ith Claire Brit. 20 part of an official record. Coble asembled her own list of names, creating an archive, uncertain of what she would do with it. Her research also revealed that one common aspect of hate crimes against gays and lesbians were words like ?dyke? or ?faggot? found inscribed on the victim?s body. As the list of names grew, Coble began to conceptualize her performance. Note to Self evolved as a way to redres the ?stunning gap betwen crime statistic reporting in the United States,? and to convey the pain of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community. 38 Coble states that her goal in tatooing the names of 438 hate-crime victims on her body was to ?offer her audience a visceral experience that would heighten awarenes of such crimes and the related human rights concerns? 39 and to promote intersubjectivity. Coble recals the night of her performance with trepidation and excitement. She remembers the prick of tatoo needle on her skin, first with fear and, as the pain grew, with the doubt that she would be able to complete the performance. She credits the support of her viewers and their presence with giving her the strength to finish. She states: ?It?s like a real interesting connection develops betwen what you?re doing and your audience.? She recals collecting the names of the hate crime victims and finding repeated names, ?like Jose, Jose, Jose, or Joseph.? One drag queen was caled Chocolate, so that is what got tatooed. For Coble the names are related to the memory of hate crimes. She says that ?people get upset about them, they?l protest, something happens then people forget and no legislation is pased, no statistics are taken, nothing?s done and it 38 Ros (205). 39 September 28, 207: Interview ith Mary Coble. 21 happens again and everyone acts surprised.? For her the repeated names are both the repeated kilings and their loss from memory, since the names on her body fade with time. 40 A few hundred people witnesed Note to Self. Susan Ross, writing in NY Arts magazine, described Coble?s performance as a ?transfixing and beautiful spectacle.? She further states that ?as row after row of names is neatly applied the initial rednes of the pierced skin is soon tempered into a soft pink. The repeating names become like lyrics to a song, Jorge, Jose Jr., Joseph, Joseph, Joseph.? 41 Bloger Kriston compared the performance to an evangelical youth group gathering. She writes: ?the galery was filed with onlookers, gawking in horror and inspiration, many of whom realy felt their hair standing on end even before they entered the space when the sound of the tatoo gun greted them on the stairs. Kriston further describes Coble?s imagery as ? . . . unrelentingly Christian. The blood transverses her back, arms, and legs; the performance centered on her back, as she sat, nearly laying prostrate. ?Note to Self? is rife with sacrifice: sacrifices forced upon the victims of these murders, who probably never realized that they would be martyred for their nature, and Coble's physical sacrifice as tribute.? 42 Joey Or logged online from Atlanta to watch Coble?s performance. Or, then curator of Atlanta Celebrates Photography, noted that the act of tatooing names on the skin derived from the anti-gay epithets becomes an act of empowerment in this performance. He stated, ?Women took back the word ?CUNT,? just as the 40 Ibid. 41 September 28, 207: Interview ith Mary Coble. 42 Gramar.polic, htp:/gramarpolice.net/archives/00759.php (September 14, 205). 22 GLBT community took back the word ?queer.?? 43 Or was particularly intrigued by his on-line experience of watching Coble?s performance. Writing for the Atlanta Pride, he observed that ?while the audience at the performance was asked to leave at 8 pm, I could continue to check on the etching of the names that went on til 5 am.? 44 Or points to the power of performance art, but questions ?what happens when performance went on when viewers are not there but instead participated in real time in cyberspace? Would that stil be considered live performance art? What happens to the connection betwen performer and audience when their interaction is mediated by cameras and monitors?? 45 Or?s questions chalenge the authenticity of Web-cast performance art, generaly taken to be an unmediated live event. The performance of Note to Self survives in documents: photographs, video, and the blood stains on 438 pieces of blotter paper. With the partial support of collector Mitchel Storey, the Hirshhorn Museum acquired Note to Self from Connor Contemporary Art. It was exhibited in a new acquisitions show mounted in 2007. Hung on the short wal of an L-shaped space in the first-floor galery is a photograph of Coble sen from behind, her head turned to look toward the viewer (fig.2.4). Neatly pinned to the longer, adjacent wal are the pieces of blotter paper with the names inscribed in blood. I was at the Hirshhorn one day after Note to Self has been instaled. As I walked through the instalation I noticed a woman approach Coble?s work. She intently studied the portrait and then proceded to the larger wal, looking at the names, trying to figure out what the 43 Joey Or, ?Fly on the Web: When Performance Goes On-line,? Atlanta Pride (206). 44 March 9, 209: Interview ith Joey Or. 45 Or (206). 23 imprints on the pinned sheet of paper meant. She then went over to read the wal text, which described the work. I saw her body tense up as she continued reading. After she was finished, she turned away taking a dep breath and shaking her head in disbelief. 46 I am intrigued by the viewer?s reactions and question the role of documentation in the context of embodiment, emotions and intersubjectivity. Scholars like Amelia Jones and Philip Auslander have acepted the evidentiary nature of performance documents. Yet it sems clear that a profound gap stands betwen the performance and the documents exhibited in the art museum. What is the status of performance documents, and do they continue to perform the archive and produce valid meaning and emotion? Mitchel Storey, who supported the Hirshhorn?s acquisition of Note to Self, is a collector of Coble?s performance-based photographs, and he folows Coble?s work closely. For him Coble?s art concerns ?integrity and intent? and speaks clearly to his everyday experiences as a gay man. He is particularly drawn to the complexity of Coble?s work, especialy Note to Self, which highlights queer politics and the pain of the LGBT community. He notes that Coble?s performances make him think and fel beyond just the personal. Although taken by the sociopolitical aspects of her work, he says that he is more concerned with her artistic conceptualization of the body in performance art. 47 Storey and Or raise questions about how performance artists like Coble problematize the contours of performance art. Like Or, I question what constitutes performance art when web cams and videos 46 Feburary 9, 208: Personal observation at the Hirshorn Museum. 47 March 20, 209: Interview ith Mitchel Storey. 24 mediate viewers? response; live performance art is known for its imediate and visceral impact. Note to Self was the first public performance Coble created as a profesional artist. She describes her early childhood, in a relatively rural community in North Carolina, as one that was protected. She atended high school with kids that she had known since kindergarten and remembers how there was litle opportunity to experience anything other than straight families, so she had no context in which to addres struggles around her sexuality. She recals being tomboyish and mostly interested in playing sports. It is not until high school that she became aware of her own sexuality, as her peers teased her for not being ?feminine.? Despite doing things to fit in, like shaving her legs, she remembers her high school prom experience as a disaster, only increasing her confusion at not being atracted to boys. On a whim she decided to cut her hair short. One of her friends responded to her new look with amusement, blurting out how she looks ?totaly gay.? In the same exchange her friend confesed to being gay herself. Although Coble remembers being upset by her friend?s confesion, she also remembers being afirmed in her own sexuality. Coble recals her first experience of feling acepted. It came as she began to hang out with other lesbians in Grensboro, and later when she atended the University of North Carolina Grensboro as a design major. Her biographical approach to art surfaced early, at Grensboro; the focus of her Bachelor of Arts show was gender and sexuality. In 2002 she moved to Washington, D.C., to 25 pursue an MFA at the George Washington University. Her encounter with alternative gender naratives, especialy ones centering on female masculinity, began soon after her move to Washington, where she started atending local clubs. She characterizes her experience of going to clubs, a way to met other ?folks like her,? as at first confusing. She had frequented gay clubs in North Carolina but never heard of drag king performances. Intrigued by the concept of drag kings, she began to sek out shows and, along with her partner, dres in more masculine atire. Coble?s fascination with?as wel as growing ability to articulate her subjectivity through?the drag king performances led her to photographing them, an obvious step since her MFA field of concentration was photography. Her photo shoots then drew her into the personal lives of several of the drag kings, who in time became her friends. For Coble, the drag kings ?chalenge and subvert the social boundaries that atempt to keep the categories of female and male separate and distinct.? 48 Motivated by her personal experiences and artistic inquiry, as wel as by the documentary character of her drag king photographs, Coble began to raises questions about gender variant subjects and their exclusion from historical archives. Interested in destabilizing the binary system of male/female, she questioned the role of embodiment and memory of queer desire. Coble?s announcement for her MFA show Asphyxiation of Genderfication: Blurring Boundaries is a postcard image with the words ?boy? and ?girl? printed on it. In summarizing Coble?s show the galery pres release read 48 Coments by the artist come from interviews conducted by the author. 26 ?Gender? is the premise of this body of work: how people display gender and how others perceive it. Not al people acept the dichotomous paradigm society has created. Some individuals, by the simple act of living their lives in a way that fels natural, eliminate an either/or way of understanding and clasifying gender and break down the boundaries that have been constructed. Others take a more activist approach and resist fiting into a single category. The combination of these approaches, the variety of ways in which people choose to expres themselves, is what is needed to redefine gender, to make it les rigid, more fluid. This exhibition is both powerful and provocative. Coble employs a variety of artistic methods to addres these important isues, from a series of vivid color images that portray drag king performances in several local clubs to a video component that depicts Coble systematicaly applying duct tape to her breasts and tearing it off for approximately one hour with a simultaneous video of a smal audience watching. The purpose of the work is not its mere shock value, but its ability to raise questions about society and the asumptions and biases placed on people. Asphyxiation of Genderfication asks society to rethink the concept of gender and alow for fluidity without boundaries. 49 49 George Washington University, Dimock Art Galery, Pres Release, April 9, 204. htp:/ww2.gwu.edu/~media/presrelease.cfm?an_id=1463 27 Intrigued by the title and description, I walked over to the Dimock Galery to se Coble?s MFA show. The galery this opening day, April 22, 2004, was ful of people. Coble was dresed in masculine atire: black pants and shirt, a Mohawk and complete facial hair. She was with a group of people, al dresed like her. I was struck by the group?s appearance as I walked past them to enter the galery. On the wals were works created during her years as a graduate student. One wal of the galery was covered with photographs of drag kings in performance. The second wal of the galery had a series of photographs of Coble?s back with the words ?boy? and ?girl? inscribed on her skin. In a third area a video was being shown. Each of the thre sections represented work from a diferent stage of Coble?s growth as the artist who would soon perform Note to Self. Coble?s photographs of the drag kings intrigue me, especialy how she captures the hyper-masculinity of the performers? sexual gestures (figs. 2.5, 2.6). Concerned with the ?representation? of gender categories and the ?enactment? of masculinity, Coble documents the ways in which the women transform themselves for the performances, both by adding and subtracting. Her photographs depict the deliberate concealing of a principal aspect of the performers? gender through the proces of binding the breasts, using ace bandages, sports bras, duct tape and back braces (fig. 2.7). The performers also use ?packing,? socks or soft packs (soft dildos) and strap-ons (fig. 2.8), to create the buldge made by a penis. Applying facial hair is a third part of creating the ilusion (fig. 2.9). The photographs capture the fluidity of the performance of the 28 drag kings and complicate gender normativity; in this way they offer an alternative narative for performing queer subjectivities; Coble?s frequent use of blurred images sems itself a revealing metaphor. The pleasure and joy in the enactment of masculine sexuality are revealed in the facial expresions and the performing bodies of the drag kings. For Coble, the proces involved in preparing for the performance becomes a means to expand and disrupt the boundaries of gender. She comes to understand, as she later recals, that ?masculinity and femininity do not have to be mutualy exclusive to males and females, respectively. These two characteristics are interchangeable.? 50 Influenced by her graduate training and delving into the theoretical frameworks surrounding gender, sexuality and female masculinity, 51 Coble states she became more interested in chalenging the norms of officialy-sanctioned archival photographs. Siobhan Somervile, Jennifer Tery and Dana Seitler examine the archives of ?queer physiognomies? critiquing discourses around sexual perversion, privileging the medical construction of homosexual identity. 52 Within this context, Coble?s photographs of enacting masculinity reveal the layered, performative aspects of gender, creating a counter?archive for the performance of alternative gender roles. Coble?s photographs capture the theatricality of performance, revealing multiple ambiguities as they uncover the 50 September 28, 207: Interview ith Mary Coble. 51 Se reads Judith Butler?s Gender Trouble:Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ([190] London: Routledge, 199) and Judith Halberstam?s Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Pres, 198). 52 Se Siobhan Somervile, Quering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, Duke University Pres, 200); Jenifer Tery, ?The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity,? in Halberstam and Livingston, eds., Posthuman Bodies. (Blomington, Indiana University Pres, 195), 135-161; Dana Steiler, ?Quer Physiognomies; Or, How Many Ways Can We Do the History of Sexuality,? Criticism 46 (204), 71- 102. 29 permeable boundary betwen acting and unselfconscious being. In this sense, the drag kings are al performing their queernes as a way to expose the artificiality of conventional gender roles. 53 Judith Halberstam (whom Coble read as a graduate student) examines performance and performativity as means to examine the cultural and social construction of gendered masculinity. 54 She observes that as a society we have dificulty defining masculinity, yet we can easily recognize it. She offers numerous examples of alternative masculinities, as when she examines ?female masculinity? performed through the photographs of Volcano Del LaGrace. Halberstam notes that the performativity and performance of drag king shows serve to chalenge the hegemonic models of gender conformity. She also questions why heterosexists and feminists have vilified female masculinity. Both hetero- and homo-normative cultures view female masculinity as a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment. Female masculinity, she contends, has become variously codified: as a form of rebelion, a sign of sexual alterity, or a place of pathology. Halberstam argues for the need to produce a model of female masculinity that recognizes and ratifies diferently gendered bodies and subjectivities and, especialy, grasps ?the logic of embodiment.? 55 Del LaGrace along with Halberstam, published portraits of drag kings (fig. 2.10). They are carefully composed images, which capture the theatricality of gender performance. As you move through the pages of The Drag King Book, the portrait of each king disrupts what we recognize in terms of gender or sex, 53 Halberstam (198), 261. 54 Halberstam (198). 55 Halberstam (198), 42. 30 appearance and reality. 56 Most portraits often present a perfect rendition of masculinity. Some photographs have two or more figures interacting, sometimes employing sexual gestures and other times just posing for the portrait. Gender in these portraits becomes a complex set of negotiations betwen recognizing and defining. Del LaGrace offers us a model of inversion through her camera lens that captures the likenes to masculinity in every way. Coble uses photography quite diferently from LaGrace. Her photographs point at ambiguity, sites where male and female, masculine and feminine, are intertwined. Each of the drag king performance photos embodies the pleasure of performing masculinity. Images of the proces of identity concealment, or the proces of transformation, concentrate on the body that is undergoing transformation. Several are headles revealing no emotion, while the performing bodies are emotive and the fluidity of gender is further enhanced through the use of long exposures, during which the figure?s motion is captured (an anti- documentary technique). Coble?s images are not about hiding or concealing, but about the transformative act underlying the performance of female masculinity as wel as the performance itself. Drawing from Butler to contextualize diference, especialy gender and the body, Coble further investigated how gendered behavior is learned and performed, especialy how femininity and masculinity are imposed by heterosexual norms implicit in our culture. 57 Her next series of photographs in the 56 Volcano Del LaGrace and Judith Halberstam, The Drag King Book (London: Serpent?s Tail, 199). 57 Butler (190). 31 MFA show have the words ?Boy? and ?Girl? tatooed on her body (fig. 2.11). This was Coble?s first collaboration with tatoo artist Leah Kym. Coble states that to complicate the performativity of gender she wanted to create a piece to question gender and the dominant, hetero-normative categories of subjective experience. ?Boy? and ?Girl? questions how subjectivity is formed and informed, how culture imposes two categories, neither of which adequately captures the artist?s own subjectivity. For Coble, the embodied, corporeal memory relates to the performative of identity, raising for her viewers questions of how gender is recognized in everyday life. Arguing for gender as an unstable cultural construct that changes in relationship to each individual?s reality, ?Boy? and ?Girl? foregrounds the role of memory and embodiment in relationship to the archive. In the piece, Coble sems to ofer the body as an unstable memory archive. 58 For thre weks, she photographed the tatoos as they slowly healed and then, finaly, disappeared (fig. 2.12 ). As the proces came to an end, the two words, ?boy? and ?girl,? are rendered invisible, leaving in their place only the performance (its memory or physical record in the photographs), refering to the power of sexuality in producing both emotion and knowledge 59 . Playing with the representation of gender, the artist questions the unconscious imprinting of memory and the problematics of nature-versus-nurture: biological determinism versus the cultural production of subjectivity. Through her work she argues that we cannot asume a stable subjectivity in which we perform gender roles. Rather, the very act of performing gender is what constitutes who we are. Coble, 58 An Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings (Durham: Duke University Pres, 203). 59 Ibid. 32 referencing Butler, thus shifts the definition of gender to highlight its socialy constructed, artificial, and performative nature, chalenging the hegemonic status quo to argue for the rights of marginalized identities (especialy gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer identities) 60 . There are no original performances and identities; every performance is both an original and an imitation 61 . Finaly, at the very end of the galery was a video playing the work entitled Binding Ritual, Daily Routine. This is a two-part performance piece shown in dual projection. The first component is the video that shows Coble wrapping and unwrapping her breasts with silver duct tape (fig. 2.13). The second video shows the audience watching the performance. Coble had invited a group of close friends to witnes the event. The only instructions she supplied were to react in whatever way spectators felt but not to interfere in her performance. Coble says that ?It was important for me to have an audience present because the viewing of the actual event was a much more visceral experience than viewing the video. Watching a projection creates a certain amount of distance betwen viewers and the artist.? 62 Both videos were shown together on opposite wals of the galery (fig. 2.14). The camera angles were devised to alow the audience and performer not only to look at each other, but also, when projected, to look directly at the viewer. I watched the video, split betwen the artists and the viewers. I felt as if I had 60 Butler (190) 61 Denzin (204). 62 September 28, 207: Interview ith Mary Coble. 33 been caught in the middle of the stares of the audience, several of whom were crying. My personal response to the performance was that it is too painful to watch, as the blood rose to the surface of Coble?s skin each time she peeled off the strip of duct tape. As do many other viewers, I, too, turned away, feling a sense of confusion (possibly the performance disrupts my own asumptions and privileges, taken for granted as a heterosexual woman). Coble?s show was reviewed in the Washington City Paper under the title ?Duct and Uncover.? 63 The reporter, Bidisha Banerje, wrote that ?With her brown mohawk and boyish clothes, photographer Mary Coble gets caled ?sir? a lot in restaurants. And when she goes into a bathroom, other women sometimes tel her she?s in the wrong place. So when Coble decided to deal with gender labels in ?Asphyxiation of Genderfication: Blurring Boundaries,? her new photo and video exhibition at George Washington University?s Dimock Galery, it was almost a given she would turn the camera on herself. But not as just another self- portraitist: In the wel-worn tradition of endurance artists Gina Pane and Marina Abramovi?, ?Asphyxiation? shows Coble being branded, and bled, and duct-taped before a live audience.? 64 Coble was subsequently invited to participate in ?Academy 2004,? an annual show of area graduate student work hosted by the Conner Contemporary Art Galery in Washington. Michael O?Sullivan?s article ?Connecting Past, Present and Futures? reads: ?Mary Coble of George Washington University engages both the past and the present in her formaly staid but gender-bending portraits of drag kings. Culled by exhibition organizer Jamie 63 Bidisha Banarje, ?Duct and Uncover,? Washington City Paper (April 23, 204). 64 Banerje (204). 34 Smith from Coble's ?Blurring Boundaries? series, the pictures are a pointed hodgepodge of tatoos, lace bras, men's underpants, fake beards and lipstick.? 65 Her next performance Note to Self deals with embodiment, the archive and intersubjectivity. Coble?s conceptual framework?using her body as a palimpsest for the employment of text through the repeated marking by tatooing, her emphasizing blood and the body in pain?ofers the body as a site for debates about representation, gender, sexuality, history and postmodernism. She uses pain and blood as strategies to convey the corporeality of the body. Or related the museum instalation of the negative imprints of the names in Note to Self?the grid style and repetition (fig. 2.4)?to minimalist art and post-minimalist strategies, as wel as to the early body art performances of feminists Carole Schneeman, Hannah Wilke and others. Or argued that Coble uses her body to erase the anti-gay epithets by replacing the victims? true identities, undoing the criminal logic behind the heinous crimes. He further noted that the blood recals the ?show of sacrifice and a symbol of absolution in the Judeo-Christian tradition.? 66 The act of scaring the body, ?records an aspect of the GLBT community?s social and political struggle, a grim but integral part of our history.? 67 While I concur with Or, I am also interested in how the act of tatooing can refer to the doing and undoing of the archive and the body, and can become a strategy to disrupt social norms. Coble?s performance makes the body an archive as each name is ?done? through tatooing and ?undone? when the body 65 Michael O?Sulivan, ?Conecting Past, Present and Futures,? WE45 (August 27, 204). 66 Or (206). 67 Ibid. 35 heals and the names disappear. Coble?s performance speaks to the pain of the LGBT community as a result of the hate crimes, but the negative imprints create an archive of the names that remain undocumented. The marking and the unmarking of her skin, as wel as her body being the subject, acted upon by her tatoo artist, offers the body as a ?dialectical and dialogical? 68 site to contest the archive. On an aesthetic level, the power of Coble?s performance comes from the acumulation of names carefully inscribed in a tight group on her body. It thus inevitably cals to mind Mya Lin?s Vietnam Memorial in Washington (and the instalation of Notes to Self at the Hirshhorn Museum sems to be calculated to evoke the war memorial, a work in the minimalist style). The Vietnam Memorial centers on the names of what some might regard as victims of an unjust war, and its efect is largely created by the relentles acumulation of names. Similarly, Coble?s performance concerns not individuals, but a collective. By inscribing only the first names of the victims, she provides her audience an intersubjective opportunity to experience the grief and pain of remembering their friends or loved ones who have been directly afected by hate crimes. Coble?s back becomes a metaphor that further aserts institutional and political indiference to crimes commited against a marginalized group. The imprinting of each name further acts as a surrogate archive for writing history and underscoring the absence of institutional records of the victims? deaths. Her performance in efect transcribes onto her audience her rage at the lack of concern for the hate crime victims. 68 Dwight Conquergod, ?Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,? TDR: The Drama Review 46 (202), 145-156. 36 Finaly, the fading of the names from her body is like the fading memory of the crimes themselves. But in the forgeting there is always a remembering that gets inscribed on an afective level; this is characterized by Eve Sedgwick as ?shame.? She argues that ?shame efaces itself; shame points and projects; shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self display, shame and exhibitionism are diferent linings of the same glove. Shame, it might finaly be said, transformational shame, is performance.? 69 Coble?s performance transforms the shame and silence producing a powerful ilustration of the body as archive. Notes to Self raises some important questions about intersectionality and the negotiation of gender and sexuality in everyday life. The life of the murdered victims is often lived on the margins of invisibility and visibility. Although academic discourses have paid atention to the social construction of subjectivity, there is litle devoted to the impact of embodiment of emotions, memory and history in relationship to the archive. How do Coble?s performances question the efects of the institutional power inequities and the authority of the archive, asking for a queer analysis of subjectivity that goes beyond intersectionality? How is an intersectional analysis of race, clas, gender and sexuality complicated when names of al victims, irespective of their identity categories are inscribed on her white body? How does her performance quer the gendered body offering an improvisational space for the ?politics of resistance?? 70 69 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Afect, Pedagogy and Performativity (Durham: Duke University Pres, 203), 39 70 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality I, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1980), 95. 37 Contesting the Archive Coble?s MFA show can be said to describe a narative arc informed by her biography: her personal struggles growing up in a smal town in North Carolina, finding aceptance for her own queer subjectivity, exposure in a big city to drag king performances in lesbian clubs, leading her to photographing shows and eventualy participating, then to deeper, more meaningful exploration of the underlying isues in the work Binding Ritual, Daily Routine. Her first experience with performance was staged in a club seting and videotaped for exhibition. Here, Coble experienced the power of performance and its intersubjective dimensions. Her MFA show related specificaly to identity politics, especialy the cultural trauma and pain of the LGBT community. Following graduation, she was taken up by a Washington galery and performed Note to Self before an invited audience from the art community. Although identity politics has come under atack for its esentialism, I argue that Coble?s conceptualization and execution of Note to Self cals for the need to construct a queer analysis that contests the archive and how people think of identity politics. Cathy Cohen argues for destabilization and not the ?destruction or abandonment of identity categories.? 71 She suggests the importance of the multiplicity and interconnectednes of identities that provide promising avenues for destabilization and radical politicization, but rejects any queer analysis that ignores the usefulnes of 71 Cathy J. Cohen, "Punks, Buldagers, and Welfare Quens: The Radical Potential of Quer Politics?" in Black Quer Studies, eds. E.Patrick Johnson and Mae. G. Henderson (Durham: Duke University Pres, 205), 21-51. 38 categories and roles, shared experiences of oppresion to build resources, shape consciousnes and act collectively. 72 Building upon Cohen?s ideas, I argue that Coble?s performances contextualize the embodied experiences of the LGBT community. Coble?s enactment of the afective experience and the embodied practices of transgendered individuals in Binding Ritual, Daily Routine, touches on what Ann Cvetkovich cals ?an archive of feling? 73 generated to explore embodied subjectivities as repositories of feling and emotions. While Coble is careful not to generalize her performance to the experience of al male to female (MTF) transgenders, she argues for the embodiment of culture and the ways in which everyday practices surround the production and reception of identity. Her performances argue for the theorization of the archive beyond one that consists of material objects, texts and history; one that acounts for the body as archive to include corporeality, subjectivity and felings produced through dominant public cultures. Coble?s video performance Binding Ritual, Daily Routine grew out of the preparatory ritual of the drag kings, and gave it an urgent political mesage. The video performance begins with the identity politics surrounding gender and sexuality for a white middle clas lesbian and unfolds to efectively destabilize identity and dramatize the pain of her community. The pain lies, literaly and metaphoricaly, in the very concealment of their identity as an everyday practice. In the performance she actively engages the viewers, who are part of her 72 Cohen (205), 45 73 Cvetkovich (203),7 39 community, as she goes through the everyday performative act of breast binding experienced by transgendered individuals; in this way, Coble evokes their history of invisibility. The representation of transgendered individuals is produced and reproduced countles times as a performative act of binding the breasts with duct tape. The renactment in the performance becomes an act of intervention concerning the materiality of the body, the ways in which the transgendered body resists being framed and categorized. Performing Binding Ritual, Daily Routine thus becomes a strategy that mutualy constructs and deconstructs, expands and delimits the body as archive in the everyday life of some FTM transgenders. For Coble this becomes a way to understand beter the transgendered?s physical and mental pain. ?FTM individuals who bind every day want to be perceived as having no breasts at al. To bind that tightly can be extremely painful; imagine having to experience that pain day after day for the majority of your lifetime . . . It was important for me to perform the act of binding myself. I needed to experience the pain of repeatedly binding and unbinding my breasts with tape. I wanted to create a physical manifestation of the mental space where I imagined transgendered individuals silently suffer. Granted, this is a secondhand, simulated experience, but I believe by watching this video piece, viewers wil be more sympathetic to the extreme anguish that is overlooked by most of our society.? In my opinion, the performance becomes a representation of embodiment: how the body is shaped by the emotions and felings of everyday experiences. Embodiment in this sense represents how history and memory are performed in everyday life. 40 Coble?s Note to self recals the work of artists Marina Abramovi?, Ron Athey and Catherine Opie, who have used their bodies to perform and contest the archive, citing isues of gender, sexuality, AIDS and citizenship. Drawing from these artists, Coble, too, uses her body to contest the limits of the archive as a source of knowledge and to addres the logocentrism of the archive. By tatooing the names of the dead on her skin, she evokes the loss and disappearance of queer naratives from official archives. Note to Self thus makes an argument for the body as archive to convey embodied memory and history and to demonstrate the profoundly afective power of sexuality in producing both emotions and knowledge surrounding the invisibility and silence of queer history. Through the repeated inscribing of each name on her body, Note to Self becomes a counter- archive in citing the loss as a way of reinscribing the archive. Note to Self raises questions about the ?dialogical and dialectical? relationship betwen the archive and the body in performance art. Coble?s work references the historical debates surrounding performance art, ones that shifted the perceptions of body beyond just ?content.? Engaging in the ?doing? of the body, performance artists engage the body as archive, revealing temporality, contingency and instability, to explore how identity is performed within cultural boundaries, rather than some inherently stable quality. 74 Exploring the physical and psychological body they sought to expres ?the self that was invisible, formles and liminal.? 75 Pushing the limits of the body, performance artists set 74 War, Tracy. ?Preface,? in The Artists Body, eds. Amelia Jones and Tracy War (London: Phadion Pres, 200). 75 Ibid 41 into motion the de-materialization of body, addresing isues of fear, death, danger, desire and perversion, for mobilizing history and memory. Artists like Coble, draw from postmodernism and poststructuralism to destabilize the semantic systems representing the body. Along with other artists, Coble uses performance strategies of pain, blood and tatooing, adding an important dimension to understanding the concept of the ?body as archive,? especialy its relationship to embodiment, memory and history. Coble problematizes the imprecise visual, verbal and textual contours of corporeality and language, highlighting the language of the body and its performativity as one that is ?inflexible and too flexible.? 76 The body becomes a site to explore the visual and linguistic categories of the body (gender and sexuality), in turn disrupting the representation and hierarchies of power, 77 that define the social and cultural norms of identity categories. In doing so, Coble joins other performance artists, raising questions about the archives of gender and sexuality, representation, notions of the self, the signifying systems of the body, chalenging the construction of the private and public archives. At the same time Coble?s performance also raises questions about ?authenticity? of the archive, what is included and what is excluded in the proces of history writing? What constitutes performance art, when documented photographs and videos are exhibited after the event? The public nature of performance art raises isues of intersubjectivity and the proces of meaning making. What is the role of emotions, especialy pain, in producing meaning 76 War (200), 13. 77 Ibid 42 among the viewers? How does the renactment of history and memory become strategies to constructs and deconstructs, expands and delimits the archives of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship in everyday life? To contextualize Coble?s works of art and her subsequent performances, it is important to place her work within the historical context of performance art, its archive and discourses of the body. Her work complicates what constitutes contemporary performance art, especialy its resistance to documentation. Performance art has mainly been considered as something live that, paradoxicaly, lives only through its disappearance. 78 I argue performance documents-- photographs, videos, and film--and their afterlife not only recal, or cite, a past event, but also underscore the ?factual, fictive, public and yet private? 79 nature of the archive. To this end, performance artists like Coble aces the archive as medium, form and felings to contest public memory and private history. The active body becomes not only the archive for knowledge retrieval but knowledge construction and agency as wel. Coble?s works reference the historical use of the body in performance art as a means of contesting the archive on a personal and political level, questioning the relationship betwen the public and private. In this context, Coble?s performances bring to the forefront structural and institutional factors that make isues of gender and sexuality invisible, questioning the organization of the archive, especialy who is included and who is excluded. Her performances offer 78 Pegy Phelan. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 193), considers that performance enacts the productive apeal of the non-reproductive through its disapearance. For Phelan performance is always live and in the present. 79 Hal Foster, ?An Archival Impulse,? October, 10 (204), 3-2, 3. 43 a theorization of the body for engaging in new forms of critical practices, especialy her research in and on the archive to ofer an examination of everyday life of queer desires and pain, in that, she offers the body as archive, moving the invisibility of the queer body from past into a visible present. She makes the role of emotions and felings central in the proces of conceptualizing, constructing, and performing. They are a central component of the documents exhibited in the afterlife of the performance. 44 CHAPTER THRE Archive of Performance Art In this chapter I examine the archive of performance art and the ways in which performance becomes a form of political practice to critique the hegemonic institutions of the art world and institute the body as a medium of artistic expresion. I look at the origins of performance art and its focus on the discourses of the body, especialy the contribution of the feminist performance artists in establishing the contingency of pain. To make my case, I show that performance art offers a theorization of embodiment as it relates to the cultural construction of subjectivity, especialy in signifying the archives of history and memory to question the raced, gendered and sexual body. The flowering of performance art coincides with the unsetled cultural and social life prevailing in Europe and America during the second half of the twentieth century. Events led to a destabilized climate that gave performance art a prominent platform in the art world. Artists were questioning and redefining the meaning and function of art. And in the proces, artists became concerned for not only the significance of their work to the audience it was created to serve, but also just how the work of art connected with the viewer. Performance art historian Rosale Goldberg, for example, streses how performance artists sought to eliminate the ?element of alienation betwen performer and viewer? inherent to traditional media. 80 Turning their bodies into the most direct form of expresive 80 Rosele Goldberg. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, 2nd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, [1979] 201), 154. Goldberg?s 1979 Goldberg?s publication remains an important source for a survey of performance history. 45 medium, performance artists transgresed the conceptual boundaries imposed by conventional tools and materials: paint, brush, canvas, and so on. Their focus became the gendered body, disolving, fragmenting, blurring, and displacing its centered presence. 81 The body emerges a site for debates about representation, gender, and history, and as a means to resist the traditional archive that defined the parameters of artistic practice and art institutions. Discourses on the body open the archive to the erotic and sexual, especialy the gay, lesbian, transgendered, and the AIDS body?becoming a feature of postmodernism. Philip Auslander notes that although scholars have debated the exact meaning of postmodernism in relationship to performance art, there is a consensus that a new critical spirit encouraged artists of the 1960s, 70s and 80s in the examination of social, cultural and political conditions. Although it is not until the late 1960s that performance art becomes a recognized medium of artistic expresion, it does have forerunners. The Happenings and Fluxus performances in the early 1960s were rooted in the Dada movement of the early twentieth century. What separates performance art from Dada, Happenings or Fluxus events is the grounding of the concept of ?representation? in the actual presence of both artist and audience. 82 Deconstructing representation becomes a crucial postmodernists strategy for resistance in performance art. 83 81 Charles Garoian, Performing Pedagogy: Towards an Art of Politics (Albany: State University of New York Pres, 199). 82 Philip Auslander, Presences and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (An Arbor: University of Michigan, 192). Goldberg (1979), 9, argues that performance art made visible ?the live presence of the artist, and the focus on the artist?s body became central to the notions of ?the real? and a yardstick for instalation and video art, as wel as art-photography of the late twentieth century.? 83 Garoian (199). 46 Jayne Wark, an art historian, charts the genealogy of American art to argue for representation as a form of political practice, especialy in the contribution of the feminist movement to art practice. She argues that while the historic avant-garde movements of Futurism, Constructivism, Dadaism and Surrealism recognized and set out to chalenge the autonomy and institutional isolation of art, the political intentions of these movements were never realized. The avant-garde, however, impacted the performances of the 1960s and 1970s. Wark notes that performance never entirely disappeared, but it did not regain a renewed interest until the 1950s Jackson Pollock?s drip paintings that became popularized by Hans Namuth?s film Jackson Pollock and the Robert Goodnough?s article in Art News, ?Pollock Paints a Picture.? In these two works, the painting became not an object but an act of performance, their succes undoubtedly based on a fundamental element of Pollock?s art, which is how clearly the work reveals the mechanics of its making. Pollock?s work became an inspiration to generation of artists who, in the 1960s, explored the possibility of performance-based art practices. Painter Alan Kaprow, influenced by Polock, organized Happenings, and created a performance based practice to expand the gestural nature of painting and its physical interaction with elements of everyday life. Amelia Jones notes that the ?Pollockian performative? 84 radicaly shifted artistic practice from a modernist to a postmodernist conception of art and subjectivity, performance and the body. Jones argues that within the historical and critical discourses of art, the artist body had remained invisible, upholding the modernist pretext of the body as 84 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Mineapolis: University of Minesota Pres, 198)53. 47 a neutral. The Pollockian performative thus changed the tenor of art and its neutrality to raise questions about embodied subjectivity, which eventualy becomes the ?basis for a newly politicized art practice by emergent feminists artists.? 85 The Fulxus movement and the paralels Happenings of the 1960s also upset the distinction betwen high art and popular culture. Feminist performance artists like Carole Schneeman and Yoko Ono made significant contributions in addresing isues of gender and the marginalization of women artists in the art institutions of the time. As Peggy Phelan notes, performance art, mostly political and cultural in nature, becomes the chosen medium for articulating ?diference? in the contexts of multiculturalism, history and memory. She takes up the problematics of visibility and invisibility to explore the ways in which performance artists have used their bodies as a medium to enact their specific cultural identities, and chalenge or transform their positions of marginality. By performing particular subjectivities (race, gender, sexuality, clas or nation), artists dramaticaly unveiled the proces by which non-normative subjects are conventionaly excluded from art historical and cultural naratives. 86 Thus, performance art, throughout the twentieth century, for some artists becomes an experimental laboratory and for others a radical art form, making the archive a space that is live and embodied rather than a static, concrete repository of documents. To this end, I argue that live work by contemporary performance 85 Jayne Wark, Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America (Toronto: McGil- quen?s university Pres, 206), 31. 86 Amelia Jones interpreting the work of Pegy Phelan, in Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, Performing the Body, Performing the Text (London: Routledge, 199), 6. 48 artists uses the ?body as archive? to complicate psychological, perceptual and conceptual boundaries, further elaborated in Chapter 4. The terms ?performance art? and ?body art? have been used interchangeably. There are, however, several scholars who distinguish betwen them. Amelia Jones uses the terms ?body art? and ?body works? to emphasize the centrality of the body in performance art from the 1960s to the mid-70s. She argues that in the 1960s the gendered and sexual body emerged onto the scene in a particularly charged way. For her, body art ?takes place through an enactment of the artist?s body, whether it be in a ?performance? seting or in the relative privacy of the studio, that is then documented such that it can be experienced through photography, film, video, and/or text? (Jones?s italics). 87 Performance and body artists may draw from literature, architecture, music, dance, painting, video and film; the definition of performance art is open- ended. Even though performance art refers to the acts performed live by artists, contemporary artists have complicated the notion of ?performance? to expand its scope. Influenced by critical theory, performance artists have used technologies such as photography, video and film to complicate the role of the viewer as a partner in the creation. At the same time, the ?term ?performative? has come to describe this state of perpetual animation? 88 to argue for the significance of engagement by artists and viewers. While I don?t distinguish betwen performance art and body art as somehow separate, I contend, along with Jones 87 Jones (198), 13. 88 Rosele Goldberg, Performance: Live Art Since 60s (New York: Thames and Hudson, 198),10. 49 and Goldberg, that performance and body art are predicated on the capacity of art to disrupt, chalenge and transform hegemonic power structures of the archive. While the goal is not always utopian, the focus on the body fals within the realm of ?the aesthetic as a political domain,? 89 particularly its emphasis on the body as socialy embedded entity. In this sense, the ?body as archive? becomes the source and medium of both knowledge retrieval and knowledge construction to disrupt the authorial functions of the archive in how bodies have been constructed and shaped. Finaly, performance art is dependent on the activation of intersubjectivity of artist and viewer. Its focus on the exchange of meaning betwen the performer and viewer ?points to the impossibility of any practice being ?inherently? positive or negative in cultural value.? 90 Anchors of Performance Art Rosele Goldberg locates the official archive of performance art in Cubism and Futurism, movements of the first quarter of the twentieth century. She argues that when artists reached an impase they turned to performance as a means of breaking down categories and exploring new directions in art. 91 For her, performance manifestos from the Futurists to the present have been expresions of disent and means to evaluate the place of the art experience in everyday life. In fact, performance is a marginal art form until the late 1960s, when it emerges as a recognized medium of expresion. Its emergence coincides with the conceptual art movement, which insists that art is concerned with ideas rather than products; 89 Jones (198), 13. 90 Jones (198), 14. 91 Goldberg (1979), 7. 50 art is more than a commodity to be bought and sold. Performance art, which has both entertained and shocked audiences, led to a revaluation of notions of art and its relationship to culture. The active interest and participation of audiences in performance led artists, as individuals or groups, to perform in places ranging from art galeries to museums, as wel as in alternative spaces: bars, caf?s and on the strets. Performances could last from a few minutes to hours and even days, sometimes repeated several times, with or without preparation. Performance artists have defied traditional limits and definitions to create a medium of expresion, thus denying ?precise or easy definition beyond the simple declaration that it is live art by artists.? 92 I situate the archive of performance art within two broad contexts, the art institutional framework and the body. First, as Goldberg realizes, within the institutional framework performance art difers from theater by its taking place in museums, galeries or private studios, whether its Yves Klein?s Anthropometries of the Blue Period (1960) in the Galerie Nationale d?Art Contemporian, Paris, Carole Schneemann?s Eye Body (1963), performed in a private studio in New York, Vito Aconci?s Seedbed (1971), performed at the Sonnabend Galery, New York, Chris Burden?s Shoot (1971) at F Space, Santa Ana, California, or Maria Abramovi? Lips of Thomas, reperformed at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2005. The modalities of theater, dance and music, often refer to the performer as an actor, musician or dancer, usualy executing a rehearsed narative, score or set of movements: a prestablished framework that guarantes a degre of uniformity from performance to performance. The audience is mostly pasive, 92 Goldberg (1979), 9. 51 seated behind the ?fourth wal.? In performance art, the performer is the artist who rarely follows a set framework, so performances tend to be unique events. Isues of time, space, the performer?s body, and the relationship betwen the performer and audience become central to its production and reception, since the audience at a performance event enjoys a more intimate relationship with the performer. There is no fourth wal as in the theater. The second overarching aspect of performance art is its chosen medium. At al times the ?body? is the central focus of performance art, and it is this focus that provides four anchors for my discussion. It is through the discourses of the body that, first, performance art confronts intersubjectivity to disolve the boundary betwen the viewer and the work of art. Second, performance art chalenges the traditional archives of the institutions, along with others, of the established art world?galeries and museums?questioning what constitutes art and who is its audience. Third, it chalenges the social, cultural and political boundaries of the archive to critique the visual hegemony of the white, male dominated art world, raising questions of inclusion and exclusion. Fourth, its critical stance in regard to cultural institutions leads to a confrontation with isues of representation, including ones of race, clas, gender, sexuality and citizenship, as an unstable archival construct?the isues that were coming to be debated beyond the wals of art institutions, and which soon brought performance artists into direct confrontation with the United States government, especialy the NEA controversy of the 1990s. 52 In considering the four anchors of performance art, I admit that they cannot be separated into to neat, distinct categories. Instead, they operate simultaneously, varying in degre acording to the intent of the artist. While the early works of performance art focus on destabilizing the bariers betwen high art and popular culture, later works foreground isues surrounding the archives of race, clas, gender, sexuality and citizenship, seking to reclaim the body as a subject for art, particularly for women and especialy women of color, gay and lesbian artists. Performance artists came to chalenge the objectification of the human body, as wel as the contours of subjectivity and its social constructednes. As it came to be widely recognized among the avant garde, particularly feminists, the work exhibited in museums and galeries reinforced hierarchies of patriarchal oppresion. Gonzales, for example, contends that museums, and anthropologists in particular, deployed the racialized body, as material evidence of social and historical events. 93 I contend that the second generation of performance artists contests the archival records and representations of race, clas, gender, sexuality and citizenship as a powerful tool in shaping the atitudes of the viewer. Discourses of the Body: Performance Art in the 1960s and 70s The 1960s open on two, highly publicized performances. 94 Arguably, they helped frame modern performance art. The first was staged by the French painter Yves Klein and the second, a year later, by the Italian proto-conceptualist Piero Manzoni. Klein entitled his performance Anthropometries of the Blue Period 93 Se Jenifer A. Gonzales, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Instalation Art (Cambridge: MIT Pres, 208), 4. 94 Klein?s performance was reported in the popular pres: Time, Jan 27, 1961. 53 (Fig.3.1). It was held, in 1960, at the Galerie Nationale d?Art Contemporain in Paris, where it took place before a live, seated audience and included an orchestral acompaniment. Klein himself appears in a tuxedo and directs a group of nude women. The women, Klein?s ?living brushes,? apply thick paint to the fronts of their bodies and then lie down on large sheets of paper or canvas and move at the artist?s direction, leaving imprints of their bodies. In April 1961, Manzoni staged his performance at the Galeria La Tartaruga, in Rome, where he signed his name on both visitors and nude models, changing them into works of art. Known as Manzoni?s ?Living Sculptures? (Sculture viventi), each person was a completed work of art acompanied by a declaration of authenticity (Fig.3.2). 95 A red stamp certified that the subject was a whole work of art for life. A yelow stamp limited the artistic status to a body part, while a gren one meant that the individual signed by Manzoni was a work of art under certain circumstances (e.g., only while sleping or running). Finaly, a purple stamp stuck on the receipt of authenticity meant that the service had been paid. Both performances look backward to the long tradition of the nude female body as a subject of art and reflect the words of John Berger, writing about the history of images: ?men act, women appear.? 96 Or, in the words of Marita Struken: ?men are depicted in action and women as objects to be looked at.? 97 Klein?s work also relates to more contemporary movements, in particular, abstract expresionism, and the work of painters like Jackson Pollack, whose paintings are 95 Goldberg (1979), 148. 96 John Berger, Ways of Seing (London: Penguin Pres, 1972), 47. 97 Marita Struken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Loking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 201), 81. 54 a record of the physical gestures made in their creation. Manzoni?s work looks to that of Marcel Duchamp, especialy Duchamp?s Ready Mades: common, industrialy-produced objects purchased by the artist, then signed by him and exhibited in an art galery. Goldberg writes that Klein was celebrated for his daring conceptual ideas as wel as his humor, 98 whereas Jane Blocker, situating Klein in the tradition of the French avant-garde, argues that Klein pushes the boundaries of painting. 99 Klein contended that he had rejected the brush and was instead using rollers. In the performance, he says, the brushes become alive and color is applied with exactnes on the canvas. Furthermore, Klein was able to maintain a precise distance from the creation yet stil dominate its execution. Finaly, the artist says that he did not have to get himself dirty, not even his fingertips. Blocker finds profound incongruities in Klein?s rhapsodies. She contends that while the models? bodies are physicaly engaged in the performance, Klein remains distant. His reliance on the women?s bodies, she points out, may celebrate their flesh, but it also creates a kind of intelectual anonymity. Klein?s experiment lies uncomfortably close to a fear of material contamination, which even extends to the tips of his fingers. The performances by Klein and Manzoni have social and cultural implications, and both had a profound influence on the rising generation of performance artists, many of whom were women seking, in reaction, to reclaim the female body. In doing so, they repositioned the body as a site for artistic inquiry and exploration in ways that tended to divorce performance art from the 98 Goldberg (198). 99 Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (Mineapolis: University of Minesota Pres, 204), 65. 55 institutional history of art as a history of painting and sculpture with their dominant tradition of the nude female. Artists replaced the traditional materials paint and canvas with the imediacy and physicality of the human form. Using the body became a way of investigating physical, psychological, and emotional contours of the archive and chalenging the viewer?s experiences as wel. Performance artists physicaly and mentaly pushed the capabilities and limits of their bodies. Feminism of the 1960s and 70s took strength from the civil rights movement to chalenge the asumptions underlying gender and women?s roles. Feminist theorists were studying gender as a system of signs, or signifiers, and the social roles asigned to diferentiate sexualy dimorphic bodies. As feminist writers were arguing that gender was a social construct, artists such as Carole Schneemann, Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovi? , among others, used art as their platform for disent; together they brought to the foreground isues surrounding gender inequality, sexuality, reproduction, and the lived experiences of women reclaiming the female body as a subject for art, 100 contesting the archive and its representation. Carole Schneemann was one of the first woman artists to appear nude in her performances, rendering female sexual agency from two perspectives: investigating the female body as a desiring subject and the objectification of women as a sexual body. In Eye Body (Fig. 3.3), performed in 1963, Schneemann chalenges the discourse on gender, sexuality and the body, especialy the female 100 Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal & Sue Scot, After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art (New York: Prestel, 207). 56 body as used by artists like Klein and Manzoni. In this piece, Schneemann photographs her nude body covered in paint, glue, fur, feathers, garden snakes, glas and plastic. Schneemann says that she wanted to merge her own body with the environment to contest the idea of materials and the image. 101 In doing so, she becomes the material, the image and its maker, re-signifying the archive as an embodied space. Most esential for her is the idea that she is the one marking and writing over her body as an erotic, sexually desired and desiring body. Her later works, especialy Meat Joy of 1964 (Fig. 3.4), further explore the medium of flesh as an erotic site that can be excesive, indulgent and material. Using raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, rope brushes and paper scraps, she creates a performance that shifts betwen tendernes and eroticism, control and abandon. The qualities enacted, she contends, could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous or repelent. 102 As Goldberg notes, such performances functioned on both a visceral and intelectual level, and they transformed the spectators into ?voyeurs, sucked into a vortex of contained eroticism surrounding the performance.? 103 Over the years, the medium of blood, especialy menstrual blood, became an important medium in Schneemann?s work. In my opinion, her most powerful performance is Interior scroll (Fig.3.5). In the work, performed in 1975, Schneemann ritualisticaly stands on a table, her body painted with mud. She 101 Carole Schneman, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge: MIT Pres, 203). 102 Schneman (203). 103 Goldberg (198), 95. 57 spreads her legs and slowly extracts a paper scroll from her vagina while reading from it. Schneeman states that: I thought of the vagina in many ways-- physicaly, conceptualy: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth pasage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by its pasage from the visible to the invisible, a spiraled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, atributes of both female and male sexual power. This source of interior knowledge would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh in Goddes worship. 104 The performance focuses on the urges of the female body, its bodily functions and emotions. While Schneemann?s work chalenged the taboos asociated with the female body, it also contested the male-dominated art world in an efort to take back the female nude. 105 Unlike the work of Klein and Manzoni, Schneemann?s was atacked not only from conservative quarters, but also from left-wing male and female artists and even feminists. 106 The second early performance artist whose work was important in reclaiming the female body is Yoko Ono. Ono?s Cut Piece (Fig.3.6) was performed, in 1964, in Japan and later reperformed in New York. 107 Ono sits on the floor of the stage in front of a large audience with a pair of scisors next to her. The audience was invited to cut her clothes, while she sat stil before them. 104 Schneman (203), 153. 105 Heartney et. al. (207). 106 Marsha Meskimon, ?Chronology Through Cartography: Maping 1970s Feminist Art Globaly,? in WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, eds. Cornelia Butler and Lisa Mark (Cambridge: MIT Pres, 207). 107 htp:/ww.youtube.com/watch?v=CvQ36yHGfzE 58 Influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre?s philosophy of existentialism, she enlisted her viewers to complete her works of art in order to complete her identity. Cut Piece also breaks through the invisible frame male artist?s like Klein were using in performance art. Her direct engagement with the audience in completing her performance can sem at first to minimize the role of the artist, but only when judged by the traditional standard of artist as maker of objects. Cut Piece heralded a new era. It touched on isues of gender and sexism as wel as the greater, universal afliction of human suffering and lonelines. Marsha Meskimon argues that Ono?s performance ?implicated her audience in voyeuristic, potentialy violent encounters with women, thus staging the parameters of masculine power. . . Ono?s body acted as a docile ?Oriental woman? and a troubling reminder of the endurance of the Japanese after Hiroshima.? 108 For her, in the postwar restructuring of economies, Ono?s body represents the imperialism and complexity of articulating female subjectivity within a cross- cultural framework. While the performances of Klein and Manzoni were admired for breaking the traditional boundaries, Schneemann?s work was criticized and ignored by reviewers, ?indignant that a female artist could insert her nude self into her art work.? 109 Ono?s daring Cut Piece, was criticized by several male artists for being too ?animalistic.? 110 Nevertheles, the work of Schnemann and Ono had a significant impact on feminist art and scholarship, even if it took decades for their 108 Meskimon (207), 32. 109 Goldberg (198), 96. 110 Ibid. 59 pioneering work to be asimilated and properly credited. 111 Historicaly, Schneeman and Ono?s performances complicated the embodiment, memory and history of the representation of the female body. Their performances disrupt the private and public representation of women in order to reinscribe, reconfigure and resignify the ?body as archive.? They are both image and its maker. Amelia Jones contends that feminist body art has the potential to achieve certain radicaly dislocating efects through the notion of engagement and exchange. She reads the work of Schneemann and other artists from contemporary theories of subjectivity and aesthetics. For her, their works are a dialogue with bodies and selves as expresions of postmodernism in the context of the performer and the spectators. She also contends that performance and body art offer an exploration of particular practices, ones in which the body ?radicaly negotiates the structures of interpretation that inform our understanding of visual culture.? 112 The performative self-exposures and enactments of artists like Schneeman and Ono make them both author and object, and therefore pose the subject as intersubjective. In this way the performance artist work in and on the archive, making the social, cultural and political contexts crucial in the analysis of performance and body art. 113 Paraleling the feminist artists, several male artists of the 1970s began incorporating their bodies in a variety of ways, influenced by the practice of conceptual art. In particular, Vito Aconci and the performance art of British duo Gilbert & George offer important insights into the discourses of the body in 111 Ibid. 112 Jones (198), 10. 113 Jones (198). 60 performance art. Gilbert & George used the human body to perform as ?living sculptures,? making themselves the art object. Perhaps the first openly gay artists of the period, they began working together in 1967, after they met at St. Martin?s School of Art. Gilbert and George appeared as figures in their own work, making their debut in The Singing Sculpture (Fig. 3.7), performed in 1969. In this piece they covered their heads and hands with bronze-colored metalic powder, stood on a table, and sang along to a recording of Flanagan and Alen's 1931 song ?Underneath the Arches.? The performance lasted an entire day. Eventualy the suits they wore for the sculpture became for them a sort of uniform, and they rarely appear in public without suits, dres shirts, and ties. They continue to collaborate and remain partners until today, and have virtualy never appeared apart. Gilbert & George argue that they cannot disasociate their art from their everyday lives, insisting that everything they do is art. Although the artists claim that anything is a potential subject, their work has in fact addresed social isues, in particular, taboos. Implicit in their work is the idea that an artist?s sacrifice and personal investment is a necesary condition of art. They have depicted themselves as naked figures, recasting the male nude as something vulnerable and fragile, rather than as a potent figure of strength. Their art over the past four decades has been sen as subversive, controversial, and provocative, because it deals with themes of religion, sexuality, race and identity, urban life, terorism, superstition, AIDS-related loss, aging, and death. In the early 1970s, Vito Aconci began subjecting himself to actions, tasks, and manipulations that tested in varying degres the limits and maleability 61 of the human body (and in this he was not alone). Aconci is known as a performance and video artist who uses his own body as the subject. His performance and video work complicate the role of confrontation and location for his viewers. Aconci directed his atention to the body in a series of performances in which he bit himself or burned the hair off his body. His most noted performance piece is Seedbed (Fig. 3.8). In Seedbed, performed on January 15 to 29, 1971, at the Sonnabend Galery in New York, Aconci lay hidden underneath a kind of ramp or false floor that ran the length of the galery. Lying under the ramp, he masturbated while talking through a loudspeaker, describing his fantasies about the visitors walking above him on the ramp. For Aconci, Seedbed was a way to involve the public in the work?s production by creating a situation of reciprocal interchange betwen artist and viewer, and in this regard his performance recals that of Yoko Ono?s Cut Piece. In an interview ith Shely Jackson, Aconci emphasized the importance of language and the body in disclosing an activity that would have otherwise remained private. He further stated that ?like the body, language is both utterly personal and basic currency of public relations.? 114 Aconci?s later works play on the paradox of the body and language. Jones?s analysis of Aconci?s work argues for a paralel betwen feminist body art projects like those of Schneemann and Ono. She contends that while Aconci ?question[s] the previously asumed authority of the implicitly heterosexual, white male artist by multiplying the 114 Shely Jackson talks with Vito Aconci htp:/ww.believermag.com/isues/20612/?read=interview_aconci. 62 efects of his body on display,? 115 he also opens the space for an investigation of spectatorial desire. Judith Butler explains the performative reiteration as one confirmed by the body, though always asumed to be the white, middle-clas, heterosexual male. She is interested in the ?power of discourse? that regulates and constrains performitivity.? 116 From this perspective Aconci?s art is inexorably involved in the disrupting the social and cultural archives that regulate the public and private body in relationship to sexual desire. Aconci chalenges the archive and the representation of the public and private body as a strategy for resistance. Contingency of Pain and Blood in the Performance Art The political climate of Europe and the Untied States in the late 60s and early 70s was in uproar. The mood was of iritation and anger as students and workers protested against the ?the establishment.? Several younger artists approached the institutions of art and its archive with open disdain as reflections of bourgeois society. Questioning the premise of art, artists took it upon themselves to take up new directions, and the galery and museum were atacked as institutions of commercialism. As artist like Aconcci, Gilbert & George and others responded by disrupting the archive?s formal properties of time, space, location, and subject mater, others like the Viennese Actionists (Fig. 3.9) were far more openly political and radical in nature. Hermann Nitsch, founder of the group, gave performances renacting ancient Dionysian and Christian rituals that involved horrific sacrificial acts with animals and blood. He, along with G?nter 115 Jones (198), 104. 116 Butler (193), 2. 63 Brus, Oto M?hl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, produced some of the most provocative, insurgent and chalenging performances of the 1960s. Their sexualy-charged and anti-social works created a profound and ireparable upheaval in the way in which art was conceived. Using their own bodies as raw material, the Actionists undertook experiments in cruelty that disasembled the human body and its acts into compacted gestures of blood, meat and excreta. 117 Acording to Philip Ursprung, the Viennese Actionists used the ?artist?s body as a place for the encounter of public and private.? 118 Several times members of the group were arested at their performances for causing a public disturbance. Their actions and responses in the public spheres underscored the highly oppresive Austrian postwar society. Ursprung argues that to transgres the boundaries of the art world, the Actionists? main addrese became the police: their ideal audience. As the police reacted to the Actionists? transgresive activities, the media amplified the public response by photographing the arests at exhibitions, creating counter-archives and naratives. Ursprung argues that the moment of imprisonment becomes a compensation for the lack of oficial recognition of the Actionists by museums. 119 Marina Abramovi? is another European performance artist whose early work, in the 1970s, centers on political resistance, especialy the embodied memory of oppresion, and whose body is her medium. Abramovi??s early performances were deeply rooted in her unhappy childhood growing up in 117 Philip Ursprung, ?Vienese Actionism in the 1960s,? in Performing the Body/ Performing the text eds. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (London: Routledge, 199). 118 Ursprung (199), 146. 119 Ursprung (199), 147. 64 Yugoslavia during Marshal Tito?s represive regime. In her work, she put her body in extreme danger in order to explore the relationship betwen performer and audience, the limits of endurance, and the possibilities of the mind. Abramovi? early work Lips of Thomas (Figs. 3.10, 3.11) derived from St. Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica addreses (among other isues) the question of whether God should be praised with the lips. 120 After noting al the scriptural arguments for and against verbal devotions, Aquinas answers that we praise God with our lips to arouse our own devotion and that of other people, but that ?it profits one nothing to praise with the lips if one praise not with the heart.? Read in this context, Abramovic's wordles Lips of Thomas pulls her heart back and forth betwen her family's incompatible Christian and Communist beliefs. 121 In the performance, Abramovi? was naked, seated behind a table covered with a tablecloth. She ate a kilo of honey with a silver spoon and then drank a liter of red wine from a crystal glas. After breaking the glas she cut a five- pointed, communist star into her abdomen with a razor. She then whiped herself repeatedly and laid down on a block of ice shaped in a cross with a heater suspended above. The heat caused Abramovi? to bled profusely, even as the ice froze the back of her body. The audience interceded to end the performance by wrapping her in coats. Lips of Thomas coincides with the development of feminist art during Tito?s regime. Abramovi? continues to present performances on various isues centered on the body, often putting herself in perilous and 120 Hartney et. al. (207). 121 Marla Carlson, Marina Abramovi? Repeats: Pain, Art, and Theater, htp:/ww.hotreview.org/articles/marinabram.htm (205). 65 painful situations. 122 She subsequently worked with her partner Ulay, who ?shared this need to confront their limitations, their egos, their identities ? sometimes at great physical risks. They shared the same birthday and felt they were karmic twins.? 123 In one performance Ulay sewed his lips shut with a needle and thread. Abramovi? answered al the questions as if she were Ulay. The performance ended at the moment when she felt she had spoken as herself. Important aspects of Abramovi? performance art have been her expectation of the public and her faith in the proces of art. Although Abramovi? herself is reluctant to se a connection betwen her art and the feminist body art of the 1970s, Hartney and others contend that her performances are about spectacle, power and commerce, 124 I would argue that Abramovi? pushes the limits for her body to make explicit the limits of the physical and psychological body in discourse. For example, in a performance entitled Role Exchange she traded places with a prostitute in the Amsterdam red-light district. In Art Must be Beautiful, Artist Must be Beautiful (Fig.3.12) she confronted the psychological boundaries of art and fashion as they relate specificaly to gender. Confronting the viewer in this performance she violently brushed her hair for an hour repeating the words ?art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful,? in an atempt to destabilize the parameters that define art and gender practices. Abramovi? and the Actionist?s performances highlight the personal as political, and the body in performance as one that relates to embodied history and 122 Hartney et. al. (207). 123 C. Car, On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (Hanover: Wesleyan University Pres, 193), xiv. 124 Hartney et. al. (207). 66 memories of oppresion. They use pain as an important element to transmit and evoke emotions in their audiences to disrupt the authorial function of the archive. Drawing on the body as archive, they created a political discourse centering on oppresion and degradation of humanity, emphasizing blood and pain in a public seting. The goal of political art was not simply the (re)presentation or critique of structures of authority; rather it was to question and expose an ideology and its basic premises and redefine images and how they mediate betwen audiences. 125 Finaly, no discussion of the body and pain is complete without acknowledging the work of controversial artist Chris Burden, whose performances were the ultimate test of bodily endurance. Burden is most famously known for Shoot (Fig.3.13), staged, in 1971, at F Space, Santa Ana, California. In Shoot Burden asked a friend to shoot him at close range with a .22 caliber rifle. He was struck in the arm, and at a more dangerous point than the preagred upon one. The performance survives in the evidence of photographs and as a short video, available for viewing on the Internet. Although the photographs and video of Shoot are evidence of what took place, Burden?s circulating photographs and video complicate that notion of performance, taking it beyond a live event (and beyond the body in relationship to intersubjective experience, discussed in Chapter 5). Like Abramovi?, Burden argues that for him ?art does not have a purpose[..;] it is a fre spot in society, where you can do anything.? 126 C. Car contends that artists like Burden establish their art outside the social contract, 125 Hal Foster, ?Readings in Cultural Resistance,? Recoding: Art, Spectacle and Culture Politics (New York: New Pres, 1985). 126 Car (193), 20. 67 creating a space for artists and spectators to do what they would otherwise think inappropriate. 127 The performances of several of the artists cited test the limits of the body, yet some, like Burden, prove reluctant to categorize or disclose the meaning of their work. (Scholars have sen a protest against the violence of the Vietnam War in Burden?s Shoot.) In the absence, scholars have taken various positions to offer critical frameworks in which performances might be understood. Lea Vergine?s Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language, published in 1974, was one of the first to take up the birth and development of body art. Vergine argues that artists of the body art movement offer an intimate acquaintance with al the possibilities of self-knowledge that can stem from the body and the investigation of the body. The body is stripped bare in an extreme atempt to acquire the right to a rebirth back into the world. Most of the time, the experiences we are dealing with are authentic, and they are consequently cruel and painful. Those who are in pain wil tel you that they have a right to be taken seriously. 128 Vergine chooses a psychoanalytic lens to examine the works of the artists she selects as she takes up the themes of love-hate and aggresion- recompensation. Scholars and cultural critics in the 1960s and early 70s leaned heavily on psychoanalysis to understand performances that often centered on misogyny and physical pain, or included the ingestion of urine and feces, in arguing for what was real and what was unreal. Kathy O?Del ses the concerns of artists like Burden and Abromovi? as a ?masochistic performance,? though 127 Car (193). 128 Lea Vergine, Body art and Performance (Milano: Palazo Casati Stampa, 200). 68 influenced by everyday life. 129 She cals atention to the structure of the ?contract? to emphasize the powerful link betwen the audience and the performer. For her, performance artists of the 60s and 70s emphasized cultural suffering as a means to point to two interconnected social institutions: the law and the home, both founded upon the contract. 130 Using this metaphor, she argues that the artists used the contract to addres volatile social and political isues like Communism and the Vietnam War. Although O?Del emphasizes the performance strategies as intensely political, she employs a Lacaian perspective to explain the psychological motivations of the performance artist, undercutting her argument by asigning a low value to audience participation, thus avoiding the isue of emotional engagement. Works, I would contend, may be fraught with psychological meaning for both performer and viewer, and in addition they create a discourse that destabilizes the Euro-American notions of a white, male dominated art scene; furthermore, they critique the ?desired utopia or perceived dystopia? 131 to expose the structures of authority and asumptions of truth that construct the archives of race, nation, gender and human sexuality. The body becomes intrinsicaly linked to the archive as medium, form and emotions to contest the authority of institutions on a personal and political level. To this end, performance artists move discourses of the body beyond the material and 129 Kathy O?Del, Contact with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the 1970s (Mineapolis: University of Minesota Pres, 198), 2. 130 O?Del (198), 12. 131 Foster (1985), 147. 69 psychological to complicate the ideological discourses that define and mediate betwen images and their audiences. 132 Identity and Esences: 1980s and 1990s Clearly, Mary Coble?s performances look back to the artists and movements that I have cited. She uses pain inflicted upon and blood and derived from her own body as principal media in her performance work. But the underlying themes of her work, with the exception perhaps of political oppresion (broadly considered), have litle to do with those of early performance artists like Burden, Aconci and others. The oppresion of which she so clearly speaks in fact develops out of another aspect of early performance, and it, in turn, develops out of the Civil Rights movement as it comes to impact the then hermetic art world. Like several Artists of the 1980s and 90s, Coble?s focus on identity politics and the body highlights the contingency of pain and blood to complicate the logocentrism and embodiment of the archive, using the strategy of renactment, performing and copying history as a means to draw the audience to stimulate, repeat and reproduce the archive. 133 Robert Blackson notes that the conventional element necesary to construct a renactment is drawing from one?s personal motivation of the past or from historical reference. Once the renactment has been performed it is open to interpretation. It need not follow the path provided by historical evidence and has no predictable 132 Auslander (192). 133 Robert Blackson, ?Once more . . .With Feling: Renactment in Contemporary Art and Culture,? Art Journal (Spring 207), 28-40. 70 conclusion, 134 alowing for an analysis of performance art beyond the lens of psychoanalysis to include questions of multiculturalism and postmodernism. Just as the humanities and social sciences were chalenged by discourses concerning the social and cultural construction of identity and diference, so have contemporary art practices been reshaped. The Civil Rights movement shifted discourses of race and the social construction of the archive, especialy in relationship to the body. I question how performance art is indeed political and, if so, how artists contest hegemonic discourses of the body and practices of everyday life. In the 1970s, performance artists of color confronted their racial marginalization at the hands of museums and galeries. Responding to the shifting social, cultural and political landscapes, artists deepened the analysis of identity and diference, especialy the social constructednes of subjectivity. Performance art of the 1960s and 70s profoundly influenced artists of the 80s and 90s, especialy when articulating isues around identity and diference. Charles Garoian argues for pedagogical strategies that shape performance art, problematizing the relationship betwen culture, language, ideology, race, the body and technology. He critiques the way performers and viewers interact, using language that codifies and stereotypes the self and the body. Garoian contends that performance art generates spaces of resistance, empowers citizens and examines the aesthetics that surround the embodied expresion of culture; it?s racial and gender codes. Performance art, in his view, critiques the cultural practices that produce oppresion. He argues that on a performative level, this 134 Ibid 71 pedagogy of performance is the point of location betwen the represive spaces and new discourses that make the struggles of the marginalized more visible. 135 Performance artist Fred Wilson staged, in 1992, a performance for the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. He began his performance by greting a smal group of docents and aranged to met with them in an upstairs galery and to give them a tour of his exhibition. He then disappeared and changed into the uniform worn by the Whitney Museum guards and took up a post in the galery, remaining silent as the docents waited for him. After waiting for the artist for some time the docents began wandering the galery, walking past the artist in his uniform and not paying atention to him or recognizing him. When Wilson revealed himself, several of docents responded with surprise and embarasment. Jennifer Gonzales cals atention to the ?race specific framing of the museum where ?black? bodies are visible if they appear in the works of art, or in the midst of ?white? museum going public, but are efectively invisible as part of the staf.? 136 Wilson?s performance, entitled My Life as a Dog, demonstrates the ways in which the black body remains invisible and read as insignificant by ?visual regimes that support cultural, racial, and clas hierarchies.? 137 Artists over the past two decades have addresed the relationship of the black body and its social, historical and even aesthetic frameworks through which subject formation acts in relationship to discourses of race. In similarly powerful ways African American women artists like Howardena Pindel, Lorraine O?Grady and Adriane Piper draw atention to the display of bodies, images and artifacts, 135 Charles Garoian (199). 136 Gonzales (208), 1. 137 Ibid. 72 offering a critique of history and the persistence?s of race as a form of visual hegemony that dominated archival practices. From a historical standpoint, the art world saw dramatic changes in conjunction with the Civil Rights movement, which impacted the social and political fabric of American culture. Responding to the racial and gender relations in the public sphere, an increasing number of underepresented artists of color emerged to chalenge conventional distinctions betwen high and low art and offer critiques of traditional exclusionary practices that dominated the art world. The early African American artist Howardena Pindel (1970s), instrumental in the artist consciousnes-raising group, expresed her disappointment with white feminist artists who considered her personal experience as a black woman as too political and ?therefore not worthy of being addresed.? 138 Other artists of color--including Betye Sar, Ana Mendieta, Faith Ringgold, and Adrian Piper--were excluded from the women?s art movement and exhibitions. In her 1980 video Fre, White and 21 (Fig.3.14), Howardena Pindel responded to the feminist movement as wel as the racism she experienced as a Black women artist. From her own experiences of racism in schools, places of employment and other social setings, she critiqued both the art world and the practices that marginalized Black Americans; she did so she says ?to satirize the condescension and hostility she encountered from many white women in the 138 Maura Reily, ?Introduction: Towards Transnational Feminism,? in Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, eds. Maura Reily & Linda Nochlin (Broklyn: Merel Publishers Limited, 207), 15-45, 29. 73 feminist movement.? 139 Pindel plays two roles in the video, wrapping and unwrapping her head in gauze bandages. She recounts stories of racist abuse while performing the role of a white feminist who denies the veracity of her story. Moving betwen roles she wears a blond wig, white stage makeup and dark sunglases. In the end, Pindel puls a white stocking over her head to draw a visual connection betwen the dismisivenes of white feminists and a mugging. Pindel?s work chalenges the complex relationship of Black Americans as members of communities in relationship to race and gender and their rights to citizenship. Chalenging the material conditions and oppresion experienced by Black Americans, she argues that history has influenced and shaped every fabric of their lives, including participating in the art world. Performance artist Lorriane O?Grady, a Jamaican imigrant, articulates her experiences negotiating the diverse presures of middle and upper clas British colonial values: the Irish ethics taught to her in a girls prep school, and those of the neighboring working-clas Black culture. Her performance Milie Bourgeoisie Noire (1980-83, Fig. 3.15) offered a powerful critique of race, clas and gender. In it she invaded several select New York art openings as an invented character, wearing a tiara, celebrating the Silver Jubile of her coronation, and a sash with the words ?Milie Bourgeoisie Noire.? O?Grady disrupted art events by reading poems about art and race. Sewn on her gown were180 pairs of white gloves that represent the unknown histories of the women who had worn them. 139 Valerie Smith, ?Abundant Evidence: Black Women Artists of the 1960s and 70s,? in WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, eds. Cornelia Butler and Lisa Mark (Cambridge: MIT Pres, 207). 74 Flagelating herself with a whip, she criticized Black artists for faling to asert themselves, crying, ?That?s enough! No more boot-licking . . . no more as- kising . . . Black art must take some risks!? 140 Shannon Jackson argues for the tensions and obfuscations about racial identification and injury, crediting the feminists of color (Audre Loure, Gloria Anzaldua, Kimberl? Crenshaw, Patricia Hil Collins, among others) who have contributed important critiques in troubling identity claims. Mapping performativity?s theoretical derivations, she contends that theories of performativity have important implications for understanding not only sex/gender identity, but also racialized subjectivity. She examines Adriane Piper?s Calling Card to complicate the relationship betwen the ?performer and audience,? in relationship to gender, race and clas. Performed at several venues in the late 1980s, Piper would hand a card to members of the audience on which she had writen: Dear Friend, I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agred with that racist remark. In the past, I have atempted to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socialy inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to asume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are no black people present, and to distribute this card when they do. 140 Smith (207). 75 I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me. In critiquing Judith Butler and Eve Sedgewick, Shannon Jackson equates the homophobic reaction with a racial encounter. She states: ?while the declaration of homosexual identity is received as a seduction (Butler?s position), the declaration of racial identity is received as acusation.? 141 Using Piper?s ?racial? work as an ilustration, she argues that performances create ?self- recognition and identification in one audience member, at the same time [they elicit] shock and discomfort in another.? 142 Such performances repeat normalized stereotypes not to reify them but to expose them, and the audience finds diferent ways of being acused, injured or left out. Alowing for a deeper level of investigation of race, performance and performativity, Jackson shows that performances of racialized body, such as Piper?s, can offer a particularly iluminating laboratory for investigating race privilege and race injury. She argues that ?the performativity critique asks us to reconsider the models of subjectivity and dynamics of locution with which artists experiment. From this view, a number of performance based artists might turn out to be ?performativity coordinators? after al.? 143 To this end, I argue that Black artists have engaged with the discourse of the racialized body and its archives, not only as a source of knowledge retrieval, but knowledge construction and agency as wel. 141 Shanon Jackson, Profesing Performance: Theater in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 204),187. 142 Jackson (204), 186. 143 Jackson (204), 216. 76 Although isues of race gained atention in art world in the 1970s, it is not until 1982 that the first exhibitions to raise isues about contemporary art and homosexual identity was organized; it was entitled ?Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art.? Bringing gay and lesbian artists together, the exhibition atempted to identify, from both personal and political perspectives, the nature of gay and lesbian art in regards to content and sensibility. While the reactions to the exhibition by the gay community were mixed, some questioning the validity of a universal gay sensibility, the AIDS crisis and the NEA Controversy, of the late 1980s, over the body and sexuality would unite the gay community, emphasizing the marginalization of the queer body and its invisibility in museums and galeries. The founding of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in 1987 led to organized public demonstrations and the shop-window display of AIDS activist posters at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Keith Haring, who until this time had sublimated his gay identity in his colorful cartoon caricatures, made a moving work of art for the ACT-UP fundraiser in 1989. Entitled Silence = Death (Fig. 3.16), it became the organization?s motto. The poster consists of a square black field with dozens of intermingling figures outlined in silver. The figures are shown in gestures that denote sobbing and grieving. Over the center of the image is a large pink triangle as a defiant protest against indiference. 144 For gay and lesbian artists, one result of the national visibility of ACT-UP was the backlash from the religious right. The batle that ensued came to be 144 GLBTQ Arts, htp:/ww.glbtq.com/arts/performance_art.html 77 known as the ?culture wars? of the 1990s. Joining the liberal side were the social minorities--gays, African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics--that became al the more defiant and determined to defeat the conservative agenda of exclusion and hate. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which had provided modest grants to artists and shows, emerged as the lightning rod for conservative and homophobic atacks. Fearing the loss or reduction of its budget by Republican senators, the NEA became a cultural surveilance agency that exerted control over artists and museum curators by withdrawing or threatening to withdraw public funding. The NEA ruled that no grant would be given to artists whose work was deemed ?obscene,? especialy those whose works had any erotic or sexual content. Art that involved sexual or bodily functions was categorized as ?moraly reprehensible.? Andres Serano?s Pis Christ (Fig.3.17) became the center of controversy in 1989. 145 The Reverend Donald Wildmon of the conservative American Family Asociation, of Tupelo, Misouri, held a pres conference to denounce NEA funding of ?anti-Christian bigotry,? refering to the exhibition of Serano?s work in which he submerged a crucifix in a jar of his own urine. The controversy later expanded to include the work of other artists, especialy the homoerotic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe (Fig. 3.18) and the work of Karen Finley, whose performances and recordings contained graphic depictions of sexuality, abuse, and disenfranchisement. 146 Shortly after the American Family Asociation pres conference, Senators Jese Helms (R-NC) and Alfonse D'Amato (R-NY) denounced Serano's work; thirty-six senators 145 htp:/dlibrary.acu.edu.au/stafhome/dacasey/Serano.htm 146 htp:/phomul.canalblog.com/archives/maplethorpe_robert/index.html 78 subsequently signed a leter to the NEA expresing their outrage. Representative Dick Armey, a Republican from Texas and long-time opponent of federal arts support, sent a leter, signed by 107 representatives, to the NEA caling atention to a retrospective entitled ?Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment,? scheduled to open at Washington's Corcoran Galery of Art in July 1989. Armey characterized Mapplethorpe?s work as ?moraly reprehensible trash.? The Mapplethorpe show was canceled by the Corcoran, but the Washington Project for the Arts later hosted it. The action by the Corcoran was strongly criticized, and in September 1989 the Director, Christina Or-Cahal, isued a formal statement of apology: ?The Corcoran Galery of Art in atempting to defuse the NEA funding controversy by removing itself from the political spotlight, has instead found itself in the center of controversy. By withdrawing from the Mapplethorpe exhibition, we, the board of trustes and the director, have inadvertently ofended many members of the arts community which we deply regret. Our course in the future wil be to support art, artists and fredom of expresion.? Artists, along with gay and lesbian rights activists, picketed the Corcoran, as slides of Mapplethorpe?s photographs were projected on the beaux-arts fa?ade of the museum. 147 Lynda Hart points out how the NEA controversies explicitly concerned policing the display of bodies, and to some extent related to sexual anxiety and atitudes towards our own bodies and those of others. She writes that the sexualized body is always a body in relationship to others, and this body is where ?identities? get constructed. Because the signifiers of the lesbian 147 GLBTQ Arts, htp:/ww.glbtq.com/arts/performance_art.html 79 and gay ?bodies? as opposed to racial, ethnic, or gendered bodies, are les secure, harder to read, presumably les fixed in a visible economy, the gay and the lesbian afirmative slogan ?we are everywhere? must indeed sem ominous to the paranoid gaze that sek identifiable objects. 148 In this context Hart examines the work of Karen Finley, one of the artists who was ?defunded? by the NEA for the (deemed obscene) content of her performances. Hart streses the link betwen defunding and homophobia, though Finley was the only heterosexual artist to have her funding withdrawn. She argues that through the gender-transgresive content of her performances, Finley, too, becomes a victim of homophobia. Hart further argues that Finley?s straight body enacting queer is enough to make the spectators and funding bodies uncomfortable. The NEA controversy has had a huge impact on the scholarship in the humanities, especialy that dealing with feminist and queer theory. Additionaly, the AIDS epidemic brought atention to the sexualized body and strong responses from artists that contest the hegemonic forces (social, familial and legal) to confront the status of the homosexual body in relationship to the dominant modes of heterosexual identity. Gay and Lesbian artists, drawing from autobiography and history, chalenge the public and private archives to question their authenticity and authority. In a similar way Cvetkovich emphasized the need to addres queernes and the discourses of the body in the gay-lesbian archive to makes visible the traumatic loss of history that acompanied sexual life and the 148 Lynda Hart, ?Reconsidering Homophobia: Karen Finley?s Indiscretions,? in Reader in Cultural Criticism: Performance Studies, ed. Erin Strif (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmilian, 203), 6. 80 formation of sexual politics. She argues for the archive of felings, especialy the role of memory and afect in compensating for institutional neglect. 149 Works by artists Felix Gonzalez-Torres and David Wojnarowicz offered a moving acount of the marginalization of the gay community highlighting the body and performance. With sponsorship from the Museum of Modern Art, Gonzales-Torres created, shortly after his lover's AIDS-related death, photo- bilboards of his own empty, rumpled bed. They are an historic, but litle discussed milestone of 1991 (Fig. 3.19). Emphasizing the absence(s) of the AIDS body and queer discourses from museum collections, Gonzales-Torres?s bilboards reflect on the devestating efect AIDS had on his community. At the same time, they suggest how fully AIDS radicalized art institutions. Although works like Gonzalez-Torres's have forebears in conceptual and feminist art of the seventies, major museums never sponsored such provocative work before the AIDS epidemic. As one of the reviewers writes, ?Felix Gonzales-Torres?s art was always charged with the sensibility of an overtly queer man, his art nonetheles often pased under the radar of the self-appointed moral guardians in both the political and art worlds. He was able to infiltrate mainstream consciousnes in a most beautiful and poetic way. Activist without being didactic, a catalyst of that rare combination of sensuality and political empathy, he raised the bar on future 149 Cvetkovich (203). Judith Halberstam, In Quer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Pres, 205). 81 queer art making, and continues to be one of the most influential artist of his generation.? 150 David Wojnarowicz was one of the most biter opponents of Senator Jese Helms and the Reverend Donald Wildmon. Wojnarowicz responded to the NEA controversy and the AIDS crisis through performance art. The tragedy and injustices of the AIDS epidemic within the gay community became the central subject of his art and writings. Using his work as a polemical tool he raises questions about social responsibility and the AIDS epidemic, documenting his own suffering. In 1990 he had his lips sewn shut in a performance that appeared in the Silence=Death ACT-UP Video (Fig. 3.20). Several other artists in the years to folow have taken up isues of gender and sexuality, citing works of Judith Butler as central in their eforts to destabilize the definition of gender and highlight the socialy constructed, artificial and performative nature of gender identity. 151 Catherine Opie, among others, creates self portraits to explore to an extreme degre the psychological and physical body, which she subjects to painful proceses. Opie?s early work centers on isues of identity politics. Using photography she questions readability/un- readability of gender. She employs her back as a scren on which to project photographic memory images. In one portrait she questions the predominance of the heteronormative narative by having a friend etch into her skin a child-like drawing of a house and two female stick figures holding hands (Fig. 3. 21). In another portrait, Opie has the word ?dyke? tatooed on her neck (Fig. 3.22). Her 150 htp:/ww.querculturalcenter.org/Pages/FelixGT/FelixIntro.html 151 Butler (190) 82 self-portraits confront the viewer with her queer identity and asert the stereotype of her butch performative stance through her haircut and tatooing. Opie?s work?which is known and admired by Mary Coble?afirms the stance of feminist theorists and the two fundamental contributions they have made in understanding individual identity. First, feminist theory separated the social from the biological, arguing that the product of biology is relatively stable and unchangeable. Second, having separated social from the biological, feminist theory insisted that gender was not something "esential" to an individual's identity. Halberstam argues that Opie?s self portrait from the back becomes a means to disrupt the social gaze. In this manner the artist?s work opens up a space for gender variation and for diferent inscriptions of the sexed body. 152 Opie, positions her butch female body, combining physical presence and time, raising questions for her audience to trouble the boundaries of heteronormativity and the desires of the queer body. Ron Athey is another artist whose performance art deals with isues of HIV. As a gay artist, diagnosed with HIV, Athey creates elaborate performances that deal with public fear, the body and misconceptions surrounding HIV. He uses needles, crowns of thorns, razors, knives to cut into his body, using his body and blood as a medium of his art. Athey was the target of the 1994 NEA controversy, as he had received $150 of federal funds to support his art that had visibly gay content. In his performance, an excerpt from Four Scenes in a Harsh Life at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1994, Athey cuts into his co-performer 152 Halberstam (198). 83 Daryl Carlton?s back. Before the performance al audience members were asked to sign a release. As the co-performers back starts to bled, Athey places strips of absorbent paper towel to the cuts to soak up the blood. The blood-stained paper towels were hung high above the ground, so when spectators walked into the performance space, they had to walk under the hanging blood stained paper towels. The local paper wrote a sensational front-page story about the performance in Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The story quickly made national headlines. Athey?s performance works as a testimony in exposing the fear and lack of knowledge of the general public of HIV/AIDS and the body. His performance further reinforces the politics of his critics and lawmakers like Jese Helms, reinforcing the social and cultural anxiety and sterotypes surrounding the queer body and misconceptions of HIV/ AIDS. The works of art discussed in this chapter demonstrate the ways in which performance artists, historicaly, have complicated the relationship betwen theory and practice, one that opens the platform for a theorization of embodiment, the archive and intersubjectivity. Performance art and performance studies scholars have argued that performance art chalenges hegemonic and injurious speech acts by decentralizing the authority of the speaker. Garoian, Auslander and Jones argue for the concept of ?re-presentation,? which asumes that identity and ideology are continual formations, not fixed ones. Garoian advocates a pedagogy of performance art as a mutual engagement betwen the student/teacher, artist(s)/audience or researcher/participant that invokes personal 84 memories and histories through performance. 153 In a similar way, Elin Diamond defines performance as the doing of ?certain embodied acts, in specific sites, witnesed by others.? 154 She goes on to write that ?the doing? and a ?thing done,? betwen the past and present, presence and absences, consciousnes and memory, invoke a continuum of history, making it possible to expose and interogate cultural inscriptions and to offer alternative possibilities for change. Madison (1998) conceptualizes performance as the ?politics of possibilities.? Drawing from political theater, she notes that performance shapes subjects, audience and performers alike. In honoring subjects who have ben mistreated, such performances contribute to a more ?enlightened and involved citizenship.? 155 Artists like Abramovi?, Opie, Athey, Coble and others, draw on their embodied cultural and everyday experiences to renact memory and history, disrupting ideological discourses of the archive surrounding race, gender, sexuality and citizenship using the body as powerful medium. In the traditional sense, the archive of performance art is created by, and survives in, the objects, photographs, films and videos documents of live performances. Performance artists frequently exhibit their photographs and videos at museums and galeries; in the later, they are generaly for sale. 156 In addition, artists and curators show these documents during lectures. Such practices, although understandable for the survival of the artists, complicates the concept of performance as a live event, one 153 Garoian (199). 154 Elin Diamond, Performance and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 196), 1. 155 D. Soyini Madison, ?Performance, Personal Narative, and the Politics of Posibilities,? in The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions, ed. Sharon Dailey (Washington, D.C: NCA, 198),276-286. 156 Recently in New York (Aug, 209) I came acros an unsigned stil photograph from the Maria Abromovi? performance, Art Must be Beautiful, Artist Must be Beautiful; the price was $30,00. 85 that lives only through its disappearance. In the next chapter, I ofer a theoretical framework to contextualize the archive and its significance for performance art practices and the body. I examine the use of technology, especialy photography as a medium was deployed in creating an archive of the body to uncover knowledge and truth for medicine and scientific research, constructing deviant and perverse bodies in relationship to race, clas, gender and sexuality. Questioning the methods of archival practice and the authority of the archive, I explore the role of documentation in relationship to performance art practices, especialy as it relates to deconstructing the archive to redefine, contest and reinvent historical knowledge regarding subjectivity. I also examine how technology and the World Wide Web ofer new sites for public spheres that destabilize the authorial nature of archive. What kinds of isues arise in the reception and circulation of the performance art through an unmediated archive? 86 CHAPTER FOUR Performance Art and the Politics of the Archive: A Theoretical Framework In the first two chapters, I employ the term ?archive? in discussing the early performance artists of the 1960s and 70s and the work of Mary Coble. In this chapter I examine in greater depth aspects of the archive, its history and historiography, to expand the theoretical framework of my discussion. Archives have existed as collections of papers and documents thought worthy of preservation by states or powerful individuals. Sometimes, the records considered important were collected in buildings constructed with the expres purpose of housing them. Archival documents posses an inherent authenticity?their basic nature is a factual one?that gives them a fundamental role in the writing of institutional history. Michel Foucault dramaticaly changed the limited conception of the archive in the late 1960s in his Archaeology of Knowledge, first published in France in 1969 and followed by an English translation, in 1972. Moving beyond ?the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve,? or even ?the sum of al texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents atesting to its own past,? Foucault proposes the archive as the law of discourse within a discipline. 157 For him, the archive is a ?system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events? by giving them eaning within a particular branch of study. 158 Alan Sekula, in his discussion of the ninetenth-century creation of photographic archives of criminals, relies on a Foucaldian analysis when he writes of how the intertwined disciplines of 157 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, 1972),146. 158 Ibid. 87 physiognomy and phrenology ?were instrumental in constructing the very archive they claimed to interpret.? 159 The photographic images and phrenological texts were mutualy informing and comprised a closed, internaly-consistent system of discourse. By the last decade of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first, the term ?archive? has come to be widely applied to a variety of phenomena, some substantial and others ephemeral: individual canons of texts, collections of family photographs, community oral histories, and performances treated as archives of ?felings.? 160 Al of these phenomena can be considered relevant to some aspect of my study. Scholars have examined the emerging field of archive theory from various perspectives, often in order to question the role of the archive in everyday life and to explore its political implications. They question the constitution of archives and the methods of interpreting their contents, and in doing so they engage with the legitimacy of the archive, as wel as its authorial function. Archival theory recognizes both physical and imaginative spaces. The one lies within protective wals as the repository of knowledge that ?preserves, reserves, protects, patrols, regulates? 161 the production of institutional history and cultural memory; it entails artifacts with a truth value and engenders counter-institutional histories. The other is a conceptual space whose parameters are always changing. Increasingly, the archive as a privileged space for afirming cultural norms has become a site of disruptive critical practices. The work of contemporary artist Thomas Hirshhorn 159 Alan Sekula, ?The Body and the Archive,? October, 39 (1986), 12. 160 Paul J. Vos and Marta J. Werner, ?Towards a Poetics of the Archive: Introduction,? Studies in Literary Imagination, 32 (199), i-vii; Hariet Bradley, ?The Seduction of the Archive: Voices Lost and Found,? History of the Human Sciences, 12 (199), 107-12; Cvetkovich (203). 161 Vos & Werner (199), i. 88 centers on elaborate instalations using trash (old newspaper articles, pamphlets, found objects like television sets and other electronics). In his instalation for the 2008 Carnegie International (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pitsburgh), Hirshhorn created an instalation resembling a cave made out of discarded cardboard boxes, duct tape and cheap lumber. Embedded in this space were photographs, texts, grafiti, books, newspaper articles and everyday objects delineating a system that concerns everything from philosophy to global travel. 162 Hal Foster discusses this dense and semingly chaotic space in an important article published, in 2004, in the journal October. 163 Foster, a critic and art historian, views the archive conceptualy, as an impulse in contemporary art; for him is it a shared notion in artistic practice that uses objects to explore events, philosophy and history. He argues that artists both draw from and contest the archive of mas culture in gestures of alternative knowledge or counter memory. Hirshhorn?s instalations, for Foster, are the artist?s means of articulating the subject-object relationship in the era of advanced capitalism. The viewing public is exposed to its detritus as a means to reimagine a relationship and efect change. Here, in this analysis, are two of the important aspects of archive as it can be applied. One is its polemic value, its presentation of an argument. The other is the power acorded to an individual to select those documents that make a meaningful record of the past or contemporary events, whether those documents are electronic parts, aluminum cans or discarded papers and magazines. Hirshhorn can appear in efect to be saying to the public, ?This is your archive.? 162 htp:/blog.cmoa.org/CI08/208/02/thomas-hirschorn.php 163 Foster (204). 89 Foster?s esay on the archive appears to have brought the concept into the art historical discussion. It was soon followed by Charles Merewether?s collection The Archive (2006), and by the exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor and entitled Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (2008). 164 Curators and, to some extent, art historians have objects as their subject, so it is not surprising that for them ?archive? often entails photographs and reproductions of photographs in the popular media. Thus, Enwezor?s exhibition Archive Fever, mounted at the International Center for Photography, New York, consisted almost entirely of photographs, newspapers and videos. In his catalogue esay he notes how ?archival legacies become transformed into aesthetic principles,? although he also emphasizes how individual artist?s archives can create naratives that run counter to society?s ?master narative.? 165 Given its often politicized nature, performance art has proved to be a medium whose practitioners likewise deal with disruptive practices. We can look back to feminist art practice of the 1960s and 70s as highly influential in shaping the contemporary outlook. Feminist performances addresed identity formation, agency and subjectivity (Schneemann, Ono, Piper, Opie, among others) in relation to what we would now cal the ?archive.? Several performances can be sen as interogating not only personal archives, but also widely acepted cultural ones, those that center on social codes and institutional structures (Piper, Pindel, O?Grady, among other). Feminism redefined the political in relationship to the art 164 Charles Merewether, ed. The Archive (London: Whitechapel and MIT Pres, 206); Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (New York: International Center of Photography, 208); the title of the later derives from a 194 lecture by Jacques Derida (later published as Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression). 165 Enwezor, Archive Fever, 2. 90 world and praxis of everyday life, liberating the art world, at least momentarily, from the object. 166 My particular concern for the archive emerges out of an engagement with the work of performance artists. I am interested in the ways performance disrupts the ideological discourses of the institutional archive, especialy those surrounding the body and constructing normative sexual and civic identities. The institutional archive has served as a guardian of memory and knowledge in ways that make it the creator of knowledge. Performance artists work within an archive as a conceptual space to make visible the ideological systems of power through renactments, in efect creating a counter-archive of political and gendered memorial spaces. They can also use materials traditionaly asociated with the archive in their subversive projects. There are, therefore, two aspects to the archive that must be addresed, and each involves diferent histories and critical approaches. There is the performance or performative act that can be viewed as a form of private archive with public implications for the spectators present at the event. But performances also live on in the form of documents, be they photographs or videos of the actual performance or secondary artifacts that atest to the performative act, but do so in ways that extend its meaning for the viewer (the blotter sheets with names from Coble?s Note to Self, sheets that are themselves individualy photographed and diseminated to collectors). I propose first to take up the archive as a physical entity, but within the context of performative acts, either ones intended or those designated as such by a subsequent archivist. My examples center on 166 Wark (206). 91 photography, which since the Victorian era has come to be asociated with many archival projects. Its documentary strength arises from the apparently unmediated quality of photographic images. 167 Questioning the methods of archival practice and the authority of text and archive, I then explore the concept and function of the archive beyond a physical repository of objects and documents and how performance as a conceptual archive leads to the creation of a counter-archive to offer alternative naratives of race, gender, clas, sexuality and citizenship. Although the history of the archive entails conservation?the saving of select materials?it is necesarily also a history of loss, of what went unrecorded, of the gaps that others atempted to fil later on. Through examining Coble?s performance of Aversion, I ilustrate how the performance event and its documentation?photograph, film or video?can become a form of ?renactment? of the history of loss, which lives through its reproduction and reception of a new archive. Within this context it becomes important to criticaly examine the role of the archives of ninetenth-century photography and question how science influenced the ways in which the body is categorized and defined, shaping citizenship and everyday life. Photography, the Archive and Counter-Archive Sciences that purported to read the body and determine traits of character emerged in the late ninetenth and early twentieth centuries. Their purported goal was to protect society, the body politic, by uncovering evidence of criminality and 167 The unmediated truth value of photographic images is one of the modern dogmas that post- modern artists have consistently chalenged and upset. 92 insanity. Photography, with its clear documentary advantage over al other media, provided the archival material for studies of social deviancy. The images of deviancy produced in the Victorian era come to be an archive for later generations, especialy ones in the late twentieth century. It is important to understand the circumstances underlying the creation of the images, and then to look briefly at one, very early response (in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois). Examining the use of photography in the ninetenth century, Sekula argues that institutional policies supported, and even hinged on, the discourses of diference. He demonstrates how the camera becomes the apparatus to establish the social categories useful to criminology and ethnography, often in contrast to the examples of bourgeois normativity. The investment in the discursive cataloguing and surveying of bodies also supported ideological investments in colonialism and nation building. Photography came to establish and delimit the terain of the other, defining the means of recording and reading bodies and translating the logics of Social Darwinism. While the British anthropologist Francis Galton and theorists Thomas Huxley created a photographic archive along the axis of primitive to modern (Fig. 4.1), French bureaucrat Alphonse Bertilion was producing the archive of criminality (Fig. 4.2), which became a system of profiling and measuring moral degeneracy corresponding to features of race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Photography provided the objective evidence to justify scientific objectivity and the civilizing mision of colonial imperialism. The role of photography in institutional archives produced and shaped knowledge of bodies in relationship to race and clas. In this sense, photography made the 93 racial, gendered and sexual body transparent, as a readable and catagorizable text, to reinforce and serve the ideology of middle-clas norms by instantiating concepts such as deviance and the perverse body. 168 In addition to criminology and ethnography, photography served in supporting the growing medicalization of non-normative sexualities. Photographic images were taken to capture the visual traces of the homosexual body. Scientific practices and methods must, of course, be read within political, economic, cultural and historical contexts. Although science is (as commonly understood) invested with authority on the basis of its objectivity and rationality, the medical gaze paradoxicaly ?maps what produces or constructs ?queer? subjectivities in the twentieth century.? 169 Furthermore, the fascination with the body becomes the source of scientific evidence for the construction of perversion. Through clinical surveilance and diagnosis, the body is teritorialized, becoming an object that is measured, zoned, mapped and read as text. In critiquing scientific discourse, new media and technology, Jennifer Tery argues that photography in particular becomes a means of popularizing representations of diference based on race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Visual images ilustrate deviancy from a norm and criticaly play a ?role in the hegemonic production of a standardized normative subjectivity.? 170 Tery adds that homosexuals were one of the ?internal others,? ?alongside criminals, prostitutes, and the feble minded ? whose bodies were believed to cary the germs of ruin.? 171 Science and medicine 168 Sekula (1986). 169 Tery (195), 136. 170 Ibid. 171 Tery (195), 139. 94 were instaled as keepers of public trust. Social inequality was merely a mater of biology. The links among race, criminality and non-normative sexuality have also been stresed by Siobhan Somervile, who surveys medical and sexological literature of the early ninetenth century. She suggests that the ?structures and methodologies that drove dominant ideologies of race also fueled the pursuit of knowledge about the homosexual body: both sympathetic and hostile acounts of homosexuality were steped in asumptions that had driven previous scientific studies of race.? 172 Following the ninetenth-century methods of racial science, sexologists began to document what they took to be visualy discrete markers of diference betwen the hetero- and the homosexual body. Somervile offers a detailed history of methods used as a visual key to ranking bodies acording to norms of sexuality and race. Paraleling the development of eugenics, sexuality becomes explicitly intertwined with questions of reproduction and the maintenance of racial origins and white purity. The medical photographs employed to locate the discrete markers of diference, especialy homosexuality, form an archive, one that Dana Seitler set out to uncover. Although she finds an archive of ?perverse bodies,? they are not located in sexology texts; instead, she finds them in popular, scientific and juridical texts that took up concerns other than sexuality. In particular, the criminologist Thomas Mosby ?deployed photographs of ?sexual perverts? to support his Lombrosian concern with visible signs on the body that may expose and may predict criminality.? 173 She notes that 172 Somervile (200), 17. 173 Seitler (204), 7. 95 the images featured in several of the texts she examined reveal the social and scientific anxiety surrounding corporeal perversion and its relationship to the ?erosion of sexual, racial and gendered bodies.? 174 A visual culture of race, gender and sexual imagery approved on scientific principles enabled the framework of deviance to validate its claims to protect society from deviant bodies. 175 In the face of the growing medical and pseudo-scientific archive of deviancy, W. E. B. Du Bois set out to create a counter archive for the Paris Exposition Universele of 1900. Du Bois?s collected 363 photographs for an American Negro Exhibit (Figs. 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6). The clear purpose of Du Bois?s collection of photographs, as Shawn Smith has shown, was to chalenge the prevailing racist taxonomy. 176 Just as the photographs underlying the racist taxonomy have been credited as an archive, so also can Du Bois?s exhibition be sen as an archive. Working as an archivist, Du Bois creates an argument by choosing, placing and juxtaposing images in relationship to one another; he thereby redefines the place of the African American in contemporary American society. 177 Using the very method of photography, with its inherent truth claim, Du Bois chalenges the authority as wel as the legitimacy and normalizing power of the prevailing archive. Du Bois constructs the private nature of the Black body and controls its public circulation. Du Bois?s archive opens a space to question the meaning of visual technologies to culturaly specific histories. His work 174 Ibid. 175 Seitler (204), 80. 176 Shawn Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. DuBois, Race and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Pres, 204). 177 Ibid. 96 demonstrates the ways in which viewers are instructed to se race in a specific way, highlighting the relationship betwen representation and the act of looking. In this sense his work chalenges the authorizing archive that enables viewing. 178 Subverting Archival Photography Techniques Artists working generations after Du Bois have used photography to subvert the archive in similar ways. In the execution and display of their work, they reference, critique and disrupt prevailing truths regarding race, gender and sexuality. Staged photography, also known as performance photography, is a principal genre, and it arguably has its roots in early tableau and masquerade. 179 Tableau, acording to Roland Barthes, is a self-conscious device used by artists to present moral subjects in a thought-provoking way that also engages the viewer on an emotional level as it generates meaning. For Barthes a key aspect of tableau is the creation of an artificial whole that embodies exces to signify the idea at stake; the work does not precisely miick the world at large. 180 The influential performance artist, filmaker, and instalation artist, Eleanor Antin critiques the culturaly imposed ideals of feminine beauty and feminine identity in a historical context. Antin has created mock stage roles to expose her many selves. Her most famous persona is that of ?Eleanora Antinova,? the tragicaly overlooked black balerina of Sergei Diaghilev?s Ballets Russes; Eleanora appears in the work entitled Reflections of my Life with Diaghilev (Fig. 4.7), recently 178 Ibid. 179 Lucy Souter, ?Enigmatic Spectacle: Key Strategies in Contemporary Stage Photography,? in Role Models: Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography, ed. Susan Fisher Sterling (London: Scala Publishers, 208). 180 Ronald Barthes, ?Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,? Music-Image-Text (New York: Nonday Pres, 197). 97 exhibited in the show Role Models. Appearing as Antinova in scripted and non- scripted performances for over a decade, Antin has blurred the distinction betwen her identity and that of her character. In the proces, she has created a rich body of work detailing the multiple facets of her beloved Antinova, including a fictitious memoir. In a second work in the Role Models show, entitled The Angel of Mercy, Anton asumes the role of Florence Nightingale. By creating tableaux of a black woman performing roles they would never have played at the purported time the photographs were made, Antin highlights the history of Euro- American discrimination. Antin?s photographs can be sen as a kind of natural extension of Du Bois?s portraits of African Americans as average people into another realm of the unusualy gifted by ironicaly using famous personas. A second facet of Antin?s practice derives its strength, at least in part, from the documentary photography asociated with medical and racial science. Her Carving a Traditional Sculpture, of 1972, which was part of the exhibition WACK!, distinguishes betwen naturalistic transformations and those that are more psychological in nature. In this performance, Antin endured a thirty-six day diet, which she documented in photographs recording the front, back, left and right sides of her nude body (Fig. 4.8). Antin instals the photos in a grid so that they appear to be a clinical record of the body, cold and scientific. Together, the photographs highlight the proces of physical transformation, doing so in a way that pits the subjective image against an ideal of femininity. Although Antin has stated that she was playing with the concept of the carving of a traditional Grek sculpture, her work actualy recals the archival techniques using photography that 98 mapped and zoned the racial, gendered and sexual categorization of bodies. Furthermore, the instalation of her photographs remind us of the work of the pioneer Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose grids of images record changes in bodies over time, though usualy only the briefest intervals. 181 His studies of motion centered on animal and human bodies, some photographed nude, acorded his work the status of scientific record for capturing the moving body (Fig. 4.9). Antin, however, has stated that her idea of ?carving? her own body was inspired by an invitation from the Whitney Museum of Art for its biennial, a survey exhibition that considers only the established categories of painting and sculpture. Her piece was considered too conceptual for the exhibition. This work of art has been mostly interpreted from the lens of a white woman, commenting on the history of the generic nude in an art historical context. Lisa Bloom notes that critical atention needs to be given to the work within an ethnic subtext, to the fact that Antin uses self portraits depicting a ?short, atractive Jewish woman.? 182 In this regard Antin begins with her own body and reveals what it means to be an embodied female and ethnic subject. Bloom also aserts that the instalation of the photos in a grid that highlights visual properties of staged photography of physiognomicaly based race theories of the ninetenth century. The use of archival and mock-archival images to subvert the very arguments they were created to support occurs in the work of the artists Carie 181 Eadweard Muybridge, The Human figure in Motion (New York: Dover Publications, 195). 182 Blom, Lisa. ?Contests for the Meaning of the Body Politics and Feminists Conceptual Art: Revisioning the 1970s through the work of Eleanor Antin,? in Performing the Body: Performing the Text, eds. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (New York: Routledge, 199),156. 99 Mae Wems and Lorna Simpson. Both use archival photographs to explore their Black feminine identity and thereby complicate isues of gender, race, clas and sexuality. In one series, Wems chalenges the ethnographic representations of enslaved African Americans. She rephotographs documentary portraits and prints them in a deep sepia tone. The images are then framed in oval Victorian frames, giving them an authenticaly old appearance (Fig. 4.10). On the glas covering each is etched a word that relates to the individual?s slave identity: ?House,? ?Field,? ?Yard? and ?Kitchen.? The viewer ses through the word, so that the human identity of each nameles figure is canceled out by the impersonal role each played as a slave. In her Kitchen Table Series (1990), Wems creates a series of documentary photographs of narative tableaux (Fig. 4.11). In them, she takes up universal themes of family, but does so in terms of the personal, cultural and political isues afecting the history of the African American family. Wems mixes hard realities with a personal vision, to convey the pointedly political, biter and painful past of being African American. The work presented in the Kitchen Table Series relates to her personal experience, using family pictures that bring out the racial undercurrents of gender, parenting and individual identity. Wems?s photographs especialy explore her relationship with her daughter at the kitchen table. The staged photographs are taken from one end of the table that is left vacant. In this way the viewer becomes part of the narative, and as Wems herself points out, ?the power of the work comes out of the fact that is it not me, but about us.? 183 183 Susan Fisher Sterling and Kathryn Wat, ?Fashioning Feminine Identity in Contemporary Photography,? in Role Models: Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography, ed. 100 Lorna Simpson combines images of body and text in order to lead us to question racial stereotypes and asumptions about clas, gender and sexuality. One of her concerns has been to highlight cultural practices and identity through the repetition of words and images. In her photographic works?Untitled (gues who?s coming to dinner) (2001) and Study (2000) 184 ?she photographs a woman and man in profile views reminiscent of ninetenth-century portraits. Simpson complicates the discourses of misperception and misrepresentation that produce stereotypes of black subjects, constructing an archival realignment. 185 In Untitled the portraits of a woman are shown in vertical rows embedded in a frame of Plexiglas. The surface of the Plexiglas is incised with titles of American films produced in the 1960s. Study shows profile photographs of a black man, but the work is underscored by paintings of male figures as subject, found in collection of American museums, Study of a Black Man and A Negro Prince. She uses similar strategies in Coifure (Fig.4.12), where she juxtaposes thre black-and-white images: the back of a woman with closely cropped hairstyle, a coil of braided hair, and an African mask. The representation of hair, especialy braided hair, is a recurring theme in Simpson?s work. Images of braided and coiled hair highlight asociations betwen hair and culture, ethnicity, gender, and possibly even the whole body. The mask serves as an object through which public and private ritual, as wel as the discontinuities and contradictions of ethnic identity, especialy African American identity, can be explored. Simpson work refers specificaly to the identity of African Americans and how they conform to, or Susan Fisher Sterling (London: Scala Publishers Limitied, 208) 35-43.39. 184 I was unable to find reproducible quality images to include in this project. 185 Enwezor (208) notes how the aproach can now be found in American films. 101 rebel against, prevailing white standards of beauty by braiding, dying, weaving, and procesing their hair. Simpson offers a powerful ilustration of the social constructednes of race and gender, using hair as a cultural product to negotiate, resist or define social relationships. In similar ways, Coble subverts the photographic proces to create a counter- archive of Drag King performances (Figs. 2.5,2.6). The vibrant images of behaviors that would at one time have been sen as perverted, she presents as the joyful playfulnes and theatricality of performance. The works together create a counter-archive of queer subjectivities. Coble?s photographs and subsequent performances alow for an analysis of the body as a literal and conceptual center of discourse to asert the active and self-determining principles of personal narative. In this sense, by intersecting the personal with the performative, performance blurs the distinction betwen the author and agent, subject and object. Performing Aversion In the early twentieth century, the work of Havelock Elis and Magnus Hirschfeld influenced the views on human sexuality, especialy the psychiatric interpretation of homosexuality. Until 1973, homosexuality remained a diagnostic criterion in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychological Asociation. In turn the pathological status of homosexuality gave rise to therapeutic interventions and treatment strategies that had as their goal converting homosexual behavior to heterosexual. Since it was asumed that al 102 homosexuals were pathological, there was litle atention paid to methodical soundnes of treatment and techniques used, which would need to have been measured by their succes. One treatment strategy was electro-convulsive shock therapy. Mary Coble took up the use of electro-convulsive therapy administered, until 1973, to thousands of gays and lesbians as the subject of her performance titled Aversion (Fig. 4.13). Performing on May 18, 2007, at the Conner Contemporary Art Galery in Washington, Coble renacted a moment in the historical past as a way to reference the marginalization of sexual minorities; the greater context was provided by current opinions of homosexuality held by the religious right wing. Coble, who first heard of the shock treatment when she was in her tens, states that her performance arose from the need to rembody a historical moment when sexuality was pathologized. Her research into the civic identity of gay and transgender people over and over again returned to the views of the religious right wing and organizations such as Exodus International, which advocated fredom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ. Her subsequent research also highlighted the devastating efect of the shock treatment, which left participants with burns and ireversible damage from the tubular electrodes of the TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) units. Know by several names?aversion therapy, reorientation therapy, reconditioning?the common goal was to reverse the sexual orientation of gay and lesbian subjects. 103 Atended by a large audience, Coble walked into the galery wearing white pants and a sweatshirt, looking stoic and restrained. She sat in a black leather chair, resembling something one would find in a therapist?s office. The other chairs, lined in theater style, were full of spectators. Forty fet away were several other viewers watching the performance on a computer scren via webcam, since there was no more space in the galery for them to sit. The viewers were transfixed as they watched Coble?s body being repeatedly shocked Coble states: "Nobody was moving. Nobody said a word. Nobody's cel phone went off." 186 At the same time, viewers logged in from other cities on the Internet to watch Coble?s performance. Coble sat on the reclining chair (Fig. 4.14), while her asistant atached two electrodes on her left arm. The black leather chair looks comfortable and inviting compared to the two cool and hard electrodes. The wires atached to the electrodes were hooked into a smal machine that sat on a table next to Coble?s chair. As the performance began, a slide projector cycled loudly, projecting a new image of scantily clad men and women every few seconds. Each time an erotic image of two women was shown, Coble?s asistant released a jolt of electricity. At first there was a gentle movement of Coble?s arm as it lifted off the arm of the chair. As the performance continued the shocks become more frequent; they caused Coble?s arm to rise more severely, jerking her arm and making her hand move backwards, the response to obvious pain (Figs. 4.14, 4.16). The shock was repeatedly administered to Coble for 30 minutes. 186 Rachel Beckman, ?Aversion: A Jolt of an Experience,? The Washington Post (May 17, 207). 104 The post performance show at the Conner Contemporary Art Galery exhibited the artifacts of Aversion, which included the slideshow, the leather chair and electrodes used in the performance. Also on exhibit and for sale were the documentary photographs and a video of Coble?s hand clenching and releasing during shock therapy. The exhibited pieces also included thre instaled videos. Sesion One and Sesion Two each focus on one of Coble?s hands as she experiences the treatment. The third, Aversion (Recounted), a twenty-one minute video, shows a series of interviews that Coble recorded in 2007; in them, unnamed individuals deliver firsthand acounts of their experiences with electro- convulsive aversion therapy. 187 When asked about the participants, Coble does not comment on the identity of her participants, or if they were actual patients or actors. Since then, Coble has been invited to exhibit her photographs and videos in local and international exhibitions. A short video can be viewed on her webiste. Kely Rand, writing for Arts and Events, asks her readers to question the motivation of the spectators who witnesed Coble?s painful performance of Aversion. She questions if seing the performance would force them to confront the ugly reality that people often do very bad things to others. In response to the display of artifacts at the galery Rand states, ?The display is disconcerting and ominous on its own. That's how one might fel when approaching Mary Coble's new show, Aversions, at Conner Contemporary Art. Coble confronts the horible efects of electro shock therapy prescribed to gays and lesbians to re-condition 187 Kriston Caps, ?Mind the Zap,? Washington City Paper (May 17, 207). 105 their sexual orientation, in a sparse but powerful collection.? 188 Joey Or, logged on from Chicago to se Coble?s performance, writes for the Gay & Lesbian Review. He notes that Coble?s Aversion taps into the everyday life of her personal experiences and those of her community as she renacts and repeats her queer reality. She offers herself as site of contestation and political action using ?her body to create a new kind of archive about the body politic.? 189 Although some spectators are repulsed by Coble?s strategies of pain and the body, others have found her work powerful, paraleling the body art of the 1960s and 70s. In performing the embodied history of her community, subjecting herself to painful procedures, Coble offers the body as a queer archive. Operating within the dialectics of the archive of memory and history, Coble disrupts the archive by complicating past and present as a ?construction site.? 190 In this sense, Coble?s performance extends the agency of art to the body, the archive and intersubjective experience. For Coble the body becomes a source and subject of the past archive to build and replay her own embodied and constructed history. 191 Her work ofers a concrete link betwen performance art and testimony and evokes strong responses in her viewers. In renacting the history of the queer body, her viewers respond with empathy, recaling a moment of cultural memory. Coble?s performance offers a queer theorizing of the archive, one that complicates conceptions of history, memory and the body as a means of making forms of 188 Kely Rand, ?Aversion @ Coner Contemporary,? Arts and Events (June 5, 207). 189 Joey Or, ?Mary Coble's Body, Electrified,? The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide (Sept-Oct, 207). 190 Keith Jenkins in Re-Thinking History (London: Routledge,191), argues the ned to separate the past from history. For him, the former is a ?construction site,? on which the later is built. In this way, he argues that facts impose no meaning in and of themselves. 191 Blackson (207), 31. 106 represed history visible, alowing for a collective way to remember. Central to this notion is the role of felings and emotions, especialy the contingency of pain and its relevance to the archive in locating the motivation for the transformative efect of oppresed voices. 192 Even before birth, individuals are paterned in the kind of subjectivity they wil be permited to live out. Subjects are ?regulated, branded, and shaped? 193 by the ideological apparatus of the archives of race, clas, gender, sex, and social powers. Chela Sondoval draws on Foucault?s conception of power and resistance as a cultural and social mutation in producing an oppositional consciousnes, making individuals capable of confronting the most intrusive forms of domination and subordination. In this regard, the political, ethical, social and philosophical problem is not one of liberating the individual from the institutions of the state, but rather promoting new forms of subjectivity to counter the histories of fear, pain, hatred and hierarchy. They come through the rejection of the forms of individuality imposed on the subject. 194 Emotions and felings thus become important factors in producing oppositional or diferential forms of consciounes to resist the performitivity of the archive. Archive as a Conceptual Space: Adresing Memory, Emotions and Pain In arguing for the conceptual nature of the archive and its impact on everyday experiences of subjectivity, scholars acros disciplines have recognized 192 Chela Sondoval, Methodology of the Opresed, argues for de-coloniality as a transitive zone in which modes of resistance were first lived, identified and defined resulting in transformative efects for an opositional consciousnes. 193 Sondoval, (200),163,4. 194 Ibid. 107 the need to acount for memory, history and emotions as they relate to discourses of the body. Performance art presents the intersection of history and memory as one inextricably linked to the embodied experiences of everyday life. Memory theorists believe that experiences of the past are cumulative, and that individuals do not have the ability to recal past experiences with precision. Theorists, nevertheles, do recognize the sensory imprints of memory that relate to the embodiment of social and cultural experiences of oppresion and trauma. 195 Performance studies scholars have added to the discussion of the archive from the perspective of embodiment, memory and history as it serves to foreground isues of race, clas, gender, sexuality and citizenship. David Rom?n, for example, contends that contemporary performance is embedded in a historical archive of past performances that help contextualize history. For him ?contemporary practice is an ongoing dialogue with once contemporary works now relegated to literary history, the theatrical past, or cultural memory.? 196 In a similar way, Joseph Roach ses performance as atending to counter-memories. Roach understands performance as an archive of the past and an ongoing engagement with the retrieval of history. From his perspective, performance constitutes both a political intervention and an embodied theorization. 197 Performance studies scholars have also argued that performance ofers a repository for the continuous re-articulation of cultural memory, which, over time, creates repositories of meaning for audiences. Like Rom?n and Roach, Diana 195 Basel van der Kolk, ?The Body Keps the Score: Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Postraumatic Stres,? Harvard Review Psychiatry, 15 (194), 253-263. 196 Rom?n (205), 13. 197 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum- Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Pres, 196), 26. 108 Taylor streses the archive?s importance to history and memory as an embodied practice. Examining everyday ritualistic practices and cultural events, she argues that performance serves as a means both to commemorate and contest the past. Performance for her is a system of learning, storing and transmiting knowledge that is embodied that she refers to as the ?repertoire.? Taylor starkly distinguishes betwen the role of performance in the archive and the repertoire; she writes that ?performance can never be captured or transmited through the archive. A video of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace performance as a thing in itself (the video is part of the archive; what it represents is part of the repertoire). Embodied memory, because it is live, exceds the archive?s ability to capture it.? 198 While refraining from creating a binary? betwen the archive and the repertoire?Taylor is very specific about the active and pasive principles of the two concepts. In its literal meaning, she notes, archival memory exists in documents, texts, maps, leters, archaeological remains, videos, and film: the material conditions of the archive resist change. She adds that the archival memory, in its materiality and documentation, succeds in separating the source of knowledge from its knower. In this context, the material and historical documents in the archive exced the live performance. In my view, Taylor?s theorizing happens in the interstices betwen the archive and the repertoire. I would argue that in the case of Coble the performance event, the documents, artifacts and audience response are al part of the archive. In this sense the archive and repertoire are not separate or oppositional, but instead are 198 Diana Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americans (Durham: Duke University Pres, 203). 109 mutualy constructing and deconstructing each other, and the repertoire resides within the archive as a conceptual, imaginative space that contextualizes embodiment and emotions as esential to the proces of meaning making and intersubjectivity. Historicaly, performance art practice has evoked emotional responses due to its resistive and provocative content. Performance art can take on a disruptive form that artists use to respond to change, whether political, cultural or social. The aim of performance art, especialy that using the body, is not to seduce its audience but rather to ?unravel and examine criticaly the techniques of seduction, unnerving viewers in the proces, rather than providing them with an ambiguous seting for desire.? 199 Performance art can sometimes be grotesque and frightening, evoking strong emotions, such as disgust, pain, hate and, in many cases, fear. The aim of some performers is to ?expose the roots of taboo and fear through their work;? 200 this, I contend, offers a space for emotions and felings to provoke resistance to the archive as a proces of meaning making, changing or disrupting power norms. Emotions and felings within the context of performance art and the archive become important subjects for my project to addres queer approaches to public cultures. Ann Cvetkovich argues for the ?archive of felings? 201 to contextualize everyday experiences that circulate in the vicinity of trauma alongside moments of everyday emotional distres often ignored by cultural theorists. She cals for recognizing the importance of both everyday and 199 Goldberg (198) 13. 200 Ibid. 201 Cvetkovich (203),7 110 historical events in the formation of lesbian subjectivities, especialy how the textures of everyday lesbian experiences resist the authority of medical discourses. In this sense, embodied subjectivities are repositories of feling and emotions. Afective experiences are encoded not only in the content of the cultural meaning but also in the practices that surround their production and reception. In this way the archive becomes a conceptual space that also acounts for the corporeal subjectivities that form the archive of felings, a product of the dominant public culture. Ofering a diferent perspective of ?felings? in relationship to the archive, Sara Ahmed ilustrates how emotions register the proximity of others. She describes emotions as ?the flesh of time? and explores how emotions are atributed to objects, such that objects become sticky, or full of afective value. Ahmed is interested in ?the public nature of emotions, and the emotive nature of publics.? 202 The archive in this sense is not about the conversion of the self into a textual gathering, but a ?contact zone.? For her, the archive takes on multiple forms of contact that include, institutional forms (records, libraries, websites) and everyday contacts (friends, family and others) within which the personal and the public, the individual and the social are shaped through interaction with others. 203 Performance artists, in my view, situate embodiment, felings and emotions at the center, rather than the periphery of analysis. Coble?s work evokes a response in viewers that serves to foreground the mesines of subjectivity as constructed and shaped by the historic functions of the archive. In this sense, the 202 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 204), 14. 203 Ibid. 111 performance artist contests the regulating principles of the legal authority of the archive using pain, emotions, cutting and the bleding body as a strategy of provocation. Artists like like Chris Burden, Marina Abramavi?, Carole Schneemann, Catherine Opie and Mary Coble have made their mark by pushing the limits of the body to provoke their audiences. To this end, pain and the body offer a powerful analysis of embodiment in relationship to the archive. Eliane Scary notes that pain is inacesible to language. It is expresed through the sensory, afective or cognitive elements of the body and perception. In performance art, pain is a literal representation as it is enacted directly upon the body. The political consequences of pain are bound up with power, especialy in relationship to torture (pain has mostly been theorized in relationship to torture and war). Scary streses, first, that pain is inflicted on the person, second, that the body experiencing the pain is objectified and made visible to those witnesing the pain, and, third, that ?the objectified pain is denied as pain and read as power, a translation made possible by the obsesive mediation of agency.? 204 Her analysis opens the debate to questioning the role of the body in pain in performance art and its relationship to intersubjectivity. In this sense, the contingency of pain and how pain is experienced by others offer an important basis for theorizing embodiment of culture and emotions as political and public discourses. While pain is about suffering on the one hand; on the other, it is about the empowerment of individuals and communities that come together to expres their personal, political and cultural marginalization. 204 Elaine Scary, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Pres,1985), 28. 112 As witnesed in Coble?s Note to Self, the renactment of pain inflicted on the victims of hate crimes become a means of ?doing and undoing? the authorial legality of the archive. The inscribing of the name followed by creating a negative imprint, followed by pinning it to the wal, become a way to re-inscribe what has been lost and forgotten, to redres the gap betwen the private and public by extracting the naratives of marginalized subjects. Coble?s performance retels, renacts the absences of the archive of hate crime victims as a way to re- write history and recreate the past on her body, quering the parameters of the archive. In Aversion Coble directly draws from the historical archive to juxtapose psychological diagnosis, neglectful treatment and the cultural production of homosexuality. In tracking the factual and yet fictive nature of the archive, Coble plays with the role of testimony by creating a video of individuals who underwent shock therapy, but refrains from revealing the true identities of the participants. Performance in this sense uses the strategy of repetition, renactment and reproduction as means of constructing and deconstructing the authenticity of the archive. Artists like Coble perform in and on the archive as a way to disrupt its performative and authorial function by becoming the absent subjects of the archive. By enacting the history of loss, she offers the archive as a conceptual space, disturbing the performativity of the archive as a means of reimaging the archival space of her communities? marginalization, offering alternative knowledge or counter-memory. In this way, the performance artist draws from public and private archives, acting as a cultural worker to re-inscribe the archive, destabilizing its evidentiary and historical authority. Coble?s performances offer 113 an implicit view of the past as ?empirical truths,? as they simultaneously disclose the relative character of the present and therefore evoke skepticism in her viewer for the subjectivities excluded from the archive. In citing the lack of evidentiary documents in the archive, Cobles performance points to isues of representation and interpretation, questioning the evidence and authenticity of identity, 205 especialy as it relates to the body, gender and sexuality. Internet and the Archive - A Mnemonic System Coble?s archive of 438 undocumented names of hate crime victims, makes visible the marginalization of the LGBT community. She uses the archive as source and subject to highlight its performativity. She also raises questions concerning the limits of the performance of everyday life and the ethics and credibility of the archive. In addition, by going live on the Internet, Coble reaches audiences that would otherwise be unable to experience her performance. The Internet raises new isues for performance art and archival practices. Although the live performance disappears, Coble?s videos and photographs of her performing can be viewed on her and others? websites. That Coble?s performance archive and its disemination via the Internet create new public spheres for discourses of the body, performance art and the archive, are questions that wil be addresed in Chapter 5. Here, I am concerned with the role of the performance event, its documentation and afterlife as it relates to intersubjectivity. What 205 Thomas Osborne, ?The Ordinarines of the Archive,? History of the Human Sciences, 12,2 (199), 51-64. 114 happens to the physical archive when it goes public in museums, exhibited in future shows or circulates on the Internet? Thomas Osborne, writing in 1999, argued that the existence of an archive depends upon its audience or public. Although aces to an archive may be restricted, its role is stil to serve some kind of public memory. New technology has not only afected artistic practices, it has equaly afected the role of knowledge and aces to archives via the World Wide Web (WW), once considered the domain of a restricted few. Howard Caygil, also writing in 1999, argued for the Internet as an archival mnemonic system. He notes that the debates surrounding the future of the web are intertwined with politics that ?largely depends on it being able to overcome the hierarchies of aces to knowledge that have traditionaly characterized the archive.? 206 The acelerating disemination of information via the Web sems to be bypasing the hierarchies that once controlled aces to traditional archival collections. While the Internet alows for a new kind of memory and archive, it cals into question the hierarchies that it does confirm and the utopias and dystopias that it provokes. The fact remains that the Internet as a mega-archive has had an extraordinary impact on the cultural organization of experience and memory. 207 Foster, in his study cited at the outset, proposes the Internet as the ideal archival medium. The Internet follows the principles of post-industrial production and mas consumption; even if it cannot replace tactile and face-to-face interaction, it efectively supplants it. At the same 206 Howard Caygil, ?Meno and the Internet: Betwen Memory and the Archive,? History of the Human Sciences, 12 (199) 1-1, 2. 207 Caygil (199). 115 time the shift in information appears as a ?virtual readymade.? 208 Although the Internet may not provide an afective intersubjective interaction, it ofers a dialogical space for the repetition and aces of performances that required the physical presence of the viewer at a given time. In this regard, the Internet serves as a virtual platform that diseminates information through photographs and video documents, offering a space of public contestation and debate?it is political, with the intent of serving recipients in the present and the future. Within this context it is further interesting to note that the photographic archives, be it Du Bois?s counter-archive or the photographic documents of Francis Galton and Thomas Huxley, can be easily acesed and viewed from any computer on the Internet. A Google search on Francis Galton reveals books and original documents used by Galton for studying the aspects of the human body. Images from the average American male to boys of al ages can be found on the Image Archives of the American Eugenics Movement website. Similarly, a special collection at the University of Masachusets, Amherst, has a digital archive of Du Bois?s photographs that can be acesed on the Internet. The archive in its contemporary acesible form has shifted the tenor of academic debates over the production and institutionalization of knowledge. 209 The defining features of the archive, once considered a physical domain of knowledge and authority open to a privileged few, mainly designated scholars, are not just disrupted, but entirely redefined, by the easy availability of archival material on the Internet. Although new technology chalenges the authority of the archive, it is important to question 208 Foster (204). 209 Anjali Arondekar, ?Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive,? Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14 (205), 10-27. 116 how the Internet complicates the concept of the archive in relationship to the viewing practices of the body. Also, how do performance artists chalenge the historical archive, especialy the materiality of the body as the medium of their art by diseminating their work via the Internet? Conclusion Coble?s performance, its conceptualization, the audience response, the documents and the afterlife of the performance, offer several points of discussion, especialy in regards to the body, the archive and performance art. Drawing on the history of homosexuality and psychiatry, Coble performs the archive to highlight the consequences of historical knowledge of the body, which excluded and made invisible queer desire, relegating queer bodies to the realm of pathology. Performance studies scholars have argued for the need to comprehend how ?human beings fundamentaly make culture, efect power, and reinvent their ways of being in the world.? 210 Performance in this sense complicates the interogation of the archive of history, identity, comunity, nation and politics in the everyday and the ordinary, and in so doing reveal the complexity of meaning production. Performance studies has sometimes asked us to rethink the ?world as a text? in favor of the ?world as a performance.? 211 Anthropologist James Cliford raised similar questions that apply to print media, questioning the methods used to 210 D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera, ?Performance Studies at the Intersections,? The SAGE Handbok of Performance Studies, eds. D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 206), xi-xxv. 211 Dwight Conquergod, ?Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,? Comunications Monograph, 58 (191) 179-194. 180. 117 evaluate and verify the truth of cultural acounts. 212 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his critical analysis of race, also points to the Western privilege given to writing: the belief that ?without writing, no repeatable sign of the workings of reason and mind could exist.? 213 Al point to the authorial nature of texts, and argue for the need to revaluate the methods used in constructing knowledge and meaning making, including embodied knowing. Within this perspective, Coble?s Note to Self and Aversion complicate corporeality and the materiality of the body in relationship to the archive. Coble?s performance of the body becomes ?the doing? as wel as the ?thing done;? it stands betwen the past and present, presence and absence, consciousnes and memory, invoking a continuum of history, making it possible to expose and interogate cultural inscriptions and thus offer alternative possibilities for change. 214 In conceptualizing performance as the ?politics of possibilities,? D. Soyini Madison notes the importance of political theater in shaping subjects, audience and performers alike. In honoring subjects who have been mistreated, such performances contribute to a more ?enlightened and involved citizenship.? 215 In a similar way Coble uses the historical repetition and renactment of pain and the body as a performance strategy. Similar to Note to Self, her performance of Aversion evokes an equaly strong emotional response in her viewers. 212 James Cliford, ?Introduction: Partial Truths,? Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. J. Cliford and G.E.Marcus (Berkeley: California Pres, 1986). 213 Henry Louis Gates Jr., ?Race,? Writing and Diference (Chicago: University Pres of Chicago, 1986) 214 Elin Diamond, Performance and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 196),1. 215 Madison (198). 118 The archive for my project thus becomes multidimensional. It can designate a source of documents, objects and events that are acesed by artists to conceptualize their performances. From this standpoint, the artist becomes the archivist, working in and on the archive. The archive can also be a conceptual space that encompases the artist?s personal experiences of embodied history and memory. In this sense, the body as archive becomes the source and subject of the everyday experiences that performance artists draw from to resist, exced, and overwhelm the constraints of the archive. Performance artists use diverse means to make visible their embodied practice to claim the body as a ?site of knowing.? 216 The body as the medium, form, source and subject ?centers performance as a primary mode of experiencing and radicaly intervening in the world, 217 to acount for ?how culture is done in the body.? 218 In this way the archive becomes an important concept in relationship to intersubjectivity. Performance hinges on the emotions and felings evoked in the viewers. When history and memory are juxtaposed in relationship to the public and private, visibility and invisibility, cultural theorists have to take into acount the role of felings and emotions in intersubjective proces, further discussed in chapter 5. 216 Conquergod (191), 180. 217 David Donkor, ?Performance, Ethnography and the Radical Intervention of Dwight Conquergod,? Cultural Studies, 21 (207), 821-825. 218 Jones (202), 7. 119 CHAPTER FIVE Intersubjectivity: Disrupting Viewing Practices In the previous chapters, I examined the archive as a physical repository as wel as a conceptual space that performance artists aces to engage audiences in participatory practices. Coble?s performances, based on strategies of renactment and re-presentation, create counter archives to reinscribe absence and invisibility and acount for the loss of marginalized naratives. Her role as an artist and archivist and her detailed research prior to her performances, al serve to highlight the social and political systems of oppresion. Her live performances and subsequent exhibitions of photographs and artifacts take place in the context of the active participation of the audience or spectators. In this chapter, I explore the role of intersubjectivity, a prominent anchor for performance art. In order to do so, I explore intersubjectivity and the role of emotion and embodiment, both of which relate to Coble?s two performances Marker and Blood Script. In examining them and their documentation, I aim to complicate intersubjectivity as a concept that operates not just within a live performance, but one that can be elicited through the secondary archives of Coble?s performance art. On the basis of the discourses surrounding the documentation of performance art, the archive, its circulation and the afterlife of the performance beyond the live event, I am interested in how meaning is created or disrupted within the social dimensions of the live performance, as wel as its documents. Through the relationship betwen participatory experience and performance, performance art serves as a conceptual space to bridge 120 intersubjectivity in meaning making, sometimes disrupting hegemonic norms of power in public spaces. I look at the social dimensions of participation and the ?politics of emotions? to examine how collaboration betwen performer and audience offers a theorization of embodiment in the collective dimension of social experience as means of producing agency. Intersubjectivity and Public Spheres The term ?intersubjectivity? has been defined as a proces ?involving or occurring betwen separate conscious minds or acesible to or capable of being established for two or more subjects.? 219 A term used originaly in phenomenological sociology, intersubjectivity was coined to refer to the mutual constitution of social relationships. It denotes a set of relations, meanings, structures, practices, experiences, or phenomena evident in human life. Theorist Herbert Mead argued that the development of cognitive, moral, and emotional capacities in individuals is dependent upon the extent to which they take part in socialy symbolic and mediated interactions with other individuals. For Mead, human interaction was esentialy and ireducibly intersubjective. 220 An intersubjective proces in this sense suggests that individuals within a community or group can reach consensus about knowledge or their everyday life experiences. As a dialectical and dialogical proces, intersubjectivity is about participation and mutuality, but not always about agrement. In this sense, intersubjectivity becomes a meaning making and meaning disruption proces as it relates to the personal, social and political experiences of individuals. 219 Meriam- Webster?s Dictionary, htp:/ww.meriam-webster.com/ 220 George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 1934). 121 Another viewpoint that emerges out of the work of psychological theory concerns the role of embodiment and intersubjectivity. Daniel Stern states that ?Intersubjectivity is the capacity to share, know, understand, empathize with, fel, participate in, resonate with, and enter into lived subjective experiences of another.? 221 He argues for the verbal and non-verbal interactions betwen individuals as co-creative acts of meaning making. The non-verbal sources, especialy gestures, posture, silences and rhythms that relate to embodiment, along with the content of spech, produce the empathic and participatory resonance of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity, for him, is not only a proces of understanding, but also one central to producing the felings and emotions that are an important component to meaning making. He argues that intersubjectivity stands at the core of empathy, identification and internalization of early social and cultural experiences. The cohesion within human groups is greatly enhanced by the moral emotions of shame, guilt and embarasment?being able to ?se oneself through the eyes of another ? that is, as you sense the other ses you.? 222 The shortcoming of psychological theory is that it privileges the role of meaning making as one that is largely creative. It fails to acount for the subversive role of disconnection and disruption in intersubjective experience, and is therefore of limited value for the study of performance art. One needs to turn to cultural theory as it relates to performance and the idea of ?public spheres.? 221 Daniel Stern, ?Intersubjectivity,? in The American Psychiatric Textbok of Psychoanalysis, eds. Ethel Person, Arnold Coper & Glen Ganard (Arlington: American Psychiatric Publishing Inc, 205),78. 222 Stern (205) 84. 122 Public spheres consist of constantly shifting temporary communities. Scholars have stresed the connection betwen the emotions and politics as one that motivates social change in public spheres. Jil Dolan supports a ?utopia in performance:? live performance that provides a ?place where people come together, embodied and pasionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleting intimations of a beter world.? 223 It is the aesthetics of performance that lead to ?both efective and afective felings and expresion of hope.? 224 Dolan makes an argument for the link betwen performance and politics; they are, she writes, always intertwined and shaping intersubjective experience. For her it is the smal but profound moments in which the audience is lifted slightly above the present, leaving remnants of hopeful felings of a beter world, that is the ?utopian performative.? The utopian performative takes us beyond the ?now? of material oppresion and unequal power relations, and leads us toward the promise of a present that opens a beter future. Dolan writes that the utopian performative springs from a ?complex alchemy of form and content, context and location, which takes shape in moments of utopia as doings, as proces, as never finished gestures towards a potentialy beter future.? 225 Some critics believe that performance art has distinct limitations. They liken performance to the theater; it is in the moment, its reality confirmed by its volatility. This is the position of Peggy Phelan, who posits an ontology of performance as one of disappearance, ?invisibility and the unconscious where it 223 Jil Dolan, Utopia in Performance (An Arbor: University of Michigan Pres, 205),2. 224 Ibid. 225 Dolan (205), 8. 123 eludes regulation and control. Performance resists the balanced circulation of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends. While photography is vulnerable to counterfeiting and copying, performance art is vulnerable to charges of valuelesnes and emptines.? 226 Phelan?s position has been criticized by Miranda Joseph, who concedes that performance may resist exchange value, but ses Phelan?s position as one that fails to take into acount the role of the audience and intersubjectivity. Jose Mu?oz takes Joseph?s argument further, stating that the ?kernel of potentiality? is the real force of performance due to its intersubjective ability to generate ?knowing and recognition? that facilitates minoritarian belonging. Arguing for a ?utopian potentiality,? he contends that utopia is ?an ideal, something that should mobilize us, push us forward,? 227 but he also recognizes that utopia concerns the politics of emotions. He makes an argument drawing from Ernst Bloch?s ?principle of hope? for ?minoritarian? subjects, whom he takes to be trapped in a world of hopelesnes. For Mu?oz, the proces of geting to utopia binds people, not just from a positive sense of belonging, but also through ?negative? emotions like shame, disgust and hate. He argues for the punks who reject the normative felings of belonging through the ?emotional work of negative afect.? 228 The ?utopian potentiality,? he streses, acounts for the efects of performance through the proces of documentation, such as the photographic records that represent the utopian performative. I agre with Mu?oz that the relationship betwen the performance 226 Phelan (193), 148. 227 Mu?oz (206), 9. 228 u?oz (206), 10. 124 and the audience is one of ?knowing and recognition? that facilitates a belonging, especialy ?minoritarian? belonging. For him, rather like J.L.Austin, 229 the performance does not disappear, but serves ?to do things in the future.? A related and useful concept is that of ?transmision of afect,? which is explored by Theresa Brennan. Brennan writes that the emotions and energies of one person or group can be absorbed by or can enter directly into another individual or group. Her theory of afect is based on constant communication betwen individuals and their physical and social environments. She believes that, ?individuals are afected by a feling in a group.? 230 Jil Bennet?s develops this idea further. Although she supports the view that art is a vehicle for the interpersonal transmision of experience, for her ?the afective responses engendered by works of art are not born of emotional identification or sympathy; rather, they emerge from the direct engagement with sensation as it is registered in the work.? 231 If so, then the use of the material body and pain ofer new strategies for performance artists. 232 Kathy Smith takes into consideration pain, performance, body, discourse representation and abject to locate the spectator?s position in contemporary performance art, questioning the dynamics and politics of the body. The material body is located within a discursive formation, one that is constantly shifting betwen ?performance/representation, the culture which 229 J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 1975). 230 Teresa Brenan, The Transmision of Afect (Cornel: Cornel University Pres, 204), 73. 231 Jil Benet, Empathic Vision: Afect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Palo Alto: Stanford University Pres, 205), 7. 232 Jean Forte, ?Women?s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism ," in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Elen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 190) 251-269argues for the undeniable presences of the material body in feminist?s performance art. 125 both acommodates and provokes representation, and the spectating subject.? 233 She emphasizes the visceral body-to-body response betwen performer and spectator. She is interested in the disquitening gap betwen the material body and the body in discourse. For her, ?the politics of performance ? the dynamic interstices betwen pain and discourse, the interface and disjuncture betwen the material body and body in culture- and these schisms and raptures are where the politics reveals itself, in the moments of unmediated visceral responses, where bodies speak and respond directly to each other.? 234 I take performance art to be a dialogical and dialectical site in which intersubjective experience is created, mediated or disrupted by evoking powerful emotions and felings. As a dialogical site performance documents experiences, addreses crises in the public and private archives of memory and history. The archive as a conceptual space for performance art becomes a dynamic site: a point of intersubjectivity that serves to bridge history, memory, emotions, felings and embodiment as means to offer alternative naratives for meaning making, changing or disrupting the performativity of the archive. Spectatorship: Subversive Participatory Practices A performance, be it live or on video, film or photographs, is always in the context of a viewer in a public sphere (and it is this fact that separates performance from theater whose ontology has been theorized as one of disappearance). The public views and evaluates what is exhibited in museums 233 Kathy Smith, ?Abject Bodies: Becket, Orlan, Stelarc and the Politics of Contemporary Performance.? Performance Research 207, 12 (1): 6-76, 6. 234 Smith (207), 76. 126 and galeries, where art provides an aesthetic or educational experience, leading the viewer, often through wal labels, into a past world of lost codes. The experience, especialy of the art of the past, tends to be private. Boris Gorys has explored another branch of art, participatory. In the Futurists and Zurich Dadaists movements, he ses the disolution of artistic individuality played out in public spaces. Both groups reached their audiences by deliberately scandalizing and provoking the viewer. The main goal was to shock the audience out of its pasivity. ?In this way the Futurists created a new synthesis betwen politics and art: they understood both a kind of event design ? as strategies of conquering public spaces by means of provocation.? 235 The Dadaists, coming on the heels of the Futurists, used strategies of repetition to disolve individuality and authorship. For example, they staged public performances of simultaneous poetry: multiple speakers and poetry recited in numerous languages, drowning out the individual voices. ?The disappearance of the individual voice amid the collective, resonant whole was the actual aim of the event.? 236 Rudolf Frieling identifies the paradox of the ?happening? in art, especialy happenings with a strong performative component. By embracing chance, inviting an audience to participate and giving up control, the production dismantles the norms traditional to evaluating art. Artists remain closely intertwined with art and anti-art as the driving force behind participatory actions. Frieling contends that ?ultimately, if artists wish to operate in the art world, they wil inevitably be perceived as the one responsible for the work, even if they involve collaborators, let others take on the production, utilize 235 Boris Groys, ?A Genealogy of Participatory Art,? The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (Ed.) (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Thames and Hudson, 209) 236 Gorys (209), 25. 127 online networks . . . . court unknown participants.? 237 Within this context, Frieling is convinced that ?art is constituted only through the participants activity.? 238 Clarie Bishop ses the role of participation as one that tends to be alied within al or one of the following concerns: activation, authorship and community. Activation is concerned with the desire to create an active subject. The goal is empowerment through participation, as wel as an examination of the viewer?s social and political realities. Thus, the aesthetic of participation directly relates to the way art is experienced (as wel as the production of individual/collective agency). Authorship is concerned with the level of control artists give up in collaborative productions. Although there is greater risk in shared production, collaborations are noted to ?emerge from, and to produce, a more positive and non-hierarchical social model.? 239 Finaly, the communitarian aspect of participatory practice is sen as a ?restoration of the social bond through a collective of meaning.? 240 The explosion of new technologies and the breakdown of medium-specific art in the 1960s provided opportunities to engage the viewer to explore the social dimensions inherent to participation. Performance art in particular strives to collapse the distinction betwen ?performer and audience, profesional and 237 Rudolf Frieling, ?Towards Participation in Art,? in The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, eds. Rudolph Frieling, Boris Groys, Robert Atkins, and Lev Manovich (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Thames and Hudson, 209), 35. 238 Ibid 239 Claire Bishop, ed., Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Pres, 206),1. 240 Ibid 128 amateur, production and reception.? 241 Participatory practices in this sense can sek to be provocative as wel as embrace collective creativity; they can be disruptive and interventionists, while others can be constructive and ameliorative. In al events, participation becomes inextricably linked to questions of politics. The emphasis is on collaboration and the collective dimensions of social experience. 242 Drawing from idea of interpretation and meaning making, I have stresed the importance of the active participation of the viewers in the performance art venues. Contemporary performance artists have used visual methods and strategies to question memory as it operates within social and cultural frameworks. From memorializing to self-reflexive practices, contemporary performance artists have insistently created work that conveys embodied, social and cultural memory. Lisa Satlzman notes that artists ?preoccupied with losses that reach from broadly historical, to the acutely personal, to the strictly theoretical, such art comes to function as a catalyst for and an agent of memory.? 243 For her such art comes to function as a mnemonic device, which I contextualize further through examining Mary Coble?s performances of Marker and Blood Script. Mary Coble?s Marker and Blood Script Mary Coble first performed Marker in New York on a cold October afternoon in 2006. She stood motionles, inviting viewers to write on her body a 241 Bishop (206),10. 242 Bishop (206). 243 Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Mater: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 206). 129 derogatory word or a slur that they had either used or been caled. As viewers walked by, intrigued by the content of the performance, they picked up a sharpie and wrote on Coble?s body (Figs.5.1, 5.2). Coble describes her first performance of Marker as dificult, mainly because participants did not pay atention to her directions and tagged her with a wide variety of words. She particularly remembers the harsh weather and her increasing discomfort caused by the cold and wind. Coble has linked the proces of performing Marker to her research for Note to Self. While she was studying hate crimes, she discovered several reports that included hate speech. For Coble, Marker addreses the relationship betwen the power of hate speech and its impact on people. Interested in the subversive nature of derogatory words and their power to promote discrimination, she wanted to perform an embodiment of language that shapes subjectivity. She also wished to confront the participants with the power of hate speech and how it produces shame and fear as part of the proces of ?othering.? While some participants wrote what they had been caled, others wrote words that they had used intentionaly or by mistake. Coble re-performed Marker in Washington, D.C., in July 2007, and then again in Madrid, in February 2008. She notes that the proces of repeating the performance gave her the opportunity to rethink and explore more deeply the power of hate speech, especialy its social and political significance when racial, gender and sexual epithets are used. In Washington and Madrid, Coble was more organized, and she specified just how she wanted participation to take place. At each site, she had her asistants hand out a flyer teling participants about the 130 nature of the performance before they wrote on her body. The flyer read, ?You are invited to write on the artist?s body derogatory words that have been used against you or slurs that you have used or heard used against others.? 244 At each of the performances, Coble stands motionles. Coble notes her surprise at the diferent ways in which participants interacted with her in Washington and then Madrid. She found that when performing Marker in non-art venues in New York and Washington, participants were uncomfortable; they avoided looking directly at her and were discret about which part of her body they wrote on. The participants in Madrid frely invaded Coble?s personal space, writing al over her body, including her face. She remembers her experience in Madrid as ?diferent,? especialy the vulnerability of being alone and not knowing what was being writen or said by the spectators and participants. Slurs and deragotory words were imprinted on her body in several languages. Coble speaks of her expectations at the performances and how she is often surprised by the way participants interact with her body. One reaction is discomfort among her participants as they write on her body. She recals several powerful incidents: in New York an agitated Armenian man shared his story of repeatedly being caled a ?towel head? since he began living in the United States. In Washington an African American man walked towards Coble pulling a woman by her arm. Reading his aggresive gesture, Coble?s helpers tried to stop him from geting closer, explaining the purpose of the performance. He insisted that he understood the purpose of the performance and proceded to pick up a marker and write the word ?cunt? on Coble?s neck (Fig. 5.3). He then turned around to 244 Marker, flyer handed out to participants. 131 his companion, apologizing for using the word and promising never to use it again on her. Another incident Coble remembers fondly is the touch of a smal child?s hand on the cold windy day in New York. She heard the voice of the child asking her mother, ?Mom, I don?t know how to spel ?stupid.?? As her mother spels out the word, the child writes it on Coble?s body. She recals how other kids have writen words like ?retard? and ?sisy? on her body. Following her performance in Madrid, Coble is invited to do a piece at the Pulse Contemporary Art Fair in New York. Folowing a patern reminiscent of the creation of Note to Self, Coble folds the thre Marker performances into a research efort that had as its result the collection of a large number of epithets. From the list she selected seventy-five words to be used in the performance of Blood Script. As in Note to Self, she collaborated with a tatoo artist (Fig.5.4) who would inscribe the words on the front of her body. As each word was tatooed, again without ink, a negative imprint was made on watercolor paper and then pinned to the wal (Figs. 5.5, 5.6). Her goal was to get her viewers to ?reflect what the insults mean to them. The dynamic proces mediates a silent dialogue betwen the artists and her audience as the performance progreses.? 245 The performance went on for twenty hours. Where a simple, unadorned style of writing was employed in Note to Self, the words of hate speech for Blood Script were inscribed using highly formal and relatively complex Gothic leters. She notes that the script was deliberately chosen to engage the viewers and chalenge them to identify with the inscribed insults. The choice, however, is open to diferent interpretations. For some viewers, the Gothic letering creates a 245 Performance Anouncement, PULSE New York (March, 208). 132 powerfully ironic tension betwen the content of the words and the way they are writen, namely in a form of writing that conjures up medieval manuscripts, which are generaly asociated (rightly or wrongly) with sacred content. Younger viewers, though, might asociate the form of writing with the nihilism of death metal bands, and thus creating no ironic tension. Blood Script is diferent from Note to Self, in that it is performed in front of an audience at a large art fair, not a smal group in the intimate space of a smal art galery. Over the two days of the performance several thousand viewers stopped by to witnes Blood Script being performed. The atmosphere in the audience wavered betwen tension and awe. Although some viewers were put off by the smel of witch hazel, sight of blood and viewing the proces of tatooing, others watched with empathy. Coble describes the performance of Blood Script as her most dificult so far because of the amount of physical pain she had to endure. Sara Hubbs, one of Coble?s asistants for Blood Script, recals her increased protectivenes towards the artist as the performance continued into the second day. She states that ?knowing the context of the performance made it easier for me to understand the importance of the pain that Mary was going through. This made the performance of Blood Script much more significant for me. When spectators got upset, I felt even more compeled to explain what the performance was about.? She also recals Coble?s performance was one of the first thing that fair goers encountered upon entering the space. Viewers were not expecting to be confronted by blood and tatooing. They were expecting to se art objects and paintings. The performance of Blood Script survives in the seventy- 133 five blood prints and photographs of Coble being tatooed, including a full frontal pose after the proces came to an end (Fig.5.7). The Role of Afect and Emotions in Intersubjectivity Coble?s previous performances Note to self and Aversion were given at the Conner Contemporary Art Galery in Washington. Several of the audience members were familiar with her focus on identity politics, and many were friends who had supported her work over the years. Unlike the previous performances, Blood Script moves Coble?s work significantly beyond identity politics and toward more global concerns of embodiment and the power of the language that produces shame and fear as it relates to race, clas, gender, sexuality, religion and citizenship. In soliciting hate speech from her audience in Marker, Coble creates a ?dialogue with and implies a certain complicity on the part of the viewer,? 246 who publicly confeses to the knowledge of hate speech and tacitly acknowledges its power. Hate speech has the ability to wound and produce an afective experience that is culturaly bound up with the politics of emotions. Coble?s Blood Script demonstrates the impact of emotions in shaping and categorizing bodies as they make contact with others though language in public cultures. The power of language is central in addresing the importance of emotions in shaping social proceses that shape individual experience, memory and history that get afectively inscribed. In order to consider emotions and afect in performance art, the participation of the audience becomes a central consideration. In esences the performance, staged or real, functions in relationship to its spectators to evoke 246 Shely R. Langdale, The 5th Anual New Prints Review, Art on Paper (208). 134 intersubjectivity. Often the response to Coble?s performances cover a range of positive and negative emotions that afect the viewers, be it her live or the secondary photographic and video archive of her performances. The words used to describe her work range from ?briliant,? ?ingenious,? ?amazing,? ?beautiful? and ?compasionate? to ?painful,? ?shocking,? ?disgusting? and ?hurtful.? Other words that emerge are pain, blood, and the body relating to the conceptualization of her performances. After a lecture at Ohio University, where I acompanied Coble, one spectator commented on her felings of anger and disgust evoked after reading about Coble?s performance art in the local newspaper Athens News, then followed by her web search for more of Coble?s performances. After the lecture the same spectator?s reaction moved to one of understanding and empathy commenting ?you are not an ?angry dyke.? Quite the contrary, you are compasionate, using your art and body as a vehicle for healing of pain, hurt, violent crimes and discrimination. Thank you for your positive spirit and humor and for making yourself venerable in order to speak for those who no longer have a voice because they were murdered.? Another spectator stated, ?I felt a strong reaction to some of your performances. It made me realize things about myself that I do and should not do.? Another viewer highlighted the role of pain, stating ?I was deeply impresed by you?re ability to mediate private pain?pain that society expects people to keep private?your performances force others to confront this pain they are conditioned to be ignorant of.? Another spectator comments ?you made me fel like I belonged. I realize how dangerous and susceptible a person like me is to certain hate-crimes. Yet, I also realized that there are alies 135 out there.? Refering to the Marker performance one spectator commented ?fascinating to hear about the marker performance, the child?s perspective of what a hurtful word was, about people actualy using your body as a human bilboard of sorts, advertising how painful words can be.? Ofering an analysis of pain and the body, Elaine Scary argues for the relationship betwen torture and war. She notes that pain is inacesible to language; rather it is expresed through the sensory, afective or cognitive elements of the body and perception. Sarah Ahmed, however, takes a diferent approach. Examining the politics of pain and how the lived experience of pain is shaped by contact with others, she contends that the ?pain of others is continualy evoked in public discourse, as that which demands a collective as wel as an individual response.? 247 For her, pain evokes history, but it also stands for the history of suffering and injustice. She contends that naratives that arouse the feling of pain are les about overcoming the pain than the empowerment of the other. In the tatooing proces, the experience of pain centers the body as a site of cultural knowing and memory. In this sense, the complex proces of culture becomes writen on the body. The individual?s pain is made meaningful through a collective experience that, in the performance, generates an intersubjective response. Coble asks her viewers to think about how hate, pain, anger, fear and shame are mutualy constitutive on a daily basis. On the one hand, Coble wants to highlight the power of hate speech for marginalized individuals, but, on the other, to subvert the power of derogatory words through her, a lesbian?s, 247 Ahmed (204). 136 reappropriation. Coble?s performance retels and renacts history as a way to re- write and recreate the past in a diferent way. Furthermore, Coble continues to evoke the lost naratives each time her work is displayed in a museum or she lectures, showing images of performances as a way to evoke intersubjectivity among audiences in the future. Coble?s performances alow for the contingency of pain and shame to queer the experience of her audience. The subversivenes of pain and shame evokes the personal and political dimensions to queer the archive. In evoking emotions and afect the performance works not only to acknowledge suffering, but also to empower the audiences and spectators through offering a counter archive, re-inscribing memory and history. Intersubjectivity and the document Following the live performance of Blood Script, Coble was invited to exhibit the related documents and artifacts of her performance in several venues. In 2008, she showed the documentary photographs of Blood Script in the exhibition ?Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection,? held at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art. This is followed by ?Galery Artists: Recent Works? at the Conner Contemporary Art Galery in Washington, as wel as ?Perspective,? at the Anaid Art Galery in Bucharest, Romania. In 2009, she exhibits the documentary photographs of Note to Self at the Schroeder Romero Galery and ?Talk Dirty to Me? at the Larisa Goldston Galery in New York. In May 2009, Coble was invited to participate in an international show in Copenhagen titled Lost and Found - Queerying the Archive. Showing the work of thirten contemporary 137 artists, the exhibition focused on memory and history in relationship to gender and sexuality. Curators Mathias Danbolt, Jane Rowley and Louise Wolthers, were concerned with the compilation of archives and how the writing of history creates canons. In the exhibition they take up questions of inclusion and exclusion in the context of marginalized identities: whose story is told and whose is left out. They present a series of ?art works that question normative history to generate new naratives based on private memories and experiences that go beyond gender and sexuality norms.? 248 In doing so, the show questions how we can create an archive for the private memories relating to gender, love and sexuality, ones that have been erased by official archives and excluded from the writing of history. How do we record and store felings and intimacy? Using photography, video, silent movie footage, jukebox archives of pops songs, and instalation, the works of art chosen for exhibition reconstruct past performances in a thought provoking way to addres the artistic visions of histories compiled and performed from a queer perspective. 249 While the show questions notions of history and memory, deconstructing and constructing power structures that are embedded in and preserved in the archives, it also raises important questions about documentation and the afterlife of the performance art. Coble, represented in this show, exhibits the documentation of her live performance of Blood Script. For the show she instaled the archive of the blood impresions of the seventy-five words, as wel as 248 Jane Rowley and Louise Wolthers, ?Lost and Found: Queyring the Archive,? in Lost and Found: Queyring the Archive, eds. Mathias Danbolt, Jane Rowley and Louise Wolthers (Nikolaj: Copenhagen Contemporary Arts Society, 209) 9-23,9. 249 Ibid 138 photographs of her being tatooed. Although Coble?s instalation can be described as a ?commemoration and remembrance? of speech and violence in society, I view her documents and photographs as evoking in her viewers a sense of deep fear, pain and empathy. I am personaly intrigued by her strategy of using florid and evocative caligraphy that seductively draws the viewer into contact with her. While there are clinical and documentary close ups of the words inscribed on her body, the photograph of her being tatooed and returning the viewers gaze is particularly intriguing. While the viewers are entranced by the script and words on Coble?s body, the photographs of her performance have a powerful emotional impact on her viewers. The strategy of juxtaposing a formal script for the language of hate speech creates a level of tension that cannot be articulated, but only experienced. Artists concerned with recreating the past are interested in producing documentation ?not of the past as incomplete,? 250 but rather ?of history as incomplete.? 251 For performance art in particular the proces of documentation leads back to an isue addresed by Walter Benjamin in the context of ?mechanical reproduction.? Whereas Benjamin argues for the loss of authenticity, the aura created by the unique existence of the original and lost through widespread photomechanical reproduction, contemporary performance artists use new technologies to destabilize the notion of a singular, authentic object. Coble?s photographic and video evidence of her performances are as important as live performances. Although the performance disappears, it 250 Santone, Jesica. ?Marina Abramovic?s Seven Easy Pieces: Critical Documentation Strategies for Preserving Art?s History,? Leonardo, 41, 2, (208),147-152,147. 251 Ibid 139 continues to be referenced through the instalations of the photographs and videos of the performance. What is subsequently acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum as the Note to Self performance is the instalation of the secondary archive of the negative imprints of the names and a large photograph of the artist?s back covered with the names of the 438 hate crime victims. (Additionaly her galerist continues to sel a limited edition of the photographic image of Coble?s performances of Note to Self, Aversion and Blood Script). Coble?s performance documents, photographs and videos, link memory and personal experience, and in this way serves to represent the historical silence and loss of queer culture. There is a ?significant link betwen performance art and testimony in terms of a shared desire to build culture out of memory. The life stories of performance art are often structured around, if not traumatic experiences, moments of intense afect that are transformative or revealing.? 252 In this way the audience participation at Coble?s performance, where audience members leave notes and flowers, becomes an embodied archival practice. The body of the performer, especialy the pain endured, impacts the transmision of felings and afect on to the audience. Exploring the ways in which contemporary artists sek to contribute to a ?narativized and/or mediated understandings of the past that already come after an originary moment,? 253 Jesica Santone argues that the archival material does not necesarily have a sequencing logic or ordering, rather the archival document is performative as it circulates to repeat and multiply historical ideas it wishes to complicate. Taking up the role of documentation and its parameters in 252 Cvetkovich (203), 26 253 Ibid 140 performance art studies, Santone distinguishes betwen artist-initiated documentation versus institutionaly sponsored documentation. She asks that we question the role of technology and how it complicates body-based performance practices, especialy isues of reproduction, authenticity, and authorship in relationship to medium. 254 In this sense documentation in performance art becomes as a mode of production that engages with critical interpretation of the archive, one that mutualy informs, constructs and deconstructs the archive. 255 Coble?s performances, artifacts and photographs play a crucial role on two levels. First, her performance summons the role of body and its social framing to complicate the function of oficial archives and second it complicates the parameters of performance art beyond a live event. While the live performance has a visceral impact on the viewers, so do the photographs and display of artifacts in future exhibits, as wel as images that circulate on the Internet. On the one hand, Coble?s performance as a conceptual archive contest the history of loss as it relates to naratives of queer life, ?the stuff of life that never usualy makes it into the archive.? 256 On the other, Coble?s medium and documentation, using her own blood to create the negative imprints of the hate speech inscribed on her body and the photographs of her being tatooed, disturb the isues of medium and authenticity as it relates to performance art. Coble?s performances raise questions about the extent to which her original performances are mediated in their afterlife. What choices she makes as 254 Santone (208). 255 Santone refers to the research program Documentation and Conservation of Media Arts Heritage/Documenation et conversation du partimonie des arts mediateques (DOCAM). For her, documentation is a mode of production and critical interpretation. 256 Rowley & Wolthers (209), 10. 141 an artist in the proces of selecting the images she shows in future exhibitions, not just in art shows, but also through her website. I contend that the exhibiting of documents of the original performance in Coble?s case is performative, though its repetition and multiplication are controlled by Coble in its afterlife. The original performance is conceptualized and documented strategicaly to ensure its circulation in the future. Coble carefully crafts and documents her performance experience as an esential aspect of her work in question. While she cannot control the original performance, the pain and her collaboration with the tatoo artist, she is purposeful in creating a counter archive through her documentation that is not based on ?disappearance and loss,? 257 rather one that acounts for the loss. In this sense the document ?emerges from and continues to reproduce the loss.? 258 Additionaly, embodiment of loss and pain has to be considered not only in relationship to the materiality of the body, but also culture. Bennet places pain within the nexus of social relationships. She argues that the lived experiences of pain are shaped by language, as wel as the silences that surround it. 259 Coble?s performances (Note to Self, Marker and Blood Script) use the body as archive to bridge the embodiment of pain and loss to argue for how lived experience is shaped by language that silences, shames and produces fear. To this end, the renactment of performances is a means to remember the historical moment as wel as the prior archives of those performances. Rom?n links contemporary performances to the past performances, arguing, 257 Phelan (193). 258 Santone (208), 148. 259 Benet (205). 142 ?performance might be said to serve as its own archive.? 260 In this context, performance art, its documentation, and disemination become an alternative archive to create global audiences. Drawing from Rom?n, Munoz and Joesph, I argue that the etymology of the archive of performance lies in its performativity. It is through performance and its documentation that a counter-archive is introduced in the archive. For Phelan, performance hinges on the visibility and invisibility, its appearance and disappearance. For Taylor performance is about the ghosting and visualization that acts politicaly even as it exceds the live. For me, the archive, especialy in relationship to performance art and intersubjectivity, mutualy construct and deconstruct audience experiences, offering a ?counter- archive? in the ?after life of the performance.? 261 Through documentation, its transmision (photographs, websites, video, and films) new publics spheres are created to contest the hegemonic performance and politics of the archive. In this respect the archive becomes a site for knowledge retrieval and new modes of knowledge construction that offer revisualization, especialy for minority subjects. In Taylor?s words, the performance ? disappears only to hover; it promises or threatens to reappear, albeit in another shape or form.? 262 Performance?s political eficacy and intersubjectivity lies among audience members that they are rooted in history and have agency to shape the future that links performance to the possibility of social change. Performance offers ?new social formations? and is inherently counter-hegemonic. 263 It ?becomes a vehicle 260 Rom?n (205), 152. 261 Rom?n (205), 137. 262 Taylor (203), 4. 263 Rom?n (205). 143 through which the body is ?exposed? and multiply delineated.? 264 In this sense performance art, conceptualy, questions subjectivity and knowledge construction as a political and transgresive act, engaging spectators in public spaces in producing intersubjectivity. 264 Alicia Arizon, Latina Performance Taversing the Stage (Blomington: University of Indiana Pres, 199), 73. 144 CHAPTER SIX Conclusion: Embodied Biography My disertation project has focused on the queering of archival practices as they relate to knowledge construction, performance art and intersubjectivity. Focusing on isues of embodiment, emotions and feling as they relate to knowledge production, I took up the ways in which performance art explores non- normative naratives of gender, sexuality, race and citizenship. The traditional archive functions in a manner that determines and regulates social and cultural categories of traditional diference. If we reach beyond its limitations, expanding the concept of the archive beyond a physical repository of documents, we can arive at alternative readings of the body and authorial power. The archive and the body involve isues of power. I have argued throughout this project for the power of performance art to resituate discourses of the body as they relate to multiple knowledge construction and knowledge production. Feminist performance artists, in particular, have disturbed the boundaries of the archive for over four decades, creating alternative discourses of the body, re-animating the archive and contesting its defining nature. By reinscribing the archive as a conceptual space, one in which the body becomes the direct medium, feminist artists argue for the power, limits and credibility of the archive. Their practice moves the body beyond a subject limited by traditional archival discourses by actively disrupting archival knowledge, chalenging what is remembered by revealing what is ignored, the collective memories that are engendered and those that are forgotten. In this sense, an embodied biography 145 like Coble?s offers a ?queer perspective? to open up alternative readings of the archive as it relates to queer subcultures, as wel as to complicate non-normative experiences that move beyond the intersections of gender and sexuality. At the same time, Coble?s performances make visible the embodied language of desire, provocation, violence and loss. They show how memory becomes inscribed as a means to acount for queer counterhistories, alternative naratives, queer subcultures and counterpublics. The body as archive in this sense is multiply delineated, one that queer epistemology suggests needs to ?embark on an expanded investigation of normalization and intersectionality.? 265 Recognizing the conceptual nature of the archive and its place in contemporary discourse, Judith Halberstam notes that ?the nature of queer subcultural activity requires a nuanced theory of archive and archiving.? 266 Along with Ann Cvetkovich and Jos? Mu?oz, Halberstam is concerned with how the everyday experiences of queer life emerge out of ethnographic interviews, archives that exist online or outside of unofficial document repositories. As important as documents, papers, posters, zines and acounts of queer life may be, the redefinition of the archive must extend beyond the physical, whether places and things. It needs to be a floating signifier for the kind of life implied by the documents. In this sense, the archive has a theoretical significance through its 265 David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam and Jose Mu?oz, eds. Social Text: What is Quer About Quer Studies Now? (Durham: Duke University Pres, 205), 5. 266 Halberstam (205), 169. 146 cultural relevance in constructing collective memory that relates to a complex record of queer activity. 267 Performance artists examine, contest and reinvent the archive to de-center history and memory as a means to complicate the concept of ?queer? beyond a marker of identity, as one that is complicated when politics, emotions, language and embodiment intersect with race, clas, gender and sexuality. In particular, I se performance art focusing on the subversive ways in which artists create themselves as historical subjects, offering the body as an archive. Referencing the archive of forgotten histories and memories, they engage with ways to reimagine ?history and genealogy, both individual and communal, and demonstrate how performance functions as an archive itself.? 268 Performance art in this sense becomes a form of cultural critique to theorize embodiment in the present as it relates to the past?the traces of history and memory?in order to complicate the present. Performance art provides a critical space for evoking felings and emotions to enable new forms of cultural sites for alternative modes of being and intersubjectivity, complicating the concept of ?queer.? The term ?queer? in this sense relates to multiple readings of the body, beyond the intersection of gender and sexuality, that emphasize the role of embodiment, desire, intimacy, space, time, and audience as important components of meaning making and disruption. An intersectional perspective presupposes and builds on categories of diference and inequality, and the resulting knowledge relates directly to the 267 As Halberstam writes (205), 169: ?In order for the archive to function it requires users, interpreters, and cultural historians to wade through the material and piece together the jigsaw puzle of quer history in the making.? 268 Rom?n (205), 3. 147 defining authority of the archive. The ?dificulties of categorization go the heart of the politics of archiving, and in this way queer critiques of identities disturb the logic of the archive.? 269 In order to upset the archival order that constrains and shapes identity, queer theory advocates the ?continual pushing and troubling of such categories and definitions.? 270 Although queer studies scholars have criticized the positivist asumptions inherent in identity politics, I argue for identity base formations as an important part of chalenging the archival order, to produce counter-archives of marginalization, diference and intersubjectivity. Yet, to destabilize and queer the archive, it is critical to pay atention to ?queer? as a proces of disonance (as wel as harmony) that emerges from the embodiment of emotions and felings as they relate to the temporality and materiality of the body as a subject of political discourse. In this sense, performance art becomes a critical site of cultural resistance, embodiment, language, memory and felings in producing knowledge and queering the archives relationship to the past and how it is engaged in the present. Coble?s most important strategy is her focus on the body, its lapses and exceses to renact the queer historical subject and raise questions concerning the limits of the traditional knowledge archive, its ethics and credibility. She draws on the power of the law and the ways in which the ?archive as law organizes social and historical diference? 271 in regulating, silencing and patrolling 269 Mathias Danbolt. ?Touching History:Archival Realtions in Quer Art and Theory,? in Lost and Found: Querying the Archive, eds. Mathias Danbolt, Jane Rowley and Louise Wolthers (Nikolaj: Copenhagen Contemporary Arts Society, 209), 34. 270 Ibid 271 Redy, Chandan. ?Asian Diasporas, Neoliberalism, and Family: Reviewing the Case for Homosexual Asylum in the Context of Family Rights,? in Social Text: What is Quer About 148 sexuality, queer desire, and intimacy. She performs in the gaps of imposed cultural norms and queer desire as one that is provocative and pleasurable, yet one that is constantly constrained by fear and violence. For Coble the body becomes a medium of political agency that is produced when emotions, felings and embodiment are expresed through performance. She pushes beyond Foucault?s concept of docile bodies that are shaped, regulated and produced within the legal sphere of the archive. In renacting the historical subject and documenting her performances, Coble complicates the definition of the body and the document. The traces and documents synonymous with the archive raise questions of not only the past with the present, but with the performance event and its occurrence as wel as with the everyday experiences and representation. 272 In Note to Self Coble complicates the relationship betwen text and the body by inscribing names of victims of hate crimes making evident the fragility of the archive?s authority. In disturbing the archive?s structure or lack of it, the body becomes a point of intersection for a redefinition. The body in this sense becomes an archive in the form of multiple texts, one that is marked by history, memory, felings of pain and fear, irespective of race, clas gender and sexuality. By making the invisible inscriptions visible through tatooing, the body mediates to chalenge the viewing practices of the audience. By making the familiar strange, the body opens the space for new critical inquiry of the archive. Quer Studies Now? eds. David L.Eng, Judith Halberstam and Jose Mu?oz, (Durham: Duke University Pres, 205),15. 272 Paul Riceour, ?Archives, Documents, Traces,? in The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Charles Merewether (London: Whitechapel, 206). 149 Coble?s move towards a broader critique of queering the archive (Marker and Blood Script), results in complicating the power of language as it relates to race, clas, gender, nationality, religion and sexuality. In reappropriating hate speech, she offers an alternative meaning to the archive of language and the body, ilustrating history as writen, inscribed and performed beyond the norm, an alternative language. In this sense, her refusal to be a subject of the archive directly relates to her own queer subjectivity, disolving the ?opposition betwen theory and practice.? 273 To conclude, the history of performance art has been grounded in the postmodern concept of representation as it relates to activating intersubjectivity betwen the audience and the artist. Performance artists have deconstructed representation using postmodern tactics as a crucial strategy for resistance raising questions about institutional power, the body politic and the performance of gender, sexuality, race and citizenship in everyday life. In this sense postmodernism has been concerned with the rhetorical significance of ideas, not their truth or rationality. Feminist theorists have argued for the limitations of postmodernism, emphasizing the need to move beyond just deconstructing cultural representations of gender and sexuality to acount for the materiality of the body. To have a more nuanced understanding of representation, theorists must engage with the ?complex interactions of the body and culture? to acount for the body beyond a cultural text shaped by social and historical systems. Performance artists complicate the theorization of the body, not simply as one being ?acted upon,? but rather as one that shapes contemporary discourses as an 273 Conquergod (202), 146. 150 active agent of change. By raising questions about the lived experiences of the body, performance artists actively engage with how the body is shaped by emotions and felings in relationship to cultural and social proceses, contesting the nature of power and truth. Though highlighting the overwhelming power in represing and marginalizing subjectivities, performance artists have turned to the body as a ?tool? to create new realities and knowledge that open the door for political and social discourses. Performance artists in this sense work within the conceptual space of the archive, not only to critique the ideological systems of power, but also to ofer alternative discourses and counter-archives. In turn, artistic strategies, especialy the focus on the body, queers the viewing practices of the audience and spectators at performance art events. Performance art in this way not only makes archives visible, but also creates new archival forms. 274 To this end, although Coble?s artistic practices play within the contradictions of the archives, making its concrete nature ephemeral, investing identity categories with emotions and felings and re-presenting the historical subject as one with agency. At the same time, they raise questions for future research, especialy with regard to the privileging of race, clas and the body; what does it mean to mark an unmarked white body? What role does the viewer?s race and clas play in promoting intersubjectivity at performance events? 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