Live Art in the UK: Contemporary Performances of Precarity 9781474257701, 9781474257718, 9781474257749, 9781474257732

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Live Art in the UK: Shaping a Field Maria Chatzichristodoulou
Part One Experiments in Life and in Art
1 ‘All We Have Is Words, All We Have Is Worlds’: Language, Looping and the Work of Tim Etchells Sara Jane Bailes
2 Marisa Carnesky, Showwoman Roberta Mock
3 Marcia Farquhar: Divergent Auto/Biographies and Lines of Hope Deirdre Heddon
Part Two Performances of Conflict, Resolution, Hurt and Healing
4 The Gold Standard: The Performances of Franko B Dominic Johnson
5 Sparkles and Sputum: The Sick Body of Martin O’Brien Gianna Bouchard
6 The Artist Is No Longer Present: Encounter, Assembly and Withdrawal in the Work of Oreet Ashery Johanna Linsley
Part Three Camp, Comedy and Laughs
7 Just a Camp Laugh? David Hoyle’s Laden Levity Gavin Butt
8 Jordan McKenzie: Three Works Katie Beswick
9 Performance and Prostitution: The Magazine Actions of Cosey Fanni Tutti Eleanor Roberts
References
Index

Citation preview

Live Art in the UK

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Related Titles The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art ISBN 978-1-3500-5757-9 Edited by Bertie Ferdman and Jovana Stokic Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre: Politics, Affect, Responsibility ISBN 978-1-4742-6714-4 Marissa Fragkou Postdramatic Theatre and Form ISBN 978-1-3500-4316-9 Edited by Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish and Brandon Woolf Social Housing in Performance: The English Council Estate on and off Stage ISBN 978-1-4742-8521-6 Katie Beswick Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance ISBN 978-1-3500-8598-5 Edited by Fintan Walsh Thinking through Theatre and Performance ISBN 978-1-4725-7960-7 Edited by Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher and Heike Roms

Live Art in the UK Contemporary Performances of Precarity Edited by Maria Chatzichristodoulou

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Maria Chatzichristodoulou and contributors, 2020 Maria Chatzichristodoulou and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Magic War by Marisa Carnesky (© Manuel Vason) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-5770-1 PB: 978-1-4742-5771-8 ePDF: 978-1-4742-5773-2 eBook: 978-1-4742-5772-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Live Art in the UK: Shaping a Field  Maria Chatzichristodoulou

vi vii x 1

Part One  Experiments in Life and in Art 1 2 3

‘All We Have Is Words, All We Have Is Worlds’: Language, Looping and the Work of Tim Etchells  Sara Jane Bailes Marisa Carnesky, Showwoman  Roberta Mock Marcia Farquhar: Divergent Auto/Biographies and Lines of Hope  Deirdre Heddon

21 45 68

Part Two  Performances of Conflict, Resolution, Hurt and Healing 4 5 6

The Gold Standard: The Performances of Franko B  Dominic Johnson Sparkles and Sputum: The Sick Body of Martin O’Brien  Gianna Bouchard The Artist Is No Longer Present: Encounter, Assembly and Withdrawal in the Work of Oreet Ashery  Johanna Linsley

89 105 118

Part Three  Camp, Comedy and Laughs 7 8 9

Just a Camp Laugh? David Hoyle’s Laden Levity  Gavin Butt Jordan McKenzie: Three Works  Katie Beswick Performance and Prostitution: The Magazine Actions of Cosey Fanni Tutti  Eleanor Roberts

References Index

139 154 172 192 206

List of Illustrations 1.1 Tim Etchells, A Broadcast/Looping Pieces, index card, performance ephemera.  1.2 Tim Etchells and Aisha Orazbayeva, Seeping Through, performed at Dalston Boys Club.  2.1 Marisa Carnesky, Jewess Tattooess, 2000.  2.2 Promotional image for Dystopian Wonders by Marisa Carnesky, Roundhouse, London, 2010.  2.3 Marisa Carnesky, H Plewis and Rhyannon Styles in Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman, 2017.  3.1 Marcia Farquhar, Sculpture.  3.2 Marcia Farquhar, Acts of Clothing, Venice Palazzo Zenobio, 2013.  3.3 Marcia Farquhar, Acts of Clothing, Venice Palazzo Zenobio, 2013.  3.4 Marcia Farquhar, Flaxman Exchange, UCL, 2013.  3.5 Marcia Farquhar, Flaxman Exchange, UCL, 2013.  3.6 Marcia Farquhar, Flaxman Exchange, UCL, 2013.  4.1 Franko B, Milk and Blood, Toynbee Studios, London, 2015.  6.1 The World is Flooding by Oreet Ashery, performance still, London 2016.  7.1 David Hoyle, Magazine, London, 2016.  8.1 Jordan McKenzie, Spent 2, 2009.  8.2 Jordan McKenzie, Border Patrol, 2014–15.  8.3 Jordan McKenzie, Shame Chorus, performed at B-Side Festival, Portland, Dorset.  9.1 Cosey Fanni Tutti, Prostitution poster, 1976.  9.2 Cosey Fanni Tutti, The Office Cleaner in Supersex No. 8, 1975–6, Magazine Action. 

28 38 49 57 64 72 73 73 81 81 82 90 120 144 154 155 156 180 183

Notes on Contributors Sara Jane Bailes is Reader in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sussex. Her research and teaching focuses on contemporary experimental theatre practices and the political and ideological implications of new performance methodologies developed in Live Art and performance since the 1970s. Bailes also works as a dramaturg and creative consultant. She mentors artists and companies and is interested in the collaborative processes artists develop around practice. She is the author of Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (2011) and co-editor of Beckett and Musicality (2014). She is on the Advisory Board of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and a contributing editor. She publishes, lectures and collaborates internationally in a variety of web-based and live contexts. Katie Beswick is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter. Her research studies how performance practices and other artistic and cultural products shape our experiences in the world. It often focuses on theatre and structural inequalities, particularly in relation to class. Beswick has published widely in journals including Research in Drama Education, Performance Research and New Theatre Quarterly. She is the author of Social Housing in Performance: The English Council Estate on and off Stage (Methuen Drama,  2019). Before joining the University of Exeter in  2015, Beswick held positions at the University of Leeds and Queen Mary University of London. She regularly writes features, reviews and interviews for general readership. Gianna Bouchard is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. Bouchard joined the University of Birmingham in 2017, having previously taught at Anglia Ruskin University since  2004. Prior to that she worked as a research assistant and doctoral student at the University of Roehampton. Her research focuses on the interface between medicine and performance. She is coeditor of the volume Performance and the Medical Body (Methuen Drama, 2016) and author of the monograph Performing Specimens: Biomedical Display in Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama, 2019). Gavin Butt is Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He is author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948–1963 and Seriousness (with Irit Rogoff). He is also editor of After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, and co-editor of Post-Punk Then and Now. Between 2009 and 2014 he was a director of Performance Matters, a creative research project exploring the cultural value of performance, during which he made his first feature-length documentary film with Ben Walters, This Is Not a Dream.

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Maria Chatzichristodoulou is Reader in Performance and Technology, Director of Enterprise and Head of Division of Creative Industries at London South Bank University (LSBU). She is also the Director of the Centre for Research in Digital Storymaking and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Performance Art and Digital Media. Before taking up her post at LSBU Chatzichristodoulou taught performance and new media at the University of Hull, and the University of London Colleges Birkbeck, Goldsmiths and Queen Mary. She is co-editor of the volumes Interfaces of Performance (2009) and Intimacy across Visceral and Digital Performance (2012), and has also co-edited special issues for the journals Research in Drama Education (RIDE) and Contemporary Theatre Review. Her monograph Live Art in Network Cultures is forthcoming. Chatzichristodoulou was also co-founder and co-director of the Medi@ terra international festival, the first art and technology festival to take place in Greece, and co-director of Fournos Centre for Digital Culture (1998–2002). Deirdre Heddon is James Arnott Chair in Drama and Dean of the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on feminism in Live Art and contemporary performance, and in walking aesthetics. Significant publications include Devising Performance: A Critical History (2015), coauthored with Jane Milling; The National Review of Live Art  1979–2010: A Personal History – Essays, Anecdotes, Drawings and Images (2010); and Autobiography and Performance (2008). Heddon is also co-editor of the volumes Histories and Practices of Live Art (2012), with Jennie Klein; and It’s all Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells (2016), with Dominic Johnson. Dominic Johnson is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture in the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of four books: Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s (2019); The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art (2015); Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture (2012); and Theatre & the Visual (2012). He is the editor of five books, including most recently Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey (2013); and (with Deirdre Heddon) It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells (2016), which was awarded the Annual Prize for Editing 2016 from the Theatre and Performance Research Association. He is a co-editor (with Lois Keidan and CJ Mitchell) of the book series Intellect Live, and a Director of the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) in London. He convenes MA Live Art, the first programme of its kind in the UK, at Queen Mary in partnership with LADA. Johanna Linsley is an artist, researcher and producer of performance. Her work is collaborative and often iterative, resulting in multiple outcomes or versions. She studies contemporary performance and Live Art; documentation of performance; sound, listening and the voice; queer domesticity; and modes of assembly. She has published her research in Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research and Cultural Geographies. Her performance work, both solo and with the London-based collective I’m With You, has been presented throughout the UK and abroad, at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Hayward Gallery and the Barbican Centre

Notes on Contributors

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(London). Linsley is a founding partner of UnionDocs, a centre for documentary arts in New York City. She is Lecturer in Creative Practice at the University of Dundee. Roberta Mock is Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Plymouth and Chair of the Theatre & Performance Research Association (TaPRA). She researches issues around cultural identities in performance with a specific interest in performances by Jewish women, representations of gender and sexuality in performance, radical and avant-garde performance practice and practice-based research focusing on feminist performance. She is the author of Jewish Women on Stage, Film and Television (2007) and editor of the volumes Walking, Writing and Performance: Autobiographical Texts by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith (2009) and Performing Processes: Creating Live Performance (2000). She is also co-editor of Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory (2009), with Colin Counsell; and Joshua Sofaer: Performance / Objects / Participation (2020), with Mary Paterson. Eleanor Roberts is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Roehampton. She is a feminist scholar with a research specialism in contemporary performance and visual art after 1960. Her PhD (Queen Mary, University of London) looked at performance at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts gallery in the 1970s. In 2015 she co-curated Are We There Yet? A Study Room Guide on Live Art and Feminism, a print and online publication focused on histories and issues of Live Art and feminism in the UK, in collaboration with Prof. Lois Weaver and the Live Art Development Agency. She has also co-curated ‘Live Art and Feminism in the UK’, an online Google Cultural Institute exhibition. Her research has been published in Contemporary Theatre Review and Oxford Art Journal.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dominic Johnson for initiating this publication and for his helpful and insightful suggestions. I would also like to thank Annie Lloyd, Robert Pacitti, Lois Keidan, Aaron Wright and CJ Mitchell for taking the time to offer extended interviews for this publication. Finally, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the publisher and all contributors to this volume for their patience and understanding during the many times when life took over, causing several delays. We got there in the end.

Live Art in the UK: Shaping a Field Maria Chatzichristodoulou

Introduction Let me start by pointing to the obvious: this volume, which looks at significant UKbased live artists, is edited by a cultural immigrant – that is, an outsider. The paradox of this does not escape me. Why would a volume that sets out to consider Live Art as a British phenomenon be edited by a scholar who is not British, and thus not culturally embedded within that tradition? I suggest that Live Art allows for that since – to refer to Marcia Farquhar as quoted by Aaron Wright within this volume – ‘Live Art is a place for people who don’t know their place’.1 Indeed, if any cultural phenomenon would allow – perhaps even invite – this to happen, it is Live Art: a strategy for inclusion, always in the process of defining itself because it is always in the process of defying definition. I remember moving to the UK from Greece in 2002 and being, for the first time in my life, ‘confronted’ by Live Art practice. Though I was familiar with contemporary performance through the work of artists with international reach, such as Marina Abramovic, and companies that straddled the divide between theatre and performance, like Forced Entertainment, Live Art as a sector was not something I had previously encountered. Being introduced to it through organizations such as the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) and festivals such as the National Review of Live Art (NRLA) was, without exaggeration, mind-blowing, greatly inspirational and, to some extent, life-changing. Live Art was revealed to me with the force of a cultural tsunami, challenging my understanding of what art, theatre and performance are and can be, and what the experience of being an audience member or participant of a contemporary performance event can feel like. What I bring to the table then, through my editorship of this volume, is the viewpoint of the person looking in from the outside. This affords a particular type of engagement with the sector, based on culturally detached, external observation combined with personal, embodied and internalized experience. Acknowledging the lack of Live Art practice in the cultural context from which I emerged (though not foreign to Greece today, Live Art did not register as an area of practice until the early 2000s and, even now, it is but a marginal practice) is also an avenue towards appreciating its cultural significance and its status as a cultural phenomenon that, though not uniquely British, certainly flourished in the UK during a particular period of time from the 1990s to date.

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This publication poses questions around the nature of Live Art as a cultural phenomenon within the British art scene, and about the cultural specificity of its identity. It starts with an introductory chapter that sets out to reflect on the process of shaping a cultural sector. In this chapter I describe some of the forces, parameters, circumstances and events that gave rise, directly or indirectly, to the conditions which were needed for Live Art to emerge as a particular set of practices, and as a sector that is distinct from visual arts or theatre. I do this through presenting the viewpoints of three ‘creative catalysts’, which have played an important part in the emergence and continuous development of Live Art. To that end, rather than offering a ‘studied’ definition of Live Art and a historical account of its development through academic sources (of which there are a number, some really excellent),2 I will attempt to piece together some form of narrative around the emergence and inherent characteristics of the sector through conversations with a small number of the people who have shaped it. I have opted to take this approach, which follows the main principles of oral history methodologies, in order to seek in-depth accounts of personal experiences and reflections from selected individuals who are themselves part of Live Art’s history. In doing so I feel I am ‘touching’ a little fragment of that history, tracing it with my hands and mind through personal accounts of how events unfolded, anecdotes and censored stories that cannot be repeated in this book, rather than studying it from a distance. Live Art allows for that approach because the histories in question are so recent, and the individuals who shaped them continue to shape the practice today. The risk of this approach is that my narrative is less embedded in critical discourse than a holistic academic study might produce. What hopefully comes out of it though is a certain richness and immediacy in the detail of the personal narratives that cannot be achieved through engagement with secondary sources.

Live Art in the UK: three creative catalysts The three ‘catalysts’ I have selected to discuss, which have played an important part in the emergence and development of Live Art are Live Art Development Agency (LADA, London), Pacitti Company and SPILL Festival of Performance (London and subsequently Ipswich), and Compass Live Art (Leeds): ●●

●●

●●

LADA is a London-based development agency which has, arguably, to a great extent shaped the field; the Pacitti Company is an artist-led organization that has developed one of the most important and longest running festivals of performance in the UK, SPILL Festival of Performance, also an artist-led initiative. It started as London-based but later relocated to Ipswich, Suffolk; Compass Live Art is a smaller organization and festival based in the North of England (Leeds), whose co-founder, Annie Lloyd, has greatly contributed to the development of a contemporary performance and Live Art scene in Yorkshire.

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Though I have decided to focus my attention, for this particular publication, on these three ‘creative catalysts’ that have impacted on the development of the Live Art sector, they are certainly not the only ones. There are numerous catalysts, in the form of both individual practitioners and art organizations that have played a significant part in the development of Live Art in the UK, such as the NRLA (Glasgow), Artsadmin (London), Fierce! Festival of Performance (Birmingham), In Between Time (Bristol) and Buzzcut (Glasgow), to name but a few.3 Mapping the complex, layered and diverse terrain of organizations and practitioners that have historically shaped and continue to inform Live Art in the UK is a worthy undertaking, but is beyond the scope of this publication. Instead, I will focus on the three sample ‘catalysts’ selected, aiming to examine some of the processes and events that led to the emergence and subsequent development of a sector through the emergence and development of the catalysts themselves.

Live Art Development Agency (LADA) Established in 1999, the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) is, as the title suggests, an agency which, among other things, supports artists to develop new, ‘challenging’ work (LADA website  2019). Indeed, it is the only development agency of its type; the only other organization that could be considered to undertake a similar type of developmental activity, albeit within a wider field of practice, is Artsadmin.4 LADA introduces itself as ‘the world’s leading organization for Live Art’ (ibid.) – a statement that might sound ambitious but which many artists and scholars working in the field would keenly support. I believe that LADA is indeed the most significant catalyst for the development of the Live Art sector in London and the UK more widely. LADA was founded in the context of a ‘relative explosion of Live Art activities happening in London, in (…) [both] institutional and club contexts’ (Keidan, Mitchell and Wright 2016). Its co-founder and co-director Lois Keidan calls this the ‘Live Art effect’ (ibid.) and explains how the Art Council London recognized, at the time, that there was ‘a real growth in this area of practice, and also that, that kind of growth (…) needed some fairly specialized support structures’ (ibid.) Gradually, Live Art emerged as a particular area of practice, distinct from theatre or visual arts, and thus in need of different types of ‘support, different types of audience development strategies, different understandings of what an audience could be or where the work might be located’ (ibid.). At the same time that Live Art was emerging as a distinct practice, different forms of experimental theatre, including Live Art, were being embraced and studied within traditional Higher Education contexts (ibid.). These developments needed a response and ‘a brokering of relationships between the academy and (…) frontline art practice’ (ibid.). They eventually led the Arts Council London to put out a tender for applications to set up a Live Art Development Agency as part of a wider drive to devolve certain responsibilities to specialist support agencies (ibid.). Lois Keidan and Catherine Ugwu, who had been running the Live Art programme at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and were, arguably, partly

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responsible for that growth and for informing the Art Council’s thinking around the need to support the sector and its needs, applied, were successful, and founded the LADA in 1999. LADA was given a ‘carte blanche’ by the Art Council at the initial stages; however, there were two conditions that needed to be met: first, the focus of the organization had to be London-centric, given that the funding body was Art Council London; and second, LADA had to develop partnerships with Higher Education providers. These are interesting stipulations that set the tone for what we see repeated frequently – institutional conditioning which comes around due to the way particular funding and administrative structures work, and which defines policy and practices for years to come. In this instance, the structure of the UK’s main art funding body meant that independent sections of the Art Council could focus on what they deemed to be relevant priority areas for their regional context, driving, to some extent, developments within that particular geographic region, while also responding to its specific cultural needs. There is no doubt that a lot of Live Art activity is naturally focused in urban centres and particularly London; however, it is also clear that the structure of the funding system did intentionally support, encourage and even stipulate that relevant developments be London-centric. Although LADA was funded to develop Live Art in London, the organization was clear from early on that ‘Live Art didn’t stop at Watford’, as Lois Keidan put it (Keidan, Mitchell and Wright 2015). Funding structures might dictate to some extent how things develop and evolve, but individuals and organizations find ways to challenge institutional and policy restrictions. LADA presented itself as ‘London-based but not London-bound’ from the very beginning of its operations and, although London focused, it did run activities that were operating outside of London as well (ibid.). Furthermore, a lot of Live Artists and Live Art organizations have indeed developed various forms of collaboration with academic institutions; LADA, for example, has developed a joint MA programme with Queen Mary University of London (2018). Though those collaborations were, to some extent, ‘force-fed’ into the Live Art ecosystem by the policymakers of the time, connections between Live Art and academia come naturally, as Live Artists experiment with pushing the boundaries of what is possible and permissible in performance practice, and academics are interested in studying new, experimental forms and developments. These collaborations are, thus, part organic, part designed by the institutional contexts that support and shape the field. According to Keidan: [LADA works] strategically, in consultation and in partnership. By ‘in consultation’ we mean that we try to be in dialogue with artists and with others, with curators, to have a sense of what the shifts are, and what the needs are. Then we work in partnership, to try and implement strategic ways that are going to address those shifts. So, in one sense we haven’t changed since we set up; in another sense we’re completely unrecognizable – but it’s just that the areas of activity have shifted and evolved. (ibid.)

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SPILL Festival of Performance Founded by Pacitti Company in  2007 (i.e. eight years after LADA), SPILL is an artist-run biennale that was originally based in London and has partly relocated to Ipswich since  2010. SPILL’s artistic director, Robert Pacitti, was himself nurtured by Keidan and Ugwu, first in the Live Art platform they developed at the ICA in the 1990s, and then through LADA. Pacitti speaks very highly of Keidan and Ugwu’s work at the ICA, and the educational benefit their work had on himself as an artist and future curator. It was at the ICA that he met artists from different parts of the world, and where Keidan and Ugwu were theming core strands of their programme around subject matters such as race, sex, gender and politics. According to Pacitti, both the programme itself and the network of artists and audiences that gravitated towards it felt like a ‘coming together of body-based activism’ (2017). Through the cultural framework and artistic networks created by Keidan and Ugwu, Pacitti was able to identify a channel for his own artistic practice that was linked to his activism, as he realized that art and activism did not have to be separate endeavours – Live Art, as defined by Keidan and Ugwu’s work, allowed for artistic practice to take on a political stance and to operate in the world as an activist force. Pacitti felt that, as an artist, he was being ‘included’ in the cultural happenings for the first time. As he puts it: Something else was being crafted that was about trying to find shared languages (…) in ways that spoke to a series of agendas that people were mutually invested in and investigating (…), where those processes were cumulative, where people were speaking and thinking about and through the work to other kinds of social causes. (ibid.)

It was Pacitti’s creative practice as an artist/practitioner that gradually led him to develop SPILL Festival of Performance. At the time, Pacitti was travelling a lot outside of the UK to present his artistic practice, often with support from the British Council. Through his travels he started to realize that being a guest in different countries but never being able to invite other artists back to the UK to present their own work was problematic, particularly when seen in the context of the UK’s colonial past. He was also concerned that he was coming across important British artists, such as Forced Entertainment and Julia Bardsley, doing experimental, bodybased performance work abroad, which was invisible in the UK. That led him  to believe that there was a need for ‘structural support’ for what he calls ‘radical practice’ – that is, ‘experimental, body-based work’ – in the UK (ibid.). That is how the idea for  SPILL was born. Pacitti highlights that SPILL was ‘not a eureka moment’ and it  was ‘contingent on lots of other people feeling the same way at the same time’  (ibid.). He became the founder and director of SPILL because he was ‘able to get enough support and be bloody minded enough to be a catalyst for change’ (ibid.).

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Live Art in the UK SPILL was founded in order to achieve three main aims:

1. Nurture nationwide dialogue around radical practice; 2. Establish an ethics of international reciprocity as a model of best practice;5 3. Raise the status of experimental theatre, Live Art, dance and performance to be more publicly visible, and present the work in an accessible and meaningful manner (ibid.). In order to raise the profile of experimental practices, Pacitti saw the need of programming them within a well-respected, mainstream cultural context, so he approached the Barbican. Pacitti describes how he sent the same email to Louise Jeffreys, at the time head of Theatre at the Barbican, daily for a fortnight, before someone called him back and asked him to attend a meeting. When Jeffreys agreed to present the first SPILL festival at the Barbican, Pacitti says, ‘Things really changed a gear. Between that and the support of Lois Keidan, it started to gather momentum. And then the Arts Council worked out’ (ibid.).

Compass Live Art A comparatively smaller organization based in the North of England, in Leeds, Compass Live Art began in 2011 as a loose consortium between three people: Karen Watson, at the time artistic director of East Street Arts; Annie Lloyd, who had just left the Studio Theatre at Leeds Metropolitan University (now Leeds Beckett); and Sarah Spanton, an independent artist. Spanton had been active for some time previously, promoting and supporting Live Art practice in the Yorkshire region, and encouraging the Arts Council England to fund research about Live Art in Yorkshire. As a result, the Arts Council made some money available through managed funds that they invited bids for. Watson, Lloyd and Spanton successfully bid for those funds, which allowed, in the first instance, for eighteen months of funding in which to cover a range of different activities: They partnered with some artist-led organizations in the region, such as Red Gallery in Hull and Bloc Studios in Sheffield, and enabled them to produce Live Art events by offering financial and arts management support; they also ran a series of professional development workshops and events for emerging artists and art students, set up a Live Art Directory, created Associates around the region and developed networks with Higher Education institutions. Through sector meetings, they identified common concerns, such as the lack of writing about Live Art and a sense of isolation for people that were struggling to be recognized as Live Artists and to access funding that would allow them to connect with others. This period culminated with a national symposium about socially engaged practice and a small city-wide festival in Leeds. It also demonstrated a real appetite for more Live Art practice in the region and revealed the gaps in relevant provision. Before that eighteen-month period had even finished, East Street Arts applied for National Portfolio status, including a budget for developing Compass Live Art. They were successful, which enabled Compass to continue. In the

Live Art in the UK: Shaping a Field

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meantime, Sarah Spanton moved out of the region and was replaced by Peter Reed, a young producer who had helped develop the original festival. Lloyd and Reed decided to continue their professional development work around the region, as well as develop the festival which, they felt, had an ‘extraordinary’ impact in the city, making the work visible (Lloyd 2015). The festival purposefully ‘took the work out into the streets’ (ibid.): it curated work in public settings, was free for people to access and was durational so that people could come and go as they pleased. It also engaged with partners in the city, such as shopping centres, the museum and the city council. That meant that the people who accessed the work did so, often, accidentally, without having to book or even know that a Live Art festival was taking place. The work produced for the 2014 festival focused on live encounters with people in the city, such as Quarantine’s Between Us We Know Everything and Rita Marcalo’s Dancing with Strangers. They also did a national call-out and developed a platform for emerging practitioners in partnership with Live Art Bistro. Lloyd stresses Compass’s focus on developing city partnerships and working with local communities to make new work happen. She also points to partnerships with more established institutions, such as West Yorkshire Playhouse and Opera North, in order to bring work that would not normally come to the region, such as Reckless Sleepers, Forced Entertainment and Kings of England. Though the biggest productions are ticketed, most activities are free; that is important to Compass, as it aims to lift barriers-to-access for people to experience the festival work.

Live Art: the what As all three creative catalysts discussed herein have both developed themselves around Live Art practice and developed Live Art practice, I asked them: What is Live Art? Is it a sector, a set of cultural practices, a cultural strategy? Is it just a different term for Body Art or for Performance Art, or is it something significantly different and quite distinct from these practices? And, is it culturally specific? To what extent is Live Art a British cultural phenomenon? Live Art emerged as a distinct cultural practice in the 1990s, a time of unprecedented cultural activity for experimental theatre and performance art in the UK. Lois Keidan points at the explosion of Live Art activities that occurred in London during that decade and the demonstrable audience appetite for the artform. As she puts it: ‘The Live Art effect was beginning to take place,’ with London as its ‘epicentre’ (Keidan, Mitchell and Wright 2015). Interestingly, this growth was happening across very different contexts, from institutional frameworks, such as galleries and the formal education sector, to subcultural contexts such as clubs. Live Art in itself is a contested category, not least because of the historical, disciplinary and institutional ambiguities that the term often tends to conceal. Since entering the performance lexicon in the 1970s, the term ‘Live Art’ has been used to describe a diverse but interrelated array of performance practices and approaches. Cultural institutions, festivals and symposia programme Live Art work, celebrating and mining its potency for critical and creative innovation. Live Art also describes an interdisciplinary tendency of scholarly publication across and between theatre,

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performance and visual studies. Cross-disciplinary collaborations in Live Art continue to emerge as practitioners look to connect, engage and enrich their creative enquiries and performance pursuits. Thinking through contemporary performance necessitates considering approaches to practice that foreground Live Art aesthetics. Live Art is also becoming a key strand in teaching and learning in higher education in the UK, particularly in drama, theatre and performance departments. The LADA website describes Live Art as a ‘cultural strategy’ (2019), as opposed to an art form or sector. Lois Keidan articulates this as a strategic choice which has allowed the Agency to ‘avoid the definition question’ – a question which, at the time of LADA’s founding, ‘certainly took away from the more important questions’ (Keidan, Mitchell and Wright 2015): The ‘what is it’ took away from what does it need, when does it need it, how does it need it. So, thinking about Live Art as a cultural strategy is a way of including the artists and the kinds of practices that are ephemeral, itinerant, process-based, that don’t fit within existing funding structures, and which certainly didn’t fit within existing critical frameworks or existing curatorial structures at that time. So, it was a way of embracing those ways of working and trying to find different ways to support them. Also, it was a way of talking about an approach. (ibid.)

Although LADA’s definition of Live Art has very much informed the way this type of practice is being critiqued in the UK, in our interview Keidan questioned how current that definition still is, explaining that her thinking on Live Art has shifted and evolved over the years. She admitted to having herself moved from being a ‘purist’, who followed Peggy Phelan’s widely rehearsed argument that ‘performance’s only life is in the present’ – that it ‘cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations’ because, once it does so, ‘it becomes something other than performance’ (1993: 146) – to believing that Live Art can ‘live’ in any medium, such as books, recordings and DVDs. Keidan and the LADA team now talk about Live Art as a cultural strategy but also ‘as a way of thinking about what art can be, how we can talk about it, where it takes place, what kinds of conversations can happen with an audience, and how it is experienced’ (Keidan, Mitchell and Wright 2015). Annie Lloyd thinks of the term ‘Live Art’ as problematic, despite the fact the organization she leads on is called Compass Live Art. The main problem with the term, she says, is that, even within the sector, people come at it from different angles – some take it to mean body-based work, for example, whereas others focus on the socially engaged aspects of many of the works. She points out that, though her organization is called Compass Live Art, the festival is just called Compass Festival, without specifying the type of practice it presents. Rather than using a term such as Live Art, Lloyd and her team use terms such as ‘contemporary art’ and ‘experience’ to talk about the work. This is because, Lloyd argues, ‘Live Art is a contested term, and a term that is unfamiliar or alien to a broad range of people’ (2015). Compass Festival, says Lloyd, aims to put people in touch with each other and to ‘make experiences happen’ (ibid.). How those experiences are categorized is not something that interests her much. She thinks that Live Art is well placed to ‘make [art] meaningful to the lived experiences of real people, right now’ (ibid.).

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Lloyd also identifies the early  1990s as the time when important Live Art and contemporary performance work started ‘flooding’ the British art scene. She mentions such artists as Forced Entertainment, Reckless Sleepers and Stan’s Café emerging from this context. And what those artists had in common, suggests Lloyd, was an ‘interest in the here and how, the moment, our experiences, and who we are’; also, the desire to create a different quality of experience with their audiences than the traditional theatre play might pursue (ibid.). Though she is questioning whether or how this might have been a particularly British phenomenon, Lloyd does concede that there seems to be very little such practice in other European countries during the 1990s and today, unless we’re looking at specific ‘pockets’ where such work might also thrive for particular sociopolitical reasons, such as Ghent (Belgium), for example. Robert Pacitti also struggles with the Live Art term; he points out that SPILL is called ‘Festival of Performance’ (2017). He sees ‘Performance’ as a more inclusive term that brings under its umbrella Live Art, Performance Art and other performance practices. He points to artists such as Franko B who have consistently resisted Live Art as a term and have refused to be categorized as Live Artists. However, Pacitti also acknowledges that the term can be useful as a ‘set of tactics, of questions, of peer reassurances that we could fight the good fight through the shared search for a bodybased language that, perhaps, resists the gallery genesis of performance art heritage’ (2017). He believes that Live Art has a social agenda and is the outcome of particular sociopolitical circumstances, defined by the politics of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States, the Cold War period, the miners’ strike of 1984–5 (a major industrial action in an attempt to prevent colliery closures under the Thatcher regime), the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the Falklands War of 1982. Pacitti points to those political and historical happenings as the backdrop for the gradual emergence of Live Art practice in the UK during the late 1980s and its consolidation as a sector in the early 1990s; he also points to Lois Keidan as the most important person in shaping the Live Art sector in the UK (ibid.). Through her access to the ICA, Keidan facilitated the explosion of Live Art practice that occurred in London at the time, providing institutional validation, visibility and resources to artists, and ‘fast-tracking’ discourses around issues of gender, race and sexuality that were core to those developments. This resulted in some really important outputs like Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance by Ugwu (1995), and the exhibition and events programme ‘Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire’ (1995), an interdisciplinary season at the ICA that considered the work of Frantz Fanon on postcolonialism, identity, cinema and psychoanalysis, and which brought together performance and Live Art, film, visual arts and critical theory (ibid.). Another part of the sociopolitical backdrop to the emergence of Live Art, argues Pacitti, is more particular to the LGBT+ community, as the early 1990s were a time of ‘high cultural anxiety around the body, and of some reclaiming of the body’ (ibid.). This was, of course, the time of the AIDS epidemic. Pacitti points out that ‘as queer people, we had our bodies taken from us in the dominant cultural context, where we were seen as withering and dying, or as transmitters of this disease that was going to kill everyone’ (ibid.). He describes his own challenge in coming of age as a queer man at the same time as AIDS hit the UK. The discrimination that queer men and women felt at the

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time, he says, compressed feelings and emotions and forms of expression; and as these became compressed they strengthened a sense of self, so that ‘there’s a language, and a music, and a fashion (…) that comes with that’ (ibid.). He describes his experience of making and consuming Live Art practice within this context as ‘definitely post-punk’ (ibid.). Though the punk years were gone, there was an energy of ‘tearing it up’, which was filtered through the works of artists such as Derek Jarman. Other influences were movements such as ‘Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners’, and artists such as Hittite Empire, an African-American group making confrontational work around race and the privilege of ‘whiteness’ (ibid.). Though Pacitti sees the work produced within that sociopolitical and cultural context as British in character due to the very particular nature of the environment that produced it, he points out that both his work and the wider scene were also porous, and influenced by international practices – particularly the work of American artists such as Coco Fusco and Julie Tolentino (both South American performance artists based and producing work in North America) (ibid.). Given the backdrop of events discussed here, Pacitti reiterates that Live Art, as per the definition offered by LADA, is not an artform but a cultural strategy that was very important during the 1990s (ibid.). He questions the current usefulness of the term and argues that it soon became ‘a series of tropes, ways of being in the world or, perhaps, visual aesthetics, that people could adapt to really quickly’ (ibid.). Though a natural development perhaps, this is neither desirable nor useful in art-making. However, as a cultural strategy, Live Art is there to be engaged with when it is useful, says Pacitti (ibid.). He does not feel bound to the term or ‘unionized by Live Art’ but does use it when he feels it is strategically appropriate – indeed, the most recent SPILL Festival (2018) was described as a festival of ‘Live Art, activism and performance’ (SPILL website 2018). I agree with Pacitti’s approach to the term and practice: Live Art emerged as a strategy for inclusion. Long may it continue to be just that.

Live Artists: the who Having discussed the ‘What’ of Live Art, I also asked; Who: Who are the artists who develop Live Art practices? What are they like? I was particularly struck by Graham Saunders’s chapter ‘The Freaks’ Roll Call: Live Art and the Arts Council,  1968–73’ in Dominic Johnson’s edited collection Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK (2013: 46–59). In this, Saunders refers to Edward Lucie-Smith, at the time (1973) Chairman of the Arts Council, who described the Arts Council’s Experimental Projects Committee (which received and processed funding applications for Live Art and Performance Art practice) as ‘an establishment mechanism for dealing with freaks’ (in Saunders 2013: 59). Interestingly, in the same edited collection (which was previously published as a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review) director and playwright Neil Bartlett, in an interview with Lois Keidan, suggests that ‘[in Live Art practice] everyone self-identified as a misfit or a freak’ (Bartlett in Keidan 2013: 111). I asked LADA, SPILL and Compass: What does this mean, and what does it entail? Are Live Artists really ‘misfits and freaks’? And is this, perhaps, a good thing, as it suggests that, as artists, they are constantly challenging the status quo because they

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cannot neatly fit into any of the established categories? Furthermore, I was interested to know what are the implications for this today; specifically, is Live Art still perceived as, literally, a ‘freak show’? And do we need to challenge this perception or might we, perhaps, want to appropriate it instead? According to Lois Keidan, one of the things that is important about Live Art and counter-culture more widely, and about work that sits ‘at the edges of things’, is reclaiming words that are perceived to be negative as positive (Keidan, Mitchell and Wright 2015). ‘Difficulty’ is an example of a word which carries a negative connotation but can be considered a positive characteristic when associated with a piece of art; an artwork that is ‘difficult’ is understood to be experimenting with new ideas or forms, challenging stereotypes, and upsetting our expectations of what art is and how we can relate to it. As for ‘misfits and freaks’, Keidan is clear about what side she’d rather be in: ‘I’d much rather be a misfit within the default mainstream culture than be part of that culture!’ (2015). That is also what characterizes Live Art, she thinks, and the reason many artists turn to this form of practice. Because it offers a space for agency, for difficult ideas that maybe don’t fit, for difficult forms of representation of identity, for different ways of being in the world, for different ways of seeing the world. It’s a really safe space to be dangerous and that’s an important thing. So I don’t have a problem with the terms misfits and freaks, depending on who’s using them and in what way, but Ron Athey used to scream at the ‘Muscle Marys’ in California on Venice beach for calling him a freak. He was like, ‘if you look in the mirror guys, who’s the freak here!’ (2015)

Aaron Wright points to Marcia Farquhar’s statement from LADA’s 2014 A Live Art Gala (ALAG) about Live Art being ‘a place for people who don’t know their place’ (2015). He points out that a misfit is, literally, someone who ‘does not fit’ in given structures. He suggests that we need to think of Live Art strategically as an umbrella term to ‘catch those artists who don’t fit elsewhere. Who, literally, don’t fit in theatre, in dance, in visual arts – those who fall within the gaps’ (ibid.). Wright and Keidan offer La Ribot as an example of an artist who does not neatly fit the category she was trained in: La Ribot is a classically trained dancer who develops work that sits between dance and performance art, using her female body as a ‘feminist statement’ (Keidan, Mitchell and Wright 2015). Keidan points out that, certainly in Spain where La Ribot originates from, her work was not understood: ‘She was the misfit and the freak’ (2015). La Ribot relocated to the UK, according to Keidan, because Live Art offered a context in which ‘it was safe to test things, to try things out’ (ibid.). That is what Live Art does really well, Keidan says; and that is what LADA is trying to achieve through the DIY programme, which encourages artists to try different ways of doing things, employ different methodologies and explore things with other artists (ibid.). ‘If being a freak is not being a default man’, offers Keidan, ‘then a freak is a great thing to be’ (ibid.). She offers to reconfigure the question: How can being a ‘freak’, not fitting within existing contexts, be reconciled with making work that can be presented through (and so, can fit within) high-profile institutional contexts? Keidan offers Joshua Sofaer as an example of an artist who develops a very individual

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type of practice that does not neatly fit existing categories, but which engages with ideas such as happiness that sit comfortably within more mainstream contexts (ibid.). Co-director of LADA CJ Mitchell points to a tendency to stuff into neat boxes or categories, things, ideas or practices that we do not recognize (2016). He thinks that labelling Live Artists as ‘freaks’ is an attempt to push away a practice that funders and decision-makers might have been unable to understand and might have felt threatened by. He points out that it is interesting to observe how those approaches to art that might have felt ‘freakish’ at some point are able to grab hold of people’s imaginations and evolve with the times, or actually play a part in changing the times so that ten or twenty years down the line they become part of the mainstream vocabulary (ibid.). Mitchell points out that practices which might have once been considered to be ‘on the misfit end of things, might now actually be on the stage of the Barbican or in a major gallery or a museum space’ (ibid.). Though charting those trajectories is very hard, Mitchell points out that ‘on a much longer term, the culture will have shifted because of the misfit’ (ibid.; my emphasis). Keidan agrees that Live Art practices have a ripple effect on mainstream culture. She references Mary Paterson’s suggestion that, when a cultural practice happens in the mainstream, it is no longer known as Live Art (2015). She offers the example of Geraldine Pilgrim who pioneered site-specific work but, as tends to be the case with many pioneers, is not widely known for it and rarely gets recognized. The practice that Pilgrim developed has become mainstream through artists such as Punchdrunk, who get all the ‘notoriety’ and credit for developing this type of work. What is important however, Keidan points out, is that the critical mainstream, the funders and the people in power, such as the Arts Council, come to recognize how practices and sectors develop and how culture shifts, through peripheral, ‘difficult’ practices, such as Live Art, are challenging and gradually changing the mainstream. Unfortunately, Keidan explains, though people understand how those shifts occur historically, it is a lot harder to pin those changes down and account for them in current time (ibid.). Lloyd is not concerned that Live Art can be perceived as ‘weird’ – in fact, she thinks a lot of Live Art practice is ‘consciously and deliberately so’ (2015), not as an intention, but because many artists set out to explore ‘deeply personal issues in idiosyncratic, unique ways’ (ibid.). Lloyd thinks this is a strength in Live Art practice and suggests that it is the job of the curator to consider the context within which a piece of work is shown and the type of audience it is attempting to engage in order to ‘facilitate the relationship between the artist and the potential audience’ (ibid.). At the same time, she also thinks that perceptions have shifted, and that there is a much greater understanding within the Arts Council around experimental, cross-disciplinary and cross-artform practices than there was in the past (ibid.). Robert Pacitti finds the word ‘freak’ very problematic, especially in the context it was used, as it implies ‘a heritage of physical abuse’ (2017). He does not have a problem with the notion of the ‘misfit’ though, as he thinks that ‘it’s alright to not fit. It’s OK to be a shape where a bit of you sticks out or you’re not going to comfortably fall within the line’ (ibid.). In fact, he points me to a new Pacitti Company programme called ‘A Crash Course for Teenagers in Performance Art: Teenage Kicks’ (2017), which is described as being for ‘misfits, loudmouths, oddballs or wannabe artists’ (Pacitti Company publicity

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for Teenage Kicks 2017). He thinks this is about reaching out to young people who are disenfranchised and offering them acceptance of themselves. Even so, he can see a danger in the use of the term as ‘some kind of power device to hold us in a particular place, or to marginalize us, or to diminish us – then, of course, it’s hugely problematic’ (Pacitti 2017). The problem is, then, not with the term itself, but with how the term might be applied from an institutional power perspective, and to what end.

Live Art: the politics of institutionalization of a counter-cultural practice I asked LADA, SPILL and Compass whether Live Art is political. I wanted to know if this is an aspect of the work that is important to consider. Is politics part of the essential make-up of Live Art practice, or is it incidental and, perhaps, applicable only to certain practices? Furthermore, I asked about the politics of institutionalization of Live Art practice. Quoting Lois Keidan’s suggestion that ‘there has been an institutional embrace of Live Art’ (2013:  110), I asked for evidence that that is indeed the case. Keidan went on to suggest that ‘that’s a cause of celebration and also a cause for lots of handwringing’ (ibid.), so I wanted to know why. What happens when Live Art becomes institutionalized? What are the implications of such developments, particularly in respect to the political potency and efficacy of Live Art practice? Aaron Wright suggested that Live Artists are working with their bodies and that bodies are inherently political (2016). Keidan agreed that Live Art is inherently political because it ‘defies all sorts of cultural orthodoxies’ (2016). She also consented that since Live Art is, to a great extent, about embodied practices, it has to be political – especially since Live Artists are negotiating complex, loaded issues, such as difference and representations of identity: ‘The gaze is political. Standing on stage as a black artist is a political act whether that is intended or not’ (Keidan, Mitchell and Wright 2015). Wright pointed out that many Live Artists publicly take political stances that are not mainstream; that Live Art offers ‘a space to be contrary, to be Other’ (2015). Keidan referred to the relationship between Live Art and activism as ‘new strategies of creative resistance [are] being developed by artists applying artistic practice to non-artistic enquiries’ (2015). She described these new strategies as ‘fiercely political and highly influential’ (ibid.). Keidan pointed to the Tate Tanks, among other developments, as important evidence of the institutionalization of Live Art practice: One of the most famous art museums in the world opened the world’s first dedicated performance space. That is an incredibly powerful statement. Moreover, the way Tate is talking about the new Switch House as an experiential space (…) is Live Art thinking. That is the Live Art effect. The Hayward Gallery putting together exhibitions such as ‘Move: Choreographing You’ (2010–11) and the ‘Art of Change: New Directions from China’ (2012) provides further evidence. The Manchester International Festival is evidence in itself. (…) Even the British Museum is engaging with Live Art. Everywhere you look there is some engagement

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Live Art in the UK with (…) experiential practices. They’re offering audience relationships and new ways of presenting and representing art. (2015)

Keidan explains that the institutionalization of Live Art and Performance Practice gives LADA and the wider sector visibility, a cultural status and ‘a profile that, if you asked us in the past, we couldn’t possibly dream of ’ (ibid.). Alongside status and visibility also come resources. Suddenly, Keidan points out, Live Art work is being produced at a grand scale by outlets such as the Manchester International Festival. These things are great, she says, but they can come at a cost, and the institutionalization of Live Art practice does cause concern. Her concern is around institutional control: ‘The institution frames the work; it controls and contains how one experiences art in a very particular way’ (Keidan, Mitchell and Wright 2015). This poses some questions in itself but, for Keidan, the greatest concern is the potential this framing has of ‘depoliticizing the work’ (ibid.). In fact, she maintains, it does do just that – it depoliticizes the work, full stop. And that is a really important issue to grapple with (ibid.). Lloyd comes to this question from a similar angle; she fears that the institutionalization of Live Art can lead to loss of ownership (as the institutions lay claim to the work) and to the instrumentalization of Live Art practice. While weary of this process, she is also keen to celebrate it. As long as the institutions come to the practice of Live Art with sensitivity and a collaborative approach, the Live Art community should be lauding the recognition it is currently getting through mainstream cultures. The only other option, Lloyd says, is that we end up with a ‘two-tier culture, where the institutions are doing heritage work, and contemporary artists are invisible’ (ibid.). In fact, the institutions have a responsibility, says Lloyd, to ‘understand and embrace contemporary culture’ (ibid.). She argues that artists can and will continue to be critical, even when that means being critical of the ‘hand that feeds them’. This comes down to the artists’ integrity. Lloyd says: ‘I trust artists. I trust artists’ integrity, and I work with artists whose integrity is sound’ (ibid.). Furthermore, she argues, ‘institutions (…) have got to have the guts to recognize that the arts are about changing views, changing opinions, and changing lives’ (ibid.). Robert Pacitti points out that, for a new generation of young makers that are coming out of college at the time of writing this, SPILL is the institution. He reminisces of himself as a young maker, waiting to ‘have a go’ at Rose Fenton speaking about the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) at the Goethe Institute (Fenton cofounded and ran LIFT for twenty-five years, from 1980 to 2005), because he perceived of her as ‘the institution’ at the time. Pacitti argues that there is, inevitably, a cyclical process within practice itself. However, the question for him is not so much about the institutionalization of Live Art practice, but about its marketization – though he thinks the two are interlinked: ‘I would say that to define something as an institution is to wrap some kind of economics around it’ (Pacitti  2017). He points out the historic  dichotomy between Live Art and performance practice on the one hand, and visual and fine art practice on the other, where the former resists marketization because it is based on ephemerality and liveness, whereas the latter thrives on it, as it produces objects and artefacts that carry market value. In that context, Pacitti expresses his concern about Tate ‘adopting’ Live Art: ‘I think that’s happened in a way

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that is problematic and ill-informed’ (ibid.). There is also a concern about the role of ‘us’, as a Live Art community, working within or alongside Institutions: There are times when we, as independents outside of those organizations, can be agents of change – we can be that little bit of grit that helps grow a pearl. Do they need us afterwards to help them do it again? No, they don’t. (…) Institutions can eat us up just to have a moment; a moment when they’ve done ‘that thing’. (ibid.)

However, the concern is small. Pacitti is clear that Live Art as a sector, and Live Artists, is in no danger through the attempt on the part of institutions to grab hold of and marketize their practice, with all the positive and negative implications of this: I don’t think there is a danger that we’ll be swallowed whole; I don’t think that’s going to happen at all! There will always be loads of Live Artists who don’t give a damn about being at the National Theatre, or the Barbican, or wherever that is. (ibid.)

Conclusion The interviews undertaken with the Live Art Development Agency, SPILL Festival of Performance and Compass Live Art demonstrate that developments in and around performance and Live Art are not ‘pure’ – that is, they are not dependent on any single set of practices, approaches or decisions. Despite Lois Keidan’s ‘purist’ approach to Live Art at the time of LADA’s founding, Live Art is, in fact, a complex ecosystem that has developed, and continues to develop, through a mixture of bottom-up, organic tendencies that ‘bubble up’ within the socio-cultural happenings of particular points in time; and top-down decisions taken by funding bodies, institutions and policymakers, which can significantly affect the ‘direction of travel’ for a generation of artists and makers. Combined with these are the impact and influence of particular forwardlooking individuals (and, often, subsequently, the groups, organizations or other structures that they found) and the wider social and cultural zeitgeist. Will the above combine to ensure that Live Art continues to grow? Annie Lloyd is convinced that Live Art will ‘grow and grow’ (2015) because it has an important role to play: In some ways, I think Live Art is doing what theatre should, but isn’t. (…) So it will continue to grow, but it will also continue to have modelled conversations around what it is and who it’s for. (…) I think that as long as there remains some public funding infrastructure and some kind of local activism (such as the rise of DIY venues and organizations that has been concurrent with the tough economic climate of the last decade) Live Art will continue to grow. The road will be bumpy, but we are not going away!

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This volume The purpose of this publication is to map out the fecund terrain of Live Art in the UK through chapters contributed by leading academics, some of which are long established and internationally acclaimed, and others who are at the earlier stages of their careers but no less significant because of that. Every chapter provides an authoritative and critical examination of a single Live Art practitioner. All artists selected to be studied herein have developed a significant body of work over time, their practice being both prolific and vital; and yet, there is a dearth in academic writing in relation to their work (admittedly more so for some than for others), which this volume seeks to address. Through examining the work of these key practitioners, this volume puts Live Art under critical scrutiny. Part One, ‘Experiments in Life and Art’, starts with a chapter by Sara Jane Bailes on the work of Tim Etchells. Bailes looks in particular at how Etchells ‘works assiduously with words’, using language as sound, composition, observation, form, ingredient, performance and event; both a medium and a material. She points out that Etchells’ practice ‘invokes (…) art histories where text and language (…) operate as a defining aspect of the work’, while also articulating it as ‘always concerned with discovering mechanisms that release something into a dynamic, that set a thing going’, showing how the artist is not concerned with creating a static, complete universe, but with setting a mechanism into action that can provoke an effect. Bailes’ well-crafted, minutely contextualized account on Etchells’ practice succeeds in demonstrating how this important artist’s work foresees new aesthetic practices of sampling, remixing and multiple authorship, through ‘the presence of the human figure as a machine for arranging and upsetting semantic order’. Bailes’ chapter is followed by Roberta Mock discussing the practice of Marisa Carnesky: a ‘showwoman’. Mock describes how Carnesky brings to life ‘waxworks, dolls, ghosts, half-remembered traditions, mythical goddesses and tarot cards’ in a ‘quirky and provocative brand of Live Art entertainment that is sexy, strange and fun’. Carnesky’s practice brings together performance art, spectacle, burlesque, circus, variety entertainment, magical illusions, autobiographical performance, storytelling, body modification and visual theatre, while her background as a dancer and choreographer is also often evident through her transdisciplinary practice. Through analysing key works such as Jewess Tattooess (1999) and Carnesky’s Ghost Train (2004), Mock examines the key themes of Carnesky’s practice: cultural identity, ritual, sexual performance and the politics that surround women’s bodies. Part One is concluded with Deirdre Heddon’s conversation on Marcia Farquhar’s autobiographical performance practice. Farquhar is an artist working in performance, photography, painting and object-making. Heddon discusses Farquhar’s performances, which are often precariously balanced between the prescribed and the unpredictable, while also addressing her questions concerning history-making: ‘who gets to tell histories and from what perspectives?’, ‘what is remembered and what is forgotten?’, and ‘who is absented as a result?’ Heddon suggests that Farquhar practices what could usefully be called ‘psychoperformance’, which signals a relocation of the psychogeographic ‘drift’ into the performance space as a ‘dramaturgical deployment’,

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but one ‘no less responsive to and affected by the shifting moods of the environment and which in turn effect that place’. Heddon concludes that Farquhar enacts the ‘unpredictability of everyday experience’. Part Two is titled ‘Performances of Conflict, Resolution, Hurt and Healing’. It starts with a chapter by Dominic Johnson, which discusses acclaimed artist Franko B’s performance Milk and Blood (2015). Johnson makes a conscious effort to not interpret the performance through metaphors, tempting though this might be, and, furthermore, to question the artist’s own interpretation of his work not in relation to its validity, but in terms of asking if the meanings provoked by the experience of the work might be different or bigger than the artist-intended effects. Johnson discusses the work of Franko B in the context of ‘Hardship Art’, pointing out the ‘cultural difficulty we tend to take in addressing pain as a factor in the sphere of representation’ in order to conclude that ‘the pain that disconcerts us in Franko B’s performance is not the artists, but our own’ (original emphasis). Gianna Bouchard offers an excellent analysis on the work of Martin O’Brien in the context of biomedicine: a ‘persistent force in Western societies’ which through the measuring, fragmentation, objectification and testing of our bodies makes us ‘perform as “specimens”’. Bouchard discusses how Martin O’Brien, an artist living with the chronic disease cystic fibrosis (CF), has developed a performance practice that ‘actively resist[s] the dominant discourses of medicine’. Bouchard shows how O’Brien attempts to reclaim agency over his body and illness through ‘staging his personal, embodied specimenhood away from the hospital and in the performance space’. She uses O’Brien’s work to shed light on the potential of Live Art practice to ‘explore the political and ethical dimensions of illness and disability’. Johanna Linsley concludes Part Two with her discussion on the notions of ‘encounter, assembly and withdrawal’ in the work of Oreet Ashery. Linsley discusses how Ashery’s early work ‘drew on the alter ego as a way of re-thinking individual subjectivity in relation to social and cultural politics through the act of encounter’. Here, she focuses her conversation on what she suggests is a shift in Ashery’s work from intimate, often one-to-one encounters, structured through the use of alter egos, to a practice that involves assembling groups of people and ‘investigating the complex politics of the collective’. Linsley goes on to argue that ‘Ashery’s withdrawal of her own body from her work is related to wider shifts within the field of Live Art’ in the UK and beyond. The final part of this volume lightens the mood somewhat with reference to ‘Camp, Comedy and Laughs’. The part opens with a chapter by Gavin Butt on the work of the idiosyncratic, Manchester-based performer David Hoyle, ‘taking as its point of focus his Magazine series of shows presented at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London between 2006 and 2008’. Butt explores the work through introducing the ‘near-paradoxical’ notion of ‘camp sincerity’: a ‘humble’ and ‘deconstructed’ form of sincerity, ‘resulting from the open-ended encounters typically entered into between Hoyle and his audience members during a live event’. Katie Beswick takes over Part Three by offering an enthralling analysis of the work of Welsh Live Artist Jordan McKenzie. Beswick argues that McKenzie’s practice, which often appears ‘simple and playful on the surface, offers nuanced social commentary

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that engages in a politics of site’. She studies how McKenzie works with ‘the spaces, places, objects and materials that surround him [to] create humorous visual and performance artworks’ that examine ‘queer politics’, ‘bodily practices’ and ‘cultural identity, particularly in relation to (…) class and notions of “Britishness”’. The volume concludes with the discussion of one of the most provocative bodies of work, perhaps, considered herein: Eleanor Roberts writes on performance and prostitution in relation to the work of artist and musician Cosey Fanni Tutti who, in her Magazine Actions, appears as ‘a model in pornography and glamour publications produced between 1973 and 1977’. Roberts explains how ‘Magazine Action clippings (…) formed the central component of the COUM Transmissions “retrospective” exhibition, Prostitution, at London’s ICA (October 1976)’, which drew ‘Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn’s now infamous denunciation of COUM as “the wreckers of civilization”’. Through archival research and an interview with the artist, Roberts, offers a feminist reading of the Magazine Actions exhibition in Prostitution, proposing performance as ‘a lens’ through which to examine the work.

Notes 1 Farquhar was referring specifically to the Live Art Development Agency as an organization but I think her suggestion can be expanded to Live Art as a sector. Her statement was repeated to me by Aaron Wright at my interview with the Live Art Development Agency team in 2015. As I write this in 2019 Aaron Wright is Artistic Director of Fierce! Festival in Birmingham; he was Programmes Manager at LADA at the time this interview was conducted. 2 Some of the most important relevant sources are, among others, Kaye (1994–5); Jones (1999); Live Art Development Agency (2010); Johnson (2013); Heddon and Klein (2012). 3 Please refer to Klein (2009: 12–36) for a more extensive introduction to this field and reference to the many other organizations which have helped shape it. 4 https://www.artsadmin.co.uk (accessed 1 June 2017). 5 Pacitti expresses some discomfort around ‘the kind of soft politics that accompanies British artists’ ambassadorial trips abroad’.

Part One

Experiments in Life and in Art

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1

‘All We Have Is Words, All We Have Is Worlds’: Language, Looping and the Work of Tim Etchells Sara Jane Bailes

Introduction: working words Tim Etchells works assiduously with words: hearing, catching, noticing them, collecting and gathering them in note form, isolating, repeating them, rounding them up, dismantling their semantic structures; troubling them, deleting or reshuffling a familiar order; reversing emphasis, celebrating their precision and their endless capacity to, just as easily, say very little at all, even as they resonate and perform for us. It’s hard to think about Etchells’ writing and his compositional approach to words without falling under the thrall of what he makes language do. His list-making is contagious. His observations often feel familiar, resonant with an understated boredom that’s peculiarly British. His writing is filled with longing, with sharp but understated political wit, humour, everyday ambitions and disappointments. Arranged in fragmented forms, decontextualized and reframed by a specific context or site in which his language-based text works are produced (such as a gallery, public/civic space, small theatre or large concert venue), Etchells uses words to recompose or dramatize a situation, to create formal distance or intimacy, suggest ideas and propose images; or else, to have them appear, literally, as concrete objects in the form of neons, or as sounds pushing towards abstraction. They are, in his practice as an artist, an active, live, dynamic force, whether they appear as a visual sign communicating across space and time, or as a unit or phrase within a spoken improvised live composition. In many of Etchells’ projects and collaborations, ongoing since his 2001 solo performance, Instructions for Forgetting, words function as both medium and material; often, they become a micro-event that stages larger

Thanks to Tim Etchells for his generosity with time, materials and discussions in person and by email, and for waiting on a ‘last draft’. Thanks also to Christof Migone for useful suggestions in my research.

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propositions, or they can function as a bridge to a more visual, detailed world than performance allows. Yet, as with the work he has continued to produce for over three decades with his internationally acclaimed experimental theatre collective, Forced Entertainment, of which Etchells is artistic director and the company’s primary writer/ author, language is used to illuminate the ordinary rather than to draw attention to the exceptional. As an artist who works with language and text across multiple forms, his practice extends a preoccupation evident since the mid-twentieth century with the idea of producing democratic methodologies and idioms in art practice that aim to soften the edges of self-conscious authorship and the distinctions between everyday (pedestrian) life and (high) art. His use of language as a material that can oscillate across different forms draws from popular culture as well as from ideas, overheard dialogue, the particular vernaculars that evolve in other media and their specific stylistic modes (such as TV, news broadcasts, film) and casual observations: an everyday, anybody, anywhere kind of language. Inevitably, this produces its own distinctive virtuosity and creates its own casual poetry, even as its affect is one that seems to belie mastery and precision. Considering Etchells’ acute attention to the imaginary potential of a language gathered out of the ordinary (in both senses of that phrase), one antecedent that springs to mind is mid-twentieth-century sound poet, painter and performer, Brion Gysin, who, collaborating with William S. Burroughs in  1958, developed cut-up texts as a way of liberating language, intent upon freeing the writer from subjectivism and the idea of ‘owning’ words. Like many US artists working in other art disciplines at that time (including music, dance and painting), Gysin’s methods of composition sought to manifest and articulate those beliefs. In a brief essay in The Third Mind, a book he composed with Burroughs, Gysin explains the radical dynamism of the cut-up, famously declaring: ‘You’ll soon see that words don’t belong to anyone. Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody else can make them gush into action’ (in Burroughs and Gysin  1978: n/p). Gysin draws our attention to several useful points: first, that language exists as shared cultural property, regardless of how it might be (individually or collectively) composed, edited or applied within specific contexts. It is communal. Language is perceived, therefore, as implicitly social, free, accessible, though its circulation and formations are inevitably bound up with ideology and (therefore) agency. Second, language can be activated and made to do certain things: its potential is dynamic, forceful; it produces effects. Formally, the cut-up releases language from the tyranny of narrative or a singular trajectory, something Etchells admits to having been frustrated by for many years in his work as writer/theatre-maker (Trueman 2017). Instead, to displace and (literally) cut up sequences of language from their original intended order proposes a more open way of reading/hearing language, allowing it to move through the individual in a less over-determined way. Meaning can be arrived at through a dissociative as well as an associative logic. Experimenting with new compositional modes and strategies, the relationship between author/reader, or performer/spectator, can be recalibrated not only by shifting the perceptive attention of the reader but also by refocusing attention from content towards the

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way in which ideas are filtered and distributed. I’ll return to this notion later in relation to the development of digital technologies and networked thinking. Judith Butler reminds us that we are fundamentally linguistic beings, that is, ‘beings who require language in order to be’ (Butler 1997: 2). Though Butler is referring to language at large, within the public and social realm rather than its activity within specialized fields of art practice, to some extent the same holds true in both domains. We  exist through language, as does our apprehension of the world. In theatre, specifically Anglo-centric theatre, language has always been moderated – restricted even – by its literal use as replication of first person dialogue. Yet within a more generalized field of art practice, where words are used as ingredients, language can structure and reorganize our sense of place, time, relationality and intimacy, our ‘felt’ or abstracted experience of the world. While J. L. Austin’s speech act theory has become central to discussions about performativity and performance, in particular the way words can do more than they say (where saying becomes doing) (Austin 1962), artists such as Etchells deploy language in ways that excavate its performative properties distinctive from the occurrence of the performative in everyday speech. While this includes foregrounding its concrete properties, in Etchells’ pieces one’s attention is often focused on the way language as a signifying practice brings a/many world(s) into being through strategies that call upon the individual, imaginative ability and corresponding thoughts and associations of the listener-reader. Is this the way that language as an event begins: as an invitation to collaborate in imagining? How does language perform ideas, things, attitudes, events in ways that other materials do not? In this chapter, I want to focus on some of the ways that Tim Etchells’ solo practice develops his interest and enquiry into the performative, spatial, social, choreographic and musical potentialities that language offers. I am thinking about these works under the umbrella of the generous and heterogeneous category, Live Art, rather than theatre where Etchells’ practice with Forced Entertainment usually belongs. Perhaps it is worth considering how these language-based text works belong to that less definitive category (Live Art), observing how these projects fall away from theatre to create conversations between and across forms. The potential of language as a textual practice has always fascinated and concerned Etchells, underpinning his work with Forced Entertainment since they began as a theatre collective in the mid-1980s. In a recent interview with Matt Trueman discussing the critical value of text in the company’s work, he states: ‘I still care very much and take care of text’ (Trueman  2017). Working independently from the group has allowed him to further explore its possibilities without the concerns or obligations that inevitably develop (a different kind of care-taking) amongst a collective of closely-knit artists over a long period of time. In his own work, Etchells is liberated from the exigencies and demands of making a group/time-specific piece of theatre that can tour and be accommodated in a range of similar capacity venues. Instead, imagination itself becomes both site and object of each performance or gallery work. In that sense, the possibilities are, perhaps dauntingly, limitless and unclear. Each project relies upon finding different containers, strategies or holding patterns that allow him to fashion language into new ways of catching the experience

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of a thing. Usually Etchells performs his own works either solo or in duets. Recent collaborators have included Meg Stuart (dancer/choreographer), Vlatka Horvat (visual and performance artist), Aisha Orazbayeva (musician/composer), Boris Charmatz (dancer/choreographer) and Tarek Atoui (sound artist/composer).1 While each distinctive project intermixes the formal structures, behaviours and limitations of these different media – primarily dance, visual art and music – the conventions of theatre are often implied in the situation created by Etchells through the texts he creates and sometimes through the processes that produce text. These pieces seem to work in dialogue with theatre performance: pushing back from it (no ‘action’, plot, characters being performed, no costumes, lights, etc.), emptying the space yet reliant upon a shared knowledge of its codified rules; eliminating as much as possible in order to better understand what needs to remain, the essential material for creating an exchange. There is a commitment, for example, to invoking an ‘already existing’ situation, to staging something as if pre-empting it or in its aftermath, to being here or ‘there’, locating us in some kind of temporal relation to it, retrieving parts of it, borrowing or retracing his own or an implied other’s experience, bringing not only time but place and mood into frame. Central to these pieces, whatever form they eventually take, is an attempt to make the spectator actively complicit in the occasion. They explore the way that narrative and subject position are intrinsic to, but not limited by, compositional practice: one is always speaking to, speaking of, speaking from, about, for or with. They pay attention to the dramaturgical possibilities of text even as they work to include the visual, choreographic and sculptural, to expand our understanding of performance as multidisciplinary or even post-disciplinary. Certain questions guide this body of work and sustain it in particular ways: How does language become performance, or, how might performance dwell within the formations and arrangements of its limitless constructions? Is language ever anything other than fictional or fictionalizing? How does meaning shift according to the different rules or strategies we apply to words, or the way we might locate them within different forms and platforms (such as neon, live broadcast or performance, gallery or wall piece)? Functioning as a time-based vehicle rather than as dialogue, how can language expand our understanding of narrative? In the following sections I’ll consider Etchells’ broader history as a writer whose practice has been situated in, and developed through, theatre and performance. I’ll then focus on compositional discoveries encountered through these works. The chapter then offers a detailed consideration of two performance pieces made in recent years: the solo work, A Broadcast/Looping Pieces, originally made and performed in 2014, and the collaborative duet, Seeping Through (2015), made and performed with composer and violinist, Aisha Orazbayeva. Both pieces can be performed in different versions (as durational or as a shorter version, for example), produced in different sites and contexts (gallery, theatre, for radio). The second work builds on some of the components and strategies that underpin Broadcast. In order to consider the development of these works, I’ll refer to earlier solo works by Etchells as well as relevant shows by Forced Entertainment. In conclusion, I suggest ways to situate Etchells’ work within diverse genealogies and contexts of practice.

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Words as worlds ‘You can make anything by writing’

C.S.Lewis

As an artist, Etchells established himself and has become internationally recognized for his more than thirty-year history with Sheffield-based theatre ensemble, Forced Entertainment. As artistic director, he writes, directs and sometimes performs. The group’s work is programmed, discussed and taught within theatre, performance and Live Art contexts, nationally and abroad, and in recent years the group (and Etchells individually) has garnered a number of prestigious awards.2 His 1999 book, Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, inclusive of the shared histories of the group, is arguably the most significant, and undoubtedly one of the most widely read collections of published writings on experimental theatre and performance in the last fifty years. Inventive in ways that echo the formal collaborative experimentation of their theatre-making, it reads as a kind of disjointed cultural, company biography from the perspective of its six members and their work, sometimes reframing them as characters (playing themselves, as they do in performance) in their own (semi-fictional) history. Together, the collection creates a kind of first- and second-person, plural mythology of their professional and sometimes personal lives together as a company, often failing (intentionally) to differentiate between private and public experience. It considers the theatre work they have made and processes of making, the performances and artists who have influenced them, experiences of touring, reflections from Etchells’ personal narrative (the birth of his sons, for example, and the influence of this on the work made) and other significant events that have shaped the group. Cast against the political landscape of Thatcher’s Britain and its aftermath during the  1980s and early  1990s, the book itself bears witness to the aggressive privatization, withdrawal of funding and diminished power of the public sector which defined that epoch, moving deftly and poetically between historical, cultural and personal fact and fiction. As both document and history of a specific and geographically located performance scene that prizes open the social, political and popular culture, the desires, behaviours and events that influence one theatre group, it intertwines making life/making theatre as two distinctive but interrelated, generative modes of experience: consciously or unconsciously, we fictionalize ‘what happens’ through each effort to recount lived experience, to narrate or tell. In that telling, or, if you like, in the different versions attempted, we inevitably absorb the histories, ideas and expression of others in order to create and engage a desired and desiring listener/ reader. In other words, we repeatedly compose and recompose our ‘selves’. In addition to providing a compendium of accounts and critical archival material from the company’s first decade of work (including loosely told memories, photos, scripts and programme notes), Certain Fragments established Etchells as a writer of distinctive and considerable brilliance. It demonstrated his ability to read and critically reflect upon the group’s practice while contextualizing it more broadly within latetwentieth-century performance histories without compromising the creative vision

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the group had evolved collectively. The book is structured in a way that plays with form (and varying degrees of formality), with the distinction between real, fictitious and exaggerated events. It offers an innovative exploration of the way a performance history might be gathered that reflects and corresponds with a company’s performance style as an extension of its aesthetics, its suspicion towards the idea of a singular ‘truth’ or account of events, its interest in popular culture and its various forms, and its concern with testing, breaking down and expanding theatre so it becomes a relevant contemporary cultural form. A willingness to play with and find poetry in the collision of materials that don’t belong together is evidenced throughout Certain Fragments, just as it is practised in their rehearsals and repeatedly dramatized in the group’s numerous theatre productions, documentation and durational works. For Etchells, writing/text has always functioned as a critical and concrete tool in the development of his practice. In many Forced Entertainment theatre shows spanning their performance history, such as  200% and Bloody Thirsty (1987), Emanuelle Enchanted (1992), Club of No Regrets (1993), Hidden J (1994), Pleasure (1997) and the long video that followed it, Filthy Words & Phrases (1998), First Night (2001) and  Real Magic (2016), and in durational works such as Speak Bitterness (1995 [1994]) and Quizoola! (1999 [1996]), text appears in a range of concrete and dynamic ways: as large, handwritten sign, as neon/backdrop, as script that is written and erased and rewritten on chalk boards, on paper, or in the form of a crumpled, hand-passed note. The writing and reading of text – that direct relation between hand-held page and performer delivering it to us – remains as part of the dramaturgy, set, action and as structural component of the piece. Nowhere is the sense in which language can operate as both material object and immaterial surrogate for things beyond that object demonstrated more clearly than in Etchells’ shift from work with the company to working with neons, as in his recent neon commissioned for the exterior of the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens. Titled All We Have (Double Line) (December  2016) and written in the classic ‘red fierce of neon’, two signs, one above the other, read: ‘All We Have Is Words/All We Have Is Worlds’. Etchells notes that the Beckettian slip and repetition between the two parts of the phrase, activated by the addition/subtraction of the letter ‘L’, alerts us to the implicit relation between the extent to which our understanding of ‘world’ is intrinsically related to our ability to name or describe it: words are all we have. They evoke and often exceed the invention of more than they signify. Etchells’ gesture towards Samuel Beckett is significant. In Beckett’s work as theatre director and writer (of plays, poetry, prose, critical essays and dialogues) limitation, rule and the attempt to express the most with the least possible focuses our attention towards the potential minimalism of language and its ability to touch upon the most indescribable of states or philosophical questions (what it is to exist, for example, or why we go on). Etchells’ interest in the abbreviated economy of the neon produces word-as-image and as concrete art object just as it examines the ability to conjure images and dramatic situations through words. His earlier neon works spring to mind here, such as the declamatory, rather dramatic, Wait Here (2008, full text: Wait Here I Have Gone to Get Help), and Please Come Back (2008, full text: Please Come Back I Am Sorry About What Happened Before), or the curt imperative of

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G.O. (2010) which reads ‘Get Out’. Here, the most intimate or throwaway phrases appear on a scale that exaggerates the significance of their meaning, projecting them into a kind of shared, ‘forever’ state of ubiquity. Cultural historian Raymond Williams observes that language should be understood as an active process, at its sharpest best capable of exacting acute precision through the identification of thought, feeling, objects, ideas, emotions and conditions (1983b). At the other end of the spectrum, according to writer Luc Sante’s definition, language is also the purveyor of ‘information’, where information is understood as ‘the elusive stuff that circulates incessantly between consciousness, document and cyberspace’ (in Calle 2009: 72). Its value resides ‘in minute specifics and fugitive shades of meaning’ (ibid.). Etchells draws on a full spectrum of possibility between these two definitions, in particular the potentially radical juxtaposition of genres, lexical fields and status that textual composition reshuffles. Language relies precisely upon that inexhaustible sea of information that carries and accompanies us, for the most part unconsciously, through everyday life. Equally, it depends upon our ability as audience members/observers to recognize genres, styles, registers and the multiple contexts from which meanings and associations are being drawn. We are able to find resonance or meaning even as text is dislocated or fragmented, endlessly recycled and redeployed. Considering Forced Entertainment’s history as a company, it’s easy to identify the way Etchells’ interests have developed through the projects he currently pursues. One has only to think of the generative list of questions in the durational Quizoola! (1996), which creates an endlessly renewable formula for an ‘open’ performance improvisation. The text (and holding structure for the performance) consists of thousands of questions listed on typed, printed pages, which the performer-interrogator draws on, but in no fixed order. An interrogator (the role switches throughout) addresses a second performer who responds with improvised answers. Thus the drama evolves in the tension between the scripted question and the unknown or, at least, unpredictable answer. In the earlier Speak Bitterness (1994), third person plural confessional statements are delivered over the course of one or many hours (when performed as a durational piece for up to six hours). The performers ‘own up’ to everything ‘we’ (and they as ‘we’) might collectively be able to think of or be guilty of. As in Quizoola! the hundreds of statements are printed out on countless pieces of paper which are strewn across a long table, their sequencing improvised in each performance. The statements propose different economies of confession in terms of scale, fantasy, status and ambition, and allude (indirectly) to the specific cultural contexts where confession is used as a convention. These include lofty and unlikely statements of belief (‘We worshipped cruel Aztec Gods’), opinions, petty misdemeanours (‘We wrongly prescribed medicines’, ‘We were loud drunks and fornicators’), ludicrous and impossible lies related to wars and significant historical events (‘We were at Tet and My Lai’), irreverent, inconsequential incidents or sci-fi fantasy roles (‘We said the Lord’s Prayer backwards’, ‘We missed a train’, ‘We were death mechanics’), the collision of mismatched words and worlds (‘We confess to trade routes, comedy scenes, kitchen knives and libel’), commonplace anxieties (‘We had butterflies’) and poetic musings anchored by references to popular culture (‘We dreamed of Tokyo, snow monsters and John Ford on his deathbed’). The often filmic, graphic and familiar worlds brought to the stage include genocide,

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infidelity, stealing, racism, identity theft, murder, plastic surgery, pornography, bank jobs, love (too much, or not enough) and unhappiness (Etchells 1999: 181–90). Speak Bitterness accomplishes its impossible ambition – an attempt to take ownership of and lay claim to everything – by creating a frame for imagining (the repeated confessional structure ‘We … ’ followed by a statement) in which that other ‘we’ (the audience) might wish to be implicated, or from which we might otherwise want to distance ourselves. Pleasure arises from that ongoing dynamic and our proximity and identification with each statement. Speak Bitterness encompasses the encyclopaedic and endless desire and capacity to ‘name’, as if naming itself were an admission of guilt, a record of all that can be thought, done or experienced. Etchells’ interest in the fragment as a unit of meaning has always been central to the way he composes work, layers moods or scenes, or pieces together unlikely ways for meaning to emerge. Fragments require no context, yet the relation to that original context remains fundamental to its potency (a fragment recalls its origin). A fragment, by definition, remains broken or incomplete. In that dislocation, however, it acquires its potency. As Marcus Boon points out discussing the heterogeneity of elements within both montage and DJ mixing, the power of montage or collage corresponds to ‘the peculiar nature of fragments as vehicles of contagious mimetic energy, and the possibility that one can play with fragments in such a way that the active viral power of the fragment is not limited by being too quickly absorbed into a new fixed form’ (Boon  2010:  151). Unpacking Boon’s suggestion, the fragment is defined by its self-sufficiency and isolation from an original context. It is also contagious: its

Figure  1.1  A Broadcast/Looping Pieces, index card, performance ephemera. Image: Tim Etchells.

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force moves beyond its micro-world. Words can be held together, activated within a structure or frame or by applying a specific treatment or pressure: looping, repetition, or in verbal delivery shifts of intonation, stress and emphasis. Returning again to the ideas of cultural historian Raymond Williams, words have complex histories: they are part of a system that chronicles the world. Their internal resonance is the residue of their ‘experience’ and the social, cultural and political meanings they contain.3 Carefully attuned to the histories and lexical fields that phrases and words ‘belong’ to, Etchells’ method of working shifts our emphasis towards the way formal strategies can redraw meaning by consciously disregarding or mixing genres and temporalities together. Language as information sits alongside the sometimes poetic, sometimes banal resonant histories of phrases. He plays with its countless uses and applications, attentive to the creative misuse and effects of the dislocation of terms while remaining alert to a specific mood or set of associations released by a phrase. Moving between ‘consciousness, document and cyberspace’ (as identified by Sante above) Etchells’ recent solos and duets trawl everyday experience and its different vernaculars, as if the whole of human affairs were a database from which meaning can be extrapolated, held for a moment then released back into the endless flux of textual abundance that the web, new media and digital technologies immerse us in. Working with improvisation in performance within self-imposed structures, he discovers lowfi, analogue ways to compose the multiple temporal and spatial realities of memory and information. In the following section, I focus more broadly on specific compositional discoveries and developments that characterize Etchells’ solo practice, drawing attention to what distinguishes them from his collective practice with Forced Entertainment. To begin this discussion, I borrow a useful term from Claire Swyzen – ‘database dramaturgy’ (2015: 59) – a term which identifies significant shifts in performance’s ability to think in response to digital and web technologies.

‘Database dramaturgy’ In an essay considering Etchells’ recent work alongside other artists and performances relevant to her discussion, Swyzen proposes a new kind of performance-making she calls ‘database dramaturgy’ and riffs on the idea of a ‘database aesthetics’ in this work. For Swyzen, dramaturgy is understood as ‘the principle of guiding the creative process of the performance as well as the performance itself ’ (Swyzen 2015: 61, 66; my emphasis). To some extent, the database is synonymous with memory, except that it implies an order or logic that enables particular kinds of access and coherence rather than the shapeless sprawl of memory over which any sense of conscious control is surely more dubious. But there are clear parallels. In Swyzen’s reading, a database structure might be adopted in the compositional stage of generating an artwork (her discussion focuses on theatre performance) but, significantly, it can also inhere in the actual performance so that the improvised activities of access, retrieval and replay remain critical to the integrity of the work. Focusing on Etchells’ A Broadcast/ Looping Pieces (2014), Swyzen’s broader project examines the way computer

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concepts and structures have profoundly impacted upon, and altered, the way we conceive of performance practices, in particular processes of authorship and material generation. The database, then, becomes a paradigmatic model and a way of analysing dramaturgical and compositional modes in performance, a new kind of nonhierarchical information architecture (perhaps building on the more rudimentary, non-hierarchical, arbitrary form of the earlier cut-up, or Cage and Cunningham’s aleatory techniques) that informs both the content of a practice and the structural mechanisms that set a performance in motion (ibid.:  61). The computer allows an almost infinite iterability of materials, which the mind can, to some extent, replicate. Performance itself then manifests as a process of navigation amongst materials, much as working at a computer (or on smartphones) we frequently find ourselves involved in a multitude of simultaneous unfinished journeys between materials, with multiple tabs, documents or windows open. In the use of these technologies, hierarchies amongst content flatten out into horizontal planes. This is similar to the internet practice of ‘folksonomy’ (coined in 2004 by Thomas Vander Wal), the literal combining of ‘folk’ and ‘taxonomy’ a way of referencing the practice of applying tags to online items in order to retrieve them.4 This allows a user-led system to develop, based on those particular tags and their frequency of use, rather than one determined by the owners or generators of the content. It creates a form of social indexing or ‘bookmarking’ that reflects the user’s vocabulary and interests, democratizing the way information can be organized. In his introduction to an anthology of conceptual writing (Against Expression, 2011) Kenneth Goldsmith further considers the development of the internet in conjunction with the database and the impact of its modalities of navigation. In particular, he questions the way that our understanding of writing as a practice may need to shift. Goldsmith suggests that with the rise of the internet, writing faces its greatest challenge since Gutenberg and the invention of print in the fifteenth century, but that the strategies that writers might use to respond are embedded within writing processes (2011: xviii–xix). Thus, in recent years, methods that explore copying and appropriation, cutting and pasting, mimic the operations of the computer. In music, sampling provides a corollary to this, and sampling as a process has easily migrated across to writing and performance. With broadband the ability to copy and appropriate multiplies exponentially: access can be instant, constant, and the possibilities of information retrieval and transfer can be unlimited and simultaneous. In this environment, the very act of ‘writing’ alters. No longer ‘content’, it is, rather, the process of filtering and selection that becomes critical in the design and execution of a work: the management of language, choices made, the mechanisms of reorganization and the material uses to which it is put. This major shift, Goldsmith suggests, enacts ‘a basic change in the operating system of how we write at a root level’ (2011: xxi). If methods of distribution have profoundly altered, then so are what he calls ‘platforms of receivership’ which, where writing and performance are concerned, ask us to reconsider the structures, manipulation, movement, and the sharing and reception of text in performance and in conceptual art practices. It has, in recent years, become evident the extent to which the internet as a highway or flow of unmediated ideas, information and popular culture, and the idea of the database as a dramaturgical paradigm, alters and reconfigures models of authorship

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within live performance as in all other art forms. But this is surely an extension of the cut-up from the 1950s and from earlier experiments concerned with heterogeneous, non-authorial methods of composition. Performance itself can be understood as a flexible and fluid site of writing or inscription: the body writes; the performer is a mechanism or set of operations that signify; the entire performance apparatus (audience included) is involved in the processes of signification where meaning can be openly negotiated. Performance is both a language and a container for (other kinds of) language. These ideas provide a useful way not only to reflect on and situate several of Etchells’ recent projects, but also to connect this work to earlier interests. I am thinking specifically about the way the retrieval of language, and its consequential misuse or reappropriation through different forms of composition, anchors his experimentation across forms. It allows him to explore authorship in ways that push beyond binary oppositions, as not necessarily bound by concerns with the individual or the collective, nor with originality or subjectivism. Instead, authorship becomes a way of accessing experience gathering from multiple directions and sources. Often in miniature or fragmented forms, language and its ‘performance’ – that is, its enunciation and (re)framing in a particular context – creates a dramatic situation, not in the traditional sense of that term but insofar as a dynamic within the compositional process activates meaning. Something relational is at stake. ‘We’, the spectator/onlooker/listener, are called into a process of exchange. Language, as the promise of shared access to, or complicity in, meaning-making, evinces the social nature of communication and exchange. It foregrounds the speech act/speaking out as a fundamentally social and collaborative act. Specific collaborations have enabled Etchells to interrogate such ideas further. One of the most significant of these was with French choreographer and dancer, Boris Charmatz. In 2013, Charmatz invited Etchells to participate and collaborate in an extended performance experiment/event called brouillon (February 2013), which took place at Argos Gallery, Brussels. Incidentally, the French word brouillon means ‘draft’ or ‘first draft’ (noun), and ‘disorganized’ or ‘unmethodical’ in its adjectival form. Etymologically, it tethers itself to the act of writing and iteration so that the sense of a thing in process or unfinished is evident in the title of this project. The second of two practical enquiries instigated by Charmatz into the status and properties of ‘exhibition’ as a form, brouillon questioned the structural, formal limitations and assumptions of different disciplinary, institutional and architectural frameworks. In each version of these collaborative experiments, mounted in a number of different international venues, Charmatz has sought to develop new kinds of temporary, flexible and exploratory structures within the apparently ‘fixed’ structure of the gallery/museum, investigating the possibilities of creating a dancing/moving exhibition, or dance as ‘exhibition in motion’.5 For brouillon at Argos (Brussels), Charmatz and Etchells were joined by five other artists of different nationalities, disciplinary backgrounds, age and experience. The project consisted of two distinctive phases: a ‘closed’ workshop period where the artists worked together and an open phase where the public joined the artists in the exhibition space/gallery/museum. For the project, each artist was invited to operate within a specific but loose structure, developing her/his own practice in the context of a broader design within a gallery setting and in relation to

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existing artworks. Etchells’ participation in brouillon triggered new language-based projects that have since developed further in other performance collaborations. Indeed, Etchells’ encounter with Charmatz, through brouillon and the earlier expo zéro, marked a significant shift in his orientation towards performance and its relation to language, space and visual culture. What elsewhere Etchells has described as ‘imaginative authorship’ combines, in Charmatz’s approach towards expanded choreography, with (static) works in a museum or gallery context (Etchells 2016). He notes: ‘I focused mostly on two improvisational processes through which I animated or remixed words in the exhibition using spoken and written languages’ (2016: 2). He produced, then, a kind of ‘exhausting verbal dance’ trapped by the constraints of materials he was either describing, attempting to relay or else animate (ibid.). Since brouillon, critical conversations with other collaborators, such as Lebanese sound artist/composer Tarek Atoui, with whom he collaborated on Forced Entertainment’s show, The Last Adventures (Ruhr Triennale, International Festival of the Arts 2013), have impacted not so much upon the direction of his work as his understanding of it: the possibilities shared by, or more or less prevalent in, one or another discipline, through its particular strategies, technologies, applications and effects. Etchells describes Atoui’s computational systems used in the sound composition, Metastable Circuit (Documenta  13), ‘designed to access the entire database of his sound archive, breaking, compounding and combining tiny slithers of the recordings and feeding these to Atoui in real time’ (2016: 3–4). As Etchells notes, effectively, Atoui’s construction ‘ensures his encounter with the unexpected and the unfamiliar and parallels the non-computational structures that we’ve explored at Forced Entertainment to related ends’ (ibid.). What often guides Etchells’ decision to engage in a new collaboration or the development of a project is a desire to discover ways to generate improvised material through mechanisms and constraints that facilitate and preserve unpredictability. This has always remained a central objective, as noted in earlier references to the durational works, Speak Bitterness and Quizoola!. So, too, has working with repetition and the cut-up, and the ordering and looping of statements that draw from movie scenes, quoted dialogue, titles and news headlines since earlier Forced Entertainment shows already mentioned, notably Club of No Regrets and Emanuelle Enchanted. One can trace a direct link between such works and Broadcast. In two memorable sections of Emanuelle, for example, the performers gather in the construction of a temporary set with microphones and read texts ‘to camera’ (looking out to the audience) in a scene that vaguely and haphazardly alludes to a (mashed up) TV news broadcast. Then, as more recently in Broadcast, Etchells directly pulled the statements from his 1993 notebooks, the texts for both shows arriving less from rehearsal improvisation and more directly from his writing. The listing and looping of statements in Emanuelle becomes increasingly fragmented and distilled until eventually only one performer (Robin Arthur) delivers them. Included in the mix of statements are several texts from the error message manual of Etchells’ first Amstrad computer: ‘THE ERASE COMMAND LINE FORMAT IS INVALID’ and ‘NO SUCH FILE TO RENAME’ appearing in list form between the phrases, ‘secret love’ and ‘sergeant, who’s in charge here?’ (Etchells 1999, 2017b). The refrain ‘I’d like to talk with you, I’d really like to talk, I know we’re talking now

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but … ’ originally appeared in the 1993 Forced Entertainment show, as it does later at the beginning of Broadcast. These experiments in manufacturing unpredictable compositional methods in the creation of text were, as noted earlier, explored by writers Gysin and Burroughs in the mid-twentieth century, but they trace a continuity that precedes this dating back to Dadaist Tristan Tzara’s work in the 1920s at a surrealist rally, where Tzara pulled words out of a hat in order to create a poem. Some thirty years later, Burroughs noted: ‘You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors’ (1978: 29). The development of these principles and techniques characterizes both A Broadcast/ Looping Pieces and Seeping Through. More recently (at the time of writing) a larger sound installation, Together Apart, commissioned by Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany (4 March–14 May 2017), further examines some of the concerns taken up in these smaller, more intimate, live performances. Spread across fifteen different galleries, language becomes both the object of the exhibition and a protagonist, as it does to some extent in the live performance works. In the installation, Etchells is absent in person though present through the twelve-channel recorded sound track that plays through the galleries. Similar to his performances, the installation works with repeated words, phrases and sentences, in this instance phrases and idiomatic expressions that invoke things that are ‘done’ with parts of the body, amplifying their absurdity/effect when heard out of context and in repetition: ‘Watch your tongue’, ‘Keep your eyes peeled’, ‘Shout your head off ’, ‘Hold your breath’. The recorded phrases – each minutes long, but interwoven and looped together as a weave of texts playing while the spectator moves through the different galleries – interrogate the way that engagement and perception shift through repetition and saturation, between literal comprehension through to absurdity and abstraction, as syllables become sound and sense shifts to nonsense. While Broadcast is a solo, structured and then improvised by Etchells, Seeping Through proposes a structured improvisation consisting of a dialogue between the sounds and broken music played by violinist/composer, Aisha Orazbayeva, and Etchells’ spoken text fragments which loop and repeat. The latter performance extends Etchells’ collaborations with theatre performers, dancers and choreographers to investigate the framework of live musical improvisation, composition and language/ sound experiment. Both works share certain elements and formal propositions: the principle of sampling texts from Etchells’ notebooks (already experimented with more than two decades earlier as noted above); looping and repeating textual fragments that function as statement or as isolated fragment of an abandoned or incomplete narrative, or a text drafted in from another situation; and improvising within a structure. Performable in different durations (Seeping Through has been performed as a four-hour durational piece, for example, but also as a fifty-minute work), each piece can also be staged in a range of locations including gallery, theatre, museum or studio. Both Seeping Through and Broadcast form part of an ongoing series of improvisational works with language, fragments, improvisation and looping. Both, along with other more itinerant and occasional performances, draw on writing and observations gathered in his notebooks.

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Live writing: A Broadcast/Looping Pieces and Seeping Through I first saw A Broadcast/Looping Pieces in Oslo programmed as part of the Ibsen International Theatre Festival  2016,6 where Forced Entertainment were recipients of the prestigious International Ibsen Award. About an hour long, the performance recalled earlier solo works by Etchells, in particular Instructions for Forgetting which I had seen in the early  2000s and which makes use of a similar formal proposition refined and simplified in Broadcast. Etchells, dressed in jeans, long-sleeved t-shirt and old trainers, stands in an empty black box space; upstage behind him a small table with a glass of water, some small index cards and pieces of paper. The performance consists of Etchells remaining standing, looking out into the audience, mixing and reading sampled, fragmented texts from varying combinations of the index cards. This is interrupted (twice) by longer sections of narrative text read from sheets of A4 paper before the shorter looping fragments of text continue. Those longer narrative sections offer a dive into a half-rendered, deliberately ambling detective story, a ride in the back of a cab at night, the precise details of the story left incomplete and inconclusive. In Instructions for Forgetting, Etchells’ first solo performance sixteen years earlier, Etchells sat at a table wearing a red Manchester United football shirt, his ‘script’ typed and handwritten on sheets before him.7 At first redolent of Spalding Gray’s seated performance monologues, several of which I’d seen performed in the 1990s, the piece located itself somewhere between an informal lecture and a performance. It drew down more on a kind of performance art monologue delivery than the more artificial conventions of theatre: Etchells as ‘himself ’ sharing materials that are chosen by him spinning biographical stories around these. It established a kind of informal, at times mischievous, at times quietly adversarial, performer-identity that has continued to define his practice. During Instructions, Etchells navigated his way through a series of edited, written accounts and events collected from friends, family and acquaintances in different parts of the world in response to an invitation from the artist to contribute either a story or a videotape of interest to them. The only stipulation was that the material must be ‘true’. The topic could be anything. It could take the form of a short report on things that had happened, or something that already existed as opposed to being made specifically for the performance. This afforded the use of an episodic structure, the incorporation of found or documentary materials, second-hand stories/ accounts, and ideas or images already of interest that may not have been shared before. Combined into a collaged performed essay, in part determined by the format of video tape,8 Etchells bound the disparate materials together into one long wandering but cohesive narrative: extracts of the video clips, letters, fragments of fiction and disclosure framed, edited and filtered through his own speculation, observation and commentary. The arrangement of the disparate materials and the range of anecdotes and recounted stories moving between narrated account and (video) image – an amateur striptease, a hospital experiment, the slow-motion detonation of a beached whale, the downfall of George Best – created an assemblage of disparate experiences: sad, amusing, revelatory and ordinary. What is significant in this, as in more recent pieces, is that the arrangement of the materials and the surprising juxtapositions they fashion, rather than their exceptional content, create the work. Etchells role was primarily to sample, edit and compose the materials he had been given to filter and then orchestrate it.

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In Broadcast, Etchells once again draws from an eclectic range of materials. This time, however, the source is singular though multitudinous, adopting an inverse compositional strategy to Instructions. Here he uses his own decades’ worth of notebook material gathered over time into a single Word file. The result is a sequential but disconnected, accumulative (it is always ongoing) collection of thought and observation. Where once he manually wrote, in more recent years he types, or copy/ pastes material: ideas, overheard exchanges, dialogue, moments, titles, scenarios from movies, names, textual fragments, observations – all manner of recording the world with the particular noticing and attention Etchells brings to such a task that is (originally) without specific motive or intention. In other words, the creation of an open database without implicit taxonomies or categories. As Etchells observes, however, with regards to the way material aggregates differently in manual and electronic form, in the physical notebooks the permanent page division means that ‘once a page is filled it retains its content, sequence and visual composition’ while a Word file page layout adjusts as materials are added and the document recalibrates (2016). Though mining his own collection rather than editing material donated by friends, the principle remains similar to Instructions though refined and bound by the present: to create a performance out of the moment-to-moment navigation and movement between disparate materials and their sequencing, and to shift emphasis away from each moment in isolation or the provenance of the texts to the accumulation and associative links of words and the images and thought patterns they construct. The work interrogates the primary function of authorship in performance as a process of filtering, sequencing and looping material into repetition. The text consists almost entirely of short repeated phrases and longer sentences or statements written on the index cards Etchells holds in his hands. He begins: ‘I want to talk to you, I really want to talk to you, I mean, I know we’re talking now, but I really want to talk to you.’ He looks out at us. The sentence repeats. And repeats again, each time emphasis or intonation shifting, a light pause, meanings multiplying. With this opening, the rules set in motion by the piece and the possibilities this might propose begin to animate the space. Etchells speaks to us as a performer reciting but that ‘self ’ seems to multiply: Etchells is Etchells quoting a text composed by Etchells which may have been written or said by somebody else; there’s talking, and then there’s talking; there’s this talking (here, now in a performance space) but then there’s really talking (for real). In a matter of minutes and through various repetitions, the piece amplifies with meanings and possibilities that are more complex, layered and humorous than the economy through which it reveals itself. Repeating the sentence (looking out, pacing back and forth a bit, facing the audience, looking down, looking up, half smiling, sometimes serious, vulnerable or over-emphatic) it repeats, shifts gear, breaks a little: ‘I know we’re … I know we’re talking now but … I mean, I really, I really want to talk to you. I do really want to talk to you … I know we’re … we’re talking now, but I really want to talk to you’ – repeating for what begins to feel like a long time until it snaps to another fragment: ‘I’ll still be here if you change your mind, I’ll – I’ll still be here if, if – you change your mind’. Jumping from loop to loop, retaining the sense of the previous loop or else abandoning it, the spectator’s mind makes connections and associations, each text fragment floating by as the suggestion or remnant of a discrete, miniature world standing in for the one that’s forgotten or lost. The sparseness of the visual space in front

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of us – Etchells, the index cards and the small table – allows the imagination to listen, to play, to dwell inside the language. The invitation is for us to think, or be thinking, along with Etchells. Over the next hour, the looping fragments continue, jumping from one territory, mood, register or voice to another: interior worlds, imperative statements, private, intimate words, philosophical or banal observations, all the time shifting direction, rhythm and mood. The piece constantly draws attention to its own looping mechanism; each series of loops bores down into the semantic and abstract properties of language. Its improvised nature, its unpredictable turns of phrase, holds our attention. Some statements arrive with the truncated ambition of a dystopic broadcast statement: ‘New calculations concerning the accurate dimensions of hell …, NEW calculations concerning the accurate dimensions of hell … ’ where, as listener, you’re plunged into the mimetic energy of the fragment. There’s an invitation to supply a context from your own repertoire of experience to establish meaning within and across sentences or phrases: ‘Rooms with walls as thin as cardboard, rooms with walls as thin as cardboard … ’ (I think of the fictional ‘world’ of this phrase, of the flimsy theatre sets of theatre shows, and of hotel bedrooms); ‘He will remain in London to oversee the uncertainty … ’ (now I’m hearing newspeak, recalling Brexit and the chaotic fallout in its immediate aftermath), to something about drone footage and ‘people like ants’, to ‘the kind of dead that are talked about in numbers … The kind of dead that are talked about in numbers … ’. Even as the sentences and phrases float out as incomplete fragments, zooming in and out, they release a deliberately chosen and identified resonance. In this last run, for example, there’s a cumulative sense of meanings that develop, partially suggested by each fragment and completed in the listener’s mind: from the reckless irresponsibility of politicians and government, reassuring us with empty platitudes, to anonymous killing by drone in foreign countries and the nameless dead constantly reported and televised as ‘collateral damage’ as a consequence of war. At other times phrases jump between territories and ideas. The imaginative poetics of a plausible idea ‘when you die the house is haunted by all your forgotten passwords’ sits next to wry observation, ‘they forgot to focus-group the ending’ or ‘a bar that only serves chloroform’ to ‘the parable of the probable son’, repeating like a language game permanently snagging upon its own clever errors and reverberations. Death often drifts up from this litany of words: those we have witnessed, those we can’t imagine and those that wait ahead of us. Reminded again of the cut-up as a precursor to this kind of work, a technique which allowed ‘literature to catch up with painting’, Gerard-Georges Lemaire observes the following: ‘Acting as an agent of simultaneous integration and disintegration, the cut-up imposes another path on the eyes and on thought’ (in Burroughs and Gysin 1978: 13, 21). Here, Etchells’ spoken and accumulated fragments impose a path of thought created through the process of editing that hovers between the construction and demise of each fragment’s meanings. The looping repetitions drive the language to perform like a musical composition. One thinks of the paring down of minimalism where a delimited series of notes repeat in compositional units exploring the way development or change occurs not so much in the notes as in the mind of the listener. The tension between threads and drifts of meaning coming together to produce an image-thought before fading out (‘an agent of simultaneous integration and disintegration’) resonates as a performative manifestation of the anarchic agency of the cut-up constrained by the repetitive logic of the loop. Broadcast

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develops the encyclopaedic database dramaturgy Swyzen compellingly suggests earlier, releasing the agency and determination assigned to authorship while at the same time discovering a structure for performance that relies upon liveness, the performed moment and which acknowledges what’s both in and outside of the room, the community of the ‘audience’ and the community of those beyond the room, what Etchells refers to as ‘the nature of the social construct or imaginary that we occupy together, the bigger society that surrounds the theatre itself ’ (2016, unpublished interview, unpaginated). The looping sits in tension with an impulse towards narrative meaning and logic in two longer sections within the piece. These consist of a rambling narrative about a man in the back of a cab. The ‘story’ is reminiscent of a detective noir, one which, however, fails to gather meaning or direction. As an aside observation, I became bored and impatient during these sections, not conscious at the time that release from the driving insistence of the looping fragments into a contrasting, meandering rhythm of text and temporality might be productive to the compositional process of the performance and especially its reception. The narrative, composed in sentences, seems to hold out the promise of character, action and plot development, though nothing coalesces. It comes as a relief to return again to the miniature economy of the fragmented loops and the instantaneous meanings that repetition nudges into the space. Yet it is precisely the contrast between these two forms of writing, their dynamic shifts in rhythm, tempo, as well as the different demands addressing the audience, that enables Broadcast to achieve its dramaturgical balance. There’s a tension between the different modes of thinking required. Citing new media theorist Lev Manovich, Swyzen describes the way that Etchells performs what Manovich calls ‘two competing imaginations, two basic creative impulses, two essential responses to the world’ (Manovich 2001: 233, in Swyzen 2016: 70): the narrative imagination and the database imagination (Manovich  2001:  239). The distinctive semantic economies through which each form delivers ‘content’ and the promised (but withheld) delivery of narrative provide an overall structure for the work. Each loop peels back the different possibilities of a thought: ‘There will be time for this; there is no time for this’. Language measures time even as its occupancy swallows it. Occasionally the content brings us back to the situation of the spatiotemporal economy of the performance, the ‘here and now’ of its improvised production. Swyzen refers to the encyclopaedic quality of the data collated in the work as a kind of ‘paratactic dramaturgy’, where parataxis implies a mode of connecting elements in a nonhierarchical way (2015: 70), where there is neither coordination nor subordination of the material elements. In discussing the evolution of Happenings in the 1960s, Michael Kirby refers to this as ‘alogical’, where separate component parts of a performance or an event are not dependent on each other for legibility (1987: 30, 119). Meaning is neither co-dependent nor (necessarily) logical, moving between sense and nonsense. Broadcast reflects something of the way the mind seems to move of its own accord when we stop paying attention to it, when it isn’t consciously focused on a particular task or driven towards an outcome and instead functions as an unconscious repository. It gathers, assimilates even, but without a predetermined logic or coherence, prompted but without cues, following drifts and currents, much like the notebooks from which material is later drawn. Sense follows retrospectively. The performance simulates different technologies of narrative construction and modalities of authorship: a lens that opens and closes its aperture in order to refocus; the alternating navigation at a computer

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moving between opened documents, windows, search engines and mail programs; a series of penned (or typed) and always incomplete notes as a way of capturing what one sees or hears. The performance winds down through a series of repetitions that record a mind deliberating in the construction of a hovering image: ‘The sound of a helicopter in the darkness outside, the sound of a helicopter in the rain and the darkness outside, the sound of a helicopter in the darkness outside, the sound of a helicopter in the rain outside.’ And finally, ‘the end was good, but a little too easy somehow’.

*** Several weeks later I see a different performance: Seeping Through (2016), an improvised duet performed by Etchells and violinist, Aisha Orazbayeva, at the Tom Thumb Theatre in Margate. Before offering some closing thoughts, I include some observations from this performance to consider alongside Broadcast. Both draw on materials from Etchells’ notebooks and experiment with looping sections of text chosen arbitrarily but preselected

Figure  1.2  Tim Etchells and Aisha Orazbayeva, Seeping Through, performed at Dalston Boys Club, 2016. © Hugo Glendinning.

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for the index cards. Since aspects of this performance overlap with Broadcast, notably the mechanisms for generating material and the performative style of Etchells’ text delivery, I’ll focus on the work as part of an improvised musical composition and duet. Framed by two small but lavish sets of gold and red curtains, Etchells stands on a tiny raised stage next to composer/violinist, Aisha Orazbayeva, who is seated on a stool to his left, scraping, bouncing, strumming and scratching the bow across her violin as she listens to Etchells. The sound she produces is sometimes quiet, barely audible, a scratch, full of wiry air instead of tone. It creeps along beneath Etchells’ words. At other times it rises to become vibrant, melodic, and drowns out the spoken text. The decorative ambitions of this compact, tiny theatre both contrast and complement the modest, stripped back, simplicity of the performance and the deconstructed staccato languages – musical and spoken – it animates. Etchells delivers lines from his index cards, and each one contains a selected series of short sentence/phrase texts that are typed, cut out, then stuck onto the cards he holds and works through. As in Broadcast, this allows him to select at random but respond fully to the shared, improvised moment. At times, Orazbayeva appears to follow Etchells’ looped sequences, while at others the sounds extracted from her violin lead or dominate the performance, though this hierarchy of listening doesn’t seem relevant to the way the piece achieves its form. It’s contrapuntal rather than homophonic. Etchells’ voice becomes instrumental – an instrument, in fact – in this work. Each performer has to deal with the presence and sound of the other, responding to the directions and proposition of what each singularly produces. Sometimes they drown each other out. Sometimes both seem to shout. Sometimes they creep tentatively into a note or a loop. ‘I’m listening to Aisha, negotiating what I do with her, feeling for rhythm, tone and connection’ observes Etchells (2017b). Orazbayeva sometimes pauses as he loops a phrase; at other times crashing down heavily into his vocal drive. At times the duet feels fluid and invisible, at others more concrete, full of weight and materiality. The violin’s presence has a dual function: as much a thing of wood and gut with horsehair bow strings that snap in a frenzy as it is an instrument capable of producing sound that soars into the more familiar, melodic phrases of a classical repertoire. Etchells voices the looped texts read aloud from the same index cards he draws upon in Broadcast. I catch and remember some of the phrases from seeing Broadcast in Oslo: ‘the kind of dead that are talked about in numbers’ and ‘I’m taking your time, I’m taking your time’. He is, of course, taking our time with each performance. Watching these solo and new collaborative works by Etchells, ghosts from past performances, many years of them, are present in the space: newsreel always seems to feed through in startling or quiet fragments; an adopted way of speaking or the drama of everyday ordinariness, an ongoing background Rolodex of information passing through. It is precisely the technologies of production – the way minds can rally around a multitude of sources binding them together and letting them fall apart – that always seem to be under investigation: how to translate the movement and patterns of thought rather than thought itself, and how to round them up and play with them. Some days later, Etchells tells me he remembers using the following phrases: ‘a kind of manual for living with defeat’, ‘something to lose sleep over, and nothing to lose sleep over’ and ‘we’ve seen better days’ (2016). There’s a sense of individual but also inclusive loss, a social ‘we’ that the audience member can feel part of.

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Etchells and Orazbayeva make striking performer-companions, and though they correspond in this improvised duet, each works independently, alone together, creating a dialogue through deconstruction. Live writing. Live scoring. Live Art. In this work, musicality and the listening it requires alter the reception of the performance. Part of that shift indexes the way music makes different listeners of us, pulling us into a different kind of attention. Orazbayeva and Etchells’ performance interrogates the elements of composing, performing and listening, challenging what they may or may not have to do with each another, stretching them out (often to breaking point) and bringing them together again. Each performer brings her/his own performer intuition, intelligence, experience, opinion, taste, prejudice and sensibility to the moment. We see them, together and separately, ‘go to work’ in different languages: Etchells rallying between overconfident stridency and tentativeness, from rational, clichéd phrasing to the irrational breakdown of sense; Orazbayeva powerfully sawing her bow, driving jagged edges that cut through the text, at times obliterating the words or else moving around it with delicate, lattice-like aural formations, scraping, scratching, creating what Etchells describes as ‘atmosphere’. Often, they play at the threshold of decomposition. Etchells writes: What we each do is a ruin, a half-broken thing, and that allows space for the other element. It allows the dialogue. The mutual seeking for completion. If I was telling whole stories, Aisha would struggle, just as I would struggle if she was playing whole melodies or complex pre-formed musical scores. The fact that we are both assembling something from shards seems important. (2017b)

A collaboration that began in 2014 and which continues to develop, it’s apparent that in Seeping Through, originally performed as a four-hour durational performance at Forest Fringe (Edinburgh) in August  2015, both artists have discovered a way to compose/perform together, live in the same instant through structured improvisation, allowing language to draw sound out of the music, and music to ‘pull language out of the everyday’ (Etchells 2017b). It is a kind of live assemblage, a new form of Language Writing in the attempt to thread words and music through each other.

Endnotes A creative restlessness drives Etchells’ inquisitiveness and his precision as an artist. He has an ease that comes with hard-earned knowledge and a curiosity concerned with formal architectures and dramaturgies within and beyond performance: What makes something work, how does it do its thing, or not do its thing? Can I pull it apart and reassemble it differently? What are its limits and possibilities and how might we find them? Many of his pieces sit comfortably at the crossroads and intersections of several experimental art and music histories, in particular language experiments (Language Writing or Language Poetry, for example) and visual art that works with text in order to break apart, combine and reassemble text and image. Assemblage, as a method or strategy that creates a new artefact or artwork from fragments or pre-existing objects or forms, is hardly new. It remains a key practice and principle

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of modernist aesthetics since the late nineteenth century onwards. The forms that assemblage takes, however, are constantly transforming. Etchells’ practice responds acutely to the present; mutating; absorbing the system of elements and conventions at his disposal in the different contexts for which he is invited to produce work. His practice invokes conceptual and visual art histories where text and language as visual signifier or as concept operate as a defining aspect of the work. One can think, for example, of artist Jenny Holzer’s textual practice manifest through posters, LEDs and projections of ‘statements’, where the ideas and provocations of the text are crucial to their impact and effect: they appear as large-scale installations, on billboards, in Times Square or installed in galleries, as broadsheets and as public posters, projected onto buildings and as illuminated light works. Until the early 1990s, Holzer’s authorship of the texts remained an important part of her compositions, while more recent work adopts and redacts literary, government and declassified US Army documents. Increasingly, the political dimension of the work has taken on a greater level of social critique. In particular, Holzer’s earlier ‘statement’ signs remind me of Etchells’ neons and the phrases that loop around in some of his recent performances. The ‘broadcast’ aspect of Holzer’s pieces, collapsing intimacy (the message) with declamation (the medium), also finds form in Etchells’ work. Or the work of John Baldessari in the mid1960s, which adopted appropriation as a principle, combining the narrative potential of images with the associative power of language; and the works of Joseph Kosuth and Sol LeWitt, and Fluxus artists in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Think, too, of British walking artist Hamish Fulton’s translations of his extensive walks into text and other media writ large on entire gallery walls: NO TALKING FOR SEVEN DAYS or ROCK FALL ECHO DUST. Part instruction, part document of these ephemeral performance walks, they compress time and space. The transmission of an experience and its detail, no matter how vast, is distilled into language, but the visual display of the text contributes to how we (the spectator) ‘experience’ the walks. French conceptual artist, Sophie Calle, also comes to mind, in particular projects where text and image stand in for experience. Calle apparently invites us to share the intimacies of her life through precise documentation of experiences that are often marked by loss, disappointment and grief.9 In addition to these visual, conceptual and performative art histories, Etchells’ structured and improvised language compositions resonate with the practices of significant twentieth-century writers, some already mentioned, notably Gysin and Burroughs (and Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists before them); but others such as Georges Perec and the literary experiments invented by the writer’s collective, Oulipo, of which Perec was a member, are also relevant. Oulipo’s interests were concerned with developing restrictions, strict rules, obstacles and constraints, in order to liberate language from its literary forms (the novel in particular) and to stretch the conventions of genre; to, in a sense, reinvent literature and discover what it might be or become rather than reaffirming what it already knew how to do. Perec’s works, which discovered a poetics of inventory based on the city, and which Etchells’ writing has extended into the dimensions of performance text, examine possibilities through the exhaustion of one particular rule or objective: listing the entire contents of each room in a house; the details visually perceived on a particular journey or route, or food ingested within a particular time frame. For three days in October 1974,

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Perec recorded everything that occurred and came into his field of vision at Place Sain-Sulpice, Paris, providing the content for An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010). The text creates an ‘outline of an inventory of some strictly visible things’ (Perec 2010: 5) combined with brief reflections and fragmented thoughts, recorded actions, the quality of time passing, all of which appear in the form of a list. The result is a detailed and exhaustive inventory which Perec refers to as ‘the infraordinary’, that is, ‘the markings and manifestations of the everyday’ (Marc Lowenthal in Perec 2010: 51). Considering these various histories as they intersect with Etchells and his prolific output as writer, theatre-maker, performer and solo artist, it is difficult to know how to position his practice, let alone summarize it. The distinctions we rely upon to categorize different art forms and events may no longer be useful or relevant. In fact, it is the shared predilection towards certain strategies, politics, formal interests and economies of what and how an artist chooses to make work that begin to suggest a more useful way to make sense of the affinities amongst artists and their practices. Increasingly, these underpin the impulses that lead to collaboration, rather than the disciplinary formation in which each artist’s practice originates. As I began writing this chapter in the late summer of 2016, 16 September marked the twentieth anniversary of the UK release of DJ Shadow’s album, Endtroducing, released in 1996 on James Lavelle’s Mo’ Wax. Hearing it, I remember sensing that a new kind of music began (and also ended) right there: the idea of the ‘original’ as we understood it would soon reach a new degree of obsolescence. At the time, I wasn’t conscious of the compositional principles at work, nor of what their consequences might be for popular music or other art forms. Though not by any means the first to use sampling,10 Shadow’s Endtroducing was the first commercially successful album composed entirely of samples from pre-existing tracks, many of which were salvaged (so the story famously goes) from fifty-cent bins in record stores across America. The list of included samples is eclectic, unpredictable, obscure, familiar; a deep forage into music’s twentieth-century histories of funk, rock, horror sound tracks and jazz. Endtroducing proposed a collection of samples pulled together in a database dramaturgy of sound. This twenty-year marker seems more relevant than theatre history might be when considering Etchells as a prolific, multidisciplinary artist in the context of this book and (therefore) in consideration of some of the broader current issues, concerns and directions within experimental, interdisciplinary performance and Live Art in the UK. Five years after the release of Endtroducing, sat in Sheffield’s Workstation with members of Forced Entertainment as they began work on a new piece, Etchells blasted the title track of the CD by Australian band, The Avalanches, titled Since I Left You. It’s estimated that the entire CD, consisting of eighteen tracks, integrates approximately 3,500 samples from different musical genres from all over the world. Within four years, sampling had become commonplace. We could no longer even hear it as that. The impulse to take apart, slice, appropriate, copy, mimic, alter or repurpose throws the world into a state of ongoing recomposition; it drives the spectator/listener down into the textures of material, discovering new ways to use or activate experience. Etchells’ work is always concerned with discovering

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mechanisms that release something into a dynamic, that sets a thing going, rather than attempting to invent a static or otherwise ‘complete’ world, with fixed identities, opinions and versions of events reflected back at us. We are now two full decades into a tradition of sampling – if we take Endtroducing as a marker here and the point at which sampling is absorbed by mainstream culture – and centuries into histories of assemblage (think of mosaic), cut-up, collage, montage, remixing and mash up. Since 1996, a time just before computers were commonplace and smartphones invented, modes of communication, reception and perception have radically altered, changed beyond recognition even within generations. It’s impossible (almost) to remember life in a pre-digital, pre-networked era. New aesthetic practices and creative models are emergent that refocus us from content to process-oriented works of art. We occupy new spaces of multiple authorship, personhood, gender and sexuality, with new kinds of creative engagement that are participatory, complex, virtual, unstable, collective and interactive, issued through networked, locative and distributive technologies that are, as new media theorist Carolyn Guertin notes, extending our consciousness (2012:  30). As Guertin observes, medium specificity has become increasingly irrelevant as all media are (increasingly) digitized, and the act of searching for materials becomes a primary part of the creative event: ‘What we “own” in the act is the process not the content. Searching and the subsequent creative remixing of existing content has become the dominant mode of talking back to television, music and networked culture’ (ibid.). Ultimately, Guertin questions whether ‘creation’ is obsolete as a category, since everything is recombinant. Our thinking, seeing, imagining and making now filter through processes that respond to the networked screen-life we inhabit. In Tim Etchells’ work, however, the presence of the human figure as a machine for arranging and upsetting semantic order remains: insistent, a talking machine, a twenty-first-century Krapp (with reference to Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape), remembering time past and its (broken) future promises through the rewind and fast forwarding of years. We are shaped by the extension and limitations of the technologies that enable us to retrieve and abandon, remember and forget. But instead of Beckett’s lonesome, regretful character, seated at a desk full of spools of reel-to-reel tape, it’s Etchells in a pair of worn Adidas and scruffy jeans, standing looking out at us, shuffling through a bunch of index cards on stage: rewind, play, repeat. Pacing the line between now and then, here and there, us and them, you and me; between a performed present, past and an imagined future present, between memory and all that it allows us to forget. Thankfully.

Notes 1 There are exceptions to this, such as his collaboration with choreographer Boris Charmatz, where the collaboration extends to a larger number of individual artists performing separately but contemporaneously. Generally, however, works are made alone or with specific collaborators or projects in mind. 2 In 2016 Forced Entertainment were awarded the Ibsen International Theatre award (Oslo). In the same year, Etchells won the Spalding Gray Award (US) noted

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3 4 5

6 7 8 9

10

Live Art in the UK for being ‘a fearless innovator of theatrical form’ (Ben Harrison, for American Theatre, 23 February 2016). In addition, he has received many other accolades, awards and commissions acknowledging his outstanding and sustained contribution as an artist. Williams posits this throughout his Introduction to Key Words (1983b: 11–26). I am grateful to the editor of this collection, Maria Chatzichristodoulou, for bringing my attention to this category of tagging and retrieval. These observations are gathered from Charmatz’s descriptions of these eventworkshop-performances and Etchells’ essay which reflects on working with Charmatz, ‘Go, Slowly, Go: Some Thoughts on Boris Charmatz’s expo zéro and brouillon’ (2017a). See also a description of ‘brouillon – An Exhibition in Motion’ at the Argos Centre for Media and Arts website: http://www.argosarts.org/program.jsp? eventid=e6ac2fc25ce34092b32f9214da323ea3 (accessed 15 March 2019). A Broadcast/Looping Pieces was performed at Black Box Teater, Oslo (22 September 2016). Seeping Through (Margate) was performed at Tom Thumb Theatre, Margate (11 November 2016). The shirt connects to a series of ‘where did it all go wrong?’ anecdotes relating to football player George Best, which Etchells relays as part of the performance. He reminded me of this in an email exchange in February 2017. Fellow Forced Entertainment member/performer, Richard Lowdon, operated the video players, rewinding/fast forwarding between different materials, extracts appearing on one of three TV monitors throughout the piece. Forced Entertainment took Calle’s project, Exquisite Pain, which had been produced as a book with images/text and published in the UK (2004) and created a seated theatre performance based on its text and its rules of repetition. Calle’s project unfolds as the description of a failed relationship, the end of an affair, where she is stood up by a lover at an appointed date and time in a hotel in New Delhi in 1985. The experience is measured out in days leading up to and after the unhappy event, as an attempt to rid herself of the pain. Sampling’s antecedents began to reach wider audiences in the late 1970s, exploding with hip hop, rap and DJ culture. In 1979, German musician Holger Czukay (also co-founder of influential experimental rock band, Can) released Movies on which the track ‘Persian Love’ famously sampled a Persian love song happened upon while tuning through radio stations. David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) further experimented with sampling from non-musical sources, including a religious exorcism. For a detailed and extensive analysis of the history and aesthetics of sampling, see Navas (2012).

2

Marisa Carnesky, Showwoman Roberta Mock

My shows are always set in Showtime. Showtime is a rare experience of being right here, right now and yet not here at all. Showtime exists simultaneously in and out of reality … . I’ve been ­making shows as long as I can remember and I intend to carry on doing so for as long as I can. Carnesky 2002

Marisa Carnesky refers to herself as a showwoman. Neither a showgirl nor a showman – although drawing from, repudiating aspects of, and exceeding both – showwoman is an appellation that, like most of Carnesky’s work, feels like it has always existed (if only you knew where, or how, to find it).1 She defines such a woman as either one who possesses ‘bombastic theatrical flair and an extraordinary skill, most likely within the worlds of “low brow” variety entertainment’, or else (or in addition), one who ‘manages and produces large-scale spectacular shows with a great talent for creating a buzz and getting publicity in inventive and risqué ways’ (Carnesky  2015). Perhaps most importantly, showwomen ‘do not work for the management or the man. Showwomen work for themselves and other people work for them’ (Carnesky Productions website). This chapter positions Carnesky’s performances to date, as she suggests, as ‘work’ at the intersection of aesthetic show-making and commercial show-business, in order to explore what it is that she is attempting to present and make present, how she does so, and why it matters. Her subject matter and themes have remained remarkably consistent over a twenty-five-year period. According to Carnesky: [They] are always in the same vein but with a different emphasis: cultural identity as it lives in the unconscious, folklore, ritual, sexual performance and the politics that surround women’s bodies as entertainment. (Carnesky 2012)

Similarly, she has been consistently fascinated by a particular aspect of ‘showwomanry’: that which uses ‘the abject, the taboo and the forbidden to create spectacle and magic’ (Carnesky  2015). Carnesky’s is the abject described by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: sensual, Jewish, queer, feminine, vulgar, liminal, frightening, perverse and

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ambiguous. It is not a narrative, but ‘a vision’, one that represents a boundary or limit (Kristeva 1982: 154). According to Kristeva, the time of abjection is always double, ‘of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth’ (1982: 9), resonating with Carnesky’s identification of a Showtime that exists simultaneously in and out of reality. Carnesky specializes in what Rogan Taylor (1985) called ‘the Death and Resurrection Show’ of traditional shamen/showmen: in re-animation, in making apparent, in the reparative conjuring of affect, in the production of jouissance. Waxworks, dolls, ghosts, half-remembered traditions, ancestors, mythical goddesses, archetypes, performance genealogies and repertoires, and the disappeared are brought to life in quirky, fragile, sexy, fun, political and provocative ways. Carnesky piles genre upon genre, blurring the boundaries of live cultures. ‘What I do’, she told one interviewer, ‘is really a mix of performance art, spectacle, circus, and experiential promenade installation theatre. Or perhaps it’s easier to say that it’s experimental visual theatre’ (in McLaren 2012). Even that description feels partial. Five years earlier, Time Out magazine credited her with the invention of ‘grotesque (or carnivalesque) burlesque’ in the  1990s: her edgy, political, ‘high end’ turns included one, for instance, in which she played Eve and removed her clothes while eating an apple that was squashed in her mouth (Baird 2007). It was Carnesky’s combination of erotic entertainment and avant-garde performance that established her at the forefront of what is now recognized as feminist neo-burlesque in the UK. Occasionally, often due to the choice of venue, her ‘satirical striptease’ (Carnesky in Rees 2004) pushed too many buttons. In a lecture recorded at the Union Chapel in London, for instance, she discusses the curtailing of an early performance at the same venue; she had been wearing a ‘Jesus beard’ and spilling red wine over her naked body (Marisa Carnesky: Being a Showwoman 2013). One way to categorize, and hence to understand, Carnesky’s amalgamation of performance cultures is as Live Art, described by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) on its website as not so much ‘an artform or discipline, but a cultural strategy to include experimental processes and experiential practices that might otherwise be excluded from established curatorial, cultural and critical frameworks’ (my emphasis). Experimental and experiential are the very words Carnesky chose to categorize her practice above, and she has used them together to describe at least two of her pieces: Carnesky’s Ghost Train (in Machon 2012: 114) and Carnesky’s Tarot Drome (in Purves  2012). Indeed, she is a textbook example of an artist who has both broken with ‘the traditions of the circumstance and expectations of theatre’ and turned to her body as the site and material of her practice, in order to explore ‘the possibilities of the “event” or “experience” of art that is live’ (LADA website). Carnesky builds the risks inherent in her ‘cultural strategy’ into what drives it. When asked about her intended ‘messages’ in an interview with a long-standing collaborator, the photographer Manuel Vason, she responded that they are less statements than a series of interrelated questions (Marisa Carnesky Interviewed for Double Exposures 2013). Echoing Richard Schechner’s ‘efficacy-entertainment dyad’ model for performance (Schechner  2013:  79–80),2 Carnesky’s creative enquiry circulates around the role of the political in popular entertainment and how popular forms might respond to the inclusion of radical art practices and ideas; how ritual and sexual representation might affect audiences of such a hybrid performance form; how

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work that is entertaining might also be transgressive, or whether it is always ‘reduced’ as – or to – spectacle (Double Exposures 2013). In Schechner’s model, efficacious performances, which he associates with ritual, are located at one end of a continuum; entertainment – its primary purpose ‘to give pleasure, to show off, to be beautiful’ – is harnessed with ‘performing arts’ at the other end. These ‘poles’ are not intended as a ‘flat binary’ and Schechner observes that any individual performance is located somewhere along this spectrum; precisely where is determined by its purpose. It is also worth noting that there are those who analyse specific forms of popular performing arts that are central to Carnesky’s work – for instance, circus (Bouissac 2012: 23–6) or neo-burlesque (Aston and Harris 2013: 151) – as, or as including, ritual. In keeping with many Live Art events, the form, content and context of Carnesky’s performances are inextricably imbricated in their meaning-making. Moreover, their processes of development and presentation are engaged both simultaneously and iteratively. Preferring to continuously shape a show according to response, Carnesky once claimed that she doesn’t ‘spend a lot of time in the rehearsal room … . I like to work it in front of the audience’ (in Machon 2009: 126).3 Placing value on the potential for and implications of change, she has said that her ‘shows change all the time in relation to the nature of different venues and audiences and my own moods and body. Live shows are full bloodied things: they remind you that you are a living, breathing, sweating entity’ (Carnesky 2002). Parts of these shows can be detached – for example, performed discretely on a variety bill with other artists – or else, their visual elements repurposed for performance-tocamera; eventually, some become the kernels of new productions. Such a practice – encompassing event and technique, synchronic act and diachronic action – more closely resembles the generation of a stand-up routine or circus production that transforms over an extended period of time while maintaining a recognizable (in this case, ‘Carnesky’) signature.

A body of work: performance, labour and temporality Elizabeth Osborne and Christine Woodworth have identified a number of tropes emerging from the academic field of work studies that are relevant to analyses of theatre. These include: The permeability or erasure of the boundaries between work and life; the connection between work and economic, social, or political power; the ways that labor is embodied and, in turn, how particular types of labor are inscribed on the bodies of workers over time; and the value ascribed to certain kinds of work over others. (Osborne and Woodworth 2015: 7)

All are apparent in Carnesky’s celebrated one-woman show, Jewess Tattooess (1999– 2005), which examined her relationship with Jewishness, performance, gender and the Shoah,4 through taboos surrounding tattoos, blood and menstruation in Judaism. With vaudevillian flourishes and employing a cabaret structure, Carnesky integrated

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striptease (quite literally unravelling mummy-like strips of fabric to reveal her body underneath), storytelling, gestural choreography, Jewish folk tale and flashes of Yiddish melodrama, film projection (both pre-recorded, with heavy post-production, and live feeds) and ‘freak show’ performance staples such as ‘the bed of nails’. In doing so, the mimetic and representational qualities of theatre (in particular, in Carnesky’s shapeshifting performance of a number of characters, including a somnambulist alter-ego called Lulla, a rabbi and ‘a Siamese Tattooed Carny Creature’) were juxtaposed with elements associated with performance art – that is, actions with material consequences, the production of experience rather than narrative, and what Josette Féral described as the appearance and disappearance of ‘flows, networks and systems’ (1982: 179). It was those latter elements that, perhaps inevitably, commanded the most attention, especially Carnesky’s acts of on-stage ‘tattooing’. Such ‘demonstrations’, Féral argues, suggest paths of freedom for a body that is ‘made conspicuous’ and ‘rendered as a place of desire, displacement, and fluctuation’, by bringing repression ‘to the surface’ through and as performance (1982: 171; original emphasis). Carnesky’s impetus for creating Jewess Tattooess was discovering that the tattoos she began accumulating as a teenager might prevent her from being buried in a consecrated Jewish cemetery with her parents.5 In the show, Carnesky-as-rabbi on video cites the prohibition against tattooing in Leviticus (19:28) and then admonishes live Carnesky-as-Lulla: ‘Your body is on loan from god … . You are a Jewess. Why? Why? Lulla, how can you claim a mark of freedom when this for us is a mark of suffering?’ Carnesky does not pretend to have a straightforward answer. As she stated in an interview to promote early performances of Jewess Tattooess, her tattoos began as gendered markings of agency, bravado, ‘visibility’ and an affinity with ‘outsider’ cultures, and not ‘as an act against the Jewish faith’ (Brennan 1999). In the show, (commercial) fairground practices often replace, enhance or supplant Judaism (as religion), if not Jewishness (as culture). Carnesky-asLulla recounts a dream, for instance, in which she dies and is refused burial by a rabbi; in limbo, her corpse is honoured in a carnival procession but, as the carnival is poor, her mummified tattooed skin is then displayed as a ticketed attraction. Paradoxically, in Jewess Tattooess, Carnesky’s tattoos mark her sexed body as Jewish, even – or especially – when this body is either rejected or othered from within Judaism (itself already othered by dominant cultures in the diaspora), or when its history is occluded. In one version, Carnesky tells the story of a sailor who encounters a woman wearing black leather gloves to conceal a concentration camp tattoo on her wrist which he then, in a gently erotic act, covers with a new tattoo of a flower. ‘You can still see [the concentration camp number] if you look very hard’, she says, before disinfecting her stomach and using a tattoo gun (but no ink) to etch a Jewish star around her navel. The live video projection behind her offers a magnified perspective and, if we look very hard, we can see the faint scars of the magen davids made during previous performances behind the fresh welts and trickles of blood.6 As Josephine Machon has noted, by leaving these traces on her body, Carnesky tells ‘another bodily story, actually cited in her flesh’ (2012: 121). During this scene, as for much of Jewess Tattooess, Carnesky is nude. Although she is wearing gloves, court shoes and a hat that

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Figure  2.1  Marisa Carnesky,  Jewess Tattooess, 2000. Photo by Manuel Vason. Courtesy Manuel Vason.

demurely and wittily covers her hair (in accordance with modesty codes for Jewish women), it is her already tattooed skin that acts as costume. As part of the process of creating Jewess Tattooess – influenced by images of tattooed women in nineteenth-century sideshows as well as women associated with the Japanese gangster culture of Yakuza – Carnesky had a large dragon tattooed on her back, buttocks and thigh by Alex Binnie (see  Figure  2.1). The hybridity of the dragon as fantastic symbol, comprising elements of a variety of non-human animals, also aligned with Carnesky’s sense of self as a British Jew: ‘Dragons made from snake bodies and tiger claws, dog heads, bird feathers and lion manes. Dragons like the Jews are complex and contradictory, cerebral and superstitious’ (Carnesky 2002). The dragon’s metonymic presence is reinforced through her spoken text in the show: ‘I am the tattooed soothsayer./Dragon lady, dragon lady/Serpentina, serpentina/Read my skin, watch my lips, lips.’ The lines of Carnesky’s tattoo were drawn larger than usual so it could be seen clearly by audiences at a distance when she was performing onstage. Exemplifying how work produces a body-in-process in the same moment that work is produced through that body, Carnesky (2017) reflects that she is now ‘living forever with a giant thickly lined dragon on my back. Sometimes I love it and embody it fully. Sometimes it feels a little grotesque/large/OTT for other aspects of my life’. According to Steven Connor, skin cannot be considered a part of the body because it cannot be separated ‘without taking the whole of the body with it’, a body that is ‘always a work in progress’ (2004: 29). Skin is a porous membrane that delineates and acts as barrier between interior and exterior corporeal horizons; tattoos, seemingly

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outward-facing, live in skin due to the intervention of the immune system which defends the body from invaders. Skin is ‘bilateral, both matter and image stuff and sign’ (Connor 2004: 41). The original stage set designed by Binnie for Jewess Tattooess, featuring three receding proscenium arches constructed from twenty-foot-high models of tattooed arms, operated in a similar way, reinforcing the synecdochical connections between skin, tattoos, Carnesky’s body, playing space, this specific performance and her body of work as a whole: Like my work, my body is colourful and crowded. I am burning-building-destroyedculture-fire-orange,  lost-in-the-forest-anxiety-green,  carnival-showman-yellow, sweet-smelling-old-lady-nearly-ghostly-lilac, hot-Mexican-pornographic-pink, ostentatious-proud-lucky-peacock-blue, difficult-stubborn-purple and a menstrual-open-wound-dark-coagulated-red. (Carnesky 2002)

Following the first UK tour, the scenography transformed significantly while continuing to evoke indeterminate spaces between interiority and exteriority, belonging and alterity. Gone were the outsized tattooed arms, replaced by a giant Jewish star on the floor through which Carnesky emerged and finally disappeared as if into an enormous vulva. The star of David on the stage floor – echoing the one she was to mark on the skin at the centre of her body, around the trace of an umbilical cord – was made of dozens of sheets of paper covered with writing in Hebrew: the translated text of Carnesky’s own version of a prayer that requests forgiveness for transgression, as mandated in the Torah (i.e. the Jewish bible, comprising the five books of Moses or the Pentateuch). That this transgression encompasses both sexed difference and body modification is made clear through her act of walking across the text, naked and oozing (fake) blood from her high-heeled shoes, a representation of the impurity of a menstruant (or niddah) in Jewish law. The connections between, and gendered exclusion from, liturgy, ritual and Hebrew text are enforced further by Carnesky’s use of the mezuzah, which is an amulet that encases a fragment from the Torah. Positioned in the doorways of Jewish homes, some religious Jews kiss their fingertips and then touch the mezuzah in passing (thereby mediating lips via body parts that are neither explicitly open to interior space nor inherently wet). Carnesky translates these various thresholds and labia onto her own body. In some versions of Jewess Tattooess, mezuzahs are placed over her eyes; in others, she additionally inserts them into her vagina. Within a religious tradition that has excluded women from text-based learning, associating them with unruly corporeal dangers and temptations, and confining them to material and pragmatic (rather than holy and scholarly) spheres, Carnesky’s carnivalesque disruptions of gendered boundaries – inserting text in body and body in a text smeared by the residue of its abjection – are not without strategic dangers. In a Jewish Journal interview, she explained that her show referenced and reclaimed figures like Salomé (via Jewish silent screen vamp Theda Bara) because ‘the very sexual, decorated woman is reviled in most cultures and I was looking for characters that societies have created to guide people away from them’ (in Pfefferman 2003). As Lori Hope Lefkovitz has written, while the Jewish woman’s body, her fluids and her

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voice ‘provide bases already inscribed in the Jewish textual tradition for a theory of woman’s subversive powers’, there is always a risk that acts of subversion based on sexual difference will ‘keep her tied to man by the energy of opposition’ as well as the ‘normative discourse that names her, defines her, legislates for her, and restricts her’ (1995: 158–9). Nevertheless, Jewishness offered Carnesky the opportunity to merge personal, artistic and professional identities and identifications, and the relationship between word and body was central to this operation. In an interview conducted while she was creating Jewess Tattooess in 1999, she announced: I’ve changed my name. I’ve changed it to the name of my grandmother: Carnesky … . It’s kind of a political thing in that all the Jews tended to Westernize their names. I’m now de-Westernizing it, going back to my Eastern European name that is my real name. (Carnesky in Bayley 2000: 348; my emphasis)

The making of this show thus not only transformed the complexion of Carnesky’s body while consolidating her themes, her public image and her stagecraft, but it also, quite literally, made her name. As one critic noted, it is a name that is ‘fortuitously redolent of both carnival and the carnal’ (Palmer  2004). Additionally, however, Carnesky’s performing persona – indelibly linked to the name that would become her brand – is rooted in a gynelineal sense of ‘realness’, of matriarchal authenticity. Prior to reclaiming the Latvian family name that had been anglicized in the 1940s, she worked under the name with which she was born. And so, it was as Marisa Carr, in 1992 at the Zap Club as part of the Brighton Festival, that she performed her first significant solo piece, This Woman Wants Your Skin for Her Shoes (which subsequently shut down a Soho fetish club for a night because police believed, incorrectly, that she was enacting live circumcisions). It was as Marisa Carr that she organized the 1994 Smut Fest cabaret in London – during which she produced a full English breakfast from her underwear and sang ‘Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs Worthington’ while it sizzled – and later appeared in a remounted programme in a disused synagogue in New York that was filmed for HBO’s Real Sex series (1995). It was as Marisa Carr that she posed as a ‘Nice Jewish Girl’ for Annie Sprinkle’s deck of Pleasure Activist playing cards.7 And it was as Marisa Carr that she removed a string of Union Jack bunting from her vagina to the tune of ‘God Save the Queen’ in Robert Pacitti’s show, Geek (1995), which was censored in Nottingham for ‘licentious behaviour and public disorder’ (Bayley 1995). In a newspaper article that doesn’t mention her by name, Pacitti notes that in the circus, a geek (as opposed to a freak) is a performer who chooses to be unlike others through their own actions or behaviour. He describes Carnesky’s act as a provocative metaphor for nation and belonging via the relationship between interiority and exposure: ‘At the start of the performance she takes the flag from inside herself and drags it out into the open, where it is up for grabs’ (in Bayley 1995). In the same year, Carr/Carnesky performed as part of the influential Jezebel season at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London – which also included performances by Karen Finley, Penny Arcade, Helena Goldwater and Robbie McCauley – in a double bill with La Ribot. Prior to reappearing in Jewess Tattooess,

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the title of that performance, Dragon Lady (1995), was repurposed as the name of a collective she directed a few years later. With the Dragon Ladies, Carnesky produced The Grotesque Burlesque Revue (1997) at the Raymond Revuebar, a famous strip club in Soho (though by then in decline). In this forty-minute piece, she first appears in character as Dolly Blue, a ‘comic whore’ murdered by her lover, Bluebeard, before she, as Dolly, transforms into the figurehead of a ship and then finally emerges from the sea as the avenging monster, Bloody Pearl, who kills sailors with golden pearls stashed in her vagina: ‘The she-thing peeled the tattooed skins off the sailors’ corpses./Creature of her own conception/Bloody Pearl, Bloody Pearl./The outsider, the survivor’ (in Bayley 2000: 358). Carnesky wears a latex bodysuit (created with the artist Amanda Moss) which is covered with tattoos and features large breasts and a lurid mouth, its tongue protruding through sharp teeth and dripping with pearls, over her crotch. Judith Palmer describes her slithering out of the same skin at the Torture Garden, a fetish club in London, at about the same time, as an act of ‘giving birth to herself ’ in ‘a sweaty, heaving mash of leatherboys’ (Palmer 2004). Carnesky was still working as a stripper then, which both informed and financially supported her other performance work, but she was already disenchanted: ‘It’s less fascinating now because it’s exploitative, not because of the stripping because that’s your personal choice but because there are no unions, no lunch hours and no showers … . And there are terrible things in the sex industry as a whole’ (in Brosnan [1998] 2013: 92).

Crossing haunted borders: ghosts, migrants and boundaries Carnesky marked her retirement as a stripper in 2002 by staging her own funeral on the streets of East London in a performance entitled Carnesky’s Ghost Box.8 As Alice Rayner has noted, ghosts ‘animate our connections to the dead’ via ‘a certain mode of attention, a certain line of sight’ and bring about a ‘moment of unforgetting’ (2006: xiii, xvii, xix). In performance, they produce ‘a visible, material and affective relationship to the abstract terms of time and repetition, sameness and difference, absence and presence’, thus drawing attention to the ‘function of perception in world making’ (Rayner  2006: xiii, xix). In Carnesky’s Ghost Box, the artist lay in a glass casket in showgirl costuming, drawn by plumed black horses, like those she describes leading the oneiric carnival cortège in Jewess Tattooess. Her friends followed behind, dressed in black and carrying wreaths, accompanied by a marching band; as the procession passed the strip clubs at which she used to work, tokens of her career (such as garters and tassels) were left behind and a ‘pall bearer’ would draw chalk lines around them as if it was a crime scene. Then, to the amazement of onlookers, Carnesky’s body magically disappeared and reappeared in her casket. This one-off performance was produced by club/performance promoters Duckie, with whom Carnesky regularly collaborated, as part of their Nightbird Season. The following year, their C’est Barbican! – which Carnesky devised and performed with Ursula Martinez, Chris Green and Miss High Leg Kick – won an Olivier award for Best

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Entertainment. Running for a month over the Christmas period, this event – called C’est Vauxhall! when originally staged on home ground – featured a showgirl-style cabaret opening and finale with synchronized shimmies and poses, sandwiching close-up and interactive ‘bite-sized burlesque’ turns. These were ordered from a menu by audience members and paid for with ‘Duckie dollars’. Dressed in a flesh-coloured body-stocking to simulate nudity, Carnesky performed table-top acts with titles like ‘Stilettos of Death’ and ‘The Woman Who Burnt Her Chicken’. Echoing audience/performer transactions in lap-dancing clubs while nostalgically looking back to the art of tease, C’est Barbican! was meant as ‘a joke at the expense of corporate entertainment and sex entertainment’ (Carnesky in Cripps 2003); Carnesky later expressed some surprise that it was ironically subsumed as the very type of corporate entertainment it was attempting to subvert. As Jeanie Forte noted in the late 1980s, even the work of radical feminist performers like Karen Finley was susceptible to co-option by commercial audiences, raising questions about the re-inscription of fetishistic values intended to be critiqued. Eventually, much like Duckie, Forte concluded that ‘if performance artists are doomed to relative obscurity, playing only to audiences of “the converted,” how will societal consciousness be raised (or abrased) on a larger scale?’ (1988: 234). Ultimately, despite (or due to) becoming ‘a trendy office party’ for City workers, in its promise of sex and then withholding of nudity, C’est Barbican confronted ‘its audience with a smart yet light-hearted comment on their own expectations’ (Costa 2003). In a show that was saucy, satirical, queer and kitsch, sex itself blinked in and out of sight like the body in its glass coffin in Carnesky’s Ghost Box. In addition to definitively marking Carnesky’s professional transition away from the sex industry, ensuring that it would be ‘unforgotten’, Carnesky’s Ghost Box is significant for two reasons: it is the first instance of Carnesky branding within the title of a show, as well as Carnesky’s first performance collaboration with the illusionist, Paul Kieve, which culminated spectacularly with Carnesky’s Ghost Train a few years later. Described in its promotional material as ‘a dark ride across haunted borders’, this purpose-built, large-scale art installation/carnival attraction with state-of-the-art optical illusions, mannequins and live performers was located first in Brick Lane, in London’s East End (the historic site of immigrant communities, including Carnesky’s own family a hundred years earlier), in 2004. After touring to other cities and various festivals including Glastonbury, Carnesky’s Ghost Train began an extended residency in Blackpool (2008–14), a long-established working-class British entertainment and leisure destination. Those who experienced the juddery eleven-minute ride witnessed spectral women reaching and wailing through bars, spinning through the air in perpetual rotation, struggling to re-attach limbs or to twist their heads into forward-facing positions, falling through floors, levitating and evaporating. Carnesky explained in the ‘Foreword’ to the 2004 souvenir poster/programme: These are the ghosts of migrant women’s journeys from Eastern Europe to Western Europe … . Ladies displaced between borders, stories of people suspended between two worlds. The characters in this ghost train transform themselves like magicians [sic] assistants, showgirls whose bodies defy natural law … . Magicians assistants with the supernatural ability to put themselves back together again, as displaced people have to, despite all the odds.

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In early versions of the ghost train, audience members were greeted by an armed border guard/station mistress, sternly sexy and powdered like a Weimar cabaret artiste in a tutu; in its Blackpool incarnation, she was replaced in this function by a grieving mother who is endlessly searching for her missing daughters. Our journey, like hers, is to a place that is ‘nowhere’, since ‘when people are disappeared there’s no closure, they don’t get a funeral as there’s no body to bury’ (Carnesky in Machon 2009: 128). Behind its deceptively muted Victorian façade, the train alternately hurtles and tantalizingly stalls through a series of haunted stations. With every lap of the circuit, the vignettes and tableaux become more violent and sexually charged. The missing link between Jewess Tattooess and Carnesky’s Ghost Train is an hour-long solo show called The Girl from Nowhere (2003), which Carnesky made and performed (like Carnesky’s Ghost Box) as part of the research and development for the ghost train. According to Carnesky, The Girl from Nowhere continued to explore ‘the figure of the “illustrated lady” as a human exhibit, an outsider lifted from the nineteenthcentury fairground with reference to the similarly subversive figure of the “wandering Jew” … and staged the magician’s assistant as a body torn between borders, to represent critical concerns in border and gender politics, and migration’.9 The figure of the magician’s assistant, simultaneously metaphor and job description, and connected to that of the ‘showgirl’, is central to Carnesky’s body of work. As Mick Mangan has discussed, while an assistant is always essential to the set-up and working of magic, by the late nineteenth century the spectacle of a male conjurer with his female assistant was already ‘a showbiz cliché’ and it was almost always a woman who was used for ‘tricks which involved symbolic death and resurrection: being put to sleep, hypnotized, incarcerated, levitated and made to vanish in various ways’ (Mangan 2010: 166). Blaire Larsen, co-producer of the 2008 documentary, Women in Boxes, about the relationship between male magicians and their female assistants, became increasingly incensed that it was the latter who executed the majority of illusions, often taking huge physical risks, while fading into the background when the magician took the applause: ‘I watched the assistants come out in these skimpy outfits and be cut in half and stabbed … . They’re playing these victims on stage yet they ended up being the brains behind the magic – the actual magician’ (in Bruns and Zompetti 2014: 7). The promotional material for a double bill of Jewess Tattooess and The Girl from Nowhere at the Riverside Studios in London in 2003 states that if ‘the Jewess tattooess is a magician whose star of David bleeds from the urgency to speak’, then ‘the girl from nowhere is a sex trafficked woman’. Carnesky had clearly begun the process of revisioning herself from showgirl to showwoman, from exploited assistant to conjurer. The Girl from Nowhere, set in a fairground and woven around the story of her own family’s exile from Riga, as well as filmed testimonies of migrant women working in the East End, seems to rehearse the back stories of the other-worldly inhabitants of Carnesky’s Ghost Train. Among them is a young woman who is sold into prostitution when she believes she is coming to London to work as a nanny, her flowing hair nailed to a wall to prevent escape; a Roma girl who saves her Slovakian settlement and family from destruction; and a Russian stripper who makes a fortune and buys a loft apartment in London’s increasingly gentrified East End. For Lyn Gardner, the show’s ‘ragged quirkiness’ produced a tangible sense of ‘past and future, the long dead

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and the not yet living’, and made it seem ‘as if the entire history of Europe’s faceless, dispossessed and disappeared has been crammed into the studio’ (Gardner 2003). Some of these invisible women had already begun to materialize in Carnesky’s contribution to Duckie’s East London promenade performance, Blowzabellas, Drabs, Mawks and Trogmoldies in 2001,10 for which she converted the Museum of Immigration and Diversity, once a synagogue, into the Museum of Strange Women. Here audiences discovered women whose bodies had fused with their trades: a street-seller covered with bagels, a tailor festooned with metal instruments and a weaver who is enveloped by her long hair that merges into a loom. The latter is a figure who detaches and returns, a revenant: the promotional image for The Girl from Nowhere is of a floating Carnesky, wrapped only in a wild mane of auburn hair. She also appears as an ethereal Amphitrite – a Victorian illusion in which a woman somersaults gracefully in space with no visible means of support – in Carnesky’s Ghost Train, the printed programme for which exhorts punters to ‘enter a world where the phantasmagorical collides with fragments of stories of displacement and exile’. It is a tagline that would have been equally applicable to The Girl from Nowhere which culminated with an illusion, created by Kieve, of a girl disappearing in a magic box. At the end of Carnesky’s Ghost Train, all the women glimpsed from the moving carriage line up on the platform, dance and then simply vanish: ‘The light is the same, the scenery hasn’t changed, the audience hasn’t blinked – but what they’ve watched has disappeared. Not aged, not faded, just gone’ (Clapp 2004). Phantasmagorias were light and shadow shows, augmented by live sound effects, often held in atmospherically spooky settings. Introduced in Paris shortly after the French Revolution by Étienne Gaspard Robert, who billed himself as Robertson, they remained popular through the first half of the nineteenth century. Phantoms, ghosts, skeletons and demons would materialize, distort and disappear through tricks of projection, creating a ‘nightmare world in which the boundaries of life and death dissolve’ (Mangan  2007:  125). Robertson originally conceived his Phantasmagoria as a scientific exhibition that demonstrated the relationship between optics and the psyche, but embraced more lucrative and wide-reaching showmanship when it became clear that audiences in the years following The Terror ‘had developed a taste for the macabre and the uncanny’ (Mangan  2007:  123), which also expressed the political, religious, philosophical and erotic undercurrents of the time. With her phantasmagoric ghost train, Carnesky similarly became a businesswoman with an expanded audience base.11 It took five years to bring such an ambitious project to fruition. She raised around £500,000 to make Carnesky’s Ghost Train (largely from the Arts Council, NESTA and Hellhound Productions, co-directed by Alison Murray who collaborated on the films for Jewess Tattooess); when Blackpool Council leased the ride (at no charge), it became financially responsible for its refurbishment, illumination, maintenance and relocation. Carnesky retained the intellectual property rights and artistic control, continuously attempting to balance her thematic concerns, aesthetic strategy and the expectations of an accessible and popular seaside ‘scare attraction’. Perceived value-for-money was always important. Most early reviews of Carnesky’s Ghost Train in  2004 mentioned the cost per minute of the ride; towards the end, online customer reviews tended to focus on the extent to which they found it creepy or

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frightening. When it closed, Carnesky explained that the ghost train was not originally built for a ten-year run and that ‘commercial realities, unfortunately, mean that we simply aren’t able [to] invest what’s needed in the structure and refresh the experience’ (Carnesky Productions website). The announcement also addressed the plight of cast members who would be losing their jobs as a result, drawing attention to another change that occurred in Carnesky’s transition from self-employed artist to impresario: that is, in multiplying her body, Carnesky was not only able to more effectively gesture to the historic grand-scale of people trafficking, generations of displaced women and ubiquity of refugee experience, but also to absent herself from the work which bore her name on a daily basis. Over the course of a decade, at some point, Carnesky played almost all the roles on the ghost train, in order not only to create and experiment with them but also to train other performers who shadowed her; as a result, audiences would occasionally see twinned versions of characters, ghosts haunting other ghosts. For Elaine Aston and Gerry Harris, Carnesky’s Ghost Train deployed popular generic conventions as an act of control and repair which ‘re-membered’ vanished and deformed bodies by reassembling them into a new and different ‘whole’ (2013: 187). While they are not convinced that all audiences would have recognized the intended metaphors and allusions – something borne out by the reviews of both professional critics and consumers, in different ways, throughout its run – they believe that in juxtaposing performance art and popular entertainment, pleasure and feminist politics, Carnesky trusted and enabled spectators to construct a range of intrinsically valuable personal meanings without leading them to easy ‘categorical’ conclusions. According to Machon, this meaning-making was fundamentally based on the corporeal experience created by the unheimlich (or uncanny) ‘potential of artifice in its mechanical technologies and modern conjuring practice’ (2016: 250). In particular, the moving mannequins and waxwork bodies that were ‘positioned with and against the sensual, human bodies of actors and audience [made] extant the disconcerting idea of embodied disembodiment’ and disturbed the ‘boundary of what is real/unreal, alive/ dead’, seen/unseen, absent/present (Machon 2016: 250). One of the origin stories of Carnesky’s Ghost Train is that Carnesky was inspired by a television documentary about a gruesome discovery on a disused ghost train (Gardner 2004; Palmer 2004): during the filming of an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man in 1976, an arm was knocked off a plaster and waxwork dummy of the ‘hanging man’, revealing a mummified human corpse inside. It is a scenario that maps more closely onto Dystopian Wonders, which Carnesky first presented at the Roundhouse in London during its 2010 Circusfest. In this production, audiences are led through an exhibition of cyborgian bodies (one of which had two heads) that merge live flesh with wounds and organs made of wax, silk and embroidered felt. Carnesky performs the role of exhibition ‘curator’, obsessed with the glass-eyed wax saints and splayed open anatomical models in lurid colours that she proudly displays; she is captivated by the beauty of their still and serene faces, like sleeping Snow Whites, and convinced that – come the day of judgement – they will all come to life. Her increasingly deranged lecture eventually reveals that she is a member of a cult led by a charismatic preacher, face wrapped in bandages and played by her then-husband, Rasp Thorne. Disciples begin to perform their devotion: an aerialist glides above us on silks; a beautiful

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contortionist disappears into the open womb of a waxwork, making complete the type of nineteenth-century anatomical female automata that, according to Corinna Wagner, are best characterized ‘as bodies without organs’ or ‘empty bodies that are all exterior’ and which expressed disgust towards gendered biological difference (2017:  2). Carnesky-as-curator is much more solid, embedding a large (trick) knife into her forearm with some exertion before operating on a planted ‘volunteer’ from the audience, who says she wants to live forever following resurrection, by clamping the volunteer to a velvet-covered podium and boring into her head with an industrial electric drill. The show’s mock executions, for the critic Matt Trueman (2010), were reminders that, despite (or because of) the ‘artifice and approximation’, encountering a waxwork ‘is to observe one’s own corpse’; this manufactures both the fear of disembodiment and ‘the ache’ of imagining being trapped in a paralysed body that is ‘stripped of purpose’.12 Carnesky, however, seemed equally interested in the reverse process. In an interview just prior to the premiere of Dystopian Wonders, she explained: ‘I’m fascinated by the idea of the body reanimating and how – certainly for me – when you see waxworks, the thing you’re most excited by is that they might come back to life’ (in Carter 2010). Echoing the promotional copy for the show, she uses the word ‘showwoman’ (rather than ‘curator’) to describe the character she is playing – and a ‘morbid’ one at that – rather than her professional role as a performance-maker or artist. Significantly, it is

Figure 2.2  Promotional image for Dystopian Wonders by Marisa Carnesky, Roundhouse, London, 2010. Photo by Manuel Vason. Courtesy Manuel Vason.

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also a piece of work that does not include Carnesky in its title. Perhaps – in a show that, for instance, provokes reflection on Madame Tussaud’s circumstances and ethical positioning as a showwoman – Carnesky was distancing herself from a fictional narrative that might implicate her performing body in the physical and emotional manipulation of other women. Still, Dystopian Wonders did bear many of the hallmarks of Carnesky’s work as a showwoman, including her hiring and championing of talented and striking burlesque, cabaret and circus performers. It featured Marawa the Amazing, for example, who ascended a ladder made of razor-sharp swords barefoot, recreating an act popularized by Koringa, the ‘only Female Fakir in the World’, in the late  1930s. Made during Carnesky’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded fellowship at the University of Sheffield’s National Fairground Archive (2008–11), which was entitled ‘Confessions of a Showwoman: Reinventing and Documenting Extraordinary Live Entertainments’, Dystopian Wonders began the work of resurrecting a tradition of popular performance by professional women, with the aim of bringing it to wider public attention and keeping it (a)live in the haunted borderspace between archive and repertoire.

Revolutions: cycles, circulation and regeneration In 2009, Carnesky participated in the making of a tarot deck for the Spill performance festival, which features a veritable who’s who of live artists including Ron Athey, Kira O’Reilly, Franko B and Oreet Ashery. Each card in the Spill Tarot’s Major Arcana is a performance-to-camera, made collaboratively with Manuel Vason; the card chosen for Carnesky by Robert Pacitti, the Artistic Director of Spill, was Wheel of Fortune. In this image, she emerges from a wall mid-torso, pouting diffidently in a red slip (one reviewer of tarot decks described her as ‘blowsy’) and holding an old clock face embossed with the word ‘Theatre’ above her head. A red sign beneath her reads ‘Please adjust your dress before leaving’. She is surrounded by maps and illegible scraps of paper and disused currency, by photographic portraits of long dead women, by other clocks telling other times and limp red ribbons. In promotional photos for the Blackpool version of Carnesky’s Ghost Train, this is the set that frames Eva, ‘the Defected Disappeared Border Guard’ who pleads forgiveness from her sisters for succumbing to ‘misdirection’ and the power of bureaucracy – that is, becoming ‘tangled in red tape’ (Carnesky Productions website). The artist Anne Bean refers to performances-tocamera as ‘reformations’, a term that Dominic Johnson suggests ‘allows for productive infidelity to one’s achievements, towards the creation of a new work informed by one’s own creative history as a generative artist’ (Johnson 2015a: 24; original emphasis). On the basis of the Spill Tarot image that Carnesky made with Vason, it is possible to observe that performances-to-camera are also able to subtly signal elements of the entrepreneurial business of art-making. In readings of the Tarot of Marseille, Wheel of Fortune orients towards change. Because ‘everything is condemned to vanish’, it indicates the ending of one cycle which sets the next in motion. In addition to ‘the cycle of death and rebirth in the

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large sense’, it ‘represents financial profit in folk notions’ (Jodorowsky and Costa 2009: 135–7). Carnesky’s embodiment of this card points towards an extended moment of professional transition for her as a performer, from the staged subject of the gaze to the body who directs the gaze on stage. In circus terms, this might be considered equivalent to adding the role of ‘ringmaster’ (i.e. the compère who manages the performance in real time) to those of ‘act’ (i.e. the performer) and/or ‘director’ (i.e. the proprietor, whose name often defines the enterprise and who has overall control of production content); in traditional circus, the ringmaster has worn a red coat since the 1920s (Beadle and Könyöt 2016: 77). The colour red, so prominent in her Wheel of Fortune image, becomes increasingly significant in Carnesky’s scenography (see, for instance,  Figure  2.2, the promotional image for Dystopian Wonders). In tarot, it represents materiality, activity and complex associations with blood, including both the danger of taboo and comforting warmth: that is, death when it is presented on the outside of a body, life when circulating within (Jodorowsky and Costa 2009: 70). Participation in the Spill Tarot project was one of the inspirations for Carnesky’s Tarot Drome (2012),13 which Carnesky later described as an ‘esoteric spectacle for ages  12 and up’. In this large-scale promenade performance, spectator-participants follow their intuition through the Old Vic Tunnels beneath Waterloo station in London,14 encountering living manifestations of the Major Arcana before eventually congregating for a rock opera that features a choreographed archetypal constellation in capes and gold bikinis on roller skates. Prior to this high camp finale, each card repeatedly performs its own ‘ritual’: Temperance (Rowan Fae) plunging in and emerging breathless from a water tank; Death (Nina Felia), caked and immobile in plaster, writhing her way out of bondage. Some of these rituals are participatory and all are visually spectacular, together offering audience members an alternative, threedimensional form of tarot reading depending on one’s whim and route. Carnesky herself embodies The World, the card considered the key to the tarot’s spatial and symbolic organization (echoing her credited role as the production’s ‘writer and director’) and described in the accompanying programme brochure as ‘accomplishment in the world … . She is the cosmic centre, fame, the universal soul and women’s sex’. Wearing a slinky gold evening dress and a winged headpiece reminiscent of that associated with Hermes (the Greek trickster god of commerce, boundaries and their transgression), she welcomes audiences to the opening set piece of the show, a lucha libre-style wrestling match between The Emperor and Strength: ‘Seekers of the truth’, she announces, ‘take hold of your senses and prepare for new experiences’. The Programme Note for Carnesky’s Tarot Drome suggests that, while its imagery might ‘speak to your unconscious mind’ and provide a ‘road map to your soul’, it is up to individual audience members to make what they would of the show’s ‘fleshy dreamscape of psychomagical phenomena’. This language of self-transformation is that of experimental filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, a practitioner of tarot who spent years teaching and reconstructing the original Tarot of Marseille, as well as the deviser of a therapeutic system called ‘psychomagic’ which aimed to heal trauma through shamanistic practices. Carnesky once cited Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre (1989) – which features a tattooed woman circus performer, a cult that revolves around a pool of fake holy blood, and a mannequin that acts as psychic substitute for an armless dead

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woman – as her favourite film, admiring its density, bright colours and dream-like qualities. She has said that she often imagines her shows in ‘filmic terms’ which she then attempts to translate to a live experience: ‘I want the audience to be trapped in the fantasy to be engaged in the other world’ (Carnesky in Machon 2009: 130–1). This other world stands in for what is unknown in the present and reaches back to the past in order to prepare for the future. Like all of Carnesky’s work, Tarot Drome emerged at least in part from personal associations. When she first started reading tarot cards as a teenage goth, she was warned against it for reasons which once again conflated Jewishness with prohibition: ‘My grandmother would say that Jewish people must not go to fortune tellers, or try to contact the dead – which of course made me all the more fascinated’ (Carnesky in McLaren  2012). It is no coincidence that a crystal ball glinted from within one of the Carnesky’s Ghost Train stations; that the protagonist of Jewess Tattooess was a soothsayer; or that Carnesky occasionally appeared at burlesque nights (such as the Whoopee Club) and in performance installations – for example, as part of the twentyfour-hour Bataille-inspired Visions of Excess event curated by Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis (Fierce Festival, Birmingham, 2003) and the Hayward Gallery’s Carnivalesque touring exhibition in Brighton (Prior 2000: 8–9) – as a nude, penny-in-the-slot fortune teller. Even focusing only on this thematic strand, it is striking the extent to which Carnesky has experimented over the course of her career with the many ‘ways in which space and design are employed by the showman’, as identified by Brooks McNamara in his classic study of traditional popular scenography (1974: 16). These categorizations include booths and other itinerant arrangements of space by street and fairground performers; improvised theatres; venues for variety entertainments; spaces devoted to spectacle or special effects; processional forms; and entertainment environments, such as travelling carnivals, festivals and amusement parks which include tent shows, waxworks and rides. Writing mainly about theatrical forms, McNamara noted that many showmen created opportunities for, and then concentrated their money and attention on, ‘trickwork, fantasy and spectacle’ that attracted audience numbers (1974: 20), shaping their productions on the ‘principle of variety structure in which there is no transfer of information from one act to another’ (1974:  19). Indeed, it is inferred that one of the principal roles of a showman is to use their professional judgement to combine various acts or ‘compartments’ into a production. This too is applicable to Carnesky’s practice, not only in company work like Carnesky’s Ghost Train but in solo shows like The Girl from Nowhere, in which the ‘transfer of information’ between sections is largely cumulative and associative. One of the key differences is that, according to McNamara, dramaturgical construction by traditional showmen was never the result of thematic consideration or attempts at coherence. Arising from this is the implication that, with the exception of spectacular set showpieces, showmen in this lineage take a fairly laissez-faire attitude to the nurturing and development of the individual acts and performers they programme within such structures. Carnesky’s approach to showwomanship, by contrast, has always included (to a greater or lesser extent) the input of the other performers with whom she works, many eventually participating in more than one of her projects: ‘I approach the

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artist and see if they are interested in collaborating with me, bringing a bit of what they do and their identity into a shared process where we make new material together, mixing a bit of them and a bit of me under my direction’ (Carnesky 2012). For Carnesky’s Tarot Drome, this process included not only working individually with each of the performers to exploit their performance specialisms and public persona in their turns as archetype, but also a weekend-long, work-in-progress experiment called Carnesky’s Tarot Village at Bestival in Dorset (2012). The latter included students from Carnesky’s Finishing School (CFS), which first developed as part of her two-year residency at the Roundhouse in London in 2008 and is now an ad hoc series of cohort-based training opportunities in the form of evening classes, five-day or weekend workshops.15 If, as Jacki Willson suggests, ‘Showmen show us the spectacle of gendered heteronormative bodies performing in an expected way in order to induce magic and joy’ (2015:  174), Carnesky’s practice as a showwoman not only recalibrates pleasure through other ways of seeing in the making of her own cultural products, but also aims to develop and promote alternative expressions of bodily freedom that acknowledge positions of power and politics by new generations of performers. The singer-songwriter Paloma Faith, who was in the original cast of Carnesky’s Ghost Train, has said that ‘Marisa is the nearest thing I have to a mentor’, that Carnesky taught her to be ‘confident on stage’ and, ‘especially as a woman, that it’s your job to go out there and raise hell’ (in Sturges 2009). Additionally, some CFS graduates go on to perform in Carnesky productions, such as the sword swallower, MisSa Blue, who collaborated with Carnesky on Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman. Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman (2015–18) was advertised as ‘an all-out genre bending contemporary performance spectacular’ that ‘scrutinised, politicised and reclaimed’ issues circulating around ‘fertility, miscarriage, trans identities, lost ancient herstories and what it means to be “female”’, while ‘putting the magic back into the last unmentionable taboo: menstruation’. Influenced by the work of the Radical Anthropology Group (whose evening lectures she attended with the Dragon Ladies in the 1990s) and, in particular, its founder Chris Knight who posited a woman-centric theory of cultural origin based on menstrual cycles (Marisa Carnesky: Menstruating Together in Theatres, Tents and Other Unlikely Locations 2018), Carnesky plays ‘herself ’ as a kooky academic anthropologist who is also a showwoman. Central to her performance text is the story of what happened when she gathered together a group of ‘menstruants’ (all cabaret/live artists who may or may not menstruate but who identify  as either female or non-binary) that met during dark moons over a period of three months at Metal, an artist space in Southend-on-Sea. Here they participated in group devising exercises, meditation, spell casting and discussions of their lived experiences of ‘bodily transformation and change’, experimenting with performance techniques to embody these experiences, and then creating new rituals in the surrounding landscape (Walters 2016). Like all rituals, these actions were symbolic and reiterative, creating a ‘sacred’ moment in time and space that simultaneously reaffirmed both individual senses of identity and communitas, or shared collective consciousness. These sited, ‘private’ rituals were filmed and then, if possible, refined into cabaret performances, their power reasserted ‘in repeating them onstage’ in a show that attempted to balance ‘menstrual activism’ with ‘menstrual spiritualism’ (Carnesky 2018).

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Plewis, a member of Duckie who had been a Ghost Train cast member as well as a Carnesky Tarot Drome collaborator, produces a red jelly rabbit made (apparently) with her own menstrual blood which she jiggles on her belly, shoves in her mouth and smears over the stage; in later versions of the show, she is accompanied by the daughter who was conceived during the ritual-making phase of the project when Plewis created and ingested similar jellies. Wearing a dress that deconstructs itself to reveal a glittery red applique river within, Carnesky connects these live rituals and those filmed on site with a survey of mythical, art historical and popular culture figures – Medusa, Kali and Sissy Spacek playing Carrie – that speak to the fear of menstruation. She says that by harnessing its power, linked to ecological cycles and the renewal of humanity itself, and by overcoming the cultural distaste that serves to shame women’s bodies, the patriarchy can be overturned: ‘The Revolution will be bloody. The Revolution will be menstrual’ (Carnesky 2016). For Carnesky to refer to herself as ‘doctor’ in the title of this show, which was created as part of her practice-as-research (PaR) PhD project at Middlesex University, was knowing, witty and cheeky. PaR methodologies both generate new knowledges and disseminate them through acts of performance, meaning that Carnesky was effectively claiming her doctorate within the title of an essential element of her thesis that had yet to be examined. She was, of course, also alluding to a tradition of ‘doctors’ in popular performance: for instance, the circus of the fictional Dr Lau, in the 1935 novel by Charles G. Finney, which displayed captured mythological creatures including Medusa and a giant (male) sea serpent; or nineteenth-century ‘Medicine Shows’ in which showmen ‘doctors’ peddled miraculous elixirs, or ‘snake oils’, interspersed with testimonials, musical acts, acrobats or fortune telling.16 Like its title, the hybrid form of Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman also effectively harnessed its multivalence within an artistic research context. Daniel Ladnar has discussed how the ‘lecture performance’ is able to temporally and conceptually link aesthetic and cultural forms of performance while simultaneously participating in and exploring ‘the performative production and dissemination of knowledge enacted in traditional lectures’ (Ladnar 2014: 16–7). As Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman demonstrates, lecture performances enable artistscholars to revisit works that were conceived as site-specific projects (such as Rhyannon Styles’s menstrual ritual at the sea’s edge, the tide lapping at her screaming, balloon and tinsel-covered body) and share them with different audiences. Moreover, as ‘one manifestation of a larger (research) process’, they are able to ‘make reference to a context whose scope exceeds its articulation in the performance event itself ’ (Ladnar 2014: 14). Carnesky had experimented with the lecture performance format before; however, as in Dystopian Wonders, she tended to be framed more explicitly as a ‘character’ within a fictional narrative or setting. In her (largely) solo performance, Magic War (2006–7, the promotional image for which features on the front cover of this volume), Carnesky discussed strategies for survival, the global War on Terror campaign and the ways in which magic has been used to wage war, while dressed as a glamorous sequined Pallas Athena. While some versions featured a story arc about a secret society trying to create a new world order, the show mainly revolved around illustrative stock magic tricks and equipment – for instance, catching a bullet in her cleavage in an homage to Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin’s quashing of an Algerian insurrection

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in the 1850s by performing a range of magic tricks (including having a gun fired at his heart) that offered evidence of supernatural power. These tricks often involved audience participation. Audience members were asked, for instance, to decide whether Carnesky should use her guillotine to cut off the finger of a volunteer, who had been cast as a terrorist, if this were to prevent a bomb exploding nearby; they always said yes and, even though the finger was magically saved despite the action of the blade, the routine raised serious questions about the ethics of violence, retribution, moral responsibility and the body politic in times of war. Although Carnesky performed some of the illusions in Magic War on and with her own body – such as levitating – she adamantly asserted that she was a ‘magicienne’ and not the magician’s assistant. While she had signalled in The Girl from Nowhere that she considered the magician’s assistant to be a victim of naturalized images of violence and gendered exploitation, the process of making Magic War enabled Carnesky to work through and reflect upon the practical implications of combining the tropes and instruments of magic with the ownership and celebration of eroticism and one’s sexed body. She described how, in a very early version, I ended up naked with a black bag over my head, on all fours, inviting people to come and cut my head off and it was awful. I just thought, it was interesting in the 90s, it felt radical to get naked and it doesn’t now … . [I]t feels too exposing because I am always representing a version of myself … . I guess the more you work, the more you start to question your own practice and with Magic War it was about the wider idea of violence to people’s bodies, not violence to women’s bodies. (Carnesky in Machon 2009: 127)

Of all the tricks in Magic War, it was sawing a body in half – which Carnesky performed on other people, often men – that is loaded with the most explicit misogynistic associations. Introduced by the British illusionist, Percy Thomas Tibbles (or ‘Selbit’) in 1921, it has almost always involved the dismemberment of a woman in a coffin-like box; in fact, one of Selbit’s first publicity stunts was to offer Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst, leaders of the women’s suffrage movement, large sums of money to be sawn in half (Mangan 2010: 164). This is why it became so important for Carnesky, not simply to control, but also to re-appropriate this illusion, to alter its meaning by emphasizing how it might finally symbolize the making whole of a woman’s body as much as violently forcing it apart. In Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman, this illusion becomes another menstrual ritual. ‘Our greatest trick as showwomen’, she proclaims after sawing one of the menstruants in half, ‘is that we perform an act of temporary death each month and then are miraculously resurrected’ (Carnesky 2016). Perhaps even more radically, the  2018 version dispensed with showing the act of dismemberment; instead, Rhyannon Styles, who is a transwoman, comes on stage in two halves (see Figure 2.3) and is ‘reborn’ when the blades are removed and the box  re-conjoined. Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman returns, quietly but insistently, to many of the themes, questions and motifs of Jewess Tattooess. The Whore of Babylon – who was so exasperated by the demonization of women’s sexuality in Jewess Tattooess that

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Figure  2.3  Marisa Carnesky, H Plewis and Rhyannon Styles in Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman, 2017. Photo by Claire Lawrie. Courtesy Claire Lawrie.

she was said to be away sunbathing with her friend, the Queen of Sheba – makes an appearance as a ‘mythological menstruating witch’ riding her many-headed serpent off to steal sperm. Carnesky even reclaims the performance actions within Jewess Tattooess as menstrual rituals in the spoken text of Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman: ‘As showwomen we have dripped our menstrual blood on holy texts’ (Carnesky  2016). Most extraordinary, however, is Carnesky’s own filmed ritual, screened within the latter. She is nude, in a white bathtub, in a white bathroom; we see her only from behind, her thickly lined dragon tattoo unmistakably recognizable. The tub is full of red liquid which she splashes repeatedly over her head, allowing it to run down her face and back. This is a ritual Carnesky made in response to her own miscarriages, alluding to the mikvah – a ceremonial bath used by the niddah to achieve ritual purity following menstruation according to Jewish law. It is an open, haunting, moving and generous image: a detournement of abjection.

Conclusion: materialization, representation and collective reparation As Julia Kristeva has observed, ‘the various means of purifying the abject’ lead to ‘the catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion’ (1982: 17;

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original emphasis). In Carnesky’s case, this artistic experience ‘which is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token purifies’ (Kristeva 1982: 17) has unfolded over an extended period of time. Images recirculate and, re-contextualized, mean (always slightly differently) again and again in humorous acts of utopian reparation. In the 2016 version of Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman, for instance, Carnesky describes the ‘magical serpent’s body’ as ‘a symbol of menstrual synchronicity and women’s solidarity’. ‘What if we could synchronize our bodies like one giant connected powerful snake?’ she asks, before suggesting, with echoes of both Serpentina and Bloody Pearl so many years earlier, that humanity could ‘rise rise rise then in a sea of menstrual anarchy!’ while quickly acknowledging and anticipating scepticism: ‘Do you think we are selling you a snake oil?’ We see here, in microcosm, how Carnesky’s work exemplifies the complex braiding of social, aesthetic and commercial dynamics in and of performance. Although Carnesky would not describe her practice as ‘commercial’, the term is used in this context to indicate how it speaks to and about precarious commercial cultures of entertainment (including sex work), as well as the way Carnesky takes professional and fiscal responsibility for large-scale productions (which are often not-for-profit or profit shares), often within commercial contexts for which they are specifically designed. As significantly, as this practice has developed, what has become increasingly visible is ‘one of the ghosts of the theatre’: that is, labour ‘as an act, a process, and a creative product’ (Osborne and Woodworth  2015:  4). This visibility is especially significant when Carnesky engages in performance forms – such as magic – in which such labour needs to be concealed to ensure efficacy. What matters about a body, according to Judith Butler, is its materialization – that is, ‘its very intelligibility’ (1993: 32). The ‘matter of bodies’ is ‘the effect of the dynamic of power’ and is ‘indissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialization and the signification of those material effects’ (Butler 1993: 2). Those bodies that are excluded become the abject – through which those same regulatory norms that have determined their disavowal are then recognized and further reinforced – and are designated to ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones (Butler 1993: 3). Carnesky’s work materializes these bodies and zones, showing the ideological borders that define them by activating the infinitesimal liminal spaces between visibility and invisibility, life and death, presence and absence, remembering and forgetting, attraction and repulsion, inclusion and exclusion, interiority and exteriority, subject and object. As for Butler, most often such spatial boundaries made apparent in Carnesky’s work link to the materialization of ‘sex’. During Carnesky’s transition from showgirl to showwoman, which was neither linear nor inevitable, she has shown how the lived experience of an individual (diasporic, secular Jewish) woman is able to foster the presentation and representation of shared, often collective, experiences of diverse women (as well as those who identify as genderqueer or non-binary and, occasionally, as men) through the making of a body of work.

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Notes 1 Although not a term that is often encountered, the Jewish American entertainer Sophie Tucker (c. 1886–1966), for instance, was billed as the ‘master showwoman of the times’ in 1921 (Sklaroff 2018: 97), and Carnesky’s definition would certainly apply to her work. 2 Schechner’s efficacy–entertainment dyad is a model through which to analyse whether an individual performance operates primarily within the realm of the ‘social’ (i.e. as ritual) or the ‘aesthetic’ (i.e. as art), each with its own set of criteria (for instance, efficacious ritual is aligned with timelessness, audience participation and collectivity, whereas entertainment is associated with the present, observation and individual creativity). Occasionally the dyad is described as a ‘braid’ or ‘helix’ in order to emphasize that most performances are produced via the tensions between efficacy and entertainment, rather than adhering to a ‘flat binary’ (Schechner 2013: 80). 3 Among the numerous implications for this strategy, often born of necessity, is that critics attend most new productions very early in a run, especially those that are eagerly anticipated. Many reviews of Carnesky’s shows thus tend to praise their concept, polished scenography and (where relevant) her presence as a performer, but also note that they still feel unfinished. It also means that there are numerous versions of the productions discussed in this chapter; I tend to cite and describe those that I saw myself, usually at work-in-progress or premiere stages, although I saw Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman during its final run as well. Carnesky now spends much more time in rehearsal rooms, not simply when developing productions but also to rework them during runs based on audience reaction, and again prior to touring to accommodate the nature of different venues and availability of personnel. 4 Shoah means destruction or calamity in Hebrew. It is used to refer to the mass murder of Jews by Nazi Germany in the twentieth century, rather than the term Holocaust, which has its similarly ancient etymological roots in burnt offerings to god. 5 While there are some Jewish communities and burial societies that refuse to do so, it is a common misconception that religious law, or halacha, prohibits people who are willingly tattooed from being buried in Jewish cemeteries. Moreover, since at least the sixteenth century, rabbinical sources have made it clear that those who are involuntarily tattooed should be considered ‘blameless’, an interpretation that was tested and upheld following the Shoah. 6 In previous versions of Jewess Tattooess, Carnesky used the tattoo gun to draw a magen david (Star of David) on her thigh and this scene was positioned differently in the overall performance text. 7 Elsewhere I discuss Carnesky, Annie Sprinkle and (to a lesser extent) original Smut Fest creator/organizer, Jennifer Blowdryer – separately and together – as situated within a tradition of sex-positive Jewish female performers and in relation to the fin de siècle stereotype of the Jewess (Mock 2008). 8 Occasionally billed at the time as Carnesky’s Burlesque Ghost Box. 9 From Carnesky’s ‘Case for Support’ submitted as part of her (successful) application to the AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts Scheme (2007).

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10 Hosted by Miss Amy Lamé, the performance elements on the streets of East London featured Chris Green and Ursula Martinez; the production culminated with a monologue written by Neil Bartlett and performed by Bette Bourne in Toynbee Hall. 11 Carnesky emphasizes the importance, in facilitating her work, of producers such as Jeremy Goldstein (with whom she collaborated on the original Ghost Train, The Girl from Nowhere and Dystopian Wonders), as well as Rose Sharp, Natasha Davis, Lara Clifton, Flora Herberich and David Sheppard. 12 Trueman reviewed a slightly different show than the one I attended at the Roundhouse, entitled The Quickening of the Wax and performed at the Chelsea Theatre as part of its Sacred Festival about six months later. 13 Other inspirations included Carnesky’s renewed interest in Wiccan practices that began in a north London coven in the 1980s and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s reimagining of archetypes for interactive promenade settings. 14 Later restaged at the Latitude Festival, UK (2013) and Cirque Jules Verne in Amiens, France (2014). 15 The purpose of CFS is to ‘empower people who may have no formal training or are from backgrounds or social groups that have traditionally had little access to affordable tutoring’ to create their own new ‘transgressive’ cabaret work, launch their careers and ‘develop their own artistic languages so that they can go forth and change the world’ (Carnesky in McLaren 2016). Carnesky has said that pedagogy is ‘in my blood’ and that she aspires to becoming ‘the tattooed avant-garde queer version’ of the ‘Jewish grande dames’ of London stage schools like Sylvia Young and Anna Scher (in Walters 2016). 16 Attendees at a work-in-progress showing of Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman on 16 October 2015 at National Theatre Studios in London received small souvenir bottles filled with a red viscous fluid, labelled ‘Dr Carnesky’s Snake Oil’.

3

Marcia Farquhar: Divergent Auto/Biographies and Lines of Hope Deirdre Heddon

Beginning ‘You could have been someone’, a friend said, and I answered, ‘Well, so could anyone’, and that little couplet made its way into a very famous song and I very rarely get credit for it. But this is just a segue into the archive and how bloody disappointing it is for some people not having been remembered Farquhar 2015a

Marcia Farquhar has been creating performances since the  1970s. Her twenty-firstcentury catalogue alone comprises more than sixty different works, many shown in or commissioned by significant arts organizations and galleries ranging from the V&A and the Imperial War Museum to the South London Gallery, the National Review of Live Art, Tatton Park Biennale and the Venice Biennale. By any account, Farquhar is an accomplished, prolific and enduring artist. Yet, in her own words, albeit delivered in a self-effacing tone, she admits to constantly asking, ‘Why am I not located in books and put in museums, and collected?’ (Farquhar 2015b). Farquhar might pose the question with a self-mocking wryness, but there’s an authenticity which prompts other questions relevant to this collection: Who gets to tell histories and from what perspectives? What is remembered and what is forgotten? What sources are used in the process of gathering and reconstruction and what – or who – is absented as a result? Farquhar’s Vox Box (from  2015) demonstrates an enduring engagement with processes of Live Art history-making and a creative attempt to acknowledge and redress gaps. Drawing on Acme Gallery’s archive,1 Vox Box repurposes a Jukebox for a collection of 7” vinyl recordings of interviews Farquhar conducted with friends and colleagues. Each interviewee recalled artists and performers from the  1970s, many of them documented in the Acme archive, even if only as a signature in the gallery’s Visitor Book. As Farquhar reflected in a presentation, Vox Box provided an opportunity for different voices ‘to remember those days in whichever way they want,

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[to] put themselves back in the archive’ (Farquhar  2015a). Vox Box is determinedly addressed to the absent, offering itself as a tool of historical inscription; a material practice which makes possible the resurfacing of the immaterial or overlooked. Farquhar deployed her jukebox idea again in a Live Art Development Agency DIY project (2015a), Jukeboxing. The project’s summary distils Farquhar’s historiographic intentions: We will embark upon a co-operative reconfiguration of questionable gossip, misheard hearsay, fakeloric legend, and minor myth. Through this re-retelling of well-worn tales, we will attempt to unburden ourselves from the stories of the past by submitting them to a process of polyphonic revisionism. Performing an extended and contradictory family history, we will develop new multi-authored narratives from the stuck records of life’s stories . … This series of single edition spoken word  45’s will become a new non-hierarchical, non-linear and deeply personal audio archive. (Farquhar 2015a)2

I find it useful to begin this chapter with Farquhar’s explicit recognition of histories’ partial and multiple ways of mis/tellings. The orientation of Jukeboxing speaks to some of the challenges signalled by this collection – what and who are included in the term Live Art? How does the term’s aesthetic, historic reach and genealogy serve to marginalize or make invisible? Jukeboxing’s summary sets off numerous threads which I will follow as I try to know and tell something of Farquhar’s work: reconfigurations, hearsay, fakeloric, and minor myths, re-tellings, polyphonic revisionism, contradictory histories, multi-authored narratives, non-hierarchical, non-linear and personal archives woven together into a dynamic surface of some sort. Farquhar’s discussions about the historicizing of Live Art acknowledge at the outset my inevitable failure at writing anything resembling a ‘comprehensive history’ of Farquhar’s Live Art catalogue. Live Art is always ephemeral and I was not (always) there. Even if I was (sometimes) there, I am bound to misremember, see things my own way, make my own connections, draw my own conclusions and repeat – wittingly or not – halftruths as well as downright lies. Farquhar’s approach to the archive, her jukeboxing, relieves the pressure somewhat by granting permission to fail; which, in the terms of her process and politics, and following in the wake of one of her significant influencers (Samuel Beckett), might be to succeed. Either way, I am grateful. Owning the impossibility of producing a comprehensive account, I hope that I succeed at the very least in stitching Farquhar into the history of Live Art and revising that history in some small way as a result. The etymology of ‘jukebox’ reflects the challenge of presenting Farquhar’s work and her place within a ‘Live Art History’: the word ‘jook’ or ‘joog’ is African-American vernacular for ‘wicked, disorderly’.3 Farquhar’s mapping of her practice on her artist’s website offers a ‘wickedly disorderly’ genealogy. Performances from 2006 onwards are gathered into a stack of ‘boxes’, each box titled individually: ‘At Home’, ‘Child’s Play’, ‘Dressing Up’, ‘Dressing Up Box’, ‘Expedition’, ‘Instruction and Information’, ‘Juke Boxer’, ‘Leadership’, ‘Refuse’, ‘Revisitation’, ‘Spirit World’, ‘The Lonely Voice’, ‘The Tourist’, ‘The Tour’. Each of these suggests a label under which Farquhar’s work can be categorized. However, upon opening the boxes the

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same performances appear multiple times, in different boxes. They simply will not stay put. These lively performances are intent on dismantling borders and moving between. They demolish taxonomies. The locating or situating of performances made before 2006 uses a different method, with diagrams showing more explicitly the flow between performances and their multiple relations (see Farquhar n.d.b). Perhaps one reason for Farquhar’s marginalization within existing histories of Live Art is her and her work’s dynamic mobility.

Beginning again I might like to work backwards to the beginning of the biography because I think it’s quite difficult for me to know where to start Farquhar 2015b

At the outset, I claim my perspective: I approach Farquhar’s work in this chapter through the lens and lines of auto/biography. It is July 2015 and I am in London to interview Farquhar. My intention is to put her Live Art biography into print for the first time. Having seen several of Farquhar’s performances over the years, I should have known better than to ask her to start at the beginning. This is not how Farquhar tells stories. Instead of starting at the beginning – How could such a time be identified? When does one ‘become’ an artist? – Farquhar takes me out for a walk. This walk unfolds over many miles and hours, intersecting with the routes of performance-walks Farquhar has created over decades (Walking, Talking, Living Yarn, 1999; Beano to Blustens: An Artist’s Shopping Spree,  2005; Flaxman’s Exchange,  2013). The long paragraph below presents auto/biographical li(n)es extracted from what I mis/heard and is mimetic of the walk we shared. I have resisted the impulse to join up the dots or reorder the lines. Farquhar’s Irish mother ran a boarding house in Chelsea. Her mother was and remains a consummate storyteller (‘tell Dee that story … ’ Marcia requests). Marcia’s childhood brought her into contact with death and mental illness. Learning – books and more books – offered her liberation from what she perceived as the grip of morality, goodness and fear emanating from her home environment. Part of her self-education was directed towards trying to understand madness and depression. She started with Freud and found R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self on her brother’s bookshelf. She attended the Philadelphia Association, where she asked Laing for some tips on dealing with depression. He told her to dress well. At fourteen she saw A Clockwork Orange and the very next day did not want to go to church because she wanted to be in the real world, one which included darkness. She digresses, she says. She considers herself a fine artist, working with concepts and scores. She loses her scripts in venues and is sure this is unconsciously related to being in the present. Her mother said that her father ‘regretted the past, dreaded the future, and could not enjoy the present’. She remembers writing a dissertation at art school and putting in an errata and then another, and then she thought that she’d like to write a book, have it published and then go every day to

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every bookshop and put the errata in, so actually the errata would swell the book, and then she thought she should just make the book open, like a file, so it never ends, and never begins. She has often said that she trusts art more than science because at least it doesn’t say it’s true. She has a slight regret that she is not a mathematician. Her father was a trained physicist. She excelled in maths as a child. Her father taught her fractions when she was three. Following her father’s death she had a very deep longing to die so she could be with him, because that’s what she was told. Not by him, because he was a Marxist. She grew up in a time when there was a Welfare State and she was on the welfare side. She got into RADA, but chose not to go because she knew that though she could create great tragic or comedic effect it would be drawn from a deep interiority and she didn’t know how she would put it back in after and shut the door. Sometimes her motivation is self-preservation. She has never taken heroin or anti-depressants. She is keen to bludgeon on through and learn. She is influenced by English surrealism – Lewis Carrol and Edward Lear. And Absurdism. And James Joyce. And Samuel Beckett. And Camus. And punk. She studied at University College London (UCL) in the  1970s shuttling between departments, including The Slade, and graduated with a degree in English and History of Art (after a professor’s wife invited her to lunch and said she was to settle down, choose her subject and graduate; she had wanted to abandon her studies and move to Spain). She remembers making a big metal face mask that went up to the Edinburgh Fringe and never came back. Those were the times – not holding onto the things you made. She returned to UCL in the 1990s to complete a Masters and now appears as a visiting artist and guest lecturer. She doesn’t like too much divulged about her family. The day after her father died, a friend of the family took her in and said ‘Marcia is being wonderful’. (She delivered a great performance of wonderfulness on top of grief.) This was the rock upon which she perished because when she heard her say that, she thought, ‘I’ve got to be wonderful from here on in’. Jollity and eccentricity are covers for other emotions. A lot of the people she is drawn to might be called ‘cracked’ but through that comes wisdom and insight. Genet’s Saints and Lou Reed are more influential to her as auto/biographers than Spalding Gray. Their work is more tangential, less diaristic or close to the ‘truth’, but nevertheless ghosted by reality. She loves storytellers. Her nickname at The Slade was Joan, after Joan of Arc (and her coat of armour). Playing with language was very much part of her family of origin. She is always going on archaeological digs in her mind. She spent ten years in therapy, from her late 20s to late 30s. She considers herself an amateur psychologist, in fact an amateur at lots of things, motivated both by love of them and by necessity. I have written elsewhere about the relationship of auto/biography to performance, and how it is that performance’s engagement with auto/biographical material gestures towards hope, looking forwards rather than backwards (Heddon 2008: 13). Farquhar’s approach to auto/biographical production, evidenced in our walk together, is sideways, tangential and oblique rather than straight-ahead. The future persists, but its coordinates are not yet plotted; radically, that ‘not yet plotted’ applies to the moment of auto/biographical performance as much as it does to the life being lived. In  Farquhar’s Live Art the auto/biographical presentation is live too. Connections through time and space are made in the here and now.

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Auto/biographical lines Many of Farquhar’s works are offered explicitly as auto/biographical. Acts of Clothing, first performed in 1999 at the South London Gallery, shares tales from across Farquhar’s life, each one prompted by and attached to a piece of clothing. Farquhar performs Acts of Clothing every seven years. Over the course of the performance, she slips out of and into garment after garment, some from other decades, some made for the occasion, including her flamenco tartan dress that pays homage to a supposed Scottish/Spanish heritage (her name – Marcia Farquhar – is a synecdoche of that heritage). Her bespoke dress is fitting attire for her improvised rendition of a Scottish Highland Flamenco Dance, unpolished and amateur in delivery but joyful in its unfettered, foot-stamping passion. Each outfit worn by Farquhar is set in its context – why she chose it, where she wore it, who else was there, what happened. After its turn, the outfit is dropped at her feet on the catwalk, a personalized form of action painting with the clothes’ colours like paint pigment. The tales, often meandering, are hilarious, insightful, poignant and painful, not just between or across, but within. Throughout her performance, Farquhar addresses the audience that is present, weaving their presence into her performance too through observations, responses and direct address. Afternoon: Content May Vary (2000), programmed by Deptford X, blurs explicitly the auto and the bio (Farquhar n.d.a). For this piece, Farquhar video recorded the afternoons of six female protagonists: the schoolgirl, the mother, the teacher, the patient, the artist and the shop assistant. The recordings offered a view into the real,

Figure 3.1  Marcia Farquhar, Sculpture. Photo by Jem Finer. Courtesy Marcia Farquhar.

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Figure  3.2  Marcia Farquhar, Acts of Clothing, Venice Palazzo Zenobio,  2013. Courtesy Marcia Farquhar.

Figure  3.3  Marcia Farquhar, Acts of Clothing, Venice Palazzo Zenobio,  2013. Courtesy Marcia Farquhar.

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everyday lives of each woman. Each afternoon, over six days, installed in a high-rise estate flat, Farquhar wore the clothes of her protagonists and performed as they had performed in the recordings. The piece functioned as a ‘femmage’ (a brilliant Farquhar neologism) to the everyday lives of women and to the different, multiple lives – or selves – that women perform; indeed, that Farquhar herself has performed. She has been these women. The Londoners (2005) experimented further with the auto/biographical form (Farquhar 2005c). A multi-cast show, the title references directly Joyce’s The Dubliners. The piece was shown in six episodes, over six days, at Artsadmin’s Toynbee Studios. The publicity material makes explicit the multiple universes brought into play: events from Farquhar’s family history (including sixty years of boarding-house life), TV soap operas and contributions from the performers – a rotating group of artists which included Gary Stevens, Jem Finer (her husband), Ella and Kitty Finer (her daughters), Franko B, Peggy Atherton, Jack Brennan and his mother Sophie Richmond, Ansuman Biswas and J. Maizlish. Some of the performers had personal knowledge of the events Farquhar had ‘fictionalized’, whilst others had none (ibid.). Where The Londoners extended the auto/biographical form by bringing in other performers and showing the piece over a number of days, The Omnibus (2010) explored a single, long-durational experience. Programmed for the National Review of Live Art’s thirtieth anniversary in Glasgow, The Omnibus was thirty hours in length and conceived as an ‘open-plan seminar … personal, political and punkish by nature’ (Farquhar 2010). Drawing on thirty years of personal history, Farquhar mixed up confessions, ruminations, reminiscences, commentaries, demonstrations, readings, record-playings, and dressing-ups and -downs, demonstrating that the personal is always historical too. Spectators could come and go throughout, with arrivals and departures often noted and addressed by Farquhar as she weaved them into her narrative. As the performance progressed – though ‘progress’, with its teleological overtones, is not quite the right word here – Farquhar would return to previous scenes and stories, criss-crossing not only her own life and the lives of those she shared (friends, family, acquaintances), as one storyline interrupted another, but criss-crossing across her live performance too, returning to a previous thread, running with it again, before letting it drop as another tangent is taken and so on. As she reconnects with an earlier thread, she reminds the spectator of its presence, of her and our having been here before. Her performance is a remarkable feat of memory. Numerous histories are mobilized – personal, social and cultural history, alongside the history of the live performance being made in front of the spectator. The long-durational form both prompted and held Farquhar’s meandering style, with forgettings and repetitions inevitable. By the end of the performance, the multiple, diverse stories seemed to have made an almost tangible surface of anecdotal history, the history of the past thirty years alongside the history of the past thirty hours. Lines were enmeshed and knotted; some were thicker than others as they were returned to and retold or extended; other lines continued as if they might go on to infinity. Farquhar’s Omnibus reminds us that no life story can ever be finished or told completely or from one perspective. These short summaries propose Farquhar’s approach to auto/biographical telling as radically non-teleological. Her yarns are spun through multiple divergences,

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deviations, digressions and tangents. A storyline is set off, often in the middle of its trajectory, only to become in turn another tangential line, which in turn diverts again. These multiple tangents and diversions nevertheless remain connected to each other in ways that are complex and criss-crossing. Farquhar’s model is one we might call a rhizomatic auto/biography. In coining this phrase, I borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, who differentiate the rhizomatic structure from the genealogical, arborescent model. Where the latter produces roots and branches, determined points and positions, the rhizome is an assemblage of ceaselessly established connections and multiplicities (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 8–17).4 The rhizome has the capacity of exploding into ‘a line of flight’ (ibid.: 10). In a rhizomatic structure – or a rhizomatic process – any point can be connected to any other, in distinction to points which are plotted and fix an order (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 7). In fact, there are no points as such, there are only lines – ruptured, lengthened, prolonged, relayed and varied which produce ‘lines of n dimensions and broken directions’ (ibid.: 9, 12). Rather than moving from a beginning or a foundation, the rhizome proceeds from the middle (ibid.: 28). With its conjunction of ‘and … and … and’, it uproots the verb ‘to be’. As the authors warn us, the questions ‘Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for?’ are totally useless (ibid.: 27). Witnessing Farquhar’s performances, we usually – and delightfully – have no idea where she or we are going to or coming from. Farquhar’s rhizomatic performance is supported by the assemblage of the personal, historical, mythical and fantastical; alignments and juxtapositions which confound certainty. As she writes, ‘The line between truth and fiction is always unclear, and, for me, that uncertainty is key’ (Farquhar 2009: 29). Her commitment to navigating a fine line between fact and fiction is explicit. Publicity materials repeatedly reference the tactic of undecidability: ‘Farquhar probes the nature of biography and autobiography and grapples with storytelling as a strategy that is forever renegotiating its relationship with truth’ (Farquhar 2010); ‘other aspects borrow from personal narratives, blending the biographical and autobiographical, while calling into question her authenticity’ (Farquhar n.d.c). This intermixing is part of her dramaturgy’s mobility. Farquhar creates a texture from her text, but it is shifting, dynamic, unpredictable, disorientating and exhilarating in equal measure. The effect of the work recalls Brian Massumi’s comment in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body? (Massumi 2004: xv–xvi)

While many of Farquhar’s performances appear at first sight to be monological – Farquhar is alone on the stage – that alone-ness is undone rapidly as the space fills with memories and stories of and from other people, alive and dead, real and fictitious, known intimately or vicariously. The Londoners’ multiple cast makes that not-aloneness or inter-connectedness explicit. However, even when Farquhar is physically alone on stage, it is not the – or her – single voice that is emphasized. It is, rather,

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Farquhar’s performances are busy with people, each person multiple but singularized in their uniqueness, and each offering other lines of flight out of and towards thinking the different and unexpected, undoing the self along the way.

The doubled self in an eccentric macrocosmos The dynamic multiplicity of Farquhar’s auto/biographical approach shares resonance with the opening lines of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: ‘The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd’ (2004:  3). However, given the threading of R.D. Laing through Farquhar’s autobiography, it is worth pondering her complex model of multiplicity in relation to his ideas. Indeed, Farquhar cited Laing directly in Mind Your Heads (2013), using a recorded reading of his writing (Farquhar 2013b). Mind Your Heads presented three ‘characters’, each held in its own large bin – a reference to Samuel Beckett – and each presenting a different position on an argument. As Farquhar explains, this was a three-way dispute ‘between herselves’, offering a literal representation of Laing’s ‘divided self ’. After this dispute, Asuman Biswas and Jem Finer joined Farquhar, each taking a bin and making the differences of opinion more tangible. The bins, ‘as well as hosting the divided self ’, were ‘nomadically’ moved ‘pulpits … from which three ideologically opposed speakers could move further and closer to each other in space, time and paradoxical speech’ (ibid.). The multiplicity of ‘self ’, then, refers not only to the relational self but also to the possibility of selves holding shifting and even contradictory positions. Farquhar is no autodidact; her work resists simplistic or dogmatic polarities. Ideological positions and beliefs are offered as sites of openness and contestation. Farquhar’s repeated references here to the ‘divided self ’ offer obvious homage to Laing’s book of that name. Notably, Laing and Guattari were linked to each other through their shared interest in radical psychiatry. Massumi notes Guattari’s ‘uneasy alliance with the international antipsychiatry movement spearheaded by R.D. Laing in England and Franco Basaglia in Italy’ (2004: x). Guattari was uneasy with Laing’s ‘communitarian solution’ which he viewed critically as an ‘extended Oedipal family’ (2004: 568). Laing’s The Divided Self (1959) offers an existential, phenomenological account of the schizophrenic subject. In part a heart-felt political treatise on the categorizations of sanity and insanity – the statesmen in control of nuclear weapons are more estranged from reality than many of those diagnosed and labelled as psychotic, and are also more dangerous (Laing 1990: 12) – The Divided Self also offers an analysis of schizophrenia. Given Farquhar’s enduring interest in Laing, his analysis provides an interesting context and lens through which to approach her dialogical and multiply inhabited performances.

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Laing describes the schizophrenic person as unable ‘to experience himself   “together with” others “at home in” the world’ and instead ‘experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation’ (1990:  19). Alternatively, the schizophrenic feels utterly merged with the other, the outcome of which is an absence of sense of self because one is separate only through relatedness. The sense of complete merging leads to a desire for complete isolation, in the hope of detachment but also, relatedly, as symptomatic of a need to be in control and to sustain a transcendent self, thereby mitigating the contingency of life and living (ibid.:  83). The polarity, then, as identified by Laing, ‘is between complete isolation or complete merging of identity rather than between separateness and relatedness’ (ibid.: 53). Either way, the schizophrenic ends up isolated. For Laing, such isolation produces an impoverished life: ‘The self by its detachment is precluded from a full experience of realness and aliveness’ (ibid.: 83). Though the isolated self develops an internal microcosmos, an intra-individual world (ibid.:  74), this is no substitute for the shared world which, by contrast, allows for a mutually enriching, ‘creative relationship with the other’ (ibid.: 83). Viewed from the perspective offered by Laing, Farquhar’s staged cosmos registers as an interpersonal or even eccentric macrocosmos, the ‘self ’ multiply connected rather than divided. This connected self is a self of immanence rather than transcendence and as such is precarious but also enriched. The richness of Farquhar’s performances and stories is a result of connectivity. Looking at the map of The Londoners reproduced on Farquhar’s website (Farquhar 2005c), she seems firmly in favour of Laing’s extended family. What looks initially to be a typical genealogical ‘family tree’, with Landlady Priss and Landlord Hoffnung at the top, is revealed as a mapping of storylines rather than bloodlines (rhizomatic rather than arborescent then). Each subject is a multiple connector. And in the live moment in front of us, Farquhar is the dynamo – detecting, connecting and rerouting energies. Farquhar admits fascination with the potential of the performer to be an energyconductor and energy-shifter (Farquhar  2015b). Reflecting on the play of energies, she draws inferences to both chemistry and physics (ibid.), seeming to work at the molecular level of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘material forces’ (2004: 377). As Laura Cull explains, ‘Molecular perception perceives the world immanently’ (2012: 36). Notably, one of the characters in The Londoners references precisely life’s immanent creativity: If you wait long enough it will fix itself. How? Well, it’s just a random ordering of particles, and particles, if you wait long enough, will go into any number of forms. It’s just the way the universe works. (Farquhar 2005c)

Lively lines and yielding surprises Farquhar supports her orientation to the immanent through a commitment to the paradox of rigorous contingency, a strategic mixing of plot and line. Versed in terms of conceptual art, she produces what she refers to as ‘the score’ or ‘the fluxus card’, ‘copious notes and scores and scripts’ which, in the moment of live performance, she departs

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from (Farquhar  2015b). As an undergraduate student at Slade, Farquhar’s sculptor tutor observed that, problematically, she tended to ‘hold onto the material’ (ibid.). As Farquhar explains, while the planning stage of sculptural practice, in terms of concept and material, must be clear and defined, there comes ‘a certain point, which is exciting for an artist … when the material rebels in some way, does something surprising, yields a surprise’. Farquhar reflects that on reaching that point she ‘was frightened. I would always hold on’ (ibid.). Working with the material of live performance – time, space, spectators – Farquhar has succeeded in developing an approach that is sculptural. Before the performance, she has a rigorously conceived concept; in the event of the performance, she releases the material and then follows it, alert to its liveness. The work does not pre-exist its enactment but occurs in the very process and moment of its making. Farquhar’s departure – or what she refers to as ‘drift’ – from her script is a responsiveness to the live moment, an attentiveness to ‘the chemistry’ of that moment (ibid.). We might consider this performance’s immanent potential, the ‘mobile, material energy of the world’ or ‘matter-energy’ (Cull 2012: 27). Responding to matter-energy, Farquhar ‘opens herself to being’, taking some ideas but then ‘seeing where they go in a conversation’ (Farquhar 2015b). I am reminded of Deleuze and Guattari’s proposition that the force of immanence sweeps the artist along so that ‘one launches forth, hazards an improvisation’ (2004: 343; see also Ingold 2010). Farquhar edits each performance in the moment of its occurrence, every performance a result of who is there and how it feels. This is to approach performance as ‘event’, a ‘realm of matter and energy, bodies and forces’ (Bayly 2011: 44). Though the material produced by Live Art is mostly intangible, the lines that Farquhar goes along are, to borrow from Massumi’s presenting of the rhizome, ‘a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connected routes could exist’ (Massumi 2004: xiv).5 This almosttangible dynamic fabric is a social plastic (Maizlish 2009: 14). That is, the dynamism of social relations are the lines that Farquhar works with. Nevertheless, she relies on the script, because without it ‘there’s no such thing as spontaneity’ (Farquhar 2015b). The script is the line’s possibility, the architecture for its immanent performance. The ‘social plastic’ of Farquhar’s work is perhaps most evident in those performances dependent on spectators’ participation. In The Pool of Fun and Games (2004, Camberwell Leisure Centre), for example, Farquhar invited spectators to wear nighties, climb into the swimming pool and float as if dead whilst she threw gladioli into the water, creating an ‘Ophelia effect’. When the music changed, she invited participants to perform other choreographic moves, including shooting each other. Theatre critic Leo Benedictus captured the improvisational energy in his review: It’s marvellous fun. In a spontaneous moment (suggested by [his partner] Sarah during the Love sequence), I pick her up and carry her, drooping-heroine-style (‘like Juliet’), around the pool. (2004)

In The Doctors and Dreamers Game (2005, South London Gallery), presented in August – apparently the month when analysts take their holiday – Farquhar offered dream analysis for those left behind. Participants were invited to bring a dream with them, or to have one in the gallery (encouraged by the provision of beanbags). Farquhar offered analysands a deck chair, with other spectators invited to sit and observe the

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session (Farquhar 2005b). The Interpretation of Everyday Life (2007) focused again on psychoanalytical procedure, though this time in a lecture theatre where Farquhar listened ‘to the everyday anxieties, pleasures, proclivities and desires of volunteers’, providing a ‘prognosis and prescription for the appropriate dream (or dream series) to assist in the sublimation of that individual’s conscious concerns and/or wishes’ (Farquhar 2007). Evident in these works is an enduring interest in the psyche. Resisting polarities, Farquhar has demonstrated an equal fascination with the psychic and the supernatural. Many of her performances draw on practices of divination or supposed conversations with the dead. You Will Find Love in a Public Place (2004), for example, projected the shapes of molten lead onto a wall to divine the future (Farquhar dressed in a black dress and shawl for the occasion), while Fortune Cookie (2005) predicted the future from projected images of eggs, cake mix and dough. These ‘psyche’ and ‘psychic’ works are necessarily improvised, responding to the agency of people and materials in the space. Thinking rapidly in, for and to the present moment perhaps circumvents momentarily some of the repressive mechanisms of the conscious mind, prompting something more like a stream-of-consciousness or stream-of-the-subconscious. Former tutor Stuart Brisley refers to Farquhar as a ‘narrator breaking out of the raconteur’s mode’, with ‘child’s play’ allowing the ‘deep rumblings of the psyche (to) erupt every now and again’ (2009: 9). This eruption of the psyche – a surrealist methodology – offers one way to interrupt everyday repression, re-singularizing subjectivity and displacing what Guattari refers to as its ‘mass-media manufacture, which is synonymous with distress and despair’ (2008: 23). Where R. D. Laing focused his analysis on the subject experiencing schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘schizoanalysis’ to figure the unconscious as rhizomatic (2004: 18). The political ambition of schizoanalysis is to resist reducing the unconscious through interpretation. Instead, ‘the issue is to produce the unconscious, and with it new statements, different desires’ (2004: 18–19). Representational thinking is exchanged for nomadic thought, which offers a ‘conductivity that knows no bounds’. The nomadic thought is a vector: ‘the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction’ (Massumi 2004: xiii). I propose that Farquhar’s performance modality is that of the vector. Contributors to Farquhar’s book, 12 Shooters, make reference to her ‘quirky sidetracks’ and deviations, ‘highways and byways’, ‘twists and turns’, ‘slippages’ (Suchin  2008:  18) and ‘diverted trains of thought’ (Maude-Roxby 2009: 189). Notably, these descriptions of her practice place the work, as if her performances have a given or presumed geography or map from which she deviates, defying expectations and habits, including perhaps the expectations of auto/biographical storytelling.

Literal drifts The contingent nature of Farquhar’s work is perhaps most apparent in her guided tours, where the ‘real world’ – with its encounters, accidents and mistakes – takes a visible role in and reroutes the score or script. As with all her performances, Farquhar’s tours, also auto/biographical in content, respond to the specificities encountered. They

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are never repetitions. In this sense, we might recognize her work not as reproduction, iteration or reiteration, but rather ‘itineration’ (Deleuze and Guattari  2004:  410) or perhaps ‘situation’. Space permits only fleeting reference to Farquhar’s extensive walking performances; placing Farquhar firmly into Live Art’s history, I also want to signal her place in the history of walking aesthetics.6 Farquhar has been making walking work for decades. Walking, Talking, Living Yarn (1999), commissioned by the British Library, invited spectators on a tour of the Kings Cross area, sharing stories from former residents who had lived there before its regeneration and gentrification, and who by 1999 were part of the British Library’s audio recordings collection. (Residents included live artist Rose English.) Though never herself a resident of the area (she was an insider–outsider), Farquhar had been closely associated with many of the individuals who lived there in the 1970s. Beano to Blustens: An Artist’s Shopping Spree (2005), constructed as an antishopping trip, took participant-spectators from Berkeley Square to Farquhar’s local hosiery shop, Blustens. Less a walking performance than a touring one, as spectators were bussed to Blustens, Marcia sold ‘Marciapieces’ on the journey (Farquhar 2005a). The Dangerous to Know Society (2008), commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary, offered a tour of the house and grounds of Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home of Byron. In this, Farquhar shared ‘testimonials and confessionals from all the Byrons in her own life, and the women who loved them’, alongside histories of the Abbey (Farquhar 2008). In February 2010, Farquhar led a guided procession to the seaside shelter in Margate where T.S. Eliot had been inspired to write. The location offered a context for an exploration of the ‘physical, historical and social terrain between Dreamland and Wasteland’ (Farquhar n.d.d). As the publicity stated, Farquhar led ‘bemused locals through landscapes with which they’d previously thought themselves familiar’. It also noted that ‘Farquhar herself spent the early years of her life just across the Estuary in the seaside town of Felixstowe, over which sweep the same Russian Winter winds’ (ibid.). A more recent work, Flaxman Exchange (2013), UCL’s inaugural arts commission for the museum, offered a ‘misled’ tour of the newly refurbished Flaxman Gallery. This drew attention to not only – but little discussed – sculptures and their makers (invisible art and artists), but also unnoticed interventions (loo rolls hidden behind a bust presumably by the cleaners) (Farquhar 2013a). Farquhar credits as influences in her work both Punk and the Situationist International (SI) (Farquhar  2015b). It is worth noting the entanglements between these two movements. To take just one example, Malcolm McLaren’s final project for his degree at Goldsmith’s College was a psychogeographical film of Oxford Street (though this film, like his degree, remained unfinished). McLaren wrote some notes about his intentions in 1970: 30  September: To use a kid’s eyelevel to describe ordinary situations and to get the utmost out of these situations. Showing the structure of Oxford Street thru the eyes of a child and the effect it has on him and his elders . … Cut into this an older person’s viewpoint … Showing how an adult is still a child still no control. (McLaren 1970, in Savage 2010 [1991]: 13)

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Figure 3.4  Marcia Farquhar, Flaxman Exchange, UCL, 2013. Courtesy Marcia Farquhar.

Figure 3.5  Marcia Farquhar, Flaxman Exchange, UCL, 2013. Courtesy Marcia Farquhar.

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Figure 3.6  Marcia Farquhar, Flaxman Exchange, UCL, 2013. Courtesy Marcia Farquhar.

By the mid-1970s, McLaren and Vivienne Westwood had launched a new line of clothing, ‘Couturiers Situationnistes’ (Savage 2010: 210), with one of the slogans on a shirt sold in McLaren’s and Westwood’s shop being a direct appropriation of an SI slogan: ‘Demand the Impossible’ (Savage  2010:  239). Intersecting with Farquhar’s commitment to liveness and aliveness was punk’s response to boredom: get up and ‘Do It Yourself ’. Farquhar’s proclivity for amateurism is indebted to this DIY-aesthetic – ‘punk allowed you to try anything, but not as an excuse for failure’ (Farquhar 2015b). The enemy of psychogeography was boredom too; as the slogan proclaimed: ‘Boredom is Counter-Revolutionary’. Psychogeography – like Farquhar’s performances – by contrast was ‘turned towards desire, towards excitement, towards life’ (Pile 2005: 13). Psychogeographical practices are visible in Farquhar’s guided-tours. Psychogeography was intended as a radical intervention in the alienating and deadening experience of urban spatial experience and sought to create new knowledge of the city at the same time as it revealed current but unrecognized habits and atmospheres. One technique for creating new encounters was the dérive or drift, described by SI founder Guy Debord as ‘a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences’ involving ‘playful-constructive behaviour …, which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll’ (Debord [1958] 2006: 52). Steve Pile underlines

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that ‘chance and coincidence are significant’ for psychogeographers because they ‘allow for unplanned discoveries to be made’ (2005: 11). Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift meanwhile refer to such unplanned discoveries as the immanent forces resident in the everyday (2002: 9), adding that the ‘lived complexity’ of the city ‘requires alternative narratives and maps based on wandering’ (ibid.: 12). Though Farquhar had routes planned for her tours, the eruption of the ‘everyday’ ensured the drift from her scripts. She recollects that on one of her Walking, Talking, Living Yarn tours (the term ‘living yarn’ is suggestive of dynamic, mobile threads or lines) she coincidentally bumped into one of the ‘characters’ she was telling stories of/ from. Unaware that a performance was taking place, he asked her for £15 for a billiard cue. Everyone on the tour presumed he was a plant (Farquhar 2015b). The tour ended at Argyle Square Gardens, which Farquhar revealed had been a plague pit and then the site of a failed fair. More recently, the park was a place for drug consumption and sex, with cheap hotels used by prostitutes surrounding it. One of Farquhar’s ‘fixed’ lines spoken here was ‘some places are just resistant to fun’, a reference to the repeated, layered ‘failures’ of the space and to the still-tangible atmosphere of desperation. While psychogeographic practices are evident in Farquhar’s work, the word ‘drift’ applies to her ‘drifting’ from the lines of her guiding script, rather than literally drifting through geographical space (though that script-drift does serve to remap spatial meaning). In this respect, I propose a similarity between what happens in the studio or performance space, and what happens on the guided walks. Similarly, if psychogeography is a practice that seeks to be alert and responsive to ambience in urban space, then Farquhar’s alertness and responsiveness to the shifting ambience of her performance space – wherever this is – might suggest a practice that could usefully be called psychoperformance. My use of this word here intends to signal a relocation of the ambient ‘drift’ of psychogeography – a practice which demands attention and response to surroundings – to the performance space. In this context, the drift is conceptualised as a dramaturgical deployment, but one no less responsive to and affected by the shifting moods of the environment and which in turn affect that place. Farquhar’s act of drifting from her script seems generatively coincident with anthropologist Tim Ingold’s notion of creativity as a practice of wayfaring. Within Ingold’s set of references, Farquhar’s script could be considered the pre-composed plot providing her with set lines, while the material conditions of live performance allow her to perform as a storyteller and take her line for a walk (Ingold 2007, 2011). Drawing on the writing of Paul Klee, Ingold proposes that the line which goes out for a walk is one that ‘develops freely, and in its own time’ (Ingold  2007:  73). This line ‘takes us on a journey that has no obvious beginning or end’ (ibid.), in contrast to the line which ‘is in a hurry’, getting from one predetermined and fixed point to another, following a set sequence as if completing ‘a series of appointments rather than a walk’ (ibid.). For Klee, as indeed for Ingold, the line that simply connects dots is static, ‘linking a series of points arrayed in two-dimensional space’. In contrast, the line that goes for a walk unfolds along, creating a trail through three-dimensional space. Envisioning the walking line as attached to – or making – three-dimensional space offers a graspable and accurate image of Farquhar’s ephemeral practice. Ingold claims this way of walking a line as wayfaring:

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Farquhar not only creates rhizomatic auto/biographies; she is a wayfaring auto/ biographer. Her auto/biographical performance – like life – is a line of becoming or, more accurately, creates multiple lines that become. Deleuze and Guattari’s reference to ‘hazarding an improvisation’, noted earlier, is also a precise and useful description of Farquhar’s process (2004: 343, emphasis added). Improvisation, letting go of the script in the moment of live performance, is undoubtedly hazardous. Farquhar summons and is summoned by the hazardous. The very condition of Live Art is its liveness, and this liveness, as liveness – in the moment, here and now – must be precarious. The precarious and live/ly are synonymous. Brisley captures something of the precarity of Farquhar’s style when he writes: At times, in the moment of the high rush, when a new thought/feeling intuitively strikes, she is transported – sometimes gracefully, at others akimbo – into new formulations of social connections. (2009: 9)

In these moments of the ‘high rush’ the lines of narrative fly along unplanned tangents, or vectors suddenly bifurcate the story, sending it in oblique and tenuous directions, away from the known and safe. Farquhar goes along as she goes along, her unfolding stories alert to chance. Samuel Beckett, another of Farquhar’s influences, is similarly alert to the precarity of life’s aliveness, its immanent indeterminacy: The confusion is not my invention … It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in … To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now. (Beckett in Graver and Federman 1999: 218–19)7

Farquhar’s tangential performance practice offers one response to this lively chaos, not an accommodation seeking to control, repress or revise, but rather to acknowledge and perhaps to harness: The story is precarious. If we talk about post-traumatic, how do we talk about trauma on-going? Our precarious state as citizens of the world? (Farquhar 2015b)

Performing her vulnerability in the moment of working with precarity, Farquhar does not just represent the unpredictability of everyday experience, she enacts it. As much as precarity is the ontological condition of Live Art, it also is life. In sharing her divergent auto/biographies, created as she drifts along multiple pathways engendered through her performances, accompanied by the living and dead, the more and less real, Farquhar’s wayfaring auto/biographer offers a salutary reminder that life is not and cannot be a line to be plotted. The precarious, in its uncertain state, is not

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entirely hopeless.8 Making the connection between life and precarity, Farquhar notes sardonically ‘death is the least precarious, I imagine, because it’s certain’ (Farquhar 2015b).

Notes 1 Acme was founded in 1972. Realizing that many houses in London had been identified as slums and were due to be demolished by Greater London Council, a group of recent graduates registered as a housing association in order to temporarily acquire the derelict houses and shops and repurpose them as artists’ live-work spaces. Over its first decade, Acme’s enterprise expanded from two disused shops to over 250 properties. In 2013/2014, Whitechapel Gallery mounted an archive display of this first decade. See http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/downloads/PR_ACME_Archive_Exhibition_ Final_08.07.pdf (accessed 1 April 2017). 2 LADA’s DIY scheme, which launched in 2002, offers development opportunities run by artists for artists. 3 http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=jukebox. 4 Deleuze and Guattari are not intent on establishing a binary between the rhizomatic and the arborescent. The ‘tree’ can be seen as rhizomatic too, its roots forming a rhizome with other things outside (2004: 12). As they write, the rhizome is immanent to all roots, and the root is immanent to the rhizome: ‘The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel’ (2004: 22). 5 In some of Farquhar’s performances, residual sculptures remain, for example, molten lead, baked cakes, vaginal imprints, a massively oversized hobby-horse, a furball of old coats and toy carcasses stitched together. 6 Farquhar is even more absent from the rapidly emerging history of and discourses about walking aesthetics than she is from Live Art. 7 Indeed, Samuel Beckett is thanked and credited on one of Farquhar’s webpages from 2004. See http://archive.marciafarquhar.com/credits/credits-a.html (accessed 1 April 2017). 8 I am aware that precarity has different meanings. Prompted by Farquhar’s practice, I am choosing here to focus on precarity as being at least a state of openness to different outcomes (positive as well as negative). This is not to deny that precarity is differentially distributed – some people are subjected to precarious conditions and effects more than others.

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Part Two

Performances of Conflict, Resolution, Hurt and Healing

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4

The Gold Standard: The Performances of Franko B Dominic Johnson

Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Gold-gloved punches slap into a gold leather punching bag. The target tenses under the sequential weight of his jabs and roundhouse lobs. It swings heavily on gold chains, a drowsy pendulum securing our attention in the centre of the space. Franko B is dressed head-to-toe in gold: gold leather boots, gold acrylic shorts and vest, and gold leather headgear. The gold expanses of hide and fabric that cover his body are monogrammed with distinctly visible icons: the number twenty-two, a reference to his registration number at a childhood orphanage; and thick, squat plus signs, reminiscent of the logo of the Red Cross – both transfigured in darker shades of gold. His gold attire wrestles visually with his heavily decorated skin, tattooed from head to toe with a multitude of symbols and images, including the numbers and crosses, as well as flames, laughing Aztec skulls, drawings, swirls and swathes of handwriting. His body is augmented by further modifications, including the gold teeth set in his confident prognathous jaw. The performance is Milk and Blood (2015), and I am sitting in a tight circle with around eighty other spectators, in a grand old venue in East London, the Court Room at Toynbee Studios. Tonight, the polished panelled walls of the former juvenile courtroom reverberate under the heavy crunching sound of Franko B’s fists. The poetry of his lurching breaths is activated by the continuous incantation of disparate spoken words, as a litany that accompanies his assault. ‘Every talent must unfold itself in fighting’, writes Friedrich Nietzsche, suggesting both the laying out of one’s authority through a project of wilful antagonism and (in its English translation) an ‘unfolding’ of one’s ascendancy – through a career, or a life – in the sense of its depletion, unbinding or undoing (1976: 37). What of Franko B’s fight, and his fighting talk? In Milk and Blood, Franko B speaks in a hushed, deep, distinctly accented voice, recounting a strained concrete poem of sorts throughout the forty minutes or so of his performance. The text, titled ‘Insignificant’, consists of around 900 solitary words. It begins:

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Figure 4.1  Franko B, Milk and Blood, Toynbee Studios, London, 2015. © Franko B. Photo by Stefano Teodori. Courtesy Franko B.

Love, insignificant, this, insignificant, body, insignificant, powerless, insignificant, never, insignificant, democracy, insignificant, pain, insignificant, life, insignificant,  shit, insignificant, fuck, insignificant, artist, insignificant, I, insignificant, mediocrity, insignificant, deleted, insignificant, self, insignificant, promoted, insignificant, love, insignificant, more, insignificant, love, insignificant, beyond, insignificant, reason, insignificant, wounds, insignificant.

Interrupted by the repetition of the word ‘insignificant’, phrases appear from the seemingly random, hieroglyphic or algorithmically constructed series of words, like ‘Love […] this […] body’, or ‘more […] love […] beyond […] reason’, suggesting a subliminal structure of feeling, barely concealed messages, sentimentality, a method to his madness. The streaming litany ends with a repeated phrase: ‘I have language on my side, I have language on my side’.1 His poem is one of grief, as well as anger, prompted perhaps by his own intimations of failure, or of squandered potential, as a human being and as an artist. The words, I later learn, are piped into an earpiece concealed beneath his gold leather headgear, and he repeats these heard words as he punches. This rote repetition provokes a leaden quality in his iteration, which usefully offsets the gravitas of the words, which could otherwise be showy, theatrical or maudlin. Notably, the performance is not about boxing, nor sports, even though it partakes in its imagery, and exploits its signature imperatives and effects – of endurance, training, physical mastery, phallic prowess (and its disappointments), loss and spectacle. His voice gets audibly more stressed and winded as the performance progresses. We see blood rise under Franko B’s skin. Unlike his earlier, iconic performances, blood is not spilled literally in Milk and Blood. As he sits in front of me between later rounds, I can see the flesh on the back of his neck is flushed crimson, as if the blood strains for release

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under the densely tattooed surfaces of his body. The blood rises and falls in his carcass, animating him, and revealing his animality, his power and his vulnerability. The gold bag should ‘bleed’ milk from its undercarriage – hence the title. According to Franko B’s design, milk ought to drip to the floor and produce a swelling pool of viscous white fluid in which he will dance as he moves in and out of range and circles his target.2 The dead weight doesn’t bleed tonight. The mechanism has been improperly tightened and won’t release as planned under the weight of Franko B’s punches. It bled last night in a version performed alone for a live-streamed audience, and it will bleed tomorrow, in the second and final performance in this short first run. It is tempting to read the place of boxing – or, at least, of boxing training – in Milk and Blood as a metaphor, or synecdoche, for something bigger than itself – for, perhaps, the maternal body. The lore of Franko B’s life emphasizes his abusive childhood, and his abandonment to an orphanage, and in this light it might be seductive to see the punching bag as a lactating cipher for the body of the (his) mother, now retaliated against in the space of fantasy (entering the world, the helpless child relinquishes its reliance on the mother’s blood in utero for the surfeit of the mother’s milk, hence perhaps the bridge between the two substances in the title). It is attractive to see the spectacle of the fight as a stand-in, somehow, for his earlier, better-known bloodletting performances – for the drama of an endurance that risks or romanticizes the artist’s unsafety – or as a surrogate for one or more of his persistent overarching themes, of vulnerability, physical risk, martyrdom or the transformative possibility harnessed by the spectacle of suffering. Joyce Carol Oates writes that she cannot ‘think of boxing as a symbol of something beyond itself, as if its uniqueness were merely an abbreviation, or iconographic’. However, she continues, ‘I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing – for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined’ (1997: 4). This does not prevent, of course, the spectacle of boxing from being meaningful, suggestive, prone to inciting understanding, or susceptible to revelation. As Oates notes, ‘The boxing match is the very image, the more terrifying for being so stylized, of mankind’s collective aggression; its ongoing historical madness’ (1997: 21). Indeed, Franko B’s appropriation of boxing refers back to earlier usages in his paintings (generally thick black impasto lines on a black surface) and stitched drawings (large canvases using coloured wool to map out images in straight lines); these sometimes appropriated images of boxers from print sources, alongside a panoply of other borrowed depictions – generally of men and boys – including gay pornography, or photojournalistic pictures of soldiers, victims of war, child migrants and corpses. Boxing is not necessarily a privileged subject or figure in Franko B’s cosmology, but a suggestive one that migrates from his handmade artworks into his performed images. For Oates, then, boxing is bigger and more evocative than mere life. She is sensitive to the ways organized violence, or aestheticized brutality, might signify in aesthetic terms, which is not to say that the figure in the grip of a fight is equivalent to the figure of the artist. Although the representation of pain in art and performance cannot be taken as a direct signal of psycho-biographical truths secreted beneath or inside the work as its authentic source, the fact of pain in performance does lean upon the same logic in formal or structural terms. What, then, remains to be said of the

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relation between violence, suffering or rage in the space of performance? And what, specifically, is the significance of Franko B’s works in this regard? Is the performance of such negative affects a metaphor for life, or is life – the teeming morass of events, actions and experiences outside of art – a metaphor for art? I want to read Franko B’s body in performance – in Milk and Blood, and in earlier bloodletting performances, specifically I Miss You (Tate Modern,  2003) – without recourse to metaphor, or to specific material and historical realities outside the spectacles he creates. To refrain so goes against the grain of received means of reading his body in performance. In Milk and Blood, it is tempting to focus on the monogrammed and tattooed twenty-two’s and crosses, for example (which, as noted, refer to his young subaltern status as an orphan), and to link these to the depicted struggle of the performance – to decode symbolically the fight at the centre of the scene. In earlier performances, his apparently sacrificial body seems to invite readings of his life story – and his perceived or intuited psychobiography – in terms of the pain he appears to need to stage with us, or for us, perhaps as a communal act of catharsis, or mourning, or martyrdom. In his published writings, Franko B actively invites such a reading. In ‘I Feel Empty’, for example, he writes: My work presents the body in its most carnal, existential and essential state, confronting the human condition in an objectified, vulnerable and seductively powerful form. […] My concern is to make the unbearable bearable, to provoke the viewer to reconsider their own understandings of beauty and of suffering. (2004a: 226)

The title of Franko B’s essay itself invites the reader to engage the artist’s insights at the level of personal biography: his feelings – and the specific feeling of emptiness, which may signal dissociation, despondency, even depression – are privileged in the ways he accounts for this work. In the text itself, Franko B proceeds to outline his politics and his imperatives. In the excerpt above, the artist emphasizes the function of the body in his performances, with explicit reference to his bloodletting pieces, but also to other representations of suffering bodies, including those of homeless people he photographed incidentally for two years, in which the suffering body offers up its rupture – as a stigmata of sorts – for the other to bear witness to, and through which the viewer might redeem herself or himself through the experience. The ‘carnal, existential and essential’ body represents, for the artist, the ‘human condition’, that metaphysical notion of a universal situation, experience or truth of being, to which art is often billed as retaining or providing exclusive access. There is a whiff of a belief in immediacy and authenticity in this characterization, as though the carnality or brute materiality of the (bleeding) body in performance transcends or undercuts mediation or representation, creating a vital experience that heightens or reconditions our ways of seeing and beingtogether, which we may like to think of as muffled or compromised in the quickened paces and alienated spaces of daily social life. To be clear, I do not seek to disprove or rebut Franko B’s own sense of his imperatives or achievements. They are valid and true. However, perhaps it is useful not to take spontaneously an artist at his or her word, or to ask otherwise if the

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meanings and conclusions provoked by the experience of a specific work may often (or always) be bigger than, different to, or depart from the intended or wished-for effects that an artist might seek to implant in one’s own creative practice. What happens if the concept of meaning itself is detached, temporarily, from the search one engages in towards or as the work of art? For the carnal phenomenologist Alphonso Lingis, in his questioning of the authoritarian desire to seek out the cultural meaning of collective ritual performances, and particularly those entailing pain, endurance and bodily transfiguration, he writes: ‘Could not some of the meanings the interpreter detects in cultural performances be absurd, designate nothing but blind pain, or indeed designate a world full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?’ (2011:  136). Lingis argues that the point of such (non-dramatic, ritual) performances of ‘exalted emotions’ and corporeal excess may work less to produce a convenient set of cultural and social meanings, than to provoke ‘splendor’, an ineffable category of effects that are ‘dramatic, epic, cosmic’ in their ambivalent grandeur (2011:  137). The twentytwo’s, the cross, boxing, gold and the apparent martyrdom of Franko B’s scene all start to look less like symbols of a greater external reality – as if carefully coded, and worked into the script or structure of the text of the performance, ready for hermeneutic resolution – and resemble more an assault on the audience, and an act of barely subdued violence against our comfortable ways of reading performance, and against our understandings of the world. Franko B’s performances may be read in the context of the brute facticity of pain, struggle and endurance, as it occurs in external reality. However, I argue, this reality is not fully trafficked or refracted into performance when an artist enacts wounds or other signals of suffering, and one certainly cannot straightforwardly function as a metaphor for the other. Rather, while the two spheres of activity – the external reality and the represented one – run alongside each other, and intersect at moments of considerate reading, the invocation of painful imagery also works to remind us of the cultural difficulty we tend to take in addressing pain as a factor in the sphere of representation. Franko B invokes pain and suffering, often by way of the wound, or another modality of injury, not as a sentimental or merely provocative gesture, but rather to take into account the impossibility of securing pain as factual, essential or authentic, or as manifest incontrovertibly in the body of another person. We may intuit pain in the experience of the other, and even may approximate it through our own emotional and physical discomfort (sweaty palms, tightness in the stomach, fretful tears, heartbeat racing), as if by some effect of sympathetic magic. Yet pain cannot be located or identified in the body of the person whose performance of endurance or sadness one may meet with sympathy, in performance or in the other worlds of intimate experience. Such is the impossible, ineffable, immaterial nature of pain, as anyone who has tried to explain one’s own pain – to a doctor, friend or foe – may testify. How, then, do performances and their documentation produce or reproduce pain, including through pain’s avatar, the wound? How does pain, struggle or hardship enter into – or indeed foreclose – representation or signification? And who or what is challenged by the production or representation of pain, wounds and hardship in performance? How is the aesthetic register managed for the admissibility or propriety of pain, and other typologies of ugliness and bad feeling?

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Hardship Attending a performance can sometimes leave us, the audience, feeling wounded. Yet performance rarely ‘wounds’ us in the material sense of the word. Franko B’s performances tend to be exemplary of the way watching (and, frequently, participating) in performances may leave us feeling upset, cut up, overextended or emotionally compromised. Franko B’s Aktion 398 (Warwick Arts Centre, 2002) was my first live encounter with an overwhelmingly emotive performance event (and with Franko B’s performance outside of its documentation). I wait in a holding room, pull a numbered ticket from a dispenser and, when called, I enter a room for a one-to-one encounter with the artist, who is naked but for a conical collar worn by wounded dogs. Franko B sits, stands or lies in a soulless chamber, slathered in white paint and scored with a bloody surface wound in the side of his belly. I remember the hushed anxiety of waiting in the anteroom, and then standing board stiff in the performance space, and finally offering up a question: ‘Are you OK?’ ‘I’m tired’, he replies, in his broken grumble of a voice, his words spilling over gold teeth and out of the translucent acrylic funnel that frames his important face. My memory of the performance privileges the artist’s evocation of physical and mental hardship – the smarting of the cut (from a scalpel, behind the scenes), his visible and stated exhaustion, the emotional toll of serial intimate encounters – and my own unease, which does not involve physical hardship in the proper sense, but certainly requires or provokes a sense of deep anxiety, or fear, or grief. ‘Hardship art’ is a broad term provisionally used to describe performances and documentation that involve the production and representation of pain, wounds or physical endurance. It is a contested term – a failed term, even – not least because relevant artists (including Franko B) reject its tenability or usefulness. A guiding principle of the form, I think, is that experiences of hardship in art and performance – through endurance, physical exertion or the use of techniques appropriated from body modification – are wilfully executed, and the pain involved is consensual. This fact of limited agency does not undermine, necessarily, the efficacy of the hardships endured as art, but, rather, tends to exemplify or condition the meaningful effects produced in the encounter with such a work. What does a bloody or otherwise difficult performance want from me? What do I want of it in return? How will or must I respond to it? What is the performer’s duty towards me? Such questions cannot be resolved by measuring the acceptability, morality or legality of the artist’s actions. (At the very least, Franko B’s assaults upon his own self are immaculately acceptable: he follows the letter – if not the spirit – of the law.) Franko B belongs to a diverse generation of artists – including Ron Athey, Kira O’Reilly, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, ORLAN and Stelarc – who are significant for their explorations of the presentation of physical hardship in performance, and the suggestion of physical and emotional pain as produced (or evoked) by representations that disavow fakery, artifice or surrogation. While the amount of physical pain actually experienced by each performer is variable, and in some instances negligible (despite the appearance or visual suggestion of extreme suffering, for which blood and wounds are often misleading stand-ins), a sympathetic audience member is urged into

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situations of difficulty, discomfort and sometimes extremity. The durational image one encounters seems ‘extreme’ because it departs, often profoundly, from assumptions about the centrality of fakery in theatre and mimesis in art, or from the tendency to want our cultural experiences to be pleasurable, beautiful, wholesome or redemptive. Artists associated with hardship have received varying amounts of critical and scholarly attention, often of a celebratory or otherwise supportive nature. This work certainly has also garnered negative criticism from detractors. Indeed, the term ‘hardship art’ (and the work itself) may be deemed to stage, accept or naturalize a range of culturally problematic outcomes, including negative affects (or ugly feelings), crisis or misogyny. Nevertheless, since the  1990s museums and galleries have frequently programmed work that employs wounding and other ‘difficult’ images and actions. I define ‘difficult’ (or, variously, ‘challenging’) work in terms of Jennifer Doyle’s trenchant study of difficulty and emotion in performance and visual culture. Doyle defines such work as that which ‘feels emotionally sincere or real and that produces a dense field of affect around it even as it seems to dismantle the mechanisms through which emotion is produced and consumed’ (2013: xi). Such effects are of course individual, subjective and contingent, yet certain works – e.g. performances that court controversy or scandal  – may foster difficult receptions in audiences more acutely (or perhaps objectively) than others. The encroachment of canonical performances into major institutional spaces has reconfirmed and revivified scholarly interest in the critical challenges of performance art, though less in terms of physical extremity, endurance or hardship, and more substantially in terms of the persistent questions of presence, authenticity, re-performance and documentation. The earliest formative usage of the term ‘hardship art’ appears in an essay by the critic Jill Johnston in the magazine Art in America. Published in 1984, Johnston’s ‘Hardship Art’ analysed a performance by Tehching Hsieh and Linda M. Montano, Art/Life One Year Performance (Rope Piece) (1983–4), in which the artists were bound at the waist by an eight-foot rope for a full year. While Johnston does not elaborate directly upon her usage (and probable coinage) of the term, ‘hardship art’ described the production of a conflicted situation of social togetherness and isolation in the performance, as a trigger for psychological insights with political ramifications. Moreover, she argues, Hsieh and Montano conceived of the work as a rite of passage, suggesting the key themes of ritual, endurance and transformation (1984: 176–9). After  Johnston, theorists similarly accounted for painful performances to explore political agency and critical revaluations of the elusive ‘object’ of performance. In Unmarked, for example, Peggy Phelan notes that ‘a genre of performance art called “hardship art” or “ordeal art” attempts to invoke a distinction between presence and representation by using the singular body as a metonymy for the apparently nonreciprocal experience of pain’ (1993: 152). For Thomas McEvilley, when artists engaged hardship or suffering ‘art activity flowed into the darkness beyond its traditional boundaries’, suggesting the ‘darkness’ of unexplored vistas as well as that of existential scariness (2005: 233). American artists like Barbara T. Smith, Kim Jones, Paul McCarthy, Dennis Oppenhein, Carolee Schneemann and others ‘manipulat[ed] semantic categories, by dissolving their boundaries selectively and allow[ed] the contents of one to flow into another’ (ibid.). Hardship art – or as McEvilley terms it, ‘Ordeal Art’ – constitutes a space

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of radical will in which ‘extreme actions seemed justified, or even required, by the cultural moment’, so creating opportunities, via performance, that ‘break up the standard weave of everyday motivations’, such that ‘new options may make their way to the light’ (2005: 251).

The golden age of blood Since his rise to fame in the early 1990s, Franko B has been the subject of extensive critical and scholarly attention, bucking the trend of critical neglect as suffered by many other peer artists working in performance art and Live Art in the UK. In this section, I give an overview of some of the critical reception and published documentation of his work, partly in order to set up the ways in which his work has, to date, been received, understood and historicized. The emergence of writing on his work has been, in great part, an effect of his own commitment to preparing and publishing his own books. His earliest monograph, published in 1998, Franko B presents portentous and slick black-and-white photographs of private performances-for-camera, sculptural objects and assemblages, and his early live bloodletting performances at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, by the subcultural documentary photographer Nicholas Sinclair, as well as essays by Lois Keidan (then the recently departed Director of Live Arts Programming at the ICA), and the art critic Stuart Morgan. Describing Franko B’s performance of I’m Not Your Babe, Part One (ICA Theatre, 1996) as ‘high risk art at its purest’, Keidan asserts the artist’s avowed antitheatricality: ‘There is no artifice here, no pretence, no manipulation, no distance’ (Keidan  1998:  2). Keidan set a precedent for a trend in much future writings on Franko B’s work, which assumes (perhaps strategically) the unmediated presence of Franko B’s body, and the obsolescence of theatrical techniques. This is despite the evocative and nearly cinematic lighting that typifies his performances, and – in the early performances surveyed in the same book – the muted industrial soundtrack and dry ice that served to maximize the ominous character of his scenography. The symbolically loaded props he utilized also evidence the probable theatricality of such works: a rubber hot-water bottle, gas mask, wheelchair, medical catheters and orthopaedic callipers, and a cage. The privately conducted photographs in the book show Franko B naked, or adorned with medical accessories, invariably bloodied, or with his lips sutured shut (a protest against the then-recent criminalization of consensual sadomasochism in England in 1990). In the book’s central documents of live performances, Franko B’s illustrated body is flattened with white greasepaint; he bleeds from medical equipment inserted into the veins of his arms, smothers himself in the blood, dips his hands into puddles of it collected in a tin bowl, sucks a rag soaked in blood, or is enveloped bloody and battered in a thick and fearful fog. His second monograph, Franko B: Oh Loverboy (Franko B, Watson and Wilson 2001), presents photographs of his later performances in full colour, alongside objects, neon works and bloodied haute couture (garments constructed by commissioned fashion designers, using canvas mopped in and spattered with blood).

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Franko B’s critical audiences have attempted frequently to define the symbolic or semiotic function of the sight of blood, or the figure of the wound, in his key works. The performance artist Ron Athey writes, ‘It’s a rare truth of our bodies that we have all bled, are all on the brink of bleeding, save for one tiny prick of a pin. A common metaphor, for us in the emotionally wounded camp, is that we are bleeding inside’ (2006:  28). He suggests that blood loss is fundamental – even uniquely essential – to human bodily experience, and the implicit suggestion is that this might mitigate the assumption that its use as a technology in art and performance may be more or less inevitable, or at least not as shocking an irruption as some critics may perceive it. At the same time, it is highly significant or distinctive in its operation within the horizon of art and aesthetics, for it acts as a visual apotheosis of extremity, and of the avant-garde project of smuggling so-called real life into the spaces and practices of art. Looking Franko B full in the face during or after a performance, Athey adds, we see a secular transubstantiation of sorts, ‘a glassy-eyed change that betrays an alteration in body chemistry, a change in our blood’ (2006: 28). Franko B’s performances index extremity because, after Athey, neither the artist nor his audience seems quite the same afterwards, in physiological, expressive or personal terms, in good part owing to the shattering of our assumptions about what art can be, and how we should feel in its orbit. Athey’s short essay appears in Blinded by Love (2006), a collection of essays, images and written fragments. Among its long essays, Amelia Jones distinctively addresses the representation of whiteness in Franko B’s works, with reference to the painted covering of his body in his most iconic performances, and the counterpoint of black pigment in his paintings and covered objects (as well as in later performances: he performs painted jet-black in Love in Times of Pain [2008]). For Jones, these investigations trouble familiar distinctions between racial whiteness and blackness, but also suggest Franko B’s nuanced troubling of other binaries that run the risk of being seen as blackand-white issues in art criticism, including life/death, mind/body, hole/whole, beauty/ horror, self/other, presence/absence and so on (2006b: 19). Jones draws our gaze to the spectacle of Franko B’s body in pain, and the ebb and flow of his lifeblood. These and other political problems of vision may function, therefore, as cumulative affronts to our assumptions about the proper objects and effects of art. With the publication of Blinded by Love, Franko B announced his retirement from bloodletting, and his legend was set, or suspended in slow motion; then, arguably, he began to slide from the central position he occupied firmly at the centre of Live Art in the United Kingdom and Europe (he has never, to date, ‘broken’ the United States). His slippage from grace, however, is less to do with a decline in quality, prolificacy or nerve. Rather, he has been a casualty of the caprices and changing vogues of curators, festivals and institutions (which, in the UK at least, arguably have shifted away from the challenging practices of performance associated with the genealogies of visual art, and decamped ostentatiously, and perhaps conservatively, to the consolations of cabaret, participatory arts and theatre). As he stated around the time of the performance of Milk and Blood, ‘Looking introspectively, I can truly say that I have successfully wrecked my career as a “bleeding” artist’. He adds, however, that he has ‘continued [his] lust for life thanks to language’, referring perhaps to his prolific output as a maker of concrete poems, interviews, polemics, harangues and other textual assaults on culture,

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which sometimes result in discrete works – and at other times result in burning bridges (Franko B 2015). In art history, Franko B is a frequent passing reference and an invariable foil to arguments concerning obscenity, masochism, eroticism or excess: he often comes under fire for the perceived transgressions against propriety in his performances. These latter references are often sweeping, imprecise or sensational. In a typical discussion, in a book on art and eroticism, Alyce Mahon describes how Franko B ‘ritualistically cuts his flesh until potentially lethal amounts of his own blood pour out of his veins’ (2007:  238). Mahon’s description is sympathetic but homogenizing – it is unclear which performance she refers to – and described in a factually inaccurate manner. His veins are never ‘cut’, and the blood loss is not ‘lethal’. Where cutting with a scalpel does take place, as in Mama I Can’t Sing (1995), Aktion 398 (1998–2002), or in private performances, cuts are made in fleshy areas that are comparatively easy to heal, such as his back, chest or side. When he does bleed, the amount lost in the performance is equivalent to the quantity taken in a routine blood donation (around one pint, or just under half a litre), which is perfectly safe (even, arguably, therapeutic), unless practised too regularly. The volume of blood lost in his performances looks copious, or excessive, because it is scattered widely on accented surfaces, or visually heightened against the whiteout expanses of his skin. Mahon’s benevolent imprecision obscures the risk management, relative safety and technical proficiency of Franko B’s practices of body modification. These characterizations enable a suggestive yet arguable claim that his performances represent ‘his terrorizing celebration of self-destruction’ (Mahon 2007: 238), rendering Franko B’s performances terroristic, martyrological or masochistic. Franko B’s extremity has also invited sympathetic concerns about the physical and moral safety of his aesthetic. In a nuanced and provocative engagement, the art/life pioneer Linda Montano wrote two letters to Franko B, signing off with care as his ‘Art Mom’. In the first, she praises his riskiness, proclaiming that his radical investment in his work makes her ‘applaud and gasp in silence in the “eternal” presence of your life/art’, and comparing his extremity to her own historically punishing works – such as, implicitly, her one-year performance with Tehching Hsieh, mentioned above (2006: 177). In the second letter to Franko B, published alongside the first, Montano contradicts or balances her earlier celebration, still in the full spirit of friendship and of care, but borne out of the experience of her urge to leave his exceptionally bloody performance of Still Life (National Review of Live Art, 2005). Montano writes: Now that I’m 64, I worry about infections and damage to the body, about misuse of this house for the soul. Please listen to me: I am disgusted by my own use of art props and actions that brought gasps and silence to my ‘audiences’ and I don’t want you to reach my age and say, ‘what was I doing?’ So listen to [me]: do the opposite for a while. (2006: 177)

What might at first sound like a conservative injunction – no longer to ‘misuse’ or abuse his body – is balanced by Montano’s experience, her realization that the performance of endurance might place too great a demand, or too onerous a burden, upon the audience it produces.

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Most recently, Franko B is a guiding problem for Patrick Duggan in his useful analysis of the theme of trauma in contemporary performance, namely because his works catalyse the central questions of how performance – or what he terms ‘traumatragedy’ – may ‘represent’ personal, social or historical traumas, and the extent to which performance differs, departs from, or trumps the same capacity of other art forms (2012: 2). Duggan throws Franko B’s blood works into a dizzying mix of visually unforgiving practices in theatre and performance, including the formally disparate works of Kira O’Reilly, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Anthony Neilson, Sarah Kane and others. For Duggan, such works address trauma dramaturgically, ‘not simply by highlighting the existence of world traumas but by trying to embody and bear witness to trauma in an immediate way’. It does so, he argues, by intensifying the historical function of theatrical tragedy, but ups the ante, as it were, by seeking ‘to generate an effect of “real” presence, or presence in “reality”’, through recourse to intensified and fully ‘embodied’ experiences, which better represent the contemporary ‘structure of feeling’, which is more fully saturated by the pornography of violence (2012:  42–3). When an artist such as Franko B attempts to represent or invoke personal or social trauma, Duggan argues, the traditionally alleged unrepresentability of trauma is undermined or overcome. Yet such performances, he argues, retain the constitutive ambivalence of the split between ‘real’ experience and mimesis or representation. When this ambivalence is staged in proximity to trauma, such actions may provoke an unsettling ‘irruption of the mimetic into the real’ – that is, the shock of theatricality becomes suddenly visible amid the brute facticity of human suffering (2012: 64).

Suffering and propriety Franko B has been forthcoming in his discussions of how pain, suffering or hardship works as a technique in performance. In an interview in 2004, he explained in relation to the work of peers including Ron Athey, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, and Stelarc: ‘The dignity of the work is important [because] it allows for you to engage with that suffering in a responsible way. They need to set up precedents that allow people to learn more about the suffering of real people. Maybe that way others won’t have to make the same mistakes’ (2004b: 3). In public statements, Franko B does not avoid or obscure the function of (the representation or invocation of) suffering in his performances, especially in relation to the bold and bloody pieces he had been making for over a decade at the time we conducted our interview. He is also sympathetic to the ethical, moral and political problems that accompany the attempt to represent or give visual or textual shape to suffering that is one’s own, and, fundamentally, to suffering that belongs to or originates in the experiences of others. He continues, of his own performances: You could say that what I do is a selfish act, but what makes it important to me is that it has a use value, it is a tool for education, for reaching people and for the work that it does beyond just what it can do for the performer in purely practical or therapeutic terms. It’s about communicating, building bridges, you know? And

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part of that especially has to include communicating things that might be really horrible in this world, because they affect us and make people suffer. (2004b: 3)

For Franko B, then, performances of extremity exist in the vicinity of personal suffering, including the artist’s prior experience, and the realities of hardship out in the world. However, such representations are neither indexes of nor a direct commentary on such realities, namely the destitute materialities of AIDS, homophobic violence, militarism, poverty, oppression, abuse, grief, orphanicity and so on. Central to the ‘problem’ of suffering in art is the long-standing ideological attitude that pain is structurally exterior to the proper responsibility and sphere of activity of aesthetics. This position was founded in the earliest modern theory of aesthetics, namely Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Published in  1790, as Kant’s third volume in a series of exhaustive inquiries into human cognition and perception, the Critique was composed in the enabling context of the Enlightenment, towards a new rationalization and classification – and relative de-mystification – of aesthetic experience and its categories. In the first instance, Kant is concerned to establish the proper modes of aesthetic reception, rather than the objects or styles that may or may not be appropriate to aesthetic contemplation. Delight in the beautiful is necessarily ‘contemplative’, he argues, whereas delight in the agreeable is corporeal, or gratified – that is, ‘pathologically conditioned (by stimuli)’ (2007: §5, 41). Kant does not go so far as actively to demean those objects or styles that may invoke the extra-aesthetic experiences of happiness, satisfaction, gratification or enjoyment. Rather, he explains that these experiences are acceptable but ‘unscrupulous’ and formally – one is tempted to say morally – inconsistent with the aesthetic register: ‘Only by what one does heedless of enjoyment, in complete freedom and independently of what nature would passively procure for him, does he give to his life […] an absolute worth’ (2007: §4, 40). At the other end of the affective spectrum, among the lower limits to aisthesis, Kant deems a single bad affect to be categorically inadmissible to aesthetic experience: ‘One kind of ugliness alone is incapable of being represented conformably to nature without destroying all aesthetic delight, and consequently artistic beauty, namely, that which excites disgust’ (2007: §48, 141, emphasis in original). The problem with disgust, for Kant, is that the strength of feeling it produces will always obliterate the necessary (aesthetic) difference between how we encounter a situation in nature and in art. Invoking our disgust, where it should command our impassive contemplation, ‘the object is represented as insisting, as it were, on our enjoying it, while we violently resist it’, such that ‘the artificial representation of the object is no longer distinguishable from the nature of the object itself in our sensation’ (ibid.). Taking as an example Salvatore Rosa’s painting Witches at their Incantations (c.  1646), we see a horde of witches, demons, ghosts and victims, and at the centre of the painting, a body hangs from a scaffold, with its grey neck broken and distended; below, a witch holds up a potion, to fumigate the corpse with some unidentifiable but likely heinous fog; another witch bleeds the cadaver by slashing his Achilles heel. Coming across the scene of occult desecration and insufferable pain in the reality of a deserted woodland would throw one into a series of violent physiological reactions: one might scream, stand frozen or vomit in disgust. If one responds in the same or similar ways when stumbling

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upon the painting in the National Gallery (where the Witches now lives), Kant might suggest that the artist and his painting fail in transforming the ‘evil’ object (the witches’ Sabbath) into a thing ‘very beautifully described’ (i.e. a work of art). If the artist fails to transform the event into a palatable or contemplative form – commanding our critical distance and not our psychic or physiological investment – aesthetics suffers a collapse in the distinction between the imagined event and the manner in which it is recorded. Pain, as a figuration that provokes disgusted apperception, and which can never be an ethical object of critical distance, is therefore constitutively ‘other’ to the proper objects of aesthetic consideration. Thirty years prior to Kant’s Critique, in  1766, the theologian and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published his Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, and anticipated Kant’s reasoned analysis with a much more visceral opposition to the representation of painful images in art, in the course of an attempt to fix the epistemological authority of the poetic arts over the painterly. Lessing’s essay is premised on a meditation on (a representation of) a classical Greek sculpture, The Laocoön Group, also known as Laocoön and His Sons (carved in the first century BC), which shows a Trojan priest of Apollo, flanked by his sons (Antiphantes and Thymbraeus), wrestling with and being bitten by giant sea snakes. In Lessing’s description of the sculpture, he focuses on Laocoön’s noble face, noting that ‘a cry is the natural expression of physical pain’ and that therefore the face of the priest must not evoke a cry. As ‘barbarians’, he writes, the Greeks were inferior to ‘[us] more refined Europeans of a wiser, later age’, but regardless, the sculptor(s) of the Laocoön understood the need ‘to govern our mouths and our eyes’ and followed classical aesthetic protocol by suggesting ‘a passive courage of endurance’ in the facial and physical comportment of the sculpture (1984: 8–9). Lessing sets up a traditional assumption, or ideologeme (one reiterated by Kant), that pain is extraneous to nobility and propriety, and its representation or celebration amounts to a disruption of progress and civilization. For Lessing, Laocoön’s face is transcendent, and not distorted by pain or the expression of suffering, despite the serpent that bites his naked loin, and the imminent death by strangulation of his sons, because to allow the tortured priest to scream would subordinate the beauty of the body – the ‘beautiful contours of the natural state’ – to external reality (the horror of what it would entail to be devoured by snakes), which would ‘degrade’ the sculpture, regardless of its topic (1984: 15). Lessing demonstrates or grounds the political unconscious of post-Enlightenment aesthetics, setting up iconographic paradigms that are still, arguably, in play today – even if their rationales are repressed, or differently phrased. For the art historian Nigel Spivey, when casts of the sculpture travelled through museums and studios in early modern Europe, the logic of Laocoön’s passive nobility in the face of disastrous pain gave rise to a ‘pathos formula’, namely ‘a certain heroic cast of body [that] held sway for decades of the High Renaissance and beyond’, inspiring Lessing, and the affective restraint of painters and sculptures of his era, enabling their diffident Christs and sultry Sebastians (2001: 121). This visual superlative of a stoic body under duress, unable to invoke sympathetic pain in the viewer, took hold as an aesthetic doctrine or dogma. Arguably, some three centuries later, it still conditions our naturalized assumptions about what is proper to the field of representation, by sustaining what Richard Brilliant

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calls Laocoön’s ‘exemplum doloris’ or a ‘Laocoönic’ ideal of sad expression (2000: 8, 34, emphases in originals). If hardship is accepted in the present, it is as a terroristic disruption, or anachronism, or as anomaly. Brilliant explores Lessing’s coy refusal to acknowledge the full brutality of the sculpture, noting that although it constitutes ‘the most complete instantiation of human agony transformed into art’, Lessing strives to propose an aesthetic humility and affective quietude that the sculpture itself does not have (2000: 35). ‘Tastefully’, he adds, ‘Lessing withdraws from the poetics of pain […] and takes refuge in the distancing abstractions of painting and poetry’, thus victimizing the work in the service of ideological gain (2000: 56). As a conclusion of sorts, to turn back explicitly to Franko B’s performances, and specifically his early bloodletting works, how might I Miss You engage with a history of the ‘pathos formula’? And how might its odd historical status remind us of the persistence of civil (or moral) doctrines on the supposed inadmissibility, impropriety, or vulgarity of pain, or ugliness, or disgust in art and performance? I Miss You was performed ten times between 1999 and 2005, including at major museums in Europe. I was in attendance at its performance at Tate Modern in March 2003, when Franko B installed and performed the work in the grand Turbine Hall (incidentally, though complementarily, beneath a monumental red fabric sculpture by Anish Kapoor, Marsyas – that year’s commission of the now-defunct Unilever Series – which suggests a hornlike expanse of flayed and bloodied skin). In I Miss You, the audience gathers along the sides of a long path of white canvas, which stretches the full length of the horizontal section of the Turbine hall. We are seated on the floor, or stand, but huddle together, close and breathless. Strip lights running the length of the perimeter of the canvas flicker into luminescence, and Franko B appears at one end of the catwalk, naked, but painted head to toe in white greasepaint. He begins to walk up the catwalk, slowly, nearly nonchalantly, but in a committed fashion, and blood drips from intravenous cannulas in the crooks of his elbows. He walks towards and past the site at which I sit nervously on the cold concrete floor. Despite my familiarity with his work, the opulence of the venue and the extremity of his actions are alarming. As he approaches, walking slowly and intently, he looks with impassive frankness into our eyes. We the audience are plainly visible as he walks close – a few feet from our faces, which are either below or (if we’re standing) on a level with his own point of vision – and he looks with a look that is unemotional, oddly plaintive. Planted at the far end of the catwalk are phalanxes of photographers, who will take incessant shots of the artist as he walks, adding a continuous layer of mechanical sounds and flashes of light to our experience of the performance. Franko B will walk towards, away and back past me some six or seven times, perhaps, in the course of the eleven minutes or so of the full extent of the performance. If I do not look up to engage his eyes, and stare straight ahead, I see his hands sway loosely at his sides. They are dripping with blood. Glutinous, coagulated skeins of blood hang from his fingers and seem to vibrate (not a little nauseatingly) as he walks. Blood does not coarse down his body, but streaks, coolly, in numberless contemplative webs across the whiteness of his skin, especially that of his legs, his loins, his abdomen and wetting his feet, which leave bloody prints on the canvas in his wake, and in a puddle where he rests between relays. Blood also spatters in a surprisingly wide tissue of stains upon

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the canvas as it falls or flicks from his inundated fingertips. After the short but full duration of the performance, he stands at the place he first appeared, crosses his arms, turns, and leaves, quick and vivid like an onrush of blood to the head. From my description, I Miss You would seem to be an exemplary performance of the experience of pain. However, at no time does Franko B look actively to be in pain. He will not give an expression of anguish. There are no Butoh grimaces here, despite his painted body and his expressionistic-looking nudity. He does not smart from his small wounds, and we are not privy to the scene of wounding (that of the insertion of cannulas through his skin). Any pain we may believe we find in the performance is an act of projection – he bleeds, so he must be hurting – but there is no evidence in play here to ground our fantasy of his personal, physical, visceral experience. Beyond our projected idea of how he feels, we also may compose a reading of the signs of his suffering: the bloody inundation of the canvas; his ravaged body; the traumatized impassivity of his eyes and face; the repetitive trap of his movements; his eerily masochistic submission to the voyeurism of his audience; and the assaulting clatter of the photographers posed at the brink of his passage. All seem to want to point to his martyrdom, his Christ-like subjection to the violence of the world and the transcendent possibility of his stigmata. In the subdued lineaments of his face, Franko B in some ways subscribes to Lessing’s Enlightenment argument, namely that in representation, ‘anguish […] must be softened into sadness’ (1984: 16). Of the Laocoön, Lessing writes, ‘this concealment [of pain] is a sacrifice that the artist has made to beauty; it is an example, not of how one pushes expression beyond the limits of art, but how one should subject it to the first law of art, the law of beauty’ (1984: 16–17). Yet, if Franko B disavows a properly expressionistic performance of pain, it is to avoid the trappings of theatricality, or, more precisely, of acting, which would require the performer/actor to fully enunciate an audience’s expectation of what a painful event should resemble. If he doesn’t grimace, it is not because Franko B actively conceals his pain, but rather because it does not hurt enough to trigger such an expression. His suffering is of a more nuanced kind. Lessing’s account of the concealment of pain falls flat in a reading of Franko B’s performance, because while Lessing argues that the subduing of pain allows the artefact to be ‘subject […] to the first law of art, the law of beauty’, by trafficking extremity into performance – by staging an act of bloodletting, without recourse to the theatrical techniques of artifice, fakery, or other sleights of hand – he obliterates the ‘first law’. His work may be beautiful in a macabre sense, or in the terrible sense, by way of his evocation of classical themes in religious paintings (of martyrdom, or of surgery), but it is not beautiful in Lessing’s sense of the term – or in Kant’s, for whom ‘the beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, pleases universally’ (Kant 2007: 51, emphasis in original). The pain that disconcerts us in Franko B’s performance is not the artist’s, but our own. This pronounced difficulty on our part, as viewers, or voyeurs, and as consensual participants in his own injurious acts, provokes a kind of squeamishness in critics and other audiences, including those who refuse, apologetically or punitively, to see, or curate, or otherwise acknowledge Franko B’s performances. This is an injustice, for it negates or disarms the complex problems – aesthetic, or otherwise – that he poses for

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us in his performances. The nuance of his work involves, in its distribution of political and affective potentialities, the function of pain, or suffering, or hardship, both as the material of our own projections and as a cipher for the ways performance may continue to dislodge or disrupt the supposed laws of artistic or critical propriety. In their beauty, which is to say, in their ugliness, Franko B’s performances might force art into an encounter with itself, as well as with its outsides, expanding, outraging or breaking its own imposed limits. If it does so with injury to the proprieties of our conventional orientations to the work of art, and to the fight of our own lives, such a scandal is unavoidable, and inconsolable – for fear, or sadness, or pain, or hardship, like a heartbeat, is a merely human thing.

Notes 1 I thank Franko B for sending me the unpublished transcript of his spoken text. 2 In its earliest phase of development, Franko B considered loading the bag with blood and milk, so that the floor would be inundated with both visceral fluids. He changed his mind to avoid the possible literalism of the violence of such a performed image. Conversation with Franko B in the artist’s studio, London, 28 September 2015.

5

Sparkles and Sputum: The Sick Body of Martin O’Brien Gianna Bouchard

Beautiful phlegm On Wednesday  24  June  2015, at the annual Association for Medical Humanities (AMH) conference at Dartington Hall, Devon, England, some of the delegates, myself included, gathered after the day’s talks and presentations to celebrate the opening of an exhibition on site that included the work of live artist, Martin O’Brien. It was a beautiful evening, as we stood with our glasses of champagne, chatting through the day’s ideas. At some point, we were asked to make our way to O’Brien’s performance and ushered towards the back of some art studios. Entering through a narrow gap between the buildings, we passed some rubbish bins and spilled into a small courtyard, where we filled three sides of the perimeter; standing, waiting, glasses in hand. The space was slightly grubby and dejected; somewhat removed from the manicured lawns and flower beds of the central quad, where we had spent most of the conference. In the centre of the ‘stage’ was a white sheet, laid out on the concrete floor, on top of which O’Brien was lying prone, beneath a second sheet that covered him. We stood in silence, watching, as the wind tugged at the edges of the sheets and the body remained immobile, waiting for us to gather, playing dead. The tension was palpable, as I wondered how O’Brien’s work would be received by an audience largely made up of medical practitioners and scholars. Once assembled, O’Brien emerged from beneath the sheet, a ‘thin, energetic and attractive … man, sparkling with a childish energy’ (Athey 2012: 86), wearing only a skimpy loincloth that has become his signature ‘costume’. Recalling actions from his piece Mucus Factory (2011–13), O’Brien covered himself repeatedly with anti-bacterial gel, particularly on his chest, whilst engaging us through his playful gaze, making us complicit in this shared encounter. In broad daylight, performer and audience could not avoid acknowledging, or participating in, the creation of this fragile, ephemeral community around O’Brien’s make-shift performance space. Reaching for a bag of disposable scalpels, O’Brien then proceeded to cut into the skin of his chest, etching into his flesh the outline of his lungs, as though drawing a rather basic anatomical

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diagram. As the wind stirred in the tiny courtyard, so did the audience, with the knife tracing its trajectory over and into his skin – our complicity in the action becoming apparent as we just stood and watched. Some stayed attentive, some turned away, some walked away, as each of us decided how to engage and how much we could take. The breath of the wind mixed with gasps and sighs from some in the audience, barely audible emissions from other lungs in the space, as O’Brien created his incised picture on his chest. With his lungs outlined on his bare chest, O’Brien then placed a foam wedge in the space and lay along it on his back, with his head towards the floor and his hips elevated. Beating his lungs with his fists, he started to pummel his chest with deliberate, disciplined vigour, forcing himself to cough up any loosened phlegm. As his sketched lungs started to bleed, so the beating also raised his blood to the skin, and his coughing, affecting his breathing, started to turn his face red. The trace of the cutting and the labour of breathing combined to create an image of constricted, raw and bloodied effort, which was strangely productive through the forced materialization of sputum. This was O’Brien’s triumphal excretion, which he captured in specimen pots and lined up along the front edge of the sheet. After each expulsion, he crawled on his knees to place the potted phlegm in front of the audience and then returned to repeat the chest beating, coughing and expulsion – a cycle of self-inflicted violence, discharge and presentation. Once the pots each had a sputum sample in them, some nine in all, O’Brien then carefully undid their lids and extracted each gooey lump, playing with its ‘warm wet viscous texture’ in his fingers, exploring its elasticity as it drooped and stretched between his fingers and dangled over his mouth, threatening to release to gravity at any moment, to be ingested once again (O’Brien 2012: 90). Playing between abjection and delight, turning phlegm into a jokingly sticky substance, O’Brien finally used it as hair gel. Recuperated from unwanted secretion to aesthetic product, the audience were also rescued from traumatic experience towards light-hearted reclamation. Re-styled and recovered, O’Brien then left the space, heading off between studios, down a hill, looking cheerfully and cheekily over his shoulder at us, as he turned the corner and disappeared. Performance over, most of the audience drifted away from the courtyard and O’Brien returned to join in with some gentle post-performance reflection, whilst he gathered his props. He was told by one medical practitioner, who had witnessed the piece, ‘You have the most beautiful phlegm.’

The self as specimen (from Foucault to the FitBit) Martin O’Brien’s specially created piece, It’s Good to Breathe In (This Devon Air) (2015), for the AMH annual conference, described above, performed a number of recurrent themes and artistic strategies within his work, which this chapter seeks to explore. O’Brien lives with the chronic disease cystic fibrosis (CF) and, as such, undergoes an essential daily regime of sustained chest percussion to dislodge the build-up of excess mucus in his body. CF is ‘a disease of the secretory glands’ and leads to the accretion of mucus in ‘the digestive and reproductive systems, lungs and

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airways’ (O’Brien 2012: 89). Following standard physiotherapy protocols, O’Brien has to perform medical treatments on his own body every day in order to combat the continuous production of sputum and expel it via induced coughing; in his words, this is a ‘perpetual cycle of clearance and production’ (ibid.: 89). Given the chronic ontology of CF, O’Brien is subject to all the rigours of mainstream medicine – physiotherapy techniques, regular sampling and testing of his sputum, medication and routine check-ups. As a lifelong patient, he experiences the full force of medicine as a ‘power-knowledge’ that, in its application to the individual body and to whole populations, has ‘both disciplinary effects and regulatory effects’ (Foucault in Campbell and Sitze 2013: 72). His body is subject to measurement, fragmentation, objectification, testing and diagnosis as a means of controlling and containing it. But, unable to simply be the passive recipient of so much surveillance and intrusive management, he has to also participate in undertaking various therapeutic regimes on his own body. This is, in some ways, indicative of the politics of medicine in the twenty-first century. Nikolas Rose (2007) has argued that each of us is now likely to experience ourselves, at least in part, through the lens and discourse of biomedicine. Understanding of ourselves is informed and underpinned by persistent health messages, from government, medical bodies and the mass media. We are expected to monitor and adjust our behaviours to take account of the indicators and symptoms of disease and our personal risk-factors. Given the current increasing emphasis on fitness, health, well-being and diet, it is unsurprising that ‘the corporeal existence and vitality of the self has become the privileged site of experiments with the self ’ (Rose 2007: 26). In other words, we experience ourselves as specimens. The specimen is ‘a single thing selected or regarded as typical of its class; a part or piece of something taken as representative of the whole’, according to The Oxford English Dictionary (original emphasis). To identify the specimen, it requires isolating and separating from the rest of the body or the part, usually for the purposes of analysis or further study. In medical science, specimens are pathological; in other words, they are excised or removed examples of diseased or anomalous parts of bodies, which can be tested and preserved for the purpose of diagnosis, research and education. Often rendered through dissection or autopsy, specimens are the epitome of the objectifying processes of medicine – the body is treated as an ‘instrument’ and ‘violated and dismembered’ in order to separate part from part (Alberti  2011:  101). The process of specimen creation, therefore, can involve trauma and violence inflicted on the body, whether dead or alive, and altering the subject into object by forcible partition. Sam Alberti, Director of Museums and Archives at the Royal College of Surgeons of England (2011), identifies the resultant specimen as ‘conceptually hybrid’ because it is ‘person and thing, subject and object’ (ibid.: 7). To consider that under the objectifying power of contemporary biomedicine, we are all now specimens undergoing self-experimentation, including O’Brien, requires a consideration of these processes and how far they can be mapped across to individuals. French philosopher Michel Foucault and his analysis of biopolitics are significant here, as he sought to identify and understand the operations of biopower, as the means of ‘administering life’ (Foucault 1998: 139). He argued that at the time of the French Revolution bodies became conceptualized, organized and treated as

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machines that were capable of being highly productive in the logic of capital, if they were disciplined into obedience and docility. Following Foucault, his disciplinary regimes incorporating health surveillance and monitoring are increasingly being played out at an individual level. Think here of personal mobile technology, marketed as ‘tracking devices’, such as the FitBit, which aim to assess our every move, every moment of the day, to provide data on everything from exercise levels to weight and sleep patterns. Through such personalized systems of biometric measurement, we sample ourselves on a daily basis, study the results and supposedly take action in response to our findings – we increase our exercise levels or take more care over our calorie intake, for instance. Examining the pharmaceutical industry, Dumit identifies such strategies of self-monitoring as forming a significant part of commercial drug advertising. Utilizing the logics of public health awareness campaigns ‘the unaware consumer-at-risk must be made into a patient-in-waiting’ through creating anxiety around the well-body. Whilst we may feel well, do we really know what is going on inside of us and are we taking account of all the various symptoms that our bodies may be signalling (Dumit  2012:  56)? We are encouraged to reduce risk through imagining the future as one filled with avoidable illness and disease. Acting now, we are constantly told, by using technology, diets and drugs, we should significantly reduce these risks and so we need to monitor, maintain and contain our unruly bodies through disciplining health and fitness regimes. Arguably, these strategies only work if we are made to consider our bodies as specimens. The word ‘specimen’ comes from the Latin specere, which means ‘to look at’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Encouraged to look at our bodies from the once privileged perspective of the medical gaze, we can generate our own biodata through personalized technologies that increasingly urge us to objectify our biological selves by sourcing and utilizing previously unavailable data. Where blood pressure and heart rate analysis were once the preserve of a doctor’s diagnostic toolkit, we can discover these things on the run or on the couch at the swipe of a screen. It is interesting to note this direction of travel in relation to Drew Leder’s seminal text The Absent Body, published in  1990. His main thesis in the book is that whilst we are all embodied and that is the ‘most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives’, our bodies are paradoxically and strangely absent to us (Leder  1990: 1). As examples, he cites the ‘invisibility of the eye within its own visual field’ and the ‘inaccessibility of the visceral organs’ (ibid.: 2). At the time of publication, Leder argued that this tendency ‘towards self-concealment’ was then exaggerated by technology, which seemed to heighten the sense of our disembodiment across time and space (ibid.:  3). In re-reading Leder in the light of emergent personal biotechnologies, it is clear that technology is increasingly being directed towards providing access to the absent body, albeit still in a disembodied form. Leder acknowledges this as the remit of the physician, who uses technology to ‘artificially [supplement] his or her embodiment, enabling a “gaze” that heretofore was impossible’ (ibid.: 51). This phenomenon has advanced since 1990 to the point of personalized interventions, although these remain ‘indirect’ mediations for each person because of our dependence on devices and equipment to realize the data (ibid.:  51). Whilst the urge might be to access the absent body, it still remains experientially unknowable, except through incorporeal readings of certain of its

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functions and processes. We still can’t feel our blood pressure or sense the growth of any abnormality, except when they encroach on our bodily experience: ‘When things go wrong with these systems, then the body occupies the centre of our consciousness, in a wholly negative way’ (Campbell 2009: 8).

The trauma of specimenhood As someone living with CF, O’Brien experiences his body as dys-appearing, in Leder’s terms; in its disease, it constantly interrupts, demands attention and therapeutic assistance (1990). The body in breakdown ‘appears as thematic focus’ and brings ‘corporeality to explicit awareness for the sufferer’ (Leder  1990:  84). O’Brien’s daily treatment regimes and work on his body are partly aimed at trying to make his body recede from his conscious awareness, to become an ‘absent body’ once more – the aim of any medical therapy, after all, is to enable the living of a ‘normal’ life, as far as possible. Under the care of the medical establishment, O’Brien is, in many ways, a medical specimen. He has been identified as a CF patient; in other words, he is an exemplar of a particular disease, who is studied and treated accordingly. He has been separated from the general population in terms of the provision of regular, ongoing and dedicated care that is tailored to his specific results and prognosis. Subject to the authority of the medical gaze, he relies on this process of objectification and intervention even as it challenges his sense of agency and autonomy (a feature I will return to later in this chapter). There are moments when this alienation from his own body becomes heightened, such as in the following anecdote, where O’Brien had to undergo a minor medical procedure to cauterize some blood vessels in his lungs to stop them from bleeding: I was awake for the procedure … I recall lying there; a partition prevented me from seeing the insertion, aware of what was happening. I didn’t feel any pain but … I had a strange sensation. I could feel a very slight wiggle of the tube inside me … [F]or that moment I contemplated what it meant to be a body, to be made of flesh. (in Bouchard and O’Brien 2014: 3)

Many will be familiar with such experiences through medical treatments that render the body partible and which unexpectedly make us realize our own embodiment and subsequent potential for fragmentation. The shift from subject to object, from self to it becomes startlingly, if momentarily, clear. I suggest that this is part of the experience of specimenhood, which O’Brien encounters more than most because of his chronic illness. It is, perhaps, easier to identify in its close association with medical practice, but, as we have seen, specimenhood seems to be permeating outwards, to reach individuals through specialized technologies that encourage the instrumentalizing of self and body. Mostly, specimenhood is experienced in isolation and in private, and this is a crucial part of its processes. Whether under the care of a medical practitioner or counting calories, we are, ostensibly, subjected to and enact the disciplinary practices of medico-science as individual subjects, a

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point referred to by Giorgio Agamben in his analysis of Foucault’s ideas. Identified as the ‘process of subjectivization’, this brings ‘the individual to objectify his own self, constituting himself as a subject and, at the same time, binding himself to a power of external control’ (Agamben in Campbell and Sitze  2013:  145). Developing this idea, Hardt and Negri argue that power, and biopolitical power, more specifically, is only effective over whole populations ‘when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord’ (ibid.: 216). From the FitBit to the doctor’s consulting room, we monitor and assess ourselves and we are separated from others in these activities by the need to focus on our own specimenhood. O’Brien is expected to undertake his physiotherapy in private, to be appropriately discrete in his expulsion of excess sputum and to generally adhere to social etiquette around illness. As an artist with CF, O’Brien seeks to undermine these disciplinary practices of subjectivization, choosing to move from the private realm to that of the public and performative with his illness. In works such as It’s Good to Breathe In (This Devon Air) and Mucus Factory he deliberately stages his medical treatments as central elements of his practice. Transferred from the privacy of his own home, the audience are confronted with his specimenhood in the gallery space. For instance, Mucus Factory includes medical apparatus that play a crucial part in his care plan: there is a small, circular trampoline for encouraging sputum production through cardiopulmonary exercise; a tilted treatment table for percussion and postural drainage; specimen pots for collecting any cleared secretions; and a nebulizing device, which turns medication into a mist for inhalation. Every hour during the performance, which extended over twelve hours when it was first performed at the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) in  2011, his physiotherapist, Becky Beyts, joined him in the space to undertake further chest percussion. In the introduction to Mucus Factory contained in the LADA publication, Access All Areas: Live Art and Disability, the text reads: ‘Presenting his body as a medical specimen, O’Brien literally performs his physiotherapy, which consists of loosening mucus in the lungs by beating his chest and carrying out exercises designed to clear the airways’ (Keidan and Mitchell 2012: 77). His specimenhood is transposed from the private space to the public space of the gallery or other performance spaces, such as the outdoor courtyard in Dartington. This moment of revelation in public is complex, as it exceeds the boundaries of individual subjectivization, played out in private, physical regimes, and becomes an active demonstration in a shared encounter with an audience, that is both intimate and communal. This tension is revealed in Beyts’s reflections on her experience of supporting O’Brien in Mucus Factory. She vacillates in her feelings between thinking ‘is this a condensed and simplified version of the life of a cystic fibrosis sufferer’ and an unspoken encouragement to ‘keep going, you’ve only got a few hours left, you’ve got to keep up with the mucus, keep on churning it out’ (Beyts in O’Brien 2012: 91). This tension is the slide in specimenhood between ‘person and thing, subject and object’ (Alberti  2011:  6). O’Brien’s staging of his own illness and care regimes depends, arguably, on a kind of detachment, which also echoes the creation of the specimen. Whether we consider O’Brien’s performed physiotherapy or responses to biodata from a FitBit device, there is an imperative towards objectifying the self, so that the body can be assessed and treated in particular ways.

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In O’Brien’s work, this process can cause spectatorial anxiety, as noted in Beyts’s reflections above. Ron Athey describes Mucus Factory as containing ‘sequences of sense, form and rhythm’ but that over the course of the piece, ‘a dark pallor creeps over [O’Brien’s] complexion and reveals that something darker than physical exertion is at work’ (Athey 2012: 86). Sheree Rose notes that O’Brien does ‘not disguise the ugliness of his disease’ and that no-one ‘observing this everyday event in O’Brien’s life could not be moved by the inexorable toll it was taking’ (Rose 2012: 95). So, what does it mean to stage the body as specimen in performance and, more particularly, in Live Art practice? I have started to explore how the specimen might be conceptualized and constructed in society and in performance, and how O’Brien’s work draws attention to some of these issues around subjectivization and disciplining practices in medicoscience. But why ‘fight sickness with sickness’ (a term coined by Bob Flanagan, another performance artist working with CF and a key influence on O’Brien) in the context of Live Art (Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist 1997).

Live Art and illness/disability O’Brien’s first major work, Mucus Factory, was commissioned by the LADA for their curated event in London titled Access all Areas and held in March 2011. This seminal project set out to explore Live Art practices as they related to disability and performance in the UK in the early twenty-first century. LADA’s director and co-founder, Lois Keidan, recognized that, as an ‘interdisciplinary, itinerant and ephemeral area of practice’, Live Art creates difficulties around the ‘contextualization, documentation and archiving’ of the work (Keidan 2013 [2012]: 8). She argues that this is exacerbated in the ‘case of “non-mainstream” artists whose experiences and practices can be sidelined and whose contributions are often ignored within the UK’s cultural histories’ (ibid.: 9). Access all Areas sought to examine how disabled artists use Live Art as a platform for their work and the ways in which they might draw attention to ideas about disability, by providing a public forum for performance, presentations and dialogue over two days. This was preceded by a LADA Study Room Guide on Disability and New Artistic Models, by Aaron Williamson (2010), and followed by a publication, Access all Areas (2012), emerging from the London event and gathering much of its content together into an illustrated book with accompanying DVDs. Keidan included O’Brien as part of this UK Live Art disability scene, viewing his work and that of others in the project as ‘radical and inspiring’ (ibid.: 12). In her book Disability, Public Space Performance, Spectatorship (2014), Bree Hadley considers the close alignment between the work of disability artists and the agendas of Live Art practice. She argues: [Many of these artists] take the moments in day-to-day life in which they most commonly feel compelled to act out a limited and limiting cultural script – the moments in which the doctor, do-gooder or bystander’s stare turns them into a monster, medical specimen, cripple or charity case that consciously or unconsciously connects them with cultural assumptions about disabled bodies – as the starting point for their practice. (Hadley 2014: 12–13)

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As O’Brien takes his daily treatment routines into the performance space, he reveals his private experiences with his body and his disease. His everyday realities of living with CF are performed and amplified in urban, industrial spaces, far removed from the safety and protection of the medical ward or home. Not only does he stage his treatments but he also includes more metaphorical and aesthetic constructions of his illness. He has worked, for instance, with a homemade green gunge, reminiscent of popular television entertainment formats in the 1980s and 1990s, where celebrities were put in gunge tanks and unceremoniously splattered with abject liquids. It also stands, of course, as a vivid reminder of the constant presence of mucus as part of the ontology of CF, which O’Brien must loosen and expel every day. In Regimes of  Hardship (2012) he bathed in the gunge and poured it over himself, whilst in Taste of Flesh/Bite Me I’m Yours (2015), it became paint, for tracing a slow, spiral movement outwards from being chained to a central pole. Using his head as the paint brush, the green trail recorded his long and painful journey from the middle of the space to the edge on his knees. Such mucosal daubing and dowsing surrounds and covers O’Brien in the figurative colour of CF, vividly externalizing and aestheticizing his internal physiological status. If Live Art is concerned with the rejection of traditional theatre spaces, through a ‘stress on installation, interruption and intervention’, such that audiences can more directly and actively experience the work, O’Brien likewise shuns the comfort of the stage and auditorium (Hadley 2014: 14). The theatre might represent a certain kind of comfort because of its capacity for distance, as the audience are disciplined into mere observers of the spectacle, in the dark and isolated from each other. There is also comfort in the illusory devices and effects of the theatre, which are stripped bare in O’Brien’s practice. Where an audience can reassure itself that the drama is not real, in Live Art reality is the point. O’Brien really does inflict pain and hardship on himself and his audiences are in close proximity to him. His stages are often concrete floors covered in a thin layer of canvas or sheeting to delineate the installation space and performer from audience. His scenography incorporates medical apparatus, as we have seen, but also industrial scaffolding, winches and platforms, as in Regimes of Hardship. Here the frailty of the body is performed against these cold, forbidding structures and O’Brien subjects himself to their hard, unyielding dominance. Even the medical ward, with its array of biotechnologies and intimidating potentials, seems more welcoming and protecting than these spaces of latent industrial power. Without warmth or even the curtain of the medical bedside or the theatre, all bodies in the space are dis-eased. There is nowhere to comfortably sit, no relief from the view of this live human specimen in amongst alienating equipment and no distance from his actions. In fact, this proximity and sense of dis-ease was actively exploited in Taste of Flesh/ Bite Me I’m Yours, when the latter stages of the piece involved O’Brien, tethered to a chain in the centre of the space, chasing audience members to get close enough to bite them. The length of the chain was calculated to make it eventually possible for O’Brien to reach certain audience members in certain places in the rectangular box, specially constructed for the work. Like sand on a beach, endlessly shifting in relation to his advances, the audience were constantly calculating where to move in the confined space in order to evade his oral grasp. As predator and prey, chased and followed, the

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audience took delight in either remaining out of reach or in being captured and bitten. Dis-ease was actively physicalized and played through an intense game of avoidance and capture; some capitulated to O’Brien’s threat and offered themselves to his bite, whilst others tried to avoid contact at all costs. Many scholars have written about the discomfort that such work can promote in the spectator. Dominic Johnson, amongst them, finds that this is an important element of Live Art practice and one that he finds compelling. He admits to being ‘attracted to the spectacle of bodies on the brink of collapse’, such as O’Brien’s, where the challenge is in the excess of the work, in the ‘horror, our discomfort and other fraught postures’ (Johnson  2012c:  146). This is not shock for shock’s sake but deliberative creative practice that ‘raises the stakes … above those of either standard social performances or standard theatrical performances’ (Hadley 2014: 15). Where we might expect the chronically ill body to be cared for in a medical or domestic setting, O’Brien confronts his spectator with his sickness in life and through Live Art practice. As with other disability artists, he attempts to ‘re-engage, re-enact’ and ‘re-envisage’ the roles he is forced to play as patient, with a ‘stress on installation, intervention or interruption’ (ibid.: 14). The work ignores more traditional theatre approaches, such as narrative and character, in favour of blurring ‘the boundaries between stage and social process’ and focuses on positioning his spectators as ‘active witnesses … and, therefore responsible for the encounter and the effects of the encounter’ (ibid.: 14). Live art practitioner Brian Lobel has written of the aptness of solo performance in relation to the realm of illness, where one is a lone and lonely traveller. Being alone on the stage is, for Lobel, the ‘perfect metaphor for being sick’, where the body is ‘on stage, isolated and vulnerable’, just as he was when he ‘was hairless, emaciated and sick-looking’ with testicular cancer (Lobel  2012:  14). O’Brien’s work similarly emphasizes this separation through his own, mostly, solitary practice and it is this that can be hard to bear for the spectator. Prevented from intervening in the work, from stopping or reducing O’Brien’s pain and endurance regimes, and likely distanced from the experience of CF as a lived reality, the audience is confronted with the radical alterity presented in and through O’Brien’s ill body. Arthur Frank too writes about illness as developing a certain kind of estrangement from others, where the ‘monadic body, understand[s] itself as existentially separate and alone’, which is reinforced and even ‘encouraged’ by medicine (Frank 2013: 36). For Frank, the monadic body is the ‘ground’ of medical practice and it is revealed in the way that patients are organized and administered: ‘Hospitals treat patients in close enough proximity to each other to obviate any meaningful privacy, but at just enough distance to eliminate any meaningful contact’ (ibid.:  36). In some ways then, the work of O’Brien and Lobel resonates with these constructions and understandings of illness but their Live Art practice also draws attention to the possibility of an alternative ethical experience. In opposition to his monadic body, Frank advocates instead the ‘dyadic body’, which can emerge from an ‘ethical choice’ to actively seek alternative relationships to others that are relational and connective, rather than isolated and alone (ibid.: 37). In enduring illness, the choice for Frank is ‘to be a body for other bodies’ and to ‘exist for each other’ (ibid.: 38), an ethical decision that could also be at the centre of Live Art practice and, more specifically, the work of O’Brien. For, is this definition not also a definition of Live

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Art? According to Lois Keidan, Live Art is ‘about immediacy and reality: creating spaces to explore the experience of things, the ambiguities of meaning and the responsibilities of our individual agency’ (Keidan  2007:  129). It is about bodies confronting other bodies in experimental, risky and precarious situations, in order to question and challenge assumptions, to re-think categories and to open onto ambiguity and fluidity. O’Brien performs his illness and regimes of treatment, offering his precarious and vulnerable body to the gathered audience, in a way that is absorbing, troubling and even traumatizing. Negating contact through self-inflicted pain and suffering, the work engenders and produces an ethical community as we are put into a relational and reflective communion with the artist and other spectators. It is this dynamic of interaction that underpins O’Brien’s specimenhood. The construction of the medical specimen demands that the fragment is isolated and divided from the original body as the ‘first step in the construction of a new entity’ (Alberti 2011: 8). Following this separation, the specimen, once prepared and ready for display, enters into a complex set of relations with its new environment through its deliberate staging and presentation. This relationality makes sense of the specimen, in the same way that the spectator of O’Brien’s work shares the physical, emotional and intellectual space of the performance with other audience members and the artist himself. Here, we are made to reflect on social and political power structures, the limits of the body, the meaning of health and our capacity for agency through O’Brien’s youthful and vital body. The precarity of our own health and well-being is made decipherable through this relation to others – both through O’Brien’s body and in communication with others in the performance space. The proximity of these other bodies in the performance space is vividly apparent in much of his work, from the gathered conference participants, described at the start of this chapter, to the trapped audience members trying to escape his bite. The spectatorial gaze consumes not only O’Brien but also those others in the performance area. We see and feel each other responding to the work, across the space, next to us, and O’Brien also joins in with and plays with the exchange of glances. He is as much a part of the looking in the space as the gathered spectators.

The work of living The ethical encounter in O’Brien’s work, however, extends beyond the gaze and seems to vivify Adrian Heathfield’s claim that live practice involves ‘artwork’ that ‘is alive’ (2004:  8). If the breath is life, then O’Brien’s practice draws acute attention to the precarity of aliveness, in staging his daily struggle with CF to clear his lungs and continue to breathe. In CF, ‘breathing is interrupted by the cough and the sticky thick green slime that restrains and prevents breath’, meaning that his treatment is focused entirely on loosening and evacuating mucus from his airways (O’Brien  2012:  89). This, in turn, is central to his performance practice, as he draws on his everyday experience of living with his chronic disease. The violent expulsion of mucus in his work draws attention to both the oppressive and exhausting nature of the disease and, paradoxically, to the same features of his treatment. His sustained coughing frees him

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from the overpowering and deathly potential of excess mucus in his body, even as it seems to stage a kind of suffocation and inability to draw enough breath, as he labours to release its hold from deep within his body. This is the cause of Athey’s observation of O’Brien’s ‘dark pallor’ mentioned earlier – the traumatic indication that O’Brien’s ‘liveness’ depends on his ability to constantly expel the stifling mucus. As an abject substance par excellence, mucus is the ‘physical manifestation of disease’, made visible in the performance space through O’Brien’s deliberate and sustained forcing of it from his lungs over long periods (e.g. over the course of nine hours in Mucus Factory) (ibid.:  90). Strangely, its visible abjection is also profoundly hopeful as he coughs it up, over and over again, and teases it into waiting specimen pots. Turned into a pathological exhibit, it appears to be ‘better out, than in’ (as the saying goes), neutralized from harmful, excessive secretion to aestheticized biological product. It doesn’t remain as an inert exhibit, however, as O’Brien extends its aesthetic potential through queering its sticky, abject viscosity into a form of body glue, lubricant and hair gel. Slathering himself with his own phlegm, he uses it to stick glitter onto himself and to style his hair in a playful, cheeky subversion of its deathly potential. For the audience, it is a welcome relief to turn the manifestation of the sick body into a frivolous, queer beauty product, which often draws laughter from the gathered spectators. This sense of play is also evident in O’Brien’s writing about this move, as he suggests that ‘this stuff should be farmed’ (ibid.: 90); such is its aesthetic potential. Through creating a-Live Art, he unequivocally points towards his continuing existence and resistance to illness. There is, then, a deep political force to this mucosal gesture from O’Brien, which is multifaceted and complex. Lois Keidan, writing about disability and Live Art in the UK, suggests that ‘using the body as an active, and often transgressive site, Live Art practices have become central to contemporary debates around issues of identity and representation’ (Keidan 2007: 135). In performing his unique specimenhood, O’Brien confronts and questions a range of issues around the politics and representation of illness, whilst also destabilizing some key tenets of medical discourse and practice. If modern medicine seeks to control, contain and cure unruly, pathologized bodies, then he resists these principles through self-inflicted pain and violence, through excessive, durational work and through opening himself to others through performance. Taking Bob Flanagan’s motto of ‘fighting sickness with sickness’, O’Brien cuts himself and allows others, namely Sheree Rose (Flanagan’s life partner), to enact sadomasochistic rituals on his body. Instead of protecting his body, he permits and inflicts further violence on it, in ways that signal a recuperation of his body, illness and treatment from the paternalism of medicine. Such disciplinary regimes of excessive physiotherapy, of sadomasochistic acts, of repetitive and monotonous actions in his work also undo conventional notions of care, treatment and healing that we have come to expect in relation to the sick body. O’Brien’s ill and fragile body is made to endure physical acts and trauma that push at the limits of the live and life. He often deprives himself of air, through wearing a tight rubber hood in sections of his work, where every breath is highlighted as a struggle and his distorted, agonized face gasps for air through the stretched, translucent material. Sheree Rose, in Do with Me as You Will (Make Martin Suffer for Art (2013),

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has poured viscous liquids down his throat through a funnel, to the point of choking – a troubling reversal of the outward expulsion of mucus, so dominant a symptom of CF. As a specimen, O’Brien tests his capacities for endurance and pain, beyond those already inscribed in and on his body by CF. He simultaneously disrupts the boundaries of his body, mixing inside with outside, through expelling his phlegm, for instance, or inserting a nebulizer in his anus, and thus conjuring the rectum as a breathing hole. Other passages and orifices become interchangeable sites of breath, air and pleasure, even as they are blocked and choked in other acts. In cutting and bleeding, piercing and pinning, his body also becomes leaky and permeable, and radical practice opens the spectator to the risk of confronting their own disintegration. He dares his audience to face his chronic condition through work that threatens them with their mortality and reminds them how close they always are to illness, frailty and decay. Although CF is not contagious in any sense, O’Brien’s work also explores cultural fears around contamination and contagion, so often based on assumptions and misinformation about illness. If medicine tries to contain the possibility of contaminating disease, O’Brien exploits the excess of his sick body and his experience of CF to expose the potent disconnect between medical discourse, social anxieties around contagion and his own subjectivity. The abject and potentially contaminating excretion of mucus is ejected from O’Brien’s body through the cough – one of the most significant indexes of contagion. Although his cough is entirely non-threatening to a non-CF sufferer, the cough is usually read as exceptionally capable of spreading illness. He endures this social understanding of the menace of the cough on a daily basis and, most explicitly, through people moving away from him in public contexts, seemingly afraid of catching the imagined infectious disease. For O’Brien, ‘the cough seems to demand the reaction of separation’ and reinforces ideas around the uncontrolled and threatening sick body (O’Brien 2016: 131). He experiences a kind of quarantine from those around him, which he then explores in performance, through various kinds of separation between him and the audience. In Taste of Flesh/Bite Me I’m Yours, he deliberately heightens and reveals the fear of contamination through chasing his audience, who are threatened by his bite – another potentially contagious act of passing infection through body fluids. His performance spaces are also polluted with the detritus of his work – mucus, blood, green gunge, paint, glitter, medical and S&M equipment all litter the space – and offer an intriguing mix of the ‘real’, with the pleasurable and the camp. The abject and the medical are side by side with the sparkle of performance, pain is alongside frivolity, death is alongside life, in a queer aestheticization of O’Brien’s specimenhood and autonomy. The instances of proxemics being defined here seem important: for example, the move away from the cough; the separation of O’Brien’s body in the space; the interior of the body expelled to the outside; the relationality of the specimen; and the closing of the gap when he catches and bites a spectator. The ‘gap’ is what we struggle to maintain in our psychic and sociopolitical life, so that distinctions between self and other remain intact and clearly delineated. Our sense of self depends on maintaining such illusory space and distance but Live Art seems to have a particular interest in collapsing, or at least reducing, the aperture between self and other, in order to provoke urgent questions about ourselves and our relations. The gap between medical understandings

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of O’Brien’s illness and his own experience as a patient is at the centre of his practice and represents the space of his creative explorations. In staging his specimenhood, he creates an opening in discourse and thought that allows ambiguity and slippage between the sides, where new ideas can emerge and where the audience can be challenged. O’Brien, arguably, also works to close the gap, through a certain kind of suturing of experience; he brings us face-to-face with pain, suffering and illness in a way that starts to close the gap between his illness and health, between life and death, and between self and other. Perhaps he makes us realize that we are all ‘temporarily able-bodied’ and that this revelation ‘speaks to the inherent instability of normative embodiment’ (Shildrick  2009:  43). If ‘we are always already exposed, already immersed in one another’, then the exposure of this is writ large in Live Art practice and O’Brien’s work (ibid.: 36). The precarious, sick body of O’Brien is performed in the opening offered by Live Art, in an ongoing attempt to overcome structures of power, stigmatization and oppression, and to offer forms of queer resistance to medico-scientific discourse.

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The Artist Is No Longer Present: Encounter, Assembly and Withdrawal in the Work of Oreet Ashery Johanna Linsley

The alter ego used in artistic practice has a complex status within the frame of self-portraiture, a form which, as Amelia Jones has argued, developed historically alongside the modern European construction of the individual subject as such (2006a). Postmodern performance histories teem with examples of the alter ego used to deconstruct the self-as-individual, as with Martha Wilson’s  1974 A Portfolio of Models, a series of photographs of the artist in a variety of guises: Goddess, Housewife, Working Girl, Professional, Earth Mother, Lesbian. In an accompanying text, Wilson states that ‘these are the models society holds out to me’. She is making clear, then, that these images are negotiations between her sense of herself and the social world that she navigates, but are also deconstructions of the notion that she (or anyone) can be thought in a singular way. More than just deconstructing the individual subject (or subject as individual), however, the alter ego can also provoke or catalyse an encounter between bodies, operating on the social and material contexts in which subjectivity is formed. In Lorraine O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeois Noire sequence of performances between 1980 and 1983, for instance, her ‘raging beauty queen’ invaded a series of art spaces in New York City, wearing a dress made of white gloves and carrying a white cat-of-nine-tails (‘the whip-that-made-plantations-move, the sign of external oppression’), with which she beat herself, and performed protest poems (‘BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!’ ‘NOW IS THE TIME FOR AN INVASION!’). These interventions were directed variously towards the segregated New York art scene establishment, the whiteness of second-wave feminism ‘that seemed to operate as though unconscious either that it was white or that it was middle-class’, as well as black bourgeois constructions of femininity and internal repression (2007). Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being alter ego, created in 1973, is both about deconstructing the individual and about provoking encounter. In a series of multiple iterations, Piper dressed in black trousers and shirt, with an Afro wig, gluedon moustache, and wire frame reflective sunglasses, and walked the streets of New York

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reciting entries from her journal under her breath. Peter Kennedy’s documentation of the Mythic Being, in the film Other than Art’s Sake, makes clear how these works are partly constructed through the encounters that result, as onlookers fill the frame, attracted to the film equipment and the spectacle Piper has produced (1975). Influenced by, but in a very different context to the  1970s New York evoked above,  London-based, Jerusalem-born artist Oreet Ashery’s early work in the  1990s and early 2000s also drew on the alter ego as a way of re-thinking individual subjectivity in relation to social and cultural politics through the act of encounter. Her creations included most notably an Orthodox Jewish man named Marcus Fisher, based in part on a childhood friend of Ashery (Ashery 2017a).1 This work significantly influenced and was directly influenced by the development of the field of British Live Art – that collection of experimental performance practices which are  at once so diverse and actively resistant to generalization and yet which increasingly seem to be both a product and expression of a particular time, space and context. In more recent years, however, Ashery has taken her body out of her work and moved towards larger scale, multidisciplinary productions, involving large groups of people. In works like Party for Freedom and her most recent work Revisiting Genesis, Ashery has brought together ensembles of performers (whether professional, amateur or neither/both), and teams of other artists, filmmakers, musicians and designers, without appearing herself. There is a shift in Ashery’s work, I argue, from the construction of encounters to the investigation of assemblies. In this chapter, I ask: how can this shift be accounted for? What are the changing affective intensities and temporalities that attend such a shift? What are the material factors – from arts funding cuts to the rise of participatory programming in major arts institutions – that condition this? How do the wider politics of the time – such as the shrinking of civic institutions and a drift towards right-wing populism – affect the work? I argue that beyond marking a period of development in a single artist’s practice, Ashery’s withdrawal of her own body from her work is related to wider shifts within the field of Live Art, and in the broader cultural sphere of the UK and beyond. I also think about how modes of withdrawal and non-relation thread through all of Ashery’s modes of working, framing encounter and assembly as highly ambivalent categories. I argue that this ambivalence can tell us something about the state of contact and the potential for collective politics today. Dee Heddon notes that claims for the value of Live Art often rest on a notion that these practices have some inherent political potential, and rightly urges that it ‘be underscored as “potential”’, which may or may not be realized. She writes, ‘There is nothing essentially political to Live Art practices, not least because the political does not reside within the art, but rather takes place within a matrix of diverse cultural and historical relations, relations that include the spectator’ (2012: 177, original emphasis). In this chapter, I aim to heed Heddon’s warning, paying attention to the specific politics Ashery’s work engages, and the multiple and often ambiguous relations produced by and through this engagement. Neither intimate encounter nor group assembly is automatically progressive or life sustaining. However, the ways Ashery has dealt with these modes offer both critical and inventive perspectives on some of the complicated politics of being together, now.

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Figure  6.1  The World is Flooding by Oreet Ashery, performance still, London 2016. Courtesy of Oreet Ashery and Tate Modern.

Before turning to examine this work, I want to acknowledge my own experiences of these practices, which necessarily inflect the readings and analyses I perform. I encountered the earliest work that I discuss as documentation, and rely on this documentation, as well as critical writing and conversations with Ashery herself. More recent work I have engaged with as a spectator, often with a dimension of participation, and I bring my own impressions and emotional intensities as I recall them to bear on my interpretations. In the final work that I discuss, I was a member of the performance ensemble, and this experience of being ‘inside’ the work certainly influences how I understand it. At the beginning of each section of this chapter I have included a brief description of a work, which gestures to the modes of encounter and forms of assembly that are at play for me in this inquiry.

Intimate encounters The video is grainy, shot on VHS tape. In every shot, there are two figures, either lying on a bed or standing near it, in what seems to be a hotel room. There is one constant figure – a small man dressed in the black suit and hat associated with Orthodox Judaism. In different shots, he is joined by a range of companions, of varying ages and ethnicities. Sometimes the two seem to be reading from a script; sometimes the conversation feels spontaneous, if occasionally awkward. Every now and then, someone looks up and presses a shutter-release cable, taking

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a photograph of the scene. The encounters are brief and strange. They don’t seem to produce any kind of transcendent experience or transformative moments of mutual understanding, at least from the outside. On the other hand, the scenes are charged, as if the participants are more than usually conscious of the micropolitics of gender, culture, language and sexuality that attend an encounter, and have been stripped of the tools to suppress or sublimate this awareness.

Intimacy is often understood as one of the primary characteristics of Live Art, flowing as an emotional and political undercurrent to Live Art’s other preoccupations with liveness or presence. The editors of the volume Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance, a rigorous and significant collection charting territories of Live Art in the UK, define intimacy as that which ‘enables two sentient beings, who feel comfortable enough with each other on an emotional and/or physical level, to reveal something about themselves and connect in some form of meaningful exchange’. Further, they write that ‘sensing intimacy in performance relocates registers of affect from the public sphere to the private experience, triggering a multitude of questions around the nature, form and affect of performance studies and practice’ (Chatzichristodoulou and Zerihan 2014: 1). The clarity of this definition usefully raises a few questions: Can there be intimacy in an encounter that is uncomfortable or where the participants in the encounter do not know each other? Can meaningful exchange occur when what is revealed is fictional or in some way disrupts the emotional or physical comfort the exchange is based on? Can the movement of ‘registers of affect’ from public to private spheres be used to show the connections between these spheres? I argue that the most potent performances of intimacy show us that private experience is a nexus of collectively established relations and that these types of encounters are not always comfortable. The prevalence and sustained engagement by artists associated with Live Art with one-to-one performance shows a particularly rich and complex history of the examination of the intimate encounter.2 One-to-one is a form that precedes what we would call Live Art practices in the UK – Rachel Zerihan, for instance, proposes Chris Burden’s 1971 Five Day Locker Piece, performed in the United States, as an early example of the form (2009: 4). It is, however, one of the modes that have been most fruitful for artists working in Live Art, and the form’s flourishing in the UK in the 1990s and 2000s is indicative of the particular economies and ecologies of performance at play at the time. On the one hand, one-to-one worked well for artists who were operating at the edges of disciplines, who might not have had the material resources necessary to develop larger scale productions. On the other hand, state subsidy of Live Art has been important for a form with necessarily limited ticket sales. Subsidy extended, as well, to a system of venues and festivals throughout the country which programmed oneto-one performance, often alongside other forms of performance, allowing artists to interact with a range of participants. This delicate balance created conditions which were conducive for an exploration of the limits of the intimate encounter, in ways that involved risk, but also care.

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It’s important to note, however, that there’s nothing inherently politically progressive  about the form. Indeed, it could be argued that the form reinforces dominant structures of individualism by prioritizing the singular audience experience, a notion which Jen Harvie examines in some detail in her analysis of participatory performance and its connection to neoliberalism (2013). Companies like immersive theatre group Punchdrunk have recognized that the heightened experience a one-toone encounter offers to an audience member constitutes a kind of added value, and by folding these encounters into the spectacle of productions like their adaptation of Macbeth, Sleep No More (2011), they have capitalized on one-to-one as part of a consumer product.3 The most interesting one-to-one works, I argue, produce some kind of crisis or instability within the encounter itself, often by questioning the integrity of the participating individuals as individuals. For example, in Kira O’Reilly’s Untitled Action performances (2003), participants were offered the choice to make a small cut in O’Reilly’s skin. Confronted with the artist’s naked body, audience members had to make a decision about whether their encounter would take a step beyond what might be understood as the limits of the individual – the outer edges of her body bounded by her skin. Zerihan argues that her own experience of making this decision produced a kind of critical ‘catharsis’, or disruption in the dramaturgy of the encounter, which was ‘critical’ insofar as it strayed from the classical function of catharsis to return a narrative to its original mode of stasis. She finds an ethic of ‘the healing function of catharsis in the re-establishment of our collective consciousness and awareness of social responsibility’ (2010: 39). In literally probing the physical limits of another body, Zerihan probes as well the limits of individuality as a structure for well-being. In Say Cheese (2001–3), the piece I describe in the introduction to this section, participants were offered a three-minute, one-to-one encounter with Ashery’s alter ego Marcus Fisher, during which Marcus would undertake ‘any kind of exchange with participants – confessional, sexual, playful, performative, conversational, psychological  – apart from causing or receiving pain’ (Ashery  2017b). The piece was performed seven times, often in curators’ bedrooms (in the video footage I have viewed, the piece was performed in a Holiday Inn in Liverpool). The offer combined a seemingly dizzying freedom with highly restrained conditions, spatially (a small bedroom) and temporally (three minutes), within which to negotiate, explore or ignore the complex registers of gender, culture, politics, as well as frames of fiction and non-fiction that Marcus brought into the room. Photographs from the scenes taken by both Ashery and participants were posted to the participants a month later, extending the encounter beyond the small room in which it had been initiated and providing a sort of evidence of its existence. Within a scene that seemed to promise some kind of brush with authenticity, a space for two individuals to truly meet, Marcus’s fictional status and the charged network of political signifiers surrounding him instead produced the intimate moment, and the individuals participating in it, as constructed and in flux. Taking this further, if one definition of the encounter is an event of intimate exchange between individuals, which implies some mutual knowledge of and by the participants, another way to think of the encounter within contemporary art is an

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event of difference. If the examination of intimate exchange allows for attention to the limits of individuality, the consideration of the encounter as difference allows for consideration of the limits of identity and the politics of exclusion. Thinking the encounter as difference is a line of thinking that often arises from engagement with Gilles Deleuze (1993).4 Simon O’Sullivan argues that the encounter between Deleuze and contemporary art itself has been so fertile because Deleuze offers a constructive (as  opposed to critical or deconstructive) mode of thought: ‘For the rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently. This is the creative moment of the encounter that obliges us to think life otherwise’ (2006: 1). Amelia Jones writes appreciatively, but with a note of warning for O’Sullivan’s celebration of the creative affirmation of the disruptive encounter. She draws on a Deleuzian framework to develop her own understanding of ‘queer feminist durationality’ – or an idea of identity and identification that does not rely on essential categories, but rather unfolds over time and in (sometimes surprising) relation to other subjectivities. However, she also cautions that ‘we miss something major, something fundamental, if we strip away the anger, activism, and specific political motivations’ of artists (2012:  189). As Jasbir Puar has shown, anger, activism and specific political motivations are powerful components for understanding the dynamic of rupture and creative re-ordering that O’Sullivan indicates. In her evocation of ‘terrorist assemblages’, vectors of sexuality, gender, race, nationalism and imperialism collide in temporary configurations that disrupt normative representations of both the Muslim terrorist and the ‘tolerant’ liberal democracy. The ‘queer bodies’ Puar’s theorizing calls attention to (including ‘suicide bombers, the turbaned Sikh man, the monster-terrorist-fag, the tortured Muslim body, the burqa’ed woman, the South Asian diasporic drag queen’) take part in ‘a cacophony of informational flows, energetic intensities, bodies, and practices’ the understanding of which helps organize opposition to systems of domination away from the fixity of identity categories (2006: 222). In Ashery’s Marcus Fisher work, identity is both mutable and highly conditioned by specific political contexts, and forms of inclusion and exclusion. Her action Dancing with Men is perhaps her most notorious outing as Marcus Fisher, and in this action the complexity of the encounter as contact with difference is especially heightened. In the action, Marcus joined Lag Ba’Omer, a celebration at Meron Mountain in the North of Israel. As Ashery writes in her description of Dancing with Men, this is a celebration based on dance, and it ‘commemorates the death of the famous second-century Kabbalist scholar Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, who ordered his disciples to dance, laugh and be happy as a way to mourn his death’ (Ashery 2017c). In the celebration, ‘the men dance and the women weep’ (Ashery 2016) – Ashery joined the men. Roberta Mock, in her penetrating reading of this action, writes, ‘[i]t is significant to me that Ashery chose to dance at one of the few sites where Oriental and European Jews come together to merge body and mind’ (2009: 36) indicating that the action is concerned with boundaries beyond gender, and that it concerns the possibility of new alignments and configurations that can emerge through encounter.

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In the documentation of Dancing with Men, a shaky video surreptitiously films Ashery. From a distance, Ashery seems to lose herself in the collective subjectivity of the crowd – a crowd which could be hostile to her presence if she performed herself in another way. Ashery’s exploration of encounter with Marcus Fisher and beyond highlights boundaries that are especially fraught – boundaries that can be ‘simultaneously territorial, sexual, gendered and religious’, as Mock notes (ibid.: 38). Where Dancing with Men shows an intense renegotiation of boundaries, Ashery’s 2007 action, Can I Join You Just This Once?, playfully investigates how encounters with difference might not, in fact, resolve in creative affirmation. The action was an intervention at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London during a large-scale demonstration during the fortieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation of large portions of Gaza, the Sinai, the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights following the Six Day War in 1967. In the action, Ashery stepped out of the Marcus Fisher character. Instead, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, presenting as a (queer) woman, but with a photograph of an Orthodox Jewish man pinned to her shirt, she approached a group of Orthodox men who are part of an anti-Zionist movement called Neturei Karta and asked if she could join them. The action is documented in a comic strip-style series of images, with captions detailing the interaction. She asks to join the group, is rebuffed. She points to the photograph on her shirt, tells the men she is just like them, but again is denied. So she steps away and then slowly tries to inch closer to the group without them noticing. Can I Join You Just This Once? is keenly attuned to the politics of difference in the encounter, even as it shows Ashery pronouncing affinity with anti-Zionist activism – indeed the dynamic is heightened by the context of geopolitical borders being contested by the demonstration. Rachel Garfield makes the useful observation that Marcus Fisher is not associated with any particular formation within Orthodox Judaism, but rather signals a generalized image legible by non-Orthodox audiences (2004). Mock notes that in contrast Can I Join You Just This Once signals to audiences that ‘there are many types of Haredi Jews5; there are many different relationships between Jews, Israel and Zionism; and some Jews, of all types are women’ (ibid.: 40). The action is not, however, about gesturing to a kind of tolerant pluralism. Rather, the encounter, which might be better described as an event of non-encounter, shows how affinity, difference and the inability to meet can function in the same time and space. In recent years, one of the central debates within queer theory has been staged between an anti-social turn, which sees liberatory force in an antagonistic nonconformity or failure, and queer utopian thought, which values the hopeful gesture towards a future which has not yet arrived, but which can inform present struggle6. Ashery’s focus on the scene of the encounter, while including elements of both queer failure and queer hope, produces a rather different mode, to be found in the struggle between connection and exclusion, commonality and specificity. What happens when a body comes into contact with another? And what happens when this contact is characterized by marginalization and exclusion? What are the material, ideological and affective dimensions that condition the forms of contact bodies can have? Ashery’s early work operated in the tensions these questions produce, without resolution – in the space of the encounter.

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Party invitations It is the summer of 2014, and I am in the garden of a house in East London for an event called Party for Hire, which has been advertised as ‘an itinerant work that combines live performance with moving-image and an original album soundtrack’, and is part of a wider project by Oreet Ashery called Party for Freedom. The homeowners have responded to a public invitation circulated by the project for people to apply to ‘host and experience the work – anywhere from a sitting room and work place to public spaces and venues’ (2017). On this evening, after some time talking in the garden, we are guided inside to the lounge, where all the furniture has been moved to the walls and a screen has been set up. The performance begins, compèred – sort of – by British dance artist Andrew Kerton, who is accompanied by a troupe of young dancers. Extreme proximity between us and the often-naked bodies of the performers is heightened by the domestic scale of the performance space. Alternating with the live performance, we watch a screening of an ‘audiovisual album’. Here there are also young, mostly white, bodies in scenes of pastoral landscapes, and bourgeois interiors, enacting striking physical sequences such as an interaction between two men, one of whom plays the piano while simultaneously licking the other’s asshole, the gentle beauty of the music in counterpoint to the intense choreography of the rim job. These pieces of film are intercut with dizzying graphics and clips from news sources, largely dealing with Geert Wilders, the leader of the far-right Freedom Party in the Netherlands. Liberation of the body, freedom to do whatever feels good, with whomever one desires, are put into uncomfortable relationship with authoritarian rhetoric of freedom as the freedom of exclusion and expulsion, of self-determination as white supremacy, of the private home as the impenetrable national border.

The sequence Party for Freedom partakes of many of the questions around intimacy and difference – filtered through examinations of the queer or gendered body, of the colonized body and of the immigrant body in Europe – explored by Ashery in her work on the encounter, examined in the previous section. However, Party for Freedom also represents a departure in several respects. First, the scale of the production is larger than the works that came before, with dozens of collaborators and a huge range of forms and media, made possible with funding from the commissioning organization Artangel and the academic research project Performance Matters. Party for Freedom also marks the shift when Ashery herself stopped performing and turned her focus from the intensities produced by the single body interacting with other bodies to the messy complexity of the assembly. In this section, I consider how and why this shift happened, and what it says about contemporary performance and the broader space of collective politics in the UK since 2010. Ashery herself points to a number of reasons for the turn in the direction of her work, including changes in the landscape of Live Art in the UK, which had been so fundamental for her early development as an artist. For the first part of Ashery’s career,

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she could count on fees and commissions from the many UK-based and international festivals that programmed her work to support her. She credits the health of the sector for making this possible, noting: I remember one year I made £17k from just performing … we’re talking years ago. Because people would pay you £2k or £2.5k, so if you did eight of them [performances] a year, or once a month, you were fine. (2016)

Jennie Klein does important work tracing the structures which allowed a UK-based artist like Ashery to make non-mainstream, formally experimental performance work, whose disciplinary location was not fixed, and to be supported in doing so. She particularly highlights the role of the Live Art Development Agency (LADA), an early and consistent supporter of Ashery, in mastering the rhetoric of innovation, entrepreneurship and risk associated with New Labour as it framed itself under the leadership of Tony Blair in the late 1990s, and deploying this rhetoric in sophisticated ways to advocate for genuinely counter-hegemonic practices. In part because of this manoeuvring, Klein argues that, for instance, ‘Live Art in the UK has […] enjoyed a level of support that is unimaginable in the USA’ (2012: 12). It is important to note, however, that the entrepreneurial ethic of the New Labour era, regardless of its connection to the state, still took its toll on artists, even those who were relatively successful. Ashery points to the constant travel during this period, endlessly performing for programmers and curators who might offer the next opportunity, which resulted in feeling ‘extremely stressed, always with a cold and precarious’ (2016). From  2007 to 2010, Ashery held a fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, hosted at Queen Mary, University of London. She emerged from this fellowship just as a change in political leadership in the UK had occurred, as the Labour government then headed by Gordon Brown was replaced by a Conservative– Liberal Democrat coalition, with David Cameron as prime minister. Under a broader programme of austerity measures publicly justified by the financial crisis in  2008, massive cuts to arts funding emerged. One blunt but telling way to chart the effects of this on the Live Art landscape is to consider the organizations that Klein describes in her chapter as fundamental to the healthy UK experimental performance ecology – in addition to LADA, these include New Work Network (London), greenroom (Manchester), the Bluecoat (Liverpool), the National Review of Live Art (Glasgow) and Hull Time-based Arts (Hull). Of these, only LADA and the Bluecoat continue to operate. For those organizations that remain, funding priorities have shifted to emphasize developing capacity to attract both private giving and commercial activity.7 Of course, new organizations and younger festivals have also emerged, but for an artist like Ashery, with more than fifteen years of celebrated work, a crucial middle section of the performance sector – not mainstream or commercial, but also not scrappy, DIY or aimed primarily at younger/emerging artists – had shrunk. However, there was also emerging within wider arts discourse a re-evaluation of ‘socially engaged’ practice. From the time Ashery moved to Leicester in the late 1980s, she had consistently worked with community groups, though she had viewed this

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as a separate (and aesthetically lesser) strand to her own arts practice. However, as funding and support for public services continued to erode post-crisis, the ethics of taking part in community arts project became fuzzier. Where once Ashery viewed leading art workshops on a housing estate as a straightforward community service, for instance, the growing connection between urban regeneration and the increased privatization of public housing with the instrumentalization of arts practice in the service of producing a buzz or vibe of creative excitement made this feel ethically dubious.8 Many contemporary artists have responded to this ethical challenge not by retreating from social ‘engagement’, but by attempting to construct new frameworks and contexts for it. As Simon Bayly observes, ‘Against the neoliberal drive towards deregulation and the privatization of public goods previously supplied by the state, a sizeable constituency of contemporary art appears to have taken on the self-assigned task of the resuscitation of the public sphere through a direct engagement with processes of “self-organization”, assembly, gathering and convocation’ (2015:  41). Since the early 2000s, this has been supported by a growing institutional awareness of and appreciation for (and some might argue co-optation of) participation and social engagement as art forms in their own right, seen in such examples as the rise of Relational Aesthetics (the term coined by curator and theorist Nicholas Bourriaud for a set of practices concerned with the construction of social situations [2002]); work by Grant Kester on ‘dialogical aesthetics’ (2004); the 2004 exhibition The Interventionists: Art and the Social Sphere at MassMOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the curator Nato Thompson’s subsequent work with the New York-based organization Creative Time; and Claire Bishop’s critical response to the embrace of participation by arts institutions in Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012) – to name a very few. Public engagement programmes at big arts institutions like Tate, separate from but often complementary to the main exhibition programmes, in the 2000s began to undertake more ambitious projects, and as Ashery notes ‘a lot of artists like myself who are not mainstream find outlets and commissions in those programmes’ (2016).9 From 2010, when the material limitations of the Live Art sector started to make Ashery’s previous ways of working increasingly untenable, she began to navigate a new set of complexities. An odd kind of reversal had taken place. Where in the 1980s and 1990s she felt it was ethically and politically uncompromised to work with nonart organizations on educational, community-based work, but illegitimate artistically or aesthetically, she then gradually came to feel the opposite. Social engagement had become, itself, a widely recognized mode of aesthetic practice, with a much greater set of resources than those she had previously been able to access. At the same time, the politics and ethics surrounding this mode became increasingly fraught. Party for Freedom was made possible by large institutional embracing of participatory work and is also highly ambivalent about the politics underlying this. This ambivalence is heightened in the work through its awareness of the broader shift to the right in mainstream politics, and the ways this affects how we think about collective social structures more widely.

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As Colin Perry points out in a review for Art Monthly, one of the central ambiguities in Party for Freedom is the play on words in the title – referring to the Dutch far right Freedom Party (which also stands in for the host of far-right movements in Europe and the United States which were until recently positioned on the fringe of mainstream politics), and ‘a group of people literally having a party in order to create some sort of freedom’. He continues: ‘Libertarianism slips easily into intolerance and freedom easily mutates into a nationalist slogan’ (2013:  34). Ashery supports this analysis, noting that part of the research process for the work involved the finding of connections between the development of hippy/naturist movements and Nazi interests in the body and back-to-nature ideology (2016). The ambivalent position of the piece regarding the tension between collectivity and libertarian individualism, and between inclusion and exclusion, is highlighted by the domestic setting of much of the performance aspect of the series. On the one hand, a domestic setting lends the piece a kind of anti-institutional casualness, a sense that everyone in the space is part of something together. On the other hand, it makes highly palpable something that is often implicit in art events: that there are dynamics which determine who feels comfortable and welcome in a space and who doesn’t. The domestic locations for Party for Freedom are absolutely appropriate if ‘party’ is taken to mean a private social gathering. On the other hand, it seems in contradiction with the implied public nature of a political party. This collapsing of one into the other highlights a contradiction at the heart of assembly as such: coming together can both welcome and exclude – in welcoming one can exclude. There is also a question of temporality at play in Ashery’s evocation of the double meaning of ‘party’ which is related to questions of assembly more broadly. Different from the encounter’s purchase on the present moment of interaction, part of how a group of people might be defined as an ‘assembly’ is by that group’s orientation towards futurity, and towards processes of deliberation and decision-making by which this future will, ostensibly, come to be. This is true for a political party, and many other more or less formal instances of coming together. In Party for Freedom, it is not only that the futures imagined by the leftist avant-garde and the authoritarian far right are put in uncomfortable proximity, but that the function of ‘the people’ to construct a common future is called into question. This complexity chimes with what seems to be a growing sense that we must rethink what it means to act collectively, what the assembled ‘people’ do and mean, now.10 As Judith Butler writes, ‘Since the emergence of mass numbers of people in Tahrir Square in the winter months of  2010, scholars and activists have taken a renewed interest in the form and effect of public assemblies. The issue is at once ancient and timely’ (2015:  1). The timeliness of these questions, for Butler, arose from engagement particularly with the series of uprisings in the Middle East throughout  2011, now dubbed the Arab Spring, and the global Occupy protest movement, partly inspired by the Arab Spring, which erupted in late 2011–12. These examples of grassroots assembly seemed to signify at the time of Butler’s writing the emergence of a true opposition to the domination of capitalist-imperialist hyperindividualism.

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Butler is aware that crowds gathered in the streets cannot be assumed to indicate liberatory outcomes or intent, and of course, the state of grassroots assemblyism has looked very different in the intervening years since  2011, with war in Syria, with far right and white supremacist street rallies from Charlotte, North Carolina to Warsaw, with right-wing election outcomes and anti-immigration panic, and so on. It is nevertheless useful to consider Butler’s reconciliation of her theory of the performativity of gender elaborated in works like Gender Trouble (1990) – by which normative gender identities are produced through the repeated performance of behaviours under conditions of relational feedback, which can nevertheless also produce variation and subversion – with her performative theory of assembly, which might be summarized as the notion that we are all partial and dependent on others in our most fundamental constitution. Here, Butler moves from gender performativity to a consideration of precarity, in which ‘“precarity” designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death’ (ibid.:  33). We are all vulnerable, all potentially precarious, because of the ultimate condition of dependence we occupy, but the level of our vulnerability and the forms it takes are profoundly unequal in their distribution. This foundational vulnerability should not be taken to indicate the impossibility of action, however. Butler’s development of the concept of ‘I’, which comes about as a reframing of Theodor Adorno’s assertion that ‘wrong life cannot be lived rightly’ (2005:  39), and through long-standing engagement with the work of Hannah Arendt, addresses this question of action. The key to answering it, for Butler, is to understand that ‘life’ is fundamentally to be understood in relation to both action or performativity (the capacity to make things happen) and dependence and vulnerability. ‘Life’ being necessarily in relation, it produces an ‘I’ who takes action, but who is also dependent and vulnerable (ibid.: 193). As with Ashery’s ‘party’, which represents both a means of freedom and a structure of oppression, for Butler, our constitutive collectivity is what exposes us (unevenly) to precarity and is also the means by which life can be made liveable.

Withdrawal methods I am in a gallery at Kingston University on the outskirts of London, part of a group of performers who are surrounding a grey mannequin which is propped up on a chair and covered with a blanket. It is mid-December 2015, and for the past few weeks, I have been rehearsing and now shooting Revisiting Genesis, a twelve-episode web series created, directed and written by Oreet Ashery. I have been invited by Ashery to play the role of Friend Two, one of a group of concerned friends of the eponymous character, an artist called Genesis (played by the mannequin) who is slowly and mysteriously disappearing – as in literally fading away. The cast I am

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So far this chapter, I have argued that Ashery’s early work with alter egos enacted a complex exploration of the politics of the encounter, which dealt with intimacy, difference and subjectivity, and later work considers assemblies, which can support, but also constrain and exclude. These two connected modes, and the shift between them, are both expressions and products of the differing social and cultural conditions over the period in which Ashery has been working. Shifts in arts funding and structures for supporting Live Art deeply affected Ashery’s work, and while she has managed to relocate her practice to a context of larger scale and in many ways more secure resources, still her current work is attuned to wider conditions of precarity underlying these shifts. This final section looks at Ashery’s most recent work, Revisiting Genesis, a twelve-part web series, recently awarded the Derek Jarman award for artist film and video. While the series is in many ways far removed from her earlier work and the Live Art context from which that work emerged (notwithstanding the involvement of other significant artists associated with UK Live Art in the 1990s and 2000s such as O’Reilly), still it draws on many of the same concerns, such as the simultaneous power and vulnerability of collectivity, and the importance of concrete materialities and politics on the production of artwork and experience more broadly, as well as themes of exclusion or non-relation. In Revisiting Genesis, these latter themes are particularly prevalent in the work’s exploration of withdrawal and the contemporary conditions of death and dying. The politics of withdrawal in the realms of high theory have often circulated around Herbert Melville’s fictional creation Bartleby the Scrivener, and his impassive ‘I would prefer not to’ (Agamben 2000; Deleuze 1998). The withdrawal in Revisiting Genesis, however, is not cool or detached, but messy, awkward, eccentric and even excruciating. The title character, Genesis, is an artist who is in the process of withdrawing from the world – physically, mentally and perhaps existentially. She is ‘played’ by a mannequin. She does not speak or act – indeed, she is so far from agency or even consciousness that she is literally inanimate. She has a group of friends who seem to be trying to help, but they are mostly confused and ineffective, and

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occasionally openly hostile. In one scene, for instance, the friends march towards the camera, probing Genesis about a failed photography commission, berating her for the state of her archive. Many of the aspects viewers learn about Genesis are directly taken from Ashery’s life, from broad facts like navigating an immigrant and working-class identity, to very  specific biographical events like working with Charles Keane College in Leicester in the 1980s as an amateur costume designer on the combined dance and drama programmes (the only A Level to have this combination in the UK at the time) or her involvement in the queer rave scene in London in the  1990s. At one level, the work can be understood as an investigation of withdrawal in Ashery’s own experience, including her decision to withdraw her body from her arts practice. Ashery tells me that in addition to the wider factors discussed in previous sections, a major reason she stopped performing was a personal feeling of overexposure, and a sense that she was soliciting too much of an autobiographical reading of her work. She also says, however, that as a strategy for limiting feelings of exposure and overidentification from the audience, removing her own body from her practice didn’t work. In fact, she now feels just as exposed (2016). In some ways, then, Revisiting Genesis is a response to these ambivalent feelings around autobiography – it confronts the impulse to read artwork autobiographically and twists it, by withdrawing the subject of the autobiography, turning her into an object. If this chapter began with Ashery’s alter ego work, here there is a kind of reversal. Where previously Ashery exposed her own body by taking on the personal histories of fictional or historical characters, here she exposes her own personal history by displacing it onto an inanimate and disappearing body. The story of Revisiting Genesis might, then, seem to operate at the level of the private or domestic, concerning as it does one individual and her group of friends, with details taken from the personal life of the artist. However, as the friends investigate the causes of Genesis’s condition, assisted by a nurse called Jackie, these causes are continually shown to be rooted in wider social formations – or, more often, in the failures and gaps of these formations. The question of agency is ambiguous in the work: Is Genesis choosing to withdraw, or are outside forces making her disappear? She might be disappearing in response to the erosion of public resources like education – the experimental arts programme Ashery/Genesis attended at Charles Keane College was closed, a common story as Further Education funding has been dramatically slashed in this country in recent years. Or it could be that it is the fate of women artists to disappear under patriarchal conditions – Genesis has a supernatural connection with the modernist sculptor Dora Gordine, whose influence on the art world during her lifetime has not secured her legacy in the major art historical canons. Or possibly, Genesis simply didn’t work hard enough to market herself online, to establish a lasting digital presence. This last factor is emphasized by the tools Nurse Jackie uses to help Genesis: her specialism is the creation of digital slideshows which help people navigate the end of their lives using narrative techniques. While this is a fictional profession within the context of the series, it is based on the real rise of what can be called the digital death industry, which involves a range of services often

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aimed at producing a digital legacy, the appeal of which is that the withdrawal of loved ones from one’s life can be arrested after death through technology. Each of these factors might have contributed to Genesis’s continued disappearance, but did she choose to withdraw in the face of them, or has this external accumulation effaced her against her will? Alongside the story of Genesis’s disappearance/withdrawal, the series follows a second nurse, also called Jackie, who also provides services to support the digital legacy of people with life-limiting conditions. In this plotline, the ‘patients’ of Jackie 2 are all played by people who have such conditions, including the performance artist Martin O’Brien who has the severe pulmonary condition cystic fibrosis, and who plays a lightly fictionalized version of himself, here called Bambi. The scenes in this Bambi narrative are largely improvised, adding a dimension of documentary verité to the surreal, sci-fi feeling of the series. The Genesis narrative is shot almost entirely in an all-white space, with the friends dressed in warm coats, and sporting elaborate, futuristic hairstyles, creating ambiguity about where and when we are. The Bambi narrative is shot primarily in domestic spaces, and the ‘patients’ wear casual clothes and speak informally, though in an interview format, with Jackie 2 asking sometimes quite personal or revealing questions. This contrast between a futuristic non-place and the documentary here-and-now is another central ambiguity in the work, framing the inquiry as abstract or allegorical, but also concrete and material. The overall structure of both narratives, however, strongly locates Revisiting Genesis in some version of the UK’s contemporary cultural and political moment, relying as it does on a certain assumption of the presence of the welfare state, which is nevertheless dysfunctional and in the process of disintegration.11 Both of the narratives of the series proceed through visits from a social services worker: the two Jackies. The characters seek support from public bodies, but this support becomes increasingly inadequate, so that one of the final scenes of the Genesis narrative shows Jackie 1 babbling incoherently while the friends respond with a kind of passive, though frustrated, confusion. This does not add up to a direct critique of, for instance, the privatization of the NHS, but rather produces a space for examining the affective dimensions of privatization, and the types of withdrawal it provokes. TJ Demos calls Revisiting Genesis an investigation of ‘neoliberal necropolitics’, recalling Achille Mbembe’s (2003) re-working of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics (1978) towards an understanding of the power of the sovereign state to govern who must live and who can be killed. Necropolitics in advanced neoliberal economies must necessarily be thought in relation to the privatization of resources necessary for physical and mental well-being. It is also important to remember that the governance of life and death is gendered and racialized. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore (cited by Butler) writes, ‘Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’ (2007: 22). Death is universal; an assembly of the dead will eventually include us all. It is also, however, unevenly distributed. Lauren Berlant’s discussion of ‘slow death’ is, perhaps, an even more appropriate lens through which to view Revisiting Genesis and its investigation of withdrawal in

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relation to the inadequacies of social support for the good life. Berlant writes specifically about the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ in the United States (which is increasingly under scrutiny in the United Kingdom as well), and also more broadly about seemingly irrational modes of pleasurable consumption that produce long-term damage on the body and are the subject of intense moralization in media, policy and other institutions. Berlant argues that these forms of pleasure are sought, even if they are harmful, because they help people get by, and they help people get by because they let people have a little break. She writes, ‘In this scene some activity toward reproducing life is not identical to making it or oneself better, or to a response to the structural conditions of a collective failure to thrive, but to making a less bad experience. It’s a relief ’ (2007: 779). This framing of withdrawal as relief resonates with one of the most affecting scenes of Revisiting Genesis. It is an exploration of the tea break, featuring the two Nurse Jackies, and two actual palliative care nurses. The real nurses speak movingly about their work caring for people at the ends of their lives and reflecting on their own mortality. Then, the register of the scene shifts, as the two Nurse Jackies share their experiences within the fictional frame of the series, speaking about feeling overwhelmed and burnt out. The four seem to bond over the value of the tea break, the opportunity to pause, to catch one’s breath, to make, in Berlant’s terms ‘a less bad experience’. This scene of bonding, which rings of sincerity, is disorientating in the colliding frames of fiction and non-fiction it contains. It acknowledges that there is such a thing as connection, and it can be a relief, and yet undercuts utopian ideas about the structural value of such connection. The point seems to be, rather, the disorientation itself, the capacity for scenes of connection to be simultaneously pleasurable and also disconnected from the broader dimensions of reality where ‘structural conditions of a collective failure to thrive’ are produced. There is lightness and a great deal of humour in Revisiting Genesis, as in all of Ashery’s work. At the same time (and again, in keeping with previous work), the series doesn’t resolve the problems it sets out to explore. The final episode is one long shot of an aerial performer completely covered in white spandex, from head to toe, moving against a white background, accompanied by a song with lyrics by Ashery and music by Johnny Parry, performed by Parry and his chamber orchestra. Ashery refers to this episode as a Kaddish or Jewish ritual mourning hymn (Searle 2017). In some ways, this movement from the chaos and disorientation of loss into the organized harmonics of grief might indicate a kind of naturalization of these processes, an acknowledgement that withdrawal and loss are sad but inevitable facts of life. However, the lyrics of the song are anchored by lines like ‘How we live is how we die’, speaking to the viewer not of redemption or resignation, but of how forms of relation and non-relation that structure our social lives also condition our mortality.

Conclusion: instructions for care This chapter has traced a shift through the work of Oreet Ashery from a focus on intimate, often one-to-one encounters, structured through the use of alter egos,

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to a practice that now involves both literally assembling groups of people and investigating  the complex and often raw politics of collective life more broadly. Underlying all of these practices is attention to the ways social and political structures produce bodies as precarious and vulnerable, and the forms of relation and nonrelation that are in turn produced by this vulnerability. While the recent work may seem to exceed the context of Live Art, there is great continuity between Ashery’s early one-to-one work and the larger scale, multidisciplinary work she makes now. The frame of Live Art helped Ashery develop a mode of attention, and she has turned this attention to the wider factors which have, among other things, shifted the way Live Art as a frame can work. In considering the turns in direction Ashery has made in her practice, I have drawn connections with changes in the funding landscape for performance in the UK, in the valuation of socially engaged practice in the arts, and in broader structures of privatization and the ongoing disintegration of public resources and the welfare state. In conclusion to this chapter, I want to pick out a final important thread which connects Ashery’s work on encounter, assembly and withdrawal, related to the politics of care. To return for a moment to the scene in Revisiting Genesis between the palliative care nurses and the two fictional Nurse Jackies, which I have just discussed: while the modes of connection in the scene are disorientating in the clash of narrative frames, what also stands out is the unromantic labour of care outlined by the nurses. This is a form of labour that is both racialized and feminized, traditionally low- or unpaid, and increasingly performed in advanced capitalist economies by low-wage, often immigrant labourers from the Global South. There has been a rise in scholarly attention to these forms of labour, attended by an increased appreciation for work such as that by the writer/activist Sylvia Federici, whose ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign in the 1970s staged a Marxist-feminist critique of the sexual division of labour, and whose research over the past forty years has addressed the effects of globalization on social reproduction, or that form of labour whose function is to refresh and reconstitute the body/bodies of workers.12 Some of the most effective political activism in London in recent years has been on the part of care workers in a range of fields, from the labour disputes of the cleaning staff at the London School of Economics (UVW  2017) to Focus E15, a campaign by a group of single mothers who mobilized to oppose their eviction from their homes by Newham Council, calling attention to the wider housing crisis in London (Focus E15 2017). One of the central tensions of the politics of care is that it is profoundly physical and intimate, which simultaneously gives it power, and also makes it precarious by placing it outside of dominant structures of exchange and profit. This tension chimes with what I understand as the particular value of Ashery’s work, from the earliest performance pieces to the most recent productions. In her examinations of encounter and assembly, alter ego and autobiography, relation and non-relation, exchange and withdrawal, she is keenly sensitive to the awkwardness and exhaustion that social conditions of collectivity and contact can produce; to the fundamental necessity of this contact in the production of subjectivity and the reproduction of bodily well-being even in the face of hostile conditions; to the desire for withdrawal; and to the toll it takes both to perform withdrawal and to have social support withdrawn.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Oreet Ashery for taking the time to discuss her work with me, and for answering a number of follow-up questions. I would also like to acknowledge Simon Bayly, on whose project Acts of Assembly I am a research associate, and from whom I discovered a number of references and frameworks for this chapter. This research was partly funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Notes 1 Documentation and critical reflection on Ashery’s other alter ego work can be found in the 2009 book on Ashery’s work Dancing with Men, published by the Live Art Development Agency. 2 See Kartsaki, Zerihan and Lobel (2012) for a special issue focusing on one-toone performance which does important work mapping this practice in recent performance histories. 3 The argument that Punchdrunk participate in a highly capitalist mode of production is made more complex, but not necessarily undermined by the fact that they receive funding from state bodies like Arts Council England. For a thorough analysis of Punchdrunk and neoliberal capitalism, see Alston (2016). 4 For the staging of an encounter between Deleuze and performance specifically, see Cull (2009). 5 A general term for the many formations of Orthodox Judaism. 6 See Edelman (2004), Muñoz (2009) and Halberstam (2011) for prominent positions on this debate. 7 See Harvie (2013) for an examination of initiatives like the Arts Council England Catalyst programme aimed at developing fundraising capacity for arts organization, in which LADA, among other organizations, has taken part. 8 See the blog of Stephen Pritchard for ongoing and trenchant critique of ‘artwashing’ or the relationship between arts, gentrification and social cleansing, http:// colouringinculture.org/ (accessed 30 April 2018). 9 For instance, Ashery produced an ambitious adaptation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1921 play Mystery-Bouffe in collaboration with members of the organizations Freedom from Torture, the UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group, and Portugal Prints, an art therapy organization, which was performed in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall as part of Tate Modern’s Public Programme. The piece, titled The World Is Flooding, is also an example of Ashery’s interest in assemblies. 10 See, for instance, Richard Sennett’s work on cooperation as skill, eroding under contemporary capitalism in Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (2012) or Hardt and Negri (2014). 11 In a screening I organized of Revisiting Genesis at UnionDocs, a centre for documentary art in New York, an audience member pointed out that this relationship to the welfare state distinguished the world of this work from one based on, for instance, the United States, where orientation towards liberal social service is very different.

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12 See Wages against Housework (1975) and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (2012). Federici took part in the public programme of talks connected to Ashery’s Party for Freedom project. For an analysis of care in relation to economic crisis and austerity in the UK, see Emma Dowling’s forthcoming Care: The Political Economy of Intimacy. In a paper for the London Theatre Seminar in December 2017, Caoimhe Mader MacGuinness made a strong case for thinking the politics of social reproduction alongside the politics of theatre and performance, and artistic labour more broadly, which has influenced my final point here.

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7

Just a Camp Laugh? David Hoyle’s Laden Levity Gavin Butt

I think that life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it Lord Darlington in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan From winter  2006 to spring  2008, David Hoyle’s show Magazine ran at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London and took the form of a performance periodical.1 Each week’s show – each ‘issue’ – was dedicated to a different subject: from ‘War’, ‘The Sex Trade’ and ‘Mental Health’ through to ‘Dogging’, ‘HIV and AIDS’, and ‘The Women’s Issue’. The desire driving Magazine, Hoyle told his audience, was for a ‘forensic’ and ‘serious’ exploration of such issues, one which saw him on stage each week interrogating various guests who provided testimonials on the subject at hand: from Maggi Hambling on ‘Art’ to two ex-cons on ‘Crime and Punishment’. Such interviews ran alongside the show’s other regular features including videos, live painting, the performance of socalled abstract shapes and Hoyle’s own peculiar brand of warm, yet simultaneously sneering, stand-up comedy. ‘At Magazine’, Hoyle tells us at the beginning of one of his shows, ‘The truth will be revealed and it will be a shared experience and there will be a mass lifting of consciousness. (…) We’re going to find the truth and the right way to live. (…) This is democracy in action. It’s a community response to the shite that we’re meant to relate to. (…) We can create the utopia that we all want to live in. Isn’t that lovely, isn’t it beautiful, working as a community?’ (2006). My quotation here misses much – though not all – of Hoyle’s mocking, ironizing tone. This tone is key, in many ways, to Hoyle’s act. You might even say it’s his métier. But it should not, in my view, lead us to see Magazine simply as an ironic send-up. True, there is a healthy degree of ridicule here for a kind of broadsheet seriousness, as there is for the earnest ambitions of Oprah-style talk shows, where the host ministers to a global community of TV viewers on the moral issues of the day. But, at the same time, This chapter was originally written in 2008 and has been revised for publication in this volume. My thanks go to Jorella Andrews, Jon Cairns and Maria Chatzichristodoulou for editorial suggestions. Thanks are also due to David Hoyle for consenting to be interviewed, Simon Casson and Oriana Fox for their help with the archive of Magazine, and Lee Baxter and Ana Escobar for supplying photographs of David Hoyle.

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Hoyle’s expressed faith here in ‘truth’ and in a ‘community response’ to, for example, the limitations of gay consumer culture, seems to comprise a heartfelt plea for a reparative coming together in the face of such things – the playful tone not withstanding.2 His ‘community’ might be more circumscribed than Oprah’s, within the confines of the largely queer and drunken audience who regularly pack the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, but it is a community that Hoyle appears to hold in something like earnest regard. Something like earnest regard, but perhaps not quite. And this is my subject here: an earnestness, a seriousness, which is one – and yet not quite. Of course, Hoyle’s expression of utopian hope is not straightforwardly sober in any sense of the word. Hoyle was sometimes visibly worse for wear from drink during the Magazine performances, and there was much hilarity as he doled out witty barbs to an audience wary of, and yet hungry for, his attention. ‘Darkness, depression, taking things very seriously’, he drolly announces, ‘it’s all wonderful, but it’s all very yesterday’ – undercutting the portentousness of his statement with camp humour (2008a). Indeed, ‘we all love a camp laugh, don’t we?’ is a near catchphrase at his shows. But even as he gives his audiences what they supposedly want – a laugh – Hoyle also delights in weighing down such levity by reference to other, darker realities beyond his entertaining, sometimes self-consciously ‘showbiz’ spectacle, including the bombing of Iraq, homophobia, crime and abusive family relationships. This makes him perhaps the blackest comedian in queer performance art, producing in his audience a lightness of affect that is shot through with the ethical and political burdens of the contemporary moment. Perhaps he might share this accolade with other so-called post-drag acts, like Kiki and Herb, who also rely on large doses of black humour in addressing serious subjects through comedic form.3 But while this aspect of Hoyle’s act may be generalizable to such a post-drag perspective – remembering that he has also performed as one half of the parodic drag duo Bits & Bobs, excoriating gay male camp’s misogynistic tendencies – it is Hoyle’s peculiar brand of sincerity that interests me here. I ask myself why it is that Hoyle’s act has proved so popular? Queues for Magazine often snaked all the way down the long road outside the performance venue, and attracted queer icons and celebrities alike, including Bette Bourne, Boy George, Marc Almond, Neil Bartlett and comedian Chris Morris of Brass Eye fame. True, it may simply be because Hoyle is a talented, hilarious and cutting comedian – but so is Chris Green in his satirical performance as country singer Tina C. Hoyle’s dominant mode, however, is not satire and instead resides in a tricksterish presentation of his affectionate, edgy and ‘genuine’ personality. ‘I love you all’, he says at the close of most shows. ‘Each and everyone of you is beautiful. You are all equally beautiful, equally valid,’ before turning the floor over to DJ Father Cloth, who spins the old anthem of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, ‘We Shall Overcome’, sung by Joan Baez. In perversely and knowingly resurrecting such an old collectivist hymn for twenty-first-century individualizing consumer society, we could be forgiven for being taken aback by the mix of apparent sincerity and general campiness here, especially as Hoyle deliberately and frequently refers to Baez as ‘Joan Collins’. The reason why we might be taken aback is because, as Susan Sontag wrote in her famous 1964 essay, ‘one is drawn to Camp when one realizes that “sincerity” is not enough’ (1982: 116). Sontag’s implication appears to be that camp’s playful mode

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marks an evident departure from the straightforwardly earnest. Sincerity and camp are distinct, if not exactly opposed, modes of discourse and being. Moreover, camp is what one moves towards when sincerity seems insufficient, when it appears dull, square and perhaps just a little too serious for its own good. This makes it difficult to think the evident overlapping of sincerity and camp in Magazine, a task made even more difficult as Sontag goes on to discourse on camp’s relationship to seriousness: ‘The whole point of Camp’, she writes, ‘is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful [ … and] involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious’ (ibid.). I take this to mean that, in contrast to camp, sincerity enjoys only a ‘simple’ relationship to seriousness, where what is said is straightforwardly meant to be taken at face value. Camp, on the other hand, with its ‘new, more complex relation’ to the serious, is certainly less than straightforward, and involves playful ways of meaning what it says, or saying what it means. Its relationship to seriousness is uncertain, whereas sincerity’s seriousness is never in doubt (except, of course, when someone is being insincere, but that also ceases to be sincerity). But is it possible, as Hoyle’s performance work seems to suggest, to have camp and sincerity at the same time? If so, might Hoyle’s work embody the rather counterintuitive idea of what Ann Pellegrini has referred to as ‘camp sincerity’4 (2006)? And what kind of relationship to the serious might such a perplexing form of expression entail? Given the ‘weight’ of the issues explored in Magazine, and the general levity of Hoyle’s comedic act, how, exactly, are we to take it all? To explore these questions, we’ll first consider some contemporaneous forms of sincere speaking predominant in the 2000s, against which Hoyle’s own might be placed.

Camp sincerity In the wake of deceptions practised by US and UK governments in connection with the Iraq War – specifically around the question of the (non)existence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – numerous cultural theorists have drawn attention to the governing power  of a certain performance of political sincerity in the Anglo-American world in the early twenty-first century.5 Such writers have variously analysed the important role played by acts of sincere speech in maintaining political affiliations between the voting public and their political representatives in the White House and on Downing Street. Though both George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and their respective administrations, misled or outright lied to their respective peoples about weapons of mass destruction, it was not a sufficient condition, these writers argue – at least in the earliest years of the Iraq War – to have them voted out of office. This is because both the Bush administration and the Blair government’s investment in the political utility of sincerity were still paying dividends in securing the trust and governance of their populations. What helped Bush  get re-elected in  2004, despite his lies and evasions over the Iraq War, is that at least he seemed to be genuine in what he said. All his famous malapropisms and misspeaking only worked to lend a certain ‘truthiness’ to him – that he meant what he said – which appealed to many voters as something that they could count on.6

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The fading of traditional ideological differences between mainstream political parties across the Left–Right spectrum since the Reagan/Thatcher years was matched by the rising value that came to be attached to a politician’s sincerity – at least until the ‘post-truth’ era of Brexit and Trump. Blair appreciated the political value of sincerity, rising to power with New Labour in 1997 by avowing himself as a ‘straight sort of guy’ (in Kelleher 2004: 173). Joe Kelleher sums up the rhetoric of the Blairite project: ‘It says, trust me; and in trusting me, trust my party. But most importantly, trust me when the chips are down not to try and persuade you with the convincingness of a mere performance’ (ibid.). The irony of both Bushism and Blairism, therefore, is that they used the rhetorical power of performance to convince the electorate that there was no performance, and instead only someone talking ‘straight’ to the people. ‘It is’, Kelleher goes on, ‘a straight guy rhetoric, more and more assured of the weight of its own ethos, and assured too of its capacity to speak on another’s behalf ’ (2004: 184).7 The value of this straight, sincere speaking, as literary scholar Lionel Trilling has argued, resides in the understanding that if someone is being true to themselves, it follows that they won’t lie to, or deceive, others. This is best expressed by Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet who tells his son, Laertes: ‘This above all: To thine own self be true/And it doth follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man’. That is, if politicians, for instance, are true to themselves then they’ll do the right thing by us, the people, who have elected them as our representatives. The problem of sincerity in the political realm, however, is that – as a particular kind of speech act – it is prone to theatricalization, which may lead us to judge it as a sham, as a cynical and hollow performance crafted to aid political manipulation. As Susan B. Rosenbaum has commented, ‘“Sincerity” (itself) seems a naive term in the age of “spin”’ (2007:  2). Arguably this became palpably so after the governmental evasions and untruths associated with the Iraq War came to light. Sincerity came to be doubted: it increasingly appeared as if politicians did not mean what they were saying, even as they were carefully crafting their speech to make it seem as if that were so.8 Indeed, as Pellegrini suggests, viewed from this particular vantage point, ‘sincere’ political speech from the early decades of the twenty-first century might almost appear ‘campy’. In the context of her own analysis of camp and Bush’s public discourse, she writes: At a historical moment when wink-wink nudge-nudge is the business as usual of both politics and commerce, a return to ‘camp’ and its politics of incongruity may seem like more of the same. To put a finer point on the matter: where politics is so openly and cynically performative, what remains of camp as an oppositional strategy? The answer to this question depends in large part on whose camp we are talking about. (2007: 169)

I’m interested precisely in addressing this question by turning to the peculiar mix of camp and sincerity in Hoyle’s Magazine. Placing it, as I do here, in the context of such acts of political speech, allows me to dramatize its unique appeal between the years of 2006 and 2008, and to signal its marked departures from then established sincere routines.

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Of course, Hoyle is very far from Bush and Blair in being a queer performer working across the pub, club, gallery and theatre circuits in the UK. Formerly known as the Divine David, Hoyle has made work for the stage, and also for television and film, including two series for Channel 4 in 1999 and 2000, and a film, Uncle David, in 2010. After a six-year break from performing in order to deal with mental health issues, Hoyle returned to the stage in  2006 under his given name, seemingly with a newfound humility, to address issues without recourse to the mask of his former persona.9 His trademark since then has been to expose himself to various encounters with others, perhaps most powerfully exemplified in his exchanges with guests and audience members at Magazine. Such interactions have taken various forms, including collaborative performances, conversation and argument – which often eschew the etiquette of liberal discussion and political correctness – thereby making for oftentimes hilarious and occasionally uncomfortable viewing. Above all, Hoyle seems to be interested in mining the truths to be gleaned from engaging with others, and not to airbrush those encounters where ugliness or difficulty arises – even where the ugliness that emerges is the performer’s own.10 ‘I’m interested in questioning and betraying my own ignorance and prejudice’, Hoyle has said in an interview, ‘rather than sounding so learned and PC-ed up to the eyeballs. I think it’s more interesting to say: “Oh well, I thought it was like this”’ (2008b). This unassuming, humble approach to making a public spectacle of himself makes his relationship to the speech acts surrounding the ‘War on Terror’ in the first decade of the twenty-first century interesting. There are arguable similarities here to Bush’s down-at-home folksiness, or to Blair’s ‘look, you know, this-is-how-it-is’ rhetoric. But Hoyle does not address the vast abstractions of national and international publics in his speech acts; rather he speaks to very specific, local audiences in queer and queerfriendly venues in London, Manchester and elsewhere. Bush and Blair largely work the ‘straight’ sincerity shtick to its maximum, whereas Hoyle is much more tricksterish and playful. Prime-ministerial and presidential sincerity of the Bush and Blair variety was constrained and shaped by the protocols of office, leading to a restrained, sober and respectable style, while the traditions of drag performance and Live Art overlap in providing the cultural context for Hoyle’s much more wayward, and sometimes ethically and politically outrageous, form of plain-speaking.11 To watch Hoyle on stage in Magazine between 2006 and 2008 was to expose oneself to a very different inflection of performed sincerity to that then predominant in the realm of the political. Indeed, one show in the first run, the ‘issue’ addressing politics (November  2006), drew attention to the limitations of such ‘straight’ performances of sincerity and foregrounded their abiding tendency to leave us cold. Hoyle’s guest that evening was London-based queer-rights activist Peter Tatchell. While highly critical of Bush, Blair and the War on Terror, and a widely known human rights advocate in his own right, Tatchell appeared on this occasion as a representative of the political class in general, at what was fashioned as a mock-serious interview. Complete with rudimentary staging of a TV-style encounter between news anchor and politician, including a desk and chairs and a map of the world hanging behind the two participants, the line of questioning got off to a good start, and promised a direct clash between Hoyle-as-layperson and Tatchell-as-politician: ‘I want to ask you, Peter,

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how do politicians get involved in lying and what does it feel like [for politicians] to tell their first lie?’ In answering, ‘You should ask Tony Blair that’, Tatchell got a cheer from the audience and expertly distanced himself from the mendacity surrounding Iraq (2006). But what followed was an extended, hour-long exchange that saw the straight sincerity of Tatchell rub alongside what we might call, in contrast, the funny – or even queer – sincerity of Hoyle in ways that illuminate the differences between the two. In the course of one extended exchange, hot on the heels of a debate about closeted gays in positions of power, Tatchell was determined to tell the story of the research of clinical psychologist Henry E. Adams, whose findings purportedly prove the nowfamiliar activist claim that behind every homophobic bigot resides a self-hating queer. Tatchell’s attempts to tell this story were constantly interrupted by Hoyle’s bathetic and tangential quipping, and sometimes by shouts from the boisterous and voluble audience (e.g. breaking in upon Tatchell’s talk about the screening of porn to male participants in Adams’s studies of sexuality, Hoyle interjects, ‘I love porn. I love it when they get two cocks in one hole. I think these people should be given prizes’ [2006]). In this context, even though Tatchell was game in agreeing to appear on stage alongside Hoyle at Magazine, his speech appeared hopelessly earnest. His evident political commitment and faith in expert specialist discourse – unremarkable perhaps in other contexts – marked him here as the straight man in a surprising and unlikely comedy duo. He became the foil that Hoyle cannily played off, to great comic effect.

Figure 7.1  David Hoyle, Magazine, London, 2016. © Mike Kear.

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But there’s more. Tatchell was – and perhaps still is – the most pre-eminent British politician who has dared campaign for the sexual rights of the under-sixteens in a climate of paedophile panic and fear.12 But, as Tatchell doggedly attempted to finish what he had to say about Adams, Hoyle abruptly broke in to produce uneasy laughter around a subject situated well beyond the legitimacy even of Tatchell’s political horizons. Hoyle asked, as if from nowhere, ‘But why can’t family members fuck each other Peter? […] You know sometimes to kiss someone or shake their hand isn’t enough [laughter from the audience]’. Then, offering up a confessional admission about his own childhood desire, Hoyle recalls, ‘I remember seeing my father up a ladder painting the ceiling. I just got a glimpse of his underarm hair and I thought “I rather like that.” [Laughter] I can’t be the only person in the auditorium who’s felt that frisson. C’mon let’s open it up! [More laughter]’ (2006). What makes this interjection so funny is that it boldly gave voice to the politically indefensible, perhaps even to the unconscious of politics itself, in affirming incest in this way. This quickly took the on-stage discussion to a place even outside the boundaries of Tatchell’s discourse of sexual radicalism. Hoyle, in this and countless other instances, typically utilizes humour to brusquely put difficult subjects into discourse, and to transgress the limitations of the morally and politically permissible. Talk of lending voice to the unconscious – such as this is even possible – places Hoyle’s act in a difficult relation to ideas of sincerity. As Trilling pointed out in his 1972 study, the very idea of being true to oneself can appear hopelessly anachronistic in the wake of psychoanalysis (134–72). This is because the ‘oneself ’ to which one might strive to be true emerges as something rather more than one, split into at least two or three across the orders of conscious/unconscious, and id, ego and superego. Hoyle, in his own inimitable way, and speaking in the wake of his own history of mental health problems, declares that ‘many of us are no stranger to a fragmented mind’ (2008b). Such a split personality, or what Dominic Johnson has aptly described as Hoyle’s ‘happily compromised person’ (2007: 12), is evident in the ways in which Hoyle angrily chides audience members for their presumed moral and political laxity, only to quickly turn such barbs back upon himself. For instance, Hoyle frequently castigates his male spectators for aping oppressive forms of machismo with their gym-honed bodies, only to admit, in the next breath, his own desire to fuck them. In this way Hoyle buries the high moral ideal of sincerity by speaking desire’s unruly capacity to betray even our most cherished ideals and commitments. The performance of Hoyle’s own hypocrisy here stands as a Genet-esque debunking of the pretence to moral virtue, and of the presumed purity of judgmental positions. This debunking of moral purity is perhaps most spectacularly achieved at the level of the show’s live-ness. Hoyle declares, in a manner now rote within much performance art, that his act is not theatre but ‘real’ (2008b). It is this realness, I think, that keeps his audience returning week after week – because it’s never quite clear how exactly things are going to turn out: whether his interviews, for instance, are going to stray into some unexpected territory; whether himself, his guests, or indeed his audience, are going to inadvertently betray their uglier sides by dint of some unguarded slip. A startling example of this was in the show dedicated to the subject of immigration, when Hoyle shockingly demonstrated his own less-than-perfect race politics and his seeming lack

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of understanding of the complexity of the issues involved (though the following week he tried to absolve himself by saying it was just the alcohol talking). Or, during the week devoted to celebrity, when Big Brother contestant Lea Walker disrupted a ‘lite’ conversation about media culture with her chauvinistic comments about the Iraq War and the people of Iraq (‘I think we should bring all our soldiers back and just bomb the lot of ’em’, she said). This brought about an immediate transformation of a generally appreciative audience – laughing along with her and Hoyle’s gags – into a hostile crowd laughing, gasping and shooting back comments in equal measure. The unpredictable messiness of Magazine, the sometime failures or unexpected turns of its routines, and the compromised moral subjects these reveal, all form part of its peculiar appeal. The foregrounding of unpredictable live-ness sets his work apart from more theatrical or routinized forms of live performance. As Hoyle himself has remarked in one of his on-stage provocations, uttered whilst performing a rudimentary approximation of showgirl leg-kicks: ‘Go to the West End and see a show. Do any of those actors and actresses, who are doing the same fucking movements every fucking night, ever break out of it and say “WOW!! We’re all fucking ALIVE?”’ (Magazine: The Reprint  2008) Being live, and alive, are therefore claimed as being at the heart of his work, as opposed to the presumptively deadening impact of the entertainment industry, and of traditional theatre’s calculated repetitions and fictive worlds. This places his work in a lineage going back to  1960s and  1970s performance art which explored instead the ‘real’ in performance, either by dramatizing the vulnerability of the (a)live body of the artist in near-deathly tableau and/or by soliciting the active participation of spectators in the creation of a singular performance event in real time – as, for example, in Marina Abramović’s 1974 work Rhythm 0. This embrace of live-ness means also being receptive to the potential ‘failures’ that might unfold during the course of what is largely an unscripted and spontaneous performance work – especially when involving the collaboration of audience members or guest performers on-stage. This could involve guests being too drunk to be interviewed as planned (e.g. when transgender TV personality Lauren Harries fell off her stool at Magazine), or hecklers or guests talking back or insulting the artist, sometimes enraging him in unpredictable ways. However, as Hoyle is a virtuoso improviser capable of seizing upon any unforeseen turn of events during a performance, he is frequently able to mould such scenarios into compelling spectacles which, for example, might turn out to be unusually revealing of himself or his audience members (and not always in a good light), and/or productive of exquisite moments of pathos or hilarity. Hoyle is thereby able to harness the critical and aesthetic potential of such untoward developments as a highly captivating feature of his approach to performancemaking. This puts him in good company. As Sara Jane Bailes (2011) has persuasively argued, numerous other experimental theatre-makers and live artists from Beckett and Forced Entertainment to Kim Noble have made similar use of failure’s potential to disrupt ideological patterns of thinking and behaviour. This fondness for staging the productive consequences of ‘flawed’ moments or subjects resonates with Hoyle’s more or less explicit critique of common-or-garden political sincerity. In a quasi-Wildean statement, Hoyle declared: ‘I like to offer things and not deliver. So I’m thinking of going into politics’ (2006). The gag here pointedly

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identifies, and voices, the hypocrisy at the heart of subjects in positions of power, whose discourse is customarily designed to keep up a facade of seamless authority and control. In Hoyle’s performance world, this kind of ‘front’ is ridiculed, and the appreciation of what people can do in recognition of their mutual limitations – of failures even – is valorized instead. In a video piece made in  2009, Hoyle again parodies and pillories the political class. In a half-serious presentation of himself as prospective MP for the London constituency of Vauxhall (which is home to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and other gay venues), Hoyle appears as representative of the Avant-Garde Alliance (AGA) party – itself largely an invention of Hoyle and a few of his peers. Hoyle presents anarchic policies on politicians, the family, coupledom, LGBTQ issues, old people, the arms trade, and inter-generational and inter-species sex. With a face covered with heavy maquillage, a colourful fedora, and alternately smoking a joint or holding a glass of champagne, Hoyle issues his bold manifesto for change. The whole conceit, of course, is nudge-nudge, wink-wink – but not in the manner of Blair or Bush. There’s no coverup here (beyond the cosmetics); no lying. This is because Hoyle’s mode of operation remains within the realm of performance, not politics: there’s no attempt to actually stand at the subsequent elections in May 2010. There is no record of Hoyle, nor the AGA, on the official list of prospective candidates for Vauxhall’s MP. Paraded on the video, however, are the ‘soiled logics’ (Johnson 2007: 12) and the comic absurdities of Hoyle’s dearly held, and sometimes bitingly expressed, worldviews. These include advocating the killing of all authority figures, creating expanded non-bloodline families, banning daily jobs, taking homosexual and artistic people out of schools and moving them into stately homes in the countryside, and staffing old people’s homes with scantily clad youths. Ultimately, the knowingness here resides in the spoofing of parliamentary democracy, and in the recognition that Hoyle’s advocated ‘reality’ is somewhat adrift from the horizons of possibility of the contemporary political realm. The tantalizing thrill of watching this would-be broadcast comes from the imaginary promise it conjures: the ‘what-if ’ of an unlikely future in which Hoyle is transported to be transported from the world of performance to politics. An almost unimaginable alternate reality that would likely be as joyous and liberating as it could be terrifying and controlling.

Laden levity In the Avant-Garde Alliance video, as in other instances throughout his performance career, we might say that, in a certain sense, Hoyle refuses to take himself, or any of his audience members, too seriously. This, I think, constitutes the peculiar ethos of Hoyle’s act that I’m trying to put my finger on here. Instead of a ‘heavy’ attitude, Hoyle demonstrates a healthy lack of respect for self-righteousness and pumpedup assertions of self-importance, for one-dimensional and morally pure characters, and for the serious and earnest manner in which such characters often present themselves. But this is not to suggest that Hoyle takes himself and his ‘community’ as fallen or unworthy exactly – as if they were more guilty than most of hubris and

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bombast. This would be to subject Hoyle, his act and his largely queer audience, to the discriminatory judgement that they lack a desirable level of seriousness. Rather, Hoyle is not desirous of such seriousness in the first place and ministers to his flock through a mocking and affectionate levity instead. This is a cheerfulness, a lightheartedness, he claims, that is free from judgement and full of love and affirmation, and which thereby encourages interviewees and members of the audience alike to speak off-the-cuff, in an unchecked manner, in what amounts to a mirthful ‘safe space’ (Hoyle 2008b). Whether in practice this turns out to be as free from judgement as Hoyle suggests, forms part of the compelling uncertainty of being at one of his performances. The evident lack of seriousness in Hoyle’s work makes for a carnivalesque dimension. Readers of Mikhail Bakhtin can readily check the definitional conditions of carnival laughter: that it is festive and communal; that it is directed at everyone, including those who laugh; and that it is ambivalent. ‘It is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding’, Bakhtin writes in his study of Rabelais. ‘It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival’ (1984:  11–12). There is also, as we have seen, a fair share of grotesque undermining of high-minded discourse with Hoyle’s frequent embrace of the ‘low’: from base, often pornographic references (‘two cocks in one hole’); displays of genital nudity (in the HIV show); and his tendency to casually belch and fart in the microphone en passant. But rather than route Hoyle’s ethos of a mocking affirmation back to the carnivalesque Middle Ages and to French Renaissance literature, I tend to see in Hoyle’s work something more like a bastardized post-war end-of-the-pier act. Hoyle originally hails from the northern English coastal town and seaside resort of Blackpool which typically hosted variety-style shows for tourists during the summer season, often fronted by light-entertainers made massively popular by television appearances. It’s possible to detect more than a hint of Hoyle’s roots – of regional and working-class belonging – in his suspicion of, or even disdain for, the seriousness of the professional classes. Hoyle makes frequent self-deprecating references to his origins during his act (‘I’m only from Blackpool, Peter, what do I know about what’s going on in Darfur?’), which speak his insecurities and vulnerabilities as a non-university-educated boy from a northern working-class family. In fact the popular derivation of Hoyle’s act, its cultural rootedness in northern English working-class society and entertainment, is perhaps even more important to understand than its affinities with performance art. Hoyle began his performance career singing songs and telling ‘ridiculous stories’ at a working-man’s pub in Blackpool in the 1970s, and went on to become a quizmaster and local personality at a student pub in Manchester in the 1980s (Johnson 2015b: 251–3). These were the contexts in which he began to forge his on-stage persona and the peculiar ethos of public engagement at the heart of his burgeoning performance-world. Hoyle also relishes provocatively telling the author that, in his view, ‘Bernard Manning is the ultimate avant-garde artist’ (2008b) – which I take to be only partly ironic, and otherwise genuine reflection upon the ‘low’ cultural pantheon of performers he identifies as his performance kin: stand-up comedians, club singers and latter-day variety entertainers.13 Seriousness can be seen to be largely anathema in such working-class pub culture, which valorizes instead shared feelings of a good time, and occasions for communal laughter and

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entertainment, rather than sober or considered intellectual reflection. We see much of this carried over, albeit with a darker twist, in Hoyle’s modern-day queer variant of such working-class beginnings. The identification of seriousness with an alien class-based culture was staged, and spoofed, in a 2012 performance where Hoyle acted as docent, guiding members of the public around Tate Modern’s painting and sculpture collection. Invited by the curator of access projects at the gallery, and in conjunction with a conference on feminist and queer curating, Hoyle took up the position normally occupied by knowledgeable experts such as art critics and academics – those often legitimized by institutional qualification and affiliation. On one level, the organizers could be seen to be relaxing the normal rules pertaining to the selection of tour guides on this occasion, by admitting someone pre-eminently renowned as a nightclub performer into the gallery space – perhaps in a bid to welcome his audience (one that would not normally go to the Tate?) through its hallowed portals. This would be in keeping with other similar access projects steered by the gallery that seek to open up its collections to constituencies not normally served by the gallery, for example, through so-called touch tours for the visually impaired. In this instance, by inviting Hoyle into the gallery, Tate Modern explicitly courted a queer audience: ‘David Hoyle queer tour’ reads the baldly titled advertisement for the event. One could, of course, also say that – on the contrary to what I wrote above – Hoyle more than qualifies to be a gallery guide, possessing the requisite authority as both painter and performance artist, albeit one who is yet to be written into the canonical narratives of academic art and performance history.14 But regardless of whether or not we think he is qualified to lead a tour of a national collection of modern art, it is significant that during the course of his tour, Hoyle betrays the perception of being ‘let in’ to an august institution otherwise designed to keep him, and his sort, out. He speaks as an outsider to the gallery scene: ‘Ladies and gentlemen we’re here. Isn’t that wonderful? It’s already an achievement. A lot of you (…) might only have known lives of homophobic bullying and intimidation and persecution. And who would have thought that we would be invited as perverts, little more than dogs, to be here tonight to take in the lovely paintings?’ This sense of being an interloper is further affirmed by Hoyle’s queerly showbiz, half-crazed, docent drag: bird’s nest hair, pearl necklace with silver dollar signs, shimmering sequined skirt, purple tights and heels. But rather than play the game once ‘inside’, it’s clear the irreverent ethos of Hoyle’s performance practice requires him to eschew almost everything save only the laziest nod towards gallery-guide business as usual. During the course of Hoyle’s tour he makes, at best, glancing reference to the artworks in the Tate’s spaces: to paintings and sculptures by modern European masters including Giorgio de Chirico, Joseph Beuys, Pablo Picasso and Francis Picabia. He does not heed, still less gives serious consideration to, the customary foci of attention of most museum guides. Instead, when he says anything about the art at all, he is flippant and mocking in his remarks: ‘This one’s lovely’; ‘It wasn’t meant to look like that when it went in the kiln’; and, in a hilarious passing quip about a video work on monitor, ‘I can’t believe somebody’s left the telly on’ (2012). To many, expecting insight into the collection, or even Hoyle’s idiosyncratic take upon it, these minimal, seemingly idle

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comments might appear too derisory or too uninformed to warrant one’s continuing attention. But, as the tour unfolds along these lines, it becomes quickly apparent that Hoyle’s performance is designed to focus our attentions elsewhere: to interactive and live engagements with members of his audience. This, if anything, is what Hoyle’s work takes seriously: the possibilities of lay interactions between people in unguarded, open and sometimes honest moments of exchange.15 Hoyle therefore fills out his gallery promenade with exchanges and provocations about sometimes weighty issues with audience members, albeit delivered with his trademark tongue-in-cheek inflection. ‘Who here self-harms?’ he asks, ‘Who here wants to die, before their time?’ Over the course of an hour and half, Hoyle as interactive guide-cum-counsellor-cum-confessor moves through reflections on homophobia and abusive relationships, the ‘fascist’ politics of the royals, mental illness and the problems of having dialogues with people in authority. He constantly interacts with the people taking his tour, even soliciting from one woman the news that she has just been made redundant from her job in the National Health Service, and then embracing her in Oprah-esque, empathic recognition of her plight. Just as equally, however, he engages people in apparently inconsequential, gossipy exchanges about household chores – dusting – or about the details of his costume. This particular mixture of ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ remarks is characteristic of Hoyle’s banter, and the protean tone of his performance work more generally. In an interview he remarked how, with camp, it can be given a ‘weight or a lightness’ (2008b). This seems apt in trying to articulate the ways in which Hoyle moves, sometimes with great rapidity, from a weighty to a light or frothy issue, or even how playful address might be brought to bear rather incongruously upon the most serious of subjects. Many fans of Hoyle’s work remark upon the change of tone from one show to another. Sometimes audience members after a particular performance say that he was in a good, cheery mood, explaining perhaps an unusually ‘light’ show. At other times, Hoyle’s output can be very dark indeed (perhaps the darkest to date is Hoyle’s 2012 documentary film made with director Mike Nicholls, Blame It on Blackpool, which unflinchingly charts the artist’s troubles with drinking and depression, culminating in his arrest and a serious court case). This almost effortless move from laden-ness to levity was particularly evident in Magazine, which each week moved from performances of abstract shapes and stand-up comedy routines to the heartfelt pathos of testimonials from Hoyle’s guests: from one young man’s astute and poetic testimonial about gay men’s lack of selfregard in practising unsafe sex, to the moving sagacity of an octogenarian alcoholic and his tales of a long life on the booze and on the streets. In sum, it is very difficult to consider Hoyle’s performance work reductively or generically: as simply entertainment or art, comic or serious, drag or performance art. Instead, as I hope to have demonstrated here, Hoyle’s peculiar brand of campery entails a playful address to its multiple subjects. This, for the most part, confounds the easy application of binary distinctions of serious/trivial, heavy/light and the like, through which we customarily judge the importance of something. As already indicated by the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, this might be understood as evidencing Hoyle’s Wildean characteristics, with the playful, deconstructive splitting of ‘seriousness’ from ‘importance’. It indicates that what Hoyle takes to be of value is

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too important to warrant being simply serious about it and that seriousness itself is a technology of capture, a constraining, class-bound set of protocols rather than any guarantor of value. His performance world invites us instead to rediscover importance in the informal, modest exchanges among his audience members and in the gamut of their shared affective states. As I have already briefly mooted, there is definitely something tricksterish in the resistance of Hoyle’s work to categorical interpretation. Lewis Hyde writes, ‘Trickster is a boundary-crosser. (…) We constantly distinguish – right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead – and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. (…) Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox’ (2010: 7). Without wanting to conclude by saying that Hoyle is a trickster (as tricksters are mythic figures), it’s worth briefly indicating how Hoyle might be understood as operating like a trickster in the twenty-first century. For Hyde, what makes the trickster dynamic and important in culture – whether this be Coyote in Navajo culture, or Loki in Norse mythology – is that he offers up creative solutions to blockages within culture, often caused by the impasse suggested by an impossible either/or choice. I like to think of Hoyle as operating in this manner: as indicating a path beyond the false choice of either serious high-mindedness or trivializing lowness, which is the fork in the road suggested by so much cultural discourse in contemporary neoliberal societies. To my mind, Hoyle refuses this choice, refuses both forks and instead shows us a further, hitherto unseen path. ‘Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act’, Hyde goes on, ‘trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again’ (ibid.). Hoyle, like the trickster, refuses the honourable path – whether in his resistance to high culture (as he revels in being showbiz) or in his refusal of spectacular entertainment (in his often-difficult address to edgy subjects). His work is as mocking and derisory of many sacred cows within so-called serious culture – including established forms of sincere and authorized speaking – as it is contemptuous of the shiny and titillating world of the contemporary culture industry. Such a refusal of established paths makes Hoyle’s work a very difficult practice to write about, especially within scholarly – read ‘serious’ – discourse. But, perhaps, that is as it should be. Part of David Hoyle’s raison d’être is to provoke, vilify, confound and sometimes shun respectable culture – of which academic language is so much a part. Nothing I have written here can contain him.

Notes 1 Magazine ran from 7 November to 19 December 2006, focusing on fashion, politics, war, spirituality, the sex trade, mental health and art. The second season (23 July–24 September 2007) addressed celebrity, cookery, crime and punishment, immigration, dogging, media studies, HIV and AIDS, ‘the women’s issue’, Antiques Roadshow and alcoholism. The final season ran between 11 March and 20 May 2008, and covered keeping fit, gender dysphoria, God, debt, the trade union movement,

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Live Art in the UK the Arts Council, ‘Lauren Harries sober’, botany, America, the eighteenth century and the internet. Magazine was staged weekly during these periods on Monday or Tuesday nights and was produced by Duckie. A DVD of highlights from season two is available (Magazine: The Reprint 2008). See also http://www.duckie.co.uk for more details. For comparison of the reparative impulse in Hoyle’s work and Oprah, see DirckinckHolmfeld (2007). ‘Post-drag’ is often used to refer to queer performance acts that came to prominence in the 1990s which, whilst continuing the theatricalizing of gender presentation common to drag acts, also marked decisive breaks from drag tradition in terms of politics, performance styles and audiences. For my take on Kiki and Herb, see Butt (2007) and Vogel (2000). ‘Camp sincerity’ is a term Pellegrini devised for the title of a conference session that I organized jointly with her at ‘Performing Rights’, Performance Studies International annual conference, Queen Mary, University of London, 14–18 June 2006. See Bennett (2009), Bleeker (2009) and Kelleher (2004). For generative comments on US presidential discourse and sincerity, see also the introduction to Pellegrini (2007). ‘Truthiness’ is a term coined by US comedian Stephen Colbert, associated specifically with George W. Bush. For more details, see Pellegrini (2007: 169). In post-Blair Britain, subsequent prime ministers have remained concerned with avowing or performing their own seriousness: whether it is Gordon Brown by dint of the ‘moral compass’ supposedly supplied to him through his religious upbringing and generally dour demeanour, or more recently David Cameron, who has tended to favour off-the-cuff, unscripted speeches, which, we are led to believe, are productive less of ‘spin’ and calculated deception, and rather more of genuine commitment. The exception to this general tendency on the British political stage is Conservative politician Boris Johnson, who has secured office and popularity through avowing, rather than denying, his buffoonish and playful personality. In the UK, Blair’s sincerity was particularly harmed by revelations surrounding the so-called dodgy dossier at the 2003 Hutton Enquiry into the Iraq War. Here, the Blair government’s prospectus for taking the country into war, based on Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction, was allegedly ‘sexedup’ in order to make the case for war much stronger than government ministers knew it to be. See Butt (2008) for more on this. For instance, Hoyle’s (2008) on-stage exchange with transsexual media personality Lauren Harries, which degenerated into name-calling and argument. See Butt (2008) for a full account of this. This chapter was completed before the inauguration of Donald. J. Trump as president of the United States on 20 January 2017. In his populist campaign for president, Trump rejected the protocols of liberal, respectable public address in order to mark his supposed break from ‘Washington’, and to emphasize his capacity for free speaking. This involved him making many ethically and politically outrageous statements that might be compared with the unruly sincerity I set out for Hoyle here. Trump can be seen to have enhanced his sincere credentials in the eyes of his supporters – and especially in comparison to ‘lying Hillary’ – by presenting himself as unconstrained by the discursive protocols of the political establishment. Whilst there are clearly superficial parallels between Trump’s and Hoyle’s sincerity here, it

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would be equally important to highlight their radically opposed cultural and political orientations. Tatchell has argued for an age of consent of fourteen in order to decriminalize young people having sex under the currently agreed consensual age of sixteen. Predictably, Tatchell has had to fight to have his arguments heard above the din of moral outrage and disgust, and accusations of pederasty. For one such conservative riposte, see Lindsay (2009). For Tatchell’s writings on the subject, see ‘Age of Consent’ (2019). Bernard Manning was a highly successful working-class comedian on stage and small screen in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. His act subsequently led him to achieve pariah status, however, chiefly because of accusations of racist stereotyping in his comedy. Though Hoyle’s work is recognized by various art, performance and theatre institutions in London – including Tate Modern, the Live Art Development Agency, Duckie and the Chelsea Theatre – academic scholarship has almost completely ignored his work. Exceptions include Hargreaves (2002) and Johnson (2007). Hoyle’s valuing of live-ness leads him to focus his concerns on current and future work, and rather less on past work. This sets him apart from most professionalized performance artists who are concerned about securing their artistic legacy through careful maintenance of an archive of their work. Hoyle seems largely indifferent to maintaining such a legacy and, when approached by scholars, only seems interested in talking about new or ongoing work.

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Jordan McKenzie: Three Works Katie Beswick

Figure 8.1  Jordan McKenzie, Spent 2, 2009. Courtesy Jordan McKenzie.

Spent (2008–ongoing) Mottled green, inky splotches splashed across yellow paper. Dotted with cell-like blobs, the shapes are otherworldly: mysterious and alien. They are dark and precise around the edges but faded and chaotic inside, bleeding into the background. The images might be a study of some exotic virus taken from a petri dish, enlarged for a gallery

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audience. The colours are cartoonish and vivid, as if they have been digitally enhanced for effect – yet there is something solemn and elegant about them, almost melancholy. Each image is slightly different, some larger or more faded than others, although uniform in their yellow-background-green-splotch form, and in size. Spent is two series of images featuring the artist’s semen covered with graphite powder (Spent 1) and on universal litmus paper (Spent 2, described above). Referencing the tradition of bodily fluids used in high-profile performance and Live Art works1 these ‘drawings’ extend the work Jordan McKenzie began in the 1990s, which explored the limits of queer art and bodily practices. By using the explicit body to produce art objects he blurs the boundaries between visual art and performance.

Border Patrol (2014–15) A small, rock-like lump of roughly hewn cement; a tiny, polished silver canister; a blue pen, melted out of shape (it’s small, of the type they supply for free at the counter in high-street banks, or at the catalogue store Argos); a rubber bird, cartoon style: its huge blue eyes framed with lush, thick painted lashes; cigarette butts; a Kinder-egg capsule; a round green plastic thing smeared with dirt; folded lengths of cardboard, newspaper, pages torn from magazines; a used plasterboard plug; a child’s toy; a plastic carrier bag; assorted sticks; a flat, folded metal component that might be from a hinge; a candystriped length of fabric. Photographs of the objects detailed above are displayed in life-size on a white background. They are items used as ‘door stoppers’ to the communal door of the

Figure 8.2  Jordan McKenzie, Border Patrol, 2014–15. Courtesy Jordan McKenzie.

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tower block where McKenzie lives. Over a two-year period, he collected these objects, used by gangs, individuals and drug users to gain access to the communal corridors and stairwells of his block. The objects document his role as ‘guardian of the border’ (McKenzie 2015), policing the barrier between inside and outside.

Shame Chorus (2016) In the cavernous ballroom of the London Irish Centre, the London Gay Men’s Chorus have finished a recital of new songs and spoken word, exploring stories of shame within the gay community. McKenzie sits on stage with members of the Chorus, journalist Matthew Todd and some of the composers, answering questions from the floor about the work that has just been performed and its difficult themes. From the audience, a man stands and begins to narrate his involvement with the project: he stares around the room intensely; standing at the centre of the room he takes the microphone from the usher’s hand. He explains what being involved in this show has meant to him. He begins a heartfelt confessional: he tells us how he was rejected by his parents because of his sexuality and was subsequently forced into homelessness. He tells us that he has recently begun recovering from a drug addiction; he is on medication for HIV; he lost a partner to ‘AIDS’ (his term) last year. Finally, he says, this project has allowed him to speak about shame and the terrible veil it has pulled over his life. His voice breaks with emotion. When he finishes speaking there is loud applause.

Figure  8.3 Jordan McKenzie, Shame Chorus, performed at B-Side Festival, Portland, Dorset. © Peter James Millson.

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This was the question and answer section of the 2016 London iteration of Shame Chorus, a spoken word and music event conceived and organized by McKenzie – partly funded by an online crowdfunding campaign with website Indiegogo.com – in which members of the London Gay Men’s chorus were interviewed about their experiences of shame by psychoanalyst Susie Orbach. The interviews were anonymized and given to composers, who adapted the material into original songs and choral works sung by the Chorus in a series of live performances. * The three works I describe above offer a montage of Jordan McKenzie’s practice throughout the past decade. I have begun with these works because, placed side-byside, they offer an insight into the range and scope of his output – which in form and dissemination often appears incoherent, almost schizophrenically so, with performance, drawing, photography and music, spanning gallery, theatre and festival spaces, the street, the internet and McKenzie’s home. McKenzie’s work is characterized by ostensibly simple practices that give way to complex social and political critiques. He often uses humour to enter into dialogue with theoretical ideas and appeals to the ‘common’ (Butt 2012) by engaging with spaces and objects from so-called low culture in order to attract audiences beyond the culturally elite art world. Working with the spaces, places, objects and materials that surround him, McKenzie creates visual and performance artworks that provoke a fractured interaction with the live, attempt to unite disparate communities and are site-focused – drawing attention to the sites from which they are performed or produced in order to articulate a politics of space. In this chapter, after offering an overview of his work to date, I return to the three works above in more detail, giving a close reading of each in order to demonstrate how McKenzie’s recent practices have worked with liveness and through site, engaging audiences in a politics that questions the status quo in one way or another.

From the street to the body and back again: sites of practice Like Live Art as an overarching category, McKenzie’s body of work resists clear definition. While Live Art embraces disciplinary infidelity, it is a slippery and contested term, perhaps uneasily applied to an oeuvre that includes a large collection of material art ‘objects’ that articulate a clear link with fine art – particularly drawing. Indeed, during an interview I carried out with him in preparation for this chapter, McKenzie told me he was uncomfortable with using Live Art as a descriptive category for his practice, partly because of its roots in theatre scholarship (Johnson 2012a: 12), which imply a lineage he does not identify with. Nonetheless, McKenzie’s work has certainly been conceived and produced within the established field of Live Art – having received significant support from the Live Art Development Agency (LADA), including the publication of a survey of his work, Jordan McKenzie Occupations: 1996–2013, 2014 on DVD under its Unbound label. So too, much of his practice – as I will later discuss – invokes liveness, even where it might be more readily understood as ‘visual art’, and

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he has, as we shall see, drawn on the Live Art sector to generate an audience for works performed and exhibited in unusual spaces. I first became aware of McKenzie’s practice in the spring of 2013, when I applied to attend a LADA-funded Do it Yourself (DiY) Professional Development opportunity that he was running from his home. ‘Look at the E(s)tate We’re In’2 was conceived as part of an initiative in which artists run training events for other artists. The event came to my attention when a colleague sent me a link to the LADA DiY page over the social networking website Facebook. Held in a two-bedroom flat located in a tower block on a social housing estate in Bethnal Green, East London, the event interrogated issues of place, localism and social engagement. Over the course of three days, participants (who were mostly artists interested in socially engaged practices) shared details of their work, toured the estate, took craft workshops in local community venues, heard papers from academics and established artists, spent an afternoon joining McKenzie’s neighbours as they went about their daily lives, and shared lunch and evening meals together. Although not an artwork as such, ‘Look at the E(s)tate We’re In’ revealed some of the hallmarks of McKenzie’s current work: his practice, though often simple and light-hearted on the surface, offers nuanced social commentary and draws attention to the political potential of the mundane. It is community focused and informally shared in social spaces, including online. Surveying the terrain of McKenzie’s work from the  1990s until now, the turn towards social engagement marks something of a departure – or perhaps a return. He began his career as a student, performing on the streets of Nottingham, an experience he argues influenced his approach to artmaking by giving him access to ‘non-art aware audiences’ and ‘working in a different context from an art institution’ (Lane  2010). These early experiments were shaped by his encounters with literary theory at the University of Nottingham, where he studied for a degree in literature. By the late 1990s, McKenzie had become especially fascinated by queer theory – during this period, he produced a series of performance works that foregrounded homosexuality and parodied the sometimes blurred lines between art and pornography. These works were often concerned with interrogating form and deconstructing established and emergent ‘live’ trends: ‘queering’ the Live Art sector in which his practices often took place by gently satirizing tropes of body-based contemporary artworks. McKenzie’s refusal to take avant-garde body-based practices seriously is obvious in the archival footage of his performance works from this period, which caricature the pornographic body and satirically draw attention to the ways that body-based practices can easily slip into a register that might be read as ‘silly’. For example, Fountain (1998) sees McKenzie dressed in a wig of baby-bottle teats, fellating a man who is visible only from the waist down while a milky-white liquid showers on McKenzie from above, looking, at moments, as though it is leaking from the teats. Meanwhile, in Suckle (1998) McKenzie sits on the knee of an elderly gentleman, on an armchair by an open fireplace, undoes his own shirt and cradles the older gentleman who suckles at McKenzie’s nipples for the duration of the work. McKenzie argues that the (queer) theoretical ideas that underpin this body of work allowed him to ‘satirise, disrupt, play and effect’ the ‘art world’ (Lane  2010). By ‘queering’ avant-garde practices, drawing attention to their inherent absurdity, he inserts himself into popular, ongoing debates

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about what constitutes ‘legitimate art’. If, as Wigeman and Wilson argue, ‘a critique of normativity marks the spot where queer and theory meet’ (2015: 1, original emphasis), McKenzie’s work during this period might be understood as a queering of the bodily practices that had become ubiquitous, if not normative, within the Live Art world by the 1990s. Between the late 1990s and early 2000s McKenzie increasingly became interested in the relationship between drawing and the body: creating art ‘objects’ (including photographs and drawings) alongside his performance-based work. Despite the playful nature of his early practice, McKenzie has argued that his output eventually became theoretically burdened (Lane 2010). ‘My early art was theoretical, and fun’, he told blogger Amica Lane in an online interview in 2010. ‘Somewhere along the way I got lost in it’s [sic] austerity and being theoretically rigorous that I forgot it was also supposed to be fun. It should also be fun; otherwise it becomes this masochistic odd endeavor’ (Lane 2010). McKenzie has pinpointed  2008, the year his studio was destroyed by an arson attack, as a significant turning point in his career, a moment when he actively returned to play as an aesthetic strategy. Expanding on his decision to move towards ‘play’ in an email exchange with me, McKenzie said: I was finding that the work was fitting too easily into a theoretical landscape (minimalism, queer, phenomenology) and that the practice, though ‘watertight’ both artistically, theoretically and conceptually had ceased to stimulate my interest. I think that the foundation of the work was so firm that all I could do was to make multiple versions of it with small changes […]. This is a problem I feel with applying practice to academia, I could have kept on looking at these issues […] but to be honest I felt that I have artistically pretty much exhausted them and the fire gave me the permission to stop. I guess it is difficult to stop of your own volition when the work is getting academically and artistically celebrated for its ‘thoroughness’. (email exchange 2017)

The destruction of many of his art objects, coupled with a year-long residency at Studio  1:1, in London’s Shoreditch, led McKenzie to reconsider his approach to making and actively search for ‘fun’, which included collaborations with other artists. In one work shown at Studio 1:1 McKenzie, Aaron Williamson and Edwina Ashton dressed as termites and systematically destroyed the gallery over a four-hour period (Lane 2010) – a mischievous, satirical intervention that signalled a return to play. It was during this resurgence of the playful in his body of work in the seminal year of 2008 that McKenzie began his Minimal Interventions series – an ongoing set of works that involve him physically engaging with iconic minimalist artworks from the 1960s and 1970s. As he explains, ‘For a short period of time I co-author the works, inhabiting the historical canon and subverting it for my own uses. These works question ideas surrounding originality, authorship and ownership’ (McKenzie 2016). For example, in Serra Frottage (2010) McKenzie attempts to ‘queer the cannon’, rubbing his body up and down against artist Richard Serra’s Fulcrum, a fifty-five-foot steel structure located at Broadgate East, by London Liverpool street station. As Klara Kemp-Welch has noted,

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in Serra Frottage McKenzie ‘dramatizes [the] contradictory drives’ of Serra’s work by ‘inserting himself into the gaps of the older artist’s ambivalent intentions’ (2014). Serra Frottage is also indicative of McKenzie’s attempts to challenge the conventional uses of public space by disobeying the laws of acceptable behaviour and ‘disrespecting’ the established and often-conservative expectations of the art world. Transgressing the acceptable boundaries of public space has become a trope of McKenzie’s post-2008 work, which often explores cultural identity, particularly in relation to ideas of the local as they intersect with class and notions of ‘Britishness’. Adopting a series of alter egos, he uses satire in order to actively critique the use of public spaces. For example, in Monsieur Poo Pourri Points at Things (2010), McKenzie, dressed as an archetypal aristocrat, walks along his local high street pointing at objects, people and landmarks with his cane. The Poo Pourri character riffs on the concept of the flâneur who strolls idly in the public domain, objectively appraising his surroundings. As McKenzie explains in an interview with Marquard Smith: I’m kind of quite interested in seeing how […] the street has one kind of narrative, especially those sorts of streets which are now full of […] pound shops. They’re quite bleak but in another way what happens if you can reimagine – how politically could that work if people had the ability to reimagine other spaces, reimagine other ways of behaving? You don’t just have to follow the discourse which is given to you by the powers that be. You can actually, to a certain level, reinvent that. Kind of finding more cultural space instead of the economic imperative which you’re sort of forced into performing, or being, as a member of the street. (Transcribed and edited for clarity by me from interview in Jordan McKenzie Occupations 1996–2013 2014)

This imperative to challenge the powers that be, and to encourage engagement from a wider public, is especially visible in McKenzie’s post-2010 projects. In Look at the (E) state We’re In (2015)3, a conference and arts festival he ran in Peckham, South London, in partnership with Patti Ellis and students from Camberwell College of Art, artists, activists, academics, journalists and members of the public were invited to participate in a series of events – including exhibitions, talks, workshops and panel discussions – that interrogated the role of art in relation to social housing. This event explored how artists have used social housing estates (or ‘council estates’) in artworks and asked how such work might usefully address the crisis of affordable housing in the capital. So too, his socially engaged work often utilizes playful strategies that draw attention to and attempt to overcome the sometimes exclusive and excluding elements of contemporary art. In this way his later work might be understood as operating within what Gavin Butt identifies as a turn towards the ‘common’ in Live Art practices. Butt argues that in the meshing of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture Live Artists are able to critique discourses that place Live Art in a ‘distinguished’ field that is notably separate from the ‘common’ (Butt  2012:  49–53). Increasingly, McKenzie’s work has become concerned with interrogating and ridiculing forms of class distinction that permeate ‘high art’ culture, and investigating the instrumental possibilities for arts practices to speak to so-called non-traditional audiences. One example of this turn towards the ‘common’ is in McKenzie’s use of the lock up garage in the car park of his estate in

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Bethnal Green, a working-class district of East London, as the site for the  2011–13 project LUPA (Lock Up Performance Art). This endeavour (realized in collaboration with Aaron Williamson and Kate Mahony) saw a range of contemporary performances, from artists such as Daniel Oliver, the Parlour Collective, Richard Wilson and McKenzie himself, take place on and around the estate, drawing audiences of up to 200 people. LUPA brought Live Art audiences to his estate and, as McKenzie explains, integrated groups who might not usually enjoy the same kind of cultural events: There’s audiences, art audiences which come onto a council estate, which they probably don’t often do. My fellow residents who see performance art which they probably don’t often do. There’s the consequence of me setting up and making work where I live – but it’s not about bringing art to the people. So, I include them, and to a certain extent ask permission, in a way, from them. And have to put up with the consequences. But it’s not about ‘come and look at art because it will be good for you.’ There’s a level of co-existence which is like: ‘yeah, we quite like what you do. It’s all right. We don’t very often come and see it. Maybe we do, maybe we won’t.’ Because I’m there for a long time, because I live there, it kind of co-exists in the community, rather than being central to it. (transcribed and edited for clarity by me from interview in Jordan McKenzie Occupations 1996–2013 2014)

As Butt argues, tactics that appeal to the ‘common’ mark ‘an aspiration to forge a common language in contemporary performance, one worthy of the name by din of being shared by all rather than exclusive property of any particular social class or cultural group’ (Butt  2012:  55). As we will see, McKenzie’s practice increasingly exemplifies this turn towards the common, moving Live Art into an actively socially engaged arena, often bleeding into territory that might be described as ‘applied’. In other words, McKenzie uses strategies of community-building, engagement with those who might be considered ‘other’ (due to class or sexuality), and the adoption of nontraditional spaces that have characterized applied and socially engaged arts practices (see, for example, Prentki and Preston  2009), in order to appeal to audiences who might not usually choose to attend Live Art events. While he may not see himself as a Live Artist, then, McKenzie’s work certainly embraces the ‘itinerant boundary cross[ings]’ (Johnson  2012a:  7) that Dominic Johnson argues are a principle feature of Live Artists’ work. Most importantly in terms of his inclusion in this collection, Live Art as a conceptual frame offers a useful method through which to consider the connecting points of McKenzie’s disparate career. In the remainder of this chapter, the ‘live’ therefore operates as a method through which to tease out identifying themes, concerns and politics that position McKenzie as a significant figure in the overlooked canon of contemporary Live Art practice.

Politics of site In what follows, I give close readings of the three works I described at the start of this chapter. Building on the narrative of McKenzie’s practice I offer above, the key

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terms I have chosen to use in the analysis of these works are ‘site’ (of the body, the home and the ‘mainstream’), ‘liveness’ and the ‘common’. Although I don’t apply them in a systematic manner, these words circulate in my analysis, enabling me to think through the political potency of each artwork. My choice to include two art ‘objects’, created for display online and in gallery spaces, may at first seem incongruous with Live Art’s association with action, with immersive, evental and experiential practices. Indeed, writing in the catalogue of personal histories, published to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the National Review of Live Art (NRLA), Richard Ayres notes that when the term ‘Live Art’ was first mooted as suggestion for the title of a book he was editing, Richard Layzell, a contributor to the collection, jokingly asked whether the adoption of the term meant that ‘we regarded painters, sculptors and all the rest of them as dead’ (2010:  15). What I want to illustrate here is how liveness permeates through McKenzie’s significant ‘dead’ arts practices, referring back to his performance works and articulating a Live Art methodology, which destabilizes artificial boundaries between live and visual practices. My close readings reveal how in both live and nonlive practice McKenzie takes ‘conceptual risks’, working to ‘create a context to look at different mediums of expression, explore ideas of process, presence and endurance, and investigate relationships with an audience’ (LADA n/d). My argument, then, is first that McKenzie’s body of work might be considered site-focused, in that it is always in active conversation with the sites from which it is produced or performed, and secondly that his use of site operates politically through liveness by appealing to the common in a variety of ways. By juxtaposing three works, we can understand something significant about the nuanced politics of McKenzie’s practice and extrapolate this in order to understand how his work fits within the wider context of the Live Art sector. As Stephen Hodge and Cathy Turner point out, Live Arts practices concerned with site often involve an interrogation of the relationship between a performance and its geography, and include ‘some degree of phenomenological engagement with site’ (Hodge and Turner 2012: 93). So too, Hodge and Turner suggest that site-based practices are inherently concerned with turning away from conventional modes of viewing and receiving artworks. They argue that the relationship between site and Live Art can be understood through two tendencies often found in site-focused practices: The first removes or destabilises the ‘grounding’ of the arts practice, through a rejection of the materialism of the art object and the conventions of viewing proposed by the gallery or theatre space. This tendency broadens out into a more general disruption of our perceptions of all socio-cultural spaces. The other tendency grounds the work in activism and socially engaged events – partially achieved, no doubt, through a destabilization of our assumptions and categorizations of cultural spaces – but partly concerned with performing alternatives (even if transient or multiple ones). Thus ‘site’, or ‘place’, is both questioned and, potentially, transformed. (Hodge and Turner 2012: 93)

These tendencies towards destabilizing materialism and social activism are central to McKenzie’s practice, which frequently articulates a relationship between performance

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and geography – even in cases where the work is not necessarily ‘site-based’ in terms of its final manifestation – in order to challenge accepted ways of being in the world. This is not to suggest that McKenzie’s practice (nor, indeed, Live Art as a genre) is uncritically ‘political’ in the sense that it gives rise to any tangible change or transformation of the status quo. As Deidre Heddon reminds us, ‘The political does not reside within the art, but rather takes place within a matrix of diverse cultural and historical relations, relations that include the spectator’ (Heddon 2012: 176, original emphasis). Instead I contend that McKenzie’s practice demonstrates a political intention – it is a politics of potential, seeking to disrupt established hierarchies, meeting Collini’s definition of politics as ‘the important, inescapable, and difficult attempt to determine relations of power in a given space’ (Collini in Kelleher 2009: 3).

Drawing with the body (Spent) Spent is a collection of two series of drawings created by McKenzie with his masturbatory ejaculate. In the first series, he dusts his semen with graphite powder – a method that references the early-twentieth-century carbon dust technique used in medical drawings, rendering flat images with a realistic, tissue-like quality – while, in the second series he ‘draws’ the semen onto universal litmus paper at the moment of ejaculation. In Spent 1 the carbon dust settles to create solid, inky, dark images; while in Spent  2 a sci-fi aesthetic is created as the semen dries and turns shades of green against the yellow/orange background of the litmus paper. Indeed, Spent, like many of McKenzie’s works, is highly referential: pointing to the use of masturbation and bodily fluids in contemporary and historical fine and Live Art practices (see endnote i). In this way Spent continues the satirical interrogation of form that characterized his queer performance work in the 1990s. At the level of site, Spent is initially confusing. Divorced from a conceptual framework, the artworks, as viewed in the gallery, online, or, as I first encountered them, on the living room walls of McKenzie’s apartment, are abstract in the extreme: incomprehensible. Yet even in their abstraction they suggest a relationship to a world beyond the image: an unearthly geography – in Spent 2 the thick, dark borders mark a boundary that the inside, bleeding towards the edges, seems intent to break free from. The knowledge that these works are made from the artist’s masturbatory ejaculate shapes our phenomenological engagement with the images in a way that undermines their material significance. The works become secondary to the performative acts that created them – viscerally invoking the bodily site of their creation and, in doing so, the live moment of their production. In Spent the act of masturbation is the live event that exists just out of our perceptual frame, and which, though not quite visible, is an intrinsic element of the artwork. Although McKenzie has insisted that he won’t masturbate for an audience – ‘we only need to look at the drawings to relate them to a physical act’ (Viceland 2008) – in his writing about the images, he graphically recounts the act of their making, the viewing of pornography, the repetitious stroking of his own skin:

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Propped up awkwardly on a cushion leaning on my left arm, remote control in hand. The litmus paper in front of my cock angled slightly up to the left so that the ‘composition’ can be framed on the paper. My eyes shift from screen, to remote, to paper … back to screen. The rhythm of intercourse on the screen falls into the rhythm of my hand and then my hand falls behind, the endless edited thrusting explored from every angle, known visually from all sides. The ache in my left arm reminds me that it needs to move; I angle my body closer to the paper. (McKenzie 2012: 6–7)

If all drawing has a relationship to the physical body, here we are directly confronted with that simple fact: we cannot escape the reality of the artists’ body, of the intimate acts of his most intimate parts. Inevitably, therefore, McKenzie’s homosexuality, his sexual appetite and the (presumably) private locations in which the masturbation has taken place become active in our interpretation of the images. McKenzie’s genitals are a site from which we are no longer wholly separated, as the inside meets the outside of his sexual impulses at the boundary of our vision. The site-based nature of the work comes into play at this conceptual level, as we attempt to navigate the relationship between the body of the artist, the artwork itself and our own body and its borders with the world. In his writing and interviews McKenzie has used site-based metaphors to explain the work, describing Spent as a ‘mapping’ of desire and then, revising this description, as a mapping of ‘mechanical reproduction, repeatability, and the boredom of making over and over again’ (McKenzie 2012: 6). Like the work of the artists it references, Spent relies on a defamiliarization aesthetic, which shocks the viewer into seeing the world differently. As Johnson explains in Theatre & the Visual, experimental art movements have long worked with something like Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt ‘as a crucial strategy for shifting the political economy of looking’ (2012b:  64). In Spent the destabilizing of the art object undermines the primacy of vision in the reception of the artworks. The knowledge of the making process invites us to enter into a conceptual relationship with a live event from which we are perpetually divorced. We are invited to ponder the abstracted geographies of ejaculate, which appeal to the common by challenging conservative attitudes towards the body, the gallery and the art world. Writing about Ron Athey’s blood-letting performances, Johnson argues: Athey’s images refuse the convenient logic of symbolisation, and cannot be analysed to reveal a single story or meaning that sets the work free from its affective difficulty. Instead, the images, sounds, moods, and attendant emotions conspire to produce highly personal responses, which the audience members work through to come to their own conclusions about the work. (Johnson 2012b: 68)

Spent places viewers in a similar position; the absence of the performance moment, coupled with the vivid presence of the images themselves, creates a symbolic no-man’s land in which viewer’s own beliefs, prejudices and worldviews are brought to the surface. The works invite the viewer to oscillate between identification and repulsion,

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undermining the strange beauty of the images (always further distanced from the viewer by a frame or a screen) with contemplation of the intimate live moment of their creation. Thus the geography of ejaculate – the movement of semen from the body onto the canvas and into the gallery space and, conceptually, beyond (by, for example, the dissemination of the images online and in print publications) – playfully queers the art object. As in his body-based performance works of the 1990s, McKenzie here is inserting himself into the well-worn debate about the limits of ‘art’. The live-but-passed moment of climax invites polarized interpretations – inevitably including those that are reactionary, moralistic and contemptuous. For example, when Spent was shown at the Centre for Recent Drawing, London, in 2008, the Islington Gazette reported that a local Anglican priest had voiced concern for McKenzie’s moral well-being. ‘All we can do is pray for the artist’, Father Kit Cunningham said. ‘The extraordinary thing is that someone actually thought it was art and put it on at his gallery. […] We are clearly dealing with a very mixed up person’ (‘Seminal Artist Upsets Anglican Priest’ 2008). The moralistic response Spent received from the Islington Gazette – particularly Father Cunningham’s suggestion that this is ‘not art’ – is a predictable, much-trodden reaction to avant-garde body-based practices, as McKenzie has wearily noted.4 Thus, Spent serves, among other things, to indirectly satirize the oft-repeated, reductive analyses of contemporary artworks that frequently appear in media coverage. Audiences are required to face the limitations of their own (dis)comfort. Underpinning moralistic responses to Spent are conservative and reactionary attitudes towards sexuality and excess – and unspoken but implied conceptions of what or who is welcome in a gallery space. The inevitable moralistic responses to the work reveal that there are limits to bodily freedoms, which are still subject to control and legislation ‘in the dubious name of protecting the moral majority from invented threats from “outside”’ (Johnson 2012c: 145). Through the use of bodily fluids, Spent manages to confront these taboos, bringing ‘other’ bodies alive within the gallery – homosexual bodies, pornographic bodies, aroused bodies: Bodies which speak to the ‘common’ in terms of their explicit sexual nature and confrontation of alternative sexuality. Spent is unashamedly ‘dirty’, transgressing the borders between public and private, providing unexpected confirmation of Turner and Hodge’s assertion that in Live Art practices, the ‘particularities of site have a stickiness, a web-like tendency to cling’ (Hodge and Turner 2012: 93).

At home (Border Patrol) Border Patrol comprises a set of found objects, collected by McKenzie and documented as photographic images, which are displayed in life-size on a white background. The objects were all used to prop open the communal door that offers access to the corridors, lifts and stairwells of the block of flats where McKenzie lives. Although the artwork is aesthetically different from Spent, there are some resonances between the works, particularly in terms of their relationship to liveness, which indicate a stylistic coherence in McKenzie’s approach. Like Spent, the images that comprise the Border Patrol collection are fun and otherworldly, though incomprehensible outside of a conceptual frame. And, as in Spent, the images are eventually subsumed by the act

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of their making. Here, however, it is the moment of their original use and the act of their collection that constitute the displaced ‘live’ events; again, this ‘liveness’ imbues the work with a political potency and invokes a removed site to challenge received understandings and appeal to the ‘common’. Border Patrol extends McKenzie’s use of his own home as a site for making, presenting and contextualizing artworks. As mentioned above, McKenzie’s home is located on a council estate in Bethnal Green, located in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which is the third most deprived borough nationally according to the London Centre for Social Impact (2011). ‘Council estate’ is the colloquial British term for a social housing estate, referencing the fact that these spaces were once owned and managed by the local council.5 As I and others have argued elsewhere (see Beswick 2015; Hanley 2007; McKenzie 2015) council estates have a particular political potency: they are sites which are regularly invoked in popular media and the newspaper press to suggest criminality, social ruin and moral decay. In the dominant discourse council estate residents, especially those who, like McKenzie, rent their property at a discounted rate (rather than own it outright or rent privately at market rate) pose a threat to outsiders. As Lisa McKenzie (2015) has pointed out, estate residents are often positioned as ‘other’ to liberal middle-class values and are rarely given a platform on which they might speak about their experiences of estate life. Border Patrol challenges the dominant discourse of the estate in a number of ways, invoking the geographies and politics of site, which underpin national estate discourses. At a perceptual level, the bright colours and incongruous objects transform the imagined estate site from one of poverty and crime to one of potential, intrigue and possibility. They serve as a reminder of the humanity of the residents who live there. The unusual and at times whimsical images, particularly those with vivid colours, challenge perceptions of estates as essentially bleak sites and enable viewers to imagine the variety of individuals who inhabit the block – most obviously, they invoke the reality of children, not as the dangerous or feral gang members often portrayed in the popular news media, but as toddlers and infants dropping toys as they play in the street outside. At a conceptual level, Border Patrol facilitates a reconsideration of the relationship between residents and outsiders, queering conventional understandings of the estate resident as the threat. The title ‘Border Patrol’ also references the fact that the estate has become a site through which national conversations about immigration are often played out – as, in UK politics and the newspaper press, the conflation between the question of who has or deserves access to welfare benefits (such as subsided rent or housing benefit), and the strain that immigration places on an already overloaded welfare benefits system, frequently invokes the space of the estate: often suggesting that immigrants are sinister undesirables whose presence amplifies the danger of estate spaces. By patrolling the border of his block, removing door stoppers to secure the estate against undesirable ‘others’, McKenzie draws attention to the reciprocal nature of fear: the fact that the outside poses a threat to residents. As McKenzie explains: The back door space in my block of flats is seen as a tense crossing space by my neighbours where the inside meets the outside. Gangs, individuals, addicts and dealers use the corridors and stairwell and in order to gain access use a multitude of found objects as ‘door stoppers’. (McKenzie 2016)

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In doing so, he suggests that the moral landscape of the estate is nuanced; that the simplistic divisions between residents and non-residents, immigrant and indigenous populations that circulate in popular debates are reductive. The work refuses polarized readings that fit into existing tropes of welfare benefit and immigration discourse. In this way, McKenzie participates in a discussion from which estate residents are often excluded. He uses the site of his home to ‘speak back’ to stigmatizing debates surrounding welfare benefits which often play out in public discourse. As such, Border Patrol speaks to a growing body of resident-artists who use their estate homes as sites from which to contest dominant understandings of council estates and resist the fetishization and stigmatization of estates and their residents. As artist and academic Lynne McCarthy has explained, exploring her motivation for creating an installation work, displayed in her home as part of the 2010 Market Estate project (in which artists were invited to make works in homes on the Market Estate before it underwent demolition and regeneration): I mark a theatrical intervention on my own performativity rather than allow the fetishization of my home by someone else. Understanding the currency of representation, this becomes a political point for me […] On this occasion I become a participant in the staging of my own politics. (McCarthy 2010)

Like LUPA (Lock Up Performance Art, discussed above), Border Patrol expresses a turn towards the common by positioning the estate as a legitimate site for the creation and reception of arts practices – and by highlighting McKenzie’s own status as an estate resident. By playfully presenting the mundane, everyday practices of working-class spaces as ‘art’, McKenzie draws attention to what Butt describes as the ‘largely under-examined and unspoken limits of Live Art discourse and culture’ (2012: 49). These unspoken limits include the classed nature of so-called high and low art tastes and practices – with so-called low culture (as articulated by Butt 2012) often understood to have emerged from working class spaces, interests and pastimes. Butt’s use of the term ‘commoners’ to describe artists who appeal to the ‘common’ is useful here in positioning McKenzie’s role in the frame of Border Patrol. His status as a council estate resident, as a commoner – reinforced by the present-but-invisible estate site – pushes against his role as the creator of ‘artworks’, signalling the unspoken ways that cultural practices are classed and inviting us to ‘think again about how we approach relationships between high and low culture, elite and popular, and the valued and valueless in the field of performance’ (Butt 2012: 49), and indeed, culture more widely.

Moving into the mainstream (Shame Chorus) Shame Chorus was a performance project devised by McKenzie and realized in collaboration with numerous partners, including the psychoanalyst and cultural critic Susie Orbach, the London Gay Men’s Chorus, the Freud Museum, writer Andy White

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and numerous composers. The performance event involved a live recital of new songs and spoken word on the issue of shame in the homosexual community. All the songs were composed in response to recorded psychoanalytic interviews conducted by Orbach with members of the Chorus. Orbach asked interviewees to recall memories of feeling shamed – events that may have, in part, shaped their feelings about themselves and their sexuality. These recorded (and anonymous) interviews were given to established, well-known and emerging composers from a range of music genres who were commissioned to turn these memories into original songs/choral works that were then sung by the Chorus ‘in a collective act of catharsis, community and liberation’ (Beswick 2014). The event was preceded by an online fundraising campaign on the crowdfunding website Indiegogo6, which McKenzie promoted through his social media accounts and other online platforms, including the digital press. The London iteration7 of the performance event took place in the London Irish Centre – a community-focused building in Camden, North London – in a sprawling ballroom with an audience of 300 people. The event was supported by a number of high-profile public figures, including comedienne Jo Brand, activist Peter Tatchell and writer and television personality Stephen Fry. It was attended by several prominent, high-profile, openly gay media figures including journalists Owen Jones and Matthew Todd, both of whom have significant platforms in the mainstream press, writing for popular news outlets and appearing regularly on television and radio. The event ended with a question and answer (Q&A) session in which audience members took to the floor to articulate how shame had impacted on their lives, and the role the project had played in helping them accept or overcome feelings of shame. In the live moment of performance, Shame Chorus operates as a relatively simple celebration of the successes of the gay rights movement. It manifests itself in the lived moment as a celebration and catharsis, shared, at the London event, by the mostly gay audience who attended. Speaking with me for a blog post promoting the funding campaign for Shame Chorus, published in the online newspaper The Huffington Post, McKenzie stated that the event marked an attempt to deal with taboos that continue to haunt the gay community: I think we’re at a point in the evolution of gay rights where we need to talk about complex issues […] Some of the gay men I’ve spoken with have asked why I want to talk about shame, why I can’t celebrate [it] instead. But I think we have come so far towards equality in the last few years that now is the time that we need to confront the more difficult aspects of sex and sexuality, in a mature way. (Beswick 2014)

In a later interview I conducted with him, McKenzie expanded on his earlier motivations for the project by discussing how Shame Chorus operated conceptually. For McKenzie, the project marked a move away from the anti-normativity of his earlier work and attempted to engage in a critique that showed respect for so-called normative homosexual culture. This engagement with normativity is an emerging method within queer scholarship, wherein, as Weigman and Wilson explore, ‘antinormativity’ might be considered

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‘a privileged rhetorical formulation’ (2015:  10). In Shame Chorus, the attention to normativity situates the work in an ongoing debate about the gay rights movement and the direction organized gay politics has taken in relation to normative heterosexual culture. Seminal queer theorists such as Michael Warner have been highly critical of the mainstreaming of gay politics – arguing that the official gay movement adopted a politics of disgrace, ‘repudiating its best histories of insight and activism, it has turned into an instrument for normalizing gay men and lesbians’ (Warner 1999: 25). Warner argues that the movement has, ‘in too many ways, […] chosen to articulate the politics of identity rather than to become a broader movement targeting the politics of sexual shame’ (Warner 1999: 31). In particular, he objected to the way that the legalization of gay marriage became a primary focus for the gay rights movement, arguing that gay marriage simply reproduces homosexual culture within a normative heterosexual model. The aspects of Shame Chorus that I draw attention to above: namely the online campaign, the London performance location, the appearance of notable celebrity figures and the emotionally charged Q&A event, each signify, in different ways, how this project marks an attempt to engage with the sites of mainstream, ‘normative’, culture. In this way, the ‘homonormative’ community constitutes the common; the group beyond the theoretical concerns of anti-normativity to whom McKenzie wished to appeal. The collaboration with the London Gay Men’s Chorus, well known for covering popular music genres including folk, pop, R&B and show tunes, and the staging at an easily accessible community venue, are clear attempts to move into a popular performance sphere: to appeal to a demographic outside of the culturally elite Live Art sector and engage in dialogues in social spaces which have a ‘common’ appeal. This is a departure from the kinds of anti-normative queer works that characterize McKenzie’s previous practice. If Spent, for example, works as a gentle satire on normativity, extending McKenzie’s earlier oeuvre in order to confront conservative taboos both within and beyond the gallery space, Shame Chorus moves in the other direction. The work takes the so-called homonormative culture seriously, and in doing so reveals the limits of the critiques of that normative culture that circulate in queer scholarship and politics. That is, it acknowledges that the triumphs of the normative gay rights movement have enabled freedoms for many who identify as gay. However, Shame Chorus is not a reductive celebration of normativity. It also speaks to the fact that normative politics has created its own culture of shame whereby the easiest response for gay people is to assimilate into the normative culture – making alternative choices difficult. This tension between normativity and anti-normativity is simply staged in a spoken word section of the performance titled ‘Duchess’. Performer and writer Andy White reflects on how shame works to create a deep desire for normality: I had a real crush on a boy that bullied me at school. He was good looking and sporty and popular; everything I wasn’t. I suppose I wanted to be like him. Actually, I think I wanted to be him. One thing I’m sure of, I really didn’t want to be me. (White 2016)

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Duchess does not find relief in the alternative queer culture that she embraces in an attempt to come to terms with her sexuality. I started mixing with other gay people and I reinvented myself; the hair went blonde, if it had sparkles I’d wear it. I got louder, I got camper; I talked about my sex life. And it was mostly imagined. […] My friends called me the Duchess of Bow and I’d strut around being fabulous; pretending I was some Chelsea richbitch. Obviously that wasn’t me but once again I was trying to be someone else. I really couldn’t be me. I couldn’t afford to be me. (White 2016)

Eventually, the Duchess is able to shed her desire to fit in. She is able to exist within neither a heteronormative nor a ‘queer’ identity. She abandons her attempts in either direction and exists somewhere in-between, in a marginally more permissive culture, and with the assistance of medication for depression. By staging these everyday stories, accessible in sites that appeal to a mainstream audience, McKenzie offers a space and a live moment in which those adverse to queer normativities might celebrate the complexities of its manifestation alongside members of the so-called normative community. To return to Hodge and Turner’s concept of the relationship between ground and groundlessness in spatial Live Art practices, Shame Chorus enacts a spatial politics that appeals to the common by disrupting the established theoretical narratives and material conditions through which the politics of homosexual shame is often understood, grounding the work in a socially engaged context.

Conclusion: the impossible task of scholarship As I indicate above, site, liveness and an attention to various articulations of the ‘common’ are useful frames through which to consider McKenzie’s work, and to map its concerns back onto the thematic, disciplinary and theoretical concerns of the UK Live Art sector at large. My close analyses have sought to illuminate how simple, playful, yet theoretically loaded practices can be understood as working to challenge prevailing discourses about the world, rendering moments of possibility where audiences might find their status quo momentarily disrupted. McKenzie’s ongoing methods of making and presenting work clearly draw on and extend tropes that circulate within Live Art practices more widely, identified in the writing of scholars such as Butt, Johnson, Heddon, Turner and Hodge and others, as outlined and unpacked above. Nonetheless, I find it frustratingly impossible to neatly package McKenzie’s considerable career within a set of theoretical frames – in part because the richness and scope of the work cannot be contained, and in part because the works I have chosen not to include in this chapter sit on the periphery of my consciousness, threatening to undermine and disrupt the readings I offer above. While McKenzie’s experiments with form and disciplinary infidelity might not be usual, his work does demonstrate how slippery and unwieldy the task of documenting a contested, ever-changing set of practices proves to be. If McKenzie’s work reveals anything significant about the landscape of the Live Art sector within the UK then,

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perhaps it most usefully illustrates the limits and possibilities of scholarship; revealing why it is that Live Art as a set of practices has – perhaps out of necessity – emerged alongside the sub-discipline of scholarship which documents and interprets those practices. The works of Live Art offer a challenge to scholars; their complexity and contradictions expressed in forms which require theoretical articulation – which are at once beyond the scope of words, and yet unable to be fully appreciated without them.

Notes 1 Including Marina Abramovic’s ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ (2005), Matthew Barney’s ‘The Cremaster Cycle’ (1994–2002), Annie Sprinkle’s ‘The Legend of the Ancient Sacred Prostitute’ (1991), Vitto Acconi’s ‘Seedbed’ (1972) and Duchamp’s ‘Paysage fautif ’ (1946) (McKenzie 2012: 32–40). 2 On his website McKenzie documents this event as ‘Look at the (E)state We’re In’. However, this was the title of a later conference (discussed below), in which the brackets were moved to surround the E; the original DiY was billed as above. 3 This project has the same name as the DiY I describe above, but is a different event. 4 Responding to Father Cunningham’s comments in an interview with popular online magazine Vice, McKenzie said: ‘I find it quite amazing that work around bodily fluids is still considered outrageous. Take the most iconic image of Jesus. There have been hundreds of paintings that feature blood coming out of his wounds. It’s literally been going on for centuries’ (Viceland 2008). 5 Unlike many other estates, which have been sold or stock-transferred to housing associations and owner occupiers, McKenzie’s estate, the Approach, is still managed by Tower Hamlets, the local authority. 6 This website allows members of the public to make a funding donation towards proposed projects using a credit or debit card. The flexible funding option, which McKenzie used for this project, means that all monies donated are given to the project regardless of whether or not it meets its target, minus a 5 per cent fee. 7 The performance was also staged at the 2016 B-Side arts festival in Dorset, England.

9

Performance and Prostitution: The Magazine Actions of Cosey Fanni Tutti Eleanor Roberts

Everything in the show is for sale at a price, even the people. COUM Transmissions, Prostitution, 19761 In Caprice Issue No.  35, exhibit number  26 of Prostitution, we see a collection of sequentially ordered images with an accompanying text, evidently taken from a magazine, under the heading ‘Water Bed Orgy’.2 Frame by frame a sex scene unfolds, beginning with two white, young, slim, naked women on a bed kissing with their eyes closed – one has long brown hair, the other blonde. The blonde woman has thrown her leg over the lap of the other, who grips and pulls back at the upper thigh beneath the buttock, exposing her hairless genitals for the camera. Later, the two women are on their knees, spread wide, face-to-face and pushing each other’s breasts up, which bulge together. Looking down and away from each other, their eyelids are dropped. The dark-haired woman’s half-open mouth registers ecstasy. In the following frame, a man has entered the scene; his head is craning into the centre of the shot as his tongue points and reaches towards the vagina of one of the women. She is identifiable only by her dark pubic hair and her waiting, open mouth as her blonde partner sits over and obscures the rest of her face. Next, the man is gone again and the women are side by side on their backs. Their legs are spread and flung up and over towards their heads, vulvas exposed in the foreground. Their smiling faces (the only smiling faces in the series of images) are in the background, and the dark-haired woman commands the majority of space. The smiles then disappear as a similar pose is performed, but this time the women spread their labia apart with their fingers, and their heads fall back with closed eyes. Tongues and fingers touch nipples and orifices in various scenes. The man’s mouth contorts as he stretches to reach with his tongue, before the final image of the two women, their labia at the centre, stacked one on top of the other. The very top of the dark-haired woman’s head narrowly comes into view behind the thigh of her blonde partner. The bottom-right corner of this frame is signed ‘Cosey Fanni Tutti’.

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Caprice Issue No. 35 is one of many Magazine Actions by Cosey Fanni Tutti, who is the dark-haired woman described in the scene above.3 In the Magazine Actions, Tutti appears as a model in pornography and glamour publications produced between 1973 and  1977.4 In addition to Caprice Issue No.  35, Magazine Action clippings taken from titles including Exposure, Playbirds, Private and Sexpert formed the central component of the COUM Transmissions retrospective exhibition, Prostitution, at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) (19–26 October 1976). Spearheaded by Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn’s now-infamous denunciation of COUM as ‘the wreckers of civilisation’ (Ford 1999: 6.19–22), the ‘porn show’ prompted media scandal (Peacock 1976: 3). Indeed, the status of the exhibition as an ‘infamous’ event continues to contribute greatly to conceptions (or mythologies) of the ICA as a place of radical experimentation in the 1970s and beyond.5 In what follows, I offer a new, detailed account of the Magazine Actions and their reception in the context of Prostitution as a foundation for re-thinking resistance to classification (both formal and political) as a strength of Tutti’s work. While the Actions have been incorrectly and unhelpfully categorized (e.g. as ‘not art’ or ‘not feminist’, as I will go on to explain), this chapter historicizes and theorizes Tutti’s work in terms of its prescience as an example of pluralistic feminist practice in the  1970s, and formal innovation in performance and conceptual art. Using archival research and an interview with the artist, I propose that performance offers a lens through which to examine the ‘troubling’ effect of Tutti’s variously interpreted works, and the fruitful strategies of equivocation she deploys. The extent to which the Magazine Actions are conceived of as photographic, documentation of live performances, or long-term convergences of art and everyday life – and whether they are contingent on display in art venues – are complex questions which will be explored in this chapter. In her works of the 1970s, Tutti re-forms representations and politics of sex and sexuality, alongside a number of other women artists emerging and performing interventions into mainstream cultural landscapes. As increasingly collective movements begin to galvanize from the 1960s, this perhaps constitutes one of the most significant innovations of feminist art. Indeed, early performance works by women artists – such as Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Charlotte Moorman and VALIE EXPORT – who directly incorporate and critique a feminist analysis of the politics of sex in their work through performance continue to hold positions of inestimable influence on not only feminist art, but wider landscapes of contemporary art and culture more broadly. Later, new sites and modes for developing creative social practices in relation to sex and sexuality were explored as feminist tools of personal–political empowerment for women, for example, in the ‘sex-positive’ performances and activism of artist and former sex worker Annie Sprinkle in the 1980s and 1990s. Sprinkle has said that for her Tutti – as an artist among those who pioneered new ways of representing sex – has been a source of inspiration in both her life and her work (Stephens, Sprinkle and Tutti 2009: 90). Indeed, in her Magazine Actions and performances of the 1970s and  1980s, Tutti opened up new spaces for artistic experimentation, within which Sprinkle could also draw on her experiences of being a sex worker and performing in pornography as part of her art practice.6 Sprinkle had previously worked as a

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‘prostitute’ earlier in life before moving on to star in pornographic films and stripping, while Tutti’s sex work had mostly consisted of stripping, posing and simulating sex acts for still photographs in pornographic magazines. However, both have performed sex acts live for art audiences. For example, Tutti performed vaginal and anal sex with Genesis P-Orridge, using an art object which functioned as a double-ended dildo in a performance titled Filth at Art Meeting Place in  1974 (Ford  1999:  4.12; Stephens, Sprinkle and Tutti  2009:  98; Tutti  2017:  176), and Sprinkle has drawn on her experience as a sex worker to develop performance pieces, some of which have involved masturbation or other acts involving penetration (Juno 1999: 34). While Tutti and Sprinkle share some representational strategies as artists, and both have elicited outrage in the mainstream press (for staging sexually explicit work in public venues), their works are very different in form and tone. Tutti’s work cannot be comfortably classified on the same terms as Sprinkle’s sex-positive performance practice – even though they share similar politics around sexual pluralism. Perhaps Sprinkle’s most iconic performance was part of Post Porn Modernist and Post-Post Porn Modernist (1990–5), a series of touring solo shows written and performed by the artist. In an act titled Public Cervix Announcement, audience members were invited to view Sprinkle’s cervix through a speculum with a flashlight. In this work, Sprinkle presents her sexually performing body for a range of artistic and also socially engaged reasons centred on pleasure and pleasure-giving, which include having fun (‘fun is really important’, she states), sharing the beauty of the cervix, and ‘demystif[ying] women’s bodies’ (Juno 1999: 34). Contrastingly, Tutti’s work does not appear to share the ameliorative, positive or therapeutic functions and aesthetics of Sprinkle’s practice. In a review of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,  4  March–16  July  2007), which displayed Magazine Action material from Prostitution, Carolyn Stuart notes visitors’ ‘quick walk-through’ past Tutti’s work, which appeared ‘pornographic-looking’ and were felt to be ‘difficult to consume as art’ (Stuart  2008:  477). Stuart notes a sense of discomfort in viewers’ engagement with – or rather, disengagement from – the work, but also ‘a failure to understand the feminism of [the] graphic photos’ – adding, an ‘explanatory wall text would have been helpful’ (ibid.). Stuart’s observations point to a weakness in the curatorial framing of the images, but also a continuing (and perhaps understandable) difficulty for advocates of feminist art to embrace images which appear to be produced in conditions that knowingly and purposefully utilize a woman’s body as a sexual object instituted within the binary system of what Judith Butler calls the ‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler  2006:  47–106). Within this discursive construct (which has historically been naturalized) desire is established as a ‘heterosexual male prerogative’ (ibid.: 58), and it accounts for ‘all desire for women by subjects of whatever sex or gender as originating in a masculine, heterosexual position. The libido-as-masculine is the source from which all possible sexuality is presumed to come’ (ibid.: 72). Butler has critiqued the psychoanalytic (structuralist) formulation of the ‘heterosexual matrix’ for its under-acknowledged set of assumptions in historical accounts of desire – both feminist and non-feminist. Her argument informs and is part of a discursive field which includes anti-censorship, sex-positive and queer feminisms

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in that it illuminates ways in which women’s desire has frequently failed to be accounted for outside of this masculine-orientated system. As Linda Williams – a film theorist and pioneer of feminist pornography studies – wrote in the late 1980s, ‘for women, one constant of the history of sexuality has been a failure to imagine their pleasures outside a dominant male economy’, which, she argues, has been conceptualized around women’s victimization, heterosexual male aggression or sadism, and violent weaponizations of the penis and/or male sexuality as a means of control over women (Williams 1999: 4, 5, 23). The fact that Tutti’s modelling work was undertaken for reproduction in magazines and films specifically targeted for sexual use by heterosexual male consumers suggests that her images are not only ‘pornographic-looking’, as Stuart euphemistically describes them; they are produced within material conditions that are explicitly grounded in pornography. This interpretive difficulty for feminist commentators persists, despite the fact that a growing number of campaigns and discussions have become increasingly focused on inclusive practice, which promotes the rights and agency of sex workers (my own argument centres on concepts of feminist inclusivity throughout this chapter). While significant advances have been made in addressing the stigmatization, marginalization, and victimhood bound up with anti-pornography and anti-sex work discourses historically, feminist art criticism may still be haunted by the spectre of the ‘porn wars’, which emerged in the feminist movement from the late 1970s to the mid1980s. Resulting accounts of pornography as ‘a unified (patriarchal) discourse with a singular (misogynistic) impact’ (Duggan 2006: 6) led to legislation which had damaging knock-on effects such as revoked funding for queer and feminist performance artists whose work was deemed to contain ‘obscene’ content (ibid.: 3). Lisa Duggan has since been among the feminist scholars to persuasively respond to anti-pornography feminism by arguing that ‘the sexually explicit materials called “pornography” are full of multiple, contradictory, layered and highly contextual meanings’, and she strategically focuses instead on the vital issues of consent and sexist, capitalist Western economies in which women may choose sex work as ‘not always the worst option’ (ibid.: 6, 8). This tension between anti-pornography feminism and other models of feminist representation and interpretation is also the subject of renewed attention in curatorial strategies in contemporary art. For example, Tutti’s Magazine Actions have recently been exhibited alongside works by US painters Joan Semmel, Anita Steckel and Betty Tompkins – who all focused on explicit representations of (mostly heterosexual) sex in the 1970s (Galo 2016; Newell-Hanson 2016). The group show, titled Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics (Dallas Contemporary, 17 January–20 March 2016), which drew mainstream press attention in the United States and also in the United Kingdom, perpetuates enduring perceptions of Tutti as a ‘black sheep’ feminist (Gingeras 2015). While work such as Sprinkle’s speaks in some ways to the enduring legacies of personal–political emancipation projects and consciousness-raising of  1970s feminism, Tutti’s work counts as evidence for an equally relevant, and currently underacknowledged dimension of the movement. It offers an example of a set of practices and discourses centred on work by women and others of a range of genders, engaged in the representation of sex and power after the ‘feel-good’ driving forces of ‘liberation’ arising from the 1960s were depleted. Emerging alongside the punk-related aesthetics

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developed by COUM Transmissions, Tutti’s harnessing of sex and sex work in her Magazine Actions of the 1970s enables entirely different representations of gendered agency which complicates existing narratives of ‘1970s feminism’ – as well as the impact of performance practices on histories of conceptual art. Active members of COUM Transmissions at the time of Prostitution were listed in the press release:7 Peter (‘Sleazy’) Christopherson, Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge (as then known, prior to later changes of gender and name to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and the collective identity BREYER P-ORRIDGE).8 The exhibition opening party also marked the formation of the founding industrial band Throbbing Gristle, of which Tutti was also member. In the exhibition at the ICA, Magazine Actions were displayed alongside documentation and artefacts of previous COUM actions and performances, including Tutti’s bloodied tampons hanging from a walking stick.9 Another tampon sculpture by P-Orridge, Venus Mound (From Tampax Romana),10 and objects and instruments including a double-ended dildo, a meat cleaver, a rubber suit, hair, Vaseline and a ‘Chain Shower and Box’ were also displayed. COUM’s statement in the Prostitution poster and press release reads, ‘This exhibition was prompted as a comment on survival in Britain’, and describes Tutti appearing in pornographic magazines as a ‘deliberate policy’ of action.11 The text continues: All of these [actions] framed form the core of this exhibition. Different ways of seeing and using Cosey with her consent, produced by people unaware of her reasons, as a woman and an artist, for participating. In that sense, pure views. In line with this all the photo documentation shown was taken, unbidden by COUM by people who decided on their own to photograph our actions. (Prostitution poster 1976)

The document details ways in which the exhibition collects how ‘other people’ (Tutti’s photographers) see and record Tutti’s actions (as part of wider COUM actions), before finally adding, ‘Everything in the show is for sale at a price, even the people’. The opening party (described by COUM in the press release as ‘key’) included live music from Throbbing Gristle (the group consisted of the listed COUM members plus Chris Carter) and the punk band Chelsea (billed as ‘LSD’). A stripper named Shelley and a ‘beautiful, tall, intimidating transvestite’ (referred to in some accounts as a ‘drag queen’) named Java were hired for entertainment and security services, respectively (Stephens, Sprinkle and Tutti  2009:  98; Tutti  2017:  203). Throbbing Gristle’s set of around six or so songs also involved the use of special effects make-up to simulate wounds across Tutti’s topless chest, and P-Orridge gargling and spitting up fake blood. Tutti’s own account describes the evening building to an explosive conclusion with a drunken brawl between P-Orridge and the artist Ian Hinchcliffe, which prompted further chaos and a trip to Charing Cross Accident & Emergency department (Tutti 2017: 204–5). The ensuing scandal in the mainstream media was also represented in a kind of living archive, as reviews were added by the group to a display on the gallery wall across the span of the exhibition (Ford 1999: 6.19–22). As Simon Ford has illustrated, reactions (and indeed, the production) of the show were both constitutive and reflective

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of ‘moral panic’ (as conceptualized by sociologist Stanley Cohen), enabled by anxieties over economic uncertainty and accumulating threats to established cultural values (ibid.). As Ford points out, this moral panic over Prostitution was partly fed by earlier controversial exhibitions and performances; particularly, the artist Mary Kelly’s display of faecal stains on used nappy liners among other works in her Post-Partum Document, which had closed at the ICA only three days prior to COUM’s show opening. Ted Little, the incumbent ICA director, continued to support COUM and Prostitution, which ultimately destabilized his directorship and jeopardized the ICA’s funding from the Arts Council of Great Britain, as well as (indirectly) the stability of the Arts Council itself as a funding body; Little resigned from the gallery the following year (‘Adults Only Art Show’ 1976: 17; Ford 1999: 6.24; ‘Protests at Use’ 1976: 8; Tisdall 1976: 10). In Wreckers of Civilisation, Ford gives an overview of the media responses to the exhibition, but falls short of any particular depth on how Tutti specifically is represented and received.12 Interestingly, a survey of the popular press responses show that Tutti is mostly discussed – if at all – as a ‘girlfriend’, ‘wife’, ‘follower’, side-kick, or incidentally involved as a model in P-Orridge’s ‘sex show’. Moreover, her name is variously misspelt as ‘Cozy’, ‘Fanny’ and ‘Tutte’. In the Daily Express, the crediting of Tutti as ‘Orridge’s [sic] girlfriend Cosey Fanny [sic] Tutti, who is featured in some of the pictures’ is particularly characteristic (Clancy  1976:  2). Similarly, both the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror fail to mention the collective status of COUM entirely and focus instead on state-supported funding given to P-Orridge, as a ‘porn show producer’ (Peacock 1976: 3; Piler 1976: 3; Usher 1976: 6). Alongside William Feaver for the Guardian (who cites Tutti as COUM’s ‘star’ seeking to ‘exploit’ the ‘exploiters’) (1976:  27), Nicholas Fairbairn, COUM’s most vehement critic, appears among those giving Tutti the most credit for the work – conveniently shifting blame to the ‘prostitute’ woman. This demonstrates some of the ways in which Tutti’s authorship is undermined, except when convenient or corollary to claims of her supposed toxicity (and is therefore an exemplary place to begin when considering how Tutti’s work functions as a complex feminist intervention). The Times reported Fairbairn’s questioning of Brynmor John, the Home Office’s Minister of State: ‘Is the minister satisfied with the law which allows bodies such as the Arts Council or the British Council to spend taxpayers’ money on sending Cosey Fanni Tutti to take a bath in polythene chips in Milan and exhibitions such as we have in London?’ (‘Protests at Use’ 1976: 8). Fairbairn cites Prostitution but also a survey exhibition, which was co-sponsored by the British Council, in Milan where Tutti and P-Orridge performed Towards Thee Crystal Bowl, a performance involving dance-like movements, hanging chains and a sandbox ‘bath’ of plastic chips.13 As recipients of public money to travel to Europe in the past,14 Fairbairn’s outrage exploded at the news that Tutti and P-Orridge had then received additional funding (reported as £496) to tour the United States: I am writing immediately to the appropriate Government departments to stop all grants of taxpayers’ money to the British Council. We’re only just getting a look at the maggots in the nest. It is clear these people have been using the excuse and pretence of art to swan around the world undermining values. (‘P.Orridge Sex-Show’ 1976b: 9)

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That the group, particularly P-Orridge, had received public funding was indeed the source of most complaints. Writing on the third day of the exhibition, journalist Shaun Usher encapsulates the aggressive mood towards experimental arts in his report that ‘this is a notoriously over-taxed nation, and the joke that some of the £28 million of our money has gone into the Arts Council and been passed on to [sic] “Prostitutes,” another display involved soiled nappy-liners, and three chaps who walked around East Anglia with poles on their heads, is too cruel to be funny’ (Usher 1976: 6).15 As Art Monthly’s coverage of Prostitution pointed out, that public funding featured as a primary complaint was particularly ironic given that the £200 given to the group by the ICA for framing the works was offset by the surge in ICA membership that the exhibition and its reporting prompted (Townsend and Wendler, 1976: 1). Questions around the concept of public funding for the arts – or specifically new practices considered to be at the limit or outside of ‘art’ – recur through the newspaper coverage, where discussion around the form and content of the exhibition works is remarkably absent. Surprisingly, considering its conservatism, among the newspapers, the Daily Mail gives one of the fullest pictures where it reports, ‘Nicholas Fairbairn fought his way through Hell’s Angels and young men with multi-coloured hair, lipstick and nail varnish […]. Among the “art” was a cage of chains and images of sadism and masochism’ (‘Adults Only Art Show’ 1976:  17). COUM as a collective entity, the contributions of Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson and descriptions of the objects or images are all conspicuously absent, even in Caroline Tisdall’s coverage for the Guardian – one of the few sympathetic reviews (1976:  10). Art Monthly reported that one element of the show, a ‘12-ft.-square sculpture in blue and orange wood’, had been entirely overlooked in the reviews (Townsend and Wendler  1976:  1).16 Evidently, the significance and specifics of the work itself were subsumed by the enactment of scandalized reception, as critics fed off – and fed into – perceptions of the provocativeness of the exhibition as a total statement. Interestingly this occurred in a variety of guises; for example, in contrast to sensational reports, as in the Daily Mail, of scandal and outrage, Studio International described the opening party as a ‘depressing evening with mediocre music’, also noting ‘the sad occurrence of a striptease by a rather shocked young girl’ (the aforementioned Shelley), for the ‘crowded and pretentious public occasion’.17 Similarly, a column in the Sunday Times titled ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ described the exhibition as ‘simulated’ (1976). One possible factor in producing this effect may have been that prior to the exhibition opening, following talks with the ICA and their leaseholders (The Crown Estate) a decision was made to take the Magazine Action images off the walls and put them into specially made ‘metal boxes’, with drawers that slide out (‘Mall Porn Exhibition’ 1976; ‘MP Tears Strip’ 1976: 3). Patrons were asked to ‘request’ a viewing from a security guard before being shown the images.18 Tutti has since commented on the irony (and, for her, pleasure) of the images being ‘returned’ to their original, seedy situation (Ford 1999: 6.26). By taking the works off the walls and into the monitored drawers, the ICA reinforces their categorization as risqué or possibly dangerous, as visitors view them under the watchful eyes of the guard. More recent exhibitions of the Magazine Action images have enjoyed a more culturally ‘legitimate’ status, for example, in their exhibition at the Tate Triennial (Tate Britain,  1  March–14  May  2006), where they

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were displayed openly on the walls and in glass cases (as in the recent feminist group shows WACK and Black Sheep Feminism in the United States). Given the sentiments towards public funding for the arts detailed above, it may be reasonably anticipated (if not expected) that, in 1976, an exhibition containing graphic sexual images, clinical waste, and aggressive punk and industrial music less than a kilometre away from Buckingham Palace would prompt scorn in the mainstream media. Furthermore, Tutti has since commented several times on the lack of support she received from other artists at the time: ‘You start off on the fringe. They build you up and you get established. Then they slag you off ’ (‘Tutti Frutti’  1983:  11). Perhaps most surprisingly, Tutti has faced attack on her artistic practice not only from conservative critics, but also from former collaborators. In a response published in Art Monthly to the Tate Triennial exhibition, which included Magazine Actions, she is described by fellow COUM member Genesis Breyer P-Orridge as the ‘supplier’ to work originally conceived of as art solely by the latter, and since ‘appropriated’ by Tutti in an attempt to retrospectively legitimate her unadulterated, irrelevant or artistically naïve engagement in pornographic modelling (2006: 15).19 Tutti has also represented herself as the subject of what might be called horizontal aggression by feminist arts communities (Tutti 2009: 25). Two years after Prostitution, art historian Lisa Tickner voiced her scepticism about ‘those who claim an art form out of being “intentionally” exploited like Cosey Fanni Tutti of the COUM Group’, who, Tickner argued, ‘shift the meaning of the work, however serious its original or possible intentions, from parody to titillation’, as the possible political statement collapses into ‘ambiguity and confusion’ (1987: 273). While Tickner appeared sympathetic to Tutti’s ‘possible intentions’ of parody and critique of the sex industry, her understanding at the time was based on the assumption that Tutti’s work centred on being ‘intentionally’ exploited. Tickner implied that Tutti had ultimately failed as her ‘intent’ (and by using quotation marks here Tickner signified her doubts about Tutti’s intent) gave way to the reinforcement of unwitting exploitation. In Tickner’s admittedly brief reading, Tutti’s Magazine Actions were summarized in the failure to escape ‘titillation’, and the myriad investigations presented by the work into questions of identification, labour, culture industries and value, sex, sexuality, obscenity, shifting ontologies of space and time – some of which I’ll go on to address – and other concepts were overlooked. While Tickner’s analysis opened up possible avenues for enquiry into how ‘titillation’ (if one accepts that as the effect of the Magazine Actions) might be harnessed in transformative politics, the basis of the argument could also be seen as complicit with flawed logics, which persist in contemporary commentaries: that people willingly engaged in the sex industry do not know what they are really doing.20 Mutual ambivalence, questioning or feelings of cynicism between Tutti and feminist communities continued through the 1980s; for instance, a group of feminists reportedly walked out of one of Tutti’s later performances, Opinions (1985) at Brighton’s Zap Club, which, according to a reporter, they described as ‘sexist’ (Shelley 1985: 49). To understand the complex, overlapping distinctions between art and pornography in this instance, I first read Tutti’s images ‘straight-forwardly’ as art objects. Perhaps the most iconic of the images shown in Prostitution is that of the poster and press release, captioned Sexual Transgressions No. 5.21 It shows Tutti, reclining on a chaise

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longue in odalisque pose, wearing only sunglasses, a loosely laced corset, and black stockings and suspenders in hard contrast to her pale skin. With her long, slender legs relaxing apart, one knee bent and angled outwards, her pubic area and breasts are exposed, and her head is cocked towards the viewer with a knowing half-smile. Tutti’s portrait echoes an immediately recognizable visual lexicon of ‘the whore’. Tutti’s defiant, returning gaze of the ‘prostitute-as-artist’s-model’ has been placed in the art historical canon by some critics, such as Julia Bryan-Wilson, in relation to Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia (1863). While I emphasize that Tutti’s image actually subverts art historical conventions of the smoothed, rounded and ethereal nudes of the long-stretching canon (as I will go on to explain), Sexual Transgressions No.  5 does prompt renewed debate around the extent to which different representations of ‘prostitution’ resist stable classification (e.g. along lines of class, sexual agency and gendered hierarchies of labour). As Bryan-Wilson points out, there is an established history of criticism that responds to Manet’s prostitute Olympia in terms of her ‘ambiguity’ and ‘indecipherability’ (2012: 79–80). At the same time, critics have also identified ways in which Olympia and other representations of prostitution have ultimately failed to reconfigure underlying ways of seeing that are based on capitalist, patriarchal and supremacist assumptions.22

Figure 9.1  Cosey Fanni Tutti, Prostitution poster, 1976. Black ink on paper. Courtesy the Artist and Cabinet London.

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There are, of course, a number of factors which differentiate Tutti’s ‘prostitute’ figure from Manet’s painting – perhaps beginning with the way in which eye ‘contact’ (deemed so central to interpretations of Manet’s Olympia) of the returning gaze is frustrated by Tutti’s dark sunglasses. The text underneath (boldly titled ‘PROSTITUTION’) candidly situates Tutti’s body as a commodity ‘for sale’ (everything in the show is for sale at a price, even the people) – but, most significantly, she is for sale at her own behest as art object but also artist.23 While the photograph appears to act as documentary evidence for working life in the sex industry, there remains an indefiniteness in one’s ability to ontologically ‘fix’ or identify the ‘limits’ of the image and accompanying text. The pattern of responses from critics and the press to Prostitution charted in this chapter seems to ask (either explicitly or implicitly) a series of rhetorical questions; for example, is it documentation of a performance, as suggested by its positioning alongside documentation of COUM’s actions? Is it ‘real’ porn (particularly as Ted Little had previously testified that P-Orridge, for one, was not engaged in the production of pornographic material) (Ford 1999: 6.12)? How can it be shown as ‘art’? How might we establish if Tutti ‘knew’ she was either an artist or a porn model at the time of the photograph? It may be tempting (albeit futile) to pursue such questions in search of ontological ‘resolution’. I also contend that the latter three lines of enquiry are loaded with chauvinist logics (does she know what she is really doing?). As ontological ‘fixing’ of the image reaches a dead-end, the focus returns to what we see. The visual language of Sexual Transgressions No.  5 is clearly informed by machinations of commercial pornography in a specific, historical location of latetwentieth-century capitalism. The organic nude is disrupted by the bondage of Tutti’s black lingerie and the suggestive prurience of the dark sunglasses worn indoors (with little else); gendered roles become blurred as she performs the ‘femme fatale’, but perhaps also a sleazier ‘peeping Tom’ or other mysterious character. The concealed gaze and implied voyeurism, hidden behind the opaque sunglasses, supplement Tutti’s ambiguous body language in their bending and blending of the gendered characters represented. The poster image, replicated from its original magazine venue, shows the sexual body as intertwined with industrial technologies (here I also refer to the corset, the sunglasses and the stockings) of commercial pornography, which directly inform or signify the sexiness of the image. Tutti repudiates the unitary, ‘innocent’ and organic nude, as well as notions of reproductive sex in favour of a sexual body produced, in part, by (technological) replication. In her image of the ‘prostitute’, qualities of partiality, dualism, contradiction and ironic corruption are amplified by the ontological questions prompted by the work (which are impossible to entirely resolve) about how to classify such representations. Interestingly, Tutti’s work might be theorized, then, as an early precursor to later theories about how to figure an anti-essentialist body, such as cyborg feminism and Donna Haraway’s notion of the ‘fragmentation and reconstitution of bodies’ in her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (Haraway 1991: 181). The argument at the heart of Haraway’s rebuttal of notions of organic and unitary identities is that the cyborg body holds feminist potential – if harnessed strategically – for ‘a powerful infidel heteroglossia’ (ibid.: 149, 180), which might disrupt regulatory systems of both capitalism and patriarchy. Haraway’s theorization of a body in a state of permanently unclosed construction can be aligned with Tutti’s Magazine Actions in that both

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challenge narratives of a feminism based on universalizing assumptions of natural and ‘unified’ identities, on the basis that those narratives may unwittingly rely on logics of marginalization, incorporation or domination – as well as unhelpful ‘taxonomic identification’ (ibid.: 156–7). The idea of making visible a process of corporeal composition (whether hybrid, cyborg or another pluralistic mode of understanding identity) is also evident in Tutti’s process for creating the Magazine Actions. Tutti has commented that the idea initially stemmed from a desire to bring her own image into the ‘cut and paste’ collage and mail artworks she was already creating with images of other women from commercial pornography (Tutti  2010). Rather than using other people’s bodies from existing magazines, Tutti sought to make the work more ‘complete’ by going out into the sex industry and making the images herself, before recuperating and returning them to her collage and mail art. This approach involves the performing of a character, propelling oneself into a situation as a ‘persona’, and with ulterior motives unknown to those who would otherwise populate the infiltrated area. In interview Tutti herself stated, ‘I was “being a model” in order to realise the end work’ (interview with the author,  3  November  2014). This is echoed in the resulting reproductions of sex industry conventions, where models enact (or are ascribed) titillating alter egos; Tutti appears as characters including ‘Slippery Millie: Piccadilly’s Oily Lilly’, ‘Nanette’ the ‘girl next door’, ‘Tessa from Sunderland’ and ‘The Office Cleaner’.24 Considered in this light, Tutti’s presentation of her composite (technologically constructed) and hypersexualized body within a work of art presents an innovative contribution to discourses on appropriation (I will go on to explore other dimensions of appropriation), intertextuality, identity and social constructionism emerging through and beyond the 1970s. In Tutti’s re-presentation of predictable, tacky (bordering on absurd) sexual personas such as ‘The Office Cleaner’, it might be assumed that the artist seeks to satirize and criticize – or is merely complicit with – an industry based on uses of women’s bodies as (cheap) sexual ‘products’. In The Office Cleaner,25 Tutti is perched and poised naked on the edge of an office table, with a clunky typewriter and drab reproduction of a floral still-life painting in a tiny frame on the wall in the background. She hugs at her knee, pulling it up against her breast which is hidden, her vulva is exposed and she looks into the camera with a hint of a coy smile. Glimpses of tufts of pubic hair contrast with the smooth skin of her long, slim leg, and her foot extends elegantly downwards as the tip of her toe is poised on the horizontal plane of her other thigh – which rests on the table. Tutti’s ambiguous body language invites intrigue on at least two levels: first, on the question of her supposed availability, as she is concealing while also exhibiting herself; and secondly, in that as she pulls her knee towards her breast, her slim but strong-looking bicep is pushed up against her leg. This gives an appearance of strength, but it also looks as though she hugs herself – a notable characteristic when considered within a historical context in which women asserting their sexual agency are frequently dismissed with accusations of narcissism. However, the intrigue of the image then jars with the trite, sexist text of the caption: ‘Not all office cleaners are middle aged Mrs Mops. Some firms hire quite young and beautiful girls to work early evening cleaning offices out. Linda is such a girl.’ The sexist caption

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Figure  9.2  Cosey Fanni Tutti, The Office Cleaner, in Supersex No. 8,  1975–6, Magazine Action. Nine black and white pages adhered to cartridge paper (detail). Courtesy the Artist and Cabinet London.

and frame provided by the magazine venue fundamentally informs how one interprets Tutti’s image; it represents (and judging by the reception of the work, evidently it may also elicit) a number of patriarchal and capitalist assumptions about how to classify a ‘working girl’ – which is problematized further when the girl is also identified as artist. In another work, Tutti appears as ‘Geraldine’ in a huge, camp, curly and obviously fake blonde wig and heavy blue eye-shadow extending up to her eyebrows, an almost comic fiction complemented by an elaborate backstory in the accompanying text, which includes glamorous travels around the world as a nightclub dancer. Appearing and disappearing elements of disruptive comic irony are thus experienced when reading these images at the crossroads between sexist cultures of their original commercial pornography venues and the critical space of their art exhibition. The Magazine Actions should therefore be considered site-specific works, which, as Tutti has recently reflected, offer a ‘rich visual time capsule of the blatant 1970s sexism that [she] lived through’ (Tutti 2017: 340), pointing to elements of ridiculousness and shock in the work, as well as sexual permissiveness and concerns about financial independence within damaging, capitalist markets. One might assume that the designation of Tutti’s Magazine Action modelling as art serves to redeem it from commercial pornography; however, Tutti actually appears

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to be blasphemous to both spaces, without entirely functioning only to subvert them. First making herself available to be ‘seen and used’ (as the poster says) by unwitting participants, Tutti then undermined that ‘usage’ and position of vulnerability in her display of the material as art. In Prostitution, Tutti revealed a long-term project by which the pornographers, consumers and art patrons all became labourers of the artist’s vision. When the ‘product’ became the creator notions of victimhood were also called into question as the all those involved in Tutti’s creating the work became ‘victims’ themselves, in the sense that they were unwittingly embroiled in public outrage. Indeed, after Prostitution’s wide media coverage, Tutti’s ‘cover was blown’, and she was ‘blacklisted’ by various model agencies, photographers and magazine editors (Tutti 2009: 37). Tutti elaborates, ‘The sex industry then was based on “using” girls and a great deal of manipulation, so for a girl to “use” them wasn’t well received at all’ (interview with the author, 2014). In this sense, while Tutti has at times been (unhelpfully) categorized as an outlier of ‘1970s feminism’, the Magazine Actions can easily be located as part of a major drive of feminist art movements at the time to re/ claim the agency of women (and as artists). As Tutti puts it: If I hadn’t put myself in that position, wanting to subsequently reclaim authorship for myself … to get it I had to let them have authorship at the beginning. So that’s what interested me most of all, […] the relinquishing of control and then the grabbing it back again at the end. Especially when they thought they had won. (Tutti 2009: 38)

Similar tactics involving the appropriation of commercially driven and predictable images or products were prevalent in works by conceptual art photographers in the UK in the mid-1970s. As feminist artist Margaret Harrison recalls, advertising was a ‘dominant theme’ at the time (1978), and images which commented on commerce, capital and fields of work (domestic and industrial) were central to influential Londonbased practices. For example, Alexis Hunter frequently appropriated visual languages of advertising, as in her photographic series Approaches to Fear (1975–8), in which products such as a high-heeled shoes are soiled or destroyed. Comparably, The Hackney Flashers Women’s Photography Collective (which included artists such as Jo Spence) Who’s Holding the Baby? (1978) juxtaposed images from advertisements with their ‘documentary’ photography, sometimes performed specifically for the camera, of women’s childcare and domestic labour, overlaid with text such as ‘If all women went on strike, our society would grind to a halt’ (Spence n.d.; Walker 2002: 244). The Hackney Flashers’ socialist and documentary sensibilities were also shared by influential men working in conceptual photography fields, such as Victor Burgin. Burgin’s UK  76 (1976) series of eleven photographic works overlaid with text (‘photo-texts’) draws, again, from visual languages of advertising and commercial magazines. While Burgin’s acts of appropriation were acknowledged for their anti-capitalist direction (whereas Tutti’s are less typically so), their critical effects were not dissimilar to Tutti’s Magazine Actions in that they often held a position of ambivalence, with an ironic distance from commercial imagery and industry on the one hand, but also not entirely eschewing its artistic, aesthetic or subjective possibilities on the other.

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As in the work of Hunter or the Hackney Flashers, Tutti’s Magazine Actions also made a significant contribution to developments in conceptual photography, where images and aesthetics which were commercial in their origin are appropriated, framed and displayed sequentially to form narratives (they are also performances for the camera). Recently, Tutti’s works have been considered by scholars and curators for their position within conceptual art frameworks; for example, Siona Wilson has related Prostitution more closely to Kelly’s aforementioned Post-Partum Document than previous accounts (Wilson 2015: 136). Overall, however, Tutti’s contribution to these areas remains under-acknowledged. Furthermore, as I suggested in my reading of The Office Cleaner, they must also be further considered in relation to workingclass experiences and concerns, intersecting with – and agitating against – art institutions. Indeed, Bryan-Wilson has interpreted Tutti’s works within the historical framework of sex workers and artists (generally independently, but in parallel) seeking recognition of their labour and unionization in the 1960s and 1970s, in the midst of a ‘post-industrialist’ shift towards gendered affective labour and associated ‘precarious practices’ (Bryan-Wilson  2012:  85). This interpretation reinforces the relevance of the Magazine Actions to histories of art engaged in critiques of capitalism, as well as socialist feminism (which would also include aforementioned theories such as Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’). Where Prostitution was ‘prompted as a comment on survival in Britain’, Tutti suggests that the artist always ‘sells’ herself in the increasingly professionalized, ‘incestuous institutional system that prevailed’ (interview with the author, 2014) in the art world of the 1970s, as she perceives it. However, questions of whether the woman, artist or prostitute can, in fact, be bought remain (though such questions cannot be fully addressed here, they must continue to be asked). Tutti’s Magazine Actions can therefore be understood, as I have suggested, as sophisticated interventions of appropriation which, for example, ‘reclaim’ agency or embodied subjecthood by turning capitalism’s own methods against itself. Considered within this critical framework the works may become fairly comprehensible as subjects of interpretation, as the reader moves towards a resolution of the difficult bind between Tutti’s account of her work and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s counterclaim of an unjustifiable ‘mythology’ surrounding the Magazine Actions (Breyer P-Orridge 2006: 15). However, Tutti never quite allows her audience to sit comfortably at this conclusion. Alongside her motivation for working towards a more ‘complete’ process of making art, Tutti also asserts her ‘genuine curiosity for the sexual experience’ gained as a sex worker (Tutti  2010). Elsewhere, Tutti has said that she moved into the sex industry more or less ‘by accident, as often happens when women seem to be good objects for the male gaze [laughs]’ (Stephens, Sprinkle and Tutti 2009: 96). Tutti’s laughter here strikes me as particularly emblematic of the ‘problem’ of interpreting her attitude between sarcastic derision on the one hand and a knowing admission and cooption of the status quo on the other. Similarly, she wrote in the mid-1990s that ‘one tends to convince oneself of all manner of things to justify ones [sic] participation in the acts of sex being photographed, filmed or portrayed on stage’ (Tutti 1994: 2–3). Curiosity and cash were also motivations for continuing with work that was at times ‘boring or even disgusting’, but also entailed highly sexually charged moments and occasionally off-camera affairs (Tutti 2009: 6).

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As I have established, Tutti’s reasons for entering into the industry are complex and tangled – as is the case for the heterogeneous communities of sex workers generally (Brewis and Linstead 2000: 189). Tutti has never (to my knowledge) claimed that her art practice legitimized otherwise ‘illegitimate’ sex work; rather, she describes colleagues sharing an assertiveness and knowingness about their position and readership (Tutti 2009: 24). The knotty temporality of the work, then, is brought into sharp focus if we entertain a conception of her artwork and sex work as materially distinct (as Genesis Breyer P-Orridge suggests retrospectively). Considering the sex work as ‘real’ or ‘genuine’ (indeed, there is no reason why it shouldn’t be), there is a supposed ontological delay in the artwork fully coming into being, inasmuch as anything can, only years later, when labelled and displayed as such. This temporally peculiar aspect to the work makes it particularly relevant for performance studies, where the images themselves are troubled as static or total objects; they are documents of an ongoing ­artlife project or performance, but also ontologically unfold in travelling through space– time, functioning differently in different spaces (the art gallery, the sex shop or the home). To borrow from queer theory, the strangeness of time and space at work here recalls Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn’s notion that ‘sex’ and ‘queer’ could be ‘fully conceived as activities and processes, rather than objects or impulses, as movements rather than identities, as lines more than locations, as motions of making rather than as forms of expression’ (Grosz and Probyn 1995: x). As such, attempts, as seen in the media coverage, to re-fix Tutti’s body as a ‘prostitute’ body, produce yet more questions about the work and propel its epistemological peripateticism. While borrowing from queer theory here to analyse Tutti’s Magazine Actions, it must also be said that for the most part there is nothing particularly queer – or even unusual – about the type of pornography she appears in. The images are mostly softcore depictions with Tutti still wearing clothes or underwear, but vary to include some more hardcore photographs of splayed genitalia and penetrative sex acts (which, to the reader, may be real or simulated). In many instances, the work holds consistency with regulatory representations of feminine bodies in commercial pornography (including their youth, their slimness, their whiteness, their long hair, their pert breasts and so on). While the ‘characters’ or the spurious fictional scenarios attached to the images change between magazines, familiar visions of implied submissiveness reverberate. We see a woman on all fours, with an arched back, her head thrown back in a routinely mundane look of ‘ecstasy’, breasts pushed together, labia spread apart, eyes vacantly half closed and mouth hanging open – the images lose distinctiveness in the echo of their familiar expression. This depersonalizing or potentially homogenizing aesthetic is particularly evident in relation to an example from Playbirds magazine, which shows images of four women modelling the same pose with slight variation together in a grid of four squares. Here, I am not arguing that there is nothing interesting or artistic about the images; rather, I am suggesting that they defy the ‘autonomous’ art object in pointing most profoundly to ways in which images can only be understood in relation to context: they make visible the intertextual existence of art objects. For example, the sequentiality and repetition of the Magazine Actions affirm their place in the context of conceptual art, while also retaining the tropes that they reveal or even parody. Indeed, these tropes are central to Tutti’s intervention into conceptual art as a historically

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male-focused space which more frequently actively excludes explicit representations (particularly women’s representations) of sex and sexual bodies. Tutti’s exhibition of the images, then, invites readings which extend beyond their use-function as aids for masturbation or sex, for example, in foregrounding the material structure of pornography production as an economy largely based on images of young, slim, able-bodied white women appearing to happily perform their roles of available, sexually functional and energetic service-providers. This prevalent categorization of women’s labour is seemingly reaffirmed to some extent by the Magazine Actions’ images whose fictions are predicated on men’s superiority in an economic hierarchy; for example, I might point to The Office Cleaner, or Sexy Confessions of a Shop Assistant Vol.  1 No.  9, in which women are tenuously grouped together as ‘customer service workers’. However, in framing and exhibiting the Magazine Actions together, a project which investigates and produces both knowledge and power becomes more visible to the viewer. In her performances of the epistemologically divergent woman-artistprostitute, Tutti resists the temptation to secure the readability of the images as morally or aesthetically ‘bad’ (or indeed ‘good’). Fixing Tutti as ‘prostitute’ is no longer possible; her status as a sex worker fails to capture or consume her, where this assumption is often made of sex workers in other ‘straight-forward’ or non-art contexts. Rather, Tutti troubles familiar and totalizing narratives by disrupting the dominant unitary principles of identity, which understandably, and importantly, featured profoundly in feminist projects at that time, as women attempted to re/claim their own expression. Tutti strategically cultivates a chimerical borderline here between and of both mythic imaginaries (such as assumptions of what constitutes a ‘prostitute’) and social realities – and she takes pleasure in their increasingly smudged and dissolving boundaries. The troubling and disruption of forms and genres (which in Tutti’s example includes those within art as well as outside of art) has been frequently noted as a characteristic of feminist performance art in the  1970s. For example, in a  1976 interview in Studio International, Sally Potter described women turning to performance as ‘an anti-specialist area’, where ‘cross references’ might take place, between and outside of existing traditions  which women have less ‘vested interest’ in preserving (Potter  1976:  33). This concept is apt for a project which, according to P-Orridge, ‘began as a satire of pomposity in the art world, especially in the conceptual art world at that time’, as audiences seeking to preserve an imagined binary opposition of art and porn (in not accepting the work as part of art, as the media coverage demonstrates) inescapably become complicit in creating the sleaze that they seek to refuse (Breyer P-Orridge 2006: 15). Moreover, the logic which assumes pornography and art to be ‘mutually exclusive opposites’ – identified and critiqued by Jennifer Doyle (2006: xvii) – is refused by the Magazine Actions, as they function as both art and pornography in dialectic tension in the process of Tutti’s work. Doyle’s argument – that art and pornography are ‘overlapping representational modes, in which one is a possibility always contained within the category of the other’ – shows that when art represents sex or becomes a form of sex (and vice versa) it takes on other dimensions and emphasizes the mutability of that which may become boring, obsessive, failed, powerful or critical, for instance (ibid.: xvii). In this way it seems to respond to calls made in the  1980s and  1990s by Linda Williams, Lisa Duggan

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and others to acknowledge sexually explicit materials in their specificity, and – to quote Duggan again – their ‘multiple, contradictory, layered and highly contextual meanings’ (2006: 6). The complexity and multiplicity of possible effects of the work go hand-inhand with some of the tensions and contradictions around how artists and critics have thought about performance. COUM members had written at the time about the difficulty of explaining such forms and the possibilities of what P-Orridge and Christopherson had termed ‘subliminal performance art’ which could ‘infiltrate mass media and systems’ (1976:  46). While what little public funding COUM had achieved had always been linked to performance (Saunders 2012: 42–4),26 in the past Tutti has rejected this categorization on the grounds that the term was too closely associated with theatricality and entertainment – opting instead for the term ‘action art’ (Ford 1998: 4). While Tutti now reflects on the Magazine Actions as differentiated from her other works by their performance qualities – including, for example, her performances of alter egos (interview with the author,  2014) – her tentativeness towards, or criticism of, ‘performance’ as an art category reflected perceptions (I would argue misconceptions) that performance was incompatible with, or at best tangential to (implicitly more ‘serious’) modes of visual art at the time.27 As Prostitution illustrates, such problems of categorizing performance have historically aggravated shortfalls in funding and institutional representation for relevant forms such as performance art and subsequently Live Art (Johnson  2013:  16; Saunders  2012:  38). As with the heterogeneous fragments of objects, forms and events that make up Prostitution (which also includes documents, sculptures, the opening party, the press), efforts to resolve the contradictions and complications of the work (which may, to some extent, include formal categorization) are frustrated by sustained refusals of unitary logics, evident in both the form and content of Prostitution. For example, Tutti refuses to either joyfully celebrate the body and its sexual potential, as sex-positive artist-activists like Sprinkle might, or condemn exactly the field of pornographic representation in which Tutti is involved (and which reminds us of our own involvement). While Tutti has commented on deeply unpleasant aspects of working in the sex industry, she also maintains a suggestion that rather than there simply being pleasure on the one hand, and pain or discomfort on the other, there is also a third area at play in the Magazine Actions, where sexual pleasure and discomfort meet and exist simultaneously. This also played out in instances where Tutti used fake blood and wound imagery, as in her performance Woman’s Roll (A.I.R. Gallery, London, 1976), or her three-day action at the Hayward Annual (1979), in which she used crushed strawberries to create the illusion of cuts on her body. As Tutti recalls, ‘The juxtaposition of the evocative aroma of strawberries and the gashes on my body created a sense-response clash’ (interview with the author, 2014) as she moved around carefully placed arrangements of objects. This ‘clash’ might be thought of as bringing Tutti’s work uncomfortably close to historically pervasive representations of the sexualities of women in performance as dominated by death drives, from the customary slashings of bare breasts in 1970s exploitation horror, to the leading women characters doomed to madness or suicide in the plays of nineteenth-century naturalism, and beyond.

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Indeed, there is no ‘satisfaction’ from this indefatigable, shifting and arguably technological (in the sense that it is produced from a technological mode of replication, as I argued earlier) notion of sex in the wake of exhausted 1960s ‘free love’. Rather, Tutti’s batting around of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ interplays does not allow her audience to fix limits, but demands an open-ended model of interpretation for work which foregrounds the continually evolving nature of art as dialogically dependent on shifting, social experiences of space and time. Tutti’s Magazine Actions and their exhibition in Prostitution, then, present a remarkably prescient investigation that models more recent theories of identification (as a more pluralistic and mobile modification of fixed ‘identity’), as well as understandings of sex and power, which move beyond the binary of oppression/liberation. For instance, links can be drawn with later feminist and queer projects, such as that of Grosz and Probyn, of ‘making queer all sexualities, about what is fundamentally weird and strange about all bodies, all carnalities’ (1995: xi). In a queer feminist durational mode (to refer to Amelia Jones’s concept; 2012: 6, 174), the Magazine Actions can be thought of in relation to recent feminist projects which have accounted for queer subjectivities as involving sexual practices of sexual and gender minorities, but also – crucially – broader application as political practice. As Doyle, drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, has also said, this may include heterosexual relations, but relations which refuse, intervene into, or trouble monolithic structures of the heterosexual matrix; investing instead in sites where ‘meanings do not “line up tidily with each other”’ (Doyle 2006: xxxi). Some recent accounts of Prostitution have characterized the Magazine Actions in terms of a queer aesthetic that deepens a disjuncture from feminism; for example, Siona Wilson argues that ‘[while] Prostitution does indeed mobilize feminist codes, it does so to stage a queer aesthetic: not homosexuality as an identity or a generalized post-1960s idea of camp, but the mutual containment of gender and genre’ (2015: 95). While Wilson emphasizes a degree of separation between feminist and queer projects (characterized here as a shift away from questions of women towards questions of gender),28 I argue that the conjoined queer and feminist elements work together in enhancing the efficacy of their shared intervention (the manner in which Wilson conflates queer and camp is also questionable). As a reader looking back, making connections and forging dialogues between Prostitution, Tutti’s Magazine Actions of the 1970s, and contemporary feminisms and understandings of art, identities, sex, sexualities and their histories, I am struck by how the questions Tutti poses continue to hold resonance – and challenge feminist and other readers. Tutti has commented: ‘I “speak” to people in a conversational way, to create a dialogue, not to make a statement. A statement is too final, it closes down communication rather than opening it up’ (interview with the author,  2014). Indeed, there is a danger in seeking certain kinds of semiotic resolution, which may have unintended consequences of diluting, sanitizing or ‘legitimating’ a work, or a political sensibility. Tutti’s enactment of the woman-artist-prostitute demonstrates the particular feminist potential offered by performance for an ‘infidel heteroglossia’ (Haraway 1991: 181).

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Notes 1 ‘PROSTITUTION’ exhibition publicity poster, Prostitution papers, TGA 955/7/7/72, ICA Collection, Tate Archive, London. 2 ‘Caprice Issue No. 35, exhibit number 26 of Prostitution’, TGA 200825, Genesis P-Orridge Collection [uncatalogued at time of writing], Tate Archive, London. 3 It is difficult to determine the number of Magazine Actions – Tutti’s website lists forty-three distinct actions (Tutti, ‘Performances, Actions and Broadcasts’), whereas Tate defines them according to their appearance in over 100 pornography and glamour publications (Tate, ‘Pop Life: Art in a Material World’). 4 Like COUM Transmissions scholar Simon Ford, I refer to Cosey Fanni Tutti as ‘Tutti’ throughout, though there is also a precedent for using ‘Cosey’ in scholarship on her work; for example, see Fusco and Birkett (2012). 5 Prostitution is frequently invoked in the ICA’s commemorative or official histories as a key event, for example, as part of their recent 70th anniversary events; ‘The ICA Celebrates its 70th Anniversary’. Available online: https://www.ica.org.uk/the-ICAcelebrates-its-70th-Anniversary (accessed 8 February 2016). 6 While there are various definitions of ‘sex work’ and ‘sex worker’, my use of the term includes workers in all aspects of the sex industry such as those directly selling and carrying out sexual services (‘prostitutes’), as well as other types of performers, models and workers engaged in creating and selling sex-related products – but particularly those whose work centres on how they use or perform with their own bodies. 7 ‘PROSTITUTION’ publicity poster, ibid. 8 For clarity, Genesis P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and BREYER ORRIDGE are referred to in accordance with the active identity at time of the event or writing in question throughout. For an overview of the transformations of BREYER P-ORRIDGE, see Johnson (2012d: 134–45). 9 P-Orridge had performed with the stick in previous COUM performances such as Through a Tamponstick Darkly, 1974–5 (Saunders 2012: 44; P-Orridge 2002: 14). 10 Venus Mound consists of the head and upper torso of a damaged Venus de Milo model, mounted with plaster, with two wires spreading from the shoulders like wings, from which bloodied tampons hang. It is now in Tate’s collection. 11 Prostitution papers, Tate Archive, London. 12 However, Ford’s research has focused on Tutti’s practice specifically in his earlier article ‘Subject and (sex) Object’ (1998: 2–7). 13 Tutti and P-Orridge had been invited to present at Arte Inglese Oggi 1960–1976 (Palazzo Reale, Milan, February–May 1976) by Ted Little, who curated the ‘Performance Art’ section of the show. Plastic chips were said to have been used as COUM were denied permission to use a bath of milk (and be naked) (Ford 1999: 6.5–8). However, Tutti’s own most recent account attributes the decision to use the plastic chips as being due to a milk ‘shortage’ rather than denied permission (Tutti 2017: 182). 14 Various figures were reported but the Guardian gives £650.40 for Milan (Tisdall 1976: 10). 15 Usher refers to the (direct or indirect) public funding towards ICA exhibitions Prostitution and Post-Partum Document, and the Leeds Polytechnic fine arts graduates Ddart Performance Group (Ray Richards, Dennis de Groot, Tony

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Emerson) who spent a week walking in Norfolk attached to each other at the head by a wooden pole in February 1976; see Walker (1999: 79, 89–92). The article is likely referring to the pyramid structure built by COUM in which Tutti and P-Orridge performed Orange & Blue (Manzoni Gardens, Birmingham 1974), which involved swapping roles and ‘cross dressing’ between the artists; TGA 200825 Genesis P-Orridge Collection, Tate Archive, London (Tutti 2017: 202). Studio International, 193.985 (January/February 1977) [clipping], TGA 200825 Genesis P-Orridge Collection, Tate Archive, London. Tutti’s own account describes Shelley’s enthusiasm for her striptease, as she ended up ‘rolling on the floor naked in the spilled fake blood […] [t]he audience loved it’ (Tutti 2017: 204). Pamphlet ‘Prostitution, an exhibition by COUM Transmissions’, TGA 200825 Genesis P-Orridge Collection, Tate Archive, London. P-Orridge’s claim that Tutti was ‘appalled’ that her sex work had been revealed via Prostitution contradicts earlier archival evidence which supports her active authorship. For example, in January 1976 P-Orridge wrote a letter to VILE magazine which makes reference to Tutti ‘coumtinuing [sic] with her Prostitution Actions’ (Ford 1999: 6.4). Groups such as The English Collective of Prostitutes and Sex Worker Open University regularly campaign for the agency of sex workers and their capacity to consent to be recognized. See ‘This is what the International Prostitutes Collective stands for’ and ‘Our Manifesto’. Available online: http://prostitutescollective. net/1997/03/04/this-is-what-the-international-prostitutes-collectivestands-for/; http://www.sexworkeropenuniversity.com/our-manifesto.html (accessed 18 May 2015). This photograph is represented as being originally published in a magazine of the same name around 1974; however, the title ‘Prostitution’ comes from the caption of Tutti’s first Magazine Action publication in Curious magazine (Tutti 2017: 150, 198). For example, in contrast to readings which have focused on Olympia’s ‘undecipherability’, Lorraine O’Grady and Rebecca Schneider have focused on the symbolic displacement of the black woman servant attending to Olympia in the background of Manet’s painting (O’Grady 1992; Schneider 1997: 28–9). Prostitution papers, Tate Archive, London. Images reproduced in Cosey Complex (Fusco and Birkett 2012: 23, 66, 138, 87). I use The Office Cleaner title to make it clear which singular Magazine Action I refer to here; however, this work might also go by its magazine title Supersex No. 8. Identifying consistent titles and dates seems to be a common problem when discussing specific Magazine Actions. For a list of COUM’s grants up to 1976, see ‘Awards etc.’, COUM / Throbbing Gristle archive, Harley Lond papers 1974–1980, MSL/1995/18, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. For example, Stuart Brisley and Leslie Haslam had argued that performance was understood as a ‘general theatrical condition’ which was ‘inappropriate’ to how they used liveness to challenge art markets (Brisley and Haslam 1976: 416). I also note here that Tutti herself has at times described her practice as being more closely aligned with Gay Liberation movement than certain types of liberal feminism in the 1970s, due to her emphasis on questions of sexuality and sexual pluralism (Tutti 2017: 114).

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Index abject 45, 64–5, 112, 115–16 abjection 46, 50, 64, 106, 115 Abramovic, Marina 1, 146 academic(s) 4, 16, 47, 61, 125, 149, 151, 158–60, 167 activism 5, 10, 13, 15, 123–4, 162, 169, 173 menstrual activism 61 political activism 134 aesthetics 26, 44, 97, 100–1, 174, 185 database aesthetics 29 dialogical aesthetics 127 Live Art aesthetics 8 modernist aesthetics 41 punk aesthetics 175 Relational Aesthetics 127 visual aesthetics 10 walking aesthetics 80 affect 22, 46, 92, 95, 100, 121, 140 affective 52, 100–2, 104, 119, 124 132, 151, 164, 185 agency 22, 36–7, 48, 79, 94–5, 109, 114, 130–1 AIDS 9, 100, 139, 156 archetype 46, 61 archive 32, 68–9, 131 Acme archive 68 living archive 176 National Fairground Archive 58 Artsadmin 3, 74 Arts Council 3–4, 6, 10, 12, 55, 167, 177–8 Ashery, Oreet 17, 58, 118–36 assemblage 34, 40–1, 43, 75, 96, 123 Athey, Ron 11, 58, 60, 94, 97, 99, 105, 111, 115, 164 Atoui, Tarek 24, 32 Austin, J. L. 23 authenticity 51, 68, 75, 92, 95, 122 authorship 22, 30–2, 35, 37, 41, 159, 177, 184 multiple authorship 16, 43

Barbican 6, 12, 15 C’est Barbican! (Carnesky) 52–3 Bardsley, Julia 5 Berlant, Lauren 132–3 biodata 108, 110 biotechnologies 108, 112 Blair, Tony 126, 141–4, 147 Blairism 142 blood 47–8, 50, 59, 90–1, 94, 96–9, 102–4, 106, 108–9, 116, 176, 188 bloodletting 91–2, 96–7, 102–3, 164 menstrual blood 47, 62, 64, 176 body 9, 17, 31, 33, 46–54, 56–9, 62–3, 65, 75, 89–98, 100–17, 124–5, 128, 131, 133–4, 146, 157–9, 163–5, 174, 181–2, 186, 188 absent body 108–9 Body Art 7 body-based 5, 9, 158, 165 body-in-process 49 body language 182 body modification 16 body politic 63 cyborg body 181 embody 49, 61, 99, 141 explicit body 155 female body 11, 50, 63, 174 gendered body 125 Muslim body 123 naked body 46, 122 paralysed body 57 breathing 47, 106, 114, 116 Brexit 36, 142 British art scene 2, 9 Britishness 18, 160 burlesque 16, 46, 53, 58, 60 The Grotesque Burlesque Revue (Carnesky) 52 neo-burlesque 46–7 Burroughs, William S. 22, 33, 36, 41

Index Bush, George W. 141–3, 147 Bushism 142 Butler, Judith 23, 65, 128–9, 132, 174 Buzzcut 3 camp 17, 48, 59, 97, 116, 137, 140–2, 150, 183, 189 camp sincerity 17, 141 carnal 51, 92–3, 189 Carnesky, Marisa 16, 45–67 carnival 48, 50–3, 60, 148 carnivalesque 46, 50, 60, 148 catalyst(s) 2–3, 5, 7 catharsis 64, 92, 122, 168 Charmatz, Boris 24, 31–2 choreography 32, 48 choreographic 23–4, 78 circus 16, 46–7, 51, 58–9, 62 Circusfest 56 clubs 3, 7, 52, 53, 143, 148–9, 183 Club of No Regrets (Etchells) 26, 32 fetish clubs 51–2 strip clubs 52 Whoopee Club 60 Zap Club 51, 179 Cold War 9 comedy 17, 27, 137, 144 stand-up comedy 139, 150 Compass Live Art 2, 6–8, 10, 13, 15 Connor, Steven 49–50 Contemporary Theatre Review 10 Cosey Fanni Tutti 18, 172–91 COUM Transmissions 18, 172–3, 176–81, 188 counter-cultural 13 cross-disciplinarity 8, 12 cultural phenomena 1, 2 British cultural phenomenon 7 cultural strategy 7–8, 10, 46 cystic fibrosis 17, 106, 110 dance 6, 11, 16, 22, 24, 31–3, 49, 55, 72, 91, 123, 125, 131, 177, 183 Deleuze, Gilles 123, 130 and Félix Guattari 75–7, 79–80, 84 depression 70, 92, 140, 150 documentation 26, 41, 93–6, 111, 119–20, 124, 173, 176, 181 Doyle, Jennifer 95, 187, 189

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dramaturgy 26, 75, 122 database dramaturgy 29, 37, 42 paratactic dramaturgy 37 drift 36–7, 78–9, 82–4 psychogeographic drift 16 disability 17, 110–11, 113, 115 discomfort 93, 95, 113, 174, 188 disembodiment 56–7, 108 Duckie 52–3, 55, 62 durational 7, 24, 26–7, 32–3, 40, 74, 95, 115, 123 East Street Arts 6 encounters 17, 32, 48, 57, 59, 79, 82, 94–5, 100, 104–5, 109–10, 113–14, 118–21, 123–5, 128, 130, 134, 143, 158 intimate encounters 94, 120 live encounters 7, 94 one-to-one encounters 94, 122, 133 (see also performance, one-to-one performance) endurance 90–1, 93–5, 98, 101, 113, 116, 162 Enlightenment 100, 103 post-Enlightenment 101 ephemeral 8, 14, 41, 69, 83, 105 epistemological 101, 186–7 erotic 46, 48, 55 eroticism 63, 98 Etchells, Tim 16, 21–44 ethics 6, 63, 127 excess 93, 98, 106, 110, 113, 115–16, 165 Visions of Excess 60 excretion 106, 116 extremity 95, 97–8, 100, 102–3 Falklands War 9 Farquhar, Marcia 1, 11, 16–17, 68–85 feminism 11, 18, 53, 118, 123, 134, 149, 173–7, 179, 181–2, 184–5, 187, 189 Black Sheep Feminism 179 feminist neo-burlesque 46 feminist politics 56 fetishization 167 fetishistic 53 fetish club 51–2 Fierce! Festival of Performance 3 Finley, Karen 51, 53

208

Index

Fischer, Marcus (Ashery) 119, 122–4 Flanagan, Bob 94, 99, 111, 115 fluids 50 bodily fluids 116, 155, 163, 165 Fluxus 41, 77 Forced Entertainment 1, 5, 7, 9, 22–42, 146 fragments 2, 21, 27–8, 31–7, 39–40, 42, 50, 55, 97, 114, 145, 188 Certain Fragments (Etchells) 25–6 fragmentation 17, 107, 109, 181 Franko B 9, 17, 58, 74, 89–104 freaks 10–12, 48, 51 freak show 11 Fusco, Coco 10 galleries 9, 12, 21, 23–4, 31–3, 41, 78, 110, 129, 143, 149–50, 154, 157, 159, 162–5, 169, 176–7, 186 Acme Gallery 68 A.I.R. Gallery 188 Argos Gallery 31 Flaxman Gallery 80 Hayward Gallery 13, 60 National Gallery 101 Red Gallery 6 South London Gallery 68, 72, 78 (see also London) gay 10, 91, 140, 144, 147–8, 150, 168–70 gay rights 168–9 London Gay Men’s Chorus 156–57, 167, 169 (see also London) gender 5, 9, 43, 47–8, 50, 57, 61, 63, 121–5, 129, 132, 174–6, 180–1, 185, 189 genderqueer 65 gender politics 54 Gender Trouble (Butler) 129 transgender 146 genitalia 186 Gysin, Brion 22, 33, 36, 41 Haraway, Donna 181, 185, 189 hardship 93–5, 99–100, 102, 104, 112 hardship art 17, 95 Regimes of Hardship (O’Brien) 112 higher education 3–4, 6, 8 Hoyle, David 17, 139–53 Hsieh, Tehching 95, 98

iconographic 91, 101 identity 2, 9, 11, 13, 34, 61, 77, 115, 123, 131, 169–70, 176, 182, 187, 189 cultural identity 16, 18, 45, 160 identity theft 28 illness 17, 108–17, 150 mental illness 70 immigration 145, 166 anti-immigration 129 Museum of Immigration and Diversity 55 Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) 5, 9, 18, 49, 51, 96 institutionalization 13–14 intimacy 21, 23, 41, 121, 125, 130 Ipswich 2, 5 Jarman, Derek 10, 130 Jewish 45, 48–51, 60, 64–5, 119, 124, 133 Jewishness 47–8, 51, 60 Jewish star 48, 50 Johnson, Dominic 10, 17, 58, 89, 113, 145, 147–8, 157, 161, 164–5, 170, 188 Jones, Amelia 97, 118, 123, 189 Kant, Immanuel 100–1, 103 Keidan, Lois 3–15, 96, 110–11, 114–15 Klein, Jennie 126 Kristeva, Julia 45–6, 64–5 labour 47, 65, 106, 115, 134, 179–80, 184–5, 187 affective labour 185 domestic labour 184 Labour Party 126, 142 Laing, R. D. 70, 76–7, 79 La Ribot 11, 51 Leeds 2, 6 Leeds Beckett University 6 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 101–3 LGBTQ+ 9, 147 Live Art Bistro 7 Live Art Development Agency (LADA) 1, 2, 3–4, 8, 15, 46, 69, 110, 126, 157 Lloyd, Annie 2, 6, 8, 15 London 2–5, 7, 9, 17–18, 38, 46, 51–6, 59, 61, 70, 96, 111, 119, 124, 126, 129, 131, 134, 139, 143, 147, 157, 159, 165–6, 168–9, 177, 184, 188

Index East London 52, 55, 89, 125, 158, 161 London Centre for Social Impact 166 The Londoners 74–5, 77 London Gay Men’s Chorus 156, 167, 169 London Irish Centre 156, 168 London School of Economics (LSE) 134 North London 168 South London 160 South London Gallery 68, 72, 78 (see also galleries) University College London (UCL) 71 University of London 4, 126 madness 70, 90–1, 188 magic 45, 55, 61–3, 65, 93 magical 52, 63, 65 magical illusion 16 magician 53–4, 63 Magic War (Carnesky) 62 psychomagical 59 Real Magic (Forced Entertainment) 26 mainstream 107, 162, 167, 169–70 mainstream culture 6, 11–14, 43, 173 mainstream politics 127–8, 142 mainstream press 168, 174–6 non-mainstream 111, 126–7 Manchester 17, 126, 143, 148 Manchester International Festival 13–14 Manchester United 34 manipulation 30, 96, 142, 184 emotional manipulation 58 Marcalo, Rita 7 Margate 34, 80 marginalization 70, 124, 175 martyrdom 91–3, 103 masochistic 98, 103 sadomasochistic 115 Massumi, Brian 75–6, 78–9 masturbation 163–4, 174, 187 McKenzie, Jordan 17–18, 154–71 medicine 17, 27, 107, 113, 115–16 biomedicine 17, 107 Medicine Shows 62 menstrual 50, 61–2, 65 menstrual activism 61 (see also activism) menstrual blood 62, 64 (see also blood)

209

menstrual ritual 62–4 menstrual spiritualism 61 mimesis 95, 99 misfits 10–13 Mitchell, CJ 12–14, 110 Montano, Linda 95, 98 mucus 106, 110–12, 114–16 Mucus Factory (O’Brien) 105, 110 music 10, 18, 22, 24, 30, 33, 40, 42–3, 78, 119, 125, 133, 157, 168–9, 176, 178–9 musical 23, 33, 36, 39–40, 42, 62 musicality 40 National Review of Live Art (NRLA) 1, 68, 74, 98, 126, 162 neoliberal 127, 151 neoliberalism 122 neoliberal necropolitics (Foucault) 132 normative 117, 123, 129, 159, 168–9 anti-normative 169 heteronormative 61, 170 homonormative 169 normative discourse 51 objectification 17, 107, 109 O’Brien, Martin 17, 105–17, 130, 132 ontological 84, 181, 186 Orazbayeva, Aisha 24, 33, 38–40 O’Reilly, Kira 58, 94, 99, 122, 130 Pacitti Company 2, 5–6, 12 Pacitti, Robert 5, 9, 12, 14, 51, 58 pain 17, 90–5, 99–104, 109, 112–17, 122, 188 painting 16, 22, 36, 91, 97, 100–3, 145, 180–1 action painting 72 live painting 139 still-life painting 182 performance 5–10, 13–18, 22–5, 27, 29–42, 45–8, 50–3, 56–8, 62, 65, 68–72, 74–9, 82–4, 89–100, 103–6, 110–12, 114–16, 118, 120–1, 125–6, 128–30, 132, 134, 139–43, 146–50, 154, 157–8, 162–4, 167–9, 173–4, 176–9, 181, 186–9 autobiographical performance 16, 49, 71, 84

210 avant-garde performance 46 body-based performance 5 cabaret performance 61 contemporary performance 2, 61, 99, 125, 161 drag performance 143 durational performance 40 experimental performance 119, 126 feminist performance 175, 187 interdisciplinary performance 42 lecture performance 62 live performance 31, 74, 77–8, 83–4, 96, 125, 146, 157, 173 one-to-one performance 121 participatory performance 122 performance action 64 Performance Art 7, 10–12, 35, 46, 48, 95–6, 140, 146, 148, 150, 161, 167, 188 performance-to-camera 58, 96, 185 performance history 27, 118, 149 performance installation 60 performance studies 121, 186 postmodern performance 118 promenade performance 55, 59 psychoperformance 16, 83 rhizomatic performance 75 ritual performance 93 solo performance 21, 32–3, 35, 62, 113 theatrical performance 29, 113 walking performance 70, 80 Phelan, Peggy 8, 95 phlegm 105–6, 115–16 photography 16, 131, 157, 184–5 The Hackney Flashers Women’s Photography Collective 184 Pilgrim, Geraldine 12 pleasure 28, 47, 51, 56, 61, 79, 116, 133, 174–5, 178, 188 Pleasure (Forced Entertainment) 26 sexual pleasure 188 (see also sex) policymaker(s) 4, 15 political 5, 9–10, 13, 17, 21, 25, 29, 41, 46–7, 51, 55, 74, 76, 79, 95, 97, 99, 101, 104, 114–15, 119, 121–3, 126–9, 132, 134, 140–7, 157–8, 160, 162–3, 166–7, 173, 175, 179, 189 biopolitical 110 geopolitical 124

Index political activism 134 (see also activism) political correctness 143 political economy 164 sociopolitical 9, 116 P-Orridge, Genesis 174, 176–9, 181, 185–8 presence 16, 39, 43, 49, 52, 65, 72, 74, 95–9, 108, 112, 121, 124, 132, 162, 164, 166 digital presence 131 process 1–3, 5, 14, 24–5, 27, 30–2, 35–7, 43, 46–9, 54, 57, 61–3, 65, 68–9, 75–6, 78, 84, 107, 109–11, 113, 127–8, 130, 132–3, 162, 164, 182, 185–7 creative process 29 process-based 8 processional 60 research process 128 prostitution 18, 54, 172–4, 176–81, 184–5, 188–9 psychoanalysis 9, 145 psychoanalytic 79, 168, 174 psychogeography 82–3 psychoperformance 16, 83 (see also performance) psychotic 76 public space 110–11, 125, 160 Punchdrunk 12, 122 punk 10, 71, 74, 80, 82, 175–6, 179 post-punk 10 Queen Mary University 4, 126 queer 9, 45, 53, 115–17, 123–5, 131, 140, 143–4, 148–9, 155, 158–9, 163, 165–6, 168, 170, 174–5, 189. See also gender queer bodies 123 queer politics 18 queer theory 124, 158–9, 169, 186 race 5, 9, 10, 123, 145 radical 5–6, 22, 27, 46, 53, 63, 71, 82, 96, 98, 111, 113, 116, 145, 173 Radical Anthropology Group 61 radical psychiatry 76 Reagan, Ronald 9, 142 Reckless Sleepers 7, 9

Index regeneration 58, 80, 167 urban regeneration 127 relational 31, 76, 113–14, 129. See also aesthetics relationality 23, 114, 116 religion 48, 64 representation 8, 11, 13, 17, 46, 48, 50, 64–5, 76, 79, 91–5, 97, 99–101, 103, 105, 115, 123, 167, 173–6, 180–1, 186–8 resistance 13, 115, 117, 151 rhizome 75, 78 ritual 16, 45–7, 50, 59, 61–4 Rose, Sheree 94, 99, 111, 115 Saunders, Graham 10, 188 schizophrenia 75–7, 79 Schneemann, Carolee 95, 173 sentimentality 90 sentimental 93 sex 5, 48, 50–1, 53–4, 59, 63, 65, 83, 139, 147, 150, 168, 170, 172–7, 179, 182, 185–7, 189 anal sex 174 heterosexual 169, 174–5, 189 homosexual 147, 158, 164–5, 168, 170, 189 sex industry 52–3, 179, 181–2, 184–5, 188 sexist 175, 179, 182–3 sexual 16, 45–6, 50–1, 54, 122, 124, 134, 145, 164–5, 169, 174–5, 179–83, 185, 187–9 sexuality 9, 43, 63, 121, 123, 144, 156, 161, 165, 168, 170, 173–5, 179, 188–9 sexy 16, 46, 54, 181, 187 vaginal sex 174 showwomen 16, 45–6, 54, 57–8, 60–1, 65 site-specific 12, 62, 183 skin 48–50, 52, 89–90, 98, 102–3, 105–6, 122, 163, 180, 182 social housing 160, 166 Sofaer, Joshua 11 Sontag, Susan 140–1 Spanton, Sarah 6–7 specimens 17, 106–11, 114–16 specimenhood 17, 109–12, 115–17

211

spectacle 16, 45–7, 54, 60–1, 90–2, 97, 112–13, 119, 122, 140 esoteric spectacle 59 public spectacle 143 SPILL Festival of Performance 2, 5–6, 10, 13–15, 58 Sprinkle, Annie 51, 173–6, 185, 188 Stan’s Café 9 Stelarc 94, 99 stigmatization 117, 167, 175 storytelling 16, 48, 75, 79 strategic 4, 8, 10, 11, 50, 77, 96, 175, 181 Stuart, Meg 24 subjectivity 17, 79, 116, 118–19, 130, 134 suffering 48, 91–5, 99–101, 103 taboo 45, 47, 59, 61, 165, 168 tarot 16, 58–9 Carnesky’s Tarot Drome (Carnesky) 46, 60–2 Tatchell, Peter 143–5 Tate 14, 127 Tate Modern 92, 102 Tate Tanks 13 textual 23, 27, 29, 33, 35, 41, 51, 97, 99 contextual 65, 111, 166, 175, 188 intertextual 182, 186 Thatcher, Margaret 9, 142 theatre 2, 7, 8, 11, 21–6, 29, 33, 35, 37, 39, 46–8, 58, 65, 95, 97, 99, 112, 143–6, 157 experimental theatre 3, 6, 7, 15 Ibsen International Theatre Festival 34 improvised theatre(s) 60 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) Theatre 96 (see also Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)) London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) 14 National Theatre 15 participatory theatre 122 Studio Theatre 6 Theatre & the Visual (Johnson) 164 theatre history 42 theatre scholarship 157 Tom Thumb Theatre 39 traditional theatre 9, 112–13 visual theatre 16, 46 therapeutic 59, 98–9, 107, 109

212 Tolentino, Julie 10 transgressive 47, 115 trauma 59, 84, 99, 103, 106–7, 109, 114–15 post-traumatic 84 treatment 29, 109, 112, 114–15 medical treatment 107, 109–10 Ugwu, Catherine 3, 5, 9 vagina 50–2, 172 Vaginal Davis 60 vaginal sex 174 (see also sex) variety entertainment 45, 47, 60, 148 Vason, Manuel 46, 58

Index Vauxhall 147 C’est Vauxhall! (Carnesky) 53 Royal Vauxhall Tavern 17, 139–40, 147 violence 63, 91–3, 99, 103, 106–7, 115 homophobic violence 100 visual arts 2, 3, 9, 11 weird 12, 189 Williams, Raymond 29 wounds 50, 56, 90, 93–5, 97, 103, 176, 188 Wright, Aaron 1, 11 Yorkshire 2, 6 West Yorkshire Playhouse 7

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214