Dan method draft
Intro
This year began with a black clad man. He wasn't exactly me.
I was interested in proxy bodies, and so was he. But he became one for me. He was the first figurative sculpture I ever made.
For some time before moving to Rotterdam I had been making sculptures that visually referenced juridical and penal furniture, that left such a gaping hole where a human body should be that they represented it by its absence. These were made as rickety modernist design, looking like prototypes for objects that never went into production. I was interested in the tyrannical control of the artist, especially the male artist. Interested in his propensity for the observation and representation of bodies. When these sculptures were activated in performance I was always uncomfortable about whether or not the present body being my physical body was conceptually necessary. Since they were usually uncomfortable to activate the pragmatic ethical necessity that it be my own body became an alibi.
(Documentation of Costume for a script for an unproduced puppetshow, May 2015)
When I started trying to put a work together upon arrival here I realised that the gaze that looks but doesn't touch, that attempts to radically disembody itself, does so in order to stigmatise the very fleshiness of the bodies it examines. I realised that one way to get out of the cycle of representation that I had inherited was to figure the gaze rather than satirise the representations it produced. In this sense I don't regard this black clad man that I have become as a representation — the gaze itself is unrepresentable because there is no first presentation to re-present. It is neither me, the man behind nor, nor his products. It needs to be figured in the first place. This is how I came to be a terrible sculpture of myself.
Materials (1)
In the past my works were always kept in close quarters with one another. New works would be tested in the presence of old ones, props would appear and reappear across videos. I had been in the same studio for 3 years.
(Still from Not yet titled/not yet exhibited/not yet resolved, 2015)
But now I found myself in a new city and a new studio, with nothing but my body and the clothes it held in place. I would start with these. With the question: What do you wear? And I would answer it with more questions: Why do I wear it? What does it produce? What does it reference? Where do I draw the borders and boundaries around the practice of wearing clothes? This would be my material.
Feeling as big as a house
I began to work again on a text I had begun writing in Dublin about a man who becomes trapped in the chimney of his parents' house. The original stakes of the text had been around the comedy of the decontextualised academic: once he gets stuck the narrator begins to try to tell the history of the chimney but can only do so from a highly personal, sometimes delusional, perspective.
Once I began to rework the text I realised that this perspective was not interesting enough to me as an end in itself. It became a vehicle for approaching the subtext of the narrative, giving the character an outlet to voice his thoughts on inheritance.
Rather than treating the journey into the darkness of the chimney as a flight from embodiment I started to try and figure it as an extension of embodiment. The narrator felt cold and small in his parents' house without their presence as he could no longer figure himself as the child in the Oedipal drama. The details became specific: the house became an impressive Georgian townhouse and crawling into it became an attempt to wear its authority. Only when he has cramped and debased his own body does he gain the confidence to use the paternal voice, to speak with confidence and hold forth on matters regardless of whether he understands them.
(Untitled drawing, 2015)
This then left me with the question of how to bring this scenario to form. For a group critique I memorised the text and performed it in the studio. I was dressed all in black. For each of the texts three sections I adopted what I understood to be different performative strategies:
-When the narrator is describing feeling lonely in a house that is getting colder and less inhabitable as his money runs out I took sedentary stiff positions pressed against walls and floors. The black clothes here were meant to be a kind of tongue-in-cheek signifier for angst.
-As he described the physical process of climbing into and getting stuck in the chimney I pulled all the drawers out of my desk and pushed myself in while speaking. This part was quite energetic. I thought here the black could be read as more or less the clichéd uniform of performance and experimental theatre.
-For the final section where he is stuck in the chimney and attempting his pseudo-academic chimney history I wore cardboard models of fireplaces on my hands and feet and a cardboard chimney stack on my head so that my body became a drawing or sculpture of a chimney network. I tried to stand as still as possible and talk with an authoritative voice. Being out of breath from the previous section made this not really work. Here I wanted to turn around the use of black as a theatrical signifier for "nothing" by using it as a dumb, literal signifier for the dark sooty chimney pipes.
Immediately upon completing the performance I knew I wasn't happy with it. I still cared about and believed in the work but felt that the performance hadn't allowed the space to read nuances and subtleties in the text, and that in the text things were often kept subtle to the point of invisibility. These problems were underlined by a general understanding among the group that the narrator was me, or too similar to me, or was someone I hoped they would sympathise with. I needed to cultivate a more clear expression of confusion, and find a way of putting bodies on the line that implicated me without direct being read as confessional.
Literary interlude
Around the same time as I did this performance I was reading and being blown away by Elena Ferrante's series of Neapolitan novels. Ferrante is a myterious and possibly pseudonymous figure, but I came across the following quotation in a rare interview with her:
'The "I" who narrates my stories is never a voice giving a monologue. It's always a woman writing, and this writer always struggles to organise, in a text, what she knows but doesn't have clear in her mind.'
Throughout her books Ferrante's narrators make occasional references to the act of writing, often citing its limitations as well as its capacities for catharsis. They don't do this more than once every hundred pages, and they rarely dwell on it. Without forcing the point they create a meta-narrative, a context for the language we are reading. Ferrante reminds her reader that bringing thoughts and feelings to form is another whole practice on top of the one that is more explicitly presented in her narratives, which is building a life in which one has space to think or feel in the first place.
As the quotation makes explicit Ferrante understands this as a problem that affects women. She situates her stories in political and academic fields where men's presumed nativeness to language allows them to gain positions of power with unthinking ease while women are forced to drop out at various points for reasons that never occur to the men as anything but "natural". Her books powerfully perform the denaturalising of this dismissal by narrating its effects on an intellectual life, the ways intellectual effort can effect and even overcome it, and the many ways that being embedded in the world where these processes occur complicate both of these effecting processes.
If I am not to be doomed to replicating Ferrante's sometimes well-meaning but always ultimately complicit male characters I feel I need to find a way to narrate this denaturalising from a man's perspective. If Ferrante's narratives show thoughts that are not permissible being brought to form by people who are not permitted to think in places where they are not permitted to act I am beginning (possibly unwisely) with the vast sea of what is permissible for men. Crucially this sea includes discourses of self-destruction, self-abnegation, self-loathing and self-fragmentation. Even in the academic fields where these discourses prevail little has changed. They haven't achieved anything and their period of experimental grace may be coming to a close. As Braidotti says when outlining the need for traditionally marginalised subject positions to assert themselves 'if the white, masculine, ethnocentric subject wants to "deconstruct" himself and enter a terminal crisis, then—so be it!'
Where can I go from here?
Materials (2)
There followed two important studio visits.
One with Jan in which he pointed out that I was a figure without a ground, and that if I didn't formulate one something unintentional (my voice, the repeated phrase "Georgian house") would become the consistent factor against which it was possible to read detail. He also reminded me that, black clothes or no, I'd eventually have to do something about the fact that I had a face.
Another with Rana Hamadeh, who also made two big "a-ha!" contributions. Firstly, and on a similar line to Jan, that I had not really employed three different performative strategies. My white male body shoving itself into various positions at various speeds only constitutes one. And following on from that, that there was no need to inflict violence on myself as some kind of penance. I am not the subject or the object of my work, my inheritance is.