Banished Body

Body art from femme, female-identifying, and non-gender binary-conforming folx.

[banishedbody]

“eat my menses” video for august, 2017

this motherfucker.  this goddamn motherfucking racist rapist asshole scum of the earth who spat him out of her mouth and said NO ABSOLUTELY NOT.  charlottesville and standing with those fucking tiki torch wet blanket white supremacist worms and more trans women of color dying and trans people kept from the military and keeping immigration checkpoints open in texas during the hurricane so that ice could round up undocumented people fleeing for safety and leave them at goddamn bus stops during a category 4 hurricane and pardoning arpaio and where is my ativan and where is my knife and where is my -

it became time for a spell, so i made one.  a simple spell, which any beginner witch can cast!  featuring: 

~a seashell from the gulf where undocumented people were rounded up during the hurricane

~the only flower that survived the storm

~a sprig of hearty rosemary

~tree berries yet to ripen

~storm water to put out tiki torches

~the menstrual blood of 3 women

[banishedbody]

been working on a poetry comic about christ’s side wounds turned vaginal in devotional texts from the 13th and 14th centuries, which is where this gif is from.  been watching body horror - “ginger snaps,” the “alien” franchise, “teeth,” “wetlands” - been reading deleuze and guattari’s “the body without organs,” too.  body horror feels like the only genre appropriate for discussing charlottesville and the emboldening of the nazi party: their fear of bodies black and brown and othered, their disgust, their rage that non-white bodies are “allowed” to exist.  a nausea present with my reactions, an old anger felt deep in my gut, the disgusting privileges of the body i inhabit.  how we clothe our bodies, armor our bodies, photograph bodies living and dead, how we stand in front of other bodies to protect those bodies, how we keep bodies alive, how we mourn for the bodies we bury, bodies, everywhere bodies, how we treat bodies matters.  bodies as organ-ized, in our desire for a dis-organ-ization.        

[banishedbody]

Regina José Galindo, “Tierra,” 2013.  Still from 33:30 film, digital, color, sound.  On exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.

From the Guggenheim’s website: “In 2012, José Efraín Ríos Montt, the former President of Guatemala, was accused of genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video is a haunting reinterpretation of the atrocities recounted during his trial. Tierra begins with the artist standing naked in a verdant field, the tranquility of which is shattered by an earth-moving machine. Here, Galindo alludes to the incident in which innocent citizens were murdered and cold-heartedly buried in a bulldozer-dug mass grave. The stark contrast between the machine’s huge, armored bulk and the artist’s vulnerable body captures the injustice of Montt’s regime, while the abyss that grows around her serves as a poignant symbol of the despair and alienation born of political violence in general, and Montt’s post-conviction acquittal in particular.”

Galindo was born in Guatemala City in 1974, and her work is ferocious, entailing everything from slicing her thighs with a knife (“Bitch/Perra”) to undergoing surgery to rebuild her hymen (“Hymenoplasty/Himenoplastia”).  She is a soldier, an activist, an international award-winning performer; she combats sexism and issues of social justice and old problems in the “new” Guatemala, and she is not quiet about it.  Her most famous performance, “Who Can Erase the Traces?/Quién puede borrar las huellas?” (2003), entailed “[walking] barefoot through the streets of Guatemala City, from the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura to the Corte de Constitucionalidad, carrying a basin filled with human blood into which she periodically dipped her feet. The trail of footprints visualized her reaction to the recent news that Efraín Ríos Montt, a former military dictator responsible for the most destructive period of the country’s internal conflict, had been permitted to run for president despite constitutional prohibitions. In this work, the line between Galindo’s body as object and subject was so subtle that the blood covering her feet appeared to be her own; she embodied the war’s victims, taking their blood as hers and appropriating their suffering” (Guggenheim).  And if you’re shocked by this blood project, go to her website and click on “La Sangre Del Cerdo” under 2017 (“Obras,” or “Works”), an eviscerating performance that condemns/uses/grieves the election of “the pig,” or Trump.  This morning her work is bolstering me in ways I didn’t know I needed.  Thank you, Regina José Galindo, for your seething courage.

[banishedbody]

Diana J. Torres aka Pornoterrorismo, “Quemarlo Todo,” March 2013 at the Antic Theatre in Barcelona.

Diana J. Torres, working under the name Pornoterrorismo, is a multidisciplinary artist working through/within the genres of poetry, pornography, video, and performance to discuss the emotional, physical, and sexual implications of the body on stage.  Her performances range from this one, an exercise in the tragedy of post-porn clowning, to rituals of queer witchcraft, to workshops on how to love and work the human body.   The author of “Pucha Potens,” an illustrated non-fiction/poetic book about the female prostate, Diana is also a body activist, and is active in the struggles for queer, trans, and women’s rights.

I first met Diana when I took her practical workshop on female ejaculation at the lesbian bar Punto Gozadera in Mexico City, where she now lives.  It was amazing: she showed us diagrams she herself had drawn because most medical diagrams of the female body leave out the prostate.  She had us each strip down naked and lay on the floor, our pelvises thrust upwards, while she shone a flashlight and aimed a camera into our vaginas to project ourselves onto the wall, where we learned to see the four points of our ejaculation holes.  We watched as she reached up inside herself and, in under a minute, made herself ejaculate into a clear, plastic cup.  

Diana is doing such important sexual education work in a deeply Catholic, homophobic country.  I’m not totally shocked that the United States blocks her website and hides most of her content when you try to search for her name, but if you search for Pornoterrorismo on Facebook, you’ll be able to see more of her - and, if you’re ever in Mexico City, even register to take one of her workshops.

[banishedbody]

“eat my menses” video for july, 2017

my drawings of him are becoming less about capturing him correctly and more about the colors of him, how i feel his head to be rather than how it’s actually shaped, how his ugliness is pressing against the restraints of his form.  can he feel me taking his likeness into meadows and dumping blood onto his face?  can he cosmically feel it?  was he mid-tweet when he thought to himself, “that’s weird, my hair feels really wet, oh well, back to being a racist rapist pig”?  

[banishedbody]

Eliza Bennett, “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done,” 2015.  Materials: flesh, thread.  London.

Eliza Bennett, costume designer and visual artist, spent hours embroidering the top layer of her own skin to make her hands look callused and worn for the project, “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done.”  Says Bennett of her own work: "By using the technique of embroidery, which is traditionally employed to represent femininity and applying it to the expression of its opposite, I hope to challenge the pre-conceived notion that 'women's work' is light and easy.  [I’m] aiming to represent the effects of hard work arising from employment in low paid 'ancillary' jobs, such as cleaning, caring and catering, all traditionally considered to be 'women's work'."

I had a dream last night about her embroidered hands.  I’m glad I remembered this project.  She also has an 8 minute film of herself embroidering her own hand after receiving a commission from KODE Art Museums of Bergen and Oslo, to be screened at their exhibition Nalen's Oye.

More of her work can be found here.

[banishedbody]

Vivek Shraya, “Part-Time Woman,” 2017.  In collaboration with the Queer Songbook Orchestra.  Toronto, Canada.

Meet Vivek Shraya, author of a bazillion books, creator of a bazillion music albums, photographer, filmmaker, educator, performer, collaborator, and positive space coordinator/human rights advisor at George Brown College, is a jane-of-all-trades with a tenor clearer than a mountain stream.  Her new album, created in collaboration with the Queer Songbook Orchestra, is a gorgeous pop opera about being a trans woman, with the title track shining clear and bright.  She led the parade for Toronto Pride this year alongside Black Lives Matter Toronto, and her projects have won countless awards.  From an interview with Shraya regarding her Hindu upbringing: “Not that Shraya's Indian roots were always a barrier to self-discovery when it came to gender. In fact, the opposite is true. While growing up in Edmonton, Shraya saw her religious organization, where she sang in the choir, as a safe haven.  ‘Gender was seen differently there,’ she recalls. ‘To be a dancing, prancing, devoted, mom-loving boy in the context of Hinduism was seen as something special.  In the iconography, male gods are very beautiful – Krishna plays the flute and often carries flowers. In the absence of queer role models, kids have to be creative to find them. So Hinduism was something I turned to, and this religious organization was my safe space. What I was harassed for at school was treasured there” (NowToronto.com).  Shraya is doing some incredible work, which can be viewed at vivekshraya.com.  

[banishedbody]

Women on U.S.-Mexico border weave their hair together in giant solidarity braid as Trump gets inaugurated

El PASO—In a unique and powerful show of cross-border solidarity and sisterhood, some 50 women from Texas and Mexico gathered along the international pedestrian bridge this morning to braid their hair together while some 2,000 miles away, Donald Trump was sworn into office.

Boundless Across Borders, “Transnational Hair Braiding During Trump’s Inauguration,” 2017.  Materials: the Juarez/El Paso border bridge, the hair of women (unclear whether that term only referenced cis women in this situation).

On January 20, 2017, while Donald Trump was sworn into office some 2,000 miles away, a non-partisan community feminist coalition called Boundless Across Borders organized a protest on the pedestrian bridge spanning the Rio Grande between El Paso, TX and Juarez, MX.  50 women from Texas and Mexico stood back to back with their hair interwoven into a braid with the woman behind them.  Said one of the organizers, Xochitl Nicholson: “We wanted something that referenced women directly, but that also sends a message about our common heritage and common backgrounds in a broader context.  It’s a symbol of collective strength.”

I found this story a few days after sobbing and protesting in the streets of Mexico City.  My feet still hurt.  The image of their hair braided together made me cry all over again, their bodies bundled in coats and scarves.  

[banishedbody]

“eat my menses” video for may, 2017.

i was living in my friend kaci’s painting studio for a few months while i tried to decide where to live for the next year, so we decided on a collaboration.  both of us being cis women with periods, we’d save our period blood in plastic ziplocs for a week and then go to the capitol building in austin, tx and give drawings of trump and dan patrick nice little blood baths.  it was super windy that day, and a couple of men in red trump hats kept standing near us with their phones out.  it made me nervous, so we kept the drawings and bags of blood hidden until they finally walked away.  maybe they were just looking for pokemon.  we set up a plastic bag on the ground and a bread pan to catch the spillage so we wouldn’t create any biohazards, but it was so windy that when i opened my bag, the wind whipped it back and i spilled dark period blood all over the sidewalk.  (the stain is still there months later.)  luckily, kaci still had her bag, and that was the blood we used.  my person, rob, filmed it.  the blood stank, which was interesting.  it’s nice to have this performance on video, and it was nice to have done it with someone.  it makes this whole thing feel less petulant and more like witches casting hexes.

[banishedbody]

an update.

i missed my period recently while i was up in new england, where clinics that offer abortions are more numbered and easier to access, so i figured it was an opportune moment to go to a planned parenthood to get a pregnancy test.  it was negative.  i breathed a sigh of relief and asked the older woman who was helping me if i could keep the pee stick.  she said, “you don’t want that.”  i said yes, i did.  then i said i was an artist.  she made a face and swaddled the pee stick in tissues, despite having handled it freely with her rubber gloved hands just moments ago.  as if touching something doused in my own pee would give me leprosy.  i thought that was funny.  she was very sweet.  she high-fived me when the line stayed singular.  “no babies!” she said.  

as i continue this project and look forward to dumping my blood all over sloppy drawings of trump - i’m beginning to get the nickname “plasmic princess” whenever i post them on instagram - i’m also witnessing the changing tides of my body.  i’ve never paid this close attention to how different my cycles are, and how light it is when i get stressed, and how heavy it is when i’ve skipped a cycle the month before.  i wonder how this project would be with other bodily fluids for other people who aren’t cis women.  like it could be really interesting to take a shit on trump’s face and see how different your shits are.  or how the color of your piss fluctuates depending on how many beets you ate that day.  or maybe there are other weekly or monthly rituals that could occur.  how is this project translatable across bodies?  i wonder.  meanwhile white men continue to murder black people and trans women, and white “feminists” keep cutting everyone who isn’t cis, white, and heteronormative out of their rhetoric, and our addled government won’t stop going to back rooms to create health care bills that will murder us all.  i lay awake scared at night.  

[banishedbody]

Caroline Bergvall, “DRIFT,” 2013-2015.  Materials: [from her website] “narratives and mappings of travel, migrancy and disappearance, specifically old nordic maritime navigation, the politics and horrors of contemporary sea migrancy, Anglo Saxon sea poetry, being lost as sea in literal and allegorical ways, through contemporary, historical, archeaological means. Initially commissioned by Theatre du Grutli, Geneva 2012 as a collaborative performance involving voice, percussion, datawork.”  A range of countries, environments, and art spaces across the UK.

I’ve been trying not to write too much of my personal interest in these artists into my descriptions of them for this blog, because I wanted their work to speak for itself.  But that assumes that the only purpose of writing myself into these descriptions is to convince you to look at them, which ignores the growing realization I’m having that as I progress through this project and settle into, the work of these folx becomes a sort of blanket fort I can huddle inside until my next period dump onto that troglodyte’s head.  The fortifying comfort I take from learning the names and work of these folx is becoming the real project.  Remedying the gaps in my knowledge.  So I’m going to be a little more present in my discussion of these artists.  They have all come to mean a lot to me over the last couple of months.  

The work of Caroline Bergvall, specifically DRIFT, is, to me, a work of genius.  One part reinvention of the Nordic sea poem, one part star chart/boat map depicting the knowledgable abandonment of refugees in a dinghy by every major naval force in the world, and one part project notebook/journal detailing a love affair, Bergvall expands what a piece is “allowed” to be.  In collaborating with Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach, Swiss visual artist and programmer Thomas Köppel, Swiss dramaturg Michele Pralong, she creates a drawing textual musical meditative harrowing devastating performance of grief, her body gasping for breath and measuring a rhythm that eventually evokes the sensation of drowning.  See her/this when you can.

Her website can be found here.

[banishedbody]

Narcissister, “Changes,” 2013.  Materials: costumes, face masks, wigs, stage make up, soundtrack, props.  The Spectrum, New York, NY.

A “self embodied by the mask,” Narcissister is the nom de plum of a performance poet working in the United States whose “real” identity is unknown.  From her website: “Narcissister employs a spectacle-rich approach to explorations of gender, racial identity, and sexuality. Humor, pop songs, elaborate costumes, contemporary dance, and her trademark mask are her tools in deconstructing stereotypical representations. By opening up and turning against themselves what Stuart Hall calls ‘fixed and closed stereotypical representations,’ Narcissister exposes, in live performance, video and photography, the practice of representation itself, and challenges the audience to question its own attraction and repulsion.”  Her work questions sexual fetishism while her mask, a “repurposed wig display form designed in Los Angeles in 1965 by female entrepreneur Verna Doran,” both pulls and pushes the viewer away.

Writer/artist/curator Martabel Wasserman says this of “Changes”: “[In ‘Changes,’ a reference to a non-binary saint of the glam variety], she goes from witchy monsters to doll faces in peach and brown tones, until her ultimate reveal as Venus on a shell.  While the birth-as-Venus seems to be the great reveal, she then takes it one step further by putting on a solid white latex mask, becoming a pearl.  As a pearl, she moves from gendered body to gendered symbol.  The pearl is a stand in for a nexus of pleasure and/or self-salved wound.”

Check out Narcissister’s website for an expansive selection of her work.

[banishedbody]

Gina Adams, “Its Honor Is Here Pledged: Broken Treaty Quilts,” 2017.  Materials: cloth, thread, texts from treaties made with Native American tribes that have been broken.  White Cube Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO.

From Naropa University’s official statement: “Gina Adams’ exhibition Its Honor is Here Pledged: Broken Treaty Quilts has everything to do with particular, painful moments in so-called modern time: when ‘white man’ broke his promise over and over again to the originals settlers and people of America: Native Americans. “I have been cutting out the letters of entire Broken Treaties–these were pacts written by the United States Government and signed by Native American Tribes. These pacts promised the tribes money and power in exchange for the rich land they called home for possibly thousands of years. The Government took the land; however the Tribes were left penniless”. The exhibit invites the visitor to step inside the gallery and witness words from the past that continue to be broken.”

From an interview with the Huffington Post: “In an email to The Huffington Post, the artist explained that seeing native people in America use quilts for warmth was a common theme in her research of old photos in the Smithsonian Museum and archives. ‘Blankets were one thing that was given to the Native people who were forced to move to the new reservations,’ she wrote. ‘It is my wish that the viewer gain an understanding that there is a relationship between the treaty text and the impact that it still has on present generations.’”

Read the rest of the Huffington Post article here.

[banishedbody]

Bridget Brewer, “Eat My Menses: Cycle 3,” 2017.  Materials: acrylic paint pens, third day period blood.  Bare dirt and juniper berries behind friend’s painting studio, Austin, TX.

3rd cycle blood snack for 10th level douche-canoe.  So runny and wet this time around; the juniper berries sucked up the juice of me.  I look forward to my period now, knowing the blood I collect will have a use.  The vagina I was born with bleeds.  For the first time ever, I don’t feel shame towards it.

[banishedbody]

Kate Durbin, “The Supreme Gentleman,” September 2015.  Materials: Elliot Rodger's "Final Retribution" YouTube video, wig, lipstick, selfie stick.  Yes All Women Benefit, Los Angeles, CA.

E! Entertainment, tumblr girls, Lady Gaga, monstrosity, dramatic readings of episodes of “The Hills,” witches, anorexia blogs, a transcription of Kim Kardashian’s fairy tale wedding: Kate Durbin revels in the “cesspools of modern culture,” using performance art, written text, and visual compilations to explore the grotesque intersections of public and private.  She is co-founder of the online journal, Gaga Stigmata, which compiles critical writing about Lady Gaga, and her tumblr project, Women As Objects, “archives the teen girl tumblr aesthetic:” “People often look at me funny when I say reality TV is a brilliant medium or that teenagers on tumblr are geniuses. But anything that we consider shallow and is yet so ubiquitous can’t really be shallow or meaningless. It has to be really important for us to create it and sustain it for so long.” 

Her book, E! Entertainment, can be found here.    

[banishedbody]

Ana Mendieta, “Blood and Feathers #2,” 1974.  Materials: feathers, clay, body.  Havana, Cuba.  

Born in Cuba in 1948 and sent as a refugee to Iowa at age 13 to escape Castro’s regime, where she spent months living in refugee camps with 14,000 other child refugees, Ana Mendieta was a painter, sculptor, performance- and multimedia visual artist who worked primarily with natural, Earth-bound objects - blood, wood, stone, mud, feathers, flowers, bone - and female bodies.  Most famous for her series “Siluetas” (1973-1981), she “left imprints or outlines in the earth with her body, sometimes adding ritualistic adornments of flowers or fire to those markings” (Art In America).  Mendieta created over 200 earth-body works during her lifetime, including a protest performance entitled “Untitled [Rape Scene]” (1973), in honor of a nursing student brutally raped and murdered at the University of Iowa - she smeared her body with blood and tied herself to a table, inviting the audience to bear witness.  Mendieta was murdered via defenestration from her SoHo loft by her husband in 1985; her husband was acquitted, because of course he was.  

Of her work, Mendieta said: “Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth... I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really the reactivation of primeval beliefs...[in] an omnipresent female force, the after image of being encompasses within the womb, is a manifestation of my thirst for being.”

[banishedbody]

Bridget Brewer, “Eat My Menses: Cycle 2,” 2017.  Materials: watercolors, first day period blood.  Sink in a feminist boxer’s apartment, Mexico City.

Really goopy this lunar cycle - perfect for dumping all over Putrid POTUS.  C U Next Time, fuckface.