re-peat

talleyvictoriamurphy

[cluster123456]

Lee Kun-yong, Logic of Place — 1975, performance documentation.

[tvictoriam]

I wrote an article about abortions when I was 15 and I’m still not sure if it was a good idea or not

I used to have a public internet presence.

I mean, I guess I’m trying to have an internet presence again because I’m trying to write and make theatre and it seems like something I should do. 

But when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I wrote online a lot, and publicly. I wrote a blog about economics, politics, and foreign policy and another about social issues. For the moment, they’re still on the internet. I wrote for the Huffington Post about abortion laws and Planned Parenthood funding. It’s still the first thing that comes up if you google me. Also on my first page of search results: my author page from my high school newspaper, an IMDB page that I just found out I have, a review of my Fringe show. Weird. 

In On the Material of Digital Cultures, Martin Hand talks about digital material as unique in its relationship with “time-space” and “risk and opportunity” (47). He’s interested in what is “essential” about the internet and what it produces. I can’t help but think about the way in which performance theory desires a namable “essential” for theatre, too—looking to validate old-form the same way that Hand tries to validate new-form. And they do so in the same directions: performance in its temporality and risk/opportunity of the live body, and digital media in its time/space totality and the risk and opportunity presented in the manipulation of the digital, invisible body. (There’s some really great stuff in Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly about the idea of the digital body as political agent, which seems to match up a real intersection between Hand and theatrical performance - and the extent to which it can operate as a digital medium). For now, I’ll deal with the performance studies/political rhetoric to think about real life and live bodies, and Hand’s to think about online life and digital bodies. A digitized stage is one mode of their intersection. My high school writing is another. 

I published the article on HuffPo (impt to note, this was before AOL bought the site, back when it was still a bit of a liberal hangout) after they reached out to me. Because of my blog? Maybe? I can’t remember. They said I could submit on any topic. I was still mad at Sen. John Kyle for his anti-Planned Parenthood pontificating the previous spring, and, about halfway between the devastating 2010 midterms and the 2012 presidential election, the alt-right was a major voice on CSPAN instead of just at rallies. Nationally, abortion rights were getting a lot of attention. Dr. Tiller had been killed two years before, and ever since, the violence around abortion clinics had received more and more attention. In Virginia, the Board of Health was trying to defund Planned Parenthood. 

So, I wrote about that. I was careful to stay away from any really radical language on abortion, because I didn’t want angry emails. Instead I wrote primarily about Planned Parenthood as an organization, Virginia policy, and the Senate. Mostly I was hoping that it could help me get into college and help get my blog a few more hits. 

Instead, it got comments. Not a ton, but more than I expected. A lot of them were mad. Some of them were mean. My parents told me not to read them, but of course I did. They weren’t devastating or even YouTube-worthy, but they reflected a little bit of the national ire that I was commenting on. It all felt so real all of a sudden. 

My dad was really into the article, and he would show it to conservative friends without thinking about it. That also felt real, in a kind of reciprocal way. My lived life seemed not just comparable to my online life, but they each seemed to make the other bigger and farther-reaching. It was a kind of alarming feeling. Risk, opportunity, and space. 

Time is an easier issue. Which is to say—you can easily click on the link at the top of this, and there are lots more of my political writings that are very easy to find. A lot of my high school performance art surfaces quickly, too. All of this is really obvious. We know that the internet doesn’t forget. But I guess I always thought about that in terms of your mistakes resurfacing: drunk photos, bitter posts. When I was sixteen, though, I was doing pretty much the same thing that I am doing now. I was making avant-garde theatre, and I was writing about art and politics. Which is really weird. And it means that there is this ongoing, through-time version of my work that I can’t really curate or respond to. Like, whatever I’m making in 20 years will be in conversation with what I made in high school, because that work is present, searchable, and still, on some level, alive. 

[wehaveallgotknives]

On Thursday, just as I am saying goodbye to Margaret Atwood at the end of our interview, I get a text message. “Oh,” I say. “Bob Dylan’s won the Nobel prize.” She is about to have her photograph taken, and is arranging a rakish grey felt hat atop her steely curls. She looks at me, opens her mouth very slightly, and widens her eyes. They are the faintly unrealistic blue of a Patagonian glacier. “For what?” she says, aspirating the word “what” with devastating effect.

Margaret Atwood’s lack of patience with sloppy male writers is just!!! The best!!! I love her!!! (via wehaveallgotknives)

@curiousgeorgiana

(via note-a-bear)

[ucresearch]

Why we need GMOs to survive climate change

Genetically modified organisms get a bad rap for many reasons, but we’ve actually been genetically altering what we eat since the dawn of human history.

“For 10,000 years, we have altered the genetic makeup of our crops,”explains UC Davis plant pathology professor Pamela Ronald.

“Today virtually everything we eat is produced from seeds that we have genetically altered in one way or another.” (You can read more about Ronald’s thoughts on genetically engineered food here.)

Right now her focus is on rice. It’s one of our basic crops and without it, we would struggle to feed much of the world.

With climate change, we’re seeing an increase in flooding in places like India and Bangladesh, which makes it harder to grow this important food staple.

So Ronald and her lab have developed a flood-tolerant strain of rice. It’s known as Sub1a or “scuba rice” and millions of farmers in South Asia are now growing it in their fields. 

Today is National Food Day, a day dedicated to hunger awareness. But as we focus on food insecurity, we need to talk more about how global warming will make the problem worse.

As our climate continues to heat up, it has huge impacts on what foods we are able to grow. Will our crops be able to survive droughts and floods? The University of California leads six labs that are working to develop other climate-resilient crops including chickpea, cowpea and millet.

Find out what other scientists are doing to improve our food.

[tvictoriam]

white actors in a teepee, or, problems I have with The Wooster Group

In the spring of 2015, I saw The Wooster Group’s Cry, Trojans! at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Cry, Trojans! is a postmodern performance of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and was adapted from a collaborative production with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The premise of the original production is fascinating: The Wooster Group rehearsed and performed the sections of the play that feature the Trojans, while the RSC performed as the Greeks. The two companies put their halves together only just before opening, resulting in a show that was part-classical, part-experimental, made by artists who are considered contemporary authorities of each style. The Wooster Group, ever an aficionado of meta-meta-cultural commentary, set Troy on Native American land.

For Cry, Trojans!, since The Wooster Group was continuing its performances without the RSC, the Greeks were played by masked Trojans, making the Greeks into actors-in-costume-as-Native Americans-as-Trojans-as-Greeks. Meta-meta-meta. Because with postmodern performance, you never forget that you start with the actor. The actor, the singular, the body. The individual might be freed from constraints of identity on the postmodern stage, he (not she - more on this below) becomes himself material. If identity is not the starting place, then body must be. 

The Wooster Group’s postmodern approach, along the lines of Brown’s thinking, assumes a release of the group (which must be an imposition) from the self. Any group identity, then, can be put on as a means to develop or consider that self, since the group has lost sociopolitical power in being released.

And so, for The Wooster Group, to place a (white) (male) body in culturally-specific costuming is to free that culture’s imagery from historical designation and to allow it to become aesthetic and symbolic fodder. The Wooster Group turns culture into rhetoric. And the only real way to turn culture into rhetoric is for the body underneath it to be white and male—removing any feature that could distract, could provide its own social designations. The white-man neutral. 

The problem, of course, with The Wooster Group’s treatment of culture and history onstage (although this is not limited to The Wooster Group, nor is it necessarily a problem across their productions - but if The Wooster Group is the authority of its own form, it also becomes the bearer of its problems) is that the productions are attempting to reach our real world, and that world is not free from consequences, and its histories aren’t erasable. I understand the appeal of an attempt to merge the specific with the universal in these moments. But the performances tend to treat the title of postmodernism as a go-ahead for turning images with tangible, historical, painful, individual, shared significance into generalized shortcuts to a feeling or theme, without understanding of the realities their choices imply.

Cry, Trojans! demonstrates the danger of postmodern erasure so clearly. Beyond the offense of using Native American icons, images, objects to tell us something about the wild and feral nature of the Trojans as compared to the organized Greeks, Cry, Trojans! works with text that makes active comment on the communities portrayed. Native American culture (which is not at all singular, but the portrayal unspecific) becomes far more than racist code for animalistic traits when worn by Troilus and Cressida. It’s telling a story about individuals trapped in the politics of their nations, of their group identities, trying to live outside of and beyond their social constrictions. Those comments do not become a postmodern-universal when they’re given from inside a teepee. They become specific to the setting. It in fact undermines the individual-universal Cry, Trojans! and The Wooster Group so desires, instead makes a strangely tied-down comment on Native Americans that seems neither intended nor dealt with. 

And for a performance with the intention of commenting on and relating to our greater world, being bogged down in racist implication only succeeds in relating that racism. Culture-as-costume is not an artistically transgressive way to meaning—it’s just an aestheticizing sinkhole that negates any attempt to affect the outside world by demonstrating a lack of understanding of what that world really is. 

[artruby]

Ai Weiwei, Think Different (How to Hang Workers’ Uniforms), (2015). 

[tvictoriam]

I Wanna Have [Groupies]

I used to really love music videos. I used to really love The Pussycat Dolls’ music video for When I Grow Up. 

I had an iPod that you could watch videos on, so I bought a handful of music videos and TV show episodes and movies that I would watch on repeat all through middle and most of high school. I remember several of the music videos almost shot-for-shot: Rihanna’s Disturbia, Gaga’s Bad Romance, Beyonce’s Irreplaceable, MIA’s Boys. When I Grow Up is still the clearest, though. My friends and I would play it on the school bus, my iPod plugged in to a little plastic speaker. We would watch at the women, strong/athletic/sexy, uncomfortable in our 13 year-old bodies, half-entranced, half-repelled, wanting to be them, desired like them, looking down on them, making fun of them.

The song, if you don’t know it, has a lyric that caused morning shock-jock controversy: “When I grow up, I wanna see the world, drive nice cars, I wanna have [unintelligible].” The band said it was “groupies.” The internet said “boobies.” This was a divisive issue on the middle school bus. We would play the video to that lyric, listen, pause it, rewind. I’ve probably heard Nicole Scherzinger sing “drive nice cars” thousands of times. 

When I started writing my response, I was ready to lay judgment on the video, to feel discomfort with a male gaze, to find in the video what I was ready to find after reading the Tyburczy - an “ideal of sexual life,” within the greater narrative of the sexual performative, a frankly Althusserian “hail” that would reveal to me my own media-driven conditioning - and I was pretty sure I would find unhealthy for my past-self. I expected “patriarchal perspectivalism.” Then, I watched the video again. 

Honestly, it’s awesome. I love it. The women are badass. It’s nowhere near the white-feminine-nude Tyburczy unfolds. The lead singer is Native Hawaiian-Filipino, but she doesn’t seem watched by whiteness. The women’s bodies are displayed, but not on-display (or maybe, to have more of a Subject, “the women display their bodies”). The Pussycat Dolls were founded as a burlesque troupe, which makes a lot of sense. It’s not without icky moments (cutaways to annoyed women as their boyfriends watch the singers, Scherzinger doing that awful early-2000s magazine cover pose where the star puts her thumbs under the waist of her skirt like she’s about to take it off), but overall, it’s sexy and powerful and fun. When the women take off clothes or slide down telephone poles, their spectators are an afterthought. It’s clear - they feel sexy, and they’re doing what they want to do.

I’m not saying that it’s some hidden feminist anthem. It’s totally not. It’s a song about wanting people to see your face on magazines, it’s pretty unsubstantial in its content, it’s an above-average entry into the catalog of a middling pop group. But the music video rocks. And I’m glad I was wrong. 

[tvictoriam]

Leslie Jones says it all.

[micdotcom]

Watch: Michelle Obama sends Native American students a crucial message in graduation speech.

[wilwheaton]

I hope America realizes how amazing Michelle Obama is.

[tvictoriam]

analyzing analysis

Something I get particularly existential crisis-y about is the value of criticism.

I love reading political and art theory, and I really, genuinely like writing about art and performance and ideology. I think it’s a useful exercise in understanding, growth, and awareness. I like the way it can show our world to us, rupture it, reform it, clarify it. Most of the time I believe that it matters. But often, especially when I’m sitting in the dark and thinking about what I’m going to do with my life and why am I taking these particular classes and what’s the point of researching this anyway and should I even read that Walter Benjamin book and why did I buy it in the first place, criticism starts to feel both pointless and counterproductive. And I feel on the path to nowhere. I worry that I’m writing for the sake of writing, thinking things thought before and earlier and better, shouting into a void, perpetuating a cycle of meaninglessness masquerading as meaning. I buy into anti-criticism criticism, anti-art art. And I take it really personally, because I feel personally about it. But then - always, even if it takes a while - something stops me. A sentence. A phrase. Lately, it’s Jean-Luc Nancy: “we ourselves are meaning.” And I remember that there’s something real in all of this. 

In her essay “Gender Politics and the Right to Appear,” from Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler refers to populations “deemed disposable.” She speaks of those populations demanding “a livable life” (25). It’s a comment, a criticism, aimed directly at those who experience gender-based oppression. It’s an offering of a battle-cry to take up as they occupy public space. It’s a practical response to what Jill Dolan identifies as the “unstable and refracted” identity reflected in self-analytical experimental theatre (stability is only possible when the conditions for stability exist - when lives are livable, lives can be stable). It’s an activation of feminist criticism of ideological apparatuses, and it’s founded on those same theatrical practices (that it’s in gathering, performance, public presence, that the ideological resistance solidifies). 

I can’t help but think of my more negative responses to critical thought in the same terms defined by Dolan as she talks about discrete disciplines coming in conflict with interdisciplinary claims and thought. When I lose the ability to remember the feeling of meaning in the analysis, I’m picking discipline over broad thought. I’m seeing importance and meaning as specific, field-based, tangible. I’m forgetting the potential for liminal, visceral, cross-disciplinary meaning that speaks to something instinctual in the reader or audience—and I’m undervaluing that reaction, considering it not-enough to count as Real or Meaningful. I’m ignoring the meaning present inherent in the position of the spectator, and forgetting that criticism is entirely a way to reach, better-reach, open that spectator, directly or indirectly. 

[tvictoriam]

Marina & Me

I have this incredibly intense and personal response to all the Marina material we’re seeing this week. This is long and not terribly academic, but writing it clarified for me why she matters this week as we think about (re)production. 

When I was a sophomore in high school and in a performance art troupe and listening to a lot of low-tech-lady-punk like Bikini Kill, my friend Zoe described Rhythm 0 to me while we were walking to class. I was HORRIFIED by it, like beyond horrified, totally visceral, really upset. They could have just shot her. Jesus. I knew I thought it was Great Art but I kind of hated myself for thinking it was great, because the very reason I found it so excellent was what made me recoil. I found myself over and over again thinking about the members of the audience. Why did they operate like that? What would I have done? It really fucked me up for a while - I thought about it every day for weeks, maybe months. 

I learned so much about her, scavenged the internet for clues about the kind of person who would do that for their art. I liked the rest of the Rhythm series a lot. I liked Rhythm 10 best of all. Something about the manner in which she pledged allegiance to merging time over and over and over again, this desperation to produce out of reproducing, the sideways self-harm that claimed action not against the body or Self but rather against the rules that govern the physical universe. I was somewhere in eastern Europe soon after and thought a lot about how she set out on her own as a young woman, living with conservative parents, into a Cold War city, burning herself by accident so she could think and share. I kind of loved that idea. When I had to bring in a code of ethics for my senior-year philosophy class for my “future career,” I brought in her An Artist’s Life’s Manifesto: THE ARTIST SHOULD SUFFER, SOLITUDE IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, AN ARTIST SHOULD NOT REPEAT HIMSELF...

I own the photo book Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramovic. It’s pages of people sitting across from her during “The Artist is Present” and crying. I imagined myself sitting across from her and crying. 

I think about Rhythm 0 all the time. I think about how it’s what I want to do. I think about how it’s what I don’t want to do. I’m haunted by her MoMA interview on the subject. It’s a great, short listen. I really recommend it. It’s sickening, but somehow extraordinarily inspiring. I think about the audience running away from her on a really regular basis. No one should ever reperform that work, in my opinion. It proved itself almost unperformable in the first place (although the table was reproduced as part of the MoMA exhibition). It’s not the only piece that’s almost killed her, but there’s something about the way that it almost killed her. She didn’t come close to dying because she pushed her body too far, or because she was reckless. She came close because the audience (are they really an audience, anyway?) almost killed her. 

I think about that a lot. 

[performingwomen2016-blog]

PRINCIPAL: SEVEN EASY PIECES by Marina Abramović directed by Babette Mangolte

In 2005 at the Guggenheim performance artist Marina Abromovic reenacted five performance art pieces that were formative to her own career. She also performed two of her own pieces- a recreated piece and an original piece.

These seven works were performed and extended for seven hours each over the course of seven consecutive days. Following is a list of the performances Abromovic reproduced in the order they appear, with descriptions from the Guggenheim website: (note content warning on #6)

1. Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure (1974). Nauman constructed a false wall nearly identical in size to an existing wall behind it. A pink poster with black typeface invited visitors to perform their own action by pressing against the wall.

2. Vito Acconci, Seedbed (1972). Acconci occupied the space under a false floor, masturbating and speaking through a microphone to visitors walking above in an attempt to establish an “intimate” connection with them.

3. VALIE EXPORT, Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969). Wearing pants with the crotch removed, EXPORT walked through an art cinema, offering the spectators visual contact with a real female body. Walking up and down the aisles, she challenged the audience to look at reality instead of passively enjoying images of women on the screen.

4. Gina Pane, The Conditioning, first action of Self-Portrait(s) (1973). Pane lay on a metal bed above lit candles for approximately thirty minutes. Her suffering was apparent to the audience, who witnessed her wringing her hands in pain.

5. Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). With his head covered in honey and gold leaf, Beuys cradled a dead hare, showing it pictures on the wall and whispering to it. He wore an iron sole on his right foot and a felt sole on his left.

**** 6. Marina Abramović, Lips of Thomas (1975, Galerie Krinzinger, Innsbruck). Abramović ate a kilogram of honey and drank a liter of red wine out of a glass. She broke the glass with her hand, incised a star in her stomach with a razor blade, and then whipped herself until she “no longer felt pain.” She lay down on an ice cross while a space heater suspended above caused her to bleed more profusely.

**** content warning: #6 runs from 55:33-1:23:22 and as stated above, Abromovic whips and cuts herself, and also bleeds.

7. Marina Abramović, Entering the Other Side (2005). Abramović premieres a new performance created specifically for this project.

From a NYT interview with Abramovic before the performances: 

In music and the visual arts, copyright protections are well established. But federal copyright laws do not extend to live performance. Choreography, for example, has had clear copyright protection since 1978, when federal laws were updated, but only as a kind of written record. The live performance of a choreographic piece cannot be copyrighted, however. And so neither can, say, the performance of a woman screaming until she loses her voice or brushing and combing her hair until her scalp bleeds – both of which Ms. Abramovic did.

“Anybody can take anything, and we can’t do a thing about it,” she complained. This is why she insisted on getting permission from artists whose work she wanted to recreate or reinterpret. (She will not be paid for the Guggenheim performances, she said, and according to contracts drawn up with the artists or their estates, only they are eligible for profits from a book and film that will be made in conjunction with the performances.)

[tvictoriam]

I make fun of the Beuys piece all the time. 

[tvictoriam]

in re: Aaron 

“I came up with this idea of ‘reperformer’.” - MA 

I’m curious about how the terms reperformance and reproduction intersect here. There seems to be a technological element of reproduction missing in reperformance / an absence of the body in reproduction and presence of it in reperformance. -- thinking mostly of reproduction in terms of Walter Benjamin and the “performance” of reperformance from the Phelan (“Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies”). There’s both a dialectical and a very real dimension to setting these terms against each other -- although maybe problematic that it implies a good/bad hierarchy between them -- ie reproduction is weak in comparison to reperformance.  

[micdotcom]

Watch: Gabby Noone explains how “White Feminists” are like men who say #NotAllMen  

[straylungs]

fatsncats:

swampies:

zygoats:

im literally always looking at my reflection not because im conceited but because i just think it feels kind strange to have a physical form and im constantly trying to process who and what i am

also im conceited

team vain and kinda freaked out by having a body

adrumadrum

[tvictoriam]

ok but can I put this onstage ??? 

[anarchistcommunism]

Why should kids be taught to hate the police? Because there are 2.3 million people in jail in the US right now and every single one was put there by a fucking cop. Some people talk about good cops and bad cops, but a good cop, a cop doing their job properly, still puts nonviolent drug users in jail for many years, totally ruining their lives as they lose their jobs, houses, cars, romantic partners, access to college, and become substantially less employable upon release. A cop doing their job properly still gives homeless people tickets for vagrancy which they obviously can’t pay and when a warrant is issued as a result an officer doing their job properly arrests those homeless people. An officer doing their job properly peppersprays and arrests environmental protesters so that logging companies can clear-cut old growth forests. An officer doing their job properly is evicting a family from their home as you read this because the parents’ jobs were shipped overseas so that the bosses could make eight figures a year instead of seven. Those people will become homeless, vagrancy tickets will be written, warrants will be issued… And then there’s the “bad ones”.

Sacking Rome, A Magazine for Vandals vol 1 (via anarchistcommunism)

[tvictoriam]

flesh + consumption