The change that I wanted to see was overall a Love Culture, which will be will be hybrid, mixed, fluid and multidisciplinary. bell hook’s thinks of love not as a noun but as a verb, implying action. Connecting the dots together I realised that all of my previous interventions had one thing in common, and that is the quality of performance. As well, a lot of the interventions that I have mentioned as examples also have a strong element of performance to them. But, How is Love performed? How can Love be performed? Why is performance powerful? And, How can I innovate or expand the limits of performance art?
Only now I have come that I am a very performative person and that I have been doing interventions for a very long time now. Yet I struggle a lot to take myself or my work seriously, and fall into generalisation like “It’s just Laura doing her quirky things’. But by being more analytic of other performers I have learnt now that performance can be very powerful and political as well. For instance, I have talked about Dada and Surrealist exhibitions and how the element of transgressive performance was key in the consolidation of community and liberation. And feminist artists have long used performance as a way reclaiming rights, space and subjectivity. In this line I came across a book called The Explicit Body in Performance by Rebecca Schneider in which they brilliantly summarize the qualities of performance art:
‘Researching thirty years of feminist explicit body performance from its early manifestations in the 1960s, I found a number of recurrent themes. First, much explicit body performance replays, across the body of the artist as stage, the historical drama of gender or race (and sometimes, brilliantly, gender and race). Second, these artists critically engage ways of seeing, specifically perspectivism, which has inscribed women as given to be seen but not as given to see. Third, these artists often tug at the plumb lines marking bodies for gender, race, and class in order to expose their link with representational structures of desire in commodity capitalism. And fourth, feminist explicit body work talks back to precedent terms of avant-garde art transgression, raising questions about modernist “shock value” and the particular fascination with a “primitive,” sexual, and excremental body.’[1]
I love this excerpt because they stablish performance as an intersectional vehicle. They specifically remark how it transgresses the barriers between gender, race and class as an oppositional response for systematic abuse, embodied in capitalist commodity. As well, they also reinforce the idea of explicit body as transgression and reclamation. My project revolves around the binary between love and abuse and the power dynamics involved in such processes, and this piece got be thinking about erotic power. In her essay Uses of the Erotic Audre Lorde brilliantly reclaims erotic power:
‘The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply feminine and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of the unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. (…) The false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusionary, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.’[2]
This excerpt goes very much in line with the ideas that I have expressed in my previous entries in which I pointed out that often oppression is justified in the name of culture the same way abuse is justified in the name of love. Lorde sees the suppression of erotic power, which is generally attributed to “the feminine”, as a tool of patriarchal tyranny. I resonate with this personally because I have always struggled with my sexuality, and felt uncomfortable expressing my sensuality, especially after a very problematic relationship. I also felt like the idea of erotic power that I had clashed with my conception of “being lovable/lovely”, but now I am very intrigued about the erotic. It is an area that I have been exploring and has been very useful in my healing journey. Although it is still a bit out of my comfort zone, I am fascinated by it and would like to explore it further in terms of performance.
As well, I could not resist going through another of Lorde’s essays called Poetry is not a Luxury. I have had the idea/possibility of publishing a poetry book for a long time now, however one of the reasons why I haven’t done it is the lack of performativity and multidisciplinariety that I felt around my literary circle. What I personally enjoy most about poetry is not its aesthetic quality but rather its imaginary, its performance, its capacity for deep connection and its endless possibilities. I see poetry as an experience rather than some “dead” words on paper, in line with Lorde’s own words:
‘I speak here of poetry as a revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover to cover a desperate need for imagination without insight.’[3]
Lorde sees power in poetry, and she inspires me to explore poetic action. I would like to explore “the poetic” beyond words, through performance.
I believe performance stablishes a dialogue, a bond between performer and audience as if they were also an active agent in the performance. In the following moths I will research this theory and explore performance myself through different interventions. As well, I am still interested in blurring the lines between high and low art performance as I strive towards a Love Culture, so I will not only analyse those considered high art performances but also those that have been relegated to more pop or low categories.
[1] The Explicit Body in Performance Schneider, Rebecca. Taylor & Francis Group, 1997, p.3
[2] The Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, Audre Lorde (Penguin Modern : 23), p.6
[3] Lorde, p.2