by grand central station

Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.

-Theodor Adorno

Because you are trying to make something new. To birth it into being. To make love real. To make real love. To be of use. To make something new, to be remembered. To be watched, to be held in mind. To be written about. To be allowed to speak for yourself. For you to shake at the touch, to be tasted, to be at the interior of feeling, to be shrouded in memory. To be sewn through the skin to this moment for a while. To be awkward in your beauty. Not to fill the room, not to be larger than life, not to surpass yourself. To be boring. To be kitsch. To be unworthy. To be lost causes. To be unaccepted. To be inexcusable. To be without excuse of documents or reason. To be wrong... To be no longer relevant. To be of some other year, but not this year... To be unresolved sex when sex has been resolved. To be your race when race has lost interest. To be silent. To answer with nothing. To be sweat and to be trembling. To be too serious, too earnest, too hopeless, too lost. To cling to the past. To hold fiercely, to hold tenderly, to hold weakly and fallibly. To be desperate in longing. To be less than enough but to be what there is. To refuse to be any more important than this. To know your place. To be your skin, your wounds, your pain, and your pleasure. To be lost in your finding of each other. To be no more than this. To be ignorant of the future. To herald no dawn. To be here now. And then to be gone.

-Theron Schmidt (excerpted from the essay, Not to Be Larger Than Life, on the collaborative work of Irene Loughlin and Jorge de Leon)

Irene Loughlin describes one of her performances, to hold/ascending:

“The final performance…involved placing a statue of the Virgin Mary at the front of the room surrounded by hyacinth bulbs in dirt. I created a line of milk bags on the floor, piercing them with a knife, and walking in them wearing my mother’s slip and white formal shoes in order to create small milk eruptions/fountains. Upon reaching the end of the line, I lay down in the milk bags making a relationship between the line and my spine. I drank the last bag of milk and stretched my arms out as a nun about to receive the order.”

Laden with symbolic signifiers, Loughlin’s performances dedicate themselves to the rupture that separates Heaven from Hell, Paradise from the Underworld – that rupture within which we live out our perhaps forlorn attempts at salvation. In to hold/ascending, Loughlin assumes the role of the nun, a figure representing the abnegation of female sexual desire for union with the Divine, and an echo of the Virgin Mary’s immaculate state. And here the going gets rough. Unconsummated by sexual union, consummated instead by Divine Annunciation, this figure of the nun/Virgin Mary – clothed in her mother’s slip/skin and white formal shoes – toes the line, milk springing forth in abundance, if only through the violent act of ripping open the skin that contains it. Not only does this nun/Virgin Mary rip open her breasts, as it were, but in an act of defiance drinks the milk herself before finally prostrating her body before the statue of the Virgin. And what of those hyacinth bulbs? In classical myth, Hyacinthus was the youth slain in a jealous rage because he chose to enter into sexual union with Apollo, his blood the wellspring for the flower. Associated with the Virgin, a complex tissue of renunciation and abnegation, desire and violation – and suffusing it all the figure of death – become the altar to which the nun submits, marking out with her outstretched arms the Cross from which all resistance takes flight.

The Hell that Loughlin fears, the Heaven that she fears may be illusory, both reside in the world of late capitalism, the world that Frederic Jameson has described as characterized by pastiche and schizophrenia, a world of amnesia. If, as Adorno claims, “Pleasure always means not to think about anything”, the particular pleasure to which Adorno refer is Jameson’s consumerist culture of emptied out significations. Loughlin’s work has sometimes been reviewed as concerned with private trauma and abjection, possibly therapeutic in intention, and perhaps related to her Irish Catholic rearing. But this personalizing of the position she chooses to occupy and from which she has the courage to speak fails to recognize the broader social formations that Loughlin symbolically acts out through her performing body. Perhaps Reality TV and game shows best illustrate the commodification of empathy that has come to devalue that which has historically been the basis for a civilized society – respect for oneself and the other. If respect is the elusive goal, the Paradise we seek, then disrespect and its agencies – shame, abuse, excess, exploitation to name a few – become the vehicles by which to demonstrate the Hell that must be contained.

Containment takes on a palpability in Loughlin’s video projection performance, By Grand Central Station, which takes its title and its theme – abandonment, grief and unrequited love – from the well-known novel by Elizabeth Smart. Set in a cramped and claustrophobic hot hotel room consisting primarily of a bed and sink, a woman engages in a series of seemingly futile or random actions as an apparently hand-held camera, with its constantly shifting views, holds her in our unflinching, somewhat Swiftean gaze of vague disgust. There’s an inescapable feeling of entrapment-in-the-body, a restlessness of mind, as her mute anxiety becomes our acute discomfort, and – tellingly – a rejection of her failure.

It is not easy to watch these performances, even when they are converted to the medium of video projection, as they must be to reach a larger public. Fumbling, transgressive to the dignity of the body, awkward, derisory even, they take us down, like Virgil’s Aeneas, into the Underworld, the underbelly, of our emotions. Unlike the classic myth, however, Loughlin leaves us stranded there, forced to make our own way back, to pick through the anger and frustrations we feel in order to reassemble, put back together, the shards of our now fractured self.

-Ian Carr-Harris

MVS Exhibition
University of Toronto
2008

Videography by Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa