Irene Loughlin, "Tracey Emin’s Installation My Bed As a Marker of Disability and Gendered Identity,"Simon Fraser University

Irene Loughlin, "An Overview of Selected Works of Performance Art at Gachet 1998-2006" Gachet Newsletter, 2006

Irene Loughlin, "The Sun is Crooked in the Sky, My Father is Thrown over my Shoulders," FADO Centre for Performance., Art. www.performanceart.ca /idea/figueroa/essay.html (posted 2006, and accessed July 31, 2007)

Irene Loughlin, "Downes Point And So Departed (Again); A work by Judy Radul," Simon Fraser University

Irene Loughlin, "The Oath of the Horatii, The Death of Marat, and The Intervention of the Sabine Women as Markers of The Interplay of Private and Public Realms and as Definitive in the Emergent Ideology of Post-Revolutionary France," Simon Fraser University

Irene Loughlin, "Carolee Scheeman’s Devour," Simon Fraser University

Irene Loughlin, "Vancouver Live Performance Art Biennial. The Work of Boris Nieslony, Aistair MacLennan, Roi Varra, and Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa," 2003

Irene Loughlin,"Historiography; The Issues of Art and Writing in the texts of Sheriff, Johnson and Darnton," Simon Fraser University

Irene Loughlin, "Gender and Master/Servant Relations in the Marriage of Figaro," Simon Fraser University

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Irene Loughlin, “Tracey Emin’s Installation My Bed As a Marker of Disability and Gendered Identity,” Simon Fraser University

My Bed is a signifier of gendered identity, and in particular, it holds traces of the presence of the female body, and acts as a signifier of female experience.  This installation draws from an art historical tradition of the “embedded metaphor”.   In particular, My Bed acts as a trope for an emerging female disability aesthetic and narrative. It makes visible a disability aesthetic that is grounded in abjection and is particularly transgressive in that it includes a narrative of sexuality. The degraded environment of My Bed, in part, signifies experiences of female mental illness related to class and economic positioning.  My Bed also explores taboo cultural issues such as depression, suicide and childhood sexual abuse, as well as an adult “bad sex” aesthetic as outlined by theorist Jennifer Doyle.  The noise around the work’s public reception includes official, and largely male, critical contempt and tabloid contempt for female experience, and in particular, the female disability experience and resultant aesthetic.  I have also included the engaged public reception of Emin’s work.  My Bed is a transgressive work of art in that it alludes to British cultural and political practices, including codes of silence and neglect around mental illness, sexuality, homelessness and oppressive immigration and globalization practices in Britain.

The installation of My Bed for the Turner Prize exhibition at the Tate Modern in London (1999) contained a double mattress heaped with stained and disheveled sheets, pillows, pantyhose and a towel…what has been described as “the debris of indulgence” (Cherry/Townsend and Merck, p. 149), (but which might be more accurately described as the debris of living), and included empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts, an empty Marlboro carton, a crumpled newspaper, Polaroid self portraits, a fluffy white toy, cigarette packs, slippers, underwear, condoms and contraceptives, a man and woman’s underwear, dollar bills, two ashtrays with cigarette butts and partly smoked cigarettes, (one located on the ground and one located on the bedside table), a razor, and a partially burned candle which is a referent “to the passage of time.” (Cherry/ Townsend and Merck, p.149)  As “a composed assemblage of items it invites contradictory responses that can be located in the polarities of both the rumpled and smoothed, bright white and stained sheets.   Beside soiled items are located pristine objects such as clear glass of vodka bottles.” (Cherry/Townsend and Merck, p. 149) 

The installation, My Bed, also contains references to still life painting through the carefully placed objects, and the arrangement and colouring of the bed sheets.  The installation refers itself as an art object to the history of still life painting.  Barthes refers to common referents of the painting tradition of the still life as part of a culturally understood tradition, and therefore, an easily exploited signifier, during his evaluation of advertising/marketing techniques in the essay The Rhetoric of the Sign. (Barthes/Mirzoeff, p. 71)

The bed has a powerful pictorial history.  Particularly interesting is the relationship of the bed to promiscuity, prostitution, and the emergent class system signified by the boudoir bed of Olympia, the painting by Eduard Manet.   In 1955 Rauschenberg used pillow sheet and patchwork quilts from his own bed as a pictorial surface.  Jim Dine created a work out of bedsprings in 1960.  “Both these artists incorporated found objects and used urban refuse as both form and content in their work.”  (Felshin, p. 8)   “Only since the 1980’s beds have been liberated from figurative context of history and addressed as an independent object. In the 1980’s, the empty bed came to symbolize the intersection of these aesthetic, cultural and social impulses, and in particular, to challenge homophobia and neglect around the AIDS epidemic.  The bed which was once a site of private pleasure has been transformed into a memorial , a site of public pain.”  (Felshin, p. 8) Emin was studying during this period of identity politics of the 1980’s.   The body’s absence in the bed only serves to indicate its strong presence in contemporary thought.  Much as Emin does, “the bed evokes the human body without depicting it.” (Felshin, p. 8)

“Sleeping and dreaming, conception and birth, lovemaking, illness and finally death, keep most of us in bed for much of our lives.” (Felshin, p. 7)  More all encompassing and significant is the bed as a signifier of disability experience.  Tracey Emin is an artist who identifies as having experienced alcoholism, childhood sexual abuse and depression, and therefore, the metaphor of the bed is central to the development of signification around constructs of illness. The implications of the “amount of time” spent in bed often doubles in the lives of persons with mental illness and the ability to “get out of bed” acts as a measure of the fluctuating mental health of an individual.  Emin resists the traditional constructs of cultural meaning surrounding mental illness as embedded with fear, revulsion and pity.  Similar cultural meaning was contested in the work of earlier artists exploring constructs around AIDS disability, for example in the work of Felix Gonzales Torres or General Idea, whose work often explored the imagery of the bed).  “The bed as a psychologically charged piece of furniture evokes intimacy and love as well as fear, dread, desire, vulnerability, pain, passion, nurturing and loss.” (Felshin, p. 7)

Emin identifies with what is commonly considered “the tortured persona” but I wish to redefine the disability experience and aesthetic of the modernist painter Edvard Munch.  Rather than dismiss this identification as trite in a postmodern era, Cultural theorist Rene Vara relates this identification to tactics of gender inversion.  She argues that “Emin carefully manipulates Munch’s art of personal confession in her inversion of its gender.  For the life of the male genius, she substitutes the experiences of a woman artist, her successful career regulated in a first person female voice.”  (Vera/Merck and Townsend, p. 188)  Munch’s painting, The Scream, is “commonly understood as the essential expressionist gesture, the barely articulate, violent externalization of psychic pain.” (Vera/ Merck and Townsend, p.187)

Tracey Emin occupies an interesting space between the self-identified complicity with the expressionist movement of the modernist era, and her current postmodern practice.  Her need to identify with modernism is to perhaps to give a contemporary voice to disability experience through the utterances of past artists with disabilities, including Edvard Munch.  It is also interesting that Homi K. Bhabha uses the example of  Munch’s painting, The Scream, to cite the difference between modernism and post modernism.  He states that the  scream “represents the high modernist aesthetic of expression, a dependence on the agency of the author and metaphysics of depth which are centered in the dialectics of essence and appearance.”  (Bhabha, p. 312)  The authentic utterance of anguish and alienation, which Munch sought to portray, and which is so important to Emin, is based on a model of the authentic expression that presupposes inauthenticity as its dialectic.  This semiotic opposition as “the scream’s deafness speaks and vibrates through the material sunset and the landscape” is what postmodernism seeks to question.”  (Bhabha, p. 312) 

In a postmodern context the authentic utterance does not resonate through a fixed material universe, where utterance is caught up somewhere between the space of personhood and the space of the social.  (Bhabha, p. 312)   This is the space that Emin inhabits within the My Bed installation, yet at the same time, she mines the position and utterances of the expressionists for a definition of an emerging disability aesthetic. Within postmodernism, the “inside/outside” dialectic of the scream is absent”. (Bhabha, p. 312)   The question here is whether agency is necessary in the expression of an emergent ideology and the deconstruction of images and theory around gendered disability.  Hal Foster opens the issue of authority/agency inherent in this question to multiple possibilities.  Hal Foster asserts that “there is never a complete transition to the postmodern, that a detour must happen through the Freudian theory of deferred action, through which one arrives at the history of the present.  (Bhabha on Foster, p. 313)  Double inscription occurs where “the desire for the dimension of death from which the scream emanates is simultaneous with the will to utter it from within disjunctive conditions.”  (Bhabha, p. 311) These disjunctive conditions include the return of “the subject in the guise of a politics of new, ignored, and different subjectivities, sexualities and ethnicities.”  (Bhabha, p. 313)  Finally, Homi K. Bhaba describes the aesthetic value of the art object as being made up of liminal and partial locations that structure the art object itself.  (Bhabha, p. 310)   The post modern action is the regulation and negotiation of spaces that are continually opening out, remaking the boundaries, and exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of identity or transcendent value – of truth, beauty, class, gender or race.  The iterative “I” engages in a social space that somehow stops short of the transcendent human universal, and therefore provides an ethical entitlement to and enactment of a sense of community as both an ethical practice and an aesthetic idea.  It is art’s capacity to reveal the almost impossible, attenuated limit where aura and agora overlap.”  (Bhabha, p. 313)

In citing Emin’s artistic influences, we are assisted in achieving a broader understanding her work in its semiotic context that encompasses and reaches beyond an autobiographical narrative.  The work of Emin’s colleagues and her artistic influences are important to a larger understanding of her work. Her colleagues, Sarah Lucas and Rachel Whiteread, have both created works with bed images, whereas Whiteread’s work is largely minimalist,  Sarah Lucas has created a stained sagging mattress propped against a wall that is impossible to sleep on.  Objects placed on the bed act as signifiers of sex organs.   Lucas’ work, as well as Emin’s, have been described within an evolving feminist framework.

Emin cites Frida Kahlo as one of her influences.  The painting of the Henry Ford Hospital can be related to My Bed in its negotiation of a female disability language. In the painting Henry Ford Hospital, Kahlo arranges six suspended objects around her bed, which signify and reference her miscarriage and hospitalization in 1932; included are a disembodied salmon-pink female torso, a snail, an autoclave device for sterilizing surgical instruments, a wilted flower and a fleshless skeletal pelvis.  Ribbons that unite at her pregnant stomach connect these objects, and in the finished painting Frida Kahlo included behind her floating bed the industrial landscape of Detroit, where she was hospitalized.  This accumulation of personal signifiers around the bed and body of the artist echoes Emin’s collection of polaroids, condoms etc. in the installation My Bed.  (Ramirez-Figueroa, p. 4)

Another possible influence, although not cited by Emin, is the work of Mike Kelly.  Kelly’s work has been associated with childhood sexual abuse, and Kelly himself has been uncomfortable with the personal assumptions critics have taken.  One of these assumptions has been that the artist’s use of childhood bed paraphernalia stems from experiences of trauma.  In order to neutralize the psychological and biographical readings of his art, Kelly began to “work overtly” with his personal life “as a kind of fiction”  He therefore mixed his own childhood and experiences of abuse, since he has never denied the validity of this interpretation with the aesthetics and tropes of childhood sexual abuse found in popular psychology.  By using this method of taking attention away from himself, Kelly has touched on the absurd with the blending of childhood abuse, with satanic ritual abuse, and alien abduction. (Ramirez-Figueroa, p. 5)

The power of embedded meaning of pain, fear and passion is also doubled with the overlay of popular perception of a woman with mental illness as violent (refer to films such as Single White Female or Fatal Attraction), her often unavoidable seductive abilities (refer again to Michael Douglas’ inability to resist the seduction of the mentally ill female) and the resulting need to either desexualize her or to control her overwhelming libido, due to this fear of domination or violence. (again, refer to Fatal Attraction, it is particularly interesting in that in Fatal Attraction the mentally ill female protagonist is also an artist)

Emin’s insistence on the possibility of the bed as a multiple site of depression, possible suicide, and shared, “normalized” sexual hetero experience is signified by the sexual debris spilling out over the room.  In particular, the casualness of half smoked cigarettes and shared bottles of alcohol, the romantic signifier of the partially burned candle, the coupling of female contraceptives and condoms, imply an active and participatory masculine presence, as well as a “post coital environment”.  (Oleksijczuk, seminar March 31, 2003)  This normalized and public display of heterosexual experience by a mentally ill woman, does not sit well with British masculinist interpreters of the work.   In order to minimize her impact, the original catalogue essays for the works by Neal Brown were entitled, “Tracey Emin Has Big Tits” and a corresponding second essay, “How Big Are They?”  These essay titles are indicative of the particular failure of a post feminist rhetoric (as discussed in class, March 31, 2003) 

In My Bed, the able bodied male super gender is subverted (Davis, p. 229), but rather than through homoeroticism as Whitney Davis suggests, it is subverted through female (disabled) hetero desire.  The super gender and the agreements made with the super gender around issues of power and acceptable social constructs (including experiences of abandonment that are tied up within an abject narrative), are spoken to, from the position of disability (the depressive remnant of conversation as a signifier of disability experience that hangs in the environment), especially present in the neon sign (Every Part of Me is Bleeding), located on the wall nearest the installation.  In her essay The Persistence of Vision, Donna Harraway has emphasized the importance of addressing the “god trick”, that is, the gender of the commonly unmarked position of the gaze. (Harraway/Mirzoeff p. 192)   In the “Every Part of Me is Bleeding” neon work, the unseen person she addresses is gendered through the masculine referents surrounding the bed in this post-coital installation (condoms, clothing).   The “conquering gaze from nowhere” is gendered, where it commonly unidentified as an “unmarked position inferred Man and White.”  (Harraway/Mirzoeff p. 191)  This neon sign is significant to the overall installation and presence of My Bed, and echoes Emin’s past neon work (You Forgot to Kiss My Soul) and the previous work of artists Bruce Nauman and Jenny Holzer, (as do Emin’s quilts) in speaking to a master narrative.  Rather than resist the able-bodied, super gender narrative through tactics of androgyny (Davis, p. 229), she addresses this narrative through a binary oppositional space of hyper femininity, that includes gender specific signifiers of biology, which can be found in the contraceptives littered around the bed and the drawings describing the grief of abortion as well as the pleasure of female masturbation.  Emin also takes on some markers of hyper masculinity where it is culturally permitted, as signified by the crumpled Marlboro carton and the doubled cigarette presence in the ashtrays.  (FPA 412 discussion, March 31, 2003) 

The bed as a site of  “the everyday” moves discourse towards the personal realm of an almost unconscious response and resistance to the maneuverings of the super gender as a romantic afterthought.  In this “unconscious tactic” of utterance that moves from elite discourse to everyday complaint in a culturally romantic poeticism, Emin aligns herself with other women who have felt abandoned in the system of the able bodied super gender, thus evoking emotional responses from female viewers.  Emin transgresses the “natural”  order of the art institution through this style of social exchange and through utterances of emotional resistance. The “ethics of tenacity” (de Certeau, p. 26) are present in her modernist-derived/female/personal utterances as a way of refusing the established order, as well as through the artistic operations of the blurring of authenticity/mediation in the presentation of the bed.  This blurring could be seen as “an aesthetic of tricks” (de Certeau, p. 29) as described by de Certeau in The Practice of the Everyday.

In a further example of a frustrated super gender narrative, Richard Dorments’ states “…billing herself as a modern day expressionist Emin brings life, into the art gallery and leaves it there, more or less unchanged like unprocessed sewage., …what interest me about Emin is not her relentless self-absorption, limitless self- pity or compulsion to confess the sad details of her past life, but that all of this adds up to so little of real interest.  We find here no particular vision, nothing universal. we learn nothing, understand nothing about ourselves..” .  (BBC website/Arts/Tracey Emin 1999)  This registers as a familiar complaint about the female perspective where a masculinist aesthetic proposes itself as universal.  He declines to view her art as anything other than personal expression.

Also familiar are his tactics of disbelief and doubt in relation to the authenticity of her work. Critic Julian Stallabrass is particularly offended by Emin’s work, and has created a whole construct of fluff around the work of young British artists (yba), naming it with the anacronym “High Art Lite”.  (Osborne/ Merck and Townsend, p. 40)  He describes Emin’s work as “A combination of pop cultural consumability and knowingly regressive expressionism.  As such, it is understood to promulgate a populist version of the hackneyed romantic myth of the artist as creative primitive, while nonetheless, in the more sophisticated context of the art world, cunningly exploiting the incongruity of its own naiveté for conceptual effect, it thus manages to achieve the marketing coup of being simultaneously popular and elitist, a conceptual sign of the exercise of knowing taste.” (Osborne/Merck and Townsend, p. 41)

While the work of male artist Andy Warhol was carefully considered despite his fame aesthetic and unintelligible mumblings about his art, “Emin is often labeled inarticulate, even stupid.” (Osborne/Merck and Townsend, p. 40) This is used as evidence against her status as an artist “she sounds illiterate and ill-informed” (Osborne/Merck and Townsend, p. 40), despite the fact that she holds an MFA from the Royal College of Art in London.   In a parallel interpretation, the Guardian hailed her intelligence as manipulative and downplayed years of artistic practice “Clever Tracey!  That bed causing a sink in the Tate has rocketed Tracey Emin from minor celebrity to mass notoriety.” (BBC website/Arts/Tracey Emin 1999)

Most telling is critic Julian Stallabrass’ description of his encounters with the work and theoretical ideas of Emin.  He states, “Being at a seminar about yba (young British art) is like being stuck behind children or old or blind people in a crowd at an underground station when you’re in a hurry for a train.  The questions are generally idiotic and the replies are inane.”  (BBC website/Arts/Tracey Emin 1999)  The male able-bodied perspective is incredibly obvious in his interpretation, as well as his disdain for the general, tabloid reading public who are interested in Emin’s work.  Another interesting commentary is critic Tom Lubbocks commented that Emin is “ an interesting bit of rough, a wild pet for artland” (BBC website/Arts/Tracey Emin 1999),  a particularly telling colonizing of the disabled, female body as savage and other, although it implies images of containment and domestication of Emin present within the double entendres of wild pet/wild art and artland/petland.

Emin played to the critical world while at the same time disregarding it, and relishes her commercial success with all the enthusiasm of the once impoverished system.  She is proud of her AEG washing machine and her home in east London.  She also refers to her dyslexia and class background by misspelling words in her quilts and her subsequent insistence upon leaving them as they are. (Betterton/ Merck and Townsend, p. 30) She mines her working class background for both visual and verbal rhetoric, and exhibits ambivalence towards upper middle class and upper class constructs of the artworld, thus infuriating the class based assessments of the critics.

She ironically positions herself within a framework of mental illness and working class culture, by defining herself in one of her quilts as “Mad Tracey From Margate” Cultural theorist Chris Townsend acknowledges the history of her reclaiming her positioning.  He states that she makes a connection with madness as being overlaid within cultural interpretations of working class women. “The degenerate female (prostitute) was clearly differentiated from the normal woman and exhibited a moral insanity.”  (Townsend/ Merck and Townsend, p. 98)  Freud intimated that all women possess as a tendency the characteristics that prostitutes live out.  He emphasized the psychopathology of prostitution originated from class origins, in that working class women are naturally disposed to prostitution because they are morally and psychically degenerate.  In popular perception of her public behaviour as artist, including an overwrought departure from a live TV debate on the death of painting, she is “depicted both by herself and others as a lewd, lubricious hysteric”.  (Townsend/ Merck and Townsend, p. 96)   Emin unapologetically describes herself as being “off her face” during this event. (Wainright/ Merck and Townsend p. 207)

The stinking bed description used by the tabloids to describe the installation is another interesting metaphor that suggests the disgust attached to the female body and the mess of living.  A particular association is made between odour and decay around disability culture, particularly in the downtown eastside, where disabled residents in single occupancy hotels have little access to safe and private showering facilities and even safe drinking water.  Such concerns are usually relegated as “third world” concerns by North America and Europe.  The masking of odour is a privilege that many persons with a disability do not have as they struggle with depression and lack of facilities and resources to control odour. 

The general lack of personal space in London, especially for low-income communities, is referenced in the installation of the bed.  Londoners relish the privacy of their rooms, as they often share high rent apartments with many people.  It is interesting that theorist Mandy Merck describes the curatorship for the Turner Exhibition through a housing metaphor.  She states, “If the exhibition was a house, the bedroom was a brightly lit foyer, the first space you encountered…and pointed to the foregrounding of sex in the exhibition”  (Merck/ Merck and Townsend, p. 119). Whereas the installation did not actually smell, critics and journalists described the bed as containing “urine stained sheets, heavily soiled knickers and used condoms.”  The daily telegraph reported that “several journalists found it stomach churning”.  (Cherry, p. 143)  The work was compared to that of Emin’s predecessor Mary Kelly.  “Emin taps into a tradition of filth…an undeodorised song of poetic extremity”(Cherry, quoting Critic Neal Brown, p. 145).   The garbage/objects littered around My Bed are partially disposable (the cigarette carton and packs, the crumpled newspaper, the cigarette butts, the disposable razor, discarded pharmaceuticals, the used condoms).  In the essay, Narrativizing Visual Culture, Shohat and Stam speak about the “aesthetics of garbage” (Mirzoeff, p. 41) and how the presence of garbage signifies “the low, the despised, the imperfect, and the ‘trashy’ as part of a social overturning.” (Mirzoeff, p. 41) Emin exposes the “white trash” garbage of a post-coital environment in order to politicize female ownership of a non-able bodied, working class sex. 

Sex as it exists in a lower and working class environment is particularly demonized and degraded.  Shohat and Stam use the example of the wording of two red-light districts in Brazil (also probable sites of sex tourism).  The first is ‘boca de lixo’ (mouth of garbage) of the poor district, the second is ‘boca de luxo’ (mouth of luxury), describing the upper class district.  (Mirzoeff, p. 43)  The site of Emin’s life is situated as ‘working class’ by herself and the press, and the fact that the title of the installation claims the bed as her own makes the imagined sex and garbage contained within it as also working class. The crassness of exposing the garbage of sex as well as the bodily excrements surrounding sex are attached to a “lack of class”. 

Emin uses the garbage of her life as an element to expose these political and identity readings around garbage.  “Garbage, like death and excrement, is also a great social leveler…as the lower stratum of the socius, the symbolic ‘bottom’ of the body politic, garbage signals the return of the repressed.  It is the place where used condoms, bloody tampons, infected needles, and unwanted babies are left:  the ultimate resting place of all that society both produces and represses, secretes and makes secret…garbage is reflective of social prestige; wealth and status are correlated with the capacity of a person or a society to discard commodities…garbage is power laden.”  (Mirzoeff, p. 43)

Accidental excrement, as located within the installation My Bed, is also a signifier of the inaccessibility of nourishing food within low-income communities, a side effect of anti-depressive and anti-psychotic medication, and the intestinal problems that result in a lack of clean drinking water, as well as the prevalence of food poisoning and hepatitis in low income communities (a disease which can be transmitted either through intravenous drug use, unprotected sex or inadequate food preparation in unsanitary facilities).   Recent studies have concluded that lower and working class women have increasing difficulties with obesity through the unavailability of nourishing food, and through the fear of not having future access to food while eating. (Ramirez-Figueroa, p. 6)  This information politicizes the accidental excremental.  The location of garbage is often found as dumped into the environments of economically deprived communities, at the same time garbage is recycled in exchange for monetary value by the economically deprived, and the economically deprived are often the ones that retrieve garbage and clean up after the more privileged.

Hal Foster considered that the 90’s aesthetic of trauma expressed through abject art was that of being “drawn to the boundaries of the violated body, which he sees as a rebuke to the postructuralist celebration of desire and the subjective mobility in fantasy.  Such art is read to register the despair generated by systemic poverty, disease, death, and an abandoned social contract.”  (Merck on Foster, p. 125)  In trauma discourse, Foster concludes, the subject is evacuated and elevated at once. (Merck on Foster, p. 125)  Foster relates these ideas to the work of Cindy Sherman.  He refers to “her signifiers of menstrual blood and sexual discharge, vomit and shit, evoke the body turned inside out, the subject literally abjected.  It is possible to describe Emin’s unmade bed, with its own residue of bodily effluents, the skid marks so evident on her sheets, and the gashed pillow emitting its pubic stuffing, in this idiom. “  (Merck on Foster, p. 126)  Representations of trauma also demand a witnessing as the voices of sexual desire mix with the historical presence of childhood sexual abuse and rape, and both swirl around the bed.  My Bed is transgressive for the British public in that it acts as a reminder that the intimate spaces of home can be dangerous.  Emin herself says about the installation, “It looks like the scene of a crime, as if someone had just died or been fucked to death”  (Cherry on Emin/ Merck and Townsend, p. 149).

Emin moves in territories perhaps unavailable to or resisted by earlier feminists.  Jennifer Doyle speaks of the “bad sex aesthetic” (Doyle/ Merck and Townsend, p. 149)  and asks about the importance of representing experiences of boring or non orgasmic sex, humiliation, even painful and traumatic, but consensual, encounters as potentially formative, as foundational, at the very least as experiences of what we do not want. The need to claim this kind of sex as something that happens, without enacting around ourselves a therapeutic discourse of victimization, confession and recovery. (Doyle/Merck & Townsend, p. 102)   In the recent first nations performance art conference, Indian Acts (sponsored by the Grunt Gallery, Vancouver 2002) artists discussed resistance to the rhetoric surrounding recovery as “a redemptive project” that sanitizes symptoms of first nations’ trauma and oppression.  Perhaps this relates to the inability of trauma survivors to consistently experience “good sex” from an able-bodied perspective, and to have their own narratives of sexual experience recognized as part of the continuum of sexual experience, which includes disassociative sex, as part of what happens, without narratives of able-bodied pity or able- bodied views of normalcy.  Doyle relates something like this when she states, “ The good sex model offers women and perhaps especially American women, who must wrangle with a cultural imperative to psycho-sexual health, a choice between only two kinds of sex – good, happy, fulfilling sex or assaultive sex”  (Doyle/Merck & Townsend, p.  102).

Emin is viewed as problematic to some feminists due to her behaviour that apparently “mimics” “female artists who gained esteem though public self flagellation play to older tropes of the dysfunctional female artist, out of control, out of mind” (Merck/ Merck & Townsend, p. 129) Emin’s apparently uncontrolled behaviour is embarrassing to able-bodied feminists who want to distance themselves from a woman artist with a mental illness who carries within herself signifiers that include violence, unpredictable (often sexualized) behaviour, and a lack of intelligence.  She “acts out” (the implication is that symptomatic behaviour is inauthentic and attention seeking).  Author Natasha Greer, who “counsels” Emin to “make her bed and move on from autobiographical expressionism to a more detached and analytical conceptualism”, furthers this implication.  (Merck/ Merck & Townsend, p. 129)  This framework reasserts sexist and able-bodied notions of grief and depression as an attention seeking methods rather than an articulations of a non able-bodied experience.

Emin also acts as a model for Vivienne Westwood and appears in alcohol advertisements in Britain, exacerbating her “bad girl” status.  Her ambivalence to some feminist interpretations grounded in binary oppositions could relate to “Derrida’s post structural interpretation of the sign, which he projects onto the past moments of the semiotic order of high modernism and capitalism.  Derrida asserts structure as apart from a fixed centre or central presence.  The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and play of signification indefinitely.  He describes this decentering as the critique of truth in Neitzche, the critique of self-presence in Freud, and the critique of metaphysics in Heidegger.” (Foster, p. 78).  This way of thinking might also be extended to extreme binary opposition and definition central to some feminist interpretations.  Emin explores Derrida’s concepts of decentering through ideas of abjection and the “bad sex aesthetic” that I have described earlier in this essay.   

Other feminist interpretations of Emin’s work explore the detritus beside her bed as referencing earlier feminist interventions, such Judy Chicago’s Red Flag and Carollee Schneeman’s performance Interior Scroll.  (Cherry/ Merck & Townsend, p. 145)   Theorist Jennifer Doyle states that she likes Emin’s work because “I think it is talking to me, I take it as being about me.  It indulges my narcissism…(Doyle/ Merck & Townsend, p. 109)  Her work re enacts clichéd performances of feminine sexual abjection.  I recognize these clichés, I am caught in the cliché of a woman’s response of a woman’s work, in which I identify with it, in which I refuse to emotional distance. …(Doyle/ Merck & Townsend, p. 137)  The work is melodramatic, and this trait is fundamentally intersubjective.  Reviews almost invariably describe weeping young women who identify with Emin’s narratives of abuse, humiliation, and rebellion.  These spectators are so moved because they feel the work is not so much about “Trace” as it is about them.” (Doyle/ Merck & Townsend, p. 112).

In an attempt to read the work from the position of the “ordinary reader”, Doyle transgresses much critical theory, where it is a given that there is an “ordinary” reader and another vague class of the culturally informed to which the cultural theorist usually belongs.  De Certeau describes interpretations by the “ordinary reader” as being repressed because they are heretical or insignificant, while in reality these readings are equally valid, but unacceptable simply because they are not sanctioned by the institutional power structure.  (de Certeau p. 171 )  Perhaps ageism and gendered identification, as well as her working class background mirrors the distaste for Emin’s work in an upper class strata.  Such distaste also defines the “ordinary reader” of Emin’s work. Emin herself is often problematically identified as younger that she is and subsequently in a category of sexualized female youth.  She has been often called “Margate’s most famous daughter” by the press, (BBC website/arts/tracey emin/1999).  One headline in the popular press describing My Bed’s reception included  the headline “at least the naughty schoolgirls liked it”(BBC website/arts/tracey emin/1999)  This objectifying headline referenced the sexualized, fetishized and pornography based imagery of girls in school uniforms.

The bed has also been used to explore the underbelly of childhood and to suggest vulnerability, fear, disturbance and dysfunction.  The bed has an anxious presence that suggests a side of childhood where fear, cruelty and violence are possible.  (Felshin, p. 9) The empty bed is an arena in which to consider how gender and cultural identity are shaped by societal norms.  Marginal artists have suggested experiences of racial, ethnic and sexual prejudice from mainstream American culture through striped sheets that may represent prison bars.  It is very interesting that Emin uses a striped mattress in her bed installation.  A bed can speak of imminent danger and a childhood that deviates from the norm.  (Felshin, p 9)

I believe the presence of Emin’s younger self is a present in the bed installation.  Much as the debris of adult sexuality surrounds the installation of the actual bed, signifiers of her younger self are present in the quilt situated on the wall to the left of the installation, the photographs of the death of her uncle at the centre wall, and in some of the drawings which mix representations of her adult and younger self to the right of the installation.  

In thinking about the quilt on the left, I believe it to invoke the presence of Emin’s earlier life at the age of 13.  I use the word invoke due to the spiritualism of Emin’s family tradition which is important to mention.  Her mother held séances in her home, and Emin often complains that her work is not considered in its spiritual dimensions. (Vara/ Merck & Townsend, p. 172)   (An interesting aside is that Spiritualists were “studied” at the Salpetriere hospital in 1862, the same hospital where the mentally ill were studied and objectified, in particular the body contortions of hysterics).  (Vara, p. 177)

The quilts are handmade, and the NO CHANCE quilt describes the period of time where Emin was raped and dropped out of school.  It also contains signifiers of “the pole in my hand” alluding to the medicalized experience of abortion. To be late is a double metaphor implying youth experience of the school structure and her menstrual cycle.  I was particularly curious about the Union Jack and what it represented within this timeframe culturally.  Theorist Deborah Cherry has suggested that at Emin’s age of 13, Britain would have been experiencing the Queen’s silver jubilee. (Cherry, p. 153) At that time, I was 10 years old, and remember receiving a jubilee coin in grade school.  I wondered what other similar memories I could piece together from this time period.  I was also aware of the shared experience of our generation having been extremely affected by pop culture images, in particular, popular film that would have been a central form of entertainment in the working class town of Margate where Emin was born. I vaguely remembered this Union Jack from my mid teens,  in relation to the largely popular The Who films, including Quadrophenia (a depressed mod youth who drives his moped into the ocean as a response to the no future impulse of the 1970’s in Britain).  The film, Tommy, released in 1975, was also extremely popular.  Tommy is a severely problematic rock opera about a child who chooses to become death, dumb and blind after witnessing his father’s death at the hands of his mother’s lover and his mother.  His mother tells him never to speak of it (if this isn’t Freudian castration I don’t know what is) As a child, Tommy is sexually abused by his uncle but doesn’t really mind since he has a disability and therefore, is considered to exist outside the norms of ethical treatment – apparently he also doesn’t mind being sexually abused because he knows no better, is supposedly unaware of and beyond general moral codes and actually enjoys being raped to the tune of “see me, feel me, touch me, heal me” (Tommy website).  Later in the film, Tommy becomes miraculously Christ like, in a similar way to the disabled woman in the Sting film of the same time period.  That woman was miraculously cured of her disability after a rape staged as a mercy fuck by Sting.   One of the creators of the Tommy musical, Pete Townsend, is pending charges by British police for surfing child porn sites, In his own website, he states that his “creative project” Tommy, has caused him to be questioned in regards to these accusations, which he denies, and he denounces all sexual predators as being “mentally ill”.  (Pete Townsend website)

Perhaps the strongest situating of the quilt work is in the context of the Sex Pistols, who released the union jack image with the song “God Save the Queen” in 1977. (http://www.observer.co.uk)  Similar to the reception of Emin’s work, the song caused huge controversy, was banned from airplay “on land” (a bizarre, historical wording of British law), and was subsequently played on the waterways of London to huge crowds climbing on and hanging over London Bridge.  This action took place simultaneous to large public receptions of the Queen.   The song states “There is no future in England’s dreaming (also a bed metaphor), don’t be told what you want, don’t be told what you need, there’s no future how can there be sin (reference to moralism), we’re the flowers in the dustbin (abjection), we’re the poison in your human machine, we’re the future, your future…”  (Sex Pistols, God Save the Queen)  Emin revisits these ideas of 1970’s anarchism through metaphors of depression and the abject in a decidedly female context.

From a Freudian perspective, fear of the possibility of being consumed, (emotionally, physically, and aesthetically) by the feminine (let alone the mentally unstable feminine) is at work in the My Bed installation.  Emin’s resists working within the narrative of a “controlled environment” for creating a language around her “illness” (i.e. a hospital bed) She makes us witness to a domestic environment, and the private experience of a woman dealing with a mental illness in an able-bodied social sphere, rather than what would be more comfortable for the able-bodied viewer - a relegated, medicalized, desexualized, (precluding rape or other forms of physical, mental and emotional abuse by hospital employees, a not so uncommon experience for a mentally ill woman) and depersonalized representation of mental illness.  There is fear present in the My Bed installation around forced medicalization.  “My Bed could also be seen as referencing the chronic crisis in Britain of national health services, where a hospital visit can be fatal.  The bed, the mortuary slab, and the operating table slide into one another.”  (Merck/Townsend and Merck, p. 119)  Such an intimate embedded metaphor of domesticized mental illness as outlined above does not sit well with British, masculinist interpretations. 

Authenticity is an issue that both concerns the art critics and the general public.  Male critical responses include “That the work feels like it is addressing me does not feel like a critical response at all, it is a failure of intellect to rise above emotion” and “emotion sometimes overflows with a somewhat smothering sentimentality which can border on the embarrassing for both artist and audience.  Julian Stallabrass adds to the authenticity debate by stating, “It’s so unmediated, I wonder if its art”.  (BBC website/art/tracey emin/1999)  The issue here is that Emin herself is the mediator between her experience and its expression.  Her work draws on shifting impressions, on memory and the exigencies of narrative.  Emin states in response to these debates, “Of course everything I do is edited, considered, and its final production very much calculated”.

The public wants her works to be true and authentic and wants to read them as such.  However Emin edits, reinvents and imagines. In doing so she looks critically at female authenticity, and such cultural tropes as false memory syndrome, which include the tendency of women to be accused of lying, emotionalizing and expanding the truth around disability and trauma issues.   Critics that are usually not bothered by ideas of authenticity challenge even the legitimacy of Emin’s working class background.  Ivan Massow, chair of the Institute of Contemporary Art, described Emin’s work as “the product of over-indulged, middle class (barely concealed behind mockney accents), bloated egos who patronize real people with fake understanding.” (BBC website/art/traceyemin/1999)

These real people perhaps include the homemaker from Wales who intervened in the installation and then told the press, “I drove straight to London with a 500 ml bottle of Varnish.  I had a go, but unfortunately I could not get to wash the sheets, just  a pre-wash.  I may have done the artist a favour.  In her video, she was bleating on about a lack of a love life.  She will never get a boyfriend unless she tidies herself up.” This spontaneous public intervention is described through an interpretation of colloquial terms. This is an example of intergenerational female communication in Britain,  by a woman from an earlier generation (who had collectively lived through the hardship of World War two).   The attitude of sorting oneself out in order to make one’s self presentable, exposes the humorous intolerance and advice by a woman of this generation towards the indulgences of younger generations. 

I have attempted to examine the complexity of issues and definitions surrounding the My Bed installation.  From the micro observations of the autobiographical in Emin’s work, we now arrive at the macro, at the big picture.  The globalization aspect of the installation is important and needs to be mentioned here.  Certainly this aspect was on the minds of two Asian performance artists when they intervened within the installation.

In the performance entitled Two Naked Men Jump on Tracey’s Bed, Jian Jun Xi and Yuan Cai, stated that they were “visual artists” attempting to make Tracey Emin’s work more interesting, and to bring attention to the marginalization of Asian artists in London.  In this public intervention/performance piece they also assumed public ownership of bed.  The two artists removed some of their clothes, rushed onto the bed while shouting and jumping, and proceeded to have a pillow fight.  They said the performance was designed to question the politics of art and the establishment.  “They acted as artistic space invaders, used London as exhibition space in order to call attention to the presence of Chinese artists in the UK.  They refuted the desire for authenticity and aimed to expose sensationalism of press, as well as to illustrate how spontaneous art is superior to institutionalized art of Turner Prize.  Possession of the bed shifted from feminine to masculine during performance, and opened up space to number of possibilities.  They transformed the materiality of the bed.” (Cherry/ Merck and Townsend, p. 146).   Later, the bed was roped off to discourage further uninvited interactivity, and Emin reinstalled the piece.

The globalization meaning of My Bed was exposed through its installation in Tokyo in 1998.   The bed was installed adjacent to a wooden coffin box and the installation contained a hanging noose, from which has been inferred multiple meanings including, execution, suicide, and autoeroticism.  Scuffed and worn suitcases were placed near the bed and chained together, and suggested transit, movement, and a life lived out of cases. (Cherry/ Merck and Townsend, p. 136).  Critics have suggested the suitcases reference the hotel business of Emin’s Turkish father. The hotel was a site “where public and private realms intertwined in a semi-public domain”, where Emin reportedly fielded the sexual advances of visitors and, as a young woman, and apparently spied on guests.  (Merck on Kent/ Merck and Townsend p. 119 )  Her father’s Turkish background figures in some interpretations of Emin’s work around the construct of the European Economic Community, and the negative effect the EEC has had on the lives of new immigrants in Britain. “The Immigration and Asylum Act of 1999 was based on an apocalyptic vision of waves of immigrants, and increased security.  Asylum seekers living conditions worsened.  Homelessness increased and shelter was temporary. Turkey, a predominantly Muslim state, was excluded from the EEC based on cultural incompatibility.  (Cherry, p. 151)  The irony of this judgment is considerable, since Turkey is a holiday destination for many Europeans.   The installation My Bed contains specific European cultural references, and in the context of 1997 Britain, it holds a history of othering cultural practices, the bed structure was a marker of civilized, European cultural practice.  Barthes describes the art object as containing an  aesthetic that is signified: the sign depends on knowledge that is heavily cultural.”  (Barthes/ Mirzoeff, p. 71) 

Women were an increasingly vulnerable group to sexual predation and sex tourism.”  (Cherry, p. 150)   Sex tourism is referenced explicitly through the inclusion of money in this installation of the debris aspect of the work in Tokyo.   It is also interesting that Emin decided to omit the noose and the money from the installation at the Tate.  (Cherry, p. 149)

Odorno speaks of the absolute commodity, of an object such as an art object that has no function or use value.  (Osborne/ Merck and Townsend, p. 54)  Such an art object has a higher cultural status precisely because it is useless.  Works of art are inscribed within this circuit of desire as extraordinary objects, through an economics of cultural form.   The paraphernalia of everyday objects are invested with the fading traces of everyday desire.” (Osborne on Odorno, p. 54)  Such is the case with the installation, My Bed.  The bed is an everyday, utilitarian object, as are the objects surrounding the bed.  However, the bed is taken from the private realm of the artist’s home and placed in the public institution.  Thus, its utilitarian value is transformed, and it becomes an art object, deprived of its utilitarian status, and relegated to the realm of high culture.  As a cultural commodity, the bed was purchased for the Saatchi and Saatchi art collection.   Emin and the press personalize this purchase; (Wainright, p. 209 and Cherry, p. 146) it is as if Charles Saatchi bought the bed out of  tasteful consideration, attraction and a kind of bemused, personal misanthropy towards the work of Emin who is situated as an artist of a working class background.  The purchase is thus transformed from the economics of investment into a personal purchase (It is questionable as to the personal involvement and decision-making of Charles Saatchi around the purchase, since the Saatchi collection is a large art collection that must be managed by a marketing team).  The installation of My Bed was  transformed through a commodity meaning.  From micro to macro, there are many layered readings and significance to My Bed.  As a signifier of the artist’s and the public’s desire to understand issues and meanings of gendered identity, class, mental illness, sexual constructs, and globalization, My Bed functions as a trope for a female disability and gendered aesthetic. 

Bibliography

Bhaba, Homi K.  Postmodernism/Postcolonialism.  Critical Terms for Art History. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1996 , pp. 307-322.

Davis, Whitney.  Gender.  Critical Terms for Art History.  Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 220-233.

De Certeau, Michel  The Practice of Everyday Life.  Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1988, pp.  148-176.

Felshin, Nina.  Embedded Metaphor.  Independent Curators Inc. New York. 1996 pp. 6 – 20. 

Mirzoeff, Nicholas.  The Visual Culture Reader.  Routledge, London. 1998. pp. 27-191

Ramirez-Figueroa, Juan.  Bed Tactics:  Gender, Intimate Interiors, and the Public Eye.  Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design  2003.

Pete Townsend website (petetownsend.com)

Sex Pistols website http://www.observer. co. uk

Tommy Website  http://www.iainfisher.com/russ26.html

Townsend, Chris and Merck, Mandy.  The Art of Tracey Emin.  Thames and Hudson 2002. p.  6-209.

Irene Loughlin, “An Overview of Selected Works of Performance Art at Gachet 1998-2006” Gachet Newsletter, 2006

The Performance Art Program at Gallery Gachet, Vancouver, has encompassed the production of numerous works since 1998. Early works were process-based and took place in experimental workshops and monthly hosted “open mike” events. Gallery members interested in performance art fortunately found a supportive and interested audience within the downtown eastside. There was no performance art specific audience for Gachet members, as the centre often operates peripherally to mainstream artist-run centre culture. Recognition came slowly over time, with the assistance of the Grunt Gallery, and often from sources outside of Vancouver, culminating in the inclusion of the Gachet Series Transference of Sensation in Canadian Art magazine. This series featured the work of Naufus Figueroa, Irene Loughlin (Vancouver), video works by Regina Galindo (Guatemala) and Lucia Madriz (Costa Rica), a photo installation of a performance by Guatemalan artist Jorge de Leon, First Nations’ performance artist Reona Brass (Regina), Wolframio Sinué (Ecuador), Berengere Parizeau (Montreal) and Guillermo Galindo (California).

Experimentation was an essential element of the early performance art works presented at Gachet. Performance artist Naufus Figueroa remembered, “In 1998, I hosted a poetry night at Gachet…we had fifty dollars payment for artists. I took advantage of this, as no one really came to the poetry event. I invited others to experiment, it was a sort of experimental lab, I considered calling it The Lab. It was built on the idea that you can’t learn performance, you can only learn by doing. It was like a playground, and I could perform every month, rather than once a year. I wanted to do it a lot, and I had a freedom particular to Gachet, which was supportive. I didn’t feel judged by the audience. I didn’t have the idea I would get money or acceptance from performing. I did it, people said it was interesting, so I did it more.” (Figueroa, in interview with Irene Loughlin, Feb 2006) Figueroa’s early performances included Fall of the American Hamburger, a work where the character "La Abortada" was born. According to the gallery materials, this aborted baby of Frida Kahlo "was raised in the sewers of Ohio, graduated in 1978 from Parsons and exhibited internationally. La Abortada currently lives in the Dominican Republic and works as a bathhouse chanteuse." La Abortada later reappeared in the Fluid Sexuality series to take revenge on her absent, narcissistic father in a gender inversion of the Freudian oedipal complex Sodomizing Diego Rivera.

Another early performance work that emerged from the experimental monthly series was 15 Aneras, which was billed as an interactive happening in honour of Francisco Ortiz and Naufus Figueroa's fifteen years of boredom and panic attacks in Canada. The work was a kind of debutante party in the genre of the coming of age parties held for teenage girls, from the campy vantage point of two transplanted Latino youth, who had experienced their own fifteenth birthday within the numbing boredom and anxiety of adapting to North American youth culture. Rose Blood Child, a performance with Naufus Figueroa and ten year old Emilian Clerc, was "dedicated to the renewal and hope for suffering children" and listed the performance elements as " an inconsistent record player, a series of lottery cards illuminating the dark, 12 spanish onions from a wicker basket, the child Emilian, the dyembe, the performance artist, remolacha, six mason jars, crowns of roses and the liquid of blood red beets..." Marie Baker contributed the performance "Medsin show" which examined constructs and assumptions regarding "native spirituality", and a performative dance work by Samantha Zahorchak explored ideas of frustration and limitation, as the dancer consistently met with and hit the wall of the gallery. Zahorchak also later mounted the work "The Spirit of Beauty" (1999) which she described as "a celebration of wisdom and simple pleasures."

The openness of this kind of experimental lab/event that occurred monthly at Gachet attracted a certain aspect of youth participation and involvement, and provided a context for marginal, emerging young performance artists. Other visiting, young artists to Gachet included spoken word artist Hugh Phukovsky, and hip-hop poet C.R. Avery. At a later stage, visiting performance artist Lisa Deanne Smith from Toronto commented that she had never experienced a performance art audience with such a large percentage of youth. At the time, the current Gachet director, Irwin Oostindie, was organizing Under the Volcano, a festival celebrating youth culture and activism in Vancouver. The group HIJOS (children of the disappeared/Vancouver) created performances at Gachet, including performative dance works by Paula Urrutia. Naufus Figueroa presented the work Sugar Skulls for the Disappeared at Gachet, a memorial performance that attracted an activist audience. He made sugar skulls and asked the children in the audience assist him. He distributed the sugar skull recipe amongst the audience.

Emerging from this open and experimental monthly series, came the impetus to establish the first performance art series Echoes and Labyrinths at Gachet (2000). This was the first program by Gachet that received Canada Council funding, provoking a certain kind of “legitimacy” of Gachet performance production. Previously, Gallery members had been involved in internal dialogue, and in participation in the neighbourhood regarding different issues related to “community art” (such as the Walls of Change Project facilitated by Sharon Kravitz at the Carnegie Centre) as well as other pressing issues related to mental health, addiction, etc. and the HIV epidemic in the Downtown Eastside. Some members took part in advocacy to improve health conditions, through working in a community context by participating in depression screening testing and education at the Carnegie Centre, by creating a public art project with VANDU, or in specialized “healing” workshops at Gallery Gachet that explored the role of alternative health practices (such as acupuncture) in alleviating pain. The member defined “art and healing” context of Gachet has always been an important and necessary aspect of the gallery. The context of "art and healing" may be defined through an interesting combination of practices, often spiritual in nature, that are hybrid and can be influenced by medical/psychiatric practices, alternative medicine, “outsider art” aesthetics, land art practices, deconstructions of globalization, local/global political activism, euro and eco feminism, deconstruction of racialized contexts, performance art and ritual, first nations spirituality and activism in the downtown eastside, queer culture, etc. The hybrid context of the art and healing aspect of Gachet, combined with the reality of many members lives (that includes successfully navigating stigma, marginal housing and economically low standards of living) necessitates the differentiation between art and healing in a Gachet peer-based context as opposed to the more privileged, class-based West Coast “new age” context, under which the genre "art and healing" is generally understood.

The political context and emotional subtext of the downtown eastside in the late 1990’s and the urgent socio-political situations locally and globally influenced the artists involved in the series Echoes and Labyrinths (presented in the summer of 2000). Some of the artists’ works reflected the ecological and political concerns of the time. This was evident in the work produced by Pedro Guillen Cuevas, who created the piece Vieques Plena de Bombas (Plenty of Bombs), a work about US military practice on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, which has resulted in extreme ecological damage and in high levels of cancer and other health problems for civilians. The artist embodied and then challenged the audience in his portrayal of particularly obnoxious, racialized characterizations. Later, the audience was invited to bomb the artist with water balloons, which they did with a particularly frenzied and relieved enthusiasm. When all the "bombs" had been exploded and the artist lay soaking in the fetal position, alone in the centre of the room, it became clear what we had done, and the performance quickly switched from frivolity to quiet contemplation.

Pedro Guillen Cuevas was a member of Gachet from Mexico, who lived in Vancouver between 1999 and 2003. His work was ritual based, such as in the piece, Chipototec/The Rites of Spring, which combined Aztec and contemporary Mexican imagery to celebrate the changes in the seasons. Guillen Cuevas’ practice, which was quite developed at the time, influenced my practice and perhaps that of other artists interested in performance art at the gallery. His work was confrontational around issues of race and class, and demanded a lot of the audience. The works that he created were also influenced by the performance works of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena.

During this period of the late 1990’s, Figueroa also stated that, “There was also the feeling of not wanting to speak for others, something that came out of the Lincoln Clark Heroines series controversy at the time, as well as the internal awareness of external visual representation, and the stereotypes and problems that can occur in “speaking for others”.

The desire was (and continues often to be) to talk about one’s own immediate experience and environment. Within this series, there was increased involvement and input from the art community, more than had ever previously occurred at Gachet. Performance artists Archer Pechawis and Alvin Tolentino taught performance art workshops at Gachet. Bryan Mulvihill participated in a tea celebration in Pigeon Park. Listings of the work at Gachet appeared in the book LIVE at the End of the Century, (sponsored by the Grunt Gallery), which was the first published context for the Gachet performance program.

In 2006, Naufus Figueroa curated Out of the Rain: A Youth Against Homelessness Project at Gachet. He described the experience of curating street-involved youth as an “amazing, amazing experience.” The youth worked together in workshops and their ideas were abundant and emerged from visual art, sound and poetry. In the second workshop, they came up with ideas for the actions that they would perform. The event was centred around rain, water and umbrellas. One of the youth stated “if you were homeless, once you got wet you couldn’t get dry again for days.” They ended up soaking the stage at the earth day youth celebration festival. Kaiya spun wet woolen sleeves that she had attached to her arms, Seb turned an umbrella filled with water upside down, Erin projected a video clip of flares that she activated one night in the area outside of the performance space, Matt combined movement and a soundscape of a fight that he had audio taped in the alley, and trans performer Sven Black smeared mud over his embodiment of Lucy Fur. Zola and Diane Jacobs, members at Gallery Gachet, provided a video backdrop of the landscape of the downtown eastside as a subtext for the work, as well as the performance video of Diane Jacobs, where she had attempted to crawl under a dumpster in the alley behind the gallery. In later works at the Gallery, Francisco performed biting into his skin as his landed immigrant papers were projected over his body. Erin filled a piñata with debris she picked up in the downtown eastside. We wore party hats and whistles. The celebratory feeling of the event plummeted heavily when the garbage fell out of the piñata. Matt created a work about generosity. He pushed a shopping cart in the gallery, recalling when he first arrived in Vancouver, a homeless man gave him new shoes from his shopping cart. He passed around oranges that he had found in the dumpster to the audience and recited a short monologue that he had created.

Recently visiting the gallery’s performance art events in 2006, I was struck by the cabaret quality of the work Full Moon performance mounted by Zola, Diane Jacobs and Sven Black. The work emerged in relation to Diane's previous "poor bashing performance". In this performance, Diane had created stages of experimentation, using mud as the performative material. She first experimented with connecting with the material on a private personal level in her garden. Two years prior to the event in 2006, she asked gallery members to work with her on a poor bashing booth. The booth had a carnivalesque aspect, and she positioned herself inside the booth while members threw mud at her. Out of necessity, gallery members became the perpetrators and found the role interesting and uncomfortable, apologizing to Diane after the event, even though she had solicited their participation in the action. She wanted to explore ideas around the visibility of being poor and the public spectacle of humiliation surrounding poverty. She was also interested in the idea of the audience as cultural observer, watching the event with passivity, as is the case with many events that unfold in the downtown eastside. Diane was also curious about how she would react to the physicality of the event and to the video documentation.

After the mud slinging, she decided to move into the alley space behind the gallery, pushing the public performance boundaries further. At this point, she experimented with crawling under the dumpster, which was too low to the ground for her body to fit under. The action became an exercise in futility, as well as a compelling image of frustration. (This clip was later shown in the Youth Against Homelessness performance). In the performance of 2006, the poor bashing became public and took place in the open gallery space. Diane wore a blindfold as a method of removing herself from the immediacy of the environment of public humiliation. The blindfold disallowed her body a kind of prepatory kinesthetic awareness, as she could not predict the moment in which the mud would impact her body.

Zola and Sven Black/Lucy Fur stood beside Diane on each side of the mud-slinging pit. Zola was dressed to represent Gaia. Sven Black's body was painted black and he wore a huge purple wig and horns. Sven Black/Lucy Fur embodied gender dualism in him/herself, and together, Sven Black/Lucy Fur and Zola represented the duality of humanity. They called an end to the mud slinging, and led a procession outside into the alley where they washed the mud off of Diane with water. Diane saw this performance as containing three distinct stages, the abusive stage, the transition stage, and the external healing stage in the alley. Bathing under the full moon, Zola sang a song about freedom, and recited a poem about Beauty being beaten down and rising up again, as Sven Black enacted the night. The performance had an allegorical aspect, which investigated the nature of performance as a transformative act. The performance and the process of its creation spilled out into the gallery space, both literally and metaphorically, before and after the event. Diane stated that the act of poor bashing references violence against women, “which brings up stuff, so that people came to the gallery and put writing on the wall”. She also felt that Gachet was a safe place for experimentation, in that she felt that “if the performance fell apart it would have been okay.” The audience was very supportive of the piece, and participated in the chanting and processional aspect.

Zola’s contribution to the piece came out of past experience supporting drag performance. Zola spoke of the performance’s multiple archetypes that were embodied by each individual involved, and the importance of the qualities in these archetypes to rejoin with humanity as a metaphor for a kind of spiritual and ecological healing process. The work exposed the discomfort of this process, which was embodied in Diane’s physical endurance and resistance within the performance to the bashing sequence, as well as her ultimate ability to wash herself of the experience with the assistance of the others.

The performance left an imprint on the physical and emotive space of the gallery prior to and after the event. Writing on the gallery walls was moving, such as the following piece of text, which was written on the wall in tiny letters at eye level in pencil.

“The only accommodations I could afford was a small room in an SRO. I got a small, mean, bare little room on the top floor facing the alley. It was right over an open, over flowing dumpster in June, so with my window open the room was perfumed with odor la garbage. I came home at night under a heavy cloud of depression. I shouldered past the drug dealers, climbed the narrow stairs lit with one naked lightbulb. The manager was drunk and entertaining his posse of resident friends. They saw me and tried to get me to join them, but I said no, being the only female in the hotel, I didn't think that would be a good idea. When I opened the door to my room, it shocked me, how bare, stark and cold it was. I thought this is the most depressing room - the perfect place for a suicide. I sat and cried - I want to die, if this is how I have to live, I can't do it anymore, I 'm a fucking loser, waste of skin, ugly, useless, stupid bitch die…”

This text was later followed by the experience of a bright light in the hallway and a soothing voice bringing the woman to sleep. Even within such difficult circumstances, narratives such as these often suggest a future possibility.

Immediately following the emotional quality of this exhibition and performance, Gachet featured a performance/exhibition by Claudia Bernal, an artist visiting from Montreal. Bernal placed pots on the ground of the gallery in a spiral moving outwards into the space. Each pot contained the name of a woman who had been murdered in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. She placed tortillas over the pots as she worked on the performance/installation. A large audience gathered in the gallery. A back projection hanging from a clothesline features the gaze of a woman’s eye, and the sky of the city, and the gathering place of the public square in Ciudad Juarez. The installation remained for one month and was part of a neighbourhood program of events that included memorial events and celebrations of International Women’s’ Day.

The performance work at Gachet was, and continues to be, a truly experimental, collaborative program that is process-based and functions beyond traditional frameworks of the  interdisciplinary. Using a supportive, peer based mode of production, the artists have crossed the boundaries of performance art as it relates to alternative and medical practices, and have addressed the tropes of healing and activism in which they are often submerged. The work is ground-breaking in that the ideology surrounding art and healing is often troubled by class-based and able-bodied disagreement as to the “legitimacy” of such work in an art context. In challenging and defining for themselves the connections between art production and “healing”, the artists have created newly hybrid forms of performativity.

The able-bodied assertion that “art isn’t therapy” brings with it a whole unsettling set of questions as to the purpose, function and legitimacy of art practice in marginal and disability communities, where it may contain a self-defined and identified “therapeutic” aspect. Here I mean to emphasize that disability art practice is not to be dismissed as contrary to mainstream contemporary art practice. How outsider is outsider art, really, when the aesthetic is reappropriated and found in the work of more market savvy, opportunistic, able-bodied artists? It is therefore, important to note that disability art practice is also necessarily a part of, and in important dialogue to, contemporary art practice both in Vancouver and globally, and should be engaged with as such. Perhaps at a future moment, contemporary discourse will navigate this uneasy relationship between able-bodied assumption and disability perspective in a less compromised manner than that of the art market, which has been both positioned as “infiltrated by” and “appropriative of” the outsider art aesthetic. In the specific case of performance art, the performance artists at Gachet have borrowed from, and have continued a contemporary dialogue with, the long-standing traditions of performance art in Vancouver. These traditions include cabaret, gender and trans politics, drag, ritual, racialized politics, remembering the dead, camp, humour, and social, ecological, feminist and political activism. The artists have adapted these performative traditions to suit their own purposes and modes of production. The Gachet program extends the necessary function of providing an experimental space and a supportive audience to the development of the work of (often) young and emerging performance artists, allowing for new developments and hybrid forms to occur within the medium.

Formal choices made during the performance actions assumed a kind of automatism attributable to the exhaustion that pushed Figueroa beyond pre-contemplated devices. The state of exhaustion was used as a material towards the enactment of altered realities undefined by dominant signs and symbols. The meditative and spiritual processes of "working with the dead"⁽²⁾ through ritual is defined in the Western aesthetic as a "shamanic" state; however, the shamanic act also carries a particular referentiality of exoticism imbued with colonialism and racism. Figueroa works through compromised referents of ritual in relation to his practice as a Latin American artist, arriving at a place of visual tension where "everything is an exercise to get to the place to forget."⁽³⁾. In this work, he was willing to work through the pain and vulnerability of embodied clich�s, which were broken down by the expanse of time and by physical exhaustion. His desire was to arrive at a new corporeal/aesthetic meaning that reached beyond the internalized and compromised realm of colonial influence.

100 hours of sleepless actions by Naufus Figueroa (numbered 1 to 21)

1. bandaging

He laid branches on the ground in descending order.

The configuration resembled the assemblage of tools for an operation or excavation.

A kettle boiled – the hot water was mixed with beet juice.

Using powdered milk that acted as glue when it dried, he soaked the linen.

Later, torn linen strips were used to bandage the skeleton of a tree.

The skeletal tree embodied the physical presence of the family tree. The tree was whitened through the application of the linen.

2. scrubbing

Figueroa washed his chest with a scrub brush dipped in the boiling water. His skin reddened, the artist later described this act as attending to the site of trauma, which he experienced in his chest at that moment.

3. pooling

Particular attention was paid to wrapping linen around the severed end of the tree, which resembled a bloody stump after beet juice was applied to it repeatedly. Viewers were invited to dab the tree with beet juice as if tending to wounds. The beet juice dripped and pooled beneath the tree from where it hung. The bandaged stump of the tree reached the ground.

I remembered that Figueroa had spoken to me of the childhood memory of viewing Vancouver Photoconceptualist Rodney Graham's work Oak Tree–Red Bluff at the Vancouver Art Gallery. At that time, he was nine or ten years old and had lived in Canada for two years. Graham’s work made an impression, which stayed with him over the years. Regarding this tree inversion image, Rodney Graham has stated, "You don't have to delve very deeply into modern physics to realise that the scientific view holds that the world is really not as it appears. Before the brain rights it, the eye sees a tree upside down in the same way it appears on the glass back of the large format field camera I use. I chose the tree as an emblematic image because it is often used in diagrams in popular scientific books and because it was used in Saussure's book on linguistics to show the arbitrary relation between the so-called signifier and the signified." ⁽¹⁷⁾ [italics added]

Figueroa's inversion of the tree during the daytime seems to speak of the earthly plane, where man is capable of enacting both generosity and brutality. Feminist scholar Farida Shaheed has stated that, "A century ago, civilian deaths and displacements were a by-product of war, today they seem to be the object of war...[:] In World War I, 14% of the deaths were civilians, today it is estimated that over 90% are civilians, the majority being women and children. In terms of displacement, some 80% of refugees are women and children."⁽¹⁸⁾ Regarding the incident of male witnessing of events that largely affect women and children, Figueroa stated, "the emphasis has been to talk about the veteran, the guerilla — the official voice of war. Women and children are considered unconscious, hysterical — child memory is seen as half fantasy, half reality and an unreliable form of witnessing. The adult male voice is the authority. Patriarchal supposition is such that male veterans are assumed to have control over their trauma, and therefore can more accurately talk about and represent the experiences of war."⁽¹⁹⁾

6. fetal position/corpse

At first, the tree was on the ground, lying sideways, a position that Figueroa's own body would assume at several points during the performance.

Figueroa counters dominant interpretations of war by incorporating childhood materials and references within his work. In one example, he adopts a fetal/corpse position relative to an abject aesthetic. This strategy has also been used by Figueroa's contemporary, Regina Galindo in the work No perdemos nada con nacer (We don't lose anything by being born), Galindo lay naked inside a clear plastic garbage bag, a corpse-like figure amongst the garbage of the Guatemala city dump. Galindo is a young artist now positioned in the post-war context of Guatemala, "a period characterized by the aesthetic of forgetting ... [and simultaneously] that of anguish, and inquisition."⁽²⁰⁾

A related past performance White Intravenous, by Figueroa, was presented at the Church of Pointless Hysteria, an artist-run space in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. This area is often cited in the media as Canada’s "poorest neighbourhood". Figueroa used garbage, medical, and natural materials such as plastic, surgical tape, flour, and intravenous bags filled with milk. The audience was provided with a glossary describing his reference to the materials. Syringes with pink blood denoted an aspect of North American youth culture, described as a ‘synthetic happiness generation.’ Surgical tape wound around the waist referenced an imagined medical technique of "keeping oneself together". Plastic signified remnants of objects found in the downtown eastside – wrappers, McDonald’s straws, etc., and body bags for anonymous immigrant deaths. Plastic as littered throughout the Third World made reference to disposable countries, overlaid in economies of plastic created through the exportation of cheaply made toys, trinkets and household items sold "cost-effectively" within the North American market. ⁽²¹⁾

7. the second day,
cocooned then birthing

He urinated into a bowl of powdered milk. He made a cocoon for himself out of linen and rocked, comforting, close to the tree. He washed his clothes and dried them, later he said that they stank of milk. With his upper body shrouded by the linen, he supported his torso in a backwards bend, rocking back and forth on his heels.

"The mestizo child knows that the father exists by the nature of his/her own skin colour, yet the father is a silent symbol or icon of colonial influence. The transference of whiteness in this familial colonial landscape has seen paternal duty to its completion, substituting the normal paternal functions of direct presence and care with racial whitening – a political project of colonialism."⁽²⁴⁾ The detached white father may send a milk allowance monthly, the milk in the performance rots over time, and formal considerations become psychic and spiritual in nature, creating tensions that compress time/space continuums. "A sense of shame pervades the performance and is connected to the conditions surrounding the mestizo child."⁽²⁵⁾

The absolute stillness of Figueroa’s body in the drinking action reminded me of the painting Sierra Madre (Mother Mountain) by Jose Silva Nogales, a political prisoner in Mexico and a relative of Naufus’ friends in Vancouver. The painting depicts a completely still, balaclava-clad guerilla fading into the foliage of the jungle behind him.

Embodied performative acts where Figueroa assumed the position of the tortured subject suggest a relationship to a kind of intimate violence, one of the most effective psychological tools used against political prisoners. Intermittent kindnesses amongst violent acts, such as the provision of food by the torturer, and the use of domestic props [such as milk with its maternal association] disorient the victim."⁽²⁷⁾. Surrender is said to involve the stage of "draining oneself of emotion and resistance as a means of survival"⁽²⁸⁾. The sleep deprivation that Figueroa undertakes is itself also used as an instrument of torture, and oppositionally, as a means of shamanic transcendence.

10. drinking

Leaving his arms in his sleeves, he folded the t-shirt into his mouth, and later ripped out a hole for the mouth while sitting motionless, barely breathing or moving.

Reaching down, he picked up a glass of milk and placed it in the ripped cotton mouth-hole. He drank the milk by holding the cup in his mouth, tilting his head backwards until it was emptied. He then dropped the cup between his legs where it clattered to the ground. The milk dripped off his lips, belly and groin, as if he were urinating milk. In the background, the tree continued to drip beet juice.

The balaclava/t-shirt became soaked and grey around the mouth opening.

At this point we have reached a half way mark for the performance. In my experience of "endurance witnessing" analysis and experience became blurred, and the artist also reported having gradually lost a sense of internal critique regarding his actions as a result of the exhaustion element of the performance. I am marking this moment in the performance as a viewer by lessening my analysis in this text, and by switching the columns of analysis and description, which I hope will also echo the inversion context that was important to the performance. The image becomes tantamount, as Figueroa approached his intent of making visual language particular, "populating it with his own intention, appropriating the word and adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention."⁽²⁹⁾

11. stuffing

Later that evening, viewers were asked to stuff the branches of the weed trees under the torso and sleeves of his shirt. It was Canada Day, and firecrackers erupted. A car alarm went off at dusk. After being stuffed with many branches, he walked backwards in time with the car alarm, down the concrete ramp, past the open garage door and into the street. The walk continued backwards; he did not look over his shoulder. It stopped when he reached the wall of the warehouse across the street. The car alarm also stopped. It was windy by the wall where he stood — the grass and trees nearby were swaying in the wind. After standing quietly, he started to loosely jump on the spot to a timed count, with his head tilted slightly down. All the weed tree branches eventually fell out of his clothing as he jumped. Reaching behind his head, he pulled the last branch over his head in a sweeping motion, releasing it from the back of his sweater.

The action spoke to me of visual art training and its influence within the performance art tradition, as when an artist first takes drawing classes and is instructed to "feel the sensitivity of the line." I saw associations to the techniques of 1970s conceptual land art in reference to this action, and in particular the work of Richard Long, who conducted extended, performative walks in nature, leaving the mark of his trail upon the natural landscape.

13. Hacking/burning

Outside the studio, Istvan Kantor helped Figueroa create a circle of bricks in order to safely light a fire. Earlier, Figueroa had hacked at the tree with an axe, gradually breaking it into pieces. The fire burned momentarily, but eventually members of the local fire department arrived and told them to extinguish it. The firemen seemed to be aware that the fire was for a performance art event. Prematurely extinguishing the fire was unexpected — the wood was not burned to ashes as intended. Figueroa was left with pieces of wood and ash, as when a body is cremated and pieces of bone remain amongst the ashes.

14. scraping

He scraped the charcoal off the remaining charred branches into a bowl with a pocketknife. The wood was black underneath, and charcoal eventually covered his hands and the inside of his legs. He would come back to this action and continue it several times throughout the day until the wood was fully scraped. The larger pieces of charcoal were ground between two bricks to create a fine, powdered material.

15. biting/chomping

A beet was peeled into the shape of a heart. Winding white thread around the top notch of the heart, he proceeded to hang the carved heart from a long piece of thread hanging from the ceiling of the studio, until it dangled about a foot and a half from the floor. Lying on the ground, he positioned his head underneath it. Using a slow internal rhythm, he lifted his head to meet the level of the beet. He bit at a part of the beet with his mouth each time that he raised his head.

Eventually, beet juice resembling blood began to slowly drip out of the side of his mouth. The beet heart spun around in between bites, but generally did not shift from its dangling position. Figueroa continued this action until the beet was fully consumed, leaving some fibrous material hanging from the end of the string. A portion of the string that had come into contact with his mouth had been dyed red.

16. comparing

He imagined the charred branches to be similar to the bones in his legs. Lying on the ground, he placed similarly sized sticks on his thighs and shins. The scraped sticks were remarkably comparable to bone, and seemed to even have assumed the round hollow indentation marking where the femur inserts into the hip. This action described the connection between the family tree branches and the skeletal structure of the artist.

The carved beet heart created associations to el corazon sangrante (the bleeding heart), a hybrid symbol crossing a spectrum of influences (Catholic, Mayan and Spanish). I was reminded of the milagros of Antigua, small wax sculptures of body parts on red strings sold to the public by local healers. To initiate healing in a particular area of the body, one could choose to buy a corresponding carved wax milagro, place it at the tomb of St. Pedro of Betancourt, and pray for their problems to be solved within that particular body part.

Figueroa stated: "I associate the beets with the small organs or hearts of children. As children in Guatemala, the fear of being kidnapped was constantly present in our lives. It was said that when they abducted you, they would open you up and steal your organs and leave your empty carapace on the street. I heard from other children that your organs would then be sold to Americans and Europeans. These fears, as much as they seemed like urban legends, had very real manifestations in our lives. Two of my childhood neighbourhood friends went missing - later there was evidence that they had been present in an abandoned illegal orphanage."⁽³⁰⁾

17. wrapping

He folded Kraft paper into pieces resembling an envelope and placed a piece of wood inside each package. Using black magic marker, he wrote the names of absent white fathers on the outside of the packages. Figueroa used forms of their names that were endearing, such as "Tate", the affectionate form of addressing a grandfather or older man. The packages were tied up with white thread and then distributed amongst the audience.

18. grinding/sweeping/ breathing/chewing

He dragged a broom over a pile of fine charcoal shavings. He swept the shavings into a line and then spread the shavings from this thick line into the shape of a rectangle. Repetitively, he dabbed the broom from side to side, trying to create a bed of finely powdered charcoals as the ground for the next action. He sifted dried milk between his hands and eventually created a pile of white powdery material within the upper edge of the black charcoal bed. He sat down at the bottom edge of the rectangle with his legs outspread and marked charcoal on his thighs with his hands. After sitting still for a while, hands at his side, he lay down on his back, and lowered his underwear. Rolling over, he shifted to his belly, and lay in the charcoal bed with his forehead against the pile of white powdered milk. Figueroa later noted that the action seemed to just emerge from the act of breathing. He noticed that the white powder shifted slightly with his breath and revealed the concrete floor. By lifting his head, and breathing through his nose, he observed that he could clear away a spot on the floor. His breathing assumed a deeply rhythmic element as he continued to turn his head from side to side, his breath clearing away more and more of the white powder. As the artist inevitably inhaled the fine charcoal and milk powder substances, the materials slightly mixed together, compromising the "aesthetic purity" of black and white. His breathe also assumed a deeply hoarse quality, lending an asthmatic, repetitive resonance to the action. Having accomplished a circular "breathing space" on the floor, his breath eventually slowed until it stopped. Lifting himself up onto his hands and knees, he started to ingest the remaining charcoal. He chewed handfuls of at a time, which seemed to induce a sense of panic, anxiety and nausea in the viewers, and a viewer was compelled to leave the viewing area. Figueroa also conveyed an impression of strength and endurance in the completion of this action.

This action had to do with a kind of genealogical exorcism. Figueroa cites the influence of Chilean artist Alejandro Jodorowsky. He created what came to be known as "happenings" in Paris. (The term "happening" was created by the later Fluxus movement.) Jodorowsky was interested in non-repeatable events and used smoke, fruit, gelatin, and living animals as materials in his happenings. He created the performative theories of "psychomagic" and "living poetry" which combined performative and ritualistic actions. Jodorowsky hosted an evening in Paris where visitors were encouraged to visit him and discuss their problems. In order to cure his guests of their discomfort, Jodorowsky would prescribe a performative action for them to complete. Jodorowsky also believed in returning to the family tree to heal traumatic wounds. He called the theory of this discomfort and the desire to re-establish contact with the internal mystery of the individual as "efimeros panicos". He attempted to treat and evoke "efimeros panicos" in his guests through the prescribed performative actions. Jodorowsky’s theories have not been translated to English, and are not presently accessible to English speakers. However, he has greatly influenced the development of performance art in Latin America.

20. Peeling

Gathering up a pile of beets into his t-shirt, he also moved a remaining pile of milk powder towards a mound of charcoal by pushing the material with his feet. He peeled the beets individually with a knife while continuously holding this pile of beets in the bottom of his t-shirt. The visual image resembled a kind of side satchel of small, bulbous organs. As he peeled the beets, he tucked the carvings down the neck of his t-shirt, and they accumulated to form the shape of a distended or pregnant belly beneath his t-shirt. His t-shirt became stained with various shades of grey and red, resulting from the mixing of remnant charcoal and beet juice. The bloating, and swelling of his exhausted body seemed to relate to earlier references of war and torture. He started swaying slightly while standing in this upright position, and at one point he almost fell backwards, which frightened several viewers. It seemed as if he might not have control of falling asleep while standing. Holding all the peels of the beets in his belly under his t-shirt, he used electrical tape to secure all of the materials within this simulated pregnant belly. Figueroa reached down for a bottle of water and held the water in his mouth while simultaneously tilting back his head. The water dribbled down the side of his mouth and dripped onto his t-shirt. With his arms at his side, he repeated this carefully timed action, while releasing the water slowly from his mouth. Over time, the water started to dye his neckline red, and as the milk powder, beet peels, and water further combined, milk dripped from the underside of his makeshift swollen belly. When he had finished the water, he released the electrical tape from the bottom of his t-shirt, and the beets fell out onto the floor at his feet.

Figueroa uses abject methods of smearing and ingestion as another means by which to arrive at a place beyond the fixity of meaning inherent in the act of forgetting in a post-war, post- colonial context.

The concluding sequence of Figueroa’s performance featured the act of expulsion. Kristeva explains the staining, ingestion and expulsion of the familial (colonial) construct, as enacted through the body: "Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The same of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them ... nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. 'I' want none of that element, sign of their desire; 'I' do not want to listen, 'I' do not assimilate it, 'I' expel it." ⁽³¹⁾

Kristeva further positioned the abject in the context of forgetting the presence of refuse, and of the corpse "... it shows me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live... There I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. (The abject) disturbs identity, system and order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite."⁽³²⁾ Figueroa’s performance The Sun is Crooked in the Sky; My Father Is Thrown Over My Shoulders is an investigation of reclaiming the other half of the image and the word, and reconstructing a visual language of representation that is previously situated half elsewhere, "at the borderline between oneself and the other." ⁽³³⁾

References

(1) Gates, Henry Louis Jr. "Writing 'Race' and the Difference it Makes" in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 51.

(2) Figueroa, Naufus. Interview by Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, February 2006.

(3) Figueroa, Naufus. Interview by Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, February 2006.

(4) Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. (NY: Continuum <1944> 1987).

(5) Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and The Sociological Imagination. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). pp. 19-20.

(6) Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and The Sociological Imagination. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). p. 64.

(7) Seekins, Sandra. "Prosthesis as Souvenirs of War: Otto Dix’s Representations of Veterans in Weimar Germany". Department of History of Art, University of Michigan. Delivered at the conference "Souvenir" Ann Arbor, October 1998. [See: http://www.umich.edu/~tapassoc/souvenir.htm]

(8) Ibid.

(9) Ibid.

(10) Ibid.

(11) Tisdall, Caroline. "Joseph Beuys: Bits and Pieces". Tate Modern Talk. The Social Sculpture Research Unit. [See: http://owww.brookes.ac.uk/schools/apm/social_sculpture/tisdall/TateModernLecture.htm]

(12) Mujica-Olea, Alejandro Rual. Co-op radio interview on El Mundo de la Poesia with Naufus Figueroa. Vancouver, 2002.

(13) Figueroa, Byron. In conversation with Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, November 29, 2003.

(14) Sosa, John R. The Maya Sky, the Maya World: a symbolic analysis of Maya cosmology. (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1985). v. 498.

(15) Figueroa, Naufus. In conversation with Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, February 2006.

(16) Figueroa, Byron. In conversation with Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, November 29, 2003.

(17) Graham, Rodney "Interview with the artist" by Anthony Spira, curator, Whitechapel Art

(18) Shaheed, Farida. "Militarization and Global Conflict" from the plenary session Women Challenging the New Political and Military Order. (Association for Women’s Rights in Development, 2002). [See: http://www.awid.org/forum2002/plenaries/day2farida.html]

(19) Figueroa, Naufús. In conversation with Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, February 2006.

(20) Toledo, Aida. "Poetry, Body and Performance as True Aesthetic Emergencies in Today’s Guatemala" in Temas Centrales. Ed. Cuauhtemoc Medina. (San Jose: Teoretica Galleria, 2002). p. 358.

(21) Loughlin, Irene and Figueroa, Naufus. "Glossary of Terms" from the performance White Intravenous at the Church of Pointless Hysteria. Vancouver, 2002.

(22) Cazali, Rosina. "Octubreazul to the point of Madness: Emerging Art in the postwar Period in Guatemala". Art Nexus No. 43 March 2002.

(23) Interview with Naufus Figueroa by Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, February 2006.

(24) Ibid.

(25) Ibid.

(26) https://www.peacecoffee.com/pcfg/0402/

(27) Copelon, Rhonda. "Intimate Terror: Understanding Domestic Violence as Torture" in Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives. Ed. Rebecca Cook, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). p. 138.

(28) Ibid.

(29) Gates, Henry Louis Jr. "Writing 'Race' and the Difference it Makes" in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 44.

(30) Figueroa, Naufus. Interview by Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, February 2006.

(31) Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (NY: Columbia University Press, 1982) [See: http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/krist.htm]

(32) Ibid.

(33) Gates, Henry Louis Jr. "Writing 'Race' and the Difference it Makes" in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 44.

6

Irene Loughlin, “The Oath of the Horatii, The Death of Marat, and The Intervention of the Sabine Women as Markers of The Interplay of Private and Public Realms and as Definitive in the Emergent Ideology of Post-Revolutionary France.” Simon Fraser University

The Paintings Oath of The Horatii and The Intervention of the Sabine Women by Jacques Louis David outline two distinct periods in the continuum of the changing social order of eighteenth century France.  The painting, Oath of the Horatii marks the beginning of an evolutionary political process brought about by the French Revolution and the violent destruction of the monarchical/aristocratic system.  David’s painting, The Death of Marat, created during the height of revolutionary violence, acts as a historical bridge between the call for revolution and the plea for resolution, and functions as the pivotal moment in the “political castration” of the female subject.  The painting, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, calls for the end of violence and a reconstruction of a new political order in France, and provides a redefined feminine role for women.  The essence of the ‘body politic’ of collective decision-making and the politics of individual and gendered identity are at work in these paintings.  The interplay of the public and private realms plays an important role in the emergent ideologies of a liberated France. 

As the first painting of this constructed triple loci of historical meaning, The Oath of the Horatii acts as a marker of emergent ideas of individuality and as a reflection of the body politic.  The manner in which David challenged the power structure of the aristocratic patronage system and the academy reinforced his own notions of individual accomplishment and ambition.  In reference to the painting, David stated, “I stopped making the painting for the king and made one for myself.” (Dawkins, Lecture FPA 313)   He asserted artistic ownership of his work by delaying its intended arrival and creating it at a size larger than that at which it had been commissioned. (Dawkins, Lecture FPA 313)  In this way, David echoed the emerging ideologies of enlightenment thinkers such as    Kant, who praised the benefits of open questioning. (Dawkins, Lecture FPA 313)  David’s assertion of the legitimacy of his own private desire within the public realm of the patronage system was symptomatic of a larger reclaiming of the rights of the individual within an oppressive economic and political system.

The narrative surrounding the  Oath of the Horatii created a tableau of commitment and a foreshadowing of a call for the defense of contemporary ideals.  The three warriors raise their swords in an oath to protect their property from the three corresponding brothers of the Curiatti of the neighbouring city of Alba.  The two families were also related by marriage, and when one of the sisters grieved the death of her betrothed, her own brother killed her in a patriotic rage.  (Dawkins, Lecture FPA 313)  Her father defended his son’s actions before the assembled people of Rome and won his exoneration.  (Crow, p. 211)  In this complicated narrative, the private realms of familial oath taking and revenge, as well as the public realms of property defense and exoneration are inextricably entwined. 

As a precursor to the French Revolution and the indoctrination of the good citizen in the private and public realms, the imagery found in the Oath of Horatii includes the modeling of fraternal pledge-taking in the defense of shared convictions and personal and public property.  The sensibilite of women (Dawkins, Lecture FPA 313) is evoked in the painting, and is perhaps seen to be a threat to the future of individual and collective positioning in a new body politic.  Through formal methods, and as asserted by Rousseau, the eighteenth century understanding of women as inherently sensitive and impressionable also allowed them the gift of touching and evoking the passions of others.”  (Desan, p 17)  This ability is embodied in the Horatii's sister, who enraged her brother with her private display of grief, thus provoking him to murder her in the name of patriotism.  The painting may act as a metaphorical warning to women of their particular place in the body politic, and how they must temper the private and emotive within the realm of public and political loyalty.

The lack of a common, unproblematic language of personal emotion, personal identity and the body in a time of profound change is found not only in the narrative of the Oath of the Horatii, but also in its compositional construction.  “The positions and gestures of male and female figures take on a far more abstracted angularity.  David makes a gesture towards tradition only in the frozen statuesque quality of the unconscious, devalued female groupings.” (Crow. P 232) These metaphors won critical favour with those who recognized the emerging semiotic language of the painting (Crow p. 220) and how it might be used to further enlightenment ideas of equality and virtue for men, and also exposed the problematic relation of the new semiotics to women. 

For more conservative critics, their particular response to the Oath of the Horatii  was one of disturbance.   There was an awareness that “ David had made an unholy alliance with a public whose desires and interests were not their own.” (Crow p 220)  “David communicated a willful rejection of compositional complexity and difficulty as values in themselves.  There is no interaction between the figurative groups and their assigned genders. The three arches, like great parentheses, mark and separate the figure from one another according to which of the three distinct roles they play in the drama.”  (Crow, p. 237) Aristocratic supporters were unversed in the newly emerging visual langue of enlightenment thinking, and were as yet unable to put a finger on their discomfort.  They were unable to recognize the premeditated awkwardness of the painted imagery, (Crow, p. 226)  and the painter’s insistence on this deliberate awkwardness as a signifier of the emerging enlightenment ideals regarding “truthful” representation. “They did not understand that theatrical expressions and gestures traditionally used by the history painter to convey narrative now appeared not  as a means, but as an obstacle to dramatic truth (Crow, p. 218)

Personal responses to the painting (The Oath of the Horatii) were coded along political lines.” (Crow 220)  To this end the Horatii accomplished a theoretical division of the salon audience, between those who understood the special significance of its language and those who do not. (Crow, p 227)  In 1781, Carmontelle stated that it was the task of the painter to see through the dissembling guises of endemic social corruption and the hideous effects on the human body wrought by economic inequality.  The ideal artist would thus produce an implicit critique of a society in which true nobility and grace could exist only in imaginary form.  (Crow, p 220). A subculture of opposition was developing within the greater public, and particularly amongst the third estate, which had been conditioned by the propaganda of the parliaments.  (Crow, p. 220)  David used this visual recognition of metaphor to his own end, to see in the history of early Rome metaphors for contemporary political conflicts.  (Crow, p 228)

The public realm continued to consume the personal loci of the body in a search to redefine itself.  During the French Revolution, David’s painting, “The Death of Marat” turned the ultimate signifier of private experience, the site of an individual’s death, (heightened by the privatized site in which Marat’s death took place), into a political signifier of great importance for the collective consciousness of revolutionary France. 

The transgressive act of the female revolutionary was present in the narrative surrounding the painting.  Charlotte Corday murdered the leader of the “sans culottes” (poor and working class revolutionaries) in a plan to end the increasing violence of the French Revolution. (Dawkins, Lecture FPA 313)   Corday imagined the impact of the murder to be quite different than the result. “The event as she imagined it was to be public, it was to be exemplary, it was to result in her death on the spot and it was to bring an end to revolutionary violence.” (Roberts, p 389)  In the end, her imagined martyrdom was actually inverted and placed on Marat in David’s painting.

Indeed, David constructed it as such. “The blood was not only on the blade of the knife but the handle as well, as if to drive home the point that Corday, the assassin, had blood on her hands, the blood of a martyr… She encountered the suffering Marat in his bath, it was there that she murdered him, and the deed provoked further violence.”  (Roberts, p. 389) The heretical nature of this independent political act was demonized on the basis of gender and class. Although she was not of a lower class, it seems that the disturbing actions of Corday characterized the “extreme” actions of poor women who lead riots in Paris over the price of bread, which was the most important staple in lower class diets. (Censar, p. 78) The actual violence of the revolution, which Corday sought to end, and which was largely perpetuated by men, was displaced on the female gender.

It is significant that David highlights this gendered relation between Marat and Corday at the moment of his death through the letter held in his hand and smeared by Marat’s own blood.  The contents of the letter were a direct plea for charity from Corday to Marat and depict him as a generous “friend of the people”. (Dawkins, FPA 313 Lecture)  Marat’s individual act of generosity towards this woman and his subsequent murder is seen to be the ultimate transgression of female sensibilite, and a tragic oversight of Marat’s kindness.  (David and public p 290)   In a larger framework, his oversight could be seen as a fatal misjudgment in his involvement of women in the public realm.   Perhaps the painting furthered questioning around the legitimate presence of women in politics, which had previously been supported by Jacobin clubs for women.  (Desean, p. 19 )

Charlotte Corday had lived in a world of heroic idealism.    “In Sparta and Athens there were many courageous women, she wrote before going to Paris on July 11 to kill Marat on the floor of the convention’.  (Roberts, p 289)  This quotation is interesting in itself,  in that it refers to the historically constructed and didactic metaphors contained in history painting, as well as her identification with the trope of the assertively politicized female Amazonian body.  When David arrives at the historical moment of creation of The Intervention of the Sabine Women, the female body has been evolved into a “politically castrated” presence. (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 414)

David sought complicity in a metaphoric castration of the female     through the use of the painting The Death of Marat,  which acted as symbol of collective consciousness.  The painting mined an already embedded and culturally understood iconography of Christian symbolism.  (Sava, FPA 168 Lecture)  “Marat’s pose, the instruments of violence, the inscriptions, the plain wood of the upright box, the insistently perpendicular compositional order, all conjure up Christ’s sacrifice without leaving the factual realm of secular history.”  (FPA 168 CC p. 31)  He orchestrated the painting’s unveiling at the end of a long funeral procession for the Parisian public, organized with the active participation of Jacobin Women’s Clubs. (Desan, p. 17)   The Death of Marat is  divided compositionally between  “a lower zone full of incident and an upper zone of shadowy, meditative stillness.”  David meant for the image “to console its viewer far more than incite them to rage for vengeance.” (FPA 168 CC p. 31) Perhaps the painting served as a replacement for religious iconography in that it was a precursor to the new spiritualism of festival culture that acted to create “spiritual collectivity” amongst the French people.  This non-secular and politically and collectively pre-identified spiritual practice served to undermine the bias and corruption of Christianity, and was defined under the newly emerging social order of France.

No one seemed clear about what post-revolutionary methods of social and economic organization would actually look like as a newly emergent ideology.  However, David, as a member of the newly formed Directory, recognized that some order must be set in place in wake of The Terror, the anarchy of guillotine practice and the destruction of public property.  (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 398)  David became part of the newly emergent class (the new bourgeoisie) a vaguely defined group of some privilege, uncertain about their identity and future, who wished to distance themselves  from any identification with the past aristocracy, as well as the resultant reign of terror and anarchy. (Lajer-Burcharth p. 407) They sought new representations of what it meant to be an “I”, an individual in the public realm of emergent political ideology based on collectivity.  David found the “I” of his right to agency within the autonomy of the work practices and exhibition practices.  In practicing autonomy, he set about arranging for the public display of his new work.  He carefully considered the installation of The Intervention of the Sabine Women, and manipulated the environment in which it would be viewed.  (Desbuissons, p. 437)  David allowed the work to “breathe”, and secured a solitary room for the viewing of the work.  This arrangement was radically different than the familiar stacking of paintings in the Salon as organized by the tapissier (Desbuissons, p. 437), where the works competed for attention through variations in size in the predetermined hierarchy of subject matter.  In contrast, David established a contemplative viewing environment antithetical to the crowding of the Salon.  This could be seen to mirror the internal soul-searching brought upon the individual as a result of Enlightenment thinking and ethical debates surrounding the events of the French Revolution.  Certainly, David had reached a moment of introspection and contemplation in the collective psyche of France.  

David’s practice of an early form of personal curation was unfamiliar and generally not commented upon in aesthetic evaluations of his work, largely because a critical language (Desbuissons, p. 436) around what was to become established curatorial practice had not yet been developed. David charged an entry fee to the public for viewing, a solution to his problematic separation from the academy and patronage systems.  In the first exchange of what is now known as the combination of private and public sponsorship, the state permitted David to use a viewing room for the work, and donated a frame for the five-year period in which the painting was displayed.(Dawkins, FPA 313 Lecture).  David was defensive about his new entrepreneurial practices, and in particular, the act of charging admission, (which he must have felt excluded viewers of the more accessible Salon), and which the academy disapproved of. (Desbuissons, p. 432)   In another authoritative, curatorial act, a leaflet written by David was distributed with the viewing ticket.  The text justified the admission principle.  David argued that “the people, in exchange for a small remuneration, could partake in the riches of genius and claim national art for themselves (and give talent a way of escaping poverty” Thus, David appealed to the populace to feel responsible for, support, and share ownership in “a renaissance of national art”.  (Desbuissons, p 398)  However, problematic to this idea was the fact that “the people” encountering the work were those who could afford the entrance fee.  David had retreated from the position of the engaged artist committed to class radicalism and public art as epitomized by his Marat of 1793. (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 399)  The Intervention of the Sabine Women related to the broader transformation of republican culture after the terror and was no longer specific to reception by “the masses”.  The painting functioned in the environment of a new regime “which sought to present itself as a lawful, legitimate republic, and also sought revolutionary closure.” (Debuissons, p. 398)

When visitors viewed The Intervention of the Sabine Women, the first thing they encountered was a reflection of themselves in a mirror.   They were encouraged through this method of presentation, to contemplate themselves and their presence within the context of the painting.  The process of viewing was structured with the intended interaction between the painted and visiting bodies.  (Lajer-Burcharth, p 405)  The viewer’s identification with painted bodies must have been even more pronounced because contemporary fashion was modeled after the clothing of the ancient Greeks. (Lajer-Burcharth, p 408). Although it is unknown the specifics of the mirror’s size or exact placement, historical accounts imply three general modes of looking at the paintinng: close viewing, at full width, and at twice the distance from a full width viewing by mirror viewing.

Close viewing implied a particular type of agency, where hand held spectacles were offered to viewers for “close inspection” (Desbuissons, p. 438)  of the work.   Ideas of fraternity are again highlighted as well as a generous interchange from within the private interior of the artist’s studio.  This hidden world with its specific technology of mirrors, its interiority of thought and the privacy inherent in art practice was interjected within the public realm where the same such mirroring devices were offered as instruments of public evaluation.  “The spectators were invited to peruse the painting’s vast surface inch by inch, men opulent with a lorgnon and women, furtively using special fans with an inbuilt lens that allowed for a more discrete appreciation of the painted nude bodies.”  (Desbuissons, p. 405) David seemed to have a specific appreciation for the heterosexual female gaze in his construction of specific circumstances for women viewers.  Perhaps he considered the “libidinal impact” of the painting to have heightened the “beau ideal” (Lajer-Burcharth, p 411)  propaganda of the male nude as an aesthetic vehicle for moral beauty, man’s excellence and moral perfection.  This particular,  gendered construction needed to be reaffirmed in women in order to gain support for the inequities of post-revolutionary life.    Historically, the suppressed male homosexual gaze had accomplished what was to be appropriated by David as the “beau ideal” in post-revolutionary politics.

The didactic nature of the work The Intervention of the Sabine Women is heightened by David who models the comradery in his “generous” movement between the site of  private, individual artistic practice and the open forum of public evaluation, the very same movement that David requests of the viewer when he posits them in front of a stationary mirror that encompasses the complete work and the viewer within it.  David also asks the viewer to consider their complicity in the familial narrative of the Intervention of the Sabine Women and individual actors in a greater whole. The universality of the familial structure is exploited as the great class leveler in this instance, and functions as a microcosm of the individual’s negotiation within a system of collectivity. 

Femininity is redefined within this familial narrative.  There is no longer the necessity to demonize the scapegoated feminine as responsible for the guillotine violence of The Terror. However a remnant figurative metaphor may be found to the right of Hersilia in the painting.  A distraught woman in the red dress with her   claspes her hands to her forehead and does not have the skills to “rationally” address the narrative that is unfolding in front of her. She is denied movement into the foreground of the picture by the sane gesture of Hersilia’s outstretched arm, which acts to suppress her movement forward.  (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 417) Through Hersilia, woman is brought back into the post-revolutionary fold of the public sphere, albeit within the specifically sanitized domestic realm of child protection and child rearing, with the goal of raising good republican subjects.  Unlike the Oath of the Horatii,  women and men are engaged within the same narrative space in this painting.  Hersilia embodies the erupting feminine principle of appeasement and reconciliation through the gestures and pose of her body, (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 400) rather than  a statuary, frozen placement in the overall composition, as in the Oath of Horiatii.  However, her intervention does also retain a particular connotation of frozenness.  The child at Hersilia’s feet “extends his arms as if to stop his mother and halts movement from his mother’s thighs…he prevents the folds of her tunic from revealing her phallic lack…. the boy arrests the mother…in a site of castration”.  (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 414)

A familial narrative replaces the dangerous fraternity that incited revolutionary violence, a fraternity that was modeled and embodied in The Oath of the Horatii. (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 416 )  The new image of family reflected the tightening of all stages of social life in ideology, which included the private aspects of love and marriage.  A married couple as a privileged figure of revolutionary closure was also a figure that desired successful synchronization of political institutions with private virtues. (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 416) The institution of marriage in the post revolutionary era was the antithesis of marriages that were associated with the nobility of the old regime - characterized by “superficial liaisons, infidelity, corruption, and artificial pleasure lacking in truth.”  (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 416)  The anchoring of pleasure and the stabilization of desire also mapped gender roles where fathers now acted as virtuous civic instructors. (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 416)    Towards these ends, in The Intervention of the Sabine Women, “The women intervene in defense of the patrilinearity of the family.  They help rescue the identity and authority of the Romans as fathers rather than rapists.  The status of the Roman men hinges on the fact that the stability and the immobility of the Sabine women must be enforced.  The major contradiction of the women’s movements are dictated by the iconography of intervention and the figural stasis of the image and the positional constraint of the female body.”  (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 414) In another interesting   example, the central female rotating structure in the composition of female bodies could be compared to emblems of revolution, in a naturalized reading of the political process.” (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 400)  Female collectivity here is seen as desirable only in the raising and defense of children, in accordance to post revolutionary goals.  Other compositional elements that reinforce the didactic nature of the painting include “the rhythmic file of the Horatii-like soldiers echoed in the pose of Romulus and recede into the background to the left of Hersilia…and the male body on the right of the composition posed like Marat.” (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 405)  David wanted to impose his past work within this new tableau of the revolution, implying the continuity of his commitment, despite his inaccessibility to the public beyond the new bourgeoisie. 

David’s insistence of reinscription of the figurative past within this painting perhaps mirrors a crisis of the self, a collective uncertainty about identity brought about by the revolution, as well as a post terrorist loss of confidence in the image of the body.  In light of the radical serial fragmentation of the body under the guillotine, republicans acknowledged, “we are all ex-something”.  (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 405)   Perhaps David’s insistence upon the beau ideal of the male body, which passes through all his work, has something to do with this collective uncertainty about the integrity of the body, and the integrity of his own artistic practice. The reflected image of self within the Intervention of the Sabine Women tableau mirrored the need of the Directory bourgeoisie to identify itself as a group, and reacquire a sense of class coherence, and to identify the general need for a body (a figure of imaginary unity) which could organize the passions and integrate the self.  The simultaneously forming and fracturing revolutionary experience unsettled the self.  The body’s physicality thus served as a platform for constructing republican subjectivity.  (Lajer-Burcharth, p. 415).    The site of the individual became the site of the body politic and vice versa.

Bibliography

Censar, Jack Richard.  Liberty, Equality and Fraternity Exploring the French Revolution.  Pennsylvania State University Press  c. 2001. p.  75 –

Crow, Thomas.  David and the Salon.  Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris.  US Yale University Press. 1985  p 211-390  -[p-

Dawkins, Heather. FPA 313 Lecture Notes 2003.

Desbuissons, Frederique. A Ruin:  Jacques-Louis David’s Sabine Women. Art History  20  S. 97.  P. 432 – 448.

Desan, Suzanne.  Constitutional Amazons.  P 14-31

Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa. David’s Sabine Women: Body, Gender, and Republican Culture Under the Directory.  Art History 14  S. 91.  p 397-430.

Roberts, Warren.  Jacques-Lousi David and Jean-Louis Prieur, Revolutionary Artists:  The Public, The Populace and Images of the French Revolution.  Albany State University of NY Press c. 2000.

Sava, Sharla.  FPA 168 Lecture Notes 2002.
FPA 168  Custom Courseware.  Figures of Revolutionary Death.  P. 31-33

3

Irene Loughlin, “Carolee Scheeman’s Devour”, 2006

Carolee Schneeman’s current video installation, Devour, (Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver) explores the role of the militarization of culture, and in particular, the effect that militarization has in both the public sphere and the private, domestic sphere.  The work consists of a large video installation which display a sequence of two differing video loops that flicker and slide across two parallel screens.  Set at ground level, in the bottom right corner of the room, two television monitors play a delayed version of the video loops.  The screens relate to each other, mimicking a sometimes disjointed, sometimes parallel visual dialogue, which might be seen as a kind of metaphor pertaining to a post 9/11,Western militarization rhetoric embedded in binary-driven ideologies of “for or against”.  Schneeman disturbs this militaristic binary within her current video landscape.  Her particular landscape is described by curator Bill Jeffries as stemming “from her subconscious…she creates forms through which the reality of dreams, inflected with the images of the contemporary art world, can find a vivid place”.  (Devour Gallery Program, Presentation House Gallery).   Schneeman’s reliance on the subconscious in her past work is also contextualized by Jeffries as particular to the “post war” US/Vietnam context of the 1960’s.   Perhaps Schneeman’s current work is particularly poignant in that she is again situated within the post war context/subtext of 9/11.  Schneeman describes the work as “a range of images edited to contrast evanescent, fragile elements with violent, concussive, speeding fragments…political disasters, domestic intimacy, and ambiguous threats.”

In Schneeman’s video installation, the contemporary experience of what it can mean to be human shifts in the direction of a left to right/right to left viewing experience. The screen illuminates particular scenes such as a baby breastfeeding, a large group of women dressed in military uniform and waving in a kind of synchronized choreography, the underbelly of a plane, a cat scratching, people walking through a carnival, a blurred image of carnival lights, a closely framed image of a mouth consuming noodles, a woman’s dead and limp body and its attempted and difficult removal by two men, a woman covered with a scarf walking down a narrow street lined with dead bodies, a flying seagull, closely framed sexual intercourse centred on penile imagery, a man dragging himself sideways along the ground, a body being carried on a stretcher by medics, soldiers running from a helicopter, a skyward image of a tree with snow falling, a roller coaster ride, a closely framed image of a man shaving, a smoking apartment entrance viewed from the ground, the pleasure of a woman’s mouth kissing her cat (excerpted from an earlier Carolee Schneeman piece), a demolition derby, an excavation site (possibly 9/11), and slowed footage of three men walking and then dodging to the side to avoid what is implied to be an explosion (this image was particularly striking, in that it resembled a choreographed action which moved instantly from real time to the shock of slow motion signaled by the implication of the explosion). 

I noted that the imagery was often displayed in the inversion genre of the photographic negative.  The use of the negative image raised the opposing associations of scanning technology used for war tactics and the ultrasound or x-ray medical technologies used to prolong and sustain life.  It seemed that closely framed intimate body images from the natural realm that encompassed kissing, smiling, eating, breast feeding, coitus, shaving, a cat cleaning and scratching, etc. were always presented in the negative image, while war images were presented in both filmic negative and positive forms.  The filmic positive used to describe the men trying to remove the body of a dead woman assumed the kind of full-colour spectrum of CNN ‘spectacle-driven’ documentary footage.  The image of a child breastfeeding assumed a kind of internal, ‘alien’ biology particular to ultrasound imagery. 

Lesa Deetree, my viewing companion, commented that the tempo and speed of the editing and presentation was both simultaneously relaxing and disturbing, and seemed built for a visually stimulated culture.  Schneeman’s editing tactics allowed for sustained viewing of difficult material. Fades between images assumed a kind of television static and images cut out or slowly faded depending upon their content.  The domestic images of Schneeman’s cat scratching spread over both screens and encompassed different views.  Sometimes these views became abstracted by the fade, and the movement flowed across both screens before becoming recognizable, a technique similarly occurring in the realization of the image of the man shaving.   The audio soundscape was not over-bearing as contained distant radio content, such as a Bee Gee’s tune concurrent to the shaving image, furthering the association with domestic life in the masculine realm.  The soundscape contained quietly audible sounds of indiscernible dialogue inferring panicked male voices and distant yelling and screaming, the sound of wind or of sound recorded without a wind filter, what seemed to be abstracted military sounds of a mike cutting in and out, and indiscernible conversations that ended abruptly. 

In viewing Scheeman’s installation, I was reminded of recently emerging concepts suggesting that the brain processes traumatic imagery in a left to right/right to left action within the cerebral cortex.  This theory suggests that the traumatic image gets locked within one side of the cerebral cortex, and might be dislodged through left to right/right to left eye movements.  Schneeman’s work seems to reiterate this left to right viewing process that I have been recently investigating in the relationship of the context of video to the therapeutic technique of EMDR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing).

Schneeman’s work is not redemptive, in that it offers no easy solution to the current impossible global context. However, Schneeman’s installation tracks a full spectrum of human experience, and contains realistic references to political strife as well as to the poetic quality of the everyday.  In a recent talk at ECIAD, Schneeman provided an overview of her work.  Her early work in the late 1950’s and 1960’s emphasized the assertion of representations of female pleasure, and worked against the suppression of creative works by women.  As curator Bill Jeffries stated in the exhibition notes, “Schneeman’s contribution to expanded rights and opportunities for women cannot be overestimated…In 1977, she wrote that “by the year 2000, no young woman artist will meet the determined resistance and constant undermining that I endured as a student…her courses will usually be taught by women; she will never feel like a provisional guest at the banquet of life.” It is interesting to note that during a lecture at ECIAD, one can still see a sort of masculinist undermining at work.  One student questioned the validity of Scheeman’s work in exploring (female) bodily pleasure at a point in history when a war was occurring in Iraq.  Although Schneeman had previously delineated her motive of the purpose of the juxtaposition of images derived from the gendered female realm, which she employed as a contrasting frame of reference to the current propaganda of militarization globally, her strategy was still framed as superfluous and irrelevant in commenting on the “urgency of the global problem”.  Apparently gendered representations of bodily experiences representing a small minority of over half the world’s inhabitants are still irrelevant to a masculinist, Western public sphere which has perpetuated the urgent situation of global militarization in which we are situated.  I thought that Schneeman must tire at this line of reasoning, and in response, she reiterated her previous explanation and suggested that the student should see her recent work regarding the impact of 9/11.  In this current body of work recently exhibited at Presentation House Gallery, she expresses her disturbance at the increased religious fundamentalism and militarization of US culture since 9/11, and seeks to strategize ways in which to counter dominant expressions of the Western militarization of culture in both the public and private spheres. 

6

Irene Loughlin,”Historiography; The Issues of Art and Writing in the texts of Sheriff, Johnson and Darnton,” Simon Fraser University

The critical work of Sheriff, Johnson, and Darnton offer particular interpretations of history.   Sheriff interprets history through a post-structuralist perspective, where she explores the multiplicity of possible meanings in work of Vigee Lebrun, but does not assert the veracity of her reading.  Johnson claims that he draws his assessments form a simple question:  “Why did French audiences become silent… over the hundred years between 1750 and 1850, (why) did audiences stop talking and start listening? (Johnson, p. 1)   In reaching conclusions to this question he examines the reception of the music by the audience, the readings of the audience based in relativity, and what he calls “the culturally compelled identical responses” (Johnson, p. 4) drawn from the audience through their social and political positioning.  He examines the physical and social structures of society as well as narrative material to address his question. (Johnson p. 4)  He also asserts a fixed meaning that is compelled through musical form or structure.  Darnton hopes to delve into the mind of 18th century France by acting as a “cultural anthropologist”.  (Darnton p. 2)  He quotes structuralist Levi-Strauss who examined culture through binary opposition and asked, “What things are good to think with?”  Darnton decides that marginally “odd” archival material is a good place to start capturing “otherness” (Darnton, p. 2), since the 18th century person did not think in the way that we do but is interpreted from a contemporaneous vantage point.  In the work of each theorist, I will explore their approach in bringing forth how the text excavates the cultural experience of reading, writing, listening and looking at the eighteenth century.  In doing this, I will also comment on these theorists’ texts as they exist in dialogue with each other.   I will also consider the reservations of the historian as well as my own reservations about their approach, and will expand upon how the text affects my understanding of how history can be researched and written. 

In examining the work of female painter Vigee Lebrun, Sheriff  assumes a post-structuralist approach. (FPA 313 tutorial) Post structuralism is defined as a method of interpretation that “regards truth as a multiplicity, and exults in the play of diverse meanings, in the continual process of reinterpretation, in the contention of opposing claims.”  (FPA 211 handout, p. 15)   The legitimation of a timely, slowly evolving reference to history is less important to Sheriff than it is to Johnson, and she resists the solid point of origin of the traditional historical event/timeline when it comes to positioning and interpreting the work.  She does not resist being informed by contemporary theory (i.e. femme/homme contemporary research)  in the reading of Lebrun’s work, and brings that contemporaneity into use in as a tool for considering multi-layered constructions of the artist’s work.  Unlike Darnton, she is not interested in “getting at the mind of the 18th century” with the purpose of uncovering a veracity of reading, even if this veracity is beyond a canonical reading.  Rather, through post structuralist methods, she is interested in “the dispersal of truth” and the “celebration of the undecidable”. (FPA 211 handout, p 16)  Theefore, she is not interested in, and does not guarantee the veracity of meaning that she makes from the text.

Sheriff is interested in Lebrun’s life and work for how it demonstrates her exceptionality as a woman, and for how she was “managed, contained and controlled by the mechanisms through which she was an exception” (Sheriff, p. 3) in 18th century society.   She examines how Lebrun supported and subverted the notion of exceptionalness through her self-representations…”  (Sheriff, p. 204)  Sheriff also interprets the “noise”, (Dawkins, FPA 313 lecture) or the reception and peer assessment of Lebrun’s work in regard to her cultural and gendered positioning.   She demonstrates how feminist readings of the past have not considered the multi-layered possibilities of meaning around Lebrun’s work and have operated largely from ideological assumption.  Such investigation occurs through Sheriff’s consideration of the subtlety of resistance evident through Lebrun’s use of  doubling as a political tool.  These methods are particularly evident in Lebrun’s self-portrait, “which is saturated by many competing and conflicting codes.” (Sheriff p. 189)  Sheriff explores these methods by applying  Freudian  psychoanalytic theories in order to reinterpret the artworks in an attempt to “reclaim them for feminism”. (Sheriff, p. 199)

Like Darnton,  Sheriff is careful to point out that 18th century women did not think as we do, and that we do them a disservice by interpreting their social structures from a 21st century perspective. In ignoring the mechanisms through which she operated, we “misunderstand in terms of overlaying contemporary meaning upon Lebrun’s work, particularly in regard to feminist readings.”  (Sheriff, p. 200)  Sheriff states, “in terms of 18th cent French art, the representation of physical beauty in a sensuously beautiful painting is not at odds with depicting “the artist”.   (Sheriff, p. 203) Lebrun’s work has been interpreted by feminist scholars, in particular Sheriff cites Parker and Pollack in their assessment of Lebrun’s self portrait, based on Ruben’s portrait of the idealized beauty of his wife.     They state, “She holds herself up as a beautiful object to look at … it is an image of an 18th century artist that is wholly unconvincing…her work represents nothing more than a feminine object.” (Sheriff, p. 199 ) Sheriff suggests that this dismissal of the work is based in a contemporaneous reading – that of feminist theory of the 1970’s and 80’s.  As a counterpoint to this assessment, she offers historical evidence that “ugliness was interpreted as sign of moral degeneracy”.(Sheriff, p. 200)  In effect, Lebrun’s action of picturing herself as beautiful was in fact a claim of virtue, a position from which she might have her voice heard. 

 Despite our modern interpretation of her portraiture work as compromised, Sheriff argues that from a historical perspective, “Vigee Lebrun’s efforts undercut attempts to view her art as essentializing gender, sex, or desire or to see it as constructing women as woman, the eternal feminine”.(Sheriff, p. 204)  Sheriff states that the feminist readings of Parker and Pollack ironically echo the opinions of Vigee Lebrun’s main detractor Coup de Patte, who stated “her’s is the art of the pretty…” (Sheriff, p 201)

Sheriff goes on to further explore peer assessment as a way of understanding the historical reception of Lebrun’s work.  Peer assessment of Lebrun’s work was generally supportive.  A male admirer of Lebrun’s work exclaimed  “a virile brush animates your portraits.” (Sheriff, p.  189)  The brush in this instance refers to the hand and arm of a male artists engaged in the act of painting.  “ Common considerations were that the arms, the head, the heart of women lacked the essential qualities to follow men into the lofty region of the fine arts” (Sheriff, p 191).

A semiotic dismembering of the body was an effective female castration of physical qualities that were gendered male, including strength, reason, and passion.  Such castration confirmed the connection between the sexed body and cultural achievement.  “What woman lacked was a penis, guarantor of physical, mental and emotional force.” (Sheriff, p 191)  Body parts were gendered male, and this perhaps explains Lebrun’s fascination with the anatomical field of what she first encountered as non-gendered internal organs.  (Later in chapter one the reader in fact discovers that the internal organs had been, in fact,  already colonized and gendered. )  “La main” (the hand),  the execution of the work, and “reasoning” inherent in the process of making art, were essentially considered the two aspects of painting that constructed a masculinist “mind/body” hierarchy in the 18th  century.  Sheriff takes this farther in interpreting Lebrun’s hand in her self portrait.  She asserts that the lowered hand in Lebrun’s self portrait doubles as a historically significant signifier of the “gesture of reason” (Dawkins, FPA 313, lecture) and a referent to the penile member, which she lacks.  Positioned at her pelvis and acting as a Freudian symbol of substitution, her hand becomes a signifier of her claim to authorship. (Sheriff, p. 191)

Although I find this particular aspect of Sheriff’s assessment to be a bit of a stretch, it is certainly interesting.  I also think that Lebrun falls short in not reconsidering the original feminist assumptions about  Lebrun’s work which was based in such evidence as“ her unabashed royalism, her aristocratic friends and patrons, her retrograde politics, and her posturing as a beautiful woman in society”. (Sheriff, p 6)  Aspects of Lebrun’s practice are problematic and also need to be examined, in particular the problematic nature of her superior positioning within racist assumptions of a colonial culture that located difference in biology such as “women in whom certain parts (clitoral) are excessively developed and pronounced, primarily in the warm countries.” (Sheriff, p 182)  

Sheriff posits that she has “tried to view her work from a critical and theoretical perspective that will reclaim it for feminism”. (Sheriff, p. 199) I believe that Sheriff will be unable to accomplish this fully until she exposes the multi-layered issues of class, race and eugenics that is implicit in Lebrun’s work, despite her attempts to rescue it from its origins.   If post structuralist analysis is to be successful, it must be “wary of patriarchal and ethnocentric tendencies that hide behind a defense of reason…above all, post structuralists want to avoid forms of political oppression that are legitimized by resorts to reason…(FPA 211 Lecture handout, p 16)  In her attempt to reclaim Lebrun’s work for feminism, she perhaps neglects “every effort to recognize differences, even uncomfortable or disagreeable ones…” (FPA 211 Lecture handout, p. 16)  

Johnson’s approach to research centres around a single question:  “Why did French audiences become silent?  Why over the hundred years between 1750 and 1850 did audiences stop talking and start listening?”  (Johnson, p.1)   In exploring this question,  he ties the change in the quality of listening (or the reception of the work) to a change in the meaning made of the music, and vice versa.  He situates 18th century reception of music as central in creating its meaning and relativity as integral to its interpretation.    He allows for fixed meaning only through form, “the structure of the actual musical work.” (Johnson, p. 4)   He quotes the literary theorist Iser in his view that a “text allows for different meanings while also restricting the possibilities (through form)”. (Johnson, p. 2)  In his work, he explores listening in the Old Regime as secondary to the social event of the Opera, the emergence of semsibilite and its effects on “quieting” audiences,  and the evolutionary change in the written form of Opera, as a kind of mirroring of social and political change. 

Johnson approaches this particular historical question by allowing for different perspectives to emerge that “create tension in his work”. (Johnson, p. 4)  He describes historical listening as “the (slow and) steady expansion in boundaries of possible meaning… listening is   historically constituted and changing over time.” (Johnson, p. 3)  However, he disputes “Foucault’s discursive leaps” (Johnson, p. 6) and finds value in a position of relativity as well as a contextualized timeline or framework as a tool to illuminate historical meaning and change within music. Johnson asserts that change occurs when music is accessible enough to meet listener’s criteria for meaning and innovative enough to prod them into revising and expanding those assumptions.  Change is directly tied to the audience’s abilities of  “continual negotiation conducted at the boundaries of musical sense.” (Johnson, p. 3) Johnson “paints the details of experience (the narrative of the situated audience member) in vivid colours” to illustrate his examples, but also recognizes the “need to illuminate the structures of experience, that which motivate what he calls “the culturally compelled identical responses” in the audience.  (Johnson, p.5)  He rejects an “institutional”, linear model of working through history.  (Johnson, p. 6)

In Chapter one, Johnson traces how the Old Regime attended the opera as more of a social event than an aesthetic encounter. (Johnson, p. 16)  He proves this point by examining architectural drawings, which exposed the seating structure and hierarchy as privileging the upper classes. (Johnson, p. 18 ) In examining subscription lists from the mid 18th century, Johnson concludes that an individual’s visibility (to other patrons) was seen as a higher priority than a clear view.   Johnson relates “this spacialization of power” to the larger social structure of the absolutism of the monarch and the privilege of the aristocracy.  (Johnson, p. 18)  He cites examples of the Opera as an institution with a function, where young aristocrats “learned social graces” and were “watched unscrupulously” for assessments of their behaviour by their peers.  “For these spectators, attentiveness was a faux pas”.  (Johnson, p.23 ) Throughout performances, spectators scanned the king and his court “for signs of pleasure and disgust” on which they themselves would form an opinion of the opera.  (Johnson, p. 33)

Johnson marks a change in audience attentiveness with the introduction of sensibilite, particularly in the writing of Rousseau.  As France moved away from the authority of the absolute monarchy and towards enlightenment ideas of egalitarianism,  Johnson asserts that audiences began to think and feel for themselves.  Simultaneously a change in musical form occurred, from that of musical imitation of natural, recognizable sounds (birds chirping etc.) to feeling an emotional response it attachment to an imitative sound to “an effort to render more abstract, non imitative emotional states.” (Johnson, p. 45 ) Johnson notes a slow and steady progression from unlit stages to improved sightlines and acoustics within the theatre by the late 18th century.  In highlighting the overlap of values, however, he mentions the “lights still flickered during performances so those who wished to pass their time watching others still could.” (Johnson, p. 59)  Also, the social hierarchy of the box system was still present in the opera.   By 1770’s, however, the critics report “genuine attentiveness” and the “strongest emotions visible on every face”. (Johnson, p. 59)  The form of written opera also changed to accommodate or provide for heightened sensibilite through              “varying the tempo, meter and key” to emphasize emotional states such as rage and love.
(Johnson, p. 63)  Musical taste also came to be associated with virtue rather than class, and individual experience of the music became important through the evolutionary notion of a “singular musical public was born through the sense of unity through sentiment.” (Johnson, p. 70) Johnson arrives at what he calls “the culturally compelled identical responses” (Johnson, p. 4) in the audience by slowly tracing historical, social and politically constituted changes that affected the reception and form of the opera and vice versa.

Johnson’s reservations about his methods include that he has isolated “significant moments in the historical construct of listening” (Johnson, p. 5) and he seems uncomfortable with this method that is based on a “selective” model.  A linear historical format seems to be an important referent for him, and his work is references historical timelines more than Sheriff’s.   He also questions his authority to analyze the music as simply a “literate listener” rather than a musicologist who would be more aware of all the historically linear implications of his selective material. (Johnson, p. 5)  Additionally, he is sensitive to the fact that much of his research is based on musical descriptions by critics and journalists rather than the “ordinary spectator”, of whom Darnton holds in high regard.  He balances the apparent class imbalance of his material by stating that the ordinary listener did write letters to the papers, and held a discursive dialogue with and influence on critical experts.  However, we can see that such influence is probably not great enough to give a rounded assessment of how 18th century audiences heard music, since there are no detailed accounts of listening from the  standing room except for their class-conscious ribaldry during the more interactive phases of 18th century opera. In this way, he “correlates aesthetic assumptions with manifestations in the behaviour of the audience” and states that he has tried to make “useful generalizations”. (Johnson, p. 5)

 The conclusions that he makes through his research are interesting and the “culturally compelled identical response” (Johnson, p. 4) is an interesting way to define the socio-political framework of history as it is located within the individual.  It is interesting that he traces the emerging identity of the individual through their reception of the opera, and tracks how this reception changes over time.   He asserts that his assessments are non-traditional, but often the interpretation is masculinist, and he does not take up opportunities in exploring further the female listener, her perspective, and the interesting transgressions of listening authority that occur through sensibilite, including the bouleversement that “seized” sensitive female spectators (Johnson p. 61). Darnton in this way could also be considered as having a masculinist perspective, as there is very little evidence within his research of the ordinary, female listener.

Darnton’s approach is in fact,  largely “anthropological”. (Darnton p. 1)  He warns the reader against approaching interpreting history from a position of contemporaneity, preferring instead  
to think of 18th century France as an alien, unmapped territory, which is in effect a kind of colonialism in moving backwards through time to capture the idea of “otherness”, “for they do not think as we do.” (Darnton p. 2)  Indeed, he quotes cultural theorist Levi Strauss who was interested in structuralist methods of binary opposition that are questionable methods of excavating information.  Levi Strauss has stated “What things are good to think with?” (Darnton, p. 4)  Darnton replies that marginally odd, anthropological and archival objects are the things that called to him, (Darnton p. 4) and that he offers as a view of history beyond the dominant model.  He passes from text to context and back again in his work, “teasing meaning from documents by relating them to the surrounding world of significance” (Darnton p. 4) much in the same way as Johnson relates narratives to the slow evolution of changes in listening. 

 Darnton chooses the files of a police officer from which to gather information regarding “a species of urban animal – the intellectual”. (Darnton, p. 145)   This suspect population was just beginning to emerge as a “social type” in the enlightenment era.  “In five years, from 1748 to 1753, (the police officer) wrote five hundred reports on authors. (Darnton, p. 146)   Although there was no word to describe this emergent group, the officer D’Hemery uses the word “auteur” and more generally, “the boys”. (Darnton p.148)   Darnton creates statistics and graphs from this information in order to reveal more about this unique moment in history. He composed (his reports) in the “first person singular and in a casual style, which contrast markedly with the formal and impersonal tone of his official correspondence.”  (Darnton, p. 160) His descriptions of the auteurs included in his report facilitated his recognition of them.  He documented that Voltaire was “tall, dry and the bearing of a satyr”.(Darnton, p. 161)  This “practice of reading faces” was also historically specific, as being “derived from physiognomy, a pseudoscience that had spread…through popular chapbooks.” (Darnton, p.161 ) D’Hemery’s style of writing is markedly different from what we would expect of a police report in the 20th century. 

In order to create “a profile of the intellectual at the height of the enlightenment”, (Darnton, p. 145) Darnton uses D’Hemery’s reports as a method of determining the overall geographic location, age group,  social status, employment etc.  of this group of intellectuals and to give further insight regarding what life was like for the 18th century intellectual within each of these categories.  D’Hemery often interjected his own interpretations and value judgments concerning the writing and character of these intellectuals within his reports, “he praised ‘taste’, ‘wit’ and talent wherever he found it, even among ‘bad subjects’ like Voltaire. (Darnton, p. 162)  The policeman’s writing echo the observations of Johnson, who notes that enlightenment theory and the dissolution of the authority of the monarchy allowed for meaning and authoritative judgment of a work was located within the assessments of individual reader. 

Darnton’s reservations of his work include his confession of a “nonsystematism”, and the “lack of authenticity that is inherent in archival research.” (Darnton, p. 5)  “The arbitrariness of selection of a few strange documents as entry into 18th century thought rather than the classics texts” (Darnton p. 4) concerns him, although he takes a contemporary approach of leveling the distinction between high art and popular culture in archival material by not prioritizing the historical canonical material over the marginal document.   But is this not understanding those that think so differently than us, with a perspective that is our own, in a manner similar to Sheriff?  Darnton claims that he doesn’t offer typical case studies or class analysis and offers how intellectuals and common people coped with same kinds of problems.” (Darnton, p. 5)  In posing marginally odd documents as “the great equalizer of class”, Darnton in effect fetishizes the “ritual or daily objects” (Darnton p. 4) of the lower classes (letters, reports etc.) in a way similar to his predecessor Levi Strauss.   The materials does however, bring the 18th century alive to the reader, and offers more insight into the period beyond that provided by the historical canon.

Sheriff, Johnson and Darnton each approach readings of 18th century looking, listening and reading from the perspective of the artist/auteur and the audience/reader reception of the work.  Sheriff employs post structuralist techniques to reclaim Vigee Lebrun’s work for feminism, Johnson uncovers the moment when audiences started listening and the underlying progressive historical movement towards this moment, and Darnton examines marginal cultural material in order to offer insight into the workings of the 18th century.  Each author establishes a point of view that is useful and contributes to a further possible understanding of the eighteenth century. 

Bibliography

Dawkins, Heather.  FPA 313 Lecture notes 2003 FPA 211 Lecture handout (1996) Critical Theory and Poststructuralism – The Modern versus the Postmodern

Darnton, Robert.  The Great Cat Massacre.  Basic Books – Random House Inc.NY  1985

Johnson, James H.  Listening in Paris A Cultural History.  University of California Press 199

Sheriff, Mary D.  The Exceptional Woman  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1966

2

Irene Loughlin, “Vancouver Live Performance Art Biennial. The Work of Boris Nieslony, Alistair MacLennan, Roi Varra, and Naufus Figueroa”, 2003

I saw the performance art group, Black Market International, at the Grunt Gallery on November 25, 2003.  Black Market International consists of artists Boris Nieslony (Germany), Alistair MacLennan (Ireland) and Roi Varra (Finland).  The performance lasted for two hours.  The artists work individually within the group, creating “clear images” (Nieslony, Grunt Gallery , 2003)  for the audience.  The collaborative effort occurs in the physical and mental relationships between these three artists. 

The performance began with each artist simultaneously performing an action.  Alistair MacLennan picked up a tree that reached to the ceiling of the Grunt Gallery and began to hang plastic bags containing herbs from its bare branches.  Roi Varra stood with a television cardboard box balanced on top of his head.   He began to draw the box down over his head with his raised arms, creating an entry hole for his head within the cardboard box.  With his head now entirely covered by the box, he began to bang the box against the wall.  Boris Nieslony balanced two doweling rods within his fingers, making tapping noises on the floor with the doweling.  A tape with a British male voice began to play.  The voice calmly relayed an endless stream of what seemed like the free association of words.  The words made one question the existence of all things mentioned as part of the human condition or as a human construct. The fact that the voice relayed the words Sadam Hussein with the same calmness and tone as the words George W. Bush relayed a sort of ironic and detached questioning of the loaded connotations attached to utterance.  I think that the free flowing word association of this tape might also refer to the Zen practice of the performance artists, in that each word allowed the listener to notice their reaction to the word and the mental, emotional and even physical reaction to the content and “mental and emotional noise” triggered by each word. 

The performance continued as a sort of continuum of exploration of the individual materials.   Alistair MacLennan took a ski mask out of his pocket put it over his head.  It became evident that there were no holes in this completely knitted, black covering for his entire head.  He began to take on a non-human, specter-like appearance.  The violence a person is driven to perform renders them dehumanized, and the obliterated sight and speech represented in this image makes the trauma of committing such an action silent.  MacLennan also took the belt from his coat out of his pocket and placed it in his mouth through the knitted material.   The belt furthered the appearance of silence, and the non-human imagery of a lizard-like tongue.   The absolute stillness of this image slipped from one identity to the other in my consciousness – terrorist,  elderly, druidic?  After these actions he stood without moving for an hour and a half.  Once Roi Varra passed by him with a German chocolate cake on a tray.  MacLennan reached into the tray with a leather-gloved hand slowly and with the utmost control and concentration, before placing the cake on his head.  This strange image mocked the silence and the deliberate actions of the violent specter.   

Roi Varra performed many actions during this performance, including playing a tiny plastic violin and taping a TV antenna to his head with duct tape, until he visually represented some kind of insect.  He turned slowly with a radio picking up airwave interceptions that would come into the gallery space and then fade away as he rotated.  On completion of this action, he sat in a chair and played with a remote control race car, which entered and exited the performance space and the audience space.   These images referred childhood experimentation.   Varra also shaved a square into his head that was reminiscent of the shape of the cake balanced on Alistair’s head.  He then placed one of these pieces of cake within this shaven square.  In a way, these images echoed each other, and reminded me of images of victims of violence with shaved heads.  This image also seemed to mock or take some of the power out of violent action.  A final image occurred as Varra laid on the ground, smoking a cigarette, with his legs supported by a chair.  A cup with a piece of twine was tied to his toes.  He casually dipped his foot down towards a bucket of water located near the side of the chair.  Each time the cup dragged in the water but could not pick up and retain any water.  This action occurred over and over, and reminded me of a kind of absent and humourous futility, of doing the same thing over and over, hoping or absently expecting the results to be different.  It also reminded me of childhood dreaming, lying in the grass and staring up at the sky, in a Huckleberry Finn kind of way.  However, smoking and dressed in a tuxedo,  Varra gave the action a decidedly adult bent.  Varra’s imagery often held the humour and absurdity of the moment.

Boris Nieslony continued to work with the two doweling sticks during the performance.  In one poignant action, he placed photographs of women who had been murdered on the wall.  I had heard that these photos were not specifically from any time period or location.  A small child’s toy was pierced by the rod and dragged up the wall over the photographs.  The toy took on the smallness and posture of childhood grief, the arms of the stuffed animal protruded helplessly from its sides,  and the rod connected through its heart to the wall as it dragged over the image of one of the women.  Nieslony balanced the other end of the doweling at his stomach and then at his throat.  He took the doweling back in his hand and applied pressure until it bent and seemed like it would snap.  Then all of a sudden he released the pinched toy and it fell to the ground. 

In another action, Nieslony turned on a slide projector that moved automatically.  The room was brightly lit so it was impossible to see the projection.  He tilted a piece of blank paper towards the projection, catching the image on the sheet of paper and revealing it to the audience briefly. The image then disappeared as he moved it away from the projector.  He then taped the blank paper to various parts of the architecture of the space, and once to Alistair MacLennan’s belt.  This action conveyed the transient nature of time and imagery as embodied by the medium of performance art and video projection.  It seemed as if once we recognized the projected image it was gone.  The move seemed almost choreographed and slightly dramatic, as Nieslony seemed to allow the exact same time of viewing for each image, in an almost tempo-driven action. 

The second performance art work I saw was Transference of Sensation by Naufus Figueroa at Gallery Gachet on November 28, 2003.    Figueroa started the performance by cooking on a flat griddle in the middle of the gallery.  He cooked pieces of lard, the leg of a plastic baby doll, and a sugar skull from Day of the Dead celebrations.   Lard or fat seemed to represent comfort and the material with which to encompass and wrap food or the body.  The plastic doll leg referred to childhood and Figueroa’s past work, which dealt with the kidnapping of children in Latin America.  Sugar skulls are also made in memory of the ancestors during celebrations in their honour at the end of October.   The action of cooking close to the ground on a flat plate reminded me of the cooking techniques of Mayan women in Guatemala.  Figueroa is Ladino (part Mayan,  part Spanish) and was displaced during the Guatemalan war and sent to Canada with his grandmother and uncles.  The melding of Mayan actions within the context of the gallery and in the body of the artist (cooking in North American clothing, as a youth who has grown up in North America) is a strong image of cultural hybridity brought about by political intervention and turmoil.

After the materials are cooked together, Figueroa disintegrates the plastic in a coffee grinder. Coffee is a major export of Guatemala, and coffee plantations have long been a site of Mayan exploitation and American intervention.   Figueroa then added the lipstick from many containers to the mixture.  The lipstick material as an oil by-product and oil production is also a site of violence and intervention.  The multiple, generic pile of plastic lipsticks brought me back to the image of bins of lipsticks found in the marketplace in Costa Rica.

When all the materials were piled together on the floor, the artist taped a plastic garbage bag to each of his legs and asked a member of the audience to do the same.  The bags looked like big plastic boots that reached to their knees.  He kneeled in the pile of the material with the audience member and they put their arms on each other’s shoulders.  Then they started kneading the lipstick into the lard and the other byproducts of cooking with their knees.  Moving from one side to another, their torsos twisted and contorted as they slid in the gummy mixture.  This movement reminded me of a mortar and pestle type movement where the bones of the knee acted as the pestle to grind down the materials on the stone floor.  It also brought to mind the visual image of Naufus making mole at his mother’s house with his grandmother’s cooking equipment, grinding the chili peppers with the stone rolling pin into a stone cooking platform.

When the mixture was complete,  Figueroa rubbed it on his body in the creases of his belly, armpits, legs, and knees.  He removed his clothes and put on a pair of white long underwear, which reminded me of a childhood sleeper.  He rubbed his legs together in a kind of stretched out position on his side.  He also rubbed his belly with his arms so that the red lipstick colour would show through and stain his white sleeper as it did at the creases of his legs through his movements.  The movements reminded me of the childhood movements of my sister’s child as he moved around the crib in his sleeper.  Both movements were balanced in the belly from where all the movement originated, rather than being balanced at the hands or feet.  The limbs often made contact with the torso in a flailing action,  (as did Figueroa’s movements in the performance) and the body flipped around from the center since her child cannot yet crawl or propel themselves with their arms and legs.

After these moments finished, Naufus smoked a cigar and inserted a small plastic tube into his anus through the back flap of the long underwear.  He smoked and coughed and exhaled the smoke until the cigar was finished.  Some of the audience took this action humorously, interpreting it through the expression  “blowing smoke up your ass.”  The artist was not aware of this saying since it is specific to a North American context.  Smoking and smudging practices have been used as a Mayan cleansing ritual historically.  I did not find this action humorous at all, and the image was very powerful as simultaneously one of healing and degradation.  When he finished the cigar, he spread the shell of the cigar carefully on the floor.

1

Irene Loughlin, “Gender and Master/Servant Relations in the Marriage of Figaro”, Simon Fraser University

Gender and master/servant relations in The Marriage of Figaro differ in the play and in the opera. Both types of relationships are influenced by the ideals of the creator of the play (Beaumarchais) and the opera (Da Ponte and Mozart) who are in turn, influenced by the politics of their era and the forms within which they worked.   Definitions of gender are revealed in the opera and the play in varying degrees with regard to marriage and the role of women in society, the construct of male identity as influenced by enlightenment thinking, and gender ambiguity as conveyed through the Cherubino character.   The master/servant relationship is revealed in the relationship between aristocrat and servant, and through love relationships, where femininity also acts as a mask for the exploration of power relations. 

Marriage and conquest, both in love and politics, are areas in the play in which gender roles become apparent.  The play reveals the aristocracy’s view of masculinity through ideas of love as conquest and marriage as formality.  “Planning an affair was like preparing for a military campaign, making it worthy of male intellect…. publicity about the success was essential.”  (Theatre Women and Aristocratic Libertinism CC p. 34) In the play, the Count advises women to make themselves interesting or they will lose their husband, and this message echoes the aristocratic idea that marriage ruins pleasure.   The Count’s pursuit of Suzanne permitted through the folkloric “droit deseigneur” (Lecture notes week 3) exposes what came to be seen as “compromised masculine values” at a time when ideas of domesticity and family became more prominent amongst the new bourgeoisie and the general population while the power and influence of the aristocracy was in decline. 

Beaumarchais’ idea of marriage was influenced by his own upward mobility in his quest for a higher social status.  In his own life he was barred from “buying into” the aristocracy because his father was a watchmaker.  He eventually married into the aristocracy. (Lecture notes, week 3)  The play contains a more negative view of marriage, perhaps as influenced by his experiences.  At the end of the play in the vaudeville section Figaro states, “Its all right for husbands to cheat their wives, everyone laughs when they boast and brag, just let the wife start making eyes, she’s punished with the label of slut and slag.”  (Beaumarchais, p 252).  His tone in the play reflects sentiments in an era prior to the French Revolution, in that the whole system needed to be torn down, along with the hypocrisy of the aristocracy.   Perhaps this “divorcing” of the present aristocratic system mirrored his frustration at being denied advancement, and having himself to marry into an advanced position.   Perhaps he was also more sympathetic to the double standard that women had to endure in the eighteenth century.   Women played a large role in the play becoming accepted, from the voting actresses who denied the play’s censorship, to the women who hosted the salons of where Beaumarchais’ play was first read and discussed.  Finally, it was the Queen herself, Marie Antoinette, who had the play staged in 1783 against the wishes of her husband.  (Lecture notes, week 4)
 
Stationed in Vienna, Mozart had a more fluid take on the ability of the aristocracy to grasp enlightenment ideas of love and equality in marriage through the opera.  Suzanne and Figaro’s equality are emphasized in the opera; their marriage reflects an equal union and a sparring of wit and intellect.  Marriage is portrayed as not very appealing in the play, but it is blissfully less complex in the opera.  The opera is influenced by Mozart’s enlightenment ideas of “companionate love”. Within humanist ideas of equality and tolerance, a free contractual relationship between individuals was considered a good basis for society (lecture notes, Jan 27th), and is echoed in Suzanne and Figaro’s relationship. While in the play Bortollo marries reluctantly, everyone in the opera marries immediately, and immediate virtue is found in marriage. (Lecture notes Jan 27th) However, men still retain their rights and privileges under enlightenment principles, and in fact their rights seem advanced by the future domestication of women and the removal of women from past power and influence in the public sphere.  (Steptoe p 113).   Marriage apparently also offered an environment within which to “reduce female suffering” (Landes p. 46) for which a metaphor is embodied by the powerful, but personally unfulfilled, Countess.

Women such as the Countess were unhappy because of deception and were no longer up to manipulation of the political sphere through use of their sexual power.  The Countess is a modern woman who believes in recovering the original love of her marriage.  Beaumarchais reiterates her virtue.  In the preface, he states, “but far may she be from any immoral purpose, what is most clearly established in this work is that no one has any desire to deceive the Count save in preventing him from doing as much to others. It is this purity of motive that puts the means employed is above criticism…(Beaumarachais, Preface, p. 146) In a similar manner,  Suzanne’s “unwavering loyalty” to her mistress, and her “wholly honest purposes in taking part in the deception of the Count” (Beaumarchais, Preface, p. 146) are also to praised, according to Beaumarchais.  He asserts that she is “entitled to our sympathy” because of her pure intentions in the face of her circumstances, where “under attack by a tyrannical seducer with more than enough advantages to turn the head of a girl in her position in society” (Beaumarchais, Preface, p. 146) she maintains her innocence.   In her similarly innocent portrayal, the Countess may be seen as a figure in transition, between that of aristocratic feminine manipulation and reworked republican ideas of female virtue.   Beaumarchais often linked class exposure and ideas or the deconstruction of sexual manipulation in this way in The Marriage of Figaro; gender is in effect used as a tool to blanket his statements of political injustice.  Eighteenth century Enlightenment thinker and philosopher Montesquieu stated,  “that the vices of aristocratic luxury lead to female corruption”. (Landes, p 36) He believed that once women were placed within the domestic realm “private virtue” would replace intrigue within the male defined, restructured family that would be the foundation for a patriotic and virile political constitution. (Landes p. 38)  He stated,  “Women’s unrestrained liberty and vanity spill over into the public domain of the court whenever ambitious courtiers are compelled to seek advancement through the offices of powerful women.”  (Landes, p. 36)  In contrast he praised the virtue and freedom of women under republican constitutions wherein liberty is constrained by manners, luxury is banished, and with it corruption and vice.  In the new symbolic politics, universality and reason were relied on to sustain, not to eradicate, the (sexual) differences erected by the order of nature.  “Bourgeois publicists shared with earlier aristocratic reformers a strong attraction to masculinist classicism and an aversion to a feminine preciosity.” (Landes, p. 46)

Preciosity or intrigue in the play is not simply a device of manipulation used by the female aristocracy to reassert power, but was also a method by which Suzanne manages to avoid her fate in regard to the Count.  By plotting with her mistress, she is able to avoid the scandal that would naturally befall her.  She is bound by etiquette not to directly refuse the advances of her husband’s master.  In the play she says “Oh, if I had the nerve to speak out!  And the Count replies “Speak freely, my dear, speak freely. Exercise today the lifelong power you have over me.” (Beaumarchais p. 114)  At the same time, he knows that she will not dare directly offend him.   In Marceline’s speech in the play, she talks about the effect of gender on a woman in Suzanne’s position.  “At an age when we are prey to illusions, inexperience and necessity, besieged by would be seducers and impaled on our own poverty, what resistance can a mere child put up against such an army of enemies?”  (Beaumarchais   p. 193)   Only a group effort of intrigue including herself, the Countess, and at times, Figaro, can save her from the Count’s mastery over her.  In both the play and the opera, she reminds the Count when she is alone with him about her social positioning.  When she goes to retrieve the smelling salts for her mistress, the Count suggests she keeps them for herself and she replies, “Do women in my position have little turns, then? That’s a sickness reserved for people of quality.”  (Beaumarchais p. 178).  Similarly the Count complains about having to wait for Figaro and states…”The servants here they take as long to get dressed as the masters!” To which Figaro replies wittily, “That is because they don’t have any servants to help them.” (Beaumarchais p. 171)  The Count acknowledges his belief in the myth of advancement by telling Figaro that “with sufficient wit and strength of character, you could make you way up into administration eventually” to which Figaro replies “Make my way by wit?  Your lordship laughs at mine.  No, be mediocre and crawling and you’ll get everywhere you want.” (Beaumarchais p. 174)

Mozart in working on the opera with Da Ponte, had also more fluidly negotiated the class structure of the time.  He did not have the same issues around class to the extent that Beaumarchais did, in that he had been privileged as a child prodigy and then had taken up a personal call towards entrepreneurialism later in his life, due to his eventual unwillingness to follow the creative restrictions of servitude within the court.  He worked under the realm of Joseph the Second in Vienna, “a ruler who struggled to realize the social and intellectual themes of his day without being prepared to accept their full consequences.”  (Steptoe, The Social Context p 19)  However, it has also been noted that Da Ponte promised Joseph the Second that he would remove the problematic and controversial text from the play in reworking it for the operatic stage.   (Lecture notes, week 3)  Joseph the Second’s official tolerance of free masonry, which Mozart participated in, and his “encouragement of freedom through his confidence and humanitarian sufferance of opposition” permitted the open dissemination of dissenting views and debate (Steptoe, p 19), debates that eventually lead to his own downfall.  Perhaps Mozart’s own less problematic relationship and less militant relationship within his own master as court composer resulted in his belief in the aristocracy as capable of embracing virtuous ideas without such ideas having to be forced upon them.  The opera ends less controversially and the Countess restores order by granting the Count’s humble plea for forgiveness when he sees the error of his ways. In contrast, in the play, the Count has to be coerced into being virtuous through the manipulation of events by his wife and servants.  (Lecture notes Jan 27th)

Gender ambiguity plays a large role in the character of Cherubino.  Cherubino might also have served as a metaphor for the new social order.   He fumbles around, having lost his way in through the reworking of gender in the Opera, where the castrato’s sexual ambiguity through castration was no longer overlooked in favour of his unusually high and transcendent voice.  In the mid eighteenth century gender roles of men and women hardened and “ideologies surrounding a constructed femininity became more insistent…increasingly the definition of “femininity” was used as a mirror to define and promote the proper dominance of masculinity” (Reynolds p. 139).  Mozart worked in the midst of these times, where the castrato became to be viewed as offensive to masculinity, and was banned.  (Reynolds p. 119)  However, Mozart was still left with the option of the travesti role, where a young woman dressed as a man dressing as a woman.  It was in this role that he could explore “possibilities of sex transgressive roles” (Reynolds p. 138) and satisfy the transgressive nature of his scatological humour.  Cherubino’s role is “explicitly about sex” and sex games possibilities, where actions such as dressing and undressing take place in front of the audience. (Reynolds p. 140) His nature as both male and female are emphasized in his name (little cherub, as well as the names Figaro gives him including little narcissus, little Adonis of love, amorous butterfly.) (Reynolds p. 141).  Figaro’s own masculinity is contrasted to Cherubino in the opera.   Margaret Reynolds points to ‘Figaro’s aria which is a march in c major to reflect the masculine activity of war, to which he is now being dispatched but which includes a switch to a gvotte rhythm with repeats from the violins on a dainty chromatic inflection to accompany Figaro’s reference to Cherubino’s feminine interest in dress and flirtation.”  (Reynolds, p. 141).  Cherubino’s is a sexuality that the women control, he is almost like their doll or plaything that they dress up, and “his body with its surprises and disguises is kept on show”. (Reynolds p. 141)   His problematic love for the Countess and her difficulties suppressing her feelings for him shocked Parisian audiences.   In the play rather than the opera, Beaumarchais’ Countess is an enigmatic creation, whose ambivalent feelings for the Count and for Cherubino are not disguised.  (Steptoe p. 113)  In her first scenes (Act 11 scenes 1 and 111) she becomes inattentive and absent-minded as she muses on Cherubino.  “The Count’s jealous actions have not only distressed and humiliated her but have at the same time have precipitated deeper sentiments about Cherubino than she has formerly cared to admit.  In the opera, the Countess is less elusive; she is introduced as expressing conventional emotion of regret for lost marital love, and rarely departs from this level throughout the text.   Da Ponte permits her to feel flattered and even flustered by Cherubino’s attentions, but prevents a casting of doubt on her desire for her husband’s reform or any equivocal passions with Cherubino”. (Steptoe p. 113)

Cherubino’s puberty suggests an age of development that has not quite reached maturity as in the realization of republicanism in France.  Cherubino’s first aria also presents a transsexual (and I might suggest a political) puzzle. (Reynolds p 148) “He doesn’t know where he is, who he is or what he is doing…Cherubino invokes the suggestion of sexual sameness at the end of the aria (I speak of love to myself) –he is often called Narcissus in the text, Cherubino represents the doubleness, the self-reflection, of woman with woman that can easily be recuperated by a positive lesbian reading.” (Reynolds p. 148)  Cherubino’s role (and ambiguity) in Le Nozze is an anarchic one. He crosses gender and questions sex difference.  He crosses class, being both aristocratic and yet at home with servants, eventually marrying Barbarina. He is always appearing in the wrong places, much to the Count’s discomfiture; thus he unsettles every social order.  The music bears out his transgressive character, for when his name is simply mentioned in the finale to act 2 the music plunges into G minor – a key that Charles Ford argues is always associated for Mozart with anxieties doubts, and suspicions.  Cherubino is about mistaken identity, liminality, tease…” (Reynolds, p 141) 

Beaumarchais pretends to be oblivious to Cherubino’s complexities, and chides the sensitivities of his audience.  He states in the preface “So is it after all my little page that so outrages you and the immorality you condemn as lying at the core of the work only to be found at its periphery?  He is a child of 13, at the first stirring of love – innocence is no longer a child, but he is not yet a man, and that is the moment I chose to show him arousing our affectionate sympathy without anyone being obliged to blush.” (Beaumarchais, Preface p 148)  Beaumarchais pleads for the character’s innocence on the basis of his age, thus denying the complexity obviously woven within his character. 

Outside of love relationships, further Master/Servant relations are most evident in Figaro’s speech and the emerging masculinity of the bourgeoisie. In contrast to the machismo surrounding conquest within aristocratic sexual practices, Figaro’s masculinity is all about independent thinking and a just and light-hearted morality.  In the soliloquy, Figaro’s denunciation of injustice and the abuse of power reaches epic proportions, and he also asserts his masculinity and his sense of injustice about class limitations through intelligent and ironically humourous rhetoric.

Figaro’s great speech of Act V was considered highly inflammatory with its denunciations of hereditary power (nobility, wealth, and station) Figaro states “Because you are a great Lord, you think your talents are infinite!…Nobility, fortune, rank, influence: they all make a man so proud!  What have you ever done to earn such wealth?  You took the trouble to be born, and that’s the sum total of your efforts.” (Beaumarchais p. 226)  He contrasts this lack of effort with his own ambition, “Whereas me…lost in the obscurity of the herd, I needed more skill and know how even to exist than its taken to govern the Spanish empire for the last hundred years”…and later, “Here a master, there a servant, according to the whim of fortune!” (Beaumarchais p. 229)

This speech was renowned for its scandalous nature, so much so that in the opera it is cut short at the beginning, and Figaro states, “the rest I’ll not say, everyone knows it already.” (Instructor’s notes, p. 227)  Beaumarchais defends Figaro’s soliloquy “why in the liberties he takes with his master, is it that Figaro arouses my amusement, never my indignation…”  (Beaumarchais, Preface p. 147)  He argues for Figaro’s essential morality that is heightened in the opera ”seeing him obliged by his condition in society to repulse ill usage by his wits alone, we forgive him everything the moment we know he only gulls his master for the purpose of preserving what he loves and rescuing his property”.  (Beaumarchais, Preface, p. 147)

Apart from social politics, the argument can be made that form creates the need for difference in the opera and the play, and affects how gender roles are delineated.  The restraints of the form of opera have to do with the simplification of views surrounding marriage in the opera.  Beaumarchais’ play employed contemporary individuation methods for character development rather than traditional stock characters, which at times is awkward in the play and did not translate well to the opera.  (Lecture notes week 3).    In many cases character depth is sacrificed in translation to opera, and is some ways,  Da Ponte reverts back to stock characterizations in the realization of the opera.    He strips the central protagonists of their complexities so that they could articulate the plot almost as familiar stereotypes, including rapacious nobleman, neglected wife, wily servant and so on.  (Steptoe p. 111)  The Count in the opera is a simpler character and is more coarsely defined.  He threatens to kill Cherubino, displaying far more anger than is portrayed by Beaumarchais in the play.    In the opera the Count is more concerned with a loss of dignity (he states, “Must I see a serf of mine made happy while I am left to sigh”) (Beaumarchais p. ) rather than distressed at slighted affection.   Also, further complexities such as the Count’s condemnation of the lack of adventure within marriage would have “inhibited the forward thrust of the musical finale, and was thus omitted from the libretto”.  (Steptoe, p. 110).

Form also plays an important role in the centrality of women in the opera.  Originally the opera was written for four high soprano voices, and therefore the opera centres around Suzanne and her socially gendered role, rather than the play, where Figaro’s character and his ambition to advance are central.  (lecture notes Jan 27)   Also, whole series of polemics on injustices to women in act 111 scene V1 had no place in Da Ponte’s fast moving plot. (p 113) Marceline’s speech mentioned earlier “displays much insight into masculine expectation of female behaviour (Act 111, Sc XV1), most of which is lost in the opera.” (Steptoe p. 113).   Although Opera Buffa as a form can be almost heretical in that it features the rule of the servants in the master’s house, the power and centrality of women, and the overthrow of the patriarch in a hierarchical society,  Beaumarchais’ work is more antagonistic in its class-consciousness.  He also mixed theatrical forms made for different classes which paralleled Mozart’s crowding of the opera with characters from the upper and lower classes, all singing  in unison.  (Lecture notes Jan 27th)

Further evidence exists that Da Ponte had to remove some of the subtler irony form the disguise scenes in order to maintain the momentum of the finale. (Steptoe p 110).   Displays of masculine rivalry n the play, including the principal confrontation between the Count and Figaro (act 11 sc. V), during which the two test each other’s metal across a range of comic and serious subjects, are also unfortunately lost.  The operatic Count cannot begin to match Figaro for insight or quickness of thought in awkward situations.(Steptoe p 111). All these alterations had the purpose of rendering the characters in the opera less equivocal in their motives and behaviour.  They could therefore be mobilized in a swiftly moving plot where the action left little room for reflection. (Steptoe, p. 113).

In conclusion, and particularly in regard to form,  Da Ponte’s motive “was not political timidity but theatrical pragmatism,  all the speeches from the most to the least contentious were removed primarily because they were tangential to the central comedy.” (Steptoe p. 113).  However, there is evidence as previously stated that he also made efforts to make the opera less controversial to satisfy Joseph the Second. (Steptoe p 113) Beaumarchais defended his play in general from criticism of intentions of class anarchy, and asserted that it has no political relevance.  He stated, “Its great fault is that I did not draw from observation of society; that it depicts nothing of any reality as it exists, and never calls to mind our present way of life, and that the vile and corrupt morality it portrays does not even possess the merit of truth.”  (Beuamarchais, p. 261)   Despite their protestations and intentions, these two artists who created the original play and the opera, also created works that were subtly and overtly charged with metaphors of gender and class relations, in particular with regard to the role of women and the master/servant/class relationships of the eighteenth century

Bibliography

Beaumarchais,  The Marriage of Figaro.   Anderson, Uraham, trans.  UK Dufour Editions/ MEA 1993.

Beaumarchais  The Preface to The Marriage of Figaro  Anderson, Uraham, trans.  UK  Dufour Editions/ MEA 1993.

Daughters of Eve:  Theatre Women and Aristocratic Libertinism  1715-1789.  Custom Courseware FPA 313  Simon Fraser University.  P. 34-39

Landes, Joan B.  Women and the Public Sphere in The Age of the French Revolution.  Cornwell University Press 1988.  p 35-38.

Reynolds, Margaret.  En Travesti,  Women, Gender Subversion, Opera.  Columbia University Press, New York.  1995.

Steptoe, Andrew.  The Social Context:  Vienna and Her Ruler/Da Ponte and the Buffa Plot. The Mozart-Da Ponte Operas:  The Cultural and Musical Background to Le Nozze Di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte.  UK Clarendon Press, Oxford.  1988.