I am interested in the kind of dispossession that leaves traces of disgust and confusion. The type of failure that is so masochistic the audience asks, “but why?” To which even the performer cannot adequately respond. It is not in order to achieve “shock” and it is not throw-away performance for the sake of masochism. There is an affective quality to masochistic acts that is not achievable under any other circumstances.
I want to test the malleability of flesh. Because I possess a feminine body, I have experienced the malleability of my own flesh through the bodies of others, while I am myself an Other. However, I have never been able (as a consequence of this "Otherness" as much as my own failures/shortcomings) to access myself either as this Other or as a corporeal, speaking, breathing, living, acting subject at all. I have disallowed myself access to my own voice and my own body for as long as I can remember. Even masturbation has always been a traumatic event. I dissociate from my own body and the whole event seems a pleasurable storm of disembodiment and a re-inscription of past traumas through my own hands (especially because I don’t feel as though my flesh is actually my own).
It doesn’t matter with whom I’m engaging in “sex-acts” with, even if it is myself. A ghost of a person is always touching me, as a shadow, traces of trauma and simply the gazes of others and what I read into (and out of) them.
I was anorexic for five (give or take a few here and there) years and did not know it. It took a year of sporadic bulimia for me to grant myself the agency to claim “bulimic” and seek medical help. Just as sex-acts are ways to dissociate from myself and live through the flesh of others, bingeing and purging provided a means with which to short-circuit; to access a plane of affect that I do not have access to in my day to day life. This isn’t a sort of reaching for the Real; my acts of masochistic transcendence weren’t efforts to reach a state of being that is irreconcilably inaccessible to all bodies. It’s rather a way to feel something in the act of complete dispossession and self-inflicted debasement. In some ways, to feel as though I am saying something, that I am able to say something, even if (especially if?) only to myself, to my own body, with my own flesh.
I have engaged in spontaneous acts of privileged consumerism. I have identified with objects in an effort to forge an intelligible identity. I have attempted to merge my own skin with the lavender walls of my room, the intricately patterned linens on my bed, my bed the site of sex and the site of identity formation and the site of identification with others and the site of all of my attempts to identify with myself through the flesh of others. A separation from the objects I have deemed significant in my repertoire is like a separation from a lover that I have never had. Once, my home was infested with bed bugs. I threw away everything that I owned in a fit of liberation and I still have not recovered.
ways in which the wall can love back (2006)
I am enamored by negativity because I identify with it. I want to make it clear, however, that I do not view negativity or regression as my goal, or any goal for purely ethical reasons. However, I question the relevance of a “goal” at all, focusing rather on iterations, of acts that perhaps do not lead to a cumulatively understandable “goal.” This isn’t to say that one cannot attempt to capture a certain amount of space within a certain amount of time and understand what is contained within as a product of lived experiences, social realities, embodiment. However, I would argue that no genealogy of cause and effect exists. As thrilled as I am with negativity, failure, dispossession, disembodiment, I have (perhaps naïve) hope in utopia. In futurity. Perhaps an interlacing of failure and success is necessary for any futurity at all – the debasement of oneself can sometimes act as a crude reminder of work that still must be done. This is not an alignment with any sort of teleological understanding of history; nor am I aiming to legitimize any harm inflicted on selves or others as necessary events in the name of “progress” or “improvement.” Instead, certain acts of negativity, failure, and dispossession can become punctums with which to understand and empathize with others and, of course, with selves – selves that span time and space in often indigestible ways.
I want to test the malleability of flesh. Because I possess a feminine body, I have experienced the malleability of my own flesh through the bodies of others, while I am myself an Other. However, I have never been able (as a consequence of this "Otherness" as much as my own failures/shortcomings) to access myself either as this Other or as a corporeal, speaking, breathing, living, acting subject at all. I have disallowed myself access to my own voice and my own body for as long as I can remember. Even masturbation has always been a traumatic event. I dissociate from my own body and the whole event seems a pleasurable storm of disembodiment and a re-inscription of past traumas through my own hands (especially because I don’t feel as though my flesh is actually my own).
It doesn’t matter with whom I’m engaging in “sex-acts” with, even if it is myself. A ghost of a person is always touching me, as a shadow, traces of trauma and simply the gazes of others and what I read into (and out of) them.
I was anorexic for five (give or take a few here and there) years and did not know it. It took a year of sporadic bulimia for me to grant myself the agency to claim “bulimic” and seek medical help. Just as sex-acts are ways to dissociate from myself and live through the flesh of others, bingeing and purging provided a means with which to short-circuit; to access a plane of affect that I do not have access to in my day to day life. This isn’t a sort of reaching for the Real; my acts of masochistic transcendence weren’t efforts to reach a state of being that is irreconcilably inaccessible to all bodies. It’s rather a way to feel something in the act of complete dispossession and self-inflicted debasement. In some ways, to feel as though I am saying something, that I am able to say something, even if (especially if?) only to myself, to my own body, with my own flesh.
I have engaged in spontaneous acts of privileged consumerism. I have identified with objects in an effort to forge an intelligible identity. I have attempted to merge my own skin with the lavender walls of my room, the intricately patterned linens on my bed, my bed the site of sex and the site of identity formation and the site of identification with others and the site of all of my attempts to identify with myself through the flesh of others. A separation from the objects I have deemed significant in my repertoire is like a separation from a lover that I have never had. Once, my home was infested with bed bugs. I threw away everything that I owned in a fit of liberation and I still have not recovered.
ways in which the wall can love back (2006)I am enamored by negativity because I identify with it. I want to make it clear, however, that I do not view negativity or regression as my goal, or any goal for purely ethical reasons. However, I question the relevance of a “goal” at all, focusing rather on iterations, of acts that perhaps do not lead to a cumulatively understandable “goal.” This isn’t to say that one cannot attempt to capture a certain amount of space within a certain amount of time and understand what is contained within as a product of lived experiences, social realities, embodiment. However, I would argue that no genealogy of cause and effect exists. As thrilled as I am with negativity, failure, dispossession, disembodiment, I have (perhaps naïve) hope in utopia. In futurity. Perhaps an interlacing of failure and success is necessary for any futurity at all – the debasement of oneself can sometimes act as a crude reminder of work that still must be done. This is not an alignment with any sort of teleological understanding of history; nor am I aiming to legitimize any harm inflicted on selves or others as necessary events in the name of “progress” or “improvement.” Instead, certain acts of negativity, failure, and dispossession can become punctums with which to understand and empathize with others and, of course, with selves – selves that span time and space in often indigestible ways.
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