Dominic Johnson

TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work

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The Wound Kept Open

Jack Smith is an artist on the margins of official narratives of art of the 1960s. This essay attempts to read his works as a means of questioning the challenges posed to normative readings of the work of culture, by presenting ideas about queer performance. Smiths almost hysterical identification with Maria Montez, a 1940s film siren, is privileged in my reading. Her key film, Cobra woman, turns on the image of a wound that will not heal. In this essay, I read the wound as signaling the breaches in our attempts at full communication, and compare this state of being to the idiosyncratic form of the camp effect, which functions as a kind of hieroglyph, or broken sign. Read through Maria Montez, the ‘failures’ of Smiths practice are explored in order to invogorate the seemingly exhausted discourse on camp, as well as to pose a critique of the ways in which certain bodies are failed by dominant culture.

Perverse Martyrologies: An Interview with Ron Athey

Abstract Ron Athey rose to international prominence during the Culture Wars of the early 1990s, and has since made his mark as a powerhouse of performance art and experimental theatre practice. His solo and collaborative works are regularly presented throughout the UK, Europe and the United States, at major art centres and festivals. His work has received critical attention, focusing variously on his denunciation by the late Jesse Helms, the implications of his Pentecostal upbringing, and the relations between his work and the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS. In this extended interview, Athey engages with and moves beyond these concerns, to discuss major themes in his practice, including: appropriation and cultural inheritance, the politics of punk and club performance, his idiosyncratic political anatomy of the body, and the interplay of his crucial themes, desire, pleasure, crisis and death. Dominic Johnsons critical introduction sets out cultural and historiographical contexts for Atheys reception and positioning in histories of art and performance since the early 1990s.

Ecstatic Intervals: Performance in a Continuum of Intimacy

Intimacy is heavy with meaning yet, curiously, resists precise definition. In its resistance, the concept of intimacy harbours undisclosed problems that could usefully be interrogated. As a series of situations in which people gather to interact with and speculate upon the experience of one or more other people, performance art is appropriate for a consideration of intimacy. Instances of performance may shed more light on intimacy than is usually granted in everyday life. Rather than imagine intimacy as simply an untroubled situation of pleasant interpersonal relations — two people coming together in a politically neutral way — I look to performance to see if intimacy might reveal itself as a more volatile, complicated and meaningful category of experience. I assume that intimacy is a political category that facilitates many forms of interpersonal relations, including ‘good’ and ‘bad’ object relations. This assumption emerges from the historical truth that while some forms of intimacy have been privileged as conducive to full and wholesome forms of citizenship, and affirmed as such by civil legislation, others intimacies have been persistently frowned upon, and represented as inhibitive to positive social participation. The diverse and ongoing battles for same-sex marriage, for example, are testament to the fact that while some intimacies are celebrated, other intimacies are disparaged, stigmatized or criminalized.

Naked hitchhikers: the unknown photography of William A. Rhoads

ABSTRACTWilliam A. Rhoads was an avid photographer of male nudes, mostly sourced from hitchhikers he picked up in California in the 1970s. His efforts were prolific and sustained – and secret – and likely made and retained for private enjoyment. The photographs were never shown in public in Rhoads’ lifetime. I approach his project, firstly, from the perspective of its historical and cultural contexts of emergence and development; and secondly in terms of the taxonomic challenges his photographs pose, in relation to established histories of art and pornography, which were being called strikingly into question in the 1970s. Both approaches allow Rhoads to be understood beyond the traditional aesthetic distinction between art and pornography – or more precisely, between a personal, erotic practice and a formal artistic one.

Introduction: The What, When and Where of Live Art

Live Art is a contested category, not least because of the historical, disciplinary and institutional ambiguities that the term often tends to conceal. Live Art is used to describe a wide range of performance practices in programming at cultural institutions in the UK, and to some extent in Europe. It also describes a busy sub-discipline of teaching and scholarly publication in theatre, performance and visual studies. However, the term ‘Live Art’ is rarely put under critical scrutiny. When did the term first come into usage? Does it formally describe a discrete set of practices? Is it the same as or differentiated from similar terms, such as Performance Art or Body Art? Is Live Art a style, a genre, an idiom or a sector? To what extent do artists identify with it as a useful label for their work? And how might we quantify the debts owed by Live Art to differing formal histories, such as theatre or visual art? The present special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review establishes a series of ways of accounting for Live Art as a geographically and historically situated set of practices. The contributors explore the potentials and pitfalls of the term, for example by reading the specific contexts, venues and sectors that support its practices, or by analysing discourses that might be referred to as a means of elucidating the work of some key artists. By providing new perspectives on the early years or ‘prehistory’ of Live Art, new theorizations of identity politics in performance, and the ways in which Live Art rethinks the history of British theatre, performance and visual culture, the contributors redefine its relation to the cultural politics of performance more generally. The articles, documents and other contributions explicitly address the historical and material conditions of Live Art in the UK. The recent social and cultural history of the UK has involved specific factors that crucially influenced the development of Live Art since the late 1970s. These have Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 22(1), 2012, 4 – 16

Positive Surrender: An Interview with BREYER P-ORRIDGE

In their pronouncements on performance, art, history and humanity, BREYER P-ORRIDGE like to paint in broad brushstrokes. They create grand narratives about human evolution, creative potential, the politics of the body and self-determination through art. Crucially, they do so in order to urge us to attempt to replace old systems with new possibilities for change. ‘Viva la Evolution!’ is a key rallying cry of BREYER P-ORRIDGE, in interviews, statements and performances. Formerly Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer, in recent years the artists have forgone their earlier names and public identities towards a new collective subjectivity. In tandem, the two formerly discreet individuals used cosmetic surgery, performance and other tools to produce a ‘Third Being’, a pandrogyne – or positive androgyne – that goes by the name BREYER P-ORRIDGE. This composite identity has obliterated the two prior individualities, towards a political exploration of the possibilities that emerge from experiments with art, science and culture. BREYER P-ORRIDGE’s project epitomises and perhaps exceeds the use of performance in everyday life to blur the distinctions between art/life, even rendering such distinctions obsolete. As Laure Leber’s portrait shows (see Image 1), the efforts of the surgical and other interventions have enabled the artists to achieve a striking similarity, troubling the common divisions attributable to gender, age, experience and other factors that become seemingly inconsequential under pressure from their unique ‘living art’ rituals. Over a series of operations, beginning 1999, BREYER P-ORRIDGE used cosmetic surgery and body modification techniques towards a corporeal translation of the cut-up technique of William S. C T R D O C U M E N T S Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 22(1), 2012, 134–166

The Skin of the Theatre: An Interview with Julia Bardsley

Julia Bardsley is a major force in British experimental theatre and live art. In the mid-1990s, Bardsley was heralded as one of the most influential directors in Britain. In 1994, she left her position as Artistic Director of the Young Vic, London, and ‘retired’ from institutional theatre altogether. From the mid-1990s, she began bridging solo performance, costume, film and video, sculpture and other media, towards a highly idiosyncratic practice. She has recently completed The Divine Trilogy (2003–2009), a series of three solo performances that continues to tour internationally. In this extended interview, Bardsley critiques the limitations of institutional theatre in Britain, and gives accounts of the relations between theatre and visual arts practices, looking to the specific advantages that live art may provide for artists working between established forms. Bardsley explores her process, forms, theories of the audience, transformation, fantasy and failure, and other provocative ideas that have emerged from her career to date.

Jack Smith's Rehearsals for the Destruction of Atlantis: ‘Exotic’ Ritual and Apocalyptic Tone 1

Jack Smith is an icon of the theatrical avant-garde of the 1960s, a pioneer of the New American Cinema, and a founding figure in the development of performance art. This article draws together some thoughts on Smiths practice by focusing on the figures of the ‘exotic’ and ‘apocalypse’, considered in relation to catastrophe, the uncanny, spatiality, laughter, and the hoax. In the wake of Lee Edelmans recent polemic against ‘futurity’ in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Smiths practice is examined here in order to pose a critical counterpoint to the forceful opposition between negativity and affirmation. Engaging a series of critical models, this article examines the place of the ‘exotic’ in thinking about sexual and racial difference, as a means of thinking difficult or volatile modes of cultural practice. As such, it stages a confrontation between ‘exotic ritual’ and ‘apocalyptic tone’, to challenge conventions about scholarly practice and find new ways of examining uncomfortable spaces and modes of working.