Flying Fish Publishing

Tabu, Culture, Performance Art, Webster University - St.Louis MO

Premise
When talking about his work, performance artist Stelarc refers to himself as "the body." He does so to separate his medium (body) from his conceptual functions. He sees the body as a vehicle through which he can express his ideas much like a painter uses paint mediums to create a painting on a support (be it canvas, paper...). A painting exists as a painting with or without an audience. If a painting is made and then destroyed, it had still existed as such. Unlike a painting, a performance piece uses an audience as a support, whoever that audience may be. The piece then becomes tangled with social phenomenology. Therefore, a successful performance piece demands the kind of attention that allows it to utilize systems or contemporary mythologies. In much the same way, for our purposes here, I will refer to myself at times in the 3rd person as "the artist."
Cultural Context
I was not born in the United States; I had immigrated here with my family when I was in grade school. At that point in my life, I didn't have the capacity to consciously understand culture shock, cultural identity, moral relativism, and how to deal with shifting worldviews. I would ask my parents not to speak Russian in the grocery store because their deviation from the norm had embarrassed me. Due to circumstance, my first year of confrontation with American culture had been spent in Toledo, Ohio. Besides our family, there where 3 others that had immigrated from the former U.S.S.R., and as small communities go, and this was the smallest, the families where not on speaking terms with one another. Anyway, I didn't have the opportunity to be amongst pears till my family moved to St.Louis. It wasn't till recently, that is the past 3 or 4 years, that I had begun to actually contextualize my cultural identity and replaying what impact Diaspora had on me and how cultural differences affect social response. The catalyst for these realizations was a series of sojourns to Southeast Asia and Central America where "the other" began to make sense contextually. My initial observations in the U.S. had led me to several conclusions; they may be obvious but bear with me.
The first of these was that almost all my early perceptions of American culture in Toledo where directly or indirectly rooted in media saturation. My images of body, sexuality, social propriety, proper dress, and proper food... came from television. At first, I had assumed that this was because I lacked the capacity to communicate with what seemed to be my peers. Eventually, reflection had led me to conclude that all boys and girls in this country had developed their sensibilities from the same source. Even in those rare cases where parental involvement was a major factor, generally speaking, the parents themselves where just an indirect transmitter for those mediated sensibilities. Now, culture did of course very immensely but what was generally a constant was that images where always distributed through mediated sources.
One thing in particular was intriguing; the way the body was treated. It is of course not unreasonable to assume that the image of the body had followed the path of least resistance as prescribed by the free market and in that context, it was an understandable treatment of the image, but when I considered this image objectively, its treatment had bothered me. The body was over sexualized and romantic sexuality was tabularized. The image of Greek-like, perfectly sculpted, almost naked bodies in shampoo commercials on the one hand, and overwhelming conservatism about things that in Russia and Europe, i.e. nude beaches, bath house... where completely demystified and desexualized.
When I was about thirteen, a story had broken on the news. On the east coast, a woman was arrested for photographing her 5 year old and three year old in the back yard without there clothes on. My parents had hundreds of these photographs, of both me and my sister. Every Russian family did. It was beyond the wildest dreams of anyone of us that these photographs could have been exploited by the children’s own mother. This was not the case at all, they where just innocent photographs completely misconstrued by certain members of society.
On Russian beaches, girls did not wear tops till they where ten or eleven and in many cases older. They where given the opportunity to have a childhood that lasted till that age. I have a niece of 10, when she was 7 years old; she had decided to go on a diet. She felt she was too fat, (the girl's weight was 60 lb). My initial instinct was to assume that the girl must need some attention, that she has self esteem issues; maybe a psychologist should have been called. That wasn’t the case at all, this dietary notion was popularized amongst the majority of her pears and she was just following the trend like kids everywhere do. After a little time allotted for ignoring it carefully, she stopped her diet and went back to jumping around on the trampoline, but she did of course have positive role models that refused to reward psychologically damaging behavior.
During my travels in Asia, it had been noted (admittedly generalizing) that American men where notably homophobic and obsessed with homosexuality at the same time. Many other cultures have become accustomed to far more physical contact amongst the same sex. American men will become very uncomfortable with touching other men beyond a brief handshake, with things like sharing taxis or whatever else. At the same time, many of them tend to seem like there obsessed with the process of engaging in joking with one another implicative of repressed homosexual fantasy. It seems as if those common and completely innocent gestures such as brushing up against somebody or sharing a crowded taxi seem to personify some kind of homosexual association and trigger an immediate response. Essentially, non sexual gestures are sexualized.
Motivations
As an artist it is my prerogative to evolve my observations so as to produce a body of work. Throughout my time here, my work has been very diverse. I started as a painter and through the evolution of thought and action, have turned to performance art and video as my medium. These choices had been perpetuated by an interaction with certain events and inferences in art history. The details are too extensive to go into so unfortunately the following explanation will lack a desirable breadth but I feel will communicate the general ideas.
The first of these is an event is Corbet's Origin of the World, (1866).

The painting depicts female reproductive anatomy in a realistic stile. The painting is sold to an individual who exhibits it to an all male audience, keeping it behind a curtain. The painting itself isn’t very interesting to me. The female anatomy has been used as an object of art for thousands of years and pornography has been around just as long as art; but this is the first case I discovered in my research that has blurred the lines so beautifully, Corbet a painter of prominence and prestige and the painting so obviously being put to provocative use, the ambiguity of how to place that particular painting is an important notion for me reflecting on how art relates to image and to culture.
In 1918, George Grosz walks down the Kurfuestendamm in Berlin dressed as DADA Death,

referring of course to the artistic movement. Performance Art develops over the century and evolves from a reactionary artistic notion into a canonized medium through which to express ideas. By the 60s, performance art is generally accepted as a completely valid form of artistic expression by most art historians and by the academy.
1974, Joseph Beuys visits America for the first time. He is intending to perform "I Love America and America Loves Me" in a New York gallery. His intention is to spend a five days interacting with an American.

As he steps out of the airport, he is met by an ambulance which promptly takes him to the gallery where he spends five days interacting with a coyote. After the fact, he gets in an ambulance and leaves the country. Beuys finds a way to communicate with the land and its ancestry without leaving New York. He also manages to negate any social interaction with and people who call themselves "Americans".
1997, Oleg Kulik visits America for the first time. The prominent Russian artist says "I'm afraid of America; I fear that it might turn me into an animal...That's why I turn my inevitable defeat into a gesture, into a performance." In "I Bite America America Bites Me,"

Kulik spends two weeks acting like a dog. Beuys came to America acting like a human interacting with animalistic but noble representation of America, Kulik confronts America scared, angry, naked, and animalistic.
A Social Experiment
I connected with Kulik’s work. I have been performing as a way to understand and interact since Toledo, though I didn't think of it that way at the time. I have done a great many performances with body and with confronting culture. For about three years, I have been conducting a social experiment in which I go out to a populated, neutral, public place with an unzipped fly and what appears to be scrotum like flesh hanging out. I would walk around seemingly unaware of this detail and note peoples reactions. Most people respond with awkward laughter, amused by this exposure but not wanting to offend, they swallow their emotions and try to keep a straight face. Many never notice. Many will do a double take. No one in the history of the experiment has ever told me that my fly was down, ever. Before I had decided to do the experiment, I had made the provision that, in case someone would be courteous enough to inform me of my absent-mindedness, I would zip up and never perform the experiment again, to date it has never happened.
The subject of the experiment is awkwardness itself. It has to do with confronting cultural taboos concerning the body and the awkwardness most people feel with having non rehearsed interactions with others. In 1970, Vito Acconci performed his "Proximity Piece" in which a piece of paper hung on a gallery wall. When patrons of the gallery would look at the contents, the artist would stand uncomfortably close to the patrons and would get closer and closer until he incited a reaction at which point he would describe the reaction and the time frame in writing on the piece of paper hanging on the wall. In 1969, Valie Export performed "Action Pants."
A piece in which the artist walks through the aisles of a crowded movie theater with her crotch area cut out of her pants exposing her genitals. Similarly, in a piece by Marina Abramovic and Ulay, the two stand facing each other at the entrance of a room forcing passersby to turn to one side in order to get through, having to interact directly with either a female or male body.

At the Webster University Career Fair, I was performing the experiment and after completing a conversation regarding employment with Sarah Lee and leaving the career fair, I was informed that the police where called. The perspective employer had taken offense to it and not only attached a sexual connotation to the action but had perceived a full exposure, suggesting that suspension of disbelieve had created an image of the whole sexual organ instead of an abstraction, a flesh like protrusion representing a single left testicle. Since the interaction was completely void of any sexual inference and since the reaction of the individual was strong enough to call the police, it is assumed by the artist that the individual had an unexpected and improbable bias to the situation. The result was the evolution of a social experiment to a full fledged performance piece. The artist was arrested and held for a substantial amount of time without charge because the police could not decide the most appropriate charge to book the artist with.
It turns out that the artist was charged with a sex crime. My pears have observed that had this incident involved a woman exposing herself such as Valie Export, the attitude towards the action might have been a bit different. Also, had the police know or had the impression that the fleshy protrusion was not flesh but a sculptural item; they would not be able to legally charge the artist with indecent exposure, regardless, the artist was arrested do to a single complaint. The performance piece became a study of perception, social reaction, and administrative response. It became a reflection on how an image could be exactly the same but how the narrative surrounding the image could drastically affect the impact of that image. It illuminated the extreme taboos associated with non-sexualized images of the body. It reflected how the perception of an image could entice fantasy and intense guilt and fear. It brought into the focus of a mediated lenses, the importance of incidentals in administration.
Ambiguity in Documentation and Cultural Perception
Walid Raad is the artist responsible for the Atlas Group Archives. He has exhibited at the most recent Venice Biennale and Documenta 11 and is a professor at the Cooper Union. He has exhibited the notebooks of Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, prominent historian of the Lebanese Civil War. The notebooks present cutouts of cars and descriptions of their engines, axles, VIN numbers, and a plethora of other absolutely incidental details.

These cars represent car bombs detonated during the Lebanese Civil War. The honorable doctor is a fictional character but the narrative itself creates the body of the work. In Raad's video "I Think It Would Be Better If I Could Weep," a narrative is presented in which the fictional Operator #17

is assigned a surveillance camera to be mounted on his food stall pointing in the direction of the main avenue. When the sun sets, he re-directs the camera toward the ocean breaking from the extreme violence of the Lebanese War to record the sunset. This narrative transforms a seemingly cliché video of the sunsets into a subtle commentary on the Lebanese Civil War with much broader global implications involving truth and perception, narrative and mythology, humanity and violence.
Similarly, artist Chris Ofili addresses controversy itself as the subject of his Turner Prize winning painting, "The Virgin Mary."

As part of a very controversial 1996 exhibition involving the group known as the Young British Artists, Chris Ofili exhibited this painting of the Virgin Mary painted with elephant dung. The painting had become instantly controversial so much so that New York authorities had threatened to censor the work. An explained was provided that asserting that elephant dung was used as a matter of venerating the Virgin referring to several African cultures that held elephant dung in high esteem and even as a divine substance. He was of course well aware of the controversy that it would cause and by considering all these cultural and social elements, had brought the ambiguity of interpretation itself to be the subject of the work.
A Reflection
A successful Art Piece is always performed with intent, mindfulness, and a sense of the absolutely deliberate. A performance piece is subject to all those things but also, due to the nature of the medium, relies heavily on improvisation. A social experiment confronting awkwardness and body then suddenly becomes implicative of censorship and substantive perception. It may result in cultural reflection or president. It may narrate itself and paint its shadows thick in mediated reflection. It may be dismantled like "Tilted Ark." It may offend a few people, but at the end, we are all in it together, globally evolving. That evolution includes visionaries and reactionaries, artists and postal workers and clerics and the entire spectrum of human experience.
I had gone through allot of suffering and confusion in trying to find a cultural identity, now I feel as if I can firmly say that I am an American, and as such, I take upon myself the responsibility of actively participating in our collective cultural evolution, a privilege that is only allotted to me in this culture and no other. As a student of life, I will always grow in discovering vehicles of evolution that cause as little tearing as possible but for now, I am only a student.
Unfortunately, do to this action, I am also being confronted by my institution and asked to go through an administrative disciplinary process. In the end, institutional censorship represses our collective evolution. Events like this should not be me with disciplinary administrative reaction but with critical discourse. What is essential is that an open dialog within thought an action stay and open dialog, and that academic institutions that claim to perpetuate culture progress allow that to happen without threatening this dialog. We need to look at these events and talk about their implications involving narrative and cultural taboos, not burry those notions. Please, take it upon yourselves to keep this dialog open and leave me any comments, or question you may have regarding this.

Thank you for your attention and consideration.
Misha Sulpovar
Flyingfishstl@yahoo.com

posted by flyingfish @ 12:45 AM