Casey Jenkins 'Casting off my Womb' (a.k.a Vaginal Knitting)

After the video of Casey Jenkin's performance going viral on youtube, she wrote an article for the Guardian in response to online criticism. These are only some extracts:

"Over the past two weeks, over 3.5m people have watched the YouTube clip shot by SBS2 documenting my 28 day performance piece, Casting Off My Womb, at Darwin’s DVAA. The short clip, which SBS2 titled Vaginal Knitting, gives an overview of the work in which I used skeins of wool lodged in my vaginal tunnel to knit a long passage, marking one full menstrual cycle."

"As the deafening response to my work demonstrates, there is a hell of a lot of clamouring noise in society about what a person with a body like mine should and shouldn’t be doing with it. The pitch and volume of opinions can be so overwhelming that it’s difficult to quiet the noise, step back and choose a clear and autonomous path. With Casting Off My Womb I have attempted to do just that by paring concepts about body parts and activities related to women back to their most elemental. Over the course of the month I sat with the steady rhythm of the knitting needles and of my body and created a work that I have complete confidence in, a confidence that thousands of internet opinions have not dinted."

Lubos Plny

Absolutely love this artist, thanks Paul for directing me to their work. There's a very interesting biography about him here. It says that he has always been fascinated with graphic art and anatomy, and that the pregnancy of his partner and their son's birth greatly influenced his work.

I find the overlapping of anatomical drawings with (hetero) sexuality and reproduction unique and very inspiring. Specially in terms of drawing boundaries between self and others.

Sorry I don't have titles or dates for these, they are taken from Abcd Art Brut website, an organisation aimed at raising awareness and diffusing Art Brut in France and beyond.

Bodyart Venue: The Flying Dutchman

The Flying Dutchman is an LGBTQ friendly pub in Camberwell with the aim to promote difference, diversity and the arts. They have developed a gallery-performance-dungeon space on the basement, which stands as Mori and Stein gallery, but also hosts all sorts of fascinating events, like a German Fetish Film Festival, impact play workshops or local community initiatives.

It's also the place to go and see contemporary bodyart, with Discharge a bi-monthly performance event curated by Martin O'Brien and Untouchable an open-submission platform for art and performance curated by Franko B.

On 18th January 2014, I attended the inaugural No Pain: No Gain, the first Discharge event, where I first encountered the work of Diana Pornoterrorista, a Spanish bodyartist whom also performed at the private view of the group exhibition Salon Hysterique I participate in, and which is still on until the 19th April. Here are some pictures of that night and the following event on Sunday 26th to mark Franko B's birthday:

No Pain: No Gain explored the intersections and histories of masochism and performance, and the politics of pain in performance. The first two images are from Diana's performance, which had some similarities with the performance she did in Salon Hysterique, and which I discuss in this post. It consisted of a ritual of transgressing borders and vengeance where Diana invited the public to write down on pieces of paper words which they (we) had been experienced as bullying at some point in our lives, and stuck with us. She took this wounds-as-words and stapled them to her body, also using her vagina and anus to engulf them, for potent metaphorical and political effect.

She would state the necessary ingredients for this particular exorcising-vengeful ritual, including 'liquids' for which she leaked her body from tears, vaginal ejaculation, blood and menstrual blood.
The last ingredient of the ritual was vibration, for which she asked an audience member to practice percussion on "a skin drum with a hole": herself. The drumming on her belly and buttocks amplified by the condom-covered microphone she had inserted in her vagina.

This ritualistic actions where also contextualized through a reading of a heavily autobiographical text by an audience member.

Aleksandra Waliszewska

Waliszewska is an extremely prolific Polish artist who's work I love, this is a selection of pieces were she explores the wound, or the access to the insides of the body, a recurrent theme in her work. She works with gouache, and takes inspiration from things as sparse as Memling, Poussin, Jan Ziarnko, Enguerrand Quarton, Hans Memling, Japanese horror movies and British skinhead attire of the 70's.

This is only a small sample of her work, other recurrent characters, themes and places in her work are threatening woods, human-eating animals, the uncanny, fairy-tales, violence, stories and myths.

Sources: all images from the artist's tumblr page, Maurizio Cattelan's interview in her blog, Diego Gerlach's interview for 'my dance the skull'.

Performance at the Private view of Salon Hysterique: Gabriella Daris and Diana Pornoterrorista

During the private view of the exhibition La Petit Mort et la Grand Hysterie on Tuesday 21st January 2014 I saw the performance Cadaver Exquis: A Parlour Game, a collaboration between Gabriella Daris and Diana Pornoterrorista. What follows is Gabriella Daris' text on the piece.

CADAVRE EXQUIS: A PARLOUR GAME: LE SPECTACLE

A parlour game played with the cut-up technique - an exquisite corpse between the White Swan/Odette/Juliette and the Black Swan/Odile/Justine. Under the veil, the corpus is stimulated by ways of poetic imagination and body memory recollection, through the operation from concealment to revelation to concealment till they reach, the end. Do you think it is easy to get rid of a wound, to shut the mouth of a wound?[© Text copyright: Gabriella Daris, 2013]

LES POETS CORPOREL | LES SALONINNIERES

White Swan/Odette/Juliette: Gabriella DarisBlack Swan/Odile/Justine: Diana Pornoterrorista

The performance involved two figures dressed in a black and a white burkha, representing a duality like white/black swan personifications, they will later reveal that they are naked underneath the garments, wearing white feathers around her long neck-Gabriella Daris- and a black feather mask, almost like a beard, surrounding her mouth-Diana Pornoterrorista.

The piece commences with Daris sitting, and the audience is asked by 'Odette' to cut pieces from her white burkah, with a pair of scissors, revisiting Yoko Ono's 1964 Cut Piece. We are asked to write on the white piece of fabric something that, based on our personal experience, is a prison for us. After a long time, when 'Odile' has barely any fabric covering her, Diana asks a member of the public to read out a text, while she collects the written bits of fabric from the audience, showing them to us, one by one, stapling them onto her flesh with a staple gun. From what I can recall, the text is a criticism to Western perspectives on the burkah, encouraging to turn 'our' (Western) critical (and prejudist) view onto our own issues, to stop criticising other cultures to look at our own, and the way in which we classify and label people to perpetuate forms of oppression.

The text is reflected in most of the words on the fabric, which have come to represent 'prisons' for their bearers, recalling a lot of insults and labels. Once the black swan is semi-covered once more by the shameful words, the white swan helps her take them off, one by one, and they are swallowed between the black feathered mouth, devoured, like an aggressive vengeful act. Each word is shown to the audience at a time before disappearing inside her mouth, and when Odile/Diana comes across one in particular, 'capitalism', she turns around and puts it up her ass, literally-in a physical metaphor.

The two characters, the white and the black burkahs, swans, with their emphasis on being a pair and somehow opposites and complementary, speaks to me of the way difference is constructed in society, in opposing pairs: female/male, homosexuality/heterosexuality, healthy/pathological, fat/thin, able/disable, black/white, strong/weak, self/other...etc. During the performance, the two artists don't function as opposites, but more as a pair working towards the same goal, revealing the body, covering it with the words-prisons- of many others, in a ritual where they are finally devoured and consumed.

Beyond, or underneath, the burkah, their nude female bodies are diverse, Diana's 'femenine' curves defied by her embodied rejection of gender stereotypes (in general in her practice as an artist), Gabriella's shows the signs of discipline and training from her formation as a classical dancer. Notions of active/passive are also explored, the two women shifting positions, Gabriella receiving the audiences cuts, cuts that become empowered in the transformation from cuts to words and from words to Diana's affirming action of self-stapling.

These are two bodies that have obvious presence in the work, from the moment they come to view and in the actions revolve around them: covering and revealing of them, cutting closely around, stapling on. The appearance of the wound in Gabriella's text, together with the concept of prison, as understood by the diversity of the personal audience's experiences, makes use of the burkah as a metaphor for the skin-as-prison, the site to reclaim the flesh in affirmative action, to define as individuals in all our diversity what it means. Perhaps the skin is the Westerner's (not only female) prison, far more subtle and engrained than any garment. Can wounds function beyond signs of abuse? Self-inflicted in affirmative creative action they defy passive/active assumptions of cutter and receiver, inflictor and victim. 

The wound is a core concept in my practice, as can be seen on two of the prints I contributed to the show, The Anatomy of the Hidden Vagina and Incredulity. These together with the work of many other artists, Lizzie Learman amongst them, is still on show until the 19th April, at Blacks, 67 Dean Street, W1D 4QH London.

 The Anatomy of the Hidden Vagina and Incredulity.

 

Lizzie Learman's Trouble and Strife



La Petit Mort et la Grand Hysterie

 

 

 

 

I will be exhibiting some of my prints at La Petit Mort et la Grand Hysterie, a fascinating curatorial project by Gabriella Daris, that is composed of the exhibition, a duet performance, and the launch of Hysteria feminist magazine. I am thrilled to take part! The group show will be open from the 22nd January to the 19th April, Monday to Saturday, 10am to 1pm, in Blacks, 76 Dean Street, W1D 4QH.

 

Amongst my work in the exhibition you will be able to find The Anatomy of the Hidden Vagina (pictured above), and will also find darkly humorous pieces by Lizzie Learman, and works by emerging and established artists including Annie Sprinkle and ORLAN.

 

 

 

 

David M. Cook

I really enjoy the graphic-tattooesque language of David M. Cook, especially on this piece that touches on religious iconography of the wound. 

Talking of his recent bird series: “I find the birds living in a new world of pattern and color, and they have taken on more religious iconography (another reappearing theme in my work) with the idea of killing dreams - The priests and bishops of this world trying to hold back the thoughts and ideas of the non-believers of their world, using mind-control, and often times death, to make their point.” David Cook.

 

The stigmatized hand in the background of this image is coming out of an open slit, which, judging by it's clitorial protuberance, is very much a vagina. I love the two small crosses on the bird's head, and the aureola type pattern emanating from the hand.

 

Zero: Embodying the Blues

Earlier this month I went to see Zero, a performance by Clod Ensemble fusing dance, visual theatre and live music. The trailer reminded me somehow of the intro for the series True Blood. (Georges Bataille's dream series.)

 

 

It was all about the music, and the performers where dressed in suits and evening dresses, emphasising gender roles, swapping them, sometimes. The live music seemed to infuse the bodies of the dancers, to follow more scripted dances, contort like predating animals, act scenes of a silent play or become characters of human tragedy. A voice in the background which I placed in between a police interrogation and an American talk show, provided snapshots of deeply personal stories, of loss, suffering and love.

Perhaps there is a link between vampires, blues and human tragedy. Perhaps it's through tragedy that our animal instincts take over and bring chaos to ordered life, when men and women, dressed acceptably to go to church, can overlook civilised norms to crawl and bite. Some of the moves, some of the scenes in Zero, also reminded me of Riccardo Buscarini's Athletes, when there is silence, and a group of individuals exchange gazes that tell a whole story that we know nothing about. And sometimes they move together, others they isolate one, creating a prey.

Susan Aldworth: Printmaking and Anatomy in the search for Self

Susan Aldworth's work is currently on show at the National Portrait Gallery, until the 1st of September 2013. I am interested in her work because she works primarily with printmaking processes, the 3 pieces on show being portraits consisting of 9 monotypes; and with medical imagery, in this case with historical and modern scans of the human body. The sitters are people with epilepsy, a condition that links with the artists' search for ways to visualise the self. She has worked before with people with Alzheimer and Schizophrenia, and her current practice focuses on the gap between the physical materiality of the brain, and the interior sense of subjectivity.

My favourite piece is Elizabeth, 2012, whom Susan portrayed with an image of her face located in her lower abdomen, due to the woman's deep concerns about having a baby. A very interesting move, changing the commonly accepted seat of identity from the brain to the uterus. Elizabeth refused to take the drugs that controlled her epileptic attacks due to their impact on pregnancy, and with this risked her life. One could say thus, that her strong yearning for being a mother is effectively reflected in the portrait, where her face, her identity, lies within her womb.

I attended In Conversation: The Portrait Anatomised, on the 6th of June 2013, where a neuropsychologist, the artist, and Max (one of the sitters) came together. Most of the conversation turned around the difficulties of grasping the self, and the gap between the physical brain and consciousness. Susan's use of medical imagery is a turn in comparison to the tradition of portraiture hosted at the gallery, medicine portrays the inside in a literal and 'truthful' way. Furthermore, medical imaging captures a fragment and perhaps depicts a more suiting vision of a changing, fractured and elusive self? In comparison to traditional portraiture that seems to idealise subjectivity, elevating it to the status of 'essence', immutable and immortalized in the process of representation, almost assuming the existence of the soul.

I described medical images as 'truthful' because I think this notion of verisimilitude is problematic, the self is something we have a sense of, but that by definition cannot be seen, therefore what we see in medical images is not it, but it's as close as we can get to having a visual token of what it's like, where it inhabits. Following scientific discourse, we are not used to believing in things that we cannot see, we deem they do not exist, thinking that the other alternative, the soul, lies in the realm of religion. However, just because science cannot provide us an image of it, it does not mean the self does not exist, and it does not mean it is necessarily the soul.

We exist in the minds of others that know us (who know more of, or differently, about us than we do), and our unconscious also exists, the even more elusive version of our subjectivity. We are too used to equating seeing with believing, to equating what we think with what we are, and to looking for the truth by removing the skin, as if it stood for the fake appearance concealing the ultimate reality. We learned the story of the Incredulity of St Thomas all too well, and forgot it was a story.

 The Incredulity of St Thomas, Caravaggio.

 

 

These are two lithographs from 2012 by Susan Aldworth, were she explores anatomically unorthodox representations of the body:

 

 Nature Nurture 2

 

 Reassembling the Self 4

 

 

Also on show now is Transience, a solo exhibition of Susan Alworth's work at the GV art Gallery, which I am looking forward to visiting.

Anatomical Wax Works

Eleanor Crook is a wax model artist that has done work for medical museums such as the Gordon Museum of Pathology and the Royal College of Surgeons, has a background in sculpture and fine art (Central Saint Martins and Royal Academy) and whose practice bridges art and science, using the fascinating technique of wax modelling. I would like to show images of a recent piece titled Death Seals Our Long Work of Thoughts, and a video in which we can see her working on a pathological model:

(Two images above) Death Seals Our Long Work of Thoughts, Eleanor Crook, 2013

 

 

 

 

She's quite unique in her specialisation, involvement with museums, as well as producing work of what would fall under an artistic nature. I find it very interesting how the materials and technique she has chosen to master, have beautifully inscribed her in the history of anatomical model making, linking her work to La Specola's museum specimens, for instance, the classic 18th century Italian models, which she even mentions in the video as an important influence.

 

And how a technique -wax modelling- having it's own cultural history, connotations, particular aesthetic and technical nature, can be further developed by a contemporary artist, employing this charged language to produce works that are relevant today, yet acknowledge our cultural history.

 

I guess this is how I feel about printmaking too, possessing intrinsic meaning, that I strive to discover and unleash, finding a logical and creative marriage between form and content.

 

Prosopology of the Dead, Eleanor Crook.

 

 

Prosopology of Death, is another piece by Eleanor Crook refering to death, and what I find so successful is the fact that the technique speaks of death too, so she uses this language to her advantage in shaping her ideas. Wax refers to death in many ways, from the anatomical models of disease, to it's use in death masks, and it's physical similarity to skin, which has made it a preferred material for realistic life-like representations of the body throughout history-which inevitably remind us of corpses. Following this trail of thought, go to an earlier post I did on wax. 

 







Tattooed Saints and Religious Anatomies

I absolutely revere Ramon Maiden's work, an artist from Barcelona; the more I see the more connections I find with my own art and interests.

I came across his work at a tattoo parlour in East London, his religious figures. Then I saw his references to anatomy, and his work on wooden hands.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tattoos, anatomy and religion, what a great mix. I like his emphasis on the wounds of martyrs, and the treatment he gives to skin, engraving representation on top of representation, creating layers of iconography on top of the body. There is the 'real' body, the image of the body, and Ramon Maiden embellishing a further layer of meaning. The reference to anatomy is very effective as the skin serves as a great metaphor for the process of representation, as if this was the 'image' we present of our true selves (our insides). A socially acceptable, gendered, hermetic, leather vessel that contains and conceals what we 'really' are: a mess of fat, blood and guts.

Mechanical Organisms

I went to see the finalists for the Place Prize for Dance, on the 26th of April, a show where a great selection of contemporary dance pieces come together. My favourite piece was Riccardo Buscarini's Athletes, which I later found out won the first prize.

I scribbled some words and thoughts it provoked:

Mechanical bio-robotic creatures, cold-blooded reptiles, depending on each other for survival. Outer space ecosystem. Survival of the fittest. Nature's inevitable cruelty. Macro and microcosm: outerspace and microscopic level. Killing in the animal kingdom, eating, reproduction and death, function and instinct. Interaction, interdependence. Praying Mantis. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sound in space. Silence. Nature's cycle of destruction.

The pristine white suits the dancers were wearing, had an external spinal cord structure attached on their back, which gave another layer of associations to the piece: covering the bodies perfectly, hygienically sealed, unstained, the bones outstanding interlocking parts of a greater mechanism. This emphasised the idea of interconnected parts as the dancers smoothly slid around each other as a lubricated biological machine. Or perhaps as inner components of the inside body, like individual cells that live, eat, reproduce and die.

Contemporary Woodcut Workshops

I delivered a woodcut course earlier this year, at Sussex Printmaking Studio, spread over 5 weeks between January and March 2011. We looked at the basics of woodblock printing and then explored the use of colour and grain. I would like to thank Geoffrey Plant, Pernille Harari, Belinda Chavasse and Michael Kalkbrenner for attending these workshops, it was great working with them. I will be doing another course in the summer, Discovering Relief, where we will look at all the possibilities within relief printing, experimenting with materials and plate-making. The dates for this course need to be confirmed, and I will post them as soon as they are.

Contemporary Woodcut Workshops was divided into three phases:

BASICS
During the first few sessions I introduced them into the technique, how to transfer the image on to the block, how to use the different carving tools, and how to approach image-making in relief printing. I showed them examples of artists using single block printing in black, and they worked on small blocks of soft wood, printing with black ink onto paper. Then we introduced colour by using coloured paper, applying watercolour, acryllic, computer printed images, and colour paper.

Some modern and contemporary artists we looked at for reference were (in order) Emma Stibbon, M. C. Escher, Uriel Marin and Paul Gauguin:

Printing exclusively with black ink is limiting, but can produce great results, and can make it easier to tackle relief printing for the first time, and to think about graphic language, mark making and the relationship between black and white in different areas of the print. These are examples of the work they produced:

 Belinda Chavasse

 Geoffrey Plant

 Geoffrey Plant

 

 Michael Kalkbrenner

Michael Kalkbrenner

 

 Michael Kalkbrenner

 

Michael Kalkbrenner

 

 

COLOUR

We experimented with using colour whilst still printing with one plate only, employing different methods to put the ink onto the surface of the plate. We looked at different artist's use of colour, such as Mabel Hewit's white-line technique, or Uriel Marin's blending of different colours on the same roller:

 

 

  

 

Here are some examples of the prints done at the workshop using colour on a single plate:

 

 

 Belinda Chavasse

 

 Geoffrey Plant

 

 Geoffrey Plant

 

 Geoffrey Plant

 

 Michael Kalkbrenner

 

 Pernille Harari

 



Pernille Harari

 

 

 

GRAIN

Finally we discovered how to incorporate the grain of the woodblock into the image, looking at different types of wood and examples from artists for inspiration. Brian Nash Gill makes amazing prints from the cross section of trees, Edvard Much printed a lovely Kiss with a grainy block and  Merlyn Chesterman is a British contemporary printmaker who often employs the grain of the wood in her practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Towards the end of the course, the students worked on bigger blocks, choosing the type of wood they wanted to use according to its grain, and incorporating what they had learned throughout the course.

 

 





 Michael Kalkbrenner

 

 Michael Kalkbrenner

 

Belinda Chavasse