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."

Witchcraft and Dissection

I went to a talk today titled Dissection and Witchcraft: Images of Corpses in Early Modern Art, by Constanza Isaza Martinez, which was based on her MA dissertation (History of Art, Courtauld Institute), at the Last Tuesday Society, part of a series of lectures organised by Morbid Anatomy.

Last time I heard about the Last Tuesday Society was admiring a beautifully crafted flyer for one of their famous parties, and besides throwing unique quirky parties, they are an organisation "devoted to exploring and furthering the esoteric, literary and artistic aspects of life in London and beyond", and they have the most amazing taxidermy-fanatic shop (11 Mare Street).

I have also come across Morbid Anatomy before, a blog and library based in Brooklyn, New York, who exist to survey 'the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture'. Sharing their love for skeletons, and corpses across the animal kingdom, these two uncanny venues have come together to delight us with a series of lectures and workshops throughout June and July, check their websites for more info.

So there I was, in the back room of the shop, still recovering from marvellous and monstrous sights such as a two-headed bat, a monkey-mermaid and a winged rodent.

Constanza's lecture was unique and fascinating in combining two realms that share a predilection for the body: witchcraft and anatomy. She discussed ways in which both the anatomist and the witch use the body, body parts and fluids, to exert their power. Similarly, they access the insides to search for ointments, particular organs or excretions to create their concoctions. Yet their status and representation could not be furthest apart, precisely because anatomists wanted to disassociate themselves from any occult practices, and wanted to present their practice as a new mission exclusively driven by the discovery of knowledge and truth, and completely unrelated to morbid curiosity.

All this talk was illustrated by historical prints of witches and anatomical illustrations, including the work of Vesalius and Alfred Durer and Hans Baldung. I truly enjoyed the lecture, which I found touched on a matter that has not been researched enough, and which my own research is concerned with.

Witches in a Cellar, Jacob de Gheyn II.

Contemporary Graphic Artists: Viewing the Insides

Koen Hauser, Modische Atlas Der Anatomie

Invisible Creature, Bleeding Through

Erwin Olaf, Royal Blood

A few artists caught my eye from Black Magic/White Noise (Klanten, Hellige, Ehmann, 2007) which analyses the influence of gothic horror in art, photography and illustration.

The aperture of the body is exploited as shockingly disturbing, within images of the horrific. The photographic language in this images works best as referencing the real. It makes the impossible true, the insides seen. Our worst nightmare comes true in the paradox of the hidden shown.

In Koen Hauser the anatomical order of a plastic model prooves dreadfully artificial and fake, forcing the realisation of our unconscious knowledge: we don't really know our insides. We don't and we can't access them/us-because this prohibited access entails death (literal death of the opened corpse and metaphorical death of the self). Anatomical structures are like euphemisms of the real experience of breaking into our insides, that attempt to sooth with order, function and meaning. Realising that they are a mask produces fear of encountering the real, the irrational chaos in which the self dissolves in the opening of the body-as-limit-of-the-self. Confronting thus a reference of the real body and of the anatomical model wakes the awareness of the artifice, making it fail and turn perverse and confrontational.

In Bleeding Through the impossibility of visualizing a living human means that forcing this vision brings horrors of decay and anhilation, the inside is nothing, and death. The outside form of the body becomes the structure that holds us, and once profaned our soul looses it's temple, darkness engulfs.

I love the tool in Erwin Olaf's Royal Blood, which makes the image more raw and brute. Tools hold the potential to transgress the vital limit of the skin and sometimes seem to hold that inherent violence within them...

Visions of Excess, SPILL 2009

Visions of Excess is a "12hour voyage into the heart of darkness" consisting of live performance and other events. It was commissioned by SPILL 2009 and curated by Adam Lee and Ron Athey. Located in the Shunt vaults of London, an underground dungeon-like tunelled space, it happened on Easter Sunday.

The cover of the DVD fuses the anatomical, religious and occult, in a tarot-like allegorical figure. The whole event occurs at a particular time in the Christian calendar, just like the whole SPILL festival, a time of yearly repeating rituals that commemorate Christ's passion. This hints at how much live performance and body art drink from the blood of Christ.

A quote by Michele Occelli (KCTV) at the back of the dvd cover reads:
"...a ritual aiming at subverting spatiologies of consumption, passification and entertainment through the inscription in the body of the city, of a rupture where creative ecstasy and collective meanings are left alone to converse..."
The idea of the rupture, result of breaking open or cutting, is most interesting as the symbology of the wound is precisely what links the religious and performative with respect to the body. The underground tunnels are the collective insides, where performers cut themselves and society's flesh, subverting and disrupting (anatomical, religious, patriarchal) order.
According to the curators the event aims to explore Bataille's concepts of eroticism, death and the forbidden. What follows are my notes, scattered reactions to watching the documental:

Ron Athey combing blond wig pinned to his head, blood on glass pieces, anal insertion his own hand / Theatrical lighting and setting in dungeon-like vaults / Female passive naked body lying skin hair removal tweezers by audience, plucking negative thoughts, proyection onto body as receptacle / Reading future with cards tarot old lady dressed man / Man figure dagger fire paint on body mickey mouse plastic head, head covered with tights / piercing tattooes nudity / Blood omnipresent / Pierced strings of shiny beads hanging from forehead, removed blood flows face, blows red pigment from hand, magic like trick / Magical Occult / The medical, woman gloves probes liquids mixing blood water / Man chewing gum wearing giant shoulder pads, takes gum out of his mouth to shape it like little men hung stuck around him, sitting on piano, he picks ready-formed men to chew and remake again, floods piano water bucket / Flags and guns posing nude men, masculinity, soldiers, phallus / Franko B on a swing, swings to music-box sound / Self cutting allusions and literal / Flames matches attached pierced skin man / Exhorcism contract ritual / Transsexual man acting male with food spaguetti and bottle of champagne / Naked woman dressed as doll dancing squirts water out of vagina and anus /

I specially liked the last performance, by Piotr Wegrzynski, where he sheds a red second skin. What at first seems to be a layer of paint is pierced and hooked to ropes, still one thinks it's his real skin-after the recurrent real piercing of skin we are exposed to in many other events-then cut open with surgical scissors by a secondary figure, whom inserts her hands into the opening at the chest. Then with the help of the strained red ropes the body peals itself from the red covering, and this red shriveled rag-man hangs from the tendon-arterial strands.
The relationship between the fake and artificial versus the real is compared to the relationship between outer flesh and inner guts.

Antichrist, Lars Von Trier

Lars Von Trier's Antichrist (2009) is a film about a couple that loose their son and retreat to a cabin in the woods. Coping with grief the mother receives psychotherapy from her husband and they go to the place she most fears: Eden, where she spent the last summer with her son while writing her thesis on Gynocide.

The film explores the (historical, mythological) belief of the evil nature of women. The female character studies the historical persecution, torture and killing of women, and the archaic theories on the evilness of their nature. Her memory of the woods, isolated with her child, engrossed in her thesis, and surrounded by the evocative atmosphere of the woods, begins a psychological process instigated by her feelings of guilt and loss. The circumstances in which she lost her son, the fact that the sexual act coincides with the baby's death, triggers the association of her sexuality with evil doing, she blames her lust for his death, for not being the protective and nurturing 'good' mother. She begins to believe and construct the 'female evil nature' within herself.

As Katarine Park explains in Secrets of Women, the Middle Ages held the idea of the 'wise women', old experienced women who held practical knowledge on female sexuality and health, from prevention of pregnancy to abortion. This practices and women (the witches) were damned and the male physicians were to gain the monopoly over women's reproductive lives, focusing on virginity, fertility and chilbearing (or better said son-bearing) in the interests of the patriarchal family. It is in this dichotomy of the witch lustful and sexual versus the good mother-wife that the character tears apart.

The episode of self-mutilation shows her cutting her genitals, in an attempt to 'castrate' that sexual evil instinct. There is a split between the cutter, equiparated with the mother and her rational side, aiming to control and subject her body-her lustful side. The genitals become the embodiment of evil, that she attempts to remove from her self in a literal way.

Hidden Anatomy Work in Progress

Preparing plates for the series The Hidden Anatomy of the Vagina.

Spill tarot cards: the magician

Helena Hunter, SPILL tarot card

SPILL was an experimental performance festival celebrated in London, at the Barbican centre, 18th-24th April 2011. The creation of a limited edition series of tarot cards was part of the 2009 edition of the festival, where photographer Manuel Vason collaborated with performance artists like Franko B, Ron Athey, Marisa Carnesky, Raimund Hoghe, Robert Pacitti, Lois Keidan, Lee Adams, Carla Esperanza Tommasini, Sheila Ghelani, Oreet Ashery, Rajni Shah, Noblesse Oblige, Vaginal Davis, Grace Ellen Barkey, Harminder Singh Judge, Kira O'Reilly, Helena Hunter, Empress Stah, Dominic Johnson, Julia Bardsley and Yann Marussich.

The Mountebank, Marseilles deck, 1701-1715

The figure of the Magician specially bridges tarot and performance, it is the first trump, the first card of the superior set (suit) that constitute the Major Arcana. He is the mountebank-a person who deceives others for money, also the seller of patent (quack) medicines in public spaces; the 'sleight of hand artist', it would correspond to the Jungian archetype of the trickster. He can be the stage magician or the artisan, he who creates artifice.

In some cards he appears playing with cups and balls, or items that represent the suits of the Minor Arcana: Cups, Coins, Swords (knives) and Clubs (baton)-this last he holds in his hand and later becomes the wand of the magician, in the esoteric reading.

This figure is close to the performer in that he creates artifice and deceives infront of an audience, what he shows is not real. He tricks, plays, appeals and engages, and what he deals with are symbols. Objects on a table that are not only what they seem, he transforms, creates or makes disappear.

The Magician, Rider-Waite deck

Spanish playing Cards

Early Spanish cards, Valencia, 1778.

The earliest tarot cards where italian, when around 1450 allegorical illustrations where added to the usual four decks of italian playing cards. These were still used for games, and it was not until the 18th century that they were used for divination purposes. This explains the similarity between tarot cards and playing cards, as is visually clear in spanish playing cards.

Modern Spanish playing cards.

Tarot cards

After making these plates I have thought about using them as tarot cards in my next performance. Tarot cards refer to my practice in several ways that attract me to them:

1. Medieval imagery and woodcuts : the earliest known tarot cards are from the 15th century, named the Visconti-Sforza 'tarocchi' decks, reproduced in 1975 as the Pierpont Morgan-Bergano Tarocchi deck. Early tarot packs are often medieval woodcuts.
2. The presence of godesses and female empowered figures: like the Empress, the High Priestess/Popess and Strenght/Fortitude.
3. The rich symbolism: the macrocosm view, the spiritual realm, the presence of key Christian symbols (like the chalice), the concentration of symbolic meanings that would be interesting to analise in relation to the body and menstrual symbolism.
4. The ritualistic and performative in relation to the cards in divinatory practices.

Reference: The Encyclopedia of Tarot, Stuart R. Kaplan

The Anatomy of the Hidden Vagina

Some of the small plates are going to become part of a greater composition, titled The Anatomy of the Hidden Vagina, were I explore medieval imagery, medical and religious depictions of wounds, dissections, and cuts, in relation to menstrual symbolism and scientific discourse. Paired up, the image on the left is the creation of Eve missing the opening, and the image on the right provides an ironically scientific analisis of it in relation to female genitalia, it reads: "Ectopic pregnancy in thoracic cavity/vaginoplasty and birth canal reconstruction".

Body opening

Body Opening: Gender/Religion/Anatomy intersect in the Wound is the title of my MA research paper where I analise the work of ORLAN, Franko B and Jenny Saville.

ABSTRACT
Within Western conceptions of the body, I will analyse the symbolism of body opening and the intersection of gender, anatomy and religion. A critical insight into the history of dissection will establish the religious and gendered meanings inscribed in dissection practices. Christian mythology from God's opening of Adam to extract the second sex to the sacred wound of Jesus, inscribes dissection in the symbolic realm. Female bodily experience of ovulation, birth and menstruation, is hidden behind masculine versions, such as the male Creator, the male surgeon, and the male sacrifice. The vagina underlies the artificial cut.
I will analyse how three contemporary artists address the intersection of gender, religion and anatomy in the cut flesh and alter the symbolic patriarchal order. I will interpret the blood in Franko B's performances in relation to menstruation, Eucharist and pathology; how ORLAN takes female agency to the extreme in managing surgically her own body; and Saville's depiction of gendered meat.

Jesus is in my heart

Jesus is in my Heart explores the medieval metaphor of religious experience compared to being 'pregnant' with Christ, the heart of the faithful becomes a metaphorical uterus. (Katarine Park)

Etching and photographic process.

The Vaginal Nature of Gauguin's Oviri and Tate's 'Phallacy'

When visiting the retrospective of Gauguin at the Tate Modern, I found a very interesting sculpture called Oviri that represents a form of primordial feminine force, an aggressive Goddess. Oviri means 'savage' in tahitian language, and Gauguin used this word to name a female figure that fascinated him, he did several woodcuts on the theme and considered it his best ceramic asking for it to be placed at his tomb. It is unclear wether he was inspired by original Tahitian myths or created and named such a Goddess himself, but this is not of so much importance. What I found really intriguing about this sculpture, specially in relationship to the whole exhibition, was Gauguin's exploration of myth and his representation of the female. The nude women in his works correspond to ideas of feminitity, "cultural arquetypes correlated with his attraction to the Romantic myth of the 'Eternal Femenine' , much invoked by symbolist artists and writers of the period, whereby a woman was an instinctual or spiritual being, wether a wicked temptress or a saintly virgin." (quote taken from Tate Modern website)

However Oviri departs from the virgin/temptress dichotomy, and seems to hint to a natural female force that surpasses the stereotypes of the time, based on the two feminine icons: Eve the sinner and the saintly Virgin Mary. Gauguin, in his unique position as artist and explorer of myth and living in exotic Tahiti, has digged into ideas of the wild, the savage and the primitive. Looking to explore a pagan culture, he was terribly disappointed when he discovered that missionaries had been converting the islanders for more than a century. This did not stop him from exploring ideas of the pagan-primitive from his western standpoint. He successfully shapes a female force, an arquetype, we can recognise in the collective unconscious, that of the primordial female creator. He described her as "monstrous and majestic, drunk with pride, rage and sorrow." Note the reference to deep emotional power and expression, and the contradictory monstrous, majestic and prideful, conveying what is powerful beyond control. This female God is irrational and violent, unlike the rational judge male version of God invented by a male dominant society, ultimate rational explanator and definer. This female God cries and rages, as a menstruating woman would.

And at the back of the sculpture, between the waves of long untammed hair emerge two foldings at the sides of a giant crack. And then I comprehend that it is a vaginal opening: primordial creator of all.

The mention of the menstruating woman results from reading The Wise Wound, a book by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove (first published 1999) which explores cultural, social and psychological dimensions of the menstrual cycle. The book associates the menstruating woman with the cursed Eve and a neglected active and powerful female sexuality, whilst associating the ovulating biological and psychological reality to cultural notions of the traditional female role as mother and submissive wife. In the light of this book, Oviri would no doubt be the rationally uncontrolled, emotionally and earthly rooted feminine force. Furthermore linking the deep associations of (menstrual)blood to violence, life and death, Gauguin's menstrual Goddess would be strangling the wolf cub she bears in her blood stained hands, to symbolise her blood-power to decide upon life and death. The female power to sacrifice every month (the blood, the unborn), death inexorably linked to her power to create life. Oviri is hence the God, the Creator, and a feminine one, for it is in the nature of she to sacrifice and create every month, and to give birth, to create.

After all this realisation while I was visiting the exhibition (and currently reading The Wise Wound), I eagerly looked for the catalogue of the exhibition in the bookshop, looking forward to reading with passionate enjoyment more about the female God and her giant vagina, when I found the text about Oviri and to my complete horror, shock, anger and dismay (and that was, without even being menstruating) it described it as having a "phallic nature"! I read the passage at least three times to make sure I was making sense of what I was reading, and yes, it did say the Goddess, with those protruding giant vaginal labia, was of "phallic nature". Anything but phallic, for Goddess' sake!!

NOTE: It proved very difficult to find an image on the internet of the vagina-shaped back of the sculpture, with which to illustrate my point, which in actual fact further demonstrates the social and cultural neglect towards an active powerful femininity, (and the vagina). Regarding the drawing, I didn't draw in detail the wolf cub she is clasping. In Paul Gauguin's article in the wikipedia Oviri's "phallic" nature is further stated.