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.
