Caitlyn Kamminga

We can try to understand this schematically as the bees absorbing pollen and making honey, while Williams’ body absorbs words. Pollen thus becomes honey, while words become knowledge. Words burrow their way –from one’s dreams and feet– into one’s brain: a theory of knowledge that can be dreamed into a being through bodily contact. Williams shared that she got wind of the flaws in her system of language-learning when, one night, she dreamed the words apicultores casco (Spanish for beekeeper’s helmet) The next morning she discovered that those words appeared nowhere in the newspapers that she had been wearing. She then changed pedagogical horses and voided language as a medium for knowledge. She bleached the newspapers. Cleansed of words, they became the material for a hat that encased –and visually obliterated and blinded– her head, while supporting a megaphone. Williams crafted, from these elements, the unpronounceable name of her performance.

The words and voice we hear through the megaphone are those of Alejandro David Osorio Pérez, her beekeeping mentor. The performance is of Williams walking, gesturing and pantomiming the actions of beekeeping. This is how Williams learned beekeeping; not through words. In this pantomime, language is dismissed from the game to which Williams and Osorio Perez retreated. [Instead, they entered] a strange, penumbral region of communication –they gestured. Semaphore without the flags, they offered each other intuitions and vagaries. Over time, they assembled passages and sequences of actions that filled in local color around the ambiguity of their gesticulations.

“Repetition is remembering,” it is said. To learn the necessary actions of her new skill, Williams would wander the evening streets of Bogotá repeating the gestures she had seen and learned in the preceding daytime hours. This perambulation itself, though not essential to beekeeping, as far as we know, is at the heart of Williams’ practice as an artist. Walking delivers the world in transitive, in-between or halfcomplete gestures and moments. That these moments and gestures may be more true to the heart of experience than the alleged denotations of words, is interesting but not fully the point. The point, foregrounded by Williams’ performance, is that, whether with words or gestures, we are acting in a social field. Words may be embodied, that is, put into service through a body in social action. And gestures may be the actual body [in motion]. But it is the relatedness that has the sting.

In her performance, the pedagogical gestures Williams and Osorio Pérez exchange with one another, inform the actions that Williams directs toward us; her invisible (since she is blinded by the hat) audience. What we witness is a deaf and blind, but not dumb, hat swallowing a vulnerable body from above. A pained series of gestures emanate from this figure and a painfully hard to hear voice resounds from on top of its head. Should we mirror back her actions – as she did with Osorio Pérez? “Not sure,” is the answer. At the end of watching her performance, will we all be qualified beekeepers? It is possible. Though perhaps a more reasonable ambition lies in an observation Williams herself made, “Wearing a specific garment and walking a specific way is a gesture, a way to transform. Think John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.” Transforming whom or what, one might ask? Well, one another perhaps. Think Saturday Night Fever, dancing, mimicking and mirroring,aping and parroting. Mimicking and mirroring, as Williams and Osorio Pérez rehearsed it, as Travolta and Karen Gorney performed it, is a foundation of relatedness, a way of being with and for one another. By referencing Saturday Night Fever, Williams implies that the garments we wear and the way we walk, stage the person we are for others.

In an ongoing series of works titled Exchange and Dirt Shirt, Williams revisits the concerns of territory, trespass and relatedness. The work in question is multipart and multi-genre. It shifts axis from agriculture to social practice with the wave of an arm. For the piece, Williams uses her armpit as the agricultural node where she germinates wheat seeds. That is to say, woven into the hair of her armpit, moistened by the perspiration from her body, the artist actually germinates seeds of wheat that will go on to become the material for baking bread that she, Williams, will serve to her audience. (Here she is the demi-restaurateur of the opening paragraph.)

Let’s clarify. Once the seeds have germinated, they are transplanted from this original site and nursed along to the next state of cultivation in a shirt worn by the artist. The shirt is something of an exquisite corpse: a man’s white dress-shirt or business shirt that has been changed to contain compartments filled with soil in which the seeds are nourished by water taken from public water-sources. Next, the seedlings are transplanted to public land where they are brought to maturity by the artist. The plants are finally harvested and used in the gallery performance by Williams, to bake the aforementioned bread that she serves to her audience.

A spirit of relatedness shapes the work and, relatedly, the work is also a useful cipher for a collapse of narcissism. Aesthetically, narcissism can be identified through its codes of expression. The opening shot in the video portion of Exchange encodes an expectation of feminine seduction and/or narcissism. Williams’ hand is raised as she looks toward the viewer, or a mirror, to her run hand through her hair. Suddenly, shatteringly, the gesture shifts to reveal, on her armpit, an unrecognizable stain. It is truly difficult at first to figure out what we are seeing under Williams’ arm. Codes are broken here (in the sense of “trashed” not “deciphered.”) Cinematic codes to be sure, but also, throughout the entire work of Exchange and Dirt Shirt, codes of production and consumption, codes of dependence and hierarchy.

In a sense, throughout the body of Williams’ work, she re-makes codes of how individuals and groups might relate to one another–how they, we really, might exchange a glance, a word, a gesture or a language; how we might negotiate something we could call our ethical responsibility towards one another and the world.

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Biography: Laurence Hegarty is an artist and psychoanalyst base din New York City. His work can be viewed at Laurencehegarty.com VOL 3 | ISSUE 6 | FALL 2021 131

Moira Williams: Let them eat bread!