BLACKGOLD

BLACK GOLD a collaborative project by Mark Lipton, Hege Tapio and Marta de Menezes.

photo credit: Hege Tapio 2020

07|18|2020 Tucked away beside perfumes lies a petri dish with silica pearls glued to the inside upper lid, letting the tiny bit of <BLACKGOLD> to dry. I smuggled a tiny amount into Norway.

08|08|2020 BLACK GOLD A collaborative project by Mark Lipton, Hege Tapio and Marta de Menezes.

Inspired by experimental alchemists like Henning Brand, a tedious and foulsmelling process has taken place to create this condensed liquid of black gold.

Though no longer golden, approximately 700ml of urine has been distilled down to dark matter. The project was initiated to see if we could discover amorphous crystals.

From the medieval time and up until our present, human body matter has been a resource for a wide range of practice – spanning from magic and folk remedy to medicinal purpose and advanced biotechnology. Just by looking at the use of urine we can find that: Back in the times of the Roman empire urine was used in the tanning industry, softening the leather – there was even a concept of “urine tax” where the urine from the citizens was collected via public pots to gather urine for the tanning pools. And as stale urine becomes ammonia – it was widely used as a stain remover as well as laundry product. It has also been used to make fertilizer, medicine, brain cells and even gunpowder. Furthermore urine has proved to be useful in making of electricity, or as injections to promote fertility. The German chemist Friedrich Wöhler,- who began the field of organic chemistry, managed to chemically recreate a compound found in urine called urea in 1828. By this he proved that it was possible to produce organic chemicals in the lab, and also that humans were part of nature.

The project Black Gold is closely linked to the work of the artist Hege Tapio where she makes use of her own body matter, to be more specific – harvesting her own bodyfat to produce biofuel. Her previous project Humanfuel yielded in total about 800ml of what could safely be called the world’s most exclusive

BLACK GOLD a collaborative project by Mark Lipton, Hege Tapio and Marta de Menezes. biofuel. The artproject started out first as a webpage presenting the Humanfuel product made from the fictious Lithuanian based company Lipotechnica. The artist was later invited to produce the actual biofuel in 2016 for the exhibition connected to the HYBRID MATTERs Nordic Art & Science Network. Coming from the oil-capital of Norway, Stavanger – this has been her contribution and way of commenting on how we extort the resources around us. Tapio uses the term extreme selfmining, reminding us that we also pose as a resource.

-- Hege Tapio

FACTT exhibition 2019 | < (be) coming > Gales Gallery, Toronto, Ontario curated by Marta de Menezes, Roberta Buiani, Joel Ong & Yu-Zhi FACTT – Festival of Art & Science, Toronto, Ontario, Canada An Exhibition of Experimental Contemporary Art : the impermanence becoming permanent

photo credit: Roberta Buiani 2019

Brought to you by Arte Institute, Cultivamos Cultura & ArtSci Salon

BLACK GOLD A collaborative project by Mark Lipton, Hege Tapio and Marta de Menezes.

Signaling with language like “BLACK GOLD”, we invite immediate memories to emerge linking your thinking to petroleum. In fact, the term entered public discourse in 1910, when BLACK GOLD entered American Frontier mythology in the Wild West, referring to petroleum or oil. 1910 was the year of Annie Oakley, the American sharpshooter; she was featured in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show showing off her skills with a rifle. Annie Oakley’s precision skill made her legendary throughout the world as a star in a male-dominated sport.

The image of a woman dominating the American patriarchy for an uncanny ability to shoot is set against Mark Lipton’s tendency to fall into queer and/or matriarchal communities. In the 1980s his media art was enmeshed among the crosshairs of Lesbian Avengers, ACTUP & Queer Nation activist politics—and sexual politics in particular. As videographer, he worked alongside lesbian sex workers in Manhattan’s East Village. He was the camera-boy on-call for Annie Sprinkle’s (1992) Sluts and Goddesses Workshops and regularly supported 2

BLACK GOLD a collaborative project by Mark Lipton, Hege Tapio and Marta de Menezes. friends learning about and how to ejaculate. As work at that time attended to capturing female ejaculation and various related arousal states, Lipton participated by learning the multiple ways cis males can ejaculate without direct stimulation. Simple put, Lipton captured prostate milking and perfected passive penetrative sexual orgasms with multiple ejaculations. This is not corruption & it remains very challenging for Lipton to describe or discuss in public settings.

In 1995, Lipton was hospitalized for an emergency rhizotomy, i.e., an operation to cut the anterior or posterior spinal nerve roots. My rhizotomy led to a rich discovery. Lipton reports,

it was amazing! there is something inside me, inside my body, that held a secret to life; deep in my body; processed by gosh-darn i couldn’t tell you. i can tell you that it wasn’t right. that i could harvest this secret – to reduce my pain; to increase pleasure; to come; not like coming in from the rain. . . come, ejaculate.

Always in question, female and male alike, was the cellular makeup of the abundant flowing fluids. The prostate secretes fluids to nourish and protect sperm. Vaginal secretions, the medical term for ‘getting wet’, is fluid discharge composed of cells from cervix and vagina, including mucus, bacteria and water.

Certainly, cis female and male fluids were a result of very different kinds of stimulation. As Lipton spoke to groups about queer sexuality for cis men, an unanswered question remained: were the fluids variably different?

BLACK GOLD holds 1910 as a point in human history to measure against time.

As Lipton digs into this and other related unanswered questions, history points to 1910 as more significant than the first known use of petroleum’s monikerblack gold.

Fluid research pointed Lipton toward Daniel Bernoulli's principle in hydrodynamics. First published in 1738, it was not until 1910 that the principle enters public discourse to refer to the pressure in a stream of fluid & its relationship to speed and flow. Simply, Bernoulli discovered that the pressure in a liquid stream will reduce as the speed of the flow is increased. The pleasure 3

BLACK GOLD a collaborative project by Mark Lipton, Hege Tapio and Marta de Menezes. of ‘getting wet,’ ‘squirting’ or other acts of ejaculative– when one’s body can be stimulated to produce plentiful fountains. For those of us experienced in these deep acts of/for pleasure, Bernoulli’s principle is second nature.

Medical communities are only interested in these liquid outpourings to diagnosis or for further pathologizing sex-ed and sexual bodies. Perhaps, we wonder, this pathological bias is also connected to that year – 1910, when the medicalization of more common therapies, treatments and instruments also enter public discourse. That is, 1910 is the recorded year for the first use of the words: chemotherapy, electrocardiography and immunotherapy. Medical hegemonies would only consider Lipton’s question about the variabilities of ejaculate within venereal contexts—now termed ‘sexually transmitted infections.’ Queer suspicions of the pathologizing and medicalizing of our liquid pleasure are founded of lived experiences of medical distrust and abuse.

1910 also welcomes language like nympho; latency period; psychosexuality; SOS; state-of-the-art; soda jerk; super-strength; and woman of the street. Let us rejoice 1910’s euphemistic celebration of sex work and (walking) sex workers.

1910 was also the year medicalized rhizotomy entered public discourse.

Within this context, and against the backdrop of a summer residency (2019) at Cultivamos Cultura/, Mark Lipton, Hege Tapio and Marta de Menezes joined forces to further explore the Art and Science of Lipton’s liquids. A before/after scenario and other explorations with fluids and distillation processes let to the creation of our BLACK GOLD. As a substance, it is solid, liquid and gas. Microcrystals only visible with magnifying lenses float in the molasses-like, gooey liquid; the “foul-smelling” experience described by Tapio is contained in the capped beaker. My golden showers, approximately 700ml of urine, distilled to dark matter & presented here, with the support, help, technical expertise and lovingkindness of Hege Tapio and Marta de Menezes.

- marklipton

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Photocreit: Marta De Mendez | Cultivamos Cultura 10|13| 2019 @ Centro Hospitalar Psiquiátrico de Lisboa.

BLACK GOLD a collaborative project by Mark Lipton, Hege Tapio and Marta de Menezes.

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