Recycled Origins Catalog

recycled origins

recycled origins vanessa castro

Use what is dominant in our culture and change it quickly.

Jenny Holzer

From the first cave drawings to depictions of Eve with a fig leaf, there are few artistic fixations more oft revisited and reinterpreted as the female body. And although these interpretations of the female form have fluctuated throughout time, the nineteenth century was a site of pivotal change for this iconic image. The birth of modernism gave way to artistic critique of institutional norms via the radical reinterpretation of artistic tropes such as the female nude. Contemporary art, rooted in post-modernism, soon implied that “the perception of the same material, the same sign, can change radically depending on where it is viewed” (Fraser 4). The female body thus becomes a site of political change. As artists continue to reinterpret the definition of the female form, manners in which we experience and view the female body diversify. Although the young artists in Recycled Origins may not be aware that their work cites the concerns of artists before them, they may not all acknowledge that their work is relevant to discussions of feminism and institutional critique.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, French artists turned to neoclassicism by focusing on the aesthetics and themes of Greek and Roman art. They focused on symmetry, mythical imagery, and of course, the iconic and idealized female body. With soft lighting and a peaceful and dreamlike atmosphere, Felix Trutat’s Rest and Desires (1845) embodies the popular imagery of his epoch: a pale, hairless woman reclines on an exotic rug, looking straight at the viewer (Figure 1). Her body is positioned toward the male onlooker, quite literally catering to the male gaze.

While the French were obsessing over classical themes, the British painter John Constable was painting landscapes. The

idea of going outside and painting what one sees was revolutionary. A select group of French artists were inspired to follow suit by rejecting the notions of tradition and fantasy prioritized by neoclassicism, igniting a modernist movement that threw the artistic canon into question. Jean-François Millet, for example, depicted simple, repetitive and often mechanical peasant life. He exposed a reality that had not been seen in art before, for his subjects existed “oblivious to everything else, including the fact of being beheld” (Fried 789). This lack of self-consciousness in portraiture suggests an authentic reality as opposed to a fabricated one. Feminist art would later see this notion as a critical tool in addressing the gaze.

As the latter half of the 1900s dawned, the Parisian artist Gustave Courbet brought modernism into full swing. Courbet’s realism was manifest in his paintings of non-aristocratic subjects. It was not only his subject matter that challenged traditional portraiture— Courbet rejected neo-classical notions of representation by using darker colors and looser gestures while keeping certain elements of academic art, such as the female nude, intact. His work was initially viewed as “uncultured and even boorish,” but would soon inspire a movement of artists who used popular imagery to address tensions in art and representation (Schapiro 181-2).

Three years after Manet’s famed Olympia (Figure 2), which is considered to be one of the first depictions of a female body to break the classical mold, Courbet painted Origin of the World (Figure 3). The reclining subject and draped fabric covering her upper half reflects the models of neoclas-

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

sicism. Yet the harsh lighting, unconventional composition, wide open legs of the subject—exposing a full-on view of her pubic hair—indicate a brazen repudiation of tradition. By both referencing and rejecting visual norms, the piece shakes the stillness and wholeness that the female body has long represented (Female Nude in Art: Obscenity and Sexuality).

art world. Feminist critics turned to Lacan to envision the phallus less as a biological entity and more as a symbol of social power. They questioned the role of the phallus that exists in a patriarchal system of symbolism in an effort to bring forth feminist ideas (Fluxus Feminus).

The artist affirmed that he “expressed the sentiments of the people and that his art was in essence democratic” (Schapiro 170). Does this mean that he had a feminist agenda? Most likely not. The use of the female body had become a site of moral and philosophical inquiry, exploited for the intellectual growth of male artists. Men were still the ones creating, viewing, and owning these artworks. Thus it is hard to believe that Courbet had the purest intentions of creating critical and “democratic” work in favor of women when he still catered to many oppressive institutions that fetishized the woman as an object. Nonetheless, his work truly was a “spectacle of modern progress” that would soon lead to even more promising and revolutionary works by contemporary artists, and go as far as being critiqued in return (Schapiro 188).

Modern art tends to overlook and forget the present, reducing it to a permanently self-effacing moment of transition from past to future. As art transitioned out of modernism in the mid-twentieth century, contemporary art and postmodernism would become concerned with the present. The sixties brought activism and institutional critique within the

The Fluxus movement, which had more women and artists of color associated with a grouping of artists in Western art history than any other, turned to visual tropes as a point of reference to diversify representation. In an effort to push the presence of the female body outside of its institutional molds, artists used the actual physical presence of the female form with performance art. The very placement of the female body outside of the gallery frame positions the woman and her sexuality as the speaking subject. The semiotic havoc created by such a strategy combines physical presence, real time, and real women in dissonance with their usual representations, which threatens patriarchal structure (Fluxus Feminus). For example, Yoko Ono and Orlan favored playing out the roles of both viewed object and viewing subject. They formed and judged their images against cultural ideals and exercised a fearsome self-regulation in the public eye. Orlan controversially live streamed several of her superficial plastic surgeries to art galleries to address the construction of gender identity.

Ono’s performance piece “Cut/Piece” allowed audience members to cut with scissors into her clothing while she stood unmoving in an unprecedented exploration of power relations between the viewer and the viewed. By using the female form

to insert themselves into the artistic canon, Fluxus artists brought a more diverse pool of ideas concerning the female form to the forefront of the art discourse.

With the reign of globalization in the eighties, artists were less concerned about the female body and more concerned about the institutions that surrounded them. Technology took on a more central role as artists embraced postructuralist techniques. Collage and digital art were used to appropriate images from popular media and, thus, critique capitalist ideals. Feminist artist Barbara Kruger, for example, turned to appropriation to deface patriarchal representations of the female body. Her photocomposition, Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face) disrupts hierarchical, ‘phallocentric’ modes of visual display by challenging the ‘ideal spectator’ with direct speech: “Your gaze hits the side of my face” (Figure 4). In doing so, Kruger created a space ‘within the gap between image and text, between illusioned object and assaultive voice’ (Linker 1992: 414). Her work encouraged feminists to dismantle representational processes in visual culture, which allowed the participation of counter subjectivity in a society where symbols so easily cater to an oppressive ideal.

As technology advanced closer to the turn of the 21st century, artists embraced cyber culture as a means to interrupt artistic discourse. Donna Haraway, a theorist and writer, proposed the Cyborg Manifesto, noting that each one of us, in one way or another, is an artificially constructed, hybrid, post-human body inhabiting a post-natural world. In an optimistic effort to find ‘pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction,’ Haraway saw the union between nature and culture as the basis for a shift in the way we understand ourselves in relation to history and the rest of the world. Technology was employed to escape the dualistic ways of thinking that are inscribed within some feminisms, including binaries that suppress or exclude any kind of difference. By first accepting and then exploiting the fact that we are all cyborgs, it is not only wrong to describe the categories of male and female as natural, it is possible that gender, as a grammatical framework for classifying human subjects in terms of sexuality, becomes irrelevant.

For example, the blunt epigrams of Jenny Holzer’s electronic information panels were all enacted in an intertextual cyberspace (Figure 5). In the process, distinctions between public and private space were collapsed, and the personal and the political were confused. The physical representation of the female form may not have been used, but that does not mean that it does not have played a role in the work. By deflecting the individual subject (the artist herself) as an objectified body into the semantic field, a realm in which subjectivity is acceptable, the artist is able to bend the definitions of how the female body can exist in the art canon and deny gender binaries altogether (Erotic Ambiguities).

Cyberfeminism’s emphasis on hybridity rightly parallels the increase of globalization in visual culture today. While the artists before the twentieth century may have cited popular tropes with the intention of diversifying representations of the female form, younger artists interact with images differently. More symbols hold more meaning. Social media has shifted the perceptions of identity and performance. Access to digital photography is more easily possible than ever before. Capitalism and over-consumption are thriving, and the Internet has provided an unknowably vast visual archive that is used both intentionally and unintentionally by young artists.

Figure 3.

Not to mention younger artists have the privilege of growing up with a more internalized relationship with technology.

For this reason the direction of the work of this generation is not as easily pinned down. Yet the works of these artists are inherently products of the art discourse and, for this reason, they reciprocate the intentions of the specific mediums that diversified the form (Fraser). This emergence of so many mismatching ways of seeing and valuing the same world highlight the fast-growing inequalities within and between one another, which can provide more room for informed and diverse dialogue concerning the female body amongst younger artists (Contemporaneity).

At this point, the female body and feminism exist in an ever-expanding amount of interpretations. Recycled Origins intends to promote the notion that feminism, and the female form, is not limited to a single definition, but is an amalgamation of experiences and perspectives. While this lack of a concrete definition makes it difficult to evaluate what feminism means in the 21st century, it could be seen as a means to diversify feminism and re-imagine the mold of female form.

Figure 4.

Figure 5.

alexandra wuest

Reminder when you are feeling particularly like a hologram empty and artificial and frail close your eyes and take a deep breath and remember that tupac is a hologram too

18

margaret saunders

Looking in the mirror, admiring her backside, my Aunt Bobbi begins to address me without taking her eyes off of her own image. “I’m the type of woman made to be stared at.” I am only five, and don’t fully understand, but I can see that what she says is true. Both of my aunts, Bobbi and Loretta, have the type of butts that rappers wax poetic about; impossibly large breasts that in old age, will hang down to their navels; huge, farmer hands; big red mouths that are quick to laugh or yell or do anything that can be categorized as “loud”.

Yearbook photos attest to the fact that they also had powerful Foxy Brown afros, which have now been straightened to oblivion, fake hair in complicated up-does on top of the remnants of charred naps. When they walk down the street, it is inevitable that men will look. Some of them will laugh.

Some of them will wet their lips. We are in Kentucky but no man tips a hat towards my aunts in a gesture of outdated, but prevalent Deep South hospitality. They are women made to be stared at. But that has never been on the same level as respect.

When I am fourteen, I buy my first hair straightener with babysitting money and my Aunt Loretta is livid. “Are you trying to straighten the Black out of your hair, or something?” she asks me. “I guess you don’t like being sexy, huh?” She looks at me as if she does not understand me anymore, as if she is not the one who taught me. On one occasion, when I am going through one of the rougher parts of puberty, a neighborhood boy calls me ugly, and it is Loretta who comforts me by saying, “You’re light skinned with good hair, baby. You won’t never be ugly.”

Ever the contradiction, she is also the one who takes me to the library when I am a high school senior to borrow a book about Saartjie Baartman, a Black woman taken to England in the 19th century and put on display. The British found her

“exotic” figure entrancing. There was something fascinating about it to them, something grotesquely and primitively sexy about her. After she died at an early age, her body parts were kept on display in a Paris museum until 1974. My aunt explains this to me, but my attention splits between her voice, the slow Southern tilt of her accent reciting a story she knows so well, and a group of teenage White boys at a corner table, who all intently watch the mass of her body shake as she had tries to squeeze her way through the narrow aisles.

If my aunts seemed to have ambiguous and complex feelings about their Black bodies—some strange mix of confidence and shame—they were not alone, and if my aunts passed this type of legacy down to my cousins and me, they were not our only instructors. Studies show that Black women are statistically happier with their figures than their White counterparts, but their feelings about their faces, hair, femininity, intelligence and sense of self worth are dramatically lower.

On TV, in music lyrics and movies, in history, Black women’s identities are reduced to bodies—the full figured, often darker-skinned Mammys are recognizable as maternal and sexless; the slick curves of the Jezebel, who is often mixed race or “high yellow”, signal wantonness and lasciviousness.

My junior year of college, I am interviewing a friend for a project on male identity. He is a White boy, who once took me on a date to a spoken word club where he told me he assumed I’d feel “comfortable being half Black.” We are talking about his penchant for dating women of color. “I like slumming it,” he jokes. He then worries for two minutes or so about whether or not I get the joke. Was I laughing? Had he offended me? In reality, it is his truthful answer that I find more jarring. “I like women who are exotic.”

Of all the micro-aggressions that people of color, specifically women, encounter in their daily lives, the descriptor “exotic” might be one of the most difficult to call out because most people fail to see anything beyond its perceived positive connotations. It is a word that I have heard used to describe tropical fruit, palm-tree dotted islands, shrunken heads, lost cannibal tribes, Saartjie Baartman and, on more than one occasion, myself. It has never meant the same as beautiful; it is

more loaded than that. It is the word “exciting” with a kinkier insinuation. It implies more than it appears to imply. More importantly, it has never meant familiar. It has never seemed to me an adjective fit for describing a human being. There is no depth to exoticism.

I am thinking of when I worked at Abercrombie for a year and did not wear the shorts because the fullness of my thighs did not fit the company’s clean-cut image. I am thinking of dance class with my best friend Rae, who was pulled out by our teacher for wearing something “too sexy” for her developed figure, although her leotard was no different than those of our thin-armed White friends. The problem with having generations of your community experience a history that instructs that your femininity is indelicate, your sexuality is charged, and your body says more about you than any other part of you, is that you begin to internalize it. It becomes a fact that beauty—the type that everyone appreciates, not just people with “fetishes”—is White beauty and even if you can be “hot” or “wild,” even if you can be “exotic,” you exist in deviation of this norm.

“There is no depth to exoticism.”

I am thinking of the way girls in my neighborhood discuss Black boys who go after White girls—“Huh, everyone knows White girls can’t fuck anyway”—as if their Black girl bodies, their assumed sexual prowess, are the only thing they had over their White competitors, girls who lived in far away three story houses, with straight hair, skin that burns red in the sun and older brothers at Yale. Finally, I am thinking of my aunts, who–despite their education, their pro-active participation in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, their ability to eat soul food without counting calories–still view their Black bodies through a lens of insecurity and selfloathing.

I am thinking of how, despite the fact that they love my female cousins and me, still inadvertently passed this legacy down to us. The result of this sort of teaching will always be a new generation of Black girls repeating the same narrative of their predecessors, subconsciously accepting as fact that they are women “made to be stared at,” that their nonstandard Black bodies will be seen first and foremost, while everything else falls by the wayside. If anyone were to turn on a television set, scan a copy of King magazine or read a book about a woman from the Eastern Cape who continued to capture the White imagination simply by having the “abnormal” body of a Black woman well past the Civil Rights Era, who could tell these Black girls that they are wrong?

the devil’s wife in sweetwood maren kelsey

Maggie May Bishop married the Devil on accident.

Nobody told her he’d be handsome. Nobody told her he would be a dancer. Nobody told her he would say please and thank you, or that he would take his wilted hat off indoors.

Nobody said he would be good to her. She thought evil was an ugly thing, so when he offered her a pretty crocodile grin and diamond ring, she said yes and moved with him to the town of Sweetwood. They lived on the edge of the wood itself, in a small one-story house with chalky, flaking paint, and a long porch. Honeysuckle grew at the edge of the trees.

There were no willows, but the bows in the forest were blanketed in long strands of sphagnum moss. All the trees wept in Sweetwood.

Maggie May learned the Devil shook hands for a living. When she first thought to find out about him she followed him to town. She once saw him shake the hand of a businessman on the corner of Lafayette and Marion. The next day there was a line out the door for the man’s shop. It stayed the same each day for a month. On the thirty-first day after the man shook the Devil’s hand the store was robbed and the man was shot. He bled to death, slumped over the counter by the register.

She saw the Devil shake hands with the boy with an angry, sunken stomach, who played trumpet on the corner of Dunn and Travis. That night when the Devil came home she asked him couldn’t they go out and hear some music.

The Devil told her he knew just the place and took her to hear the boy. Sitting at a corner table in Sullivan’s Ringside she listened to the boy play the trumpet while the Devil smoked a cigar. Maggie May couldn’t be sure, but in the dark of the club she thought she watched the Devil eat smoke. He seemed to breathe in, the red end of the cigar glowing angry, and then exhale clean air. The boy on trumpet played from his rich round belly, notes so beautiful they came out of the

rust colored brass bell of the horn and wrapped right around Maggie May’s heart. At the end of the show she had goose flesh on her arms. Thirty-one days later the boy woke up in the night with a scratching feeling in his lungs. He cupped a hand to his mouth and coughed up all his teeth until they rattled in his palm like gambler’s dice.

Maggie still cooked the Devil dinner. When he sat across from her at the short, uneven table in the middle of their unswept kitchen she wondered if she should be afraid.

She watched him pick his teeth with the bones of a catfish she had cooked for him.

“Am I to be afraid?” She asked out loud, for she needed to know, though she wasn’t sure she could find the fear in her if she needed to. The Devil had only ever held her hand gently, often when dancing in the parlor. He never shook it, not once.

“No,” he said and then paused. “I don’t know.” He crossed his skinny legs under the table, narrowing his eyes the way he did when he was honest.

“Are you evil?” She asked him.

“Please, only one question at a time,” the Devil sighed. “Have mercy on me, Maggie May.” The Devil closed his eyes, tired, and Maggie knew she would have to wait another day to earn another question.

The next morning Maggie made her way through town to go out to her mama’s house nearby the bayou on South Tiger Bend Road. She passed through the main streets of town, and smiled politely to Blind Eddie who sat on a three-legged lawn chair outside the Piggly Wiggly. Inside, in the chemical breeze of the AC, she bought her mama the same things she brought week after week: salt pork, green beans, honey, dry ingredients for biscuits, and canned peaches. Leaving the store she passed Blind Eddie again and gave him some of her change as always and he said, “Now bless you, Sister,” his breath coming out in sour whiskey vapors.

She caught a bus out to the bayou, and got out to her mama’s by late morning time.

“Hey there Mama,” she said, walking in through the mouth of the house. Her mama walked in as she set the Piggly Wiggly bag on the counter and went about finding space in the pantry.

“Well, hey yourself Maggie May. How’s that hand-

some man of yours?” Her mama walked slowly to a seat at the dark wooden table, leaning on a cane with a weight that was surprising for her frame. She had always been all bones.

As a girl, Maggie couldn’t sit on her mother’s lap without hurting her skinny legs. Maggie said that the Devil was doing all right, but there was breath at the end of her sentence that her mama knew well.

“You know what I say about him Maggie May, that man is a charmer through and through. There’s a sharp tongue sleeping in that sweet mouth of his. But you know what I also say—”

“Mama, please,” Maggie tried. She knew the words by heart by now.

“I said, I say that sometimes it’s best not to look too clear into things, baby. Sometimes you keep better with your eyes closed. You keep your man at least,” Maggie’s mother gave a long look, head tilted down, eyes chastising from up under the line of her brow. “Now baby, won’t you open some of them peaches for me. I know you have a bus to catch soon,” she said, and Maggie did as she asked.

Maggie made it back to the house to find the Devil taking his lunch at the table. She kissed him on the cheek, keeping her eyes ahead, and then went to undress and take a long bath. After dressing slowly in their bedroom, dark from having closed the shades’ eyes, Maggie heard the soft, howling creak of the screen door as the Devil left the house.

She followed him out to the wood in the backyard. Keeping her distance, she tried to step lightly on dry ferns. He walked ahead of her with soundless, steady footsteps. He seemed to follow the cool shadow of tall trees, weaving through them, his hands in his pockets.

When they reached a small clearing, Maggie saw him take off his coat and lay it across a low hanging branch.

On the far side, a large oak stood proud. He crossed over to it, and lay his palms across the rough bark lightly. Without his suit jacket, Maggie May saw how the flightless, wing blades of his shoulders heaved with every deep breath. Then he cast his forehead against the tree, and began to shake with light sobs. He rolled his head, grinding against the tree, to the side and she saw his eyes clenched, lips speaking silently, his face in pain. He spoke for some time, and soon Maggie’s heart pounded from the quiet and her knees began to shake,

and when thunder growled in the sky she felt it in her chest.

Rain fell heavily and all at once. The raindrops landed on the leaf canopy of the wood, a somber round of applause, until tears rolled off the branches above them and sank darkly into the ground. Still the Devil stayed and spoke.

At long last, he stood straight and went to collect his jacket. As he walked back toward the house the rain stopped, the sun returning to the sky, the forest once again still, now glittering.

That night they ate crawfish. Maggie had cooked them in the high heat of the late afternoon. As she boiled the water with the lemons, and cloves, and onions, she watched the bag from the fish market twitch in the sink. When she emptied the bag and poured the crawfish into the stew, legs wriggling, claws pinching, she wondered if they shook hands with the Devil as well.

Maggie May had her question ready. That night the Devil ate with his hands, dipping the crawfish into small bowls of melted butter. Greasy drops ran down his shiny, slippery fingers all the way to his wrists, the yellow seeping to bloom into the white cuffs of his shirt. She thought of the question that afternoon while standing over the stove, sweat coming to bead on her forehead from the heat.

“How do you choose?” she asked.

“I don’t,” said the Devil. “They choose themselves.”

He told her thank you for the supper and then rose from his chair to go have a cigarette on the porch. Maggie May watched him eat smoke from the window above the kitchen sink where she stood. She washed the crawfish pot and made plans to follow the Devil once again.

The next morning she watched the Devil leave the house, and waited to go after him. She found him on the corner of Burgess and Stump, and saw him take a seat at a café table outside. Maggie May went into the shop across the road and looked at him through the window. He ordered sweet tea, which then sat untouched. He leaned back in his chair.

After checking his watch, the Devil stretched his skinny legs out, tilted the brim of his hat over his face, and closed his eyes.

Maggie waited. The sun made its way up and the afternoon heat rolled in. She thought, from the air-conditioned shop window, that the Devil’s glass of sweet tea must be half

sweated away. Checking her watch she began to worry about the Jambalaya she still had to heat on the stove back home.

The sun fell, slowly pulled toward the earth until it sat just on the horizon. Maggie May heard the evening church bells begin to call out for six o’clock. At this the Devil sat up, fixing his hat and checking his watch. At the third chime of the bells a drunk rounded the corner. Maggie May knew him to be Jackson Morris. On the fourth chime the Devil drained his glass of sweet tea in one gulp, pouring the amber water straight down his throat. At the fifth chime the Devil walked to meet Jackson Morris on the corner of Burgess and Stump, and on the sixth and final clang of the bells the Devil shook the man’s hand.

Maggie ran home to beat the Devil. All the way back she kicked up dust from the road, and when she got back to check on the jambalaya her feet were caked in dark, red-brown dirt that had gotten into her sandals. Soon after, the Devil came in through the screen door at the porch. He sat at the table, took off his hat and said, “hey” to Maggie. She scraped their dinner with a ladle, the jambalaya had burnt and curdled together all about the bottom and sides of the pot. Digging into the center she was able to fill two small bowls and bring them to the table.

“Thank you,” said the Devil. He began to eat though Maggie waited so the hot stew wouldn’t burn her tongue.

“I have another question,” she said. At this, the Devil stopped eating and looked up. He let go of his spoon and swallowed. Maggie took a deep breath.

“Not tonight,” said the Devil. “Tonight I’m gonna ask you a question.” He spoke low and even, and for the first time, Maggie May felt nervous.

“Okay. Go on.”

“I want to know,” started the Devil. He brought his hands together on the table in front of him, lacing his fingers together. “I want to know if you want me to leave,” he said.

“I need to ask you my question before I can give you your answer,” Maggie said. The Devil nodded. “What is to happen to Jackson Morris?”

“They find him in the bayou.”

“What’d he do?” she pressed.

“One question,” said the Devil and he brought up a hand to show her his raised pointer-finger.

“You get a question tonight so I get two,” pushed Maggie. “What’d that man do?”

“He hit his wife,” said the Devil, and he laced his hands before himself again. “So now, Maggie May, now you answer my question. Am I to leave?”

She thought of the Devil across the table, this man who ate smoke, who was a graceful dancer. He shook the hands of bad souls, she told herself. She tried not to think about how the papers said this year had the highest number of deaths in Sweetwood. She tried not to think about how all the honeysuckle outside had gone to rot.

“No,” said Maggie May. “You’re to stay.” And the Devil smiled and reached his right hand for hers across the table.

are you the manager I control nothing comes from all the great things we’ve been doing better but not god’s gift to women recently went to a comedy show where the punch line was that the host wanted to fuck me

christ’s womanly wounds elizabeth lorenz

Universally shared but unique to each individual, the body is the primary means by which human beings experience the world. Able to absorb knowledge and communicate globally, the body possesses an innate signifying strength in personal and public realms. It has surpassed its physical nature to become a medium for thought and expression, acting as ‘‘a text of culture and locus of social control’’ where norms are enforced or new conceptions proposed (Luce 65). Women and their parts have been appropriated as both subjects and objects—likely the most reiterated motif in the history of art. Moreover, the female body is endowed with acute discursive abilities. Even though—perhaps because—it is widely objectified in society and visual culture, the feminine form can expertly speak to those outside of traditional power structures while continuing to attract said privileged groups. The corporeal holds ultimate fascination in its multifaceted meanings and incarnations, making it a frequent subject in artwork.

Examples—even phenomena—of somatic representation demonstrate the body’s extensive power, but what remains virtually unknown to modern audiences are the hundreds of medieval illuminated manuscripts depicting the isolated wounds of Jesus Christ. In the late Gothic period circa 1350 to 1420, prayer books from Northern Europe often illustrate the Passion of Christ, including visceral imagery surrounding the Crucifixion. Besides the instruments of his torture, Christ’s side wound is rendered in raw detail. In the Psalter and Book of Hours created for Bonne of Luxembourg—along with many other private, devotional texts for mystics and lay aristocrats alike—the wound is isolated as a full-page ‘‘foci of devotion’’ (Binski 125) (fig. 1).

Here, Christian medieval viewers can contemplate the most

Figure 1.

essential tenet of their faith. The gash is removed from its bodily setting and vertically reoriented; it confronts the reader as a peach, pink, and scarlet mandorla-shaped cavity.

A black slit outlined with the deepest shade of red lies at its center, creating an immersive and destabilizing image. The purpose of this aesthetic trope is much debated in art history, yet the visual similarities with the female anatomy are clear to audiences across centuries.

To approach a medieval attitude toward the body and ultimately sexuality and gender representation, it should be understood that in this period the physical form was ‘‘a site

of sensation, where emotion and intellect meet the natural flesh’’ (Green). Often the body was an active metaphor to stand in for spiritual concepts and larger social constructions. Furthermore, Christianity—essentially ubiquitous in the period and location discussed here—was the first monotheistic, universal religion to relegate the body a sacred entity of worship (Binski). Rooted in the truth of Christ’s physical suffering during the Crucifixion and subsequent Resurrection, the body became a landscape for religious experience—the principal sign in matters of heavenly and earthly life. Yet, however ‘‘deeply interiorized, immaterial and transcendent’’ late medieval religion was, its imagery was simultaneously ‘‘somatic, body-centered and material:’’ a widely accepted paradox that helps explain the genesis of unflinching depictions of Christ’s wounds (Binski 124).

Although contemporary viewers will never completely understand the medieval psyche and beliefs on gender and sex, Augustinian and Franciscan doctrines and writings of Gothic mystics assert that the sacred and sexual were not mutually exclusive, likely stemming from a similar logic to the aforementioned paradox (Easton). Medievals were not fundamentally opposed to expressing sexual themes because the body is natural and medical, alluding to the fact that no single institution governed all somatic conceptions (Green). Perhaps a surprise to today’s audiences, even heteronormative gender traits become destabilized at times, as will be seen with the wound imagery analyzed here. With this medieval lens, it is increasingly understandable why the wounds of Christ are brutally isolated and closely resemble a vagina.

Before sexual allusions enter the analysis, it is important to address the utilization and implications of Christ’s human form in images, since it aids in understanding the treatment of the body during the late medieval period. Beginning in the 1300s, there was a shift in the visual arts concerning aesthetics and subject matter. The rise of the macabre permeated daily life, spiritual concerns, and art. Along with immense population loss from the Black Death, a period psychology of ‘‘decadence, fear, romanticism, guilt culture,

[and] moral penitential thinking’’ created an atmosphere of extremes (Binski 127). In doctrine and depiction, Christ’s humanity became more important, and his suffering was illustrated by an emaciated, gnarled body with contorted bones and bloody gashes. Affective piety—whereby the viewer is moved by ocular or physical discomfort to experience the plight of the divine—advanced to the forefront of religious devotion. ‘‘Visualizing becomes part of religious experience,’’ and the grotesque qualities of images endow them with mystical attributes and a need for great reverence (Binski 124).

Even though—perhaps because— the female body is widely objectified in society and visual culture, the feminine form can expertly speak to those outside of traditional power structures while continuing to attract said privileged groups.

The Arma Christi Book of Hours, made in Paris in 1415, relies on stirring emotions in this visceral manner (fig. 2).

Christ’s body is missing from the illumination so that viewers can place themselves among the whips and thorns. The only somatic evidence of the Passion is Christ’s isolated side wound. His body is deconstructed so that symbols of his pain directly confront the reader. The trauma and voyeurism with which his body was treated, by both the Roman soldiers and the monk who illuminated the text, are characteristic of the medieval macabre aesthetic (along with aligning to the fate of many female bodies throughout history).

The body’s fragmentation into parts is horrifying to imagine and fetishizing in its effects. When isolated, the wound becomes an evocation of pain that humans can identify with and an indication of the redemption they will receive because Christ accepted this fate. Thus, the fleshy cut stands for the whole body, and a relatable, corporeal component is

worshipped as the divine—its nature infinitely elevated by this fetishization. Here, Christ’s body is surreally broken up as a relic and ‘‘reconstructed imaginatively…[subjecting it] to critical rethinking [in which] it [is] fetishized…[during] an internalized pilgrimage of the mind;’’ this logic created virtually no conflicts for the medieval viewer during spiritual contemplation (Binski 124).

Besides the mindset of the devout viewer, the fragmented wound appropriated religious and discursive authority despite deconstruction because of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead three days after the Crucifixion. To Christians, this is the ultimate gift which allows triumph over

Figure 2.

death and logic. Christ redeemed ‘‘humanity [by taking on] human form’’ connecting his message of salvation and love ‘‘inextricably—if ambiguously—with bodiliness’’ (Bernau, n.p.). As affirmed by the sacrament of Communion when practicing Christians consume a portion of Christ’s real body and blood, the fact of Christ’s corporeality ‘‘raised the human body from its lowliness and promised the possibility of radical transformation’’ (Bernau). Thus, the inherent significance of the human body even in moments of fragmentation and fetishization is certain, provoking a stimulating dialogue when the vaginal motif is accounted for.

The formal resemblance between Christ’s wounds and the female anatomy is not merely a contemporary assumption or over-sexualization. Art historian Karma Lochrie notes that said illuminations in Gothic texts such as the Bonne of Luxembourg Psalter are ‘‘constructed in the same way as the vagina in medieval visual culture’’ in both religious and secular contexts (188). This observation aligns with medieval beliefs that accept an intersection between the sacred and sexual, especially within art and literature. Understanding these unique Gothic norms, the presence of the vaginal wound—which represents the entirety of Christ’s body as argued above—effectively feminizes the body of the Christian savior. He is simultaneously a man dying on a cross and the quintessential attribute of femininity. This gender dislocation is fascinating in its ability to create more fluid albeit ambiguous conceptions of medieval sexuality.

To Lochrie, this appropriation ‘‘introduces confusion at a very foundational level of religious language’’ as both sexes worshiped Christ in a physically loving manner, especially during private devotion and contemplation (188). Ultimately, Christ’s feminized body is appealing and relatable to males and females in multifaceted ways.

The pain that Christ endured on the cross is often compared to labor pangs in early Christian and Gothic texts (Easton).

Beyond a signifier of divine grace, his pain marks him as a genuinely compassionate figure for women. Medieval writers believed that the most sensitive flesh suffers the greatest: as women suffer more than men, the perfect Christ feels

pain most acutely (Easton). Further feminizing his body, the comparison of labor connects to the vaginal wound imagery: the bleeding gash evokes scenes of menstruation and birth. As women bear children, Christ birthed the Christian Church from the wound in his side during the Crucifixion.

A community of believers, the Body of Christ, sprang forth from his corporeal suffering. This widely-held doctrine provides a inextricable link between women’s experiences and somatic trials and the Christian savior’s; this further demonstrates an impetus for describing and depicting wounds as female genitalia especially within the texts of women. In an early fifteenth century Book of Hours, the illumination Side Wound and Sacred Heart depicts the isolated, vaginal wound (fig. 3). An ambiguous entity or heart protrudes from the laceration’s deep opening; the artwork features a literal birth as this red matter enters the world and the space of the viewer. Notably, female audiences gain ‘‘physical access to the sacred’’ through their ease in relating to the imagery where Christ’s body is equated to their own (Lochrie 181). However, the sexualized wound imagery was not created solely for women, and all Gothic viewers inspired by this motif could consider Christ a mother due to his suffering to bear the Church. Further complicating the relationship between Christ and viewers of these illuminations, accounts exist that document his wound as a site of lactation and nursing.

The late medieval period saw a rise in female mystics, known today through their writings. These women primarily honored the relics of the Passion relying on Christ’s feminized body and wounds to experience piety. Within the spiritual realm of ‘‘Mother Jesus,’’ they exercised a distinctly physical side of devotion in both imagination and practice. Catherine of Siena, who received the stigmata—or wounds of Christ—before she died, recounts her desire to put her mouth on Christ’s sweet wounds and suckle from them as lactating breasts (Easton). Transforming his male body with distinctly feminine attributes, she further destabilizes his gender. Catherine asserts Christ’s role as a nurturer. Reinforced by illuminations which isolate the wound in a Eucharistic chalice, Christ nourishes the world

with redemption and knowledge through his suffering and compassion. Furthermore, Catherine’s language has sexual connotations that attest to a profound desire for her physical longings to be slaked by Christ’s body and to a mystical pleasure fulfilled by contact between her mouth and his side wound. To Martha Easton, the attitude of Catherine and other mystics broaches the ‘‘possibility of [an] experience that is both devotional and erotic’’ (396). This obscures the role of Christ’s feminized body when it appears fragmented and fetishized, along with any assumed medieval heteronormative predilections. Perhaps to Gothic people, Christ was lover as much as mother, and the two influential relationships could exist in harmony during the spiritual contemplation of religious teachings and illustrated manuscripts.

Sexuality also exists in masculine responses to Christ’s wounds. From the skeptical apostle Thomas’s need to pen-

“Understanding these unique Gothic norms, the presence of the vaginal wound—which represents the entirety of Christ’s body—effectively feminizes the body of the Christian savior. He is simultaneously a man dying on a cross and the quintessential attribute of femininity. This gender dislocation is fascinating in its ability to create more fluid albeit ambiguous conceptions of medieval sexuality.”

etrate these gashes with his fingers in biblical times to medieval authors’ fantasies like James of Milan who was ‘‘enflamed with desire for entrance into the wound,’’ men too are entranced by the vaginal lacerations (Lochrie 194). Their actions, vocabulary, and tone are distinctly sexual when the wound is considered an appropriation of female anatomy.

In fact, James of Milan searches to join Christ’s wound with his, enter as a spear, and stay for eternity; revisionist art historian and queer philosopher Lochrie is sure to mention that the Latin word for wound, ‘‘vulnus,’’ is quite similar to its term vulva (195). A penchant for penetration as opposed to suckling is clear, suggesting the more aggressive nature with which men have tended to approach the wounds (that were created when a male soldier pierced Christ’s side with a lance, close to where the female womb would reside).

Additionally, there are medieval religious instructions for

“Female sexuality and desires have been dismissed or demonized, as the vagina dentata evidences in its visual incarnations from the Gothic to contemporary periods. Moreover, the vagina has been considered a locus of lack virtually since the founding of Western philosophical thought. Because of a supposed physical void, women lack ‘access to a signifying economy’ which renders them incapable of of ‘founding [their] reality, reproducing [their] truth’ in a society which is continually, albeit decreasingly, dominated by male norms.”

praying with this type of illuminated manuscript which invite the viewer to caress and kiss the lacerations. In one existing manuscript, the pigment has been rubbed off of the lips of the wound’s opening by an especially devote patron (Monti). Other illuminated books feature an actual cut in the paper that runs the length of the wound (Monti). The viewer is invited to penetrate the slit, fostering a transcendent viewing experience whereby the sensual allows access to a spiritual moment. Thus, Christ’s vaginal wounds are the ‘‘object of adoration and love but also the object of violence’’ (Lochrie 190). They are fetishized as mystical parts of a perfect whole and abruptly isolated into bloody ailments subjected to profane treatment—during the Passion and even occasionally when addressed by medieval viewers in a voyeuristic manner.

This duality is often apparent in the treatment of women in the contemporary era: they are reduced to the somatic, yet specific body parts are idealized; their beauty is revered, but their sexuality is debased. The fascination with and fear of the female form is a longstanding truth of the human, especially male, psyche. Female sexuality and desires have been dismissed or demonized, as the vagina dentata evidences in its visual incarnations from the Gothic to contemporary periods. Moreover, the vagina has been considered a locus of lack virtually since the founding of Western philosophical thought (Irigaray). Because of a supposed physical void, women lack ‘‘access to a signifying economy’’ which renders them incapable of of ‘‘founding [their] reality, reproducing [their] truth’’ in a society which is continually, albeit decreasingly, dominated by male norms (Irigaray 88).

Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray believes that ‘‘any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the ‘masculine’...Subjectivity [is] denied to woman’’ (133). In Gothic manuscripts that feature the fragmented, magnified wound of Christ, the vagina—the agent of womanhood—receives an opportunity to embody essential religious truth. Christ temporarily merges with woman, represented by her most intimate part. In these illustrations, the wound/vagina performs the most important creative gesture in Christian

doctrine—the birth of the church. If humanity receives honor because Christ became human, then the vagina, as depicted here, is certainly endowed with great power and respect when it brings forth the foundation of worship—the body of Christian followers, the central institution in medieval life. With this point of view, images of isolated vaginal wounds in late Gothic manuscripts such as the Bonne of Luxembourg Psalter are not examples of aggressive fragmentation or unmerited fetishization and voyeurism.

Instead the appropriated vagina is activated in its isolation.

This demonstrates a performative use of the female anatomy to constitute a signifier in the location where women have been denied one. The gesture effectively links the creative powers of women and Christ—a hypothesis appealing to many female Gothic mystics.

Whether the majority of medievals recognized the aforementioned, quite liberal theory is unclear. Although the exact Gothic views about sexuality and gender differences

and equality are out of reach for contemporary audiences, many informed hypotheses can be constructed based on knowledge about somatic-centered macabre leanings and various philosophical and religious writings. In regard to the wound of Christ imagery, the visual trope’s existence provides evidence of a surprising connection between the sacred and sexual. The possibility of Christ as mother and lover is a phenomenon which obscures norms of gender and sexuality. Ultimately, this Gothic motif reveals the real power of images in mediating transcendent spiritual experiences and the authority of the body in creating universal truth through its communicative abilities. Illuminations of these suggestive wounds attest to the undeniable force of the female form to fascinate and evoke awe. By activating and asserting what is unique to them, women’s bodies have been and will continue to be a focus of representation, contemplation, and inspiration.

Figure 3.

we’re all doing the same thing: musings on performance

vanessa castro and becca kauffman

Becca Kauffman: What’s going on with the Warm Up tomorrow?

Vanessa Castro: It’s going to be good! It’s actually funny because when the line up first came out I was really disappointed because I didn’t know a single act.

Disappointed in yourself or in the curation?

Both. I looked at them and... I kind of feel like that now when I look at any festival line up I feel so old.

You’re not old!

I know I’m not but that’s how I feel. This is what the young folk are listening to!

There are just so many people in the world. The only person that can be mega famous is Beyoncé.

Right.

That’s pretty much it. She’s the president of pop.

Yeah. She’s interesting.

But other than that, everyone else is just a bunch of other riff raff.

What are your thoughts on Beyoncé? Are you a fan?

Well, I’m a humongous fan. But it’s not political.

Yeah, you can’t really. Once you start politicizing that kind of stuff, it’s hard. She’s just fun.

Yeah, the interesting thing is that the last couple of years I’ve been as a means of income, and because it interests

me personally, and will eventually tie back into my video work soon I hope, is voice overs. I have been on all sorts of websites where you put up your reel, and producers will contact you for your voice sounds and what they want. And a couple weeks ago I landed the biggest job I have ever been offered, which is happening right now. I am the voice of the Music Video Awards on MTV. Since a week and a half or so ago, until the the 24th, I am on call on my phone waiting for a text message saying “Can you come in in an hour?” and I’ll come in and be like, “The world will be watching as Beyoncé takes the stage for an earth shattering performance as she accepts the 2014 Video Vanguard Awards” blah blah blah and it’s really, really the most fast paced extraordinary... God. MTV. Television. It’s all Marketing. It’s all them.They have all these creepy integrated marketing with commercials and everything is sponsored, obviously. Everyone says TV is just a moving billboard. I’ll do a lot of things like, “The VMA’s are coming, the date and time, here are some artists like Ariana Grande and other people, are going to be performing.”

But the biggest thing, the Video Vanguard Award which was originally called the Michael Jackson Award. Justin Timberlake won it last year, and it’s supposed to be for someone who is constantly involving the upmost icon of pop music right now. Who is always updating themselves, spans generations, and obviously she is that.

She is definitely that. That latest album is genius.

Yes! I agree! Well, do you like her?

Yeah! It’s great!

I don’t think there should be any guilt in that. And honestly...

Well, have you heard the song Drunk in Love? It’s the song they are using in the promo and it got stuck in my head so much and brainwashed myself because I get hired to go in and say this language over and over and over and over again. And because it’s one of the biggest spots, the Beyoncé spot, it has been worked and worked and worked. Like last week I went in to record a spot and the producers— they’re young. Way younger than what you’d think a producer with a capital P would be, but it almost makes me think it must not be too hard to get a job like that. They’re writing really basic commercial copy, and direct a VO session and some

are good and some are bad. Then they have to print it, send it to the big ups, the big guys, Senior Vice Presidents et cetera.

So I recorded the spot at least six times in less than six days.

Because of hearing the promo I just got in the mood for Beyoncé and I have been listening to it over and over and over again. Not to mention that I think her video album idea was amazing. It’s actually a model that I’m using for my own project because I have this thing called the Home Music Video series, which is what the videos you’ve seen are a part.

I’m trying to feel it out. Basically my model for making any whole project comes from a music standpoint from being in Ava Luna. So, you know, we have gone away to a friends parents house upstate to record Electric Balloon and just sat down and jammed, and then sculpted the jams into songs, and then over dubbed, and that’s basically the format I’m using to make sense of my own work. But it’s really new to me.

I have been doing these for the last two years.

These videos?

Yeah, that’s the way I have found that makes the most sense to me. Because I’ve always wanted to do performance art my whole life but I didn’t know how to make sense of it, and maybe three, maybe two-and-a-half years ago I started getting interested in the comedy scene. It’s very concrete. And the thing is that I’ve always been an interdisciplinary person.

Yes, I can tell.

And to a degree where I’m so lonely. You know? Who else is doing it? Where do I turn? Who do I look to? Where are examples? I just haven’t really found that many. I have found inspirations to draw from and of course, in the end it’s probably good that there’s no one who is doing the exact same thing because I’d be crestfallen that I wasn’t original or anything. But comedy is funny because on the one hand the content can be so cutting edge and modern and it’s everyday commentary about these things. When I first started to go to live comedy shows just to watch and observe what else is out there I assumed anyone with a sense of humor is going to be weird. And then I started going and realizing like, “Oh. There’s actually a lot of normal people.” You would think that it would be creative. But it’s been interesting, comedy is—it’s a trope—an old pre-existing genre of entertainment that

definitely falls into these concrete categories. I mean, if you break it down you’ve got your improv, sketch teams, stand up, certain kinds of stand up underneath that, and it’s very mathematical and obviously male dominated—whatever— but there’s a lot of cool stuff going on. In fact, I’ve found a more DIY/Bushwick/Williamsburg comedy scene that kind of parallels the music scene in a way. It just doesn’t get covered or glamorized in this way that music does. I mean, it’s still really cool. The reason it doesn’t get glamorized is because you make a fool of yourself in comedy and expose the less flattering parts of humanity whereas music still has this removed romantic sheen. It’s more about a nonverbal feeling and comedy is about putting things in words. It’s satisfying to hear that happen. And I’ve tried it. I’ve tried improv, and I’ve done a little bit of stand up, and it’s all incredible. It’s all incredible. And I can’t, I guess. In the end, it all comes down to decisions, you know? If you’re creative and you want to make stuff you’re passionate about and you’re drawn to all these different mediums, eventually you have to choose and hunker down and do one. But the people who do comedy have very structured minds. They are working within a blue print of what comedy is. And even if they’re breaking rules and pushing boundaries it’s still considered stand up and then they’re just doing an avant-garde, forward stand up, which is the core of what their genre of comedy is. If I wasn’t so multi-disciplinary, if I was a more singularly focused person, then that is one thing that I would just love to pursue. I think it’s the most heroic path, but unfortunately, I am just a little bit too enthralled with multiple things.

“If I wasn’t so multi-disciplinary, if I was a more singularly focused person, then [comedy] is one thing that I would just love to pursue. I think it’s the most heroic path, but unfortunately, I am just a little bit too enthralled with multiple things.”

Yeah. I’m the same way. There are too many cool things to do out there, I don’t know why people need to put themselves into one.

In another way though, I’ve started to feel like—Okay, here’s where it ties back to Beyoncé— by brainwashing myself by saying this copy over and over again about how just fucking amazing she is and watching all these videos... I have seen her video album multiple times and I’ve looked at it for inspiration because I eventually—once my technical chops improve... They have a long way to go. I taught myself Final Cut, basically. I had a crash course when I took this class in college called Feminist Philosophy and Performance Based Media.

At UMass?

It was at Hampshire. But at UMass, it’s a part of the five college consortion. You have a 617 number, where are you from?

Brookline.

No! Cambridge! Oh my god! Well, do you know about

the Freelance Players? Or Creative Arts at Park at the Park School?

Yes! I had friends who did that.

Yes, original musicals! And they have a camp at Creative Arts at Park. And I did that for several years too. I was always on stage.

Yeah, I can tell you’re very comfortable on stage.

Definitely. I love the stage. My problem, really, with music is that it just doesn’t treat the stage the same way that theater does. It just feels a little watered down. Because you’re not playing a character, it’s not a play. Even if there’s no fourth wall in a production there’s still like all planned, everything is all choreographed and movement, you know? Blocking is a thing I’m interested in. So there’s almost this bravado and fearlessness stylized built into musical theater... Broadway.

The style of singing, the history that it comes from, being unamplified, whereas music—once rock and roll came to be— it was amplified. And the microphone changes your execution

completely! I’m learning that even more in an even more minute way doing voice overs…

Ugh, I hate [voice overs]. I don’t like it.

Really? You have a great voice!

Oh, thanks. My project [Pull Push] it originally had a voice over.

I really want to see!

No, no, no.

Why? Is it because you don’t like your voice?

No, it’s not because I don’t like my voice. I can get over that.

Right.

Um, I guess I kind of had a deadline.

Aw, art school. It’s so nice.

I’ve been trying to make stuff this summer—and I have been—but it’s not as easy when you have someone breathing over your shoulder.

Let me remember what it feels like to have someone who I really respect, who has taught me a lot, to tell me that I have to do it. Because they believe in you, they’re curious to see what you come up with. It’s really hard outside of school. I’m still dealing with it. I’m twenty nine. I took two years off after sophomore year and then I went back. I graduated in ’08. So I’ve been out of school for six years and the whole time it has still been this struggle to structure myself. As an artist too, it’s like when no one gives you a structure, you have to make your own but it’s not as simple as that. Because you’re cycling through all these jobs that have different schedules. And then you get used to that one and then you realize oh, this job isn’t really for me, I’m going to switch. And then you have to get used to another one. But it’s so funny because I’ve spent so long—like my whole life—being unconventional... but still feeling all this pressure I’ve imposed on myself. I thought I felt a strong presence from a past life like I had this very conservative approach to life and the way things worked didn’t really align with my own family’s lives.

How so?

Well, I have two moms. They’re gay. They’re not together anymore, but my biological mom, Joyce—she’s a lesbian—she actually went to UMass Amherst, my same school. She’s a big political rights activist so she was born in 1950 so she went to school, say, ‘68, ‘72 or so...

Primetime.

Right? The height! That makes me think what were politics like back then... Can we draw comparisons to now or not?

Because I feel like being political is it’s own subculture. And I’ve tried so hard to be political for so long and I just didn’t identify with anyone around me, and my brain doesn’t work in a political way. I’m much more an experiential, personal.

I just have to experience things to understand them. I don’t think in abstract terms very much. I need material. So it’s a weakness when it comes to politics and understanding the minutia of that knowledge. It’s the structure. And the structure is the same as comedy. I don’t like working within assigned confines. It just shuts me down. And I’ve always felt like that’s what school is. And I did do well in school up to a certain point and then it stopped making as much sense to me. I’m aware of academic thinking, but I don’t naturally think academically. So it’s a bit of a stretch for me. I’m trying to find that there is still legitimacy and potency in non-academic thinking when it comes to being artistic.

Oh, you have to. You have to think beyond that.

Yeah, I feel like that is the problem or goal to being an artist... That word is too uncomfortable for me to say. It seems highfalutin or something! Because it’s the way people talk about artists. It’s like, “Yeah I’m an artist.” It’s like, “What do you do?” I say, “I play music.” No, I’m a rock star. No, a pop star. But if you read any interviews with major pop stars, like Katy Perry or Beyoncé or whatever, they are very, very aware and they acknowledge like, “Oh, yeah. I’m a pop star.” That’s actually a role! It’s not necessarily a compliment. It is what you are because you are one... Somehow I still harbor this burning desire to be one.

Oh yeah, don’t we all?

I don’t know!

I feel like whenever I go to a [pop] show... It’s so high production.

I love that! A, to B, to C, there is nothing wrong with high production!

It’s great! And here’s the thing. The difference between Broadway and theater performance and what you see when you go to these shows in Brooklyn... I mean, there’s a big difference.

I mean, it’s still on a stage. So it’s up for comparison.

Exactly!

I mean I appreciate all the different styles of being on stage but in the end, we’re all doing the same thing. We’re all stepping on stage, and that in itself is an experience. Before and beyond transcending what style or genre you’re enacting on that stage.

That is what I love about what you do on stage because we are in this grungy whatever and there’s this whole shtick about rock people being apathetic and going on stage and playing their instruments and that’s all. And you are just like, “Fuck that. Let’s actually make a show.”

Yes! The audience gets more involved that way too. You’re seeing something happening. It’s still performance... you’re involving that kind of theatricality— Generosity!

It’s so nice!

Why else are people here to see it visually executed, if not to see something beyond what they could imagine, which is just those people play their instruments? I mean, you’re here. That’s what I live for. I hate recording music, but I love performing!

You wore blue lipstick at one of your shows. I thought that was amazing.

I’m so glad you appreciated that! I mean sometimes... Ugh, I feel like I should do it up more. I feel obligated. Andrea from

Twin Sister puts on this whole Cosplay costume thing and I just think that it’s so beautiful she’s so willing to go the extra length. But my band sets the tone, which is sort of “no ego.”

To a beautiful degree. It’s why we miraculously exist and have this most amazing relationship as a group, but as far as stage persona and their relationship to performing and just being visibly present in photographs, videos, and on stage... they’re behind the scenes more. And here’s why I think it gets interesting. I have always been a natural performer. I just can’t remember a day that it hasn’t brought me joy. Couple that with not being hyper focused on one particular thing, like just a ballerina! Or just a Broadway singer! Or just a musician! But I can’t. It’s just not in me. So I am in the process of sort of finally lassoing all of these things in. All these things that I love. It’s like baking a cake. It’s like a recipe. A teaspoon of this. A cup of that. It’s a chemistry. Here, I’ll take a little bit of what I know about African dance, and a little bit of what I’ve absorbed from music videos, and a cup of my experience with Ava Luna, et cetera. And that’s how it makes sense to me.

Yeah! I guess that [the diversity of infleunces] are what on my mind because I was talking to someone earlier about this. And how “millennials” or what ever— Yeah. You’re a millennial, but I’m not. I’m pre-millennial.

Right? I’m twenty nine. I’m different than you, you’re different than me. But it’s cool. I was thinking of this—sorry to interrupt—I’m very excited to talk to you. Last night I was going to sleep, I was stoned. I had just gone to the Spectacle to see Women in Revolt with Candy Darling. I love it. Loads of fun. I was thinking, I’m glad that I grew up in a time when the Internet came about in a consumer way when I was in around 7th or 6th grade. My best friend had Compuserv. I don’t know if you have even heard of this. It’s like the eight track of the fucking internet. It’s like the PC version of AOL... In any case, that shit happened while I was living, and didn’t exist before. And that is the difference between you and I. And of course, watching it develop so rapidly to a point where it sort of spiraled out of my brain capacity. It’s ahead of me now. I can’t keep up! I’ve tried but I’m not in shape. It does not come naturally to me. People my age and older who know a shit ton about computers... It’s like they

“I am in the process of sort of finally lassoing all of these things in. All these things that I love. It’s like baking a cake. It’s like a recipe. A teaspoon of this. A cup of that... I’ll take a little bit of what I know about African dance, a little bit of what I’ve absorbed from music videos, and a cup of my experience with Ava Luna, et cetera. That’s how it makes sense to me.”

Yeah, I see that, sure. It makes more sense that it’s more intuitive for someone around my age because— It’s just more casual for you. Your engagement with it is not even a thought... it’s just intuitive.

socially isolated. By myself completely. I spent a lot more time on the Internet. I was slow, I felt old fashioned. I was drawn to a different era. I originally studied jazz singing so when I moved to New York I wanted to be a jazz singer and I was very into the thirties, fourties, or fifties music... the vocal style. I just really connected with that and wanted to do that.

So I did that for a year and I remember—I was also new to the city—I remember staying in my house a lot and scared to go outside. The pace is like when you go onto a treadmill and it’s on a very high speed and you think that you can barely get along but you realize you can turn it down. New York is like stepping onto a treadmill. It’s running faster than you can walk. And I love walking fast a lot. But it also hurts my body. And in walking fast, action precedes emotion. And it’s just a rule. And the way that your body moves makes you feel certain ways and vice versa and in New York it’s like a whole different way of movement, a different rhythm. It’s so quick and I adapted to that really well because I like moving fast, but I learned last year I injured my back in a car accident. I have been healing from it in the last year and having stiffness and weaknesses and body limitations that really affected how I move really basically on a day to day basis. I need to go brush my teeth, do the dishes, tie my shoe, putting on pants, any kind of bending over, walking a lot, what ever. Trying to navigate this pain and find the correct perfectly aligned way of moving has started to make me experience the world physically, primarily. And that has changed my whole perspective. I feel a lot less brain cluttered and, in a way sort, of less analytical and what comes with that. Less analytical is almost a downside, but I had a really active brain before and the analysis was really negative, it was critical analysis. It was a lot of judgements about myself, about the world, everything. Dark, I guess. Close minded, defensive, self-conscious, insecure, blah blah blah. Very self critical and then there was this sort of shift when I got into the car accident and everything became body forward instead of brain forward. And then leading my experience with my body and have my mind follow... it’s very different. If that makes any sense.

It’s a reality... it’s a world of its own at this point.

It’s like a telephone. Can you imagine. While I was in Kingston—I told you I was there for the last 3 weeks—I was

I can imagine.

So in relation to your show, like “female show.” Some of it is gender oriented, some of it might not be... I have sort of been

are weird evolutionary miracles or just a statistic presence of humans that have existed whose particular brains happen to already kind of click with and compute, so to speak. This new technology came into existence and they say, “Oh that clicks with the way that my mind works.” There are other people, their peers, myself I feel included, where their brain just happens to not naturally do that. And I have to learn it.

Whereas a generation younger than me, that grew up when it has already existed it, was already in the lexicon. Doesn’t matter what kind of mind you have. It’s basically a privilege, you know? It’s different. As opposed to class or race or gender privilege, it’s generational privilege almost.

Yeah, it’s almost an entire language of it’s own.

Yeah, it’s sort of bred in you. I think. I imagine. I mean, you don’t even know to the degree.

thinking about it. Because I have been thinking about what I wanted to say to you, you know? Because I haven’t talked about anything that I have made ever. So I’m really just discovering it in the moment... I don’t know. I feel like it might be farfetched but in a faithful way that in order to make [art] I need to free myself from stuff. I had to rotate to a more open, receptive mind instead of assigning things. For a long time I was like, “I want to be a journalist! I want to be a music journalist! I like writing!” I don’t know. Things that are revolving around creative stuff, but aren’t necessarily aren’t the creative thing themself. And I still love that, although I don’t think I’m that good at it because I am so interested! I just survey a lot of stuff and internalize it. Anyways, I have come to a much freer place where I’m making so much I can’t believe it. I made a biography project in 6th grade... a video. Autobiography, what ever. I spoke into one of those toy reverb microphones and said “When I grow up I want to be a performance artist!” I held up a definition of performance artist from the dictionary. But I kind of made up the definition and my mom was holding a camcorder zoomed in. It was all in camera editing. We borrowed this really crude consumer camcorder, what ever. My aunt Jackie had one. Anyway, funny stuff. There’s this weird difference I’m noticing, when you make stuff you have to let go and be very open space. But it’s a very deeply solitary spot. It’s all you, it’s only you. This is all coming from you. Obviously you have absorbed so much you don’t even know. And the things that you do that are not conscious. Involuntary absorption. All of it counts. I feel like I’m finally turning around and starting

“Just a bitter artist who never made it, and her ideas seeped in, traveled up the golden staircase into the pop realm and then become churned out in this volcanic eruption. I don’t really feel like there’s a reason to be bitter about that. In the end don’t you expect that?”

my own language to make sense of everything. I feel like I have absorbed what my sponge contains. And so the videos are my first attempt at how I know how. What I can possibly create. Each video is just the best of I can do in the moment.

So it’s definitely a huge, weird process!

Yeah, it sounds like you’re in the midst of figuring something out.

Yeah, you’re like damn it.

No! I think a lot of people don’t think about that when it comes to artists and their craft just because when you think about an artist, there’s this one piece of work that they have. You don’t think about the whole part in between!

Yeah, it’s like that’s the single that got the hits and there’s the rest of the album that no one ever really listened to! It’s the same! So when you hit on that sweet spot and you think, I’ve made it! This is the single! I mean sometimes, we’ve had to stretch with Ava Luna and be like, What’s the single? And you just choose one. And when you choose one you’re like, “Yeah! I decided this is catchy! Because it’s the single!” So it’s supposed to be the one.

Yeah, exactly. It’s actually an overlooked thing. The process. That’s a thing I’d like to look into more, or just try to make sense of it in a way.

I think it just takes repetition. I think you have to keep going through it and it’s going to be a little different every time but over the course, once you collect a real bundle of experiences you can identify and extract what the sort of commonalities between those and see that and say, Oh there’s that thing that I do and then this other thing will like one off. A part of my process at the time. A spark.

I feel like the problem with being in New York is that everyone is in such a rush to have that one single. That can easily take away from the work that comes out of it. You want to find that thing so much quicker and you know...

Do you know who Tavi Gevinson is?

Of course.

Obviously America loves to build that up.

No matter what it is, if it’s prodigy, they’ll see beyond any boundary crushing. Simply because people fetishize prodigies! That’s what it is. I used to have that syndrome too, just seeing someone so young and successful and be like, “How did they do that so fast?” I’m sorry, but to me, at the point I’m at now, I’m finally starting to feel this weird glimpse of, “It’s cheap.” It’s not supposed to sound like boastful, it’s like a wisdom. I’m just saying that I’m observing it. I’m settling into my life and I’m looking back on a section of youth that I can now see clearly demarcated from where I am now. It’s a new phase of life, I think. I don’t want to delve too much into this bull shit but I’m sure you know zodiac stuff? I don’t know if you’re into astrology at all.

Yeah, I dabble.

Yeah, I dabble, but I’m also just like, It’s wonderful you guys live in that world! I just feel like I’m on a theory level, you know, connecting with the moon and looking at it and feeling it? But I don’t... It’s just another type of human. And it’s actually more feminine!

Yeah, it’s totally associated with women.

And it associates with women because it exists purely, with a very small statistic of ratio of men into it. And here’s another thing about gender... ugh. It’s so complicated. But I feel like witchy women are very feminine. Speaking in terms of the words we know and use, let’s just be basic. Because there’s just not much language to talk about it beyond that now but, yeah. My best friends’ best friend in LA, Marty, has does thing called tarot-scopes, it’s like a double mystic new age situation. She writes a screenplay, she’s a great writer. She’s also a witch, which is a real thing! But it’s hard when you haven’t felt witchy yourself. To delve into that and believe that it’s not a croc of shit. That’s what I feel like most prejudice is. Basically not believing it if you haven’t seen it. The things that exist that you don’t understand just because you can’t experience it.

It’s just another belief system.

They’re realities! And that’s where the belief systems stem from, but that’s why so many different religions exis— I feel like I’m on a tangent.

I was going to say that I think it has provided a wider archive for artists in terms of finding sources of inspiration.

Which is how art is different. Which is how we are different.

The wealth of content to comment on.

Exactly. And I was starting to think about how some twenty-something artist’s work is can refer to Fluxus and they don’t even know it. And what does that mean? Just even thinking about these shows and talking about artists who are so young... Nobody here is fully developed yet in the sense of “the fully developed artist,” you know? Warhol found his screen prints and kept doing that for a while before the soup can. Everyone is still experimenting.

Warhol has six hundred films that are being currently being digitized right now because they are getting ruined and there are no reels and projectors for it. MoMA and The Andy Warhol Foundation, or what ever, are digitizing all his archives and films. He was pre-reality TV. What I mean is that he was a creative genius and had a lot of interesting friends, so it’s cool. But they were talking about how no one has ever seen that stuff, they only know his singles. All this shit that he’s famous for. But there has really never been a place for it.

There’s just a few select works of his, like three films that have ever really been shown, so they’re going to finally bridge the gap and get all these videos into museums and also screen them. BAM is also funding part of it. It’s going to fill out a lot of gaps in his whole career. It’s interesting.

She’s bringing that theatrical aspect back into rock music.

Yes! Care of David Byrne. The perfect match.

Exactly. This new album… she got Byrne-ified. It’s the best thing to ever happen to indie rock, I think.

Or what is about to be pop music basically. Which is great.

Yes! And I went to her show at Terminal 5 and she’s a pop star! She’s doing what Lady Gaga wished she thought of first. But St. Vincent did it so much better. She now has choreography. It’s so fucking cool.

It’s so sharp. It’s unbelievable. She’s like the Beyoncé of Pitchfork or something.

Truly! If they collaborated and made some weird-ass, girl power album...

What’s funny though is she can move because she’s a fucking alien athlete, like an Olympian weirdo. It’s almost autistic the level of excelling that she’s doing.

Exactly. Everything is so meticulous.

There’s a funny twist that I think about when I listen to her stuff that makes me chuckle a little bit.

What? That she went to Berklee [College of Music]?

Well, that is a funny little charm on the key chain. I did the Berklee summer program once when I was nineteen! I was old by the way, there were fifteen, sixteen year old boys with Bob Marley guitars and jew dreads. I was living in my parents’ house. I took a songwriting class and I was like, “We’ll learn how to write songs in this class!” I went and it was a seminar with this old man, a white combover, and a white board. And he taught us copyright law and selling songs.

And I just wanted to know how to write a song, the creative side. And I was shocked that that was the default songwriting class. And that’s what they say about Berklee is. It’s a vocational school for music.

Yeah, that’s why the good people drop out. Because it’s setting up too many limitations.

But they do become these powerhouses at the same time.

Yeah, pop is just a different world.

Think about it. While I was in the studio a couple days ago they had a bunch of shitty magazines, like Rolling Stone. I was looking at this poster for Madonna... The Blonde Ambition tour? Nineteen ninety-two or something. And I grew up loving Madonna. I still do. Obviously Lady Gaga is the neoMadonna. And she has quoted actual lines, lyrics, attitude, individuals, everything. Everyone is always accusing her. But there is some artist, some downtown staple... unknown on main levels. One of Lady Gaga’s looks or videos is a straight up rip off of her work. And there was some window display at Barney’s or Macy’s. It was one of those Lady Gaga inspired window dressing. And she did some protest piece that was video taped and put on YouTube really shottily, protesting in

front of the sign and ranting about how she had done it first.

Just a bitter artist who never made it, and her ideas seeped in, traveled up the golden staircase into the pop realm and then become churned out in this volcanic eruption. I don’t really feel like there’s a reason to be bitter about that. In the end don’t you expect that? It’s crazy the way television works around... It’s all about coordination. Just what you think is creativity. People who write copy at MTV, they’re the “creatives”. But it’s not creative! And it’s so gross. Which is why for the last week I’ve been walking around like, “I can never be happy because I can never be Beyoncé!” Do you know that video for Partition?

Yes! That silhouette of her breasts and ass that are perfect circles?

It haunts me! And that’s why I think I don’t know what feminism is anymore. I’m confused. I don’t think I completely paid attention. So, Beyoncé. Is she a feminist, is she not a feminist? What’s the word?

I feel like that’s any conversation about most pop icons.

Yeah, true. Like, “She’s a strong woman, what does she know about feminism?” Well... who I am has really worked, so I have no complaints. They are not the right spokespeople.

It’s not easy to talk about feminism and women’s rights eloquently if you haven’t read certain texts and talked to certain people in an academic environment, or have families that talk about it. I don’t know why they’re expecting that from them. To have that kind of vocabulary. And also, what is feminism? What is this definition that these people are tracing back to? I mean, it’s cool that Beyoncé, who is the biggest person in the world right now, says she is one.

Because there’s conflict. I remember there’s a sample in one of her songs, the African Women’s Rights Activist from the TED Talk. They’re like, “She quoted that, BUT she’s a feminist!” I’m like, what! It’s nothing.

I don’t know... People are way too critical.

I decided that pop stars are like politicians because you’re constantly running for office.

With more influence.

They’re relatable, not behind closed doors as much because they’re exposed in a grotesque way. I feel like they all have to be in this zone of not claiming any particular belief because they need to keep appealing to everyone. Panning cross cultures and class and all of that. In order to maintain universally respected and paid attention to they sort of have to not commit to one thing or another.

Exactly. From observing since this last album that came out. She’s a business. She found her target market, which is women. And basically she was like, “Okay. I’m going to make music about women.” But maybe I’m trivializing her actual beliefs. Obviously I don’t know her. But it seems so easy for her to market to women.

So do you think it’s insincere?

I don’t know! Maybe there’s not a problem with that!

It doesn’t matter!

She’s a pop star... would you call her an artist?

I mean, I don’t know the inner workings of her creative team.

But the idea that she gives off is that she dictates everything.

The album is a great business idea too. She made so much money. She’s her own manager? It used to be her dad... I watched the documentary. And after watching that documentary I kind of liked her less because it felt so fabricated. That’s when I could tell her life was her— Creation.

Her business endeavor.

Everything. Jay-Z. Blue Ivy.You know that song Drunk In Love where Jay-Z is like—He’s such a fucking bad rapper—“If

I do say so myself, If I do say so myself... Your breastesses are my breakfast” It’s like. You suck! You’re bad.

I was thinking how do they let him get away with putting that on the track?! It’s embarrassing.

She’s the alpha! She’s way more talented than him. There was this fucking article in New York Magazine or Times or what ever. And it was power couple profiles... It documents and cites examples of how they co-promote one another, but it’s also cloaked under this like, “I support my husband!” or what ever. They start to market themselves as a unit.

That’s the part where I feel like it’s somewhat insincere.

I guess. It’s just insincere on what level? Because she’s recognized? She’s been doing music business her whole life. And music business infiltrated her as a person and her identity.

But she seems like really knows herself! Or she’s doing a great job... I don’t know. I love to fantasize and give her the benefit of the doubt. She’s great.

I was looking at Beyoncé and how she compares to other “divas.” Her whole family oriented, very pro-marriage idea that she is a very sexual being but within her marriage to her husband... She’s on the piano table but her husband is right there watching her. God forbid. I guess that’s just pop. If you’re trying to cater to the masses you want America to approve of you... I guess. Does sincerity even matter? Does that define someone as, in her case, a pop star? That has never really been even an issue.

Maybe it’s not even worth looking at that part. It’s sort of negligible. The fact is that she’s doing it.

Exactly.

I guess in terms of her dancing and the purity idea. I completely understand your perspective, but I feel like that’s a removed critical, academic eye.

Very much so.

And one thing that has altered and enriched my perspective in the last two years is that I had a serious relationship with a boy. Which hadn’t happened in ten years because I was mostly dating girls, and I also grew up primarily

with women. I have two moms, they got divorced and had girlfriends. So I guess I have four moms and I also have a dad, who is also gay. And I saw him less frequently. Hardly any men in my life. The experience of being really close to someone of the opposite sex for the first time totally lit up and illuminated parts of myself that hadn’t been drawn out before. And that happens with any personality. After dating women for so long, it was always just the experience of one personality combined with another. What parts of their personality combine with your personality and vice versa. But I felt like there’s really a stark difference. It’s more than just one personality compared to another. Because that’s within the framework of two women. I feel a sort of naiveté and ignorance surrounding the difference between women and men because I wasn’t exposed to many male figures. I was like, “Gender? What ever.” I don’t really understand gender because I wasn’t in any opposition to the other gender. I just didn’t have them to compare myself in any way. So gender didn’t really exist as male or female for a long time. Once I could articulate being involved with men and finding that more feminine parts of myself and realizing that those parts exist... I almost feel like—I think other girls might internalize this too— there is a negative association with any kind of inequality.

I feel like that happens when there is a comparison.

Yeah, I mentally separated myself from girls and girliness.

I’d be like, “I’m not girly! I’m tough” or what ever. But I cry really easily. Whether or not that means I’m a girl or has anything to do with the fact, I don’t know and I’m not necessarily interested. I don’t care. But when you start to read about it and you happen to find all these people who happen to be girls and say “I cry all the time!” And you’re like, “Oh, this is actually a club.” As I’ve gotten older and sort of hormonal it’s actually stronger and nicer to feel these things out of my control and be like, “Oh, this is what people have been talking about.” I just didn’t really get it. It’s the same way when people say they’re allergic to things. It’s like, “Are you really allergic to things?” It’s like, “Yes! There is nothing I can do about it.” It’s just different realities.

I was going to ask you about your presence on stage... The

way you use movement, the way you use fashion, and your control of your voice... It’s very not expected in a great way.

Karen O is a huge inspiration to me. I saw her play after my freshman year of college in 2003 at Siren Fest. It was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Chick Chick Chick, Sleater Kinney, TV on the Radio. It was the generation that Williamsburg built, basically. She was the first person I saw that was just theatrical.

And that just resonates with me. I learned how to play guitar two years ago to play with Ava Luna. And that helped open me up to jamming with people because I was still learning what to do on guitar. I still don’t know. Over the course of the last couple years I have also become less self conscious so it’s easier for me to take more risks in the moment.

“Whether or not that means I’m a girl or has anything to do with the fact, I don’t know and I’m not necessarily interested.”

And then over the course of playing shows repeatedly it just became this open window for me to make any kind of vocalization that I wanted and it’s basically like how I was studying jazz in school. I was learning to scat. Yet another structure.

It’s stupid. There’s a nonsensical vocabulary. Like boo bop boo wee bop, what ever. No one wants that. I don’t think of this as scatting at all but being able to improvise and thinking of different females that do that. I like the idea of that. I like the idea of speech as a form of expression. As a musical form of vocalization but it’s not necessarily singing. I’m interested in that aspect of it. [Ava Luna] was making this transition where Felicia and I went from being strictly singers and having our own songs that were almost pre-written. The melody was already there. I wrote within those confines. But then the next album we were just jamming and it was just ours. And as that sort of channel widened, the opportunity to put your own ideas into something became this wider, safer vessel to open up and experiment. And from my own experience and through repetition I developed my own voice and identity within the band and on stage. And I have an idea of what I

become when I perform and keeping that consistent. If that makes sense.

The humor aspect is clearly a tool, at least used in your videos. What are you hoping that does for you and for the viewer?

“Hey Donny/Hedony” has words in them, but when I do them they’re nonverbal, which is not something I expected to do because I always loved writing. I always felt like I had to get things into words in order to understand them. Like I said, changing my perspective has resulted in action without thinking about it first, then trying to define it later. Humor can be communicated without words. It’s a way of performing, a tactic or a skill, that I am interested in. I spent a year going to stand-up comedy shows and just watching and trying my hand at it too. It’s great but I felt like I could more easily access the essence of what I thought was humorous in a look, in an expression. Right now to be funny in a video would be much faster for me to just give the camera a look than to try to write a joke, which I could spend a month doing.

Comedy is an extremely hard medium. In terms of writing especially.

Yeah, they’re formulas really. It’s timing. The only places I’ve ever shown my videos are at comedy shows and I performed at comedy shows. But I’m always the weird one or the odd one out, which gives me anxiety, but if it gets good feedback then I don’t mind. But I don’t like the idea of completely surprising people or interrupting the flow of a show because people’s expectations might be for more comedy rather than me doing some sort of theatrical performance of “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan in a yellow leotard, which is what I recently did. I don’t know... I’ve gotten kind of addicted to the film thing. It’s more private. You can tweak it. You can control the visuals more. I like controlling the sets and the colors and shapes.

That brings in a different way to create something.

I talked about the stage and how the stage is different from music than it is from Broadway theatre. Film and video are different. Anything on the screen is different, that kind of

performance is different from stage performance. It’s like a different kind of stage, a mobile stage. Anywhere you put the camera, whatever is in the shot, is the stage. You’re projecting your energy towards a different focal point, it’s not this widespread, diffused, projected thing to people who are there.

It’s into a small, tiny lens, into your imagined idea of who might be watching, and that’s one thing I’ve thought about a lot lately. I realized when I perform for the camera, it’s me and this object that is capturing what I’m doing. To me it’s company. I do it sometimes because it’s my friend. It turns out to be a very contemporary feeling that a lot of us harbor.

Feeling the need to document something in order to feel like your tree fell and someone heard it in the forest. I kind of have an analog approach to performing. It’s not “Internet art” but it’s art that applies to life on the Internet. I also perform on Chatrandom.

Is that a Chatroulette kind of thing?

Yeah, it has less hoops to jump through. You don’t have a profile, it’s mostly just scanning through closeups of dicks. It’s all sex.

“A fun thing about experiencing the medium of video or photography is that it’s an advertising medium. Once you see yourself in that format, that’s the filter. Because it’s video I need to conform my body in this particular way to make it presentable for the medium and it’s almost obscene to show any kind of imperfection on screen.”

And what do you do?

I’ve done all sorts of things. I’ve gone off the clock just ‘cause.

Then over time it sort of developed... Having a webcam is so weird because it’s beyond anyone having a camera or camcorder, or even a smartphone with a camera in it. It’s your computer, which is your diary, and you’re usually looking at a really intimate space, maybe your bedroom where all sorts of private, personal things happen. And then you turn on your camera and here you are, broadcasting this intimate space to a stranger halfway across the world. It’s a wild thing to be occurring! So of course I think that our notion of intimacy is really simplified based on black and white. It’s either “platonic” or it’s “sexual.” But then there’s this whole spectrum of “romantic” where “romantic” can be “romantic” without being a sexual relationship. Any kind of intimate [relationship] that’s beyond surface-level can be romantic. It’s a beautiful thing, I guess, but people get so uncomfortable that they try to whip out their dick. Which sums up the whole complication of “men and women”. Everyone is too eager to make it into a sexual opportunity instead of something maybe a little more complex, which I think is a thing that women actually have to navigate more because they’re like, “Hold up hold up hold up. Let’s talk about other options for relating to one another.” We just have a really limited vocabulary for how to experience and relate to people in the world.

The act of seeing yourself at the same time that you’re talking to someone else…

I realize what’s amazing is that it’s so safe. You can take all kinds of risks in just physically exposing yourself online in the moment with someone, because you’re impossibly far away. You’re almost not real to one another, but you are. And the fact that you’re actually using video as a medium is what loops it all in to my video projects. You can actually frame yourself and you can look at particular angles. It’s basically cinematography. And you’re like, “I will make this shape and this curve,” and you’re contorting yourself to find the right look. A fun thing about that is experiencing the way that using, by necessity, the medium of video or photography, is that it’s an advertising medium. Once you see yourself in that format, that’s the filter. Because it’s video I need to conform my body in this particular way to make it presentable for

the medium and it’s almost obscene to show any kind of imperfection on screen. I had a really hard time when I was upstate because I started looking at the footage and getting really bummed out about my body. I didn’t move as well as I thought I did, I’m out of practice, my arms are fat, I’m getting old, you can see my pores in that close-up... All of this horrible shit. Because it’s an unforgiving medium and what you’re used to seeing through that lens or through the screen is something that is unreal. So when you see realness you’re just like, “What! Shield my eyes!” It’s difficult to work with that, but it’s a hard personal challenge to try to stay comfortable and confident while pitting myself against a really oppressive medium.

I agree. When I was doing that project [Pull Push] it was the same idea. I turned to a very safe form when it comes to representing the body because I went to a specific trope, but looking back at the footage I was like, “I’m wearing a fucking beard right now, what is going on?” That’s when it was real to me what was happening, or what I was doing. I had that idea and I cannot believe that I just did that and I’m a normal human being. But it only felt crazy looking back at it. I guess the weird thing about film is that it allows you, if you’re filming a performance at least, a kind of separation.

Do you feel like you experienced it differently knowing that it was being filmed?

Sure. I was more hyper-aware of my movements. Especially because you want your fingers to be in this exact place.

Since I was doing the same thing repetitively I had to be aware that my head was in this one spot.

So [the photographer] was looking at the last shot and saying, “Okay tilt your head to the left a little bit…”

She would also hold up the Polaroid to the camera - my iPhone actually - so it was very specific. We wanted it to be identical. All of them turned out the same and really great, and I was super proud of them. Except for this one guy... we took three pictures trying to get it right but it just wouldn’t happen. Even when I was getting dressed up as him I was like, “I don’t even care about this guy... I don’t

think about him at all,” and that clearly showed through because I was doing the same pose! She was being so meticulous about getting the right angle... that’s the one that I kind of want to take out because only I know he was the person that I didn’t care about. Aesthetically it just doesn’t match up.

I’ve had this experience, too. Just trying to film stuff every day and not all of it’s gold, and I realize that. I’m like, “I’m scared to look at the photos, oh my god,” and there are certain ones where I’m like “I thought this was the good one”.

And there were the stronger ones, and there were ones where in the moment my heart wasn’t in it and when you look back you can tell it’s just not a winner. And you want to, just for volume, to do something with all of them, but I think there’s some value to saying “it’s just not worth it”. It’s like cutting a song off an album because it’s not cohesive. Sometimes you try to find justifications.

Exactly, and I guess that’s a big thing when you’re making decisions about making art. If I cut them out then it’s not the same kind of honest thing that I’m trying to do. I don’t know if you read my monologue but it’s extremely personal, which is also why I had difficulty recording it.

Not only because I realized annunciation and emphasis are really important when you’re speaking, but also it was hearing my voice talk about what it’s like to be a girl who doesn’t really care to cater to anything, and what that means when you’re also straight... I guess that’s partly why I feel uncomfortable with people hearing my voice. My dream for the project is to get the guys to do the narration, I think that would be so badass. I mean, they know I’m kind of weird.

Do they know you did this project?

No, only one of them does. He’s my favorite portrait in the whole series because I knew him so well and he’s someone I care about, so the picture came out really well. I sent it to him being kind of nervous. I mean, he’s an artist, too. I just texted it to him randomly, out of the blue, and he was just like, “Oh, you’re killin’ it, that’s great.”

I think that’s a wonderful idea. I love that. I enjoyed reading [your monologue]. It reminded me of this mask I made

because I had to use it in camp when I was in 6th grade. I played two characters. Last year I actually did this performance piece where it’s actually a conversation that I, without him knowing, recorded in GarageBand. I was on a date with this guy that asked me out in a public park down the street and I just decided to go for it. And we spent this night in my bed, stoned out of our minds, talking. It was our second date. I recorded the entire conversation and I wrote it up and then I performed it as a dialog. I wore these masks on either side of my head and turned for each. I had this huge stack of index cards with “his line, her line, his line, her line” turning back and forth.

When did you perform it?

During comedy shows. It was the one performance where I was like, “I could do this again.” It would be repeatable. The other ones, I always come up with stuff right before I need to because I get so nervous that I procrastinate.

People should look at children’s art more... Artists are searching to find that kind of authentic sense of expression that comes out when you just give a kid a marker and they make whatever. I guess you grow up and you’re clouded by so many different things.

I almost feel like on one hand it’s sort of liberating to dive into identity politics and academics, and feminism/gender studies, but one thing is that I sense that politics - like the women’s lib movement - it was such a humanitarian movement, and there was not really too much of a strong place in academia for it. Since that time, it’s just gained status and now it’s highly academic and highly criticized for all of the language surrounding it, because it’s really prohibitive to the average person. It has become really removed and abstracted from everyone. The idea around saying you’re a feminist and knowing what a feminist is is so intimidating because “only experts can talk about that”.

Well that’s what I’m trying to do with this show, in a way. If you see the diverse forms, you see that there isn’t this one definition of what feminism is. Because I don’t like that academic jibber jabber.

I was reading this article that had some wording I liked and it said, “reject the idea of feminism as still organized around male and female forms of embodiment...a vision of a new regime of power that has little use for conventional gender demarcations... new genders and new sexualities emerging from subcultural spaces.” I like this. I can’t believe how long all sorts of totally subcultural expressions have been going on and it just takes decades to reach the mainstream. Like the transgender stuff that’s happening now...Candy Darling was made in ‘71, it’s insane! Insane! The work that I make does a lot of time de-gender, but sometimes I’m just doing stuff and it’s not like this is about being a woman. Maybe after it is about being a woman, but other times I wonder if it has to be about being a woman, or can it just be a thing. This is already in my own mind, but as amazing as the whole influx of female artists in the 80s and 90s is, it was still framed within being a female artist, and I feel like it puts someone like me in danger of almost being lazy because you’re just like, “Well this is about me being a woman.” By virtue of being a woman and making it, its importance is higher simply because of the maker, in my perspective. In a way, I’m stressed out and critical of the idea that the last cutting edge term was “women” and the new cutting edge term is “gender” and the people who most effectively tackle gender are super queer people.

Now “queer art” is replacing “feminist art” or “female art”. I spent a lot of time in the queer community, I don’t identify with it and I don’t like being a part of a large culture no matter how “sub” it is, I just never identify completely. Sorry!

Queer theory can makes things unapproachable. And that’s not the point.

There are some self-selecting individuals where that’s their strong suit, so they’re forging ahead in that way and I appreciate it. It’s gonna eventually trickle out and absorb into the surface. But it’s funny because in the meantime it’s completely vulgar. Going back to Madonna and Lady Gaga, Madonna I always fully accepted and couldn’t believe people ever thought she was racy. It’s so normalized. And then other

“[Feminism] has become really removed and abstracted from everyone.

The idea around saying you’re a feminist and knowing what a feminist is is so intimidating because ‘only experts can talk about that’.” people do stuff and it makes me uncomfortable. Then I think about someone born now and what they will think of Lady Gaga. That will maybe be their Madonna. It’s impossible to predict how people’s standards and levels of shock will change over time.

That’s what I was thinking when I was seeing St. Vincent.

Indie and pop are merging. When I saw her onstage, the entire production level compared to the tour beforehand skyrocketed. But all she did was build a pale, pink pyramid with a few steps for climbing up and down. But that made all the difference. She made up this broken doll choreography. I left that show thinking, “Wow, that was really queer and different.” And that’s why I thought of Lady Gaga because she does that too. She ties into this idea of queerness. For St. Vincent it’s just there and she’s unapologetic for whatever it is that she’s doing, this theatricality.

She’s another businesswoman. This is how they do it.

Yeah, it’s very clever. She’s doing the right thing, I think.

I mean, it’s cool to see weird, freaky girls gaining such popular attention.

And it’s because she’s just that good. She can go to the top just by being really good. And it’s legitimate.

I think it’s really interesting that we’ve been referring to pop music. I don’t know if maybe that’s because it’s an easy thing to refer to or if it’s something that, if we’re going to talk about female performance, it’s the go-to.

It’s our biggest example. The two best are that and solo female artists. Who do you look to? Cindy Sherman and Beyoncé or

whomever it is. It’s really nice to have a small bank to draw from for examples and inspiration. But it’s also really limited and so that can shut you down sometimes.

Are there other people you’ve been turning to lately?

There’s a whole bunch of stuff I’ve drawn from lately. I like to watch movies for video style and framing. I like this movie Desperate Teenage Love Dolls by Dave Markey. It’s like an early 80s punk, girl revenge movie. I’ve seen a lot of movies about girl revenge. GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, have you ever heard of it? It was a show in the late 80s or early 90s filmed in Las Vegas, at the Riviera Hotel. It was the first televised show devoted to all-female wrestling. It was these highly vaudevillian, stereotypical characters. There’s a set of bad girls and good girls and they go against each other. I have it on DVD. It’s really horrible acting. There’s a Middle-Eastern girl named “Palestina” who fakes prayer before her matches. It’s completely artificial television. The whole approach to the making of that film is really punk. Just do whatever you can with what you can. The acting’s pretty shitty and there’s weird dubbing, and sound effects with his mouth, and there’s a punk soundtrack. I love that approach.

My relationship with technology is very one step at a time.

I’m just learning as I go. Those are inspirations. Vocally, I was listening to Meredith Monk, who does a lot of vocal improv and weird noises. Always female solo artists, period.

Pina Bausch, the choreographer, I watched her movement.

I got really into Tai Chi and Eurythmy, which are really simplified ways of synchronized motion. It’s holistic, not really dance choreography. Because once again, dance gets broken down into these structured genres and disciplines, and it’s really limiting. It also expresses gender, specifically.

Like Beyonce’s choreography, making these perfect shapes and silhouettes to feminize the body. Eurythmy and Tai Chi are not gendered motion. You’re not trying to appeal to or express any particular thing. It’s called “joy of movement”. So those are huge inspirations to me. Cindy Sherman always is, but I looked into her more after watching this documentary on YouTube. There’s footage of her just sweet baby talking to this bird as it’s nibbling her lip. She’s weird. She doesn’t really do interviews and she’s not very verbal. Her interviews are never sort of giving you what you want. She said, and

“This is already in my own mind, but as amazing as the whole influx of female artists in the 80s and 90s is, it was still framed within being a female artist, and I feel like it puts someone like me in danger of almost being lazy because you’re just like, “Well this is about me being a woman.” By virtue of being a woman and making it, its importance is higher simply because of the maker.” this kind of gave me some comfort, “I work so intuitively. I don’t think about what I’m doing before I do it, I just do it.

And oftentimes, I don’t know what I’m doing until after the fact or until I read what someone else has written about the work.” She’s just operating, she’s going, she’s not calculating or deciding beforehand. That’s how I work so far to get these videos, but I aspire to articulating it better than she did. You know Sophie Calle? I have her book on my bedside table.

Have you seen that movie of hers called No Sex Last Night? I was thinking about that when you were doing the voiceover for your monologue. She has a whole voiceover in English.

She’s so into documentation and logging life. She goes on this long road trip from New York to Las Vegas with this guy she vaguely knows, who’s kind of a fan of her work and a depressed writer, and they make this plan to go on a road trip all the way to Las Vegas and if they make it they’ll get married in a chapel there. So they both had video cameras and both video taped each other and the whole experience, and take turns afterwards narrating their perspective over the footage. I’ve always wanted to make something like that. It’s dated because it’s a hideous form of video capturing. It’s gross VHS, no color, lo-fi. Visually, it’s not that interesting, but all of her work is more about the fact that she did it. It’s really organized and creative the way she captures this information.

Yeah, I definitely learned a lot about myself through

the whole process of recording. Not just because this is my first performance piece. I really embraced the idea of trying to embody this other character that is not my gender, and a character that made me feel like an idiot at one point. That’s kind of where it all started. I was feeling kind of like an idiot, and then thought, “What’s the most cathartic thing I can do to forget about the fact that I feel like an idiot and try to make something more productive out of this?” I realized I’m more capable of things than I thought I was, in terms of artistic practice, and not only do I have an issue with performing gender, but these guys are performing, too. Choosing the clothes, wearing them, and feeling out what these guys feel is their most comfortable way to perform themselves made me realize the way I perform as a human being. I’m giving myself a little more room to do whatever I want, and not think of it in terms of gender.That was always a concern of mine for some reason.

Being worried about being seen as either too feminine or too masculine.

That’s huge. I worry about that every day.

Yeah, I think a lot of girls can relate because most of us feel like we don’t fit within this little square. And at first I was like, “Oh I’m totally gonna just put the instruments that these guys play in the pictures! That’ll be hilarious!” But then I thought about it in terms of performance and what it means to be a musician. Because musicians are obviously seen as artistic, sensitive, maybe more open-minded, but in the end it’s totally a way that these guys are performing their idea of masculinity. It’s, in essence, an extension of their dicks. Whatever that means. We all have something like that.

My guitar is not my dick. I think I have my dick elsewhere. I can see that. The guitar is such a dick, though.

There’s this idea of the phallus, and the phallus doesn’t necessarily mean the actual penis, but it’s the symbol. I very much feel like musical instruments symbolize some sort of authority or power that you have. I think that’s why, to this day, people still have a weird reaction to women who write their own music. And there’s the whole idea of the musician and the muse, and I don’t like that. Because it

puts me in this “object” position, like a tool.

It’s an abstraction from not being able to create yourself. The first thing that I ever made was in college called “Everybody Everybody”. It actually is a home music video, and the song is basic, but it’s a mash-up of two Broadway musical songs: “I Feel Pretty” and “How Lovely to be a Woman” from Bye Bye Birdie, that Ann Margret performs. It’s a bunch of characters in a split-screen. I was like, “Oh, fractured identity! All of these different ways and versions of being a woman, all of these ways to fail, only a few ways to succeed. Every attempt to succeed only highlights the things that you lack...” where can you go? I thought that was a uniquely female perspective, but then I talked to some guys and they said they feel that way all the time. It’s kind of unfair because white men are privileged fucks. But has there really been a movement acknowledging what their social location is and what that all means, and how complicated and difficult it is? It’s just as complicated. Just because they’re not outwardly oppressed in the way that we are. Because there’s not as much violence done to them, they don’t get to talk about their position in the movement.

There are Men’s Rights Activists.

I do think that in a way the idea of feminism is sort of stodgy and old-fashioned. There are so many associations with it. It’s probably inching towards “genderism” or whatever you want to call it. Something that’s acknowledging and appreciating this spectrum instead of one or the other. I feel very boxed in.

What am I? Am I female? Sometimes I feel really male, but I don’t even know what male is. I spend time around them, but I know that I don’t feel the way women are as presented. So, what does it mean? It makes you feel like an alien. Dressing up is a hugely therapeutic process.

It really is. Just the rituals of doing it.

Fashion makes you understand constrictions, fabrics, shapes, cuts. They change everything about how you hold your body and how you feel.

I didn’t even acknowledge, until this project, that fashion was a tool for me to reject these notions of what the cut of the clothes for a female body “should” be. And even when

I’m putting on these men’s clothes, my hips are trying to protrude. I’ll never look the same way in men’s clothes as a man will look when he’s wearing men’s clothes. Through that I’ve become more comfortable with the fact that I dress this way. I would do it before but I thought that made me— Weak?

Yeah. In the end I became much more comfortable in my own skin. Performance art isn’t as scary either. There’s such a stigma with it. I told my friends that I had a performance piece in the show and they were like, “Oh what are you gonna do, like, rub a pineapple all over your body?”

I’m realizing that finding other awesome female artists that are exploring that territory is exciting.

I find that I end up being drawn to really feminine expressions. I’ll never be the female ideal and there was a lot of disappointment in that for me. Not a level that I’m proud of. I’m better about it now, but these last couple weeks I just wanted to cut away all these pieces from my body. “It’s just not perfect.” Just horrible stuff. I thought about my own view of my body and how it’s so fractured and fucked up. I’m looking at myself like cuts of meat. The arm’s not slim enough, the waist should be narrower, the butt isn’t round enough.

But it’s my body. It’s me and I’m doing this to myself? I do it to other people, looking at their legs while walking down the street, and it’s horrible stuff. It definitely pollutes my mind a lot, and I’m trying to realize there’s no one shape and whatever the space a person takes up is unique. This one time I saw this girl in these ads and she had a perfect body. I saw it for the first time in real life and she had all of these things that I wanted. It was alarming, in a positive way. Her body is completely anonymous. There’s no personality in it, it’s like Anybody, USA. There’s no “her” inside of it. A standardized shape. And because she happens to fit into that outline and shape of the body, she lost her identity. She’s not herself, it’s weird, she just got consumed into this generic mold. That helped me feel okay about not being that way.

That’s interesting, you think it’d be the opposite.

Right. But you never really see them in real life. It’s striking.

Meanwhile, everyone’s heads were turning. You could see all

of the guys’ eyes follow. Girls, everyone. She had an amazing ass. Like one of those Brazilian mannequins. The female form is loaded.

Well, it’s getting late. One last question. Does anything limit you?

A fear of my own limitations, and a fear of my own limitlessness, simultaneously.

a passive strike (blood to the hilt) madeleine alpert

One day I’ll be an honest beauty, One day I’ll claw the earth, an authentic Peter pansy but a hue darker shooting my shade into your underworld.

A Man’s World: an intercepted message. The size of a walnut in your mother’s womb.

I am at a loss of how to write this. How do I write about being a Woman? How do I write about our desires, the constraints that impede our desires? How can I be honest without letting the gargantuan resentment I harbor shine through?

Is it for men? Is it for “the patriarchy” (meaningless)? Is for the women who are complicit in our “oppression” (meaningless)?

Is it for myself? Where do I begin?

Do I begin with Freud? Lacan? Would it be in poor taste to begin with a Man’s Philosophy?

A mirrored cloth: a metaphor I have been toying with. I carry it. I chew it, but can’t swallow . Unwilling to. A refusal. Masticate, dammit! Swallow, bitch!

The mirrored cloth of (our?) beauty, of satisfaction, of satiation of desire. Whose desire? Not my own. Where is my desire?

In hiding? Beneath the underbelly of contempt? I have looked. Is it numbed? Is it stagnant? Can the seed still flower, can my desire still bloom?

Cloth can be crumpled, layered, stretched, dyed, punctured. Burned. Destroyed.

Can she be pruned? Preened?

Woman not only as canvas; she is much more malleable. A pliant piece for every man’s wishes.

An extraordinary amount of possibilities.

Today, a man reached out and touched my hair. He told me I was perfect. I thought, “if only I could fit every man’s predilections!”

“Power is everywhere,” they tell me. Who are They? Where is this power? May I touch it? Taste it? Just a nibble, please. A pinch for my sour stew of placation, please.

Let me tell you about performance. Let me tell you about performers. I’m one of the best.

Freud talks about “pleasure in pain”. I posit something thoroughly pessimistic, wholly theatrical, histrionic perhaps. I say this

with wild gesticulations, with a cigarette in tow--that the mirrored cloth’s very existence, essence thrives on this pain. The pain of plucking, shaving, starving, morphing, mutilating, fucking. We do not suffer but survive with this pain. Shall I be so trite?

Quotidian masochism of the cloth. I see you and you see me. My eyeliner isn’t sharp enough to kill a man but only enough to puncture my own psyche. Am I pretty today?

We are not denied anything. In fact we are thoroughly enthused with the tools we have in which to kill ourselves. We do not need someone else to set fire to our flesh as we can do it ourselves. I see you and you see me and I see you and you see me.

Layers. An artichoke. Let’s get to the heart.

Is this complicity? “Subversion”? This “corporeal pleasure in pain”? The fact we find ourselves beautiful only after-the-fact, after our cloth becomes either a bachelor’s bedspread or our husband’s curtains? Do we truly believe we are free?

The ego, the id, the flesh, the essence. Subject, object. END SCENE. They seem indeterminable, even erratic. This way and that.

Is a Woman ever whole? The drapes, the sheets, the cushion covers. Not only being fucked but fucked on fucked in front of.

Watching ourselves in such states. Old news, sister, they tell me.

Imagine: a female beaten mercilessly with the selfie on her cellphone, eyeliner shoved up her ass, her made up face slammed against a mirror.

Am I pretty today?

Suffocated with flowers from her own garden! Did we see this day coming?

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

Are we the heroes or the monsters of our own stories?

The episode in which: we determine the villain.

The episode in which: we determine the victim.

Indeterminable; even erratic.

Our findings are unknown.

featured works

“Untitled” by Corina Lupp “Detroit” “Hawaii” “Blagoveschensk” and “Southern Chile” by Fiona Szende Recycled Origins by Vanessa Castro “Seated Figure” by Julie Stopper “Excess” by Ondine Vinao Reminder by Alexandra Wuest “Untitled” by Molly Lambe “Family” by Julia Golda Harris Photographs from Jackson Krule 18 by Margaret Saunders “The Impossibility of Mapping A Site II” Michael Adno “White Gyal Wid A Rass Batty” by Summer Eldemire The Devil’s Wife in Sweetwood by Maren Kelsey “Esther” and “Cherry” by Jennifer Ro “Punch Line” by Nicole Reber Christ’s Womanly Wounds by Elizabeth Lorenz “The Intern Project” by Jordan Barse It’s All the Same: Musings on Performance by Becca Kauffman and Vanessa Castro with stills from “The Home Music Video Series” by Becca Kauffman “VS Girls” by Isabel Legate A Passive Strike (Blood to the Hilt) by Madeleine Alpert

citations Recycled Origins by Vanessa Castro

Christ’s Womanly Wounds by Elizabeth Lorenz

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Hans Haacke. Free Exchange. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. Print.

Bernau, Anke. ‘‘Bodies and the Supernatural: Humans, Demons, and Angels.’’ A Cultural History of the Human Body in The Medieval Period (500-1500). Ed. Linda Kalof. Oxford: Berg, 2010. n.p.

Clark, T. J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. New York: Knopf, 1985. Print.

Dallow, Jessica. “Rethinking Feminism and Visual Culture.”

NWSA Journal 15.2 (2003): 135-43. Print.

Binksi, Paul. ‘‘The Macabre.’’ Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1996.

123-163.

Klein, Naomi. No Logo. London: Flamingo, 2001. Print.

Easton, Martha. ‘‘The Wound of Christ, the Mouth of Hell: Appropriations and Inversions of Female Anatomy in the Later Middle Ages.’’ The Making and Meaning of Illuminated Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts, Art & Architecture. London: Harvey Miller Publishers in association with Brepols Publishers, 2006.

295-409.

Lebel, Jean-Jacques. “L’Origine Du Monde De Courbet” Vue Par Jean-Jacques Lebel: “C’est L’interdit Qui a Organisme Le Fantasme.” Beaux Arts Mag Aug. 2008: n. pag. Print.

Green, Monica H. ‘‘Introduction.’’ A Cultural History of the Human Body in The Medieval Period (500-1500). Ed. Linda Kalof.

Oxford: Berg, 2010. n.p.

Lovelace, Casey. “Orlan: Offensive Acts.” Performing Arts Journal 17.1 (1995): 13-25. Print.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

McDonald, Helen. Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in Art. London: Routledge, 2001. Print.

Lochrie, Karma. ‘‘Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies.’’ Constructing Medieval Sexuality. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 180-200.

Fraser, Andrea. “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique.” Artforum International 1 Sept. 2005: n. pag.

Print.

Nead, Lynda. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality.

London: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Nochlin, Linda. “Courbet’s “L’origine Du Monde”: The Origin without an Original.” October 37 (1986): 76-86. Print.

O’dell, Kathy. “Fluxus Feminus.” Tdr (1988-) 41.1 (1997): 43. Web. Schapiro, Meyer. “Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naïveté.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 4.3/4 (1942): 164-91. Print.

Smith, Terry. “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity.” Critical Inquiry 32.4 (2006): 681-707.

Monti, Elizabeth. ‘‘Ecstatic Somatic: Visionary Experience and Devotional Art.’’ Class lecture for Gothic Art In Northern Europe, New York University, 17 April 2014.

Editors Vanessa Castro Stephanie Eckardt Brooke Marine Zoe Zachary

Designers Vanessa Castro Brooke Marine

Contributing Artists Michael Adno Jordan Barse Summer Eldemire Julia Golda-Harris Becca Kauffman Jackson Krule Molly Lambe Isabel Legate Corina Lupp Turiya Madireddi Nicole Reber Jennifer Ro Julie Stopper Fiona Szende Ondine Vi単ao

Special Thanks To Kathe Burkhart Meleko Mokgosi The Living Gallery NYU Gallatin

Š 2014 Vanessa Castro All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written consent of the artist or publisher.