Last night I got to hear two incredible performance lectures from D Mortimer and Leo Bussi. In the first, Mortimer talked about influence, whirligig methodology, spiral dances, decomposition, disturbance and Genet’s play Deathwatch, while periodically strumming an electric guitar. It was virtuosic! In the second, Leo talked about his love for Jeff Koons’ Hulk (Friends) by telling the story of his falling for Koons after poring over art books in the GSA library and celebrating his work’s ‘real-fake performance’ and ‘sentimental horseshit’. We looked at ‘paintings which actualised what [Leo] hoped [his] work would do’, a version of abundance felt as emptiness, Andrea Long Chu’s definition of desire, metaphors of puncture, fantasies of ‘masculinity interrupted by attachment’, gender as citation, strength as atmospheric. He had the audience blow up a number of inflatables – champagne bottle, dolphin, yasssified horsie, parrot, frog, elephant, saxophone, caveman club, airplane, flamingo, duck – then strap each one to his body with duct tape. A great deal of ripping and balancing was felt and heard. He crawled to a hole in the floor to see what was underneath as I passed him the microphone, saying ekphrasis might be experienced ‘as the holes in the residency’s floor’. But just as the beach might not always be locatable beneath the paving stones, abundance isn’t always found under the residency’s floor – Leo said something like what he had seen down there was something of a disappointment. One thinks of a sort of virtual ekphrasis. For ekphrasis was in the air, a humming poem-to-come, even if the found objects could not be conjured to satisfaction. Other things I thought about: inflation and the economy, ecological readings of species coexistence on the human body (Hulk ecologies??), Leo as the angel of inflatables (in a sort of Antony Gormley, statuesque way), steroid bod as empty calorie capitalism, cuteness and kitsch as dramaturgies of gender, the politics of anthropomorphism. Leo concluded by reflecting on how we are more interested in looking at each other, in talking about art, than we often are in the art itself. And how that can be very specific, historical and contextual. In some sense performing his art object of choice, via a process of collage and becoming-object, Leo made us really look at how we look.
This event took place at The Writers’ Room in London. Check out what they are doing here.
(Unfortunately in the first half of the event I was too sun-dazed to take a picture.)
mariaology 