BODY MEMORY - BODY VISION: Performance Works

CYCLIC

CYCLIC
A performance by Ron Athey, Cassils, and Fanaa






The soundscape, Extinction, featured at the beginning and end of the show are noises from animals that have gone extinct up to 1987 when the Biosphere was built. The first performance is by Ron Athey, with mythical sounding chatting featuring Hermes Pittakos, Ron Athey's assistant, unwrapping a rope around Athey and holding a bundle of peacock feathers. A cleansing ritual. Pittakos does rhythmic breathing while cleansing the space, a breathwork technique that is typically used to ground oneself into a present moment.

The performance then cuts to Ron Athey, dressed in a suit methodically stepping into different boxes that are laid out in a grid and shouting numbers 1-5 in random order. This part of the performance is a reimagined version of Brion Gysin's recording of "Pistol Poem". Bright spotlights flood the space, similar to that of headlights. 1, 2, 4, 5, 1, 3, 4, 2. Sometimes when Athey steps he does not speak. At different points in the performance, other performers join Athey, their movements greatly differing from his. The second person to join moves in a very exaggerated fashion. A third person joins, who has more feminine features than the two previous performers. The noises playing in the background sound like the clanging of metals, and loud booms similar to thunder, cars running, or gunshots. One performer is in a hoodie while the others are dressed more formally. The music becomes so loud and layered that it almost completely drowns out Athey's voice. The other performers are local performance artists Natalie Brewster Nguyen, Richard Michael Thompson, and Kris Aman. 

The next part of Athey's performance features him at a podium, in formal attire that looks like it would be on a leader or a politician. His speech is projected above him on the ceiling. He talks about sex, grief, spirituality, mythology, death, and identity. The text that Athey reads has been pulled from Genesis P-Orridge's Esoterrorist - Selected Essays (1980-1988). His speech both sounds poetic and as though he is only spouting words that make no sense together.

After being buried for an hour, Fanaa is pulled from under the dirt by two men. In the background, a Palestinian lullaby by Rim Banna plays in reverse. Fanaa is dressed in a gold dress. She rubs the soil on her hands, arms, legs, face, head, and hair. Dirt can be heavily related to attachment to the home, and with this song being played in reverse it connotes that Fanaa is looking to return to the earth and to her roots (home). Fanaa also sounds similar to Fauna, which correlates back to this performance relating to becoming one with the earth. She then pulls a sack filled with dirt out from under the dirt and crawls off into the darkness dragging the sack behind her. When she starts to drag the sack away, the song ends. The dirt leaves a trail, an imprint behind her. The act of Fanaa dragging the dirt with her is a nod to Medea’s action of carrying the soil of her homeland wherever she goes, as well as Ana Mendieta’s Earth Body series.

In Pressed, Cassils lays starfished onto the floor, blue lights spotlighting then and flooding the space they take up. The room is nearly freezing cold. Two men come and lay a giant, 100-pound glass sheet on top of Cassils. Cassils begins to grunt, groan, and wriggle about to signify that the glass is crushing them, that they're trying to get out from under it. This dance of constraint and slowly maneuvering of the glass pane around them highlights the physical limits of their body. Invoking an idea of the specimen, Cassils makes a nod to the idea of the "otherness" of trans bodies in the social world, with surveillance disproportionately affecting trans people. The growing visibility of trans identity in art and society is both a sign of liberal progress, while also coinciding with heightened violence against trans people and the suppression of trans rights. Cassils soon give up, and they starfish back onto the ground; their breathing rough and tired. The two men come to remove the glass from their body.




In the next scene, Ron Athey revives his iconic piece, The Human Printing Press (1994). Athey lays on a medical looking chair, his hands gloved and locked so that he cannot use his hands. A man, Paul King, takes a scalpel/knife contraption and slowly cuts a symbol onto Athey's chest, him groaning each time the knife cuts through his skin. The scarification is Dionysian and is based on the Cretan symbol of the Minotaur. King then takes pieces of paper and pressed them onto where he did the cut, making prints of the cut that two assistants then line up on what looks to be laundry lines. King continues to press pieces of paper onto Athey's chest until the cut design is more and more faded. The noises in the background sound like metal being dragged on the ground, phones ringing. Once the laundry lines are filled, King continues to make prints but throws them on the ground. 

The performance cuts out to two rectangular troths, both human-sized, one filled with a blue and one with red glowing UV reactive pools. In the red troth, some intestines lay. Two nude people, Cassils and Pittakos,  come and lay in the troths. They roll around so that their bodies are covered in the colored goo. In the background, noises from now-extinct animals arise. At the same time, each individual places the head of a bull over their heads, the red one, Pittakos, also wrapping the intestines around their neck. They emerge as the Minotaurs foretold in the blood on Athey. Cassils sits on their knees in the blue liquid, then drips a yellow goo onto their body, while Pittakos holds the intestines up in the air. Cassils stands up and pours all of the yellow liquid onto their body. Both Minotaurs stand, Cassils holding the yellow bowl up, Pittakos holding the intestines. In the center of the room, Fanaa throws pulverized gold around her, imitating an alchemical fire. The space goes black, and the sound of screams echo through the Biosphere. The performance ends.
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RON ATHEY
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Based in Los Angeles, CA, self-taught performance artist Ron Athey has developed his work out of the post-punk and pre-goth scenes in the 1980s. Athey experiments with performances that occur in a trance-like state, mirroring the Pentecostal spirit states that he experienced as a child. In the 1990s Athey formed Torture Trilogy, a company of performers whose focus was to address the AIDS pandemic through memorializing and philosophical reflection. Athey continues to do solo performance pieces, along with collaborative and group work.  


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Starry One - Tale of the Minotaur

Shameful mother
Takes him walking.
Back and forth, back and forth
--- he’s the son of the beast
Disgraceful and hotheaded---
And he imagines a boat
And rides it to peace

Starry one,
So lonely, growing up among
Mountainous walls
And imaginary intimacy.

Drowned in expectations,
Trapped beneath watchful eyes.
Othered. 

To be held
Out of his own imagination
Despite his beastly appearance
And to be loved;
He cannot inherit

Will he later hallucinate
His gods? Rescuing
Him from the maze
Of his consciousness?

The love, the recognition--
Something so rare
Felt in his soul,
Met in his dreams
--nostalgia
Of another existence.

A question of living
Or of freedom--
A losing battle
Of little innocence--
A ball of thread
Rolls by.

And his mother grieves,
But he feels nothing,
Blissful nothing.
Free.

The thread is wound again.

Written by Hannah Scott
In response to Ron Athey's performance in "Cyclic"
Style inspired by Alan Ginsberg’s, “Wild Orphan”

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FANAA
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Flora and Fauna

They opened the road through the woods,
Too many years ago.
The weather and rain have divided it more,
Untamed wilderness, and proper man,
And you would never know
What the Earth looked like
Beneath the cobblestone.

There was once no path through the woods
Trees grew taller than any man:
They are now smoke for progress,
And the gentle deer,
The sharp witted foxes,
The orchids wane
There is no untouched home. 

Yet, if you enter the woods
On an early spring morning
When the air is cool,
And dew still clings to blades of grass
Where no whisper of man can be heard,
You will hear the soft beat of a mother’s heart
And the swish of the willow’s skirt
Nodding in the wind
As though they perfectly understand
The Earth that was stolen
Will never be returned

…

There is no home in the woods.

Written by Hannah Scott
In response to Fanaa’s performance "Exhumed" in "Cyclic"
Style Inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s, "The Way Through the Woods"
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On Feminism, Fanaa, and Identity, an Interview with Arshia Fatima Haq.

Moderated by Lucille Henderson and Hannah Scott
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Hannah: Hello, and welcome. Today Lucile and I will be interviewing Arshia Fatima Haq. Arshia is a multifaceted artist, working in film, performance, sound, and visual art. Arshia's work deals with the complexities of having multiple different identities, hers being woman, Muslim, immigrant, citizen, etc. Through her work, Arshia recognizes the marginalization of her identity in the worlds she moves between. Arshia creates feminist work, while gracefully relinquishing the Western feminist model, making her work innovative and original. Thank you, Arshia, for joining us today.

Arshia: Thank you for having me.
 
Lucille: I'll start us off with the first question. Our first question is, how do you veer your art away from the traditional, Western feminist structure?
 
Arshia: Yes, so I think just from my interests and kind of where I begin the embodied knowledge I have that's been transmitted to me from where I was born, through my family line, and being a migrant to the US, I definitely had other systems of knowledge that were primary for me growing up. It's always been my point of reference, so even early on when I was a student in comparative literature and then went on to do my MFA in film and video - which was at an amazing program at Cal Arts which was super experimental - I generally felt disenchanted with  - and this didn't happen so much at Cal Arts, but in my early academic education - being handed the Western body of knowledge as the cannon and it felt irrelevant to me. I always just followed my own independent study, starting from the traditions I was raised with, then going on to further those studies with reading and traveling in the region that I'm from beyond what I knew as home there, and really focusing on indigenous tradition and localized languages, things like that that comprise the world for me as opposed to the books I was given later in life. I have a weekly debate on whether to get rid of all my Western philosophy books that are on my shelf.
 
Lucille: Right
 
Arshia: But then I'm like, what if I have to someday prove that I read these. But it's actually not so relevant to me now.
 
Lucille: It does help to know the structures we're trying to dismantle first.
 
Hannah: Yes, and if you're brought up only being taught the Western mode of thought it's difficult to expand your knowledge and read from another perspective.
 
Arshia: Yeah, I think what you encounter first can be really formative. You can talk about that from a psychology perspective, you can talk about it from an academic perspective. I was lucky because it's complicated to be from two places or multiple places, especially when you're young and you're trying to find your footing, but I think it's a blessing because it gave me multiple perspectives to look at things from an early stage. Also, English is not my first language. The books I was exposed to first were not in that language, so I always had an alternative corpus of knowledge to draw from.
 
Hannah: Yes, that leads wonderfully into my next question. Do you believe that the meaning of your work is more relatable to a wider audience because you avoid the Western feminist model?
 
Arshia: No, I think that it makes my work harder for people to relate to. And that is something that I do think about and struggle with, but early on I made a decision that a lot of my work is made first and foremost for me, and that is not meant to be solipsistic in the way that it might come across, but more that everything becomes an investigation into a set of issues or concerns or aesthetics that I am interested in, and that I am trying to figure out and that I am problem-solving. Everything is a question that I am asking for myself first and from that extended to others like me, people in my community. A lot of the work I do, the social practice I do is resisting things like translation and not giving a digestible or run-down synopsis. I do like to work a lot in dream states or poetic states, subliminal, subconscious states because that leaves things open for people's own interpretation, which I really like. I don't like being didactic, but it is complicated because I often reference histories that are not popularly known here, and so sometimes I think it makes the work inscrutable. I hope that creating immersive environments and things that are working at a more dream-like state can allow people to at least have some sort of palpable sense or intuition about what they're experiencing.
 
Lucille: Our next question relates to your relationship to your work. What is your relationship to the body as form, and how do you like to portray that relationship in your work?
 
Arshia: It's interesting because I come from a tradition where representation is discouraged. I grew up in a Muslim household, and there are all kinds of variations of relationships to art and artmaking, but in the most conservative interpretations of the practice, figurative representation is strongly discouraged. You rarely see depictions of religious figures, spiritual figures, or the human body in general. That's why there's such a beautiful and complex tradition of art around botanical motifs and abstract motifs within countries that have majority Muslim populations. My decision to enter visual art, first through the lens of filmmaking, was not a very expected one, and it's something that I have grappled with a lot because I think I have internalized a lot. I think that there's a beauty in that because there's this existential idea of how representation can never really be full. It's always less than what it is trying to represent. In a lot of my work, until very recently there was no body, there was no figure, and even when I do deal with the body, I am really interested in the things that are ephemeral, things that don't leave a trace, or things that contain their own dissolution from beginning to end. That's kind of my relationship to the idea of the body within art and form is really working with the idea of permanence and transience whenever I can.
 
Hannah: Lovely. Our next question is regarding your thoughts on, Cyclic and Fanaa's work Exhumed. Do you think the meaning of the work is strengthened by being performed in a group setting?
 
Arshia: The piece was created for that particular setting, so it was an original composition. Fanaa was working with Ron Athey and Cassils, and Ron had this idea of creating this piece in this wild atmosphere of the Biosphere which in and of itself is this defunct idea of utopia that eventually failed. We were working with different themes, and we came up with the idea of working with mortality. Ron ran the human printing press, and all the attention that had come to him when the human printing press was originally performed, and then Cassils working with the idea of the glass pressing on them as a metaphor for the reduction that is given to marginalized bodies or treating the "other" as a specimen, something that can be dissected and categorized, filed away, reduced. For Fanaa, it was the idea of burial and rebirth, and eternal mourning. In a way, it was everyone dealing with the idea of their death and their death rite. In the case of Fanaa's work, it was a resurrection. The idea of things cycling over and over, life and death, rebirth was a big part of it.
 
Lucille: Thank you for that. Our next question is do you think creating work centered around the idea of "home" or "homeland" is a feminist concept or notion?
 
Arshia: That's interesting. I think that in so many traditions and cultures the feminine body is tied to the idea of "home" by extension of that domesticity. I think earlier on in my practice I was really interested in the idea of homeland and home, and I think as I've grown, evolved, and changed, I am less interested in that because in the feminine body that I occupy I haven't chosen to identify with some of these domesticated roles. I am also really interested in mysticism from India and Pakistan, and from the Sufi tradition in which a lot of the ideology is around breaking down the ideas of home, the ideas of the temple or the mosque; the structures that hold us or contain us. These can also be structures that hold us back and not just hold us in. There's this idea of decentering or destabilizing to come to a new understanding. My friend Fanaa, who is in Cyclic, chose her name because it means, "death before death". Fanaa is a concept in Sufism, that's where that name comes from. It's not actually a literal death, so it ties back to Cyclic as well, It's the idea of losing the sense of your ego to form a new identity. It's probably tied to other traditions in the world that are coming from a more indigenous practice or shamanic practice. I think for me, regarding the idea of home, I'm more interested in the wild right now.
 
Hannah: Very cool. I love that idea; I've been looking into how a lot of feminist artists go out into nature to create artwork and how there's this deep connection to nature and feminist work. Especially in relating women's bodies to the Earth always happens, and how in our society there's so much abuse happening to the Earth, and then also abuse happening to women. They're paralleled in that way.
 
Arshia: Right. I mean, there are artists like Ana Mendieta, who is super influential to me, and her working with the body in these settings, not only working in natural settings but deliberately choosing to work outside of institutional spaces (i.e. the white cube), is something that has really interested me. I have an MFA in film and video, so I am not coming directly from the fine art world. It's really different. My coming back to having a studio practice is through Discostan, which is a club space, radio station, record label that I run, which is also a performance space. It's a curatorial space, and there are a lot of artists that come through there and perform. Not just musicians, but visual artists and performance artists. Really radical work has been performed there, and I think it could have only happened in a space like that; in club space, something that isn't the traditional white cube that we're used to because that encourages more liminal practice, more fluid practice.  It allows certain things to germinate that wouldn't otherwise. For me, those kinds of spaces are more generative, dynamic, and interesting. I think there is a formality and sanitary nature to a lot of how work must be produced or presented in traditional spaces. For example, I work with dirt a lot and a lot of galleries are not going to want to have dirt in that gallery or that it will have to be really contained. For my last solo show in LA, I filled the whole gallery with dirt, but it was more of an informal space that allowed that, and the work wouldn't have been the same in a different setting. I couldn't have realized it in the way that I wanted to without having some of those parameters relaxed.
 
Hannah: Yeah, I really like your response to that. For my next question, I was wondering how does spirituality affect your work?
 
Arshia: I think that there is a very primary engagement with a spiritual tradition in my work, especially my work since 2014 or so. That's when I started traveling back to India and Pakistan to research the tradition and culture of local shrines, Sufi shrines. I became interested in more radical and alternative interpretations of spirituality in that time and onwards. In Fanaa's performance, she's doing a version of a purification ritual that is done at various times before prayer, or in certain situations such as at a funeral. There is a version that is done with sand, it is usually done with water, but there's a form of it that you can do with sand or with dirt in the absence of water. In a time of scarcity, drought, plague, or war, you can use this other material as a symbolic purification agent. In Fanaa's performance, there was a whole subtext of apocalypse or resurrection, and in this apocalyptic and dystopian space that had formerly been a utopia, it made sense to revise the ritual. At the same time, it's never direct reference, there's always a little bit of an "if you know, you know", type of intention to it.
 
Lucille: Kind of like the other work you were just saying in general how most of your work is very specific and maybe not relatable to most. But I think that has a lot of power in it itself, and I think a lot of identities that are mixed or at a borderlands aren't shown for their complexities, so I really think it's quite amazing that you show and exhibit all parts of that instead of trying to diminish that complexity by focusing on just one aspect of your life. So yeah, I think that's really beautiful.
 
Arshia: Thank you.
 
Lucille: That does lead to my next question, which is, as a women-of-color artist, do believe that your work must address your identities? Have you always felt this pressure to do so, or does it come naturally?
 
Arshia: I think it's kind of in between the two. It comes naturally to some degree because of the body that I am in, but also the way that I was raised. Even though I am in diaspora I did go back and forth a lot, so home was not just here, it was in another place as well which would be South India. I think there is a natural urge to begin with my body. That relationship is there. There's been a moment right now for certain identities to be privileged, and rightfully so, and at this moment where we are especially being disembodied - and even before that with the advent of social media - there's so much awareness now and so much language to talk about certain things. And again, it comes back to this idea of maybe over-explaining or over-identifying, and then tokenization is still very real. There are so many times where people are asked to be a part of something and it's checking a diversity box. But is it really changing anything? I don't know if it is, and it's something I struggle with. I choose from situation to situation whether to participate in something that is kind of so rigidly defined by gender or by ethnicity or nationality. I think where that question gets answered more for me is who the work is being made for and because I do tend to work more for the communities, I am engaged with that automatically focuses and simultaneously limits where the work is regarded or seen. And I am mostly okay with that. I'll always be referencing where I am from in my work. I think I'll always be asking the same five questions, and I think part of the resistance in having it be reduced is using some degree of opacity and lack of visibility, or refusal to been seen. A text that I have been really engaged with recently is Édouard Glissant's The Right to Opacity, and in that he speaks a lot about the marginalized body's right to refuse and the right to be concealed as a strategy to assuming power. And at this moment, we're in a time of almost total surveillance, you can't even resist it anymore. Everything is seen, and everyone talks about everything all the time, and yet very little is perceived. So having things that aren't seen can be quite powerful.
 
Lucille: And resistance in taking over a body that is often degraded or used for other purposes. Yeah, that's beautiful, thank you for sharing that. I do believe that is our last question. Thank you so much for spending time with us, for sharing your works meaning, and for giving us more insight as we watch the video
 
Arshia: Thank you so much for having me, it was really nice to speak to you both.

Arshia Fatima Haq (born in Hyderabad, India; based in Los Angeles, CA) works across film, visual art, performance and sound. She is interested in counter-archives and speculative documentaries and is currently exploring themes of embodiment and mysticism, particularly within the Islamic Sufi context. Her body of work stems from the complexities of inhabiting multiple personas – woman, Muslim, immigrant, citizen – and is conceptualized in feminist modes outside of the Western model. She is the founder of Discostan, a collaborative decolonial project and record label working with cultural production from the SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) region.


Haq's work has been featured at Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Broad Museum, LACE, Toronto International Film Festival, MOMA New York, Hammer Museum, LAXArt, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Pacific Film Archive. Currently, she hosts and produces monthly radio shows on NTS, and recently released an album of field recordings from Pakistan on the Sublime Frequencies label. She received her MFA in Film and Video from California Institute of the Arts in 2005, and is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship, the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and the Onassis AIR Fellowship.



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CASSILS
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CASSILS is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils's art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle and survival. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils’s work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment.  

Cassils has had recent solo exhibitions at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC; Institute for Contemporary Art, AU; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bemis Center, Omaha; MU Eindhoven, Netherlands.   

They are the recipient of a 2020 Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist (2020), a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (2019), a United States Artist Fellowship (2018), a Guggenheim Fellowship and a COLA Grant (2017) and a Creative Capital Award (2015). They have received the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California Community Foundation Grant, MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award, and numerous Visual Artist Fellowships from the Canada Council of the Arts. Their work has been featured in New York Times, Boston Globe, Artfourm, Hyperallergic, Wired, The Guardian, TDR, Performance Research, Art Journal and was the subject of the monograph Cassils published by MU Eindhoven 92015) and their new catalogue Solutions, is published by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, TX (2020).



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Petri Dish 

Fit,
Shift,
Bend,
Press,
Break,
Meld into
The mold set for you;
Not by you.

Let me examine you
Let me touch you
Let me tell you
Who you are.

No, they do not decide
How I change.
I have climbed mountains to arrive
At my body’s haven.

My body
Is nothing novel
Nothing strange
Not a science project.

Our dates are too brief
To concern oneself
As to how I should best
Fit into a binary
When I contain the universe.

To be,
To belong,
To exist,
In peace
And safety.

No one questions how a star shines;
How glass breaks into crystals.

Break the glass
Into crystals.

Written by Hannah Scott
In response to Cassils' performance, "Pressed"





We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.



https://www.cassils.net

https://www.ronathey.org


https://arshiahaq.com



 

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