FIRE IN HER BELLY
Curated by Martabel Wasserman
Curated by Martabel Wasserman
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| Annie Sprinkle performance: "Post Porn Modernist" 1992 |
“We were trying to get under the cosmeticized skin of
representation, not only in the mass media but also in art itself, to develop a
more complex understanding of the connections between studio and street work,
academic and populist writing, and all the stuff in between.”- Lucy Lippard, “Too Political? Forget It.”[i]
“Who am I beyond this skin I am in? beyond this place
where I’ve been changed?”- Kara
Walker [ii]
Read my lips. Bodies are
battlegrounds. In wars waged over and through contested bodies, pain and
pleasure become political fodder. Loss is collateral damage. Casualties are
kept off the evening news, and wars linger on. If representation is not
reclaimed, the risk is invisibility.
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| GANG, READ MY LIPS,1992, photocopy on paper 17" X 11" |
Read my lips. Different types of bodies are policed
differently, strategically obscuring how experiences of oppression are
connected. It takes moments of crisis to make
the connections clear; when the cultural pendulum swings so far right,
coalitional politics between marginalized bodies becomes the only option. The
early years of the AIDS crisis and the ensuing culture wars were one such
moment. Feminists, leftists, queers,
anti-racists and AIDS activists united in anger, sharing tactics for reclaiming
representation, resources and rights. The AIDS crisis and the culture wars are
ongoing, but the cultural and political landscape is bathed in the cheery glow
of neoliberalism with the false promise of justice looming on the horizon.
Appeasement divides us again.
There is an art
historical narrative of the culture wars that is relatively well rehearsed: it
focuses on the battle staged over the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA).
Senator Helms and his cronies tried to define and regulate obscenity on a path
to eliminating federal funding for the arts to restore “family values” in the
United States. Artists who were caught in the crossfire emerge as the key
figures in this version of the story and the significant aesthetic,
performative and theoretical challenges posed to right wing ideology are
ascribed to the (undeniable) brilliance of only a select few. This approach has
the inadvertent effect of reinscribing the legacy of Reaganomics and the
individualism of the 1980s that the coalitional organizing of the time sought
to counter. Some of the artists in the story of the culture wars emerged from
the trenches of ACT UP; others did not. Nevertheless, this backdrop of
coalitional politics is crucial to how dissent was articulated during this
moment. The commodification of dissent by the market and the academy evacuates
the charged conditions in which these subversive aesthetic and theoretical
frameworks emerged.
There
have been significant formal innovations in the historiography of the culture
wars to narrate the horizontal organizational structures, and emphasis the
privileged place that bodies coming into contact with each other had within the
movement. Ann Cvetkovich insisted we make space for affect in An Archive of Feeling. Jim Hubbard and
Sarah Schulman’s The ACT UP Oral History
Project is a collection of personal narratives that counteract the dominant
tendency of narrating history through a singular disembodied voice.
Additionally, both of these projects recognize the importance of feminism in
the successes of ACT UP — a legacy that is often lost in art historical
accounts of the time. Fire In Her Belly
seeks to counteract the dominant art historical narrative of the culture wars,
resurrecting images that have been obscured from feminist and queer histories
alongside those that have been anointed as canonical, bridging time and space
to point to the collective process of visualizing dissent. The exhibition is an
attempt to insist upon the importance of feminism in the visual culture of the
time, and to look at how contact – between bodies, social movements, and ideas
– shaped the interventions that big names made in contemporary art.
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| Anita Steckel, “Presidential Handshake,” 1983, offset print, 11" X 8 1/2" |
The beginning of the AIDS epidemic called for new ways of
thinking about identity politics. In the trenches, activists knew the virus was
transmitted through specific acts, not specific identities. Grassroots
education about the transmission of HIV/AIDS focused on descriptions of acts,
dislodging common practices from generalizations about identity: not all men
who have sex with men identify as gay, for example, or not all users of
intravenous drugs fit popularized descriptions of junkies. The necessary focus
on the exchange of bodily fluids informed new thinking about the fluidity of
identity itself.
AIDS activists saw that bodies are not autonomous – that
they change each other through contact. We are physically permeable but often
oblivious to this materiality of the self because of the challenges our
permeability poses to dominant ideas of the individual. The centrality of the
body, both physically and theoretically, made space for the emergence of queer
politics – a politics of non-normativity not bound to a fixed identity.
In the 1995 theoretical investigation of ACT UP, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography,
David Halprin articulated the utopian potential of queer as a rallying cry:
ACT UP draws members of all
constituencies affected by the AIDS catastrophe, creating a political movement
that is genuinely queer insofar as
that is broadly oppositional; AIDS activism links gay resistance and sexual
politics with social mobilization around issues of race, gender, poverty,
incarceration, intravenous drug use, prostitution, sex phobia, media
representation, health care reform, immigration, law, medical research and the
power and accountability of “experts.””
Halprin describes queer as all-encompassing of difference.
But the gap between theory and practice, was, as it often is, a treacherous
chasm to traverse. Halprin’s analysis of queer is reflective of the hopes of
this period, but elides the difficulties of organizing across difference. Similar
to popularized notions of the social movements of the 1960s, dissent and
conflict that happened within AIDS activism are often overshadowed by an
idealized picture of the movement’s potential. Commentators of social movements
often fall in one of two equally destructive camps: on one hand, to
over-idealize, and on the other, to over-criticize. When telling these stories,
it is our job to account for the difficulties inherent in organizing, but also
to find the real moments of hope upon which to graft new movements.
“If I could open your body
and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused
with yours I would. It
makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of
so much loss. It makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my
palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures to
reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these memories will be lost in
time like tears in the rain” – David Wonjnarowicz
The text is excerpted from a 1990 work, When I Put My Hands On Your Body. The description mourns the loss
of an individual, a lover. It is
silkscreened across the surface of skeletons in an image of excavated ruins,
mourning the loss of a society, a tribe. Wonjnarowicz was taken by the epidemic
1992. What the does it feel like not to
die with your comrades in battle, but to keep on living and fighting as the
moment of impact recedes further into the catacombs of history?
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| Julie Tolentino performance: "it will all end (in ultra red) tears," 2011 documentation courtesy of Thomas Qualmann |
In Julie Tolentino’s
on-going series of collaborations The Sky
Remains the Same, she performs the pieces she has found most influential
alongside her peers who originally performed them. In opposition to the
reperformance impulse in contemporary art, which seeks to stabilize the meanings
of work, Tolentino explores “how works may unbind/unwind/undo us as another
form of history making.” Her performance Self-Obliteration
with Ron Athey poignantly speaks
to the questions of translating pain and desire across difference that Fire in Her Belly seeks to address. The
performance begins with Athey, and later Tolentino, aggressively brushing a
lush blond wig. When the performers remove the wigs, they reveal a set of pins
on the underbelly of the acrylic blond mass that had been piercing their skulls
as they brushed. Blood drips down. The prop, a sign of normative beauty and
desire, stages drag that is specific to the gender, race and sexuality of each
performer. In the second part of the performance, they each slide a pane of
glass back and forth across their nude bodies. He is HIV-positive; she is not.
He is a white man; she is a woman of color. They are both queer. Though
performing the same action, their embodiment changes how the connotations of
blood, nudity and pain are interpreted. Meaning is not transmitted between
performers. Their queer exchange speaks to both the impossibility and necessity
of solidarity.
Solidarity, like love, is
difficult by design. As forms of bonding, they point to the limits of empathy
and the impossibility of understanding another human’s experience. Love is
charged by the inevitability of loss. Solidarity is fueled by the optimism that
organizing across difference is sustainable. While we can’t hope for a pure
translation of experience, what we produce in the process of trying is the very
material of radical transformation.
Andres Serrano, "Piss Christ" 1987, cibachrome print, Edition of 10, 40 X 30 inches © Andres Serrano
Installation view: Ron Athey, Julie Tolentino, Andres Serrano, video loop: Pussy Riot, Ai Weiwei, David Wojnarowicz
all images copyright: the artists
Installation view: Connie Samaras, Lisa Kahane/Paulette Nenner
all images copyright: the artists
Installation view: Anita Steckel, Clarissa Slighe, Robert Mapplethorpe
all images copyright: the artists
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Martabel Wasserman is an artist, writer and curator currently living in Long Beach and
completing her MFA at the University of California, Irvine. In 2010 she
graduated from Harvard University with a degree in the Studies of Women, Gender
and Sexuality and Visual Environmental Studies, for which she completed a
catalog documenting the exhibition ACT UP
New York: Art, Activism and the AIDS Crisis, 1987-1993. She has shown her
photography in Boston, Providence, New York City, Los Angeles and Berlin. She
is currently editing RECAPS (Reclaim Culture, Art, Politics and Sexuality) at
RECAPSmagazine.com
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All image copyrights: the artists
