Text 1: Jack Halberstam,
The Queer Art of Failure (2011)
Chapter 4: Shadowy Feminisms; Queer Negativity & Radical Passivity
Cutting is a feminist aesthetic proper to the project of female unbecoming. As Erika Kohut walks along the streets of Vienna at the end of The Piano Teacher she drips blood onto the sidewalk. The cut she has made in her shoulder, which repeats a number of other cuts she has applied to her own skin and genitalia at other times, represents her attempt to remake herself as something other than a repository for her mother, her country, and her class, but it also crafts a version of woman that is messy, bloody, porous, violent, and self-loathing, a version that mimics a kind of fascist ethos of womanhood by transferring the terms of Nazi misogyny to the female body in literal and terrifying ways. Erika’s masochism turns her loathing for her mother and her Austrianness back onto herself. With the notable exception of work by Lynda Hart in Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (1998) and Gayle Rubin’s early essays on S/M, power, and feminism, masochism is an underused way of considering the relationship between self and other, self and technology, self and power in queer feminism. This is curious given how often performance art of the 1960s and 1970s presented extreme forms of self-punishment, discipline, and evacuation in order to dramatize new relations between body, self, and power. It may be illustrative to turn to Freud, who refers to masochism as a form of femininity and a kind of flirtation with death; masochism, he says, is a byproduct of the unsuccessful repression of the death instinct to which a libidinal impulse has been attached. While the libido tends to ward off the death drive through a “will to power,” a desire for mastery, and an externalization of erotic energy, sometimes libidinal energies are given over to destabilization, unbecoming, and unraveling. This is what Leo Bersani refers to as “self-shattering,” a shadowy sexual impulse that most people would rather deny or sublimate. If taken seriously, unbecoming may have its political equivalent in an anarchic refusal of coherence and proscriptive forms of agency.
Following up on the act of cutting as a masochistic will to eradicate the body, I want to use the example of collage, a cut-and-paste genre, to find another realm of aesthetic production dominated by a model of radical passivity and unbeing. Collage precisely references the spaces in between and refuses to respect the boundaries that usually delineate self from other, art object from museum, and the copy from the original. In this respect, as well as in many others, collage (from the French coller, to paste or glue) seems feminist and queer. Collage has been used by many female artists, from Hannah Hoch to Kara Walker, to bind the threat of castration to the menace of feminist violence and both to the promise of transformation, not through a positive production of the image but through a negative destruction of it that nonetheless refuses to relinquish pleasure.
To apprehend the violence implied by collage, one only has to think of the work of Kara Walker, the African American artist who has used cut paper and the silhouette form to convey the atrociously violent landscape of the American racial imagination. By maintaining a constant tension between the elements of the work, the collage asks us to consider the full range of our experience of power—both productive power, power for, but also negative power, or power to unbecome. Hijacking the decorative silhouette form, Walker glues life-size black silhouettes to white gallery walls to produce a puppet show version of the sexual life of slavery. In the black figures and the white spaces in between she manages to convey both the myriad ways that the human body can be opened up, ripped apart, penetrated, turned inside out, hung upside down, split, smashed, fractured, and pulverized and the nearly limitless archive of the human violent imaginary. Despite the flatness of the silhouette form, she creates an illusion of depth, sometimes by projecting light onto the dioramas she creates but also by making the whole gallery a canvas and then gluing cut outs, sketches, and paintings all over its walls. In some pieces she also writes letters to her detractors and enemies and refuses the reading of her work as simply confirming stereotypes.
The array of discourse that chatters from the walls of the museum and that dialogues with the silence of the black characters in the cut pieces implies that institutions of art are themselves catalogues of both racial violence and the erasure of such violence through the theoretical association of art with beauty. The title of one of her shows, “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,” names the sadomasochistic terrain of speech and silence and makes clear that in a world engendered by sexual violence and its bastard offspring, a world where the enemy and the oppressor is also the lover, the victim is not choosing between action and passivity, freedom and death, but survival and desire. In such a world sex is the name for war by other means. From the horrified responses to her work (charges mainly of creating a new archive of racist imagery), many of which are pulled into her textual collages, Walker draws out the anxieties that she also represents. Using art as bait and deploying the female body in particular as a site for the negative projection of racial and colonial fantasy is simply a modern technology. But using the same technology to turn racism and sexism back upon themselves like a funhouse mirror is a part of what I am calling feminist negation. In fact in 1964 Yoko Ono used her own body as a battleground to draw out the sadistic impulses that bourgeois audiences harbor toward the notion of woman. Her performance “Cut Piece” is not a collage, but the elements of the performance—cutting, submitting, reversing the relations between figure and ground, audience and performer—do conform to the definition of collage that I am using here. What is more, in the dynamics that Ono explores between stillness and motion, production and reception, body and clothing, gender and violence, she allows for a complex and fascinating discourse on feminism and masochism to emerge at the site of the cut or castration itself. In her nine-minute-long performance she sits on stage while members of the audience come up and cut off pieces of her clothing. The act of cutting is thus assigned to the audience rather than to the artist, and the artist’s body becomes the canvas while the authorial gesture is dispersed across the nameless, sadistic gestures that disrobe her and leave her open to and unprotected from the touch of the other. As the performance unfolds, more and more men than women come to the stage, and they become more and more aggressive about cutting her clothing until she is left, seminude, hands over her breasts, her supposed castration, emotional discomfort, vulnerability, and passivity fully on display. How can we think about femininity and feminism in the context of masochism, gender, racialized display, spectatorship, and temporality?
In a brilliant analysis of “Cut Piece” Julia Bryan Wilson acknowledges the reading of Ono’s performance within a meditation on female masochism, but, she proposes, most often these readings fix Ono’s mute and still female body within a closed system of female submission and male aggression. As she puts it, “There is little possibility in these interpretations that the invitation Ono proffers might be positive—no space for “Cut Piece” to be a gift, a gesture of reparation, or a ritual of remembrance” (2003: 103). Locating Ono’s peformative offering of her clothes, her body, and her silence against the backdrop of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Wilson places the piece within a global imaginary. Calling it a “reciprocal ballet” in terms of its gesture of generosity and a “tense pantomime” in terms of the way Ono stages her own vulnerability and brings her flesh close to strangers wielding scissors, Wilson refuses to sever Ono’s remarkable performance from either postwar Japanese art or the rest of her oeuvre. Nor is Wilson content to rescue the piece from its own self-destruction or consign it to what she calls “solipsistic masochism” (116). Instead she situates the work firmly within the activity of witnessing and casts Ono as a master of the art of sacrifice. I am absolutely convinced by Wilson’s reading of “Cut Piece,” and I see this reading as definitive on many levels. And yet, while I want to build upon the situating of Ono’s work within the context of photographs of torn clothing taken after the atomic blasts in Japan in 1945, I also want to return to the ambivalent model of female selfhood that the performance inhabits.
Wilson notes the strange temporality of “Cut Piece” and the ambivalent optimism in the gesture of allowing people to cut off pieces of one’s clothing as souvenirs; in this performance and in Ono’s “Promise Piece” (1992), where a vase is smashed and its shards handed out, Wilson points out, there is always the possibility, indeed the probability that the fragments of the whole will never be reunited. I would emphasize this commitment to the fragment over any fantasy of future wholeness, and I want to locate the smashing gestures and the cutting gestures in Ono’s work in relation to this other antisocial feminism that refuses conventional modes of femininity by refusing to remake, rebuild, or reproduce and that dedicates itself completely and ferociously to the destruction of self and other.
Wilson notes the tendency to pair “Cut Piece” with Marina Abramo- vic’s Rhythm o (1974) and Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), but she quickly dismisses Abramović’s performance as unscripted and marked by “complete surrender” and is similarly critical of Burden’s work, which she sees as an attempt to “manage and engineer aggression” and as “a far cry from the peaceful wishes of Ono and Lennon” (117). Male masochism certainly stakes out a territory very different from female performances of unraveling. While the male masochist inhabits a kind of heroic antihero- ism by refusing social privilege and offering himself up Christ-like as a martyr for the cause, the female masochist’s performance is far more complex and offers a critique of the very ground of the human. A remarkable amount of performance art—feminist and otherwise—from the experimental scene of the 1960s and 1970s explored this fertile ground of masochistic collapse. Kathy O’Dell (1998) writes about masochistic performance art of the 1970s as a performed refusal of wholeness and a demonstration of Deleuze’s claim that “the masochist’s apparent obedience conceals a criticism and a provocation” (Deleuze 1971: 77). O’Dell’s psychoanalytic account of masochism provides a nice summary of the genre and places pieces by Burden, Cathy Opie, and others into interesting conversation with one another, but ultimately she wants to make masochism into something from which we can learn, through which we can recognize the invisible contracts we make with violence, and with which we can negotiate relations with others. But there is a problem with trying to bind masochistic critiques of the subject to humanistic renegotiations with selfhood. In many ways this reconfiguring of masochism as a way of grappling with and coming to terms with violence rewrites the dilemma I identified at the start of this chapter in terms of a feminism that needs to rescue other “women” from their own destructive tendencies. Performances like “Cut Piece” and Rhythm o but also like Faith Wilding’s Waiting (1972) do not necessarily want to rescue the woman; rather they hang her out to dry as woman.
Obviously none of these performances immediately suggests a “feminist” act, but they instead make feminism into an ongoing commentary on fragmentariness, submission, and sacrifice. Ono’s dismantling performance presses us to ask about the kind of self that comes undone for an audience in nine minutes. Is such an act, and such a model of self, feminist? Can we think about this refusal of self as an antiliberal act, a revolutionary statement of pure opposition that does not rely upon the liberal gesture of defiance but accesses another lexicon of power and speaks another language of refusal? If we understand radical passivity as an antisocial mode with some connection to the anti-authorial statements made within postcolonial women’s theory and fiction, we can begin to glimpse its politics. In a liberal realm where the pursuit of happiness, as Jamaica Kincaid might say, is both desirable and mandatory and where certain formulations of self (as active, voluntaristic, choosing, propulsive) dominate the political sphere, radical passivity may signal another kind of refusal: the refusal quite simply to be. While many feminists, from Simone de Beauvoir to Monique Wittig to Jamaica Kincaid, have cast the project of “becoming woman” as one in which the woman can only be complicit in a patriarchal order, feminist theorists in general have not turned to masochism and passivity as potential alternatives to liberal formulations of womanhood. Carol Clover (1993) famously cast male masochism as one explanation for the popularity of horror films among teenage boys, and we might similarly cast female masochism as the willing giving over of the self to the other, to power; in a performance of radical passivity we witness the willingness of the subject to actually come undone, to dramatize unbecoming for the other so that the viewer does not have to witness unbecoming as a function of her own body. Here Joseph Roach’s (1996) formulation of culture as a combination of projection, substitution, and effigy making comes into play. Indeed radical passivity could describe certain versions of lesbian femininity. Queer theory under the influence of Judith Butler’s work on the “lesbian phallus” argues for the recognition of the potentiality of masculine power in a female form, but this still leaves the feminine lesbian unexplained and lost to an anti- phallic modality.
In fact if one form of phallic queerness has been defined by the representation of the body as hybrid and assembled, then another takes as its object the dis-appearance of the body altogether. In an explicitly queer use of the collage, that tension between the rebellious energy of gender variance and the quiet revolt of queer femininity comes to the fore. J. A. Nicholls’s work has mostly involved figuration and has evolved around the production of work in stages, the building of an aesthetic environment through representational strata that become progressively more flat and progressively more painterly at the same time. This movement works precisely against the three-dimensional aspirations of collage which build up from the canvas and transform the dialogue between paint and canvas into a multivocal discourse through the importation of “external” materials. In her process Nicholls first creates, Frankenstein-like, a small collage of myriad parts and materials of the figure she wants to paint. Next she paints a version of the collage onto large canvases, trying to capture the quality of the pieced-together materials in an assemblage of moving and static parts, anatomically correct limbs and cartoon-like stumps, motion and stillness, identity and facelessness. Some of her figures recline like classical nudes, but many of them, gender-ambiguous figures all, are suspended in time, space, water, or paint. They are glued together, the sum of their parts, and they twist and turn in and out of wholeness, legibility, and sense.
In new work Nicholls turns to landscapes, emptying the landscape of figures altogether, turning from gender variance as assemblage to queer femininity as startling absence. What had been a backdrop becomes a stage; what was ground becomes figure; what had been secondary becomes primary. The landscape emptied of figures, when considered in relation to her paintings of figures, still does speak about figuration. Only here figuration, as in Kara Walker’s art, is absence, dis-appearance, and illegibility. In Here and Now the landscape is graphic and dramatic, vivid and emotional (see plate 10). The figure’s psyche is spread horizontally across the meeting of ocean and land rather than encased vertically in an upright body, and the relationships between inside and outside, the primary drama staged by the collage, are cast here as sky and land, vegetation and waves, blue and green, with a barely transparent fence marking the nonboundary between the two. Time and space themselves collide at this boundary, here and now, and the immediacy and presence of the emotional landscape announce themselves in the startlingly dynamic waves in the middle ground. In Higher Ground and New Story the canvases are marked more by stillness and fixity, and the landscape becomes much more of a backdrop waiting for a figure (see plates 11 and [12]). These new paintings attempt to represent femininity as a blurring of the female form with the natural landscape and as a violent cutting out of the figure altogether. The surreal and often hyperartificial landscapes represent queer femininity as a refusal of conventional womanhood and a disidentification with the logic of gender variance as the other of normativity.
Appropriately, given the new subject matter, Nicholls also uses a new form of collage that challenges the viewer to consider the meaning of collage in the age of digital graphics. She scans a photograph into the computer, where she uses Photoshop to cut and paste different elements and materials onto the photo. She then prints the image and paints from it onto a canvas. The three media—photography, digital imaging, and painting—become sites for elaborate and complex digital collage. Whereas in traditional collage by Picasso and others we might find newspaper pieces pasted onto paint, here we find graphic elements grafted through software onto a photograph and then transformed into a painted canvas.
In a contemporary fifty-five-minute performance piece that picks up where these artists left off, titled “America the Beautiful,” Nao Busta- mante combines avant-garde performance with burlesque, circus act, and the antics of an escape artist. The solo performance marries banality and the rigors of feminine adornment, to high-wire tension, the trembling and wobbly ascent of the bound body up a ladder, and combines the discipline of physical performance with the spectacle of embodied uncertainty. The audience laughs uncomfortably throughout the performance, watching as Bustamante binds her naked body with clear packing tape and clumsily applies makeup and a raggedy blond wig. Sentimental music wafts smoothly in the background and conflicts noisily with the rough performance of femininity that Bustamante stages. In her blond wig and makeup, with her flesh pulled tight, she displays the demands of racialized feminine beauty; to confirm the danger of such beauty, she bends and sways precariously as she dons high heels atop a small ladder. Finally she ascends a much larger ladder carrying a sparkler and threatening at any moment to fall from her perch.
This performance, along with a number of others in Bustamante’s portfolio, confirm her as what José Esteban Muñoz (2006) has called a “vulnerability artist.” In his inspired essay on Bustamante’s performance practice, Muñoz calls attention to the ways Bustamante “engages and re-imagines what has been a history of violence, degradation and compulsory performance” (2006: 194); her engagement with the dangers attached to the subject position of “woman of color” make her vulnerable and infuse her performances with the frisson of potential failure, collapse, and crisis. At a poignant moment in America the Beautiful, for example, while perched precariously atop a large tripod ladder, Bustamante turns her back to the audience and uses the stage lights to create a puppet show with her hands. The flickering shadows that she creates on the backdrop refuse to cohere into another theatrical space and merely mirror her blurry status as puppet, mannequin, and doll. But the moment is compelling because it reveals the mode in which Bustamante becomes her own puppet, ventriloquizes herself, constructs her body as a meeting point for violent discourses of beauty, profit, coherence, race, success.
In an interview with Muñoz, Bustamante addresses the improvisa- tional quality of her work and clearly and brilliantly engages both the thesis that there is no such thing as improvisation in performance and the idea that “fresh space” always exists. Something of the balance between rehearsed improvisation and the unpredictability of “fresh space” marks her work as a rigorous refusal of mastery. Muñoz terms this positively as “amateurism,” in relation to the ladder performance in “America the Beautiful” in particular, and Bustamante concurs but elaborates: “The work that I do is about not knowing the equipment, and not knowing that particular balance, and then finding it as I go” (Muñoz and Busta- mante 2003: 5). As she says, each night the ladder is positioned slightly differently on the floor, or it is a different ladder; the wobbling is different, it has a different range, and her body must respond on the spot and in the moment of performance to the new configurations of space and uncertainty.