Virtual Bodies film & video screening at the T. A. J. Residency, Bangalore, India

from "Puce Moment"

On Tuesday, October 22 I presented a series of films and videos loosely connected by the question of how the human body, both as an object and as a subject, is presented in film and video. Below are links to the videos I showed, as well as some casual notes about them:

"High As Kite Female Battles Against Reality," Anonymous, 2013

This anonymously shot (and edited) footage from my neighborhood in Brooklyn went viral. Incredibly complex issues seem to be jammed into this 6 minute clip--drugs, control, authority, class, race (it becomes clear by the end of the clip that the photographer is male and if not white (he sounds white) at least of the demographic of young people moving into traditionally Hispanic areas in Brooklyn), not to mention the complicated ethics of videotaping other people who have not given their consent (ethics which are becoming both more and less complicated as we approach the point where everything everywhere will be videotaped--"I'm a photographer!").

But what strikes me most forcibly here is how effectively the difficulty, danger, and anxiety of having a physical body--a relatively fragile body--is conveyed. When thems is talking about the abject, kids, heres it is. 

Excerpt from "Olympia" by Leni Riefenstahl, 1938

Okay. So yes, it's true that she worked very closely with Hitler. And that she hung out all the time with Goebbels. And that this film was financed by the Third Reich to document the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. It's also true that Riefenstahl is essentially the mother of moving sports photography and it's no wonder why. The first person to appear, after a stately tour through the ruins of the Acropolis, does so in a cross-fade where he is superimposed onto the form of a statue of a discus thrower. As far away from the previous clip as possible, Riefenstahl shoots her athletes from below, making their god-like bodies even more godlike, with raking light across their (almost) complete nudity highlighting the merciless perfection of their musculature. The direct connection between these Aryan athletes and classical sculpture is made literal: WE PERFECTION, YO. Then the music changes and it's time for the women to come on. They look good, too, but methinks Leni had... well, see ART THOUGHTZ below...

"Puce Moment" by Kenneth Anger, 1949

I love this film. There is something so appealing to me about the way it's shot, the colors, the mood, the effervescence underlaid with melancholy. I like the scale of it; it's a parlor drama with only one actor. One actor and a lot of dresses. This is clearly a woman who was made to be looked at, and legend has it that after shooting this film she moved to Mexico where she became the mistress of the President.

"Meat Joy" by Carolee Schneeman, 1964

Schneeman is a seriously polarizing figure. Both adored and reviled for performances like "Interior Scroll" which has been reduced in the popular (reactionary) imagination to a cipher for self-indulgent-feminist-performance-that-we-can-laugh-about, Schneeman was the inspiration behind the character Maude Lebowski in the Coen bothers cult classic "The Big Lebowski." Schneeman is an excellent illustration of how the art world isn't nearly as enlighted as it thinks it is. Male artists who push the boundaries of the physical, like Paul McCarthy or Chris Burden, are lionized as risk-takers and soldiers of the mind, but people like Schneeman are ghettoized and/or ridiculed in part because she just wouldn't act like a lady.

So if you're a good feminist, how do you reclaim the image of 'woman' back from the patriarchal hegemony that has been holding it hostage to it's own hungry lusty aesthetics for forever? One way is to celebrate the flesh in a performance that doesn't have a gender hierarchy and which is funny, gross, serious, and also, still, (a little bit) sexy. AKA: Meat Joy. Enjoy.

[If you ever have a chance to see her 'seminal' work "Fuses" on film, go. It is an extraordinary look at the formal qualities of film and film making, the physical characteristics of film, which Schneeman altered by hand, and of sex. And definitely best seen not on the internet...]

"Feeling Free with 3D Magic Eye Poster Remix" by Shana Moulton, 2004

[Here we have a jump of 40 years of very important film and video history... a great deal of great stuff happened in there. But I'm going to skip to the present, and look at the more self-conscious, self-conflicted, and possibly self-loathing relationships of today between images of bodies, ideas of bodies, and our own bodies.]

"Feeling Free" is part of a cycle of works about a character named 'Cynthia', performed by Moulton herself. This installment began when Mouton found a VHS copy of the Angela Lansbury exercise video which is incorporated into the piece. Here we do see a woman acting  like a lady. So much so that she is essentially dissociated from her own body--which is held together with wrist and neck braces and potentially a host of other orthopedic devices not as readily apparent to the viewer. The tacky decorations in Cynthia's living room begin to insinuate themselves into the Lansbury video she is watching--objets d'art and Lansbury's video image and Cynthia herself become equivalent. Angela Lansbury's not helping her connect with herself AT ALL! The only way for Cynthia to really boogie down is to retreat within herself; she can only be a body in her mind.

"ART THOUGHTZ: The Female Gaze, with Special Guest Tamara Suber" by Hennessey Youngman (aka Jayson Musson)

Hennessey Youngman is the artworld persona of Jayson Musson in a series of brilliant and hilarious internet videos called ART THOUGHTZ. Youngman, a streetwise, straight-talking realist, deconstructs all kinds of things germane to the young artist, including studio visits, curators, post-structuralism, relational aesthetics, and why Bono and Damien Hirst are so eerily alike. In this very Not Safe For Work video, Youngman takes pages from Laura Mulvey and John Berger and asks why it is that there are lots of pictures of naked bitches in art history from a male perspective, but, like, not so much stuff from a female one. "Do women have eyes?"

Right now New York is experiencing a moment of incredible anxiety about art making, and this is definitely true vis a vis issues of representation and the body. The fact that Musson has created an avatar to speak through itself is an indication of artists' desire to displace the responsibility of making clear statements away from themselves (and from their 'core brand' which is best kept as a whitish, slightly windy Warholian vaccum, where it can be free to be cagey.) And what Youngman is saying here, is how complicated aesthetics, politics and desire are to tease apart when looking at pictures of bodies, whether those images are 'art' or 'pornography'.

"Dark Green" by Paper Rad, 2011

Paper Rad is a intimidatingly prolific Provincetown, RI-/Pittsburgh, PA-based collective who make videos, music, insane installations, and general mayhem and ructions. This video, ostensibly a public service announcement about the benefits of recycling, depicts a worldview where everything, images, videos, bodies, popular culture, computers, the internet, the world, everything is melting. Though rather than melting into air, these things melt into a toxic, possibly intelligent, oily black ooze. All of the detritus of culture is shown clumping up here to form a kind of post-human, definitely post-body kind of world where the physical reality of garbage becomes a problem for the imagination. There are also kittens wearing top hats. So recycle, y'all; it's good for mother Gaia.

[My thanks to the T. A. J. Residency, and to all of the people who came to the lecture. I hope you enjoyed it. I would also like to thank Allison Freeman, who also gave a talk; in her case about the state of a certain kind of Daniel Buren-inspired painting in New York City happening right now. Big ups to A.F.]

About a Gym

                                                    Image courtesy of the internets

     To make one thing clear, I am not a 'gym person'. But I am in possession of a body, for better or for worse. I knew coming here that as I was going to be living and working in the same place--indeed, the same room, albeit spacious, breezy and lovely--that I was going to need to be able to take off and stretch ye olde legges. So I packed a pair of running shoes, some shorts, and a have-feet-will-travel attitude. As I may have mentioned in previous posts, pedestrian life here is unlike, say, County Highway LS in between Sheboygan and Manitowac, where the only thing to disturb your communion with the pristine macadam is a occasional pickup truck from which Lynyrd Skynyrd is being played at a very reasonable volume. Running in Bangalore, at least where I am, is not an option. And while it was nice for a day or two to savour the feeling of being a naïf, I knew that I'd have to explore some other option or return to New York a character out of Dickens.
     Times have changed in even the five years it's been since I've spent any significant amount of time out of the US; it is now possible to use Google to get reviews of anything, anywhere. Gyms in central Bangalore being no exception I discovered the following three options: 1) THE HOCKEY STADIUM! 2) Gold's Gym (seriously) and 3) Zela Luxury Fitness. According to the locals, the Hockey Stadium fitness center was "just not clean," "gross," and "fine if you're not too picky". To say that I'm not too picky would be to say... no one would say that. A personage no less August than J. S., internationally recognized sculptor and installation artist and erstwhile head of the Department of Sculpture at the Yale University School of Art called me "fussy". I was already in the acute stages of Dusty Shock, and I knew that even to attempt to enter the Hockey Stadium would be unwise. I had a similar feeling about the Gold's Gym, which I'd passed several times on my perambulations around the neighborhood, and in front of which were inevitably a claque of bros. (If you think that Indian guys aren't particularly 'bro-y' I suggest you check out the Gold's Gym in Bangalore, and stop being so G-- D--- ignorant.) Nevertheless, I sent both Gold's and Zela email requesting the cost of a one-month membership. The rates were jaw-droppingly high, Zela being almost twice what I pay for my local gym in New York (though not quite as much as what I paid for the fancy gym I belonged to years ago when I had a 'job'...) and Gold's was almost as much.
     I emailed both of them back and suggested that I pay a different, significantly lower amount. Zela agreed, so I made an appointment to visit. I was excited about the visit--I had actually sort of enjoyed going to the fancy gym I'd belonged to in New York, which was at least as fancy as the Gregory Gym Fitness Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which was so incredibly beautiful it ruined me for gyms forever, especially a certain gym in New Haven. All this being in the service, mind you, of getting myself to GO to the gym which I'm fairly sure isn't a problem just for me. And after 30 it becomes less and less optional, as I discovered this winter when I stopped going. So I'm on my way to Zela, proud of what a shrewd bargainer I was, etc. I arrive, and my first impression is that it's NQR. NQR, or 'not-quite-right', is an acronym used by T. K., our extremely well-connected friend, former classmate, and  co-hostess, and her other extremely well-connected, Western-educated friends to refer to things in India which don't quite fulfill equivalency requirements. [As a foreigner it's very easy for me to spot NQR--I've internalized R; I like to think of myself as something of an R canary. What is much more difficult for me to gauge is the emotional valance of NQR for locals. I won't dwell on this point, but I bring it up only to say that part of what makes places like Bangalore or Beijing so exciting is that a middle class is developing and inventing itself as it does so. If things in New York are seldom NQR, they're also often rather boring (witness the endless parade of old-timey bars unceasingly sprouting up all over Brooklyn like the borough that the future forgot...)] ANYHOW, Zela is a bit NQR.
     The reception area is two, low storeys high with a reception desk on the left perpendicular to the entrance, and three turnstiles straight ahead. I told the young man at the desk that I had an appointment with S. D., an explicitly Italian name, and he buzzed me in and told me to wait in one of the big cube leather chairs hunched below the stairs to the second floor.  S. appeared after a short delay, though not at all in an Italian manner. She was young, brusque, and wearing adult braces and had all my paperwork ready to go. I told her that I'd like to see the facilities before I filled anything out, so she took me around the place. The weights area looked fine (I don't exactly have high demands when it comes to the weight-lifting department) and the cardio area had a lot of machines, all of which looked like they were in very good condition. Then it was time to see the pool. We each went through our corresponding locker rooms. The men's was dingy dingy. But I would soldier on! We came out the back end and she led me down a pretty appalling back stairs to the pool area. The mold here is intense enough to be visible through the window from the street a level below. The pool itself was small, with what seemed like an awful lot of people in it. The area surrounding the pool was flooded, and a janitorial worker was pushing the water with a squeegee the size and shape of a mop towards a drain somewhere. We didn't linger in the pool area; I am not a swimmer, and Zela Luxury Fitness was decidedly not going to be the site of a watery transfiguration. Once back at the leather cubes I was a bit stymied. She asked me what I thought of the place and I wanted to say "I think it's kind of skanky and I wouldn't touch that pool with an MRSA-proof pole," but that would have made me a bad person, and they did offer a lot of classes. So I said that I was still going to Gold's Gym to check them out and that I would get back to her in a day or two. I wished I'd seen the place before I made my counter-offer.
     I returned back to the residency and spoke of my harrowing experience to T. K. She said that Zela was her gym, and that she liked it because it was like a 'clean oasis'. I suggested that there was a possible gender discrepancy in the condition of the changing rooms. She countered that perhaps I was being a bit to hard on the place. (I would like to point out, please note, that she does not use the pool.) I asked her about Gold's Gym, and she said simply "Gold's is much worse." So, two days later after I finally heard from Gold's that they would not lower their rate making Zela about $10 less expensive, I joined.
     After having worked out at Zela a few times I realize that a significant part of what I was reacting to (I stand by the mold opposition), was the use of materials and the way they were deployed. The floors, for example, are clean, but the laminate has separated from the substrate making raised blisters in patches. Some of the walls have been given an interior treatment inspired by the famous Herzog and de Meuron winery in which huge stones are encased in mesh and used to create an exterior structure. At Zela, however, some fencing is wired to horizontal metal strips with a bunch of little stones stuffed in behind it. There are chunky structures which divide the space and which are covered in fake wood paneling. One has the feeling that everything doesn't quite line up at right angles. And it's true: things don't. In large part because almost everything here is done by hand. It is astonishing and impressive what gets done here with much less than one would expect in the way of machinery. Cement is mixed by hand, tiles are printed by hand, stainless steel handrails are shaped by hand--but all of these are done with the intention of being as perfect as things which are made by machines. As someone who works directly with materials I find this amazing and impressive, even when the result is NQR. Now I feel like Zela is a good gym (pool notwithstanding). I just wish I wasn't paying so much. I guess I'll have to actually GO.

"Happy Birthday, Mr. President"

     A. F., the other foreign resident here at the TAJ, has been sick. Dizzy, aching joints, hacking cough, get-into-an-auto-rickshaw-with-the-maid-to-go-see-a-doctor-25-minutes-away-in-Indiranagar sick. [Incidentally, in honor of the shutdown of the United States government by the Republican-hostaged House of Representatives that's spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $70 million overturning again and again a piece of legislation that everybody wants, I can't fail to mention that her visit to the doctor cost $5.00. And her medications (two of them!) cost $7.00. Um, go team America?] A. took those cheap meds and began feeling better almost immediately. And yesterday she and I went to lunch together so she could get out of the house.

     It turns out it was a good deal more difficult to get lunch than we'd anticipated. Everything was closed. Or, more accurately, everywhere that we would eat was closed (germ paranoia = no street food). One place had a sign out front that said "CLOSED FOR DRY DAY." We ended up at UB City, a giant mall/hotel/entrepôt for foreigners, thinking that, at least we'd be able to find someplace that would feed us--hotels being, like airports, somewhat removed from the temporal/geographical/and cultural realities in which they find themselves. And we were right. There was a Subway® with a long line. You may surprised to learn that we passed up the opportunity to get a Paneer Tikka sub, but we did. Finally, we walked thtough the automatic doors of the Oakwood Hotel to find ourselves in 'Soul City', the hotel restaurant which was open, had empty tables, and with about 20% Westerners felt like the Whitest Place I'd Ever Seen. In case you're thinking: 'Soul City'--funky vibe, great music, fried chicken and biscuits and collards and waffles and bar-b-cue and cornbread and beans with bacon and sweet tea and pie and... nope. It was a semi-formal dining room straight out of West Elm® down to the cluster of antiqued mirrors on one wall. And a lone, extra-large-screen TV bracketed into a corner (pictured above in someone else's photo which I found on the internet). They had only a buffet available, because of the mysterious 'Dry Day', which was fine and similar to the kind of lunchtime buffets at nicer Indian restaurants you can find in the US. Maybe a little bit disappointing, actually. I mean, come on, look at that place.

     A. commented that the two of us would never come to a hotel restaurant like this anywhere else, and of course she's right, if only because we wouldn't be able to afford it. When we got home, I asked R. K., our resident local/journalist/genius, what in God's name 'Dry Day' was and why in the name of all things holy did the town of Bangalore see fit to prevent me from having a three-martini lunch? "It's Gandhi's birthday."