The last ten days or so have been quite something. Revealing.
I started working like crazy in the workshops at the Rijksakademie. When Mercedes asked me to go into the workshops to “produce physical work … [that] could be used in the future for further performative projects”, I wasn’t sure where to start. What kind of object to make? I didn’t want to make something that would seem completely alien to her practice as is, but at the same time didn’t feel like making things that would make sense in the context of a previous performance only. Plus: I am objectively clumsy.
I decided to go with the idea of ‘words as objects’. The work of Mercedes is both very textual and bodily. So why not take it from there? Words became one word: perform. That one word turned into letters, namely P, R, F and M. Taking out the vowels creates room for more words, such as reform, morf or pro forma. An explosion of meanings, all coming from the same source – a phenomenon I am rather fond of.
Taking it from there, I wanted to play around with the idea of letters themselves having performative qualities. Letters with agency. Letters that would continue to work after I would have been done with them in the workshops. Embodied bodies. Letters over which I, their creator, would ultimately have limited control.
In the workshops, I start working with materials that have lots agency. Materials that refuse to do what I tell them to do. I love the behaviour of the stuff that I am working with. The way it plays hard to get, its rapidly changing consistency, its stubbornness, its outright resistance. I find everything deeply poetic.
(Luckily this overreaction wears off after a few days. I am more or less back to wanting the material to do what I tell it do…)
In the meantime I have been informed about artists and designers who also worked with embodied letters. The Animated Discourse of Guy de Cointet and anthonBeeke’s Naked-Ladies Alphabet for instance. I remember (reruns of) Open & Bloot, the first Dutch sex education program from the 1970s. It all comes together in a blog on the Erotics of Type. Not sure where this is going but at least I have a feeling that the direction I have taken makes sense.
But then again, is making sense what this is all about?
I talk to advisors here the Rijksakademie (as a resident you get to meet lots of people from the art world in your studio) and they seem to be thinking there is nothing wrong with where I am going. Yet I can’t help but notice that they do not seem overly impressed with what I am doing.
And frankly, increasingly neither am I.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with what I am doing. But being here, at the Rijksakademie, that doesn’t seem to be the point. I talk about the body, I read into bodily art, I celebrate the notion of embodied text – but the body is and remains out there, as an object of the study.
Swapping professions with an artist who works through her body I start to feel like a poseur. For the past two weeks I have taken comfort in not trying to be a proxy Mercedes. Since I cannot be Mercedes, I seem to have concluded that the best thing I can do in March is to come up with some smart insights or directions that Mercedes can use from April onwards.
The one thing that I have desperately been trying to avoid thus far is to include my own body in this project. And I failed hopelessly at it.
Since the very start of this project, I have subjected my body to a new working environment, to stress, to uncomfortable positions, to catching trains, to toxic fumes, to long hours of standing up, to high expectations, to poor blood sugar level management. More surely than slowly, my body started to inform me that it wasn’t happy at all with how things were going. So I did what I always do when my body refuses to cooperate. I take medication – lots thereof.
By the end of last week I was getting really desperate. Migraines like I never had before. So tired I am panting for breath. Negotiating with myself if today, just this one day, I can take that extra painkiller so I can get the legs going again.
On Friday I wake up (with a migraine) with this full-size 3D image of myself, but then completely made of meds. It’s a pretty dramatic, larger than life kind of image to wake up with.
After Donald Trump was elected president of the US, Meryl Streep advised to take your broken heart, make it into art.
I am wondering how you can make a broken body into art. How I could do so.
Feeling better now.
Art work by Julian Hoke Harris