Re-Enactions (of a love affair) 2006
Re-Enactions (of a love affair)
Damen_wahl Exhibition, Wolfsberg Castle, Austria,
9th July 2006
Special Thanks to
Curators Igor Pucker & Wolfgang Giegler
Brian Maguire
Part 1
I lie on an elegant double bed covered in sheets stained with gorgeous bloodflowers (patterns like Rorschach Test 'ink blots'). I am dressed in a nightgown and deliver a spoken monologue, which is in part a two way conversation with the audience, including actions that convey and represent events and experiences from love affairs in my life. The trajectory of the performance moves from attraction, consummation and transformation through love and sexual connection (in much the same way as love affairs do).
I tell or show the stories through the script and through actions I make (I use a coiled rope around my body to signify entrapment, I offer jelly babies wrapped hygienically in new condoms to the audience to eat. I write on my gown 'I love' over and over. I cut open the gown with a scalpel at a large scar on my abdomen to show what a wound means...)
The work is about a relational exchange between artist and willing audience members culminating in the shared physical embrace of a kiss. I finally ask for a kiss, a real one... this relates to a story told early in the performance, of the significance of a first kiss.
The performance script incorporates poetic texts that are declarations of love and betrayal, love and disillusion, love and renewal. This script, while expressing my personal experience makes universal points and connections, moving from the singular to the mutual, from the specific to the general experience of love. It is a ceremony about human emotional and physical connection.
There are four video works playing in the installation space (the performance space). They are the subtext to the overt performance. They function as the undertone to the work implying other meanings and allusions. The filmic images include a fellatio of flowers, a burning house, stained love letters, a mans body on a floating bed...
Re-Enactions (from a love affair) is a work that elaborates on life, mirrors and exposes lived experience for the purpose of making one life emblematic and relating to all lives. The purpose of the work is to present and enable sexual love as a theme for human connection, to make an exchange and new forms of engagement with audience.
Part 2
For the duration of the opening launch of the exhibition "Damen_Wahl" (of which my work was part) I performed a 'blind' action, buried naked under the sheets of the double bed, my stage for the main performance. I enacted gestures and movements of sex acts between lovers - but solo, I had a small hand held light creating shadows. The sheets, stained with blood-flower patterns like Rorschach test 'ink blots' that move and undulate with the obscure body of a woman underneath, hazily illuminated. The experience is intimate and unsettling, clearly a private act made public.