fyeahwomenartists:

Lesley Dill
Dada Poem Wedding Dress, 1997
Photo litho on muslin and Hindi newspaper 

(via LESLEY DILL : PRINTMAKING : LANDFALL PRESS)

(via boystown)

Griffith University | Erotics conference < News and events < Griffith Centre for Cultural Research < Humanities, languages and criminology

I will explore new idioms of performance and feminity as they appear within the performance-scape of Lady Gaga.

Less as survey of Gaga herself, and more a commentary on what it may mean to go “gaga”, this essay considers a range of  female performers who have gone gaga, who have literally pushed the coventions of performance and femininity to the point where  they splinter and indicate a new horizon. Like Grace Jones, Annabelle Lwin, and Nina Hagen before her, Lady Gaga creates alter-egos,
…

Going gaga is not simply being Gaga, it is a journey to the edge of sense -Grace Jones goes gaga in her cover of Joy Divisions “Ive lost control” and Poly Styrene went gaga on “Oh Bondage Up Yours”.

While masculine versions of going gaga take on heroic proportions in rock history (guitar smashing, stripping onstage, crowd diving), feminine ecstatic performance is read quickly as sexual excess, wardrobe malfunction or psychological breakdown. This essay reads feminine performative excess as a new performance horizon.”

Annabelle image via this blog

This conference is on in my city [Brisbane,AU] this week. It’s indicative of how busy, distracted etc. I am atm that I’m not going despite the lure of Halberstam and general queer art nerds energy.

OTOH trust Halberstam to extract something interesting from the Gaga hoopla.

GA GA GA!

onebadapple:

missquitecontrary:

foxesinbreeches:

Emmy Hennings with doll, 1917. Photo via Hans Richter, Dada and Anti-Art, Thames and Hudson: 1965.

Emmy Hennings (1885-1948) was a performer and poet, and wife of the Dadaist Hugo Ball. Despite her critical role in the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire which launched the Dada movement, and her centrality in its performances (particularly as its only female member), it is difficult to locate information on her that does not correspond directly to her relationship with Ball.

Thomas F. Rugh describes her as “a primary contributor to the sensual display of bombast at the cabaret”, personifying the spirit of the Dada movement with which she was so intimately involved as “impulsive, enigmatic, creative, and at odds with her materialistic culture”.

The Zürcher Post wrote of her on 7 May, 1916: “The star of the cabaret however, is Mrs. Emmy Hennings. The star of who knows how many nights and poems. Just as she stood before the billowing yellow curtain of a Berlin cabaret, her arms rounded up over her hips, rich like a blooming bush, so today she is lending her body with an ever-brave front to the same songs, that body of hers which has since been ravaged but little by pain”.

Her poems are amazing.