kusama pyjamas
Titled for Yayoi Kusama, who is the cat's pyjamas.
cat ruka. just latfq.
“Cat Ruka (Ngapuhi, Waitaha) b. Auckland 1983 is an award-winning emerging independent performance artist and dance critic/researcher based in Auckland, New Zealand. Cat uses her artistry to innovatively unravel the presence of her body, and what it means to have this body in the current political, social, and economic climates of a globalized world. Among other things, this includes investigating the point at which her indigenous and colonial bloodlines meet each other in an age of cultural complexities.” (from Manukau Institute of Technology)
the new issue of women & performance: ”punk anteriors: genealogy, theory, performance.” it was co-edited by fiona ib ngo and beth stinson and features articles by mimi thi nguyen and kate wadkins, plus a review of alice bag’s book violence girl. this image is by allison hamilton.
Tammy Rae Carland: I see comedy as one of the most vulnerable kinds of performance. The idea of getting up there by yourself, without props in most cases; you don’t have a band, you don’t have a troupe of actors with you, you don’t have a support system, and your dependency on the audience for reaction, approval, and success is so profound. The idea of actually doing that is unimaginable.
Bad At Sports: It makes me think about Bill Hicks, a comedian who does encapsulate the transgressive and progressive sensibility you’re talking about. There’s that two-minute clip on YouTube from the end of his career where he just melts down at a heckler and becomes so hateful. The pressure of being that guy who has to do this thing in this way, and represent all these values to the audience, just gets to him and he falls apart.
TRC: Have you seen the Joan Rivers documentary?
BAS: No, I have not yet. I’ve been looking forward to it.
TRC: It’s pretty genius. There’s a scene in which she’s heckled. She gets incredibly emotional and starts to fight back in a vulnerable way, and then gets hostile toward him, and then turns it into a genius joke, and then the whole audience is back there with her. The thing is that she was actually making a joke about a disability, and this man in the audience said something about having a child with a disability. She completely lost the audience, but then managed to bring them right back to her. It was a very interesting narrative moment.
via Interview with Tammy Rae Carland | by Bad at Sports | Art Practical
Image ‘Upside Down’ from Carlands 2010-11 ‘I’m Dying Up Here’ series on stand up comedy.
Paris 1972, Le Lait Chaud.
Dressed in a white shirt, Pane sits with her back to the audience. She slices her back with a razor blade. The blood sinks into the fabric. The red stains stand out against the white, like a drawing. Aestheticism. At another point of the performance, Pane faces the audience and lays the razor against her cheek. Blood comes to the surface. The participants, always silent during Pane’s performances, as if hypnotized, are suddenly aroused from their paralysis and scream, “No, not the face!” There follows an explosion of emotions and sense. via interalia > 2010 - 5 > Female St. Sebastian: Parallel lines in the radical lesbian art of Gina Pane and Catherine Opie
Essay comparing the works of Catherine Opie, her predecessor Gina Pane and images of St. Sebastian/eroticised suffering in western art, esp. the use of those themes through late 20th century feminist/queer art.
More documentation of my performance, A Jaunt through the Forest with Two Spirits, during my time at Fire Island Artist Residency.
Mutual Caress II. Sleeping performance. Sculpture is made of hand cut paper. Another one coming this May.
My Big Dandy, 2012.
Click through for the bigger images no really!
My Big Dandy, 2012. Jade Yumang. Fabric (seersucker and striped dress shirt), vinyl, nails, enamel, and chicken wire; performances by Cupid Ojala and Sara Jimenez.
Najva Sol is a Iranian-American writer, photographer, and multi-media artist. She was born in the DC area, and received her BA in Creative Writing from Eugene Lang The New School For Liberal Arts. Since then, she has worked at various non-profits that deal with some combination of art presenting, queer empowerment, people of color, social justice, and education. She co-founded an artist collective called The Lowbrow Society for the Arts in NYC, where she curated various underground events, including a renegade art show on a subway car. She is currently an MFA drop-out in poetry at the California College of the Arts. Her writing has been published in Look Look Magazine, AM New York, Release, Inprint, Periwinkle, Bitch Magazine, and more. Her other work was recently featured in the National Queer Arts Festival (2010 2011), Femina Potens Gallery, Commonwealth Club, and The Red Poppy Art House. Lowbrow Society has appeared in Nerve.com, New York Press, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Time Out New York. (via Bio | ; & })
Has so many projects I don’t know how to describe her practice. Anyway, one of the artists on tumblr who’s also feat in Love Inshallah.
Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovic as a feminist, activist, and video pioneer will be introduced in MOMA in New York from December 18, 2011–March 26, 2012.
Part of the generation known as the Nova Umjetnička Praksa (New Art Practice), Iveković produced works of cross-cultural resonance that range from conceptual photomontages to video and performance. As the culturenet.hr informs “this exhibition brings together a historic group of single-channel videos and media installations, including Sweet Violence (1974), Personal Cuts (1982), Practice Makes a Master (1982/2009), General Alert (Soap Opera) (1995), and Rohrbach Living Memorial (2005). Among the 100 photomontages featured in the exhibition is Iveković’s celebrated series Double Life (1975–76), for which the artist juxtaposed pictures of herself culled from her private albums with commercial ads clipped from the pages of women’s magazines.” “(…)
After 1990—following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the birth of a new nation—she focused on the transformation of reality from socialist to post-socialist political systems. Iveković offers a fascinating view into the official politics of power, gender roles, and the paradoxes inherent in society’s collective memory.”
(via Barbara T. Smith, Feed Me)
During an event organised by the San Francisco Museum of Conceptual Art in which various male artists performed wreckless and macho gestures like drinking beer and peeing into a metal tub, Smith sat nude in an intimate space inviting audience members one at a time to ‘feed’ her. The room contained an oriental rug-covered mattress, a sink, incense, body oils, shawls, books and music. The artist offered tea, wine and marijuana that she could be fed in exchange for ‘conversation and affection’. In the background, a taped loop played “Feed Me, Feed Me” over and over again.
Smith has explained that the image she projected of herself reflected both the fantasy and the reality of femininity; by presenting herself as mother, courtesan and artist she opened up the possibility that all these identities can co-exist.
I have found The One – performance 25 March 2011
amira.h.’s performance, The One, is an act of rebellion. Raised as a Muslim, much of amira.h.’s adolescence was spent thinking about, talking about, and fighting about the issue of marriage. Now, at age twenty-seven, these same issues are still making their presence felt in her life-the contradictory life of an unmarried queer Muslim visual artist. Intrigued with instruction and ritual, as well as testing the limits of the body and how much it can endure, amira.h. presents herself, alone, as both bride and groom performing one of the rituals of marriage.
Exorcising a tradition that will not take place in her life, the solitary figure portrays a sense of mourning, pathos and loneliness, with the end result being strangely celebratory. amira.h. invites the viewer to consider and question their own assumptions and expectations concerning gender, sexuality and power whilst she stands on the dichotomous altar of her identity. Come along and celebrate The One. amira’s work questions the roles of young women in the Muslim/domestic sphere and (expectations placed on them); fat/queer/feminist politics and rituals (in marriage and religion) and transgression of these/contradiction/failure.
Suzanne Lacy // Three Weeks in May
“In May 1977, Suzanne Lacy organized an “expanded performance” over the course of three weeks to raise awareness among Los Angeles inhabitants of the frequency of assaults on women citywide. The project opened on Mother’s Day, May 8, 1977, and included performances and installations as well as non-art events such as speeches, interviews, self-defense demonstrations, and speak-outs. On this map of Los Angeles, installed in the mall outside City Hall, Lacy stenciled the word “RAPE” in red on the approximate locations attacks reported to police during the three weeks of the project. (At the close ofThree Weeks in May, ninety rapes had been reported.) The artist later stated that “if rape was practically a household experience [she should] make its name a household word.”
