by Sara Muthi

Sirens, according to Greek mythology, were deadly mermaid like creatures who seduced sailors into shipwreck with their enchanting voices and echoing music. While no audience member was hurt in the making of this performance, all of us in the room were lured into a drawn circle. Huddled together the sheer dressed seductive figure of Tara Carroll slowly circled and circled and circled the audience to an uncanny, transfixing soundtrack. Lifting up her dress slowly, without a hint of shame she lured us into her gaze. Suddenly and without hesitation her line of sight exists ours as Carroll turns a corner. Only then were we released from our temporary trance. This was just the beginning to what would become an eventful episode of Livestock; the bimonthly performance art platform.

Joan Somers Donnelly’s playful and scripted performance lecture speaks on the topic of authenticity. In today’s digitally curated age where the most flattering, and envy-inducing moments of our life are cropped and filtered to no end it’s become more difficult than ever to recognise what’s authentic within ourselves and within others. Accompanied by a spirited harpist, Anne Duvieuxbourg, Donnelly walks us through different iterations of what it means to be authentic: how to spot an authentic body, what we can do to check our own authenticity etc. Within the hustle and bustle of our day to day lives, having a light hearted reminder injected into your day about the importance of being true to yourself  has more impact than expected. Speaking to others in the audience I know I was not alone in appreciating that small nugget of wisdom.

As an enthusiast in performance art you inevitably expose yourself to a lot of different types of practice. Once your pool of knowledge becomes well equipped to differentiate your subjective opinion of what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ performance is you begin to be more critical of live art. I find art which seems to do little more than plainly illustrate a theory or concept isn’t particular stimulating, this is close to the impression I got from the work of Anne Ebeling.

Paralleling the actions of a life sized projection of herself Anne follows through a sequence of pre-performed actions agasint a wall, both in projection and live. My pondering of the work has brought me back time and time again to contrasting it as an iteration of Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965).

Simply put Kosuth has arranged three representations of the concept “chair”. The physical manufactured object, a photograph and a printed definition. A ground-breaking work for its time and still highly influential in almost every discussion relating to the real and representation. Both Kosuth and Ebeling are making straight to the point, cut-and-dry visual statements on the tangible; Kosuth a chair and Ebeling her body. The contrast of the tangible to the digital representation seems to be something majorly at play here. While Kosuth’s work on the one hand can be condensed into a simple statement on representation, it also reaches more complex issues about the status of the art object, authorship and philosophy of representation. Ebelings work in contrast, to me, didn’t go much farther than a simple statement on representation. As a work in light of a larger developing practice there is much potential for important statement to be made on the representation of the body in performance practice, an area in live art that has not been critically explored enough.

With a formula such as Livestock’s the performances tend to be more open to interpretation as there is (usually) no overarching theme of the live art on show, nor any available text associated with the performance to guide your interpretation any which way. With that said the following was my impression of Paula Guzzanti’s performance, or as we in the audience came to know her as “the bag lady”.

With the booming sound of  a heartbeat filling the space, Paula Guzzanti balances horizontally on a chair in a foetal position caressing a bright red, soft object. Emerging from the dark her chair is revealed to be decorated with household fabrics and textiles. Stretching out and leaning back she holds the object to her stomach, slowly opening her legs the red objects falls off onto the floor and between her knees as if birthed. The object however has no life, it is not difficult to read the images to be that of a miscarriage. Following this Guzzanti performs a series of vaguely recognisable, non-sensical actions.

Standing up on her throne she tries to balance but gets down. Using an unnecessarily careful touch she plays and moves the soft-red object around her body, hanging it from her arms, spinning it around, wrapping around her neck, running incessantly struggling to remove the object from around herself.

Eventually it reaches her head and takes a sort of crown-like demeaner. Looking pretty pleased with herself, she does a quirky little dance, lifting her dress in a awkwardly seductive way to the audience, I saw a sense of blank desperation sitting in her eyes. This is not who this woman wants to be.

Interpreting the symbols present in this performance leads me to see woman who has miscarried her child. Experiencing unimaginable trauma she creates a throne of domestic rags, the confetti of  her everyday life. A psychotic break creates the non-sensical actions, swishing, swooing, shuffling with the presence of her burden she cannot escape. Concluding the work, her burden latches onto her ankle, like a ball and chain she cannot escape, physically dragging her trauma wherever she tries to go.

 

Livestock: Get Real  featuring Robery Suchy, Austin Hearne, Anne Ebeling, Tara Carroll, Rob McGlade, Siobhan Kelly, Robbie Maguire, El Putnam, Paula Guzzanti, Joan Somers Donnelly, Aine O’Hara and Michal Lubinksi took place on October 30th, 2017 at the Complex. Curated by Eleanor Lawler and Francis Fay. Photography by Misha Beglin and Amber Baruch.