The Explicit Body in Performance

Rebecca Schneider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134876921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The Explicit Body in Performance interrogates the avant-garde precedents and theoretical terrain that combined to produce feminist performance art. Among the many artists discussed are:
* Carolle Schneemann
* Annie Sprinkle
* Karen Finley
* Robbie McCauley
* Ana Mendieta
* Ann Magnuson
* Sandra Bernhard
* Spiderwoman
Rebecca Schneider tackles topics ranging across the 'post-porn modernist movement', New Right censorship, commodity fetishism, perspectival vision, and primitivism. Employing diverse critical theories from Benjamin to Lacan to postcolonial and queer theory, Schneider analyses artistic and pop cultural depictions of the explicit body in late commodity capitalism.
The Explicit Body in Performance is complemented by extensive photographic illustrations and artistic productions of postmodern feminist practitioners. The book is a fascinating exploration of how these artists have wrestled with the representational structures of desire.

1	Binary terror and the body made explicit

“My body is a temple.”

The declaration rings of 1960s and 1970s cultural feminist attempts to resurrect the Goddess and celebrate female biology. But in 1989 “My body is a temple” appeared in large bold type on a promo flyer featuring a photograph of a nude black man performing oral sex with Veronica Vera, a white “porn queen” who had recently become a “performance artist.” In Plate 1.1 we see the man’s broad and muscular backside, his head bent to his task. With her black-lace corseted front to the camera, Vera’s is the only face we see, but her expression is so stock, so standard, that it is only readable relative to the iconic lexicon of pornography. It is the stock porn-pleasure face, the semi-comatose, openmouthed, lax-tongued expression signifying “X-rated.” Nothing out of the porn-ordinary at all. Yet, despite the stock quality of the pose, Vera’s promotion was not conventional porn promotion.

The photograph, titled Marty and Veronica, is a 1982 Robert Mapplethorpe. Vera’s use of the photo in her 1989 promo flier made the most of the Helms/Mapplethorpe funding controversy exploding in the art world at the end of the 1980s.¹ A new label heralded the not-so-tongue-in-cheek politics of the porn Vera was wielding, and that label was the three-letter word “art,” giving a twist of up-scale validity to the four-letter “porn.” Avant-garde art venues began presenting work such as Vera’s in the mid-1980s, among them Franklin Furnace Gallery, The Kitchen, and the New Museum in Manhattan (Fuchs 1989). At the same time that the appellation “art” appeared to bequeath “porn” a dubious validity, the outright and blatant quoting of porn in the art space threatened the tenets of that very validity – a project entirely in keeping with modernist avant-garde anti-art agendas spanning the twentieth century. Discretionary boundaries defining supposedly discrete centers – porn and art – were laid on top of each other, resulting in an interrogation not only of form and content, but of function and frame. In much of this work – especially work wielding the label “feminist” – it is the pornographized object, the woman in front of the camera, who is reincarnated as artist.

Since the early 1960s women have been involved in performance art and have worked to “liberate” the body marked female from the confines of patriarchal delimitation. In the later 1980s and early 1990s, the clash of the rubrics “porn” and “art” manipulated by artists such as Vera, Scarlot O, Carol Leigh (a.k.a. Scarlot Harlot), and Annie Sprinkle would complicate the already embattled debates about the terms of that liberation.² One of the earliest instances of porn artists working in art spaces was a “feminist” exploration sponsored by Franklin Furnace Gallery in January 1984 titled Deep Inside Porn Stars. The project was presented as the culminating performance in a month-long exhibit and performance series titled “The Second Coming,” organized by the woman’s art collective Carnival Knowledge. Deep Inside Porn Stars was advertised as a show in which porn stars would recreate on stage “what goes on at the on-going support group meetings between seven celebrated sex stars.” Changing clothes in the course of their re-enactment, the seven stars transformed “from glamour girls to ‘regular girls’” (Sprinkle 1991:102–3). The terms of this porn/art exchange were clearly outlined in the Furnace program notes. Sprinkle and Gloria Leonard conceived the idea and presented the show as “a unique opportunity to be aligned with other feminist artists, usually considered arch-adversaries of the adult entertainment movement.” For their part, Furnace published the statement: “We welcome this moment when women, regardless of calling, can respectfully stand together.”

Plate 1.1 Robert Mapplethorpe, 1982, Marty and Veronica with Veronica Vera. © 1982 The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Common to the flavor of this exchange was the statement made by Carol Leigh: “I’m not ashamed. I’m proud. I’m proud … that I’m not ashamed” (Delacoste and Alexander 1987:182). This early feminist collaboration across the porn and art divide was, in essence, a kind of consciousness-raising effort, reminiscent of late 1960s consciousness-raising groups which were extremely influential, as Moira Roth has argued, in the development of early feminist performance art in general (1983:16–17). But within five years, much porn/art performance exchange would abandon neat explanations and careful distinctions between “regular” and “glamour” girls, and even, as in Sprinkles 1991 video Linda Les and Annie: The First Female-to-Male Transsexual Love Story, distinctions delimiting “girl” at all.

Works at the boundaries of porn and art raised, anew, old questions about the social functions masked by the implicit “high” of fundable art and “low” of porn, questions which simultaneously interrogated the social functions of sexual economies such as gender, and in Vera’s particular flyer, race. In the later 1980s, such questions became increasingly complex and lost the careful tone of Deep Inside Porn Stars. In the example of Vera’s use of Marty and Veronica, we read that Vera’s body is a temple, a sacred place, yet clearly the iconography of that sacrality is the iconography of pornography, socially marked as sacrilegious, base, and profane. Thus, to the degree that the artist’s object – her own body – fits the stock porn format, or works within the standard lexicon of porn significances, sacrality doubles as its own social underbelly, the realm of the base, the familiar, standardized, and class-marked taboo of porn.

Vivian Patraka has written of the terror unleashed in the collapse of binary distinctions – or “binary terror” as she calls it (1992:163). The terror that accompanies the dissolution of a binary habit of sense-making and self-fashioning is directly proportionate to the social safety insured in the maintenance of such apparatus of sense. The rigidity of our social binaries – male/female, white/black, civilized/primitive, art/porn – are sacred to our Western cultural ways of knowing, and theorists have long pointed to the necessity of interrogating such foundational distinctions to discover precisely how they bolster the social network as a whole, precisely what they uphold and what they exclude. Indeed, the interrogation of binaries – the “forcefield” of antinomies between subject and object³ – is arguably the general project of dialectical materialism, especially of the Frankfurt School variety. Interrogation of dialectical distinctions for the purposes of understanding social networks is a method of inquiry linked to the modernist avant-garde methodological collapse of such distinctions, or strategic binary explosion, more in the vein of theorists of the French Collège de Sociologie. Collège founder Georges Bataille, whose work, as well as that of the Frankfurt School’s Walter Benjamin, surface repeatedly in this study, was fascinated with binary terror. Interested in the combustive moment of violent interaction that occurs when “two necessary and incompatible positions impossibly meet,” Bataille did not see a transformation or resolution of the socially matrixed forcefield of dialectics, nor, unlike contemporary feminists, was he intent on crafting political change (Stoekl 1985:xxiii). But Bataille’s combustion of binaries ignited insight born of terror, like the insight which for Benjamin “flashes up in a moment of danger” exposing the deeper nervous networkings of our social dialectics (Benjamin 1969:225). Such moments of danger were sought by Antonin Artaud as well, and similarly provoked by binary explosion, specifically the collapse of socially coded distinctions between mind and matter.⁴ The danger inherent in binary explosion – the fear unleashed in close interrogation of our distinctions – is manipulated with political purpose in contemporary feminist performative interrogations of social symbolic constructs made explicit across literal bodies.

Binary terror is provoked when the word “art” is flashed over the image “porn.” In fact, a host of distinctions is threatened, as if linked to one another in a circle of dominoes making up the Symbolic Order. Most obvious is the distinction between form and content – a distinction questioned throughout Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre. Unpacking that distinction in the case of Marty and Veronica/My Body is a Temple, the obvious question arises as to whether the formal mastery of Mapplethorpe’s photography allows a viewer to ignore the blatant confrontation of its contents. The contents of the Vera/“Marty”/Mapplethorpe collaboration confront the category of art precisely because they make absolutely no deviation from porn standard. To admit that Mapplethorpe’s content itself is in any way aesthetic would be to admit pornography, lock, stock and barrel, into the art museum. But, does privileging the formal aspects of Mapplethorpe’s photography allow us to dismiss the contents together with their explicit confrontation? Can we separate form from content here, when the blatancy of Mapplethorpe’s content is so obviously integral to his manipulation, indeed his interrogation, of form?

The argument that Mapplethorpe was a master of classical form won Dennis Barrie his acquittal when on trial for obscenity after mounting Mapplethorpe’s Perfect Moment exhibition at his Cincinnati gallery in 1990. In effect, the court found that Mapplethorpe’s mastery of formal properties – and importantly the symmetry of classical formal properties – excused, even eclipsed, the supposed obscene confrontation of his contents (Phelan 1993:45–7). Yet the necessity of a “decision” regarding the dialectical tension between form and content makes Mapplethorpe’s manipulation of this dialectic apparent. That Mapplethorpe’s work had to be “decided” lends credence to the notion that framing itself is ultimately that which denotes artistic value, a notion that dates back at least to Duchamp, and that framing is less an aesthetic concern than a social, political, and ultimately legal concern. Any image framed in an art museum or an art history textbook is “decided” art, historically buttressed by the language of form over content, while the same image appearing as a fold-out in Bazoombas or Hot Pussy is, by virtue of the content-oriented venue, porn. Thus it is not the contents within the frames but the decided nature of the frames themselves that “artify” or “pornographize.” The apparent transgression of venue relative to content was precisely what caused the general Mapplethorpe uproar in the first place. The Western cultural tradition of ascendancy of form over content was reinscribed in a decision which, ironically, both instituted and eclipsed porn content within an art frame.

As Barrie’s case had to be decided relative to appropriateness of venue, it was the critical art commentary that could be extracted from Mapplethorpe’s work in formalist art historical banter that ultimately decided his case in the direction of “art.” Antecedent to appropriate framing, then, is the application of art historical commentary. It might follow from this that the application of art historical commentary provides a frame around the frame, as it were, and that such commentary is where art has always and only existed, and, further, that the process of decision-making relative to the social sanctioning of art has been an arena for broader social, political, and legal commentary upon the socially, culturally, and politically appropriate.⁵

The Vera/Mapplethorpe piece and the collapse of the space between porn and art which their collaboration invites provokes Patraka’s notion of binary terror – a terror that results in the necessity of “decision.” In Mapplethorpe’s picture and in Vera’s modeling for and then re-framing of that picture within a doubled and/or collapsed context of porn and art, the classical symmetry of Mapplethorpe’s formal arrangement interacts with the unruly content of Vera’s porn-standard – that standard itself a matter of symbolic form (the black teddy and high heels, the porn pose, the seamed stockings, and lax-mouth expression). Indeed, as Barrie’s case exemplifies, Mapplethorpe’s classical symmetry of form beckons a viewer to place his photograph alongside other “formally correct” canonical entries across the history of Western art. And yet it is this very placing beside that becomes confrontative precisely because Mapplethorpe’s content, rife with contemporary taboos of class, race, and subcultural references, can be seen to comment on social and political histories eclipsed from formalist approaches to art.

Mapplethorpe’s classical formality creates a deliberate ghosting – his work quotes and thus is ghosted by art-canonical precedent of classical form. But the content, too, can be said to be ghosted, and not only by the lexicon of formal porn imagery. When placed within the formalized trajectory of the art canon, the explicitly “inappropriate” contents can be read relative to historically “appropriate” contents, raising provocative questions. Looking to art-canonical precedence, Vera’s explicit reference to herself as a templed goddess places her in company with other holy women enshrined in art. Some of them are the high holy prostitutes of modernism, from Olympia to Nana. As in such modernist works, the obvious and even clichéd transgression of the space between whore and virgin, low and high, is in full swing.

In the border crossing between whore and virgin in My Body is a Temple, however, Vera’s porn-specific body works less simply to transgress a high ideal with low content than to interrogate the formal terms of the distinction between high and low – terms indelibly linked to the explicitly marked body in formalized social distinctions between the appropriate and inappropriate.⁶ That is, it is possible to “read” Mapplethorpe’s photo of Marty and Veronica as an exposition of the tension between the appropriate and inappropriate as explicitly marked by race, gender, and class. In the photograph, it is not the black man’s penis (that mytho-cultural locus of white male fear and envy) that prompts the white woman’s mimesis of pleasure⁷ – it is, rather, his equally invisible tongue. Yet Vera’s lax-mouthed expression seems to suggest that his unseen tongue is working – dare we read speaking? Consider aesthetic precedence: With the aesthetic distance and supposed disinterestedness afforded the symbol, the white dove stand-in for the Holy Father repeatedly penetrates and impregnates the Virgin Mother through her unsuspecting ear in paintings canonized in the halls of art museums around the Western world. In Vera’s “art,” however, a black man speaks into the cunt of the consenting prostitute/artist/model – not in the same frame, please! Not beside each other, please! Maintaining the contexts of art and porn as separate and distinct categories can keep the force of their relationship undercover, discrete. However, when porn imagery bleeds out of its social sanctioning as appropriate underground, into the “light-of-day” of art, the content of its formalized taboos (especially as they stick to the standardized lexical imagery of the sex industry) has the potential to become incendiary social commentary. Such works are arguably less invested in transgression for transgression’s sake than in explication of the terms of transgression as they “talk back” to the formal apparatus of sacrality, unveiling secrets in aesthetic symbolism by literalizing that which such symbolism excludes, secret(e)ing that which such symbolism secrets. This literalization, manipulated most often across the explicit body, triggers issues of the state, the family, gender, and race.

Art contexts have traditionally been considered the domain of symbolic form and thus afforded an aesthetic distance of “disinterestedness.” Pornography threatens the myth of disinterestedness, flooding the field with a ribald literality marked by porn’s immediate and “interested” aim toward sexual or visceral effect. In the tangle of issues implied in works which challenge art with porn, the collapse of the symbolic into the literal, and the literal into the symbolic, is fundamental. This collapse doubles as the collapse of obscenity into sacrality and sacrality into obscenity, which provokes, in turn, a host of subsequent binary terrors, making apparent the depth of Helmsian anxiety over policing the social pact which marks porn porn and art art.

Coming out of the porn industry, or “coming out” as porn queens in art spaces, Veronica Vera and Annie Sprinkle call themselves post-porn modernists. Vera and Sprinkle cross from porn into art. In 1985 Sprinkle appeared as a porn queen in The Prometheus Project, a “legit” avant-garde theater piece directed by Richard Schechner at the Performing Garage in Manhattan, an avant-garde venue Schechner founded in the 1960s. She appeared as a “show within a show,” as well as the character Io, doing one of the show-and-tell acts she performed regularly on 42nd Street – to the consternation of several art-world critics (Rabkin et al. 1986; see also Fuchs 1989:42–7). Still, in this work, Sprinkle was appearing under the validating authorship of the art-established Schechner, a fact that would change when her one-woman show, Post Porn Modern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of plates
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Binary terror and the body made explicit
• 2 Logic of the twister, eye of the storm
• 3 Permission to see
• 4 The secrets eye
• 5 After us the savage goddess
• 6 Seeing the big show
• Epilog: returning from the dead
• Notes
• Works cited
• Index