Tag Archives: Performance Art

Lizzil Gay is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher currently living and working on Wurundjeri country. Her creative work locates the body as a site of disruption, resistance, erotic habitat and spillage. The body is an anchor point for her conceptual, philosophical and political thinking.

As a researcher Lizzil has completed a PhD in Media and Communications from RMIT, Melbourne. Her doctoral thesis Wounded bodies as sites of dissensus: Acts of resistance by detained people seeking asylum, and in the performance art of Mike Parr explores the philosophy of pain as political, and the body as a site of resistance.

With her body as a habitable site, Lizzil works with issues of depersonalisation and incarceration to explore the fragmentation of identity and self, the unstable self. Drawing on her early training in Performance Studies, Suzuki Method, and Butoh at Melbourne University, and video media studies Victoria University, she has created works that animate the body as a site of expression, resistance and queer politics. Her seminal solo piece  ‘C’mon Mickey. I love you’ (2010) was an embodied response to the death of her long time creative partner Mango Dysfunkt. Lizzil performed a 3 day durational live art installation at Donkey Wheel House in Melbourne exploring complex trauma, grief and loss through expressions of live self-harm and body modification. 

Lizzil formed the notorious feminist burlesque group the Voodoo Trash Dolls in 2004 with fierce co-conspirators Willow J, Sparkarella, Lolly A’Bell and the late great Nikkity Splits. The Dolls unique and experimental blend of performance art, cabaret and ‘grotesque burlesque’ culminated in their most acclaimed show ‘Dressed to Kill’ in December 2008 directed by John-Paul Hussey. She also co-founded, alongside Mango Dysfunkt, the queer eco-activist performance group Dysfunkt Productions whose provocative and daring multi-media events toured nationally and internationally from 1996 until 2002. Prior to this she worked with a number of experimental performance groups including Tedium and Wild Lunch Dance Theatre.

Lizzil has also been fortunate to work alongside a number of significant Australian performance artists such as Stelarc, Casey Jenkins, Glitta Supernova, and Jill Orr. She continues to explore her own body within a performance art context, whilst researching the body as a site for radical relational politics and social transformation.

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Alway Was Always Will Be

‘I live, create and work on the sacred and sovereign lands of the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the Kulin Nations, and respectfully acknowledge the elder’s past, present and future becoming. I acknowledge that the sovereignty of these lands has never been ceded and the deep disrespect and brutality with which my ancestors illegally occupied the land of the Gunai Kurnai peoples on which I was born. I acknowledge that my sense of place and belonging is built on the struggle of dispossessed Aboriginal people and that I benefit from this as an occupier. I acknowledge and apologise for the continuing acts of colonial power, racism and violence which disregard the transgenerational trauma and pain of dispossession for Aboriginal people. I further acknowledge the rightful and Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors  of all the lands and waters across Australia which i travel. I commit to being open and humble and always respecting the knowledge and wisdom of the First Peoples of this land. Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.’

This acknowledgement is a work in progress for me. It was inspired by the generous conversations and musings with Indigenous and non-Indigenous people at the recent AAANZ conference. I now look to reflect on my position as an occupier of this place called ‘Australia’ in my art, writing and creative practice and this is a step in that process. 

Glittering Feminist Threads

I recently had the pleasure of working with Casey Jenkins suturing her body for her art work: Broken and re-made, time stretches across my lives and my thighs piercing me with splendour. The video work she produced was part of the Pockmark Project produced by Liv_id. Casey’s work had an element of gentle beauty to it that I had not had the opportunity to experience for some time.

We spent a gentle morning of skin sewing in her home.The morning brought to mind thoughts of ‘women’s’ intimate or domestic space as a site of political contestation. Whilst we did not engage in a grandiose display of body modification, those moments of quietly sewing Casey’s body still occupied a space of resistance for me. Tracing the stretch marks on her hips and thighs reminded of me of growth and retraction, the movement of life lived in skin. It felt in such contrast to some of the more ‘violent’ or ‘forceful’ acts of piercing, cutting or ‘harming’ the body that I have been a part of. Pushing metal through skin is not always easy. The body is resilient and tough, it resists. But having enjoyed the peace found whilst gently stitching my own skin in performance I felt honoured to be able to share this peaceful action with another artist. A lot is said without words when we trust each other with our bodies. I also reflectively acknowledged that it was a moment of privilege that we could sit safely in her home and ritually embroidered her skin – such safety is not a privilege everyone has. Thanks so much to Casey for having me help her with this work, it was a beautiful.

The video work Casey produced for the Pockmark Project was showcased on selected tuk-tuk’s in Bangkok, Thailand and images of the work can be viewed on the Liv-id site via this link. More of Casey’s work can be found via this link.

Thoughts on Empty Ocean and Exhibit A by Mike Parr

Empty Ocean and Exhibit A  (Dark Mofo, Bruny Island and Detached Gallery)

Excited to be getting on a ferry at 1am to make the trip to Bruny Island, I was rugged up and already tired. The trip through the water with the full moon in the sky, and the cold arctic wind winding its way onto the deck, seemed a perfect way to be transported to Mike Parr’s latest performance work Empty Ocean. On arrival we were ushered off the ferry, asked to not speak, and walked with torches to a paddock close to the Island’s shoreline. Around 30 chairs made a square in the landscape like an empty auditorium, and we were instructed to stand around creating a three-sided square held in shape by a rope on the ground. We waited, wondering what would happen and when. After a short interlude, Mike Parr’s voice could be heard in the distance as he repeated the numbers 1,2,3,4 through a megaphone, reminiscent of ground troops in one of the old world wars, or maybe prisoners walking home to their quarters. If I turned around I could see a long group of people, wearing blue vertical striped pyjamas with navy dressing gowns, walking the same path we had, their torches facing down. The seats that were in the middle of the spectators were for them, with Parr, in everyday clothes of pants and a jacket, standing to the side. Parr’s pyjama clad volunteers, each had two stones, which,once sitting they started tapping together. This continued for about 90 minutes.

From the beginning we were part of the mise-en-scene. Our silence as we walked in a human line lit by torches. Our standing to attention in a 3 sided square as we waited eagerly for Par to arrive. As the clicking sounds of rocks set in, the expectant energy shifted to a slow realisaton that this was possibly the totality of the performance. It was cold and I lay down to relieve my aching back. I fell asleep for a bit. Many others took to lying on the ground, and whether sleeping or in a meditative state, shivering or cuddling a loved one for warmth, the giant moon above us, the undulating landscape around us and the shoreline close by, opened the empty ocean to our consciousness. The image was quite moving and surreal. The instruction not to talk was a godsend. The quietness was heaven.

In the harshness of the Island’s coastal elements this was a gentle work. I appreciated being forced to engage with the extremities around me. Becoming cold and tired made simple the need to surrender to the situation whilst the action occurred. This was perhaps an action of endurance for both performer and spectator. The cold serving to focus the senses ensuring the only choice was to submit and absorb the beautiful moon, the stillness of the scene and the sound of rocks clacking. Me, I like being pushed into the elements and feeling the intensity of nature gnaw at my body. I heard later that other people were not so impressed by this forced endurance spectating, but then performance art isn’t about making people comfortable or happy. Leave comfort and happy consumption for the objects one can buy in the Mona gift store.

I must admit the work was not what I expected, and others seemed confused at how it played out. I am familiar with Parr’s works where his own body is acted upon, often violently, whilst his spectators act as voluntary witnesses. This work kept us ‘captive’, whilst a group of people over 55 years old, sat rhythmically clinking rocks in a paddock. When I unintentionally ran into Parr on the street the next day we casually chatted about the work. He said the age of his volunteers was important to him. His generation were born on the back of WWII and that was the global crisis that shaped them. Now however, young people are facing different forms of crisis such as, climate change, rampant consumerism, and a whole new way of engaging in war. His war references in Empty Ocean were evident to me; the megaphone voice of 1,2,3,4 creating a marching troupe, the vertical striped penal like pajamas, and the audience standing to attention in the beginning but slowly fading onto the ground like soldiers in a field.

I didn’t realise until speaking with Parr the age of the performance volunteers which led me to ponder about those people clinking their rocks, who may not live to see the breaking point of current global crises, which they are part of creating. Members of their generation hold positions of power politically. Members of their generation own assets and have equity. Their generation has made, and continues to make policies that ignore the environment and compounds the complexities of the global security situation. Their drive for wealth and material comfort is leaving our oceans, our rivers, our forests and our farmlands devastated. Of course we, the younger generation are also playing a part in these disasters, but these people are our elders and our role models. Like they followed the 1,2,3,4 and marched to war in the 1940s, so we follow them into perhaps, an empty ocean.

Parr also staged an installation/exhibition Exhibit A in the city of Hobart at Detached Gallery. It was simple in form, and carried on a theme from many his works – urine in buckets. Literally rows of steel buckets of urine were arranged in the gallery similar in form to the rows of seats in the paddock on Bruny Island. The smell of the ammonia from the stale urine was overwhelming. It’s a smell that takes me back to my grandfather’s nursing home where he saw out his last days in striped pyjamas. When considered as a whole, these two separate yet linked art actions/works, Exhibit A and Empty Ocean, have shared associations; the smell of the urine in the gallery, tiny oceans of toxic human waste in each bucket, and the performers being over 55 years of age and wearing pyjamas as if they’d escaped the nursing home. The vulnerability of the old people in a freezing cold field perhaps speaks to the vulnerability of old people as they near the end, which may well be in a urine scented nursing home. Surely this is a time when they look back and see the results of their lives both individually, socially and globally. Ageing seems to be an issue here.

Similarly Asylum, created last year for Dark Mofo in the Willow Court Asylum, New Norfolk, spoke to Parr’s position as an ageing artist. In Asylum he wore the pyjamas, shuffled around the asylum making drawings and had a room with a urine bucket. These performative works take a step away from his early acts of self-aggression and severe body actions. Parr’s own role as an artist in Empty Ocean has him standing in the background, warm and safe, observing. Perhaps as he heads further into his seventies the ocean feels closer, the environment more precious, and his vulnerability present and real. I found Empty Ocean to be quite a profound work, and it has continued to speak to me well after the event. This is what I want art to do; hang around in my mind and body, remind me of what I experienced at random intervals, and encourage me to think about the world I live in and my place in it.

Democracy

Direct Democracy
Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA 26 April – 6 July 2013

I always find it refreshing to see art so clearly and unashamedly articulated as political. Direct Democracy an exhibition at MUMA was full of politically potent works calling our attention to both the necessity of, and the inherent problematic nature of a notion we cherish in the west – democracy. I was taken in by many of the works no holds barred politics.  Natalie Bookchin’s 18 channel video installation Now he’s out in public and everyone can see (2012) was one example. Here one stands amidst multiple screens of video bloggers simultaneously discussing a prominent ‘black male’ who I never worked out the identity of. The chat room? The democracy of social commentary? Bookchin created an engaging and effectively confusing audio/visual assault of identity based chatter which held me for some time.

Whilst many of the works on display engaged me for much longer than my sometimes short attention span allows, my personal joy lay in the video of the previously live performance art of Mike Parr.  Video footage of the sewing of Mike Parr’s face and the branding of his leg in an earlier live work, which took place at MUMA in 2002, had me riveted. Close the Concentration Camps was originally performed live by Parr to bring attention to the cruel treatment of asylum seekers in detention in the early 2000s. I find it incredibly depressing that today, over ten years later this work’s potency lies in its relevance to contemporary policies surrounding asylum seekers. Still holed up in indefinite detention by our governments, asylum seekers exist in camps that become places where acts of self-harm and daily suffering are something we may vaguely hear about, but rarely if ever see evidence of. Parr’s original live work sought to bring our attention to such notions of suffering and injustice, which were and still are, occurring in Australia. Our detention centres are truly ‘locked down’ when it comes to the media, with government legislation censoring any images or stories from the inside that people attempt to release. An act such as Parr’s public lip sewing in 2002 attempted to scream attention for those who are made invisible to us by the state.

Twelve years later what was on exhibition was not a reenactment of the original live work, but screened video footage. It was well placed alongside a selection of letters written by Parr to a colleague whilst planning the work. Also sections of text chosen from a report written in 2000 on the conditions of detention centres entitled Not the Hilton played on another screen. Essentially we were viewing an edited and recontextualised documentation of the original work, framed by the curators as such.  The Performance Art genre of which Parr has been a key part of, can be considered limited in its live audience reach. It is not unusual for a live work such as those presented by Parr, to be viewed by a small and specific audience. Close the Concentration Camps as part of Direct Democracy illuminates how the resulting documentation of live art becomes an important part of the bigger picture with its capacity to act as an important historical, cultural and political reference to a time and place. In the absence of images of the aslyum seekers he was showing support for, Parr created within the institution of art, images providing a direct reference to a series of controversial political events. Years later his work gives a visual reference to the time and place of thesse political events. He creates ‘stand ins’ for visual images which were not part of the media coverage or the public discourse of the time.

This documentation of his work remains as an artistic and political artefact with the artefact bound to the historical event it refers to. John Berger muses in his famous essay ‘Uses of Photography’ that the use of photography must be to create a memory that is socially and politically alive.  As documentation, the recontextualised and exhibited moving images resulting from Parr’s original work, have the capacity to encourage an engagement with the social and political memory of the early 2000s.

I had a flutter of great excitement when I realised the footage from Mike Parr’s original live work was on display at MUMA. Having missed the original live piece, this video work had its own intensity and capacity to ‘move’. Close up images of Parr’s face being sewn and the clarity of the audio of his utterings of pain and discomfort were unsettling. I wonder if such proximity would’ve been possible at the original live event?  Having been allowed a new site and a new format, the installation of the video encouraged a recalling of the political and historical period of the original work.  It held form as an important artefact pointing to the past, but also cried out about the politics of today. The situation for asylum seekers in Australia remains unchanged. The concern of our governments seems to not be in maintaining human rights and dignity, but about who can best keep those seeking asylum out of Australia. Sadly it seems Parr’s incredibly moving work is one whose political potency is stuck in time.

Suspending Stelarc

I had the amazing opportunity recently of assisting in the suspension of Stelarc. I was part of the small team who were asked to perform the insertion of the hooks into his skin and ready the artist for suspension. The suspension occurred as part of the ‘Stelarc Suspensions’ exhibition held on 8 March 2012 at the Scott Livesey Gallery, Melbourne.

What draws me to perform this kind of ‘procedure’ is the intensive level of focus one must engage in to achieve inserting thick hooks into a body’s skin. The skin is tough and resilient, it doesn’t allow for hooks to pass through easily. It resists the action. But key to the performance is the absolute conviction that we will achieve this. Certainly at times the force was far greater than expected to get the hook as far in as we required for safe suspension – at these moments the sense of ‘this will work’, ‘there is no option but for this to work’, ‘there is no turning back’ is exhilarating. Fully engaged with the body as matter. I rarely such states of complete immersion in a task – my world is one of consist existential ruminations and uncertainty which no doubt flood this blog at time. Except when performing. Except when engaged with a body in such an intense moment as his. The focused pushing, pushing, pushing – a relief from the everyday scattered nature of my self.

As Stelarc is winched into the air we witnessed many moments of sculptural beauty. The body is suspended.  The body hanging perfectly over Stelarc’s Arm/Ear Sculpture; the room is quiet; people seem thoughtful and reverent as they watch the body become art.


Stelarc Suspension Video

Scott Liversey Gallery

Stelarc