I’m performing in an Yvonne Meier show (Brother of Gogolorez) at the end of February, and creating a dance performance (Shitopia) with Igal Nassima (sound) for the week right after that. At least I’m not silly enough to make something completely unrelated! Shitopia is drawing some of the same material and concepts as Body Island, but set in a different context and as a solo dance performance. Different but the same.

Performance score in process:

Shape in space of the score:

The performative aspects of the Time Map table created for mid-terms by Igal Nassima, Sooyun Yun and myself partially originated in the transformative experiences I have had working as a performer in the last twelve years. As I continue to grow, accruing new information in my body and revisiting old information, I am struck by the shrinking boundary between art and life. It might be inherent to the specific choices I make as an artist, or it might be the choices I make in life that open me up to transformation. Either way, both ways, I love it.

The Time Map table asked people to hammer a nail into a box that represented the exact minute in which they exist, within a grid layout of minutes contained in a week (10,080 little boxes). We wanted this marking of time, a violent act, to focus concentration on a task in a particular meaning-laden place (the ITP floor), the physical operations of the body in space and time, as well as the existential questions of what it means to be participating in, or be locked into, the space/time continuum. The hammering person could attach some representation of their identity to the nail (one among many, identical) using a marker, thus rendering each nail unique yet somewhat anonymous, for the head of a nail cannot contain much more than a set of initials or a reductive icon. Each nail is like a tiny person, occupying a modicum of space in a crowded plane, vying for real-estate. The pattern created by the nails on the tabletop shows the accumulation of participation in the project at that location, but more blatantly, it points to itself.

For me, the intersection (or overlap, depending on the subject at hand) of art and life is a very deep and personal inquiry. The questions that keep coming up are, “why do I choose to occupy my limited space/time with art process and production?” and, “how does the work that I do impact the space/time I occupy?” and, “what is it that makes me do what I do?” It was only very recently that I found some form of direction in those questions. Certainly there are no answers, but proceeding with direction comes close. And for me, performance comes the closest to reifying that direction.

Recently, I engaged in a performance at Performance Space 122 that blew the top off my up-until-now intellectual pursuit of finding the intersection between art and life. The performance was a revival of a work called THEM, created between 1984 and 1986, by Ishmael Houston-Jones (dance), Dennis Cooper (words) and Chris Cochrane (music), in collaboration with the dancers. Originally generated during the rise of the AIDS epidemic (aka “the gay cancer”), THEM gets to the heart of what it means to create art in a time when one’s existence is on the verge of being extinguished. The work is dark and raw. It is physically, emotionally and psychologically challenging for the performers and vicariously for the audience. Like the original 1986 version, most of the dance exists as improvisations within movement scores—embodying unique and original behavior within a structured yet open series of tasks. For me, this is the ultimate analog to daily life.

My role in THEM was brief, but intense. I had a couple of small duets in the beginning of the piece to set up the part I did at the end. When asked, the way I described that part to friends and family was, “I have a blindfolded duet with a dead goat.” This short statement, minimally descriptive, says nothing of the extreme emotions and psychological upheaval this act caused within me and the other cast members. It is hard to write about it. The goats (three of them, because it was a two-week run) were purchased from a Halal butcher; it came gutted and drained, but complete with hooves, head and fur. The throat was brutally slashed, the insides humiliatingly naked. The first goat arrived twenty minutes before the dress rehearsal, completely limp and caked in blood and shit, and still warm. Before that night I had only practiced the two-minute duet with blankets or a cast member as a stand-in. I had no time to prepare myself for the reality of the dead flesh, once alive, now an object—the liminal state of a fresh corpse. The encounter will stand out in my memory for the rest of my life. When I finished the improvised duet, which is scored as a frantic oscillation between wrestling, fucking, tender love-making, mourning, refusal, fear, and loathing, I was covered in blood, as was the mattress where the duet took place. I was shaking. The meaning of the work as a whole had come sickly into focus.

Quoted below is an extract of an email I sent to the cast after the dress-rehearsal, in response to an email Ishmael sent. He said that naming the goat would help, to which I replied:

I haven’t named it. I think goats don’t name themselves or each other, and naming the goat would make it more impersonal to me, oddly enough. A distancing. This work is extremely personal to me.

I had a really hard time with it last night. …I know tonight won’t be the same as last night, less blood will help. The arrival of the goat right before dress, and actually having to face it, totally changed the work for me.

I just had a conversation with Dennis [cooper] about the goat, and how neither of us are okay with it. But we’ll do it anyway. We’re both a little worried what our friends will think of us. And that’s okay because it means the work is effective and people should question the validity of what we’re doing. Because it’s both valid and immoral, people who see it will be changed somehow, which is the root of art for me.

[The work] is not just a reminder of mortality for us. It’s really complicated. Problematic. I have multiple perspectives on the same exact thing (the presence and use of the goat), and those perspectives conflict. On the one hand I eat meat and on the other hand I love animals and have never killed one myself beyond insects. I’ve participated in euthanasias [I worked as a veterinary technician for two years]. I still don’t know the ramifications of those either, but they play into how I inhabit the world, how I interact with other beings on this planet in this life. How and why I am an artist is impacted by what I do in life and what I acknowledge as valid source material. That makes the remorse a useful thing instead of stultifying. Anxiety = future, remorse = past, ??? = present. Real life and art have collapsed in this piece for me. It could not have happened without the goat.

The goat had a hard day yesterday. I take that knowledge into me and ask my deepest self what that means, how it felt, why I am drawn to those things. I am going to die someday, and so will the people I care about. Memories vanish. At that point names don’t matter. So I don’t name the goat. I touch the goat and think about what it means to be just like him.

The two weeks following that initial encounter contained more emotional turbulence for me than the two preceding years. I felt simultaneously enriched and drained. I had asked for the part with the goat, nearly begged, because it was a personal challenge, and because I had already known about it for a long time.

Ishmael Houston-Jones has been one of my mentors for some years now. I met him in 2003 when he taught a class at my university. He showed us videos of his old work, including THEM. I was pretty green and had no idea that performance could be made in such a loose way, or be so visceral. Revisiting the work at this age, and being given the role I was given, is an honor. Hearing Ishmael and the other original creators of the work talk about what it meant to be living and making art in that time gave weight to the fact that we were choosing to spend our space/time as artists. Ishmael writes:

I think my […] point here is that we all just wanted to be doing then what you all are doing now – making our art and our mistakes; having sex, having love, getting wasted, loving NYC, leaving NYC, dancing, loving our friends. But there was this pall over everything we did (in addition to the usual, wars, ecological disasters, right winger homophobe/racist/misogynists,) We couldn’t French kiss without thinking we might get sick and die. Sharing a swig from a friend’s beer was suspect. And friends and lovers were dying. It led to some pretty insane reactions. Wrestling with a dead goat on a mattress is just one of them.

Dennis Cooper also had strong reactions to the presence of the goat after the dress rehearsal:

It’s simultaneously like a violent battle, like sex, like an outpouring of uncontrollable grief … it’s very much supposed to reference what it felt like in the early 80s to have friends dying around you constantly and to have to think of sex as a terrifying, possibly fatal act, and so on.

As artists we are remiss if we do not scrutinize the world (including our own actions) and feed it back into the work. Part of art is creating or recreating the world around you. Because after all is said and done, there is only one form of closure for everyone.
Participating in THEM was a wake-up call. It was the first time art and life were joined for me in a matrimony of emotion and function. The work conjured long-dormant memories, and reconstituted personality traits and immature behavior patterns I thought I had put behind me. Being in this show was one of those turning points in life, where the past, present and future collapse into a heap of dust. It was not unlike gestalt therapy, but self-directed. Even though I have had a life-long obsession with death, up until this show I had only vaguely gestured at mortality as an artist, like hammering a nail into a piece of wood. The pre-occupation with death as an inescapable fact of life was revived in me. It made me live harder, love harder and appreciate how I spend my time/space. The rupture will no doubt change how I make work. For a brief span of time, life and art were on a feedback loop, inextricably linked. Now the question is, how the hell do I find that again?

Reviews of the show:
NY Times
Culture Vulture
CultureBot 1
CultureBot 2
Infinite Body
TheaterMania

[this is where the work is as of now. Several other elements/parts will be included, and this text will be updated accordingly]

Body Island (working title) is a live-recorded video piece created through an ensemble performance with live rats. The main objective is to produce a stand-alone video work that will outlive the performance, and can be shown in lieu of the performance. The structure of the event is similar to a television show with a live studio audience, except the live viewers of Body Island will not have ‘applause’ signs, only the quiet reflection of their own and others’ reactions. The event and resulting video work challenge the existing relationships between performance and documentation.

The main performer, a bodybuilder playing the role of demigod, is concealed inside a structure shaped like a quarter pyramid. The performer has no contact with the live viewers, and the viewers can only see the performer through live-feed video of the activities within. The camera crew shoots through portholes in the exterior; their actions and decisions are exposed. The camera crew has been directed to choreograph their movements to reflect the performance events emerging in the cinematographic style of wildlife documentary. Decision-making on their part is improvisatory, reactive. A director of photography is editing the video feeds in real-time, which are then projected onto the wall for the viewers to observe and discuss. The final video product will be the outcome of the event.

The opinions of the viewers are emphasized in the resulting video work. The viewers can see the activity behind the walls only through the camera feeds. Microphones are hidden throughout the space to capture the viewers’ conversations about the work. The comments and impressions will be overlaid as a soundtrack to the culminating video. The viewers of Body Island and their articulated opinions have a hand in the creation of meaning in the work. Thus, this performance serves two sets of audiences; live viewers, and the video audience who will then experience the camera feeds as well as the live viewers’ reactions. The performance setting and audience are there as a way to create a context, a driving external component contained within the frame of the video.

The final edit of the live-feed will be composed in real-time by the camera crew; the resulting video work will be the only substantial remnant of the performance.

HOW (60 min):
Viewers entering the space are confronted by set of cages containing brown rats. Two rat wranglers stand on the other side of the cages, in a fenced in area. A free-standing structure, a quarter pyramid, occupies the center of the space. Three video camera operators are situated in turrets built into the exterior of the pyramid structure at different heights, facing inward. Two more camera operators rove the space. A director of photography sits at a table away from the pyramid watching the feeds from the three pyramid cameras, editing them live, and directing the camera operators over headset. Video projections on the walls display the edited live feeds. The live feeds show the interior of the pyramid: a grungy, tiled room reminiscent of a miniaturized communal shower. A small Dutch door is set into one of the pyramid faces. Among miniature sailboats and bits of trash that litter the tiled room lies the bodybuilder,  face-down and unmoving. The entire surface of his body is re-skinned in latex. A pig’s carcass pocketed with holes that lead into the chest cavity is strapped to his back with a tiny saddle.*

The bodybuilder plays little gestural games inside the communal shower. The scaled down tiles and shower heads makes him appear enormous. He mumbles to himself, and engages in a score of improvised micro-movements. The camera feeds show him from various angles.

As though staging a ceremonial rite, the rat wranglers put one rat after another down a tube set into the base of the pyramid like an anus. The projection of the live video feeds shows rats emerge one by one from a crack in the tiles and enter the shower room. The rats explore the contents of the room, returning to the obscured face of the performer over and over again. Some rats venture into the folds and holes of the pig carcass. The bodybuilder talks to the rats, asking them questions. He tries out different parts of the room. After some time, murky water begins to seep into the room through cracks in the tiles. To escape the water, the rats have no choice but to clamor aboard the performer. The water level rises to about six inches and stops, transforming the performer’s body into an island landscape, restructuring social interaction in the new post-catastrophe state.

The bodybuilder and the rats co-exist in the reshaped environment. Miniature sailboats float among the trash and echoing sounds. Over time the human island shifts imperceptibly, forcing the rats to adapt to the changing landscape. The rats have to negotiate the limited real-estate provided by the performer’s body. Time passes and the water eventually empties out of the shower room through a drain in the floor. The bodybuilder opens the Dutch door and plucks a towel hanging from the exterior of the pyramid. One by one he dries the rats and places them in an antechamber located behind several tiles. End.

NOTE:
Despite the limitations placed on the rats and the performer by the controlled environment, the core of the work rests on capturing the unpredictable interaction between the performers, the camera units’ adaptation to those interactions, and the viewers’ articulated impressions.

The rats are hired actors, brown rats identical to the kind of reviled rats one might see in the subway or on the street at night, but hand-raised and accustomed to direct contact with humans. Neither the bodybuilder nor the rats are playing to their stereotypes. Using rat actors, as opposed to city rats, lessens the tension between the hoard (rat) and the individual (human) while pushing perceptions of unsanitary and menacing conditions. The interaction is portrayed with as much neutrality as possible to elicit a range of responses from the viewers.

*The pig carcass may simply be a structure reminiscent of a carcass skinned with pig hide.

This video is what I want to happen in the interior of the scaled down communal shower room.

More tiles for inspiration for how to paint the interior of the communal shower. Maybe not this grungy, but I love the sediment textures and ochre colors. Photos and video taken at the Brooklyn-bound Canal Street Q/N stop.

First sketches for the mountain/pyramid for Body Island. This structure will contain the 8 ft cube communal shower where the body builder will meet the rats. The original impetus for this was to skin the communal shower in something more meaningful, so it doesn’t look like a cube. Exterior should say something about the interior but maybe have an asynchronous relationship– you can’t tell what the inside of something looks like based on the outside.

A pyramid is the most abstract 3D representation of a mountain (or island, if it’s surrounded by water). I felt that I had to shave back several layers of detail and work on this abstract level to get to a place where I can begin to play with the shape. I’m interested in the reflective surface, but not mirror, to semi-reflect the large projections in the space, as in the light in the image below. In a crit, Igal Nassima mentioned that it might be nice to lacerate the surface or place things behind it that will show through somehow. I’m in the middle of making several iterations that will help figure out the design (in clay, fabric, paper garbage, plastic, and so forth). The mountain shape is both a reference (via the matryoshka doll metaphor I’m working with) to the island shape on the body builder’s back, as well as to mythologies I haven’t started to flesh out yet.

Short version of the previously posted text. Plus more sketches!!

Body Island is a live-recorded video piece in the style of a wildlife documentary, created through a solo performance with live rats. The main objective is to produce a stand-alone video work that will outlive the performance. The performer and the rats are contained within a closed structure. The viewers see the performer-rat interaction only through live-edited video feeds, projected on a wall. The video crew and director of photography are exposed, coordinating and making decisions about how to capture mediate the interior of the structure. Audio recording equipment is scattered throughout the space to surreptitiously capture the viewers’ conversations about the work. These comments and impressions will be edited and overlaid as a soundtrack for the culminating video. Thus the viewers of Body Island and their articulated opinions have a hand in the creation of meaning in the work.

The interior of the structure is reminiscent of a communal shower, a confined space with a defined use that evokes notions of the unsanitary and the sanitary, privacy and public exposure. After some time, murky water begins to seep into the shower room through cracks in the tiles. To escape the water, the rats are forced to clamor aboard the performer. The water level rises to about eight inches and stops, transforming the performer’s body into an island landscape, providing harborage, and territory for a new state.

The final video will be two channels displayed side-by-side in a one-hour loop.

Some of the pics from trip to Ecuador are now on Flickr. It’s meant to be documentation, so I whittled the number of pics of monkeys with lasers on them down to 20 something. There were over 500.

Go to Flickr

Here’s a few of the best:

Looking for a space!!

Some criteria that would be great:

-7pm performance
-Capacity for 50+ people
-A place to fill up a 45cu/ft cistern
-A place to drain water
-Walls good for projections would be great
-Animal friendly and food/drink allowed
-At least 11′ ceilings
-3 days install, 1 evening performance, +1 more day break-down
-February dates (2nd week is best)
-Central location is preferred, i.e. Manhattan, easy for people to get to

I’m thinking it could be a space that has a few dark days between shows. If it fits the criteria above it doesn’t have to be a notorious space– it could be a gutted apartment or whatever.

“I know of no one thing so universally detested, or so unjustly charged with everything that is foul, treacherous, and disgusting, as the rat.” –James Rodwell (aka Uncle James), The Rat: It’s History and Destructive Character, 1858

Rat Island:

(Link to the video on Blip)

What is it about rats that makes people hate them?

I’m asking you. Most people say it’s the tail, or disease, or that they’re greedy and quickly outnumber us, or some combination. I am interested in understanding rats as more than these fear-based surface attributes. I’m also interested in understanding rats as a threat to our way of life, and why efforts to eradicate them have been so wide-spread, long-standing, and unsuccessful. I don’t have any answers, even after all the research and work I’ve done in the last few months. If nothing else, I have more questions.

Rats, specifically Rattus Norvegicus (AKA the brown rat AKA sewer rat AKA wharf rat AKA the Norway Rat) live because we support them. They are our pets, our laboratory heroes, our dark half scuttling through our garbage. I have to ask myself, where does my interest in rats come from? Being our more uncivilized neighbors marks rats as a reflection of our ways and attitudes. Being a close genetic relative proves useful to our scientific quests. Rat bodies are boundary breaking. They fit neatly into the physical and analogous boxes we describe for them in some contexts, and yet we cannot control them in others. They have a dark vitality we cannot overcome. Simply put: they are awesome. I am in awe of them.

Rat Island, the video above, is an effort to show rats (as represented by an individual) in what I hope is an unfamiliar light. The tub is grungy. The rat is a fancy rat: Russian Blue, rex fur, Dumbo, yet still Rattus Norvegicus. I am an island upon which the rat is trapped. The island is also a boon for the rat, who would be swimming in the water otherwise, with drowning as a real risk. For the first time, as a performer I disappear with little effort, all the focus is on the rat.

This video will be scaled up, with more rats and a larger container. It may be a companion video rather than treating this first one as a sketch. I may be looking to have the scaled up video emphasize different elements, for example, the interaction between the rats. Their reaction to me as an inanimate object, and their reaction to their situation will still be important. Will they fight? Will males and females mate? I am less concerned about my own well-being, though I will likely spread a bad-tasting ointment on any exposed skin to prevent tasting/biting. As Molly aptly put it, “swarming creatures can easily become disgusting.”

——————–
Daily Life:

(Link to the video on Blip).

We all have an inner rat. I understand my own inner rat through practicing not-knowing. To enable a different part of my consciousness I must restrict my anatomy and my orientation to the earth. Resistance and limitation beget new ideas. Self-knowledge through experimentation, I am the test subject. I cannot write a script, or build a structure to understand the inner rat, rather, those conscious choices are stripped away and replaced with action and reaction. Pre-conceived sets of boundaries, closed systems that elicit behavior, are the materials. Through repeated daily practice of these boundaries, for a duration, an understanding emerges. What at first might have seemed unfamiliar becomes habitual, what felt shallow becomes deep. I am creating a repository for new behavior, accessible at any time, that communicates the cumulative involution concerning all things Rat.

This video was the result of an hour or two of recording video in the forest with Sofy Yuditskaya. The next step for this part of the project is to work consistently in the studio, or another private space, until I have achieved a certain level of Ratness. At that point I will move the practice to the streets of NYC. This work is under development.

In order to bear the weight of my body and the entire rat costume without getting exhausted and TOTALLY sore, I’m building a partial exoskeleton that will relieve some of the load, even if it does end up limiting my ROM a bit. It’s still really basic. I have to make a wrist joint (I’m thinking torsion springs– from a rat snap trap!), secure things, and make a ball-and-socket-esque joint for the part that goes on my chest.

This mechanism will only bear my weight when I’m in a specific position, with the stock of the modified crutch aligned perfectly over the base, making a pillar. That’s tough to build onto a body that’s going to be moving around and changing orientation in relation gravity. Refining the relationship between the massive tension springs (Ace Hardware, $10) and the aluminum tubing will help the springs lock and prevent buckling. The shafts inside the spring are about 3 inches apart to allow for more flexion, with loose bolts preventing spring slippage along the shaft, but allowing slippage around the rotational axis. That means at the wrong orientation the springs easily buckle. Too many degrees of movement… must find the happy balance.

The spring on the rear side is placed lower on the shaft to allow for spiraling around my arm, similar to how our muscles spiral/wrap around our bones, which are also spirals. The whole dang human body is a collection of spirals. Eventually I want my hand to be completely free, not holding on to the handle of the crutch, so thumbs can operate the pan-tilt camera eyes and the fingers can puppeteer the rat fingers.

I’m imagining something similar to chest armor, but without the faux leather pants and pads, though I like the rigid plastic spine– good for mods. Right now the center of gravity falls into the crook of my arm, but if I modify that part into an L shape going towards my center, with a joint that allows weight bearing and a quarter sphere’s worth of ROM, and increase the surface area that interfaces with my chest, I can spread the load from one point to possibly my entire upper torso.

Below is the demo-video with a free stand. Imagine both arms having this mechanism.