Devora Neumark's Interventions and the Concept of Flesh

HOW DOES WHAT'S BRED IN THE BONE COME OUT IN THE FLESH? DEVORA NEUMARK'S INTERVENTIONS AND THE CONCEPT OF FLESH

Vera Kiriloff

Department of Art History and Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal August 2005

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How Does What's Bred in the Bone Come Out in the Flesh? Devora Neumark's Interventions and the Concept of Flesh

Vera Kiriloff

This thesis examines seven of Devora Neumark's artistic interventions that activate an embodied transfer or continuity of knowledge. 1 am inspired by phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of "the flesh of the world," that is the element enabling a reversibility between subject and object, specifically with regard to the body. Neumark draws from a repertoire of her everyday activities like crocheting or peeling beets to make a stew. She resituates the activity from one which is traditionally practiced in the private sphere of the home, often undervalued, to one which critically engages passersby in various urban settings. 1 study the repefitive capacities of these everyday activities, how they are negotiated in the public sphere, and how they remain (re)productively in the flesh through body-to body transmission. Flesh becomes the operative concept in this thesis and activates a phenomenology in Neumark's interventions that goes beyond Merleau-Ponty's and which engages with both aesthetic and socio-political questions.

2 SOMMAIRE

How does what's bred in the bone come out in the flesh? Les interventions de Devora Neumark et le concepte de la chair

Vera Kiriloff

Ce mémoire cherche à examiner sept des interventions artistiques de Devora Neumark qui activent un transfert incarné ou une continuité de connaissances. Je puise mon inspiration dans le concept d'une "chair du monde" du phénoménologue Maurice Merleau-Ponty, c'est-à-dire l'élément favorisant une réversibilité entre sujet et objet et ce particulièrement en ce qui concerne le corps. Prenant inspiration d'un ensemble d'activités quotidiennes comme le travail au crochet ou l'épluchage de betteraves, Neumark transforme une activité qui se fait traditionnellement dans la sphère privée de la maison, en une autre qui engage les passants en divers milieux urbains. J'étudie les capacités répétitives de ces activités quotidiennes, comment elles sont négociées dans la sphère publique et comment elles restent (re)productivement dans la chair par une transmission de corps à corps. La chair devient le concept opératif dans ce mémoire et aide à établir une phénoménologie par rapport aux interventions de Neumark qui dépasse celle de Merleau-Ponty et qui active simultanément des questions d'esthétique et des éléments sociopolitiques.

3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks go out first and foremost to Baba, my grandmother, who taught me the principles of unconditionallove, and strength in the face of life's challenges. She has inspired me indirectly to continue in the best ways 1 possibly cano It is Cynthia Hammond to whom 1 owe direction though: my undergraduate professor who patiently showed me that feminist scholarship can be done in the narne of grandmothers like mine.

AIso, 1 extend many thanks to my thesis supervisor, Professor Christine Ross, who enthusiastically supported my ideas and my future plans. Of course 1 am extremely grateful to Devora Neumark, who se passion, quirkiness and devotion to people cornes through in aIl her work. 1 thank the faculty and staff in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies here at McGill for their help and support.

1 am extremely grateful to aIl my friends who offered advice and often that "extra push," as weIl as to my godmother, Natasha llliesco, for her curiosity and my sister Elena, for listening to me from Australia at 3 am. 1 thank most of aIl, my partner Andrew Gibson for his endless support. He has edited, given advice, listened and always made sure that 1 think about doing things "for the right reasons."

Finally, writing this thesis would not have been possible if it weren't for my mother and father who have offered their loving financial support throughout the years. Marna, thank you for telling me that you're proud of me, and for your advice - 1 do appreciate it. And Papa, my "m.p." - there just aren't any words that could thank you, your presence, phone calls, 'vibes,' jokes, support and advice (let' s not forget the incentive of your "Burberry fund"). This is for both of you, thank you.

4 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... 2

How Does What's Bred in the Bone Come Out in the Flesh? Devora Neumark's Interventions and the Concept of Flesh

SOMMAIRE ...... 3

How does what's bred in the bone come out in the flesh? Les interventions de Devora Neumark et le concepte de la chair

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... ••...... •••••...•••...... •...... •...•. 4

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... 5

INTRODUCTION ...... 7

CHAPTER ONE: EMBODIED INTERACTIONS ...... 19

Appropriation and (in)visibility 21

A critique of the mind/body dualism 29

Intersubjectivity and interobjectivity 30

Conclusion 39

CHAPTER TWO: INTERACTIONS IN URBAN SPACES ...... 41

Being home (or dwelling) 43

The public sphere 47

The Everyday 51

Intertwining the intersubjective and the interobjective 57

Conclusion 60

CHAPTER THREE: FLESH ...... •.•...... ••••...... 62

Being flesh 65

5 Responsibility/ability and sensibility/ability 72

Reproduction and difference 766

Conclusion 84

CONCLUSiON ...... 86

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 92

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 96

6 INTRODUCTION

« Comment pouvons-nous apprécier le merveilleux sans être capable de vivre les banalités? Le merveilleux étant une perle, le banal est son sable. Aurions nous toujours besoin de nous éloigner du sable pour connaître la beauté de la perle? »1 Ying Chen

"Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh ?,,2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty

1 first came into contact with Devora Neumark's art work through one of my undergraduate classes and was fascinated by the simple daily activities that she would adapt in quirky yet approachable ways for her interventions. Neumark has crocheted, peeled beets, meditated, pulled the petaIs from daisies, set up a living room for conversation and even toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She did this, not in convention al ways - in a kitchen, in her hou se, alone or in the country - and instead she moved each activity right into the hustle and bustle of a busy city, inviting anyone to join her or to talk with her throughout. Most interesting for me, from her own accounts of each intervention, was the way that her work seemed to act, as a type of therapy for both herself and the participants. Many seemed to walk away having gained sorne sort of insight into the ways in which they pursue their daily lives. Neumark's work includes a focus on people - from random passersby,

1 Ying Chen, Les lettres chinoises, Montréal: Leméac, 1993 (85). Sassa, one of the protagonists in this novel, living in China writes this refection in a letter to her finance who has moved to Montreal. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969 (135).

7 family, even on herself and how she is when she is alone. The interventions allow each participant to reflect on their experience of the world and the people they encounter throughout these experiences.

At the time, 1 wasn't very familiar with performance art at all. The knowledge 1 had of it included either early Happenings, or on the other hand, what 1 now know to have been called a feminist "explicit body in performance" by

Rebecca Schneider.3 One of the objectives for both of these notions was to reject any commodity status or ownership of art. Neumark herself is described by curator

Marie Fraser to have gone "against the idea of the object, and to resist the co-option of traces of the past.,,4 This is in reference to the one intervention discussed in this thesis, Presence (1997, fig. 1), throughout which Neumark actually created an object.5 ln this intervention, she was seen sitting in different locations around

Montreal and crocheting a purple and yellow cocoon or body bag. She documented the time she sat alone by using the yellow thread and the time passersby would speak to her with the purple thread. The resulting object, that is the cocoon-shaped body-bag, literally documented the interactions which took place throughout the intervention. Displeased apparently, with this idea of having an art abject,

Neumark, in a follow-up to Presence, staged a work at UQAM one year later (1998, fig. 2) entitled, Une résistance certaine, where she unraveled this cocoon on the opening night.6

3 Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance. London, New York: Routledge, 1997. 4 Marie Fraser, "A Community of Strangers: The Public Space of Speech in the Work of Devora Neumark", Parachute. no. 101, (Jan.-March 2001), 55. 5 This intervention will be discussed at length in chapter one. 6 Devora Neumark, Being Home. http://www.devoraneumark.com. in her discussion of Une résistance certaine. Last accessed: June 2005.

8 Schneider' s notion of the "explicit body in performance," has the further purpose of rendering the (marked) body explicit in order to address what she caUs

'binary terror.' Schneider writes of the intention of such feminist performance artists as: "peeling at signification, bringing ghosts to visibility, they are interested to expose not an originary, true, or redemptive body, but the sedimented layers of signification themselves.,,7 Although Neumark's interventions don't appear to engage an "explicit body," or one which is naked and visible, 1 decided nonetheless to entertain the idea that something "explicit" is revealed.

1 have found that Neumark does bring to question the body and shows it to be in fact a thinking body and a subject, rather than merely a mindless object. The interventions both put into action and investigate the phenomenological theory of

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which questions Descartes' Cogito (Je pense donc je suis;

'1 think, therefore 1 am') and implicates the mind as belonging at the base of human existence and the body as auxiliary, feminine, and getting in the way ofthe mind.8

Feeling physical reactions to the social and personal experiences of her interventions, Neumark contributes to the notion that her body is not only subjective, but also necessarily intersubjective, as she subjectively recognizes others' subjectivities, and they hers.

Furthermore, throughout sorne of my research on performance art, 1 stumbled upon other definitions of performance as an activity which "becomes itself through disappearance.,,9 Such a definition puzzled me however. If 1 was to

7 Schneider, 1997 (2). 8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962 (72). 9 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London; New York: Routledge, 1993 (146).

9 think of therapy or the activity of going to a therapist, it would never be described as disappearing. It is obviously meant to remain, its effects becoming incorporated into a lifestyle. Neumark's interventions have not disappeared, most obviously because 1 am writing about them today. It seemed important to me then, that this notion of disappearance would also have to be c1arified with regard to Neumark's interventions.

Performance studies theorist Rebecca Schneider, in a 2001 essayentitled

"Performance Remains," argued extensively, precisely toward an understanding of the disappearing and nevertheless remaining nature of performance. She draws from Jacques Derrida's explanation of the archive as extending from "the Greek root of the word archive [which] refers to the Archon's house; by extension, the architecture of a social memory which demands visible or materially traceable remains."lo Examining how Derrida's notion relies on a patriarchal "logic of the archive," Schneider argues that following such logic, performance would be required to disappear in order for the archive to come into being. That is, that the archive "becomes the trace of that which remains when performance (the artist' s action) disappears.,,11 As Neumark unraveled the cocoon for Une résistance certaine, going against the idea of an art object, or "archive," she destroys any neatly ordered material remains of the performance. 12 And Fraser explains that

Neumark's motivation rests on the idea that "memory, in order to be transmitted, still needs a body, in other words, an act; it can neither find completion in the object

JO Rebecca Schneider, "Performance Remains," Performance Research 6, no. 2 (2001), 102. Il Ibid, (102 and 104). 12 1 will discuss in more detail the significance of the remains that she does leave and which are not neatly ordered in chapter three.

10 nor be taken up into it.,,13 Therefore Neumark's interventions emphasize these acts which are located at the root of the object and which have led to the creation of the

object, rather than the object itself.

1 have found that one of the key elements to Neumark' s interventions is the way that she draws from her daily or everyday "common" activities which passersby would likely be familiar with themselves. In sorne of the reflections,

Neumark has specified that her works are "performative interventions" rather than performance. 14 Much literature has led me to believe however, along with

Schneider, that performativity intertwines necessarily with performance when seen in relation to identity.15 It seems that what Neumark is trying to emphasize though, is that even if she puts on a costume (as she does in an intervention 1 discuss in

chapter one), she nevertheless is performing her own identity. For her, the

intervention is always a meditation on how she wants to be and how she decides to

present herself to others on a daily basis.16 1 posit that this is why her interventions

involve a daily activity, one which is prone to be repeated as part of a daily life

outside of the 'official' intervention. Schneider has further commented on this

repetitive nature of performance to emphasize the fact that performance remains

simultaneously, as it disappears through repetition and body-to-body transmission.

Bringing all this together, 1 found it interesting that Schneider decided to borrow from Merleau-Ponty by using the term "flesh" in order to explain her theory

of the role of the body in performance. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-

13 Fraser, 2001 (56). 14 Neumark, Being Home. http://www.devoraneumark.com. last accessed: June 2005. 15 Rebecca Schneider, "On taking the blind in hand," Contemporary Theatre Review 10, no. 3 (2000),29. 16 Neumark, Being Home. http://www.devoraneumark.com. last accessed: June 2005.

11 Ponty demonstrated that it is through our own flesh that we are able to understand ourselves as simultaneously, subject and object, mind and body. By extension, he

defined "the flesh of the world," as the element which allows for the reversibility of

all subjects and objects and enables mutual understandings of our co-existence in the world, or intersubjectivity. For Merleau-Ponty, flesh should be considered in the sense of "a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a

fragment of being.,,17 Flesh for him is "not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to location and to the now.,,18 Schneider on the other hand, uses flesh as a metaphor to designate aIl those performances,19 which by the "patriarchallogic of the

archive," disintegrate and slip away from the bone. She plays off of more everyday

definitions of flesh, in order to describe it more appropriately as the body-to-body

transmission and repetition of performance, concluding that it remains "in the flesh

with its feminine capacity to reproduce.,,20 Consequently, according to her, flesh no

longer stands in opposition to the bone as it does by the logic of the archive.

1 have noted already that in her interventions, Neumark draws from her daily

or "everyday" activities. She reproduces and adapts these previously performed

'banal' activities by changing their spatial or temporal characteristics; this consists

of making them longer than they usually are or moving them from more private

spaces of the home and into the hustle and bustle of the city. Furthermore Neumark

makes sure that she is always interacting with passersby, inviting them to

17 Merleau-Ponty, 1969 (140). 18 Merleau-Ponty, 1969 (140). 19 By performance here 1 mean aIl those practices which have been described in terms of performance, that is, theatre, storyteIling, ritual, performativity, etc. 20 Schneider, 2001 (104).

12 participate and therefore emphasizing the different intersubjectivities which come into play throughout. Already connoting Merleau-Ponty's flesh then, Neumark takes this a step further as she enables critical relationships through which all the participants can question or at the very least, take note of the nature and organization of urban spaces. 1 daim therefore that this relationship between the participants and the urban spaces of the interventions is one that is potentially interobjective. Vivian Sobchack has formulated a definition of interobjectivity which "names the condition of a deep and passionate recognition of ourselves and the objective world filled with 'things' and 'others' as immanently together in the flesh - that is, as both materially and transcendentally real and mattering.,,21

Amelia Jones explains that intertwined with intersubjectivity, interobjectivity enables a person to recognize their experience as being "not only in the world, but as also belonging to it and thus owing it something.,,22 Noting that this experience occurs particularly in works like Orlan's and Bob Flanagan's, Jones shows that this is due to an interactive and fleshy "technological relation that intertwines intersubjectivity and interobjectivity.,,23 Although Neumark's work does not involve a technological interaction between the artist and the participants, it is my contention that through a critical and objective, relationship with the urban spaces in which the interventions strategically take place, intersubjectivity and interobjectivity can intertwine nevertheless. Interobjectivity in these social interactions, as 1 will show, is always necessarily intertwined with intersubjectivity

21 Vivian Sobchack, Camai Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 2004 (318). 22 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 (239). 23 Ibid (239).

13 in the flesh, such that the interaction becomes more invested a weIl as, simultaneously artistically and politically mattering.

In this thesis 1 will look at seven of N eu mark 's interventions to show their repetitive capacities as everyday practices, su ch that they remain (re)productively in the flesh through body-to-body transmission and as flesh: a flesh which allows us to demonstrate a phenomenology that draws from and goes beyond Merleau-Ponty's and which is deeply rooted in social and political motivations. Flesh therefore becomes the operative concept which enables a conclusion that Neumark's work contains aesthetic elements and at the same time engages with meaningful socio- political questions.

As Schneider looks at feminist performances that render the tactile and fleshy body explicit, she shows how this "mass of orifices and appendages, details and tactile surfaces" exposes a stage where "socio-cultural understandings of the

'appropriate' and/or the appropriately transgressive" are questioned.24 Neumark never literally exposes her own tactile fleshy body. However, she interrogates daily activities and urban spaces as sites "which bear ghosts of historical meaning, markings delineating social hierarchies of privilege and disprivilege.,,25 1 will show that Neumark in fact exposes the fleshy characteristics of the interventions themselves. Each intervention discussed here brings visibility to those practices and people that have become disregarded or invisible over time, and deemed feminine, private, primitive, or ethnic.26

24 Schneider, 1997 (2 and 3). 25 Ibid (2). 26 Ibid (137).

14 The chapter succeeding this introduction explores the ways in which three of

Neumark's interventions in particular, engage the notion of the body as both subject and object, subjective and objective. In the first work, Presence (1997, fig. 1 and 3),

Neumark crocheted a partial body bag as she sat in different locations around

Montreal, for eight weeks, five hours every day. In another work, S(us)taining

(1996, fig. 4 and 5) she sat for an entire day peeling beets and dressed in a white dress in front of her bumt down house. And finally, in 2000, she dressed up as one of the women in a painting by Gerard ter Borch from 1660 entitled, Curiosity, housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. For this piece, Dutch

Woman at Large (fig. 6 and 7), taking on the role of this woman, Neumark walked around the museum and its surroundings, speaking only when spoken to. These three interventions are argued to be collaborative practices which, by involving aIl participants through direct interaction, show the socially and politically constructed nature of the gendered body. Through each intervention, a cathartic element becomes evident which allows Neumark to confront a persistent discomfort she felt in having to abide by an identity that was being imposed on her. It also enables her to refIect on how it is that she will negotiate her own identity in the future. 1 will further examine how Neumark's interconnectedness with the world (of people and things) enables a practice which is simultaneously intersubjective and interobjective and therefore contributes to her own experience of her phenomenologie al fIesh. For this chapter, as for the following two, 1 have chosen to use works that clearly embody subjectivities. However, my contention is that similar conclusions can be drawn for aIl of Neumark' s performative interventions examined in this thesis.

15 ln the following chapter, 1 look at the different social relations that are at the base of two more works, in order to engage in a discussion about their relationship with urban space. Going back to the summer of 2000, 1 discuss a situation when every week for ten weeks and four hours each time, Neumark arranged her living room fumiture in front of the Frontenac metro station (fig. 8). She invited anyone who was willing, to engage in The Art of Conversation with her. 1 also bring in the analysis of a later work entitled 1 have arrived, 1 am home (2002, fig. 9), for the purpose of showing that social relations do not necessarily manifest themselves only through spoken word or speech. For this intervention, which took place every day for se ven days, Devora meditated in a moving van which was relocated each day to a different spot in Quebec City. There was a ramp leading up to the truck, and books about meditation were strategically placed on tables in the truck. These were supposed to invite and encourage people to join her in her silence or, as 1 will also discuss, react to it. The social relations, as a major component of the interventions, are shown to be questioning the space of the home as it has been placed conventionally in opposition with the public sphere. Here, 1 discuss sorne of the implications of home and homelessness and how they are negotiated as these interventions take place in 'public' spaces. The potentially subversive nature of The

Art of Conversation and 1 have arrived, 1 am home, especially with regard to the gentrification of cities, is also brought into question. 1 conclu de here, that the participants not only relate intersubjectively with each other but simultaneously experience interobjectivity through a critical relationship with the spaces they inhabit.

16 ln the final ehapter, 1 eontend that Neumark's interventions are in faet the

very flesh that allows for the interrelatedness of subjeet and objeet, and of 'a state

simultaneous intersubjeetivity and interobjeetivity. ,27 Here, specifie attention will

be paid to She loves me not, she loves me (2001, fig. 10) and The Four Cardinals

(2003, fig. Il and 12). In the first, the artist sat in a square in Montreal, surrounded by thousands of white daisies, pulling away at eaeh flower' s petals and repeating the question "she loves me not, she loves me, ..." Merely sitting there, she

attraeted passersby to join her, either in the game or even just in conversation. The

Four Cardinals was Neumark's contribution to the efforts of a world-wide

performance event to unite artists in their own durational performance for nine hours on one specifie day. Neumark, dressed in loose, white clothing and in the

solitude of her own garden, incorporated different prostrations from the several

spiritual praetices that have been present throughout her life, kissing the ground

each time. In this chapter also, 1 chose to look at two interventions which strike an

interesting relationship between each other. As She loves me not, she loves me

obviously implicated participants and random passersby, The Four Cardinals was

done in what appears at first as solitude without interaction with other participants.

1 show that there is nevertheless an interconnectedness which is potentially formed

with others in The Four Cardinals and 1 proceed to look at how it manifests itself in

a similar manner as in She loves me not, she loves me. Original aesthetic and

political implications are manifested in these two interventions as flesh through

interconnected intersubjectivity and interobjectivity. As Schneider posits, repetition,

or the reproduction of flesh plays an important role in these interventions also; each

27 Jones, 1998 (239).

17 one is a repetition of an everyday activity and therefore has the potential to be repeated again. The difference however, which any repetition necessarily implies is notable as weIl and will be discussed with regard to these interventions as flesh.

Much politically-laden contemporary art work makes a point at the expense of sorne sort of aesthetic component. As performances which contribute to an affective transfer and continuity of knowledge, Neumark's interventions have the potential to teach us aIl that art can still have an aesthetic component even as it is created with political motivations. As participants walk away from an intervention with a special thought or even a raised eyebrow, the intervention gives them something to draw from and something to repeat. It is my hope even, that this thesis will be further read as a repetition then of each intervention in question. My writing, a performance in its own right, can not be separated from, and depends on

Neumark' s interventions. Any further reading of this thesis should similarly constitute a performance which allows the interventions to remain.

18 CHAPTERONE EMBODIED INTERACTIONS

Every fall 1 look forward to pulling out the beets from our garden at the cottage and bringing them home to proudly make Borscht, the bright red Russian beet stew that both my mother and my grandmother before her used to make.

Devora Neumark similarly tums to comforting thoughts of her grandmother in her

1996 intervention S(us)taining when she sat on the street corner outside her house

and studio which had been bumed down six months earlier. She had lost most of her belongings as well as any mementos of her previous work?8 So she sat there in

a white dress, barefoot, with white pussywillows in her lap, peeling pre-boiled beetroots as her grandmother did when she made the traditional Russian soup -

Borscht (fig. 4).

For an intervention of the following year, Presence, Neumark sat in

different places around Montreal (in the plaza at the Musée d'art contemporain,

outside Concordia University Library, in front of Snowdon metro station, at the

Voyageur bus terminal, the base of Mount Royal, Atwater Market, and in a private

home on Saint Denis) over a period of eight weeks for five hours a day and

crocheted a type of cocoon or body bag from the thread traditionally used by Jewish

women to make men's head coverings or Yarmulkas (fig. 1 and 3). She worked in

yellow thread until someone would stop to converse with her and switched to purple

for the duration of the conversation, thus "weaving together her daily experiences

and interactions with people, braiding together each moment of encounter and each

28 Devora Neumark, Being Home http://www.devoraneumark.com. in her discussion of S(us)taining. Last accessed June 2005.

19 moment of solitude or isolation, as if she were weaving the memory of people, the experiences and recollections they have recounted.,,29 We often see her covering herself with the cocoon in pictures, having it envelop her body (fig. 1). The coco on was unraveled by Neumark one year later for an exhibition/intervention at UQAM entitled Une résistance certaine, where she inscribed with oil stick the exact pattern that was created into glass windows that separated the gallery space from the rest of the university space. The pile of cotton thread which was left over was placed on a glass shelf and photographs of the making process were screened as a part of the display (fig. 2).

Lastly, as the Dutch Woman at Large (1998-00), Neumark had a costume made that would imitate the one of the seated woman at the desk in a painting by

Gerard ter Borch entitled Curiosity (1660), housed at the Metropolitan Museum of

Art in New York City. Dressed for the part, she entered the museum, went to see her painted double (fig. 6), walked around the museum and Central Park (fig. 7).

She spent the day as this 'Dutch woman at large,' reflecting on what this woman's life might have been like and only speaking when spoken to. 30

In this chapter, 1 will examine the body as it is presented in these three interventions. Although Neumark often makes reference to the body with regard to her work, it is not explicitly shown or revealed in the interventions. Art historian

Amelia Jones has distinguished "body art" from performance art, in that:

29 Marie Fraser, "A Community of Strangers: The Public Space of Speech in the Work of Devora Neumark", Parachute. no. 101, (Jan.-March 2001), 54. 30 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of Dutch Woman at Large.

20 Body art does not strive toward a utopian redemption but, rather, places the body/self within the realm of the aesthetic as a political domain (articulated through the aestheticization of the particularized body/self, itself embedded in the social) and so unveils the hidden body that secured the authority of modernism?l

Neumark herself further specifies that her interventions are not performances and refers to them instead as "performative interventions.,,32 1 therefore propose an investigation of the mechanisms through which S(us)taining, Presence, and Dutch

Woman at Large might be considered "body art," and how they function in relation with performativity. First, 1 will explore the ways that Neumark uses the body to show and deconstruct its role in the construction, of what has been expected from her, in a "traditionally feminine" identity. 1 will further identify the Ihany hierarchically gendered binaries that are problematized and subverted in the interventions, and show that these interventions made c1ear the necessary and irreducible co-existence of mind and body, subject and object. In looking at several phenomenologically-invested discourses, 1 will discuss finally, how Neumark goes beyond showing her body as subjective, and shows in fact its interconnectedness with the world around her: intersubjectively, and as 1 will explain, interobjectively.

Appropriation and (in)visibility

The situation in Dutch Woman at Large involves Neumark taking on the identity of a woman in a painting by Gerard ter Borch through whom she is able to learn more about her own identity. The painting, Curiosity (ref: fig. 6) depicts two

31 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Peiforming the Subject. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 (13). 32 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of Dutch Woman al Large.

21 women curiously looking over a third who is carefully writing a letter. According to the catalogue entry on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website, all are presumed to be ofhigher class.33 A little dog also watches on curiously but

obediently on a stool beside the desk. Neumark, curious herself, was most interested in the figure of the seated woman writing the letter and decided that she would personify her. Noting how the painter freezes this woman in time, Neumark writes that she hoped to

[activate] a place for the seated figure in the painting to participate in the culture around her. Through this work she was to be offered a different sort of agency after all these long years of being gazed at and (being limited to), gazing out of her forced pictorial domestic (interior) space.34

Dressed as the Dutch Woman at Large, Neumark made her large and 'at large,' and therefore more visible and interactive with the world around her. Neumark gave her agency, enabling an embodied participation in the world around her. She explains her own feelings as she wandered around the museum and around its exterior, wearing the costume:

Upon wearing the costume, 1 began to become aware of how much this work is about the internalized and external expectations of the "good Jewish daughter" within the larger North American secular culture and historical constructions.These expectations, like most demands imposed by family and community are scarcely ever achieved.35

As the Dutch Woman at Large, Neumark becomes the material reality of the woman in the paining, and brings awareness to an artwork that vi si tors to the

33 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Curiosity." Works ofArt, Permanent Collection. http://www.metmuseum.org/Works of Art/viewOne.asp ?dep= Il &viewmode= 1&item=49%2E7%2 E38. Last accessed: 9 August 2005. 34 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of Dutch Woman at Large. 35 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of Dutch Woman at Large.

22 museum often pass by for more known works.36 Neumark also performs her own identityas she dresses up and sees in the Dutch Woman at Large, reminders of her own childhood. She activates art critic Benjamin Buchloh's description of appropriation in Michael Asher' s exhibition "Museum as Site," where it

[... ] functions primarily in a designatory manner to establish a context and generate an awareness of the layers of ideological determination that condition the conception and construction of a work of art.'.37

Her performance in fact takes appropriation to a new level as she quotes both the figure of the seated woman from the ter Borch painting and "the good Jewish daughter" from her family' s expectations. Buchloh finds devaluation and mockery at the root of appropriation used by montage artists. Instead, Neumark brings a renewed interest to an often under-valued painting, visibility to the seated woman, and simultaneously criticizes the political and historical interpretations of the painting. In her appropriation of "the good Jewish daughter" however, she destabilizes the socially constructed ide a of woman as passive, domestic creature,38 by exaggerating, confronting and rendering ridiculous the demands that were expected of her, and hardly ever achieved.

A similar phenomenon is notable in the repetitive gestures that make up both Presence and S(us)taining, when Neumark repeats the tedious, methodological gestures involved in crocheting and peeling beets, respectively. She exaggerates these gestures however in both interventions and shows the presence of her own thought throughout what is usually seen as a mindless, passive activity.

36 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of Dutch Woman at Large. 37 Benjamin Buchloh, "Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art." Art Forum vol. 21 (Sept. 1982),51. 38 Judith Bulter, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990 (141).

23 Furthermore, in taking these activities to spaces outside of the home, she shows herself as active and political, rather than passive and domestic. In Presence, she

starts with the act of crocheting a Yarmulka, or Jewish skuIlcap for men. She does

not stop there however, and instead continues to crochet the same piece for days on

end, marking out the spontaneous interactions with passersby (with purple thread),

as weIl as her own moments of solitude (with yellow thread). As part of

S(us)taining, she peels many more beets than would be needed for a stew, doing

this to outwardly manifest her psychological pain and trauma.39 Neumark exposes

it to the world passing by, making them aware of her pain and by extension, her

subjectivity.

In bringing emphasis to and reworking or exaggerating these traditional

gestures (peeling beets and crocheting), Neumark activates what performance

theorist Richard Schechner writes about in an essay entitled "The Future of Ritual",

showing that the repetitive, exaggerated nature of rituals stimulates the release of

endorphins by the brain and into the bloodstream which results in cathartic relief.4o

Neumark confirms this notion in both Presence and S(us)taining as she addresses

the pain she felt growing up, trying to negotiate an identity of her own while at the

same time one was stringently imposed on her by her Orthodox Jewish family.

Additionally, through S( us )taining, by going back to the location of her bumt down home, she also confronts the trauma she suffered in the loss of her belongings in the

fire.

39 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of S(us)taining. 40 Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Peiformance. London; New York: Routledge, 1993 (232).

24 In aIl three interventions, and most obviously in Presence and S(us)taining,

Neumark appropriates a gendered practice. In Presence, she does this by quoting the act of crocheting a Yannulka, an act which is traditionally practiced by women for men. Similarly in S(us)taining, she repeats but also thwarts the woman's role in the kitchen, keeping the family warm and comfortable and preparing the food for the celebration of Passover. In Gender Trouble, Butler writes that "Gender is the repetitive stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of

a natural sort of being.,,41 Neumark works a traditional and gendered act of the domestic sphere and through continued "repetitive stylization of the body", or appropriation of this act, she thus "exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as poiitically tenuous construction.,,42

S(us)taining plays a particularly important role in thwarting what is expected from her as a woman. For Neumark, beets symbolize revealing her bleeding heart to others, showing her pain as a way of dealing with it.43 1 am more inc1ined however, to propose a different reading of the beets, her white dress and her notion of "performative intervention". As she sat there barefoot, in her white dress, with white flowers, a red stain slowly began to appear in her lap (fig. 4 and 5).

Because of the direct effects of the Holocaust on her family, Neumark often refers to intergenerational trauma that keeps on being passed down from generation to

41 Butler, 1990 (33). 42 Butler, 1990 (141). 43 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of S(us)taining.

25 generation.44 As the bright red juice stains her white dress and the petaIs of the white flowers, the blood that was shed in her family during the Holocaust begins to stain the innocence of the forthcoming generations.

On the other hand, this situation also draws interesting and more obvious parallels between menstruation and the Orthodox Jewish laws of niddah, whereby women are required to abstain from intercourse during their period and for se ven days following.45 In the Jewish faith, menstruation symbolizes the loss / separation of the mother from the egg, the loss of the soul of a person that could have existed.

Women also wear white clothing, which is claimed to facilitate in cleaning later on.46 Thus it might be speculated that Neumark is once again drawing from her

Orthodox Jewish "roots" and the conventions that were imposed on her as a girl growing up.

With regard to this idea of menstruation as a time of change and "becoming a woman," Elizabeth Grosz explains that "[ ... ] there remains a broadly common coding of the female body as a body which leaks, which bleeds, which is at the mercy of hormonal and reproductive functions.,,47 Neumark herself describes this piece as representative "of a new body of work.,,48 S(us)taining takes on a transitional nature as she sits on the threshold of renewal, of work, of all the aspects of her self. The white dress, the white flowers in her lap, her bare feet aIl symbolize the blissful innocence she is leaving behind. As the beet juice starts to stain her

44 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of S(us)taining. 45 Blu Greenberg, "On Women & Judaism: A View from Tradition". Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981 (108). 46 Greenberg, 1981 (115). 47 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994 (204). 48 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of S(us)taining.

26 hands, her dress, the flowers, her feet, she is able to acknowledge her own suffering as weIl as a move beyond it. The pussy willows, which Neumark thoughtfully incorporates into the intervention, often seen as a symbol of springtime approaching but also in a Chine se tradition, a symbol of longevity,49 become (fig. 4) the symbol of a fresh start with many possibilities.

Grosz expands on the associations of menstruation as weIl and writes insightfully that:

The idea of soiling one self, of dirt, of the very dirt produced by the body itself, staining the subject, is a 'normal' condition of infancy, but in the case of the maturing woman it is a mark or stain of her future status, the impulsion into a future of a past that she thought she had left behind. This necessarily marks womanhood, whatever else it may mean for particular women, as outside itself, outside its time [ ... ] and place [ ... ], and thus'a paradoxical entity, on the very border between infancy and adulthood, nature and culture, subject and object, rational being and irrational animal. 50

Jane Blocker takes this idea further when she sees blood "[... ] as evidence of the body's indeterminacy, its simultaneous living and dying.,,51 Neumark, in this piece thus creates a paradoxical view of menstruation. She subverts the idea that women's corporeal flows signify uncontrollability, an unclean and leaky body. And she uses this notion simultaneously to emphasize a transitional process, acknowledging the negative and gently allowing for it to pass, allowing her to move on, to heal. This intervention becomes therefore an examination of Richard

Schechner' s conclusion regarding rituals in that they "[ ... ] are also bridges -

49 We1come to Singapore, the Lion City. "January," Festivals. http://www.www singapore.com/festivals/festivaI2.html. 50 Grosz, 1994 (205). 51 Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost: Desire, History and Performance. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004 (107).

27 reliable rites of passage.,,52 For me however, the reference to menstruation in

Blocker's interpretation of Anna Mendita's performances is more compelling with regard to Neumark's interventions:

Performance is blood's work. Whatever else it may be, it depends on and is defined by the living body. Even when the performer is silent, immobile, and unconstumed, blood moves. Mendieta would probably have understood the mystery of that movement as ashé, which, in the Afro-Cuban religion Santeria, is the life force, the source of divine power, the energy that brings balance and order to the uni verse. Ashé is present in the blood that courses through the body, in sap that rises in plants, in speech that flows form the mouth. It is useful to understand performance not as an artistic medium, not as a doing or a saying, but as the lingering in ashé. [ ... ] In Mendieta's performance, blood speaks in a pulsing voice that says, 'So be it.,53

Likewise, as Neumark peels her beets, as the red juice stains her hands and her dress, she is able to confront the hardships she had faced. Furthermore, as she continues to sit there, she does not beckon passersby to come and speak to her - she sits in silence until they approach her. 54 Blocker also explains silence in Mendieta's performances by using Luce Irigaray' s notion that language flows like blood, therefore providing "a strategy for speaking in the space of the silence that words produce, a strategy whereby bleeding is substituted for telling because meaning wraps itself too tightly around words.,,55 Neumark sits in silence and relies on her bleeding hearts to tell her story. Furthermore she simultaneously makes her gendered body visible, one which has been invisible or ignored in society for so

52 Schechner, 1993 (230). 53 Blocker, 2004 (114). 54 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of S(us)taining. 55 Blocker, 2004 (123).

28 long. 56 And to recall then Amelia Jones' definition of body art, Neumark "unveils the hidden body that secured the authority of modemism.,,57

A critique of the mimllbody dualism

Elizabeth Grosz, in "Refiguring Bodies," critiques the Carte sian dualism which links "the mindlbody opposition to the foundations of knowiedge itself, a link that places the rnind in a position of hierarchicaI superiority over and above nature, including the nature of the body.,,58 She looks toward an "embodied subjectivity" through which a division of the subject into rnind and body would be avoided.59 Presence thwarts many gendered binaries as the body here, and as 1 will show, "hovers perilously and undecidedly at the pivotaI point of binary pairs.,,60

Neumark works in traditional materials, considered of the domestic realm within public spaces and she co vers her body with what is intended to cover a man's head.

The resulting cocoon is an interesting "in between" what is interior and what is exterior; stranger and friend; temporary dwelling and permanent dwelling; being and becorning; presence and absence; the phallic shape of the piece and the vaginal, cavemous aspect of it, (that is, penetrator and penetrated as part of both the identity of the cocoon and of Devora); self and other; and finally subject and object. In this intervention, as Neumark makes a poke at phallicism's modes ofthinking and the dualisms that reinforce it; it exemplifies what Kathy Davis caIis "queer theory' s attack on aIl forrns of binary thinking, including dualistic conceptions of sex and

56 Schneider, 1997. 57 Jones, 1998 (13). 58 Grosz, 1994 (6). 59 Grosz, 1994 (21). 60 Grosz, 1994 (23).

29 gender.,,61 Neumark stressed this as she pulled the phallic-shaped cocoon,

extending from a Jewish skull cap worn traditionally by men, over her head, penetrating it like a phallus with her own (female) body (fig. 1). This gesture

implies a critique of the patriarchy still found in many traditional or orthodox religions, which unevenly segregate gendered roles. Neumark also addresses her

feelings with regard to her own experience of such a religion when she recalls having to play the role of "the good Jewish daughter" in Dutch Woman at Large.62

The cocoon and Neumark' s performance of the process of its creation are therefore

"the site at which self and other converge".63 The phallic coco on furthermore was created out of the realm of experience with the other, with the world through the

interactions with passersby. It is unstable, and has multiple markings which resulted from this experience. It thus serves as one of the sexual discourses that not only contests "sex", but to follow Butler' s discussion of the non-coincidence of gender and sexual difference, converges with other similar discourses "at the site of

'identity' in order to render that category, in whatever form, permanently problematic".64

Intersubjectivity and interobjectivity

Most interpretations of body art tend to be about those feminist works which address contemporary female beauty standards; or how the female body is expected

61 Kathy Davis, Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body. London: Sage Publications, 1997 (13). 62 See above and Neurnark, Being Home, in her discussion of Dutch Woman at Large. 63 Judith Butler sparked this ide a in rny rnind in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990 (171 and 45) as "the wornan who both has and is the phallus" she elaborates on this in her later Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993 (103), where she c1ears up sorne of what she wrote in Gender Trouble. 64 Butler, 1990 (163).

30 to be performed.65 The three interventions studied here, on the contrary show us that aIl female bodies, past and present, c10thed and unc1othed, have been objectified in sorne way and robbed of agency. This is also reiterated and expanded on by Jones in her insights about Maureen Connor's work being more about an

"embodied and open-ended femininity", through which the experiencing subject is given the opportunity to "interrogate her or his own structures of selfhood and othemess, subjectivity and objectivity, masculinity and femininity," that is, their intersubjectivity.66

The late phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is known for his analyses of the body as perceiving and therefore as inseparable theoretically from the mind and from consciousness. He showed that the body exists both as subject and object simultaneously in that "the body, by withdrawing from the objective world, will carry with it the intentional threads linking it to its surrounding and finaIly reveal to us the perceiving subject as weIl as the perceived world.,,67 He implied that as a result, "bodily experience forces us to acknowledge an imposition of meaning which is not the work of a universal constituting consciousness, a meaning which c1ings to certain contents.,,68 The experiencing body then, becomes the site of meaning and subjectivity. Neumark activates this notion especiaIly as she uses her own body in The Dutch Woman at Large, recreating a different meaning and therefore a different subjectivity for this woman through her/their

65 This is particularly evident in most of Rebecca Schneider's The Explicit Body in Performance. London; New York: Routledge, 1997, as she discusses the art/pornography binary in chapter one: "Binary terror and the body made expIicit." 66 Jones, 1998 (210). 67 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962 (72). 68 Merleau-Ponty, 1962 (147).

31 experience wandering about in New York City. Intersubjectivity, or as film theorist

Vivi an Sobchack explains, "how human beings co-constitute a sense not only of their own subjectivity but also of the subjectivity of others who are not themselves ,,,69 is necessarily embodied and relies on the body. As Sobchack asserts, this embodied experience is shaped by both social constructions and by body specificities such as race, sex and age "with the understanding that the significance of these also varies according to the context.,,70 Therefore as 1 will show, interactions between Neumark and the different participants in the three interventions constitute multiple intersubjectivities.

When Neumark roamed the Metropolitan Museum of Art quoting The Dutch

Woman at Large, she was usually mistaken by passersby for a woman in a Vermeer painting and thereby began to suggest to them "that it was not only the famous

Vermeer women who merited being noticed.,,71 She indicates however, what happened when she ran into one of the guards:

The guard on dutY took a long look at me and then promptly said, "Great ter Borch!" 1 laughed and said, "You mean you did not mistake me for a Vermeer?" to which he replied, "How could anyone mistake you for a Vermeer when you are so clearly the seated women from Curiosity. Enjoy your outing."n

This exchange is particularly witty since the security guards monitoring museum spaces are usually regarded as objects themselves, thought to not really know much about the art and essentially there just to protect it. In seeing Neumark as the

69 Vivian Sobchack, Camai Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 2004 (296). 70 Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1992 (144). 71 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of Dutch Woman al Large. 72 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of Dutch Woman al Large.

32 woman in the ter Borch painting, not only did he recognize which painting she was from but he also recognized her as a subject - one to whom he could wish a happy outing. For Neumark too, he was no longer merely a guard on dut y; he became someone who noticed and interacted with the paintings he was responsible for.

Further, with regard to Presence, she describes the interaction when one passerby stopped to find out what she was doing and upon realizing that her own presence would materialize in the cocoon, the woman decided to tell Neumark aIl about her life in Chile when General Pinochet held power. Neumark remembers:

She spoke of how her family was scattered and how her memories still held pain and sorrow. She spoke for nearly an hour, addressing her words as much to herself, as to me. AlI the while, 1 was crocheting continuous circular rows in purple. When she came to the end of her expression, her eyes welled up with tears and with a voice full of all that she was feeling, said "1 am so pleased that you changed to purple when 1 came to speak with you, because 1 deserve to be in someone's story.'.73

As Neumark recalls the story with such detail, and as the woman shows her gratitude in being part of Neumark's own story, each participant's intersubjectivity is activated. Similarly, in S(us)taining, Neumark does not hide her subj ecti vit y as she takes what was private to her and makes it accessible, almost imposing it on the random passersby. In fact, as her following recollection from her website shows, her healing, and by extension, her self, is actually dependant on the other:

Once, while 1 was sitting barefoot peeling beets in a white dress on rue Notre Dame marking the arson that had destroyed my home and the bulk of my life's work, a woman bending low under a fullload of grocery bags made her way slowly across the street and stopped directly in front of me. Without so much as a hello, she said "1 don't know what it is that you are doing - but let me tell you, 1 understand it." "But you know," she continued, "it doesn't matter how fast you peel those beets, or for how long, you cannot

73 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of Presence.

33 go faster than time." And with the gift of her words still resonating in my heart, she walked away.74

In an elaboration ofher definition of body art, Jones writes that it is the artist's

avowal in her or his own narcissism and "the contingency of this narcissistic self on

its others,,75 which distinguishes body art practice as a postmodem process. As the

woman passing by, recognizes Neumark's pain, the artist in tum, becomes aware of the woman's subjectivity.

The title of this piece in itself offers as weIl sorne interesting insight in to the

notion of intersubjectivity. In 'S(us)taining' three possible words are present:

'sustaining', 'staining' and 'us'; each word has multiple meanings on its own. First,

'sustaining' reminds us of Neumark who throughout her hardships has to sustain herself, her children and her practice. Second, the 'stain' refers most likely to the

literaI stain of the beet root juice, or in a metaphoricaI sense, to the stain on her life

that she is confronting. It is the last word - 'us' - that 1 would like to expand on however. In this intervention and in the other two, Neumark interacts with her

audience, blurring the distinction between artist and viewer/interpreter. She does

not create a work of art; she just initiates the process that it is. Amelia Jones and

Andrew Stephenson might daim that the viewer/interpreter' s actions are just as performative as Neumark's gestures, and thus move away from a detached and neutral interpreter.76 They explain: "Interpretation is, ( ... ) a kind of performance of

74 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of S(us)taining. 75 Jones, 1998 (52). 76 Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, "Introduction" in Performing the Body, Performing the Text. London; New York: Routledge, 1999 (1-10).

34 the object, while the performance of the body as an artistic practice is a mode of textual inscription." 77

This demonstrates that intersubjectivity is allowed only through intertwining of self and other, subject and object, mind and body. AlI three works therefore show the relation of the artist to her audience and vice-versa, and how this interplay of numerous intersubjectivities is crucial to the artistic process that is the work of art. Merleau-Ponty has contended that the interconnectedness of subject and object, or this fghenomenon of intersubjectivity, allows one a feeling of being-in-the- world. 8

In Neumark's work, as she interacts not only with people but also with

objects around her. There is usually a discrete element of pain or at the very least,

of endurance and coping as she feels both subjectively and objectively through her body, what it is like to be an object. Her interaction with her cumbersome costume

as the Dutch Woman at Large is particularly interesting. On her website, Neumark

quotes Colette Sparks in an unpublished essay, writing that clothing's role is "to

display a unified identity while in reality holding together an always fragmented

self.,,79 She continues by recalling the bodily experience of clothing in the tightness

of the corset, the weight of the fabric, the discomfort and the growing anxiety:

The shadow si de of the psychological and physical pressure to conform to standards set by society and family were also vividly present an experienced. In short, as the aching of my ribs, brought on by the tight corset lacings and sheer weight of the clothing, subsides with time, so too will the clarity emerge, linking my intentions with my experience as 1 sit with and digest what 1 felt, what 1 learned, what became apparent for me in the doing of this, how people's reactions and responses effected and affected me and how my being present might have effected and affected them.80

77 Jones and Stephenson, 1999 (8). 78 Merleau-Ponty, 1962 (149). 79 From an essay entitled A Dwelling Place by Colette Sparkes, (unpublished, Montreal), 1997 (96- 98) quoted by Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of a truth, afiction, ... of Sabath clothes and feeling an impostor. Last accessed April, 2004. 80 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of Dutch Woman at Large.

35 Neumark, by dressing in the clothing of the woman in the painting, presents her body as an object, as the woman in the painting, whose freezing in time, stripped her of her subjectivity. What she notes in the reflections on her website however, is how she began to understand her/their body as both object and experiencing: fragmented but displayed as a unified identity by the costume.

She further explains with regard to this doubled nature, that she "inhabited the outfit of the figure in the painting" and asks the readers to "note the French connotation of inhabit as an article of clothing." 81 In French, one assumes that to wear "un habit", c'est l'habiter (to wear clothing is to dwell in it, live, exist in it).

Merleau-Ponty makes a similar comment with regard to our bodies as not in space and time, but rather as "belonging to space and time, inhabiting it.,,82 As we

"inhabit" our clothing, it simultaneously acts on us. Nina Felshin eloguently guotes

Virginia Woolf on such a notion: "There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; [ ... ] they mold our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.,,83 The costume which Neumark wears and which simultaneously "wears her," sets into play the notion that clothing is not only an object, but also a subject which conceals / exposes her body and plays in identity formation of the body/self.

In Presence, as she endures crocheting five hours a day for eight weeks, she feels pain in her over-worked fingers. In S(us)taining, she finds herself surprised on the moming following the intervention, to find that her hands were charred from the oxidized beet root juice (fig. 5). Sobchack has defined the notion of interobjectivity,

81 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of Dearest. 82 Merleau-Ponty, 1962 (142). 83 Nina Felshin in "Clothing as Subject". Art Journal, 54:1 (Spring, 1995),20-29.

36 positing it as a structure in relation with intersubjectivity, as one that "is experienced in a mode both complementary and contrary to intersubjectivity.,,84

Interobjectivity is a material connection with things as weIl as people in the world which allows not only for a feeling of being-in-the-world but also belonging to it. 85

She explains that "as intersubjectivity is a structure of engagement with the intention al behavior of other body-objects from which we recognize what it objectively looks like to be subjective, so interobjectivity is a structure of engagement with the materiality of other body-objects on which we project our sense of what it subjectively feels like to be objective.,,86 And when interconnected with intersubjectivity, one cannot but recognize the other as mattering subject (like the clothing in the above discussion).87 As the crochet needles, the tight corset of the heavy costume, and the beet rootjuice, all aet on Neumark's body, they are no longer passive objects but simultaneously and reversibly, active and "mattering subjects." Rer relationship with world (of things as weIl as of people) is therefore both interobjective and intersubjective.

At the heart of Neumark' s website, rests another type of significant exchange, which this time includes me, as 1 sit down at my computer, type in the address of Neumark's website, navigate it with my mouse, look at the images and read about her accounts of the interventions. 1 begin to recognize here my own exchange with Neumark. 1 can empathize with the participants, imagining that 1 ran

84 Sobchack, 2004 (312). 85 Sobchack, 2004 (317) 86 Sobchack, 2004 (317). 87 Sobchack, 2004 (318).

37 across Neumark crocheting or peeling beets. 1 remember my grandmother who taught me how to crochet, knit and sew, and my mother whom 1 call every time to remind me how it is exactly that one makes Borscht. 1 can also empathize with the endurance of crocheting for hours on end, as 1 feel the pain in my fingers from knitting for a long time. And finally, 1 definitely feel myself as an object when 1 am objectified as a woman and further recognize my own capacity for being objectified in the world, via my computer and the internet. In Body Art: Perfonning the

Subject, Amelia Jones defines what she has termed 'technophenomenology.,88 She explams. that works such as Mona Hatoum's Corps Etranger' ~ (1994),Orlan's

Omnipresence9o (1993) and Bob Flanagan's video-recorded bodily mutilations like

You Always Hurt the One You Love91 (1991), engage a body/self that is technophenomenological, "fully mediated through the vicissitudes of bio- and communications technologies, and full y engaged with the social.,,92 The audience itself is also engaged through their own embodied interaction with the media.93

Jones argues that "high-tech media act via interfaces that mark the artwork as a site of the exchange between subjects, the site of joining between subjects and objects,

[ ... ].,,94 The experience of the artists as well as of the audience becomes through this interface, both intersubjective and interobjective. As Neumark posts pictures

88 Jones, 1998 (237). 89 In this work, Hatoum used anthroscopic photography to probe the orifices of her own body and project the video for a tunnel effect viewing in the gallery. Jones, 1998 (228). 90 Orlan underwent a series of plastic surgeries in order to transform her face and body into various ideals ofbeauty. They were staged as graphie theatrical performances for which she remained full y conscious. They were also video-taped. Jones, 1998 (228-9). 91 Bob Flanagan's project mainly consisted ofhim chatting "casually with the audience about his illness [cystic fibrosis] and his desire for physieal pain while nailing his penis to a stool, then pinning it to a board." Jones, 1998 (231). 92 Jones, 1998 (235). 93 Jones, 1998 (213). 94 Jones, 1998 (236).

38 and thoughts onto her website, her body/self is "technologically performative" and to an extent so is mine, as 1 become her "electronic audience.,,95 My research and reading of the interventions therefore constitutes another performance, one which is also intersubjective and interobjective.96

Conclusion

In this first chapter, 1 have looked at three interventions that grasp the viewer/interpreter through a collaborative practice that involves them directly. 1 have contended that in Neumark' s interventions, subject and object co-exist simultaneously in the body, interacting with each other and with the perceiving and codified world. She goes beyond merely recognizing her own objectification in the world and trying to subvert it into subjectivity, activating not only intersubjective relationships but interobjective ones as weIl. A discussion of Neumark' s Presence,

Dutch Woman at Large and S(us)taining as "body art," has enabled an understanding of how she performs her body/self and shows the constructed nature of identity and the gendered body.

Her work has been seen here to have commonalities with sorne of the more radical body-oriented works of Bob Flanagan and Orlan. Neumark's work, as this body art studied by Jones "makes c1ear that the Cartesian '1 think therefore 1 am,' the logic powering modemist art theory and practice wherein the body (privileged as male) is transcended through pure thought or creation, is no longer viable in the

95 Jones, 1998 (234). 96 Many performance theorists including Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephanson in Performing the Body, Performing the Subject, Peggy Phelan, Elin Diamond and others, agree that the writing they do about performances, constitutes another performance in its own right.

39 decentering regime of postmodemism (if it ever was ).'.97 Neumark' s work asserts that the nature of the embodied experience of aIl the participants in her interventions contributes heavily to the discourse of the body in contemporary art practice.

97 Jones, 1998 (10).

40 CHAPTERTWO INTERACTIONS IN URBAN SPACES

Every spring as 1 pass through the square in front of Montreal's metro Mont-

Royal, 1 delight myself by purchasing the occasional tire sur la neige. The yummy treat, the interaction with the salesperson and best of all, the surprise of fin ding a

Cabane à Sucre in the city offers many passersby a similarly amusing and charming moment. Outside of the downtown core, Montreal' s metro stations can be distinguished from many subway stations around the world by the presence of a small to medium sized plaza around or in front of the building-marker. These spaces are sometimes marked by a seasonal kiosk, such as my Cabane à Sucre, almost as a way to satisfy the passing-through, passing-by, empty space's call for acknowledgement. Neumark also seems to have heard this call by deciding during the summer of 2000 (fig. 8) to literally bring the comforts of her own home to the square in front of the Frontenac Metro station. In this intervention, which she called The Art of Conversation, for ten weeks, every Tuesday afternoon from noon until four, Neumark had her living room furniture set up in the space for anyone to join her in conversation.98 ln another later intervention, entitled 1 have arrived, 1 am home (2002, fig. 9), Neumark had almost the opposite strategy. As the moving truck she was to make her home for five hours a day for a period of se ven days, was moved daily from place to place around Quebec City. The doors to the truck were opened and she was seen meditated in silence - sitting, standing or walking around inside of the truck - throughout the entire day, leaving the option open for

98 Devora Neumark, Being Home, http://www.devoraneumark.com. in her discussion of The Art of Conversation. Last accessed June 2005.

41 passersby to join her, yet never speaking with them. This was part of the Folie

Culture Dépossession project, and participating artists were asked to inhabit either moving trucks or storefront windows throughout the week-Iong duration, and bring to question new developments in the city which forced sorne people out of their habituaI environments. The artists were further asked to imagine the city, the home and the body as confronted by such imposed displacement. 99

ln the previous chapter 1 conc1uded that through the different levels of interaction in three interventions, Neumark puts herself in a position through which she is aware of the other as simultaneously and necessarily object and subject.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has posited two notions of space which rely on such an experiencing body. He looks at phenomenal space, or the space which is activated by the motions of the body and lived space, which is inherently social.100 It is my goal in this chapter to build on the notion that a relationship is created between the participants and the spaces they inhabit in The Art of Conversation and 1 have arrived, 1 am home, which goes beyond Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. It is my contention here that the participants in the interventions are not merely social and intersubjective, but rather have more agency, as they become engaged critically with these spaces. 1 intend to show first that The Art of Conversation and 1 have arrived, 1 am home question the gendered bifurcation of public and private space, through which women - associated with bodily needs and emotions - were confined to the private sphere of the home so that men could cultivate "a public realm of manly virtue and citizenship as independence, generality, and

99 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of 1 have arrived, 1 am home. ]00 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962 (72).

42 dispassionate reason."lOl Next, 1 will discuss how in both interventions Neumark takes issue with an economically oriented organization of urban spaces which leads to dispossession and eviction. And finally, as a result of this critical engagement with space, it will be demonstrated that the participants becarne involved not only intersubjectively, but interobjectively as weIl.

Being home (or dwelling)

The homepage of Neumark's website is entitled Being Home, which she defines there as: "a site of reflection on relational practice, presence and being,

[being home] is an invitation to consider creativity, wellness and peaceful engagement.,,102 In a cornrnentary she wrote about Presence, Neumark further offers us sorne cross-cultural interpretations of dwelling and home that have particular significance for her. It seems that the Hebrew notion shechinah, identifies home (or shelter even) as both an 'understanding of the divine' and non- material sites or places, which are temporary and shifting. I03 For Neumark, 'home' is accordingly practiced and temporal, rather than merely spatial. As such, for the purposes of this chapter, it will be interesting to note how Neumark engages with the double sidedness of the word dwelling, as both a noun and a verb. A dwelling, une demeure, often refers to a home, conversely to be dwelling, demeurer, refers to the spatial action of residing in a home.

101 Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and other essays in feminist philosophy and social theory. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990. (117) 102 Devora Neumark, Being Home, http://www.devoraneumark.com. home page. Last accessed June 2005. 103 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of Presence.

43 1 have arrived, 1 am home, makes a paradoxical point on the notion of home however, since the title suggests a certain stillness, an end, and that a final destination has been reached. The moving van on the other hand, which was

Neumark's home for the week, definitely implied that home had not yet been reached and that a move was still in progress. Neumark standing there affirmed, almost as though to con vince herself, as weIl as the participants, that she was at home in the moving truck. She suggested through this that although a person could be moving from place to place, and never physically having a home, a feeling of being at home within one self can be achieved. For her, the physical space of the home is not necessarily what one needs in order to feel at home.

As Neumark's biography on her website explains, in 2000, at the time of

The Art of Conversation, she had recently fini shed serving as the vice president of

'Auberge Shalom,' a crisis centre for women victims of conjugal violence. 104

Consequently, she was weIl aware of the fact that the home can often be felt like a type of prison, and a space of violence rather than comfort. 105 As Elizabeth Grosz asserts in this vein:

The containment of women within a dwelling that they did not build, was not even built for them, can only amount to a homelessness within the very home itself: it becomes the space of dut y, of endless and infinitely repeatable chores that have no social value or recognition, the space of the affirmation and replenishment of others at the expense and erasure of the self, [ ... ] the space that harms and isolates women. 106

104 Neumark, Being Home, in the section entitled "biography". Last accessed June 2005. 105 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of The Art of Conversation. 106 Elizabeth Grosz, Spaee, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Polities of Bodies. New York: Routledge, 1995 (122).

44 Throughout The Art of Conversation, Neumark we1comed random passersby into her temporary living room and gave each pers on the opportunity to sit down and rest from the hustle and bustle of their daily chores. Explaining the work on her website, Neumark quickly recollects that she engaged passersby in conversations

"about home, belonging, family, the continuum between private and public, domestic abuse and political terror, exile, comfort, and anything el se that was suggested, or came Up.,,107 She further recalls that they had also "touched an a number of central issues including trust and what happens when it is broken, childhood memories and the way in which they play their part in adult life, decision making and the notion of choice.,,108 By setting up her living room in the open space of the Frontenac metro square, Neumark took down the walls of the home, and imbued the stories that emerged with regard to the home within a "larger social context."I09

Moreover, in both interventions most of the participants contributed to defining the home as a space where one feels comfortable on their own but where guests feel we1come and comfortable as weIl. In The Art of Conversation, Neumark invited anyone, be they friends, family or random passersby into her home space.

Each person was made to feel we1come as Neumark had prepared a couple of couches, a coffee table and even a rug. The pictures on her website indicate that she even had refreshments for her guests! Participants also tried to make her feel

107 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of The Art of Conversation. 108 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of The Art of Conversation. 109 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of The Art of Conversation. Neumark further writes with regard to She loves me not, she loves me - a work that 1 will look at in the following chapter - that before women's shelters came into being, "personal (even intimate), stories were fragmented and taken out of the larger social context," and as a result, "there was no holding place within our society, as a collectivity, to take into account of aIl their individual stories."

45 we1come in her new home. Throughout each sit-in the artist recounts that there was an effort made by the participants to make the physical space more 'homey;' apparently, sorne people brought items from their own homes to decorate the makeshift living room. Neumark remembers in particular one woman who came by on several Tuesdays and once brought a painting she herself had created, hanging it

1 on a nearby tree throughout the duration of the intervention. 10 In 1 have arrived, 1 am home, Neumark wanted those who came into her truck to feel "at home" as weIl, and made sure to arrange chairs, tables and books about meditation throughout the truck. Potential participants could sit down and take a break but also read about, and explore how to 'find a home' or comfort from within. Here too, Neumark recollects how she received a house-warming gift as one day a man brought and left her a tomato. 111 A curator for an exhibition of Neumark' s work, Marie Fraser states in the catalogue, that "la demeure, [ ... ] n'est pas seulement solitude, c'est-à-dire recueillement, mais partage d'intimité, c'est-à-dire hospitalité."Il2 Fraser furthermore explains in another article, "A Community of Strangers: The Public

Space of Speech in the Work of Devora Neumark," that what is expressed with regard to the space of the home through The Art of Conversation in particular, is

"the need to preserve and protect a 'home' as a place in which to we1come the other, the stranger, yet without abolishing or appropriating his or her strangeness [ ... ].,,113

As 1 have shown until now, and based on what was dispelled in the previous chapter,

1 JO Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of The Art of Conversation. III Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of 1 have arrived, 1 am home. 112 Marie Fraser. "Sur l'expérience de la ville." Sur l'expérience de la ville: interventions en milieu urbain, commissaires, Marie Fraser, Diane Gougeon, Marie Perrault. Montréal: Optica, 1999 (my translation: "Dwelling is not only solitude, and therefore welcoming, but also an exchange of intimacies, that is hospitality.") (37). 113 Marie Fraser, "A Community of Strangers: The Public Space of Speech in the Work of Devora Neumark", Parachute. no. 101, (Jan.-March 2001), 59.

46 both interventions imply a hopeful characterization of the home through different intersubjective engagements.

The public sphere

Fraser similarly continues with regard to "the need to open the limits of the public sphere, by instituting within it, the intersubjective process of the private

sphere, creating a space conducive to the exchange of speech and personal, daily experiences.,,114 ln this vein she contends that Neumark doesn't separate the public

sphere from the home or the private sphere, but rather that she links the two through

speech. 115 Yet, this notion is easily refuted in two ways. First by taking into account the situation in 1 have arrived, 1 am home, speech is notably absent, but the intervention nevertheless still links public and private. It is further countered by

sociologist Henri Lefebvre who argues that:

The relationship to space is reflected in the relationship to the other, to the other's body and the other's consciousness. The analysis - and self-anaIysis - of the total body, the way in which that body locates itself and the way in which it becomes fragmented, aIl are determined by a Rractice which includes discourse but which cannot be reduced to it. 1 6

1 contend then, as an alternative, following the arguments set out by Lauren Berlant

and Michael Warner in their article "Sex in Public," that Neumark links the two

spheres through the "partage d'intimité" which takes place throughout the interventions. l17 She doesn't follow "the normativity of heterosexuaI culture

[which] links intimacy only to the institutions of personallife, making them the

114 Fraser, 2001 (59). 115 Fraser, 2001 (60). 116 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1991 (204). 117 1 recall that "partage d'intimité" is Faser's phrase from: Fraser, 1999 (37).

47 privileged institutions of social reproduction, the accumulation of capital, and self- development.,,118 Neumark rather, for The Art of Conversation, moves the intimate environment of the living room into a public square. For 1 have arrived, 1 am home, the mutual understanding that is created in common meditation is moved out into the busy city streets.

The public sphere and art which is destined for it however, have been the focus of much debate regarding contemporary art outside tradition al museum

spaces. Accordingly, Fraser asks her readers: "Fait-on encore un art public ou donne-t-on à ['art une destination publique?,,119 When Neumark opens up the

space of the home (both in her moving truck and in her open living room) in order to address the random passersby, her work certainly questions - as art activist

Suzanne Lacy argues - the very notion of what is 'public.' It is therefore, according to Lacy, defined as 'public art.' 120 As 1 noted in the previous chapter, Neumark often refers to her work as questioning the li mit between public and private spaces.

Art historian Rosalyn Deutsche in an essay entitled "Agoraphobia," explores the implications that Jurgen Habermas' notion of the public sphere can have on a discussion of public art. The public sphere in bourgeois society, as the arena of political discussion and activity in between society and the state, was distinguished by Habermas from the private sphere, where the state could not get in the way of

118 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, "Sex in Public" Critical Inquiry vol. 24, no. 2, Intimacy (Winter 1998),553. 119 Fraser, 1999 (my translation: "Do we still make public art or do we give art instead, a public destination ?") (14). 120 Suzanne Lacy, "Introduction," Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1995 (3).

48 financial exchanges or social relations. 121 She writes therefore, that "for the interpretation of public art as art operating in or as a public sphere - whether it follows or rejects the Habermasian model - means that an art public, by contrast with an art audience, is not a preexisting entity but rather emerges through, is produced by, its participation in political activity.,,122 Accordingly, Deutsche maintains that "the public sphere idea locates democracy in society to which state authority is accountable.,,123 Nevertheless, when faced with the notions of public space as site of democratic exchanges, she finds problems with this idea as weIl.

Conflict becomes central, emphasizes Deutsche in conclusion, for maintaining democracy within the public sphere, so that its functioning makes use of the different opinions of the various people who inhabit it. 124

Out of Neumark's work there almost always emerges sorne sort of conflict or at least sorne element that she didn't expect, a 'twist' which grounds her in reality. What her two interventions bring across however is that this conflict is useful only when the relations taught within the home are we1coming and open to strangers. For example, as she stood there quietly meditating in her truck, "a gang of adolescents" tried to get her to react by riding their bikes up and down the ramp of her truck, shaking the truck, and throwing garbage at her. 125 She recounts her feelings of fear throughout their activities and how she tried to continue her own, passive meditation as a response to their behavior. Even though she stood in silence,

121 Rosalyn Deutsche, "Agoraphobia," Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Chicago, Ill: Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996 (287). 122 Deutsche, 1996 (288). 123 Deutsche, 1996 (288). 124 Deutsche, 1996 (289). 125 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of J have arrived, J am home.

49 the boys' opinion regarding her intervention, her taking over 'their' space, obviously conflicted with hers. She maintained her silence however, allowing them to make their point and still, as 1 will discuss in a following argument, getting through to sorne of them eventually.

Furthermore, in The Art of Conversation there emerged not so much a conflict, but rather a surprising illumination. As Neumark was enjoying the conversations she was conducting and the random people she was getting to know, speaking out about different issues surrounding the home, she was reminded of the need nevertheless, for a physical space to call 'home.' When her father sat in on

The Art of Conversation one Tuesday afternoon, she recalls how he appeared upset and uncomfortable. She remembers that when she asked him in the following days what had been bothering him, he revealed to her that sitting in an exposed living room triggered him to remember an incident he had forgotten from his childhood.

Neumark explains:

When he was a little boy growing up in Russia, he was the one in his family to be responsible for closing the curtains every Friday night before his mother would bench licht (light the Sabbath candIes). As it was forbidden to openly practice any form of Jewish ritual, the consequences of being caught were known to be quite severe. Sitting in the living room space created nearby the Metro Frontenac, he recalled how one Friday night he had forgotten to attend to closing the curtains. The lit candIes were seen by a neighbor who promptly informed the local authorities. My father, along with his parents and siblings, were then evicted from their home and were not allowed to return for quite sorne time. AlI of what they had was locked into the house leaving them no access to any of their belongings.126

Neumark further observes how this interaction enabled something to shi ft in her relationship with her father which had for a long time been affected by his brutal

126 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of The Art of Conversation.

50 experiences growing Up.127 In The Art of Conversation, Neumark' s conversation with her father manifested and inscribed feelings and emotions into the public sphere. The intervention contributes therefore to what cultural theorist Ann

Cvetkovich calls a "trauma culture," which actually does "the work of therapy; rather than a model in which privatized affective responses displace collective or politicalones.,,128 Like Neumark's interventions have shown, Cvetkovich similarly proposes that such therapy or "affective life," be more present in "public life.,,129

The Everyday

Furthermore, the nature of Neumark's interventions is contingent with such an idea to rework the social relations in the public sphere. In Thirdspace, spatial theorist Edward Soja defines 'spatial praxis' as the translation of knowledge into action in a conscious - and unconsciously spatial - effort to improve the world in sorne significant way.130 He explains that this takes place in the margins, which are not at all specifically localized but rather practiced. Such spaces are "of radical openness and hybridity.,,131 In The Art of Conversation and 1 have arrived, 1 am home Neumark encourages passersby to gather and find sorne sort of connection, be it through conversation or even just mere understandings of each other. The participants in both cases find, as Soja writes conceming Thirdspace:

127 Neumark"Being Home, in her discussion of The Art of Conversation. 128 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures, Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2003 (10). 129 Cvetkovich, 2003 (10). 130 Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Joumeys to Los-Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996 (22). 131 Soja, 1996 (319-20).

51 meeting places where new and radical happenings can occur about a politics of deterritorialization - and - reconnection, a politics in which arguments over space, its enclosures, exclusions, intemments, become subjects for debate and discussion, and more important, for resistance and transgression. 132

Both The Art of Conversation and 1 have arrived, 1 am home appropriate

specific, but rather banal practices: conversation and meditation. Spaces are

organized physically around the city so that such practices can take place in specific

locations. Conversation is usually held within the home, in coffee shops, in parks.

Meditation similarly, is usually reserved for the home, temples, perhaps the park.

Spaces are created by the city with specific activities in mind so that order and a

certain preconceived aesthetic is maintained. Certainly for example, anyone

wanting to 'set up shop' in the square in front of a metro station would have to

apply for a permit. Through an incorporation of everyday activities, Neumark

creates a "spatial praxis.,,133 It is for this reason that Michel de Certeau's theory of

a "practice of everyday life" becomes useful for understanding Neumark's

interventions in such a context.

De Certeau has posited a notion that he calls "the practice of everyday life,"

through which the most banal of daily activities has the potential to be 134 subversive. Asserting that spatial everyday practices can be seen as a way of

going against the dominant order, he describes this as "the ways in which the weak

make use of the strong" and therefore "lend a political dimension to [the se]

132 Soja, 1996 (319-20). 133 1 recall that 'spatial praxis' is Soja's term from: Soja, 1996 (319-20). 134 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984 (xvii).

52 everyday practices.,,135 Distinguishing extensively, strategies from tactics, de

Certeau describes the devices used by the strong and the weak, respectively. A strategy argues de Certeau, is proper to a source of power which simultaneously defines, creates, and is created by knowledge. 136 It is characterized by privileging spatial relationships over temporal ones so as to establish a specific, delimited place of power, from which it can manage any 'exterior threats or targets.' 137 He explains this to be "a Cartesian attitude, if you wish: it is an effort to delimit one's own place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other.,,138 According to de

Certeau, such logic assumes that the users of space will adhere to the organization that is imposed on them through the space. As she staged The Art of Conversation

Neumark led the participants in an everyday activity which, by changing the order of the space and lending itself "to the possible intersections of durations and heterogeneous rhythms," it "[took] the established order by surprise."I39 AlI of a sudden passersby had to choose to either sit down or walk around the installation to get either to or from the metro. The woman who came one week and hung a painting on a tree, emphasized the way that any random or daily gesture can modify the order of space. The space that was organized aestheticalIy by the 'strong' was taken over by the 'weak' in the one swift gesture of arranging the square to their liking. 1 have arrived, 1 am home also got in the way as the moving truck occupied

135 De Certeau, 1984 (xvii). 136 De Certeau, 1984 (36). J37 De Certeau, 1984 (36). 138 De Certeau, 1984 (36 and 38). However, Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, more obviously shows the ridiculousness of the Cartesian subject who would "miraculously, that's to divine intervention, [grasp] an 'object' - space - which is the result neither of intellectual construction nor of sensory elaboration but which is, rather, given en bloc as suprasensory purity, as infinitude." Lefebvre, 1962 (247). 139 De Certeau, 1984 (38).

53 more space than was allotted for a vehic1e. It stopped traffic, and the ramp that was let out all day long was obtrusive to other cars and pedestrians; this is often the case with moving trucks on moving day. Neumark however, extended the time and therefore the intensity, of the obstruction. According to de Certeau, what is interesting about such tactics is that they are just daily activities, such as walking in the street, and even dwelling; one can cut a corner, cross a street where there is no intersection; wear a dirt path through the grass in the park. 140

De Certeau further suggests that these everyday practices are most resistant to homogenization because:

Their movement cannot be captured in a picture, nor can the meaning of their movements be circumscribed in a text. Their rhetorical transplantation carries away and displaces the analytical, coherent proper meaning of urbanism; it constitutes a 'wandering of the semantic' produced by masses that make sorne parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order. 141

The square in which The Art of Conversation took place is usually quickly bypassed. Instead, Neumark emphasized it when she set up as an unexpected place to sit down and relax or join in a stimulating conversation with a stranger. As 1 was thinking about these interventions, it occurred to me that most Montreal metro stations named after historical figures (aside from one or two), commemorate renowned Canadian or Quebecois white men. 142 Infused with a patriarchally normative order, this type of naming imposes conceivably who and what monumental figures and historical moments we are supposed to remember. It

140 De Certeau, 1984 (37). 141 De Certeau, 1984 (102). 142 Société de transport de Montréal. Carte du métro. http://www.stcum.qc.ca/metro/mapmetro.htm. last accessed: 4 August, 2005.

54 follows that The Art of Conversation, through every participant' s different stories, narration, discussion, intersubjectivity and memories -like those of Neumark's father - ascribes to this metro station, different memories than those associated with a commemoration of Count Frontenac. As Michel de Certeau argues:

The dispersion of stories points to the dispersion of the memorable as well. And in fact memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localizable. Fragments of it come out in legends. Objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating, going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber. 143

Through these seemingly banal but subversive activities, we can leam about ourselves and remember things we thought had been forgotten. Neumark has spoken to the way that the trauma of the Holocaust survivors, like her father, is experienced by their children. 144 She cites this as the repetitious intergenerational trauma which plays out "as the cycle of family violence, in particular child abuse, as a consequence of cultural and ethnic traumas.,,145 The trauma of the Holocaust lived on in her everyday emotionallife, through her father's suffering. In The Art of

Conversation, Neumark shows that this type of everyday life needs to be confronted and that this can happen most naturally and yet subversively, through everyday activities.146

As it has been discussed in this chapter, 1 have arrived, 1 am home has sirnilarities to a film 1 saw recently. Ce qu'il reste de nous is a documentary about a video-recording of the Dalai Lama offering Tibetans words of encouragement and

143 De Certeau, 1984 (108). 144 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of (un)veilings/back pain. 145 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of (un)veilings/back pain. 146 Cvetkovich, 2003 (269).

55 support for a peaceful resistance to the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The film shows the various responses to the recording by sorne families and monks. Similar to sorne of the scenes shown of this peaceful resistance, was Neumark as she stood siiently in her moving truck. Her own silence contrasted greatly with the hustle, bustle of the city, with noise of traffic around her. She herself did not go anywhere; regardless of how many times her (temporary) home was moved by sorne other authority. She stood her ground, inviting others to join her in a quiet, peacefui protest. The work therefore also became about her individu al tactic in the face of the capitalist hegemonic order of the city. It was here that Neumark echoed the silence of de Certeau's 'silent majority.'147 Standing there steadfastly, aimost stubbornly and silently, Neumark was saying something along the lines of: ''You can take away my home; you can try to pretend that 1 don't exist, but you can't take away my presence, my being. 1 will still be here." This silent protest is also a tactic, silently working against the imposed strategies of the city.

Although in The Art of Conversation Neumark was surprised by her father' s reaction, both interventions nevertheless question the economically strategie gentrification of spaces as weIl as dispossession or eviction. With regard to The Art of Conversation, Fraser has highlighted the fact that the metro Frontenac is situated in one of Montreal's most "disadvantaged and multiethnic neighborhoods.,,148 For 1 have arrived, 1 am home, although Neumark didn't know exactly where her truck would be placed, the locations chosen by the organizers from Folie Culture were also strategie - where amelioration for the better good of 'the city' was taking place

147 De Certeau, 1984 (xvii). 148 Marie Fraser, 2001 (57).

56 and sending residents of such places into 'exile.' 149 Many theorists of space, and especially urban space, such as Lefebvre, Soja and de Certeau, agree on the fact that

cities are often organized around economie benefits for those residents and corporations with more of a financial advantage. Stories emerge of space being

'ameliorated,' but only for those residents with more economic privilege. In The

Art of Conversation and 1 have arrived, 1 am home, through the strategie placement

and the engagement of passersby, Neumark addresses such issues, acknowledging

and making evident the people who are often forgotten. Dispossessed, the homeless, or as Rosalyn Deutsche would argue the 'evieted,' 150 are living proof of the inequalities in the organization of space, and especially urban space.

Intertwining the intersubjective and the interobjective

In this chapter 1 have shown that the actions of fostering intersubjective experiences are at the core of The Art of Conversation and 1 have arrived, 1 am home. As the participants engage their interconnected subjectivities however, they remain to a certain extent, objects on display for other passersby. 1 will argue that this is balanced by interobjective engagements, which are also nurtured here. In the previous chapter it was discussed that Neumark brings out an awareness of her intersubjective and simultaneously interobjective experience through the interventions. 1 will contend here that not only Neumark, but the participants as well, can potentially experience their own "state of simultaneous intersubjectivity

149 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of 1 have arrived, 1 am home. 150 Deutsche, 1996 (54). Deutsche writes: "To elucidate the specific historical, rather than mythical, reasons for today's homeless residents, the homeless should, more accurately, be called 'the evicted' ."

57 and interobjectivity.,,151 This happens through an inteiface, similar to the one described by Amelia Jones in her notion of the technophenomenological experience,

which was outlined in the previous chapter.152 The interface in question here however, is not technological, but rather embodied and spatial. 1 demonstrated that participants in The Art of Conversation and 1 have arrived, 1 am home question the

gendered bifurcation of public and private spaces. AIso, drawing from de Certeau, 1

showed that throughout the interventions the participants contribute to contesting

space as it is unfairly planned by the city. As such, they have an interobjective relationship with space itself since they experience and interact with it as both

subject and object. Elizabeth Grosz, in an essay entitled "Bodies-Cities" writes precisely about su ch an exchange with urban space. She looks at and refutes two

earlier models, which could establish the relationship between body and city,

conceding finally that elements from each would serve as a more appropriate ideal.

The first is a causal relationship between body and city which Grosz points out is

one-way and therefore subordinates the body (as object) to the city (as mind). What

should be taken from this model is that causality exists in a mutually defining

relationship between body and city. The latter situation suggests the city as

151 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Peiforming the Subject. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 (239). 152 Jones, 1998 (237). 1 recall: Jones explains that works such as Mona Hatoum's Corps Étranger, Orlan's Omnipresence and Bob Flanagan's video-recorded bodily mutilations like fou Always Hurt the One fou Love, engage a body/selfthat is technophenomenological, "fully mediated through the vicissitudes of bio- and communications technologies, and full y engaged with the social." The audience itself is also engaged through their own embodied interaction with the media. Jones argues that "high-tech media act via inteifaces that mark the artwork as a site of the exchange between subjects, the site of joining between subjects and objects, [ ... J." The experience ofthe artists as weIl as of the audience becomes through this interface, both intersubjective and interobjective. As Neumark posts pictures and thoughts onto her website, her body/self is "technologically performative" and to an extent so is mine, as 1 become her "electronic audience.,,152 My research and reading of the interventions therefore constitutes another performance, one which is a continuation of the "official ones."

58 representational, which is in the form of, or parallel to, the organization of a body.

Grosz also refutes this idea, contending that "there is not a mirroring of nature in artifice.,,153 She proposes instead, a linkage which she cites as an inteiface. 154 And

1 recall Jones who uses precisely the same term, as she posits also the inteifaces of high tech media, as the "locus of exchange.,,155 Since the participants in Neumark's interventions can recognize, through a highly charged and subjective process, their body-as-object as belonging to space-as-object, they can potentially through such a relationship, have the experience of "the sanguine sense of not merely being-in-the- world but also belonging to it.,,156

Neumark recounts another story on her website for 1 have arrived, 1 am home, which furthermore demonstrates that a space is created where sorne participants entertained a simultaneously intersubjective and interobjective relationship not only with space, but with her as weIl. 1 recall for this the boys who, for over half an hour shook Neumark' s moving truck, riding up and down the ramp on their bikes and throwing wads of paper at her. She continues to write that the boy she figured to be the youngest stayed and participated in her silence for about twenty minutes after the departure of the others. After Neumark fini shed her five hour meditation, she found him waiting outside of her truck to tell her that what she had do ne there was "very important.,,157 When he was pursuing altercations against

Neumark with the other boys, he saw her more objectively as someone without

153 Grosz, 1995 (108). 154 Grosz, 1995 (108). 155 Jones, 1998 (236). 156 Vivi an Sobchack, Camai Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 2004 (317). 157 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of 1 have arrived, 1 am home.

59 subjectivity, unreactive to their behaviour. As he later went to sit with her in the truck however, he was able to subjectively become aware of his own objectivity,

sitting silently in the truck like Neumark, where his conception of her changed in to one of a perceiving, thinking and social subject.

A sirnilar situation is evident in The Art of Conversation. 1 am reminded for this, of an old apartment 1 used to rent which was at street level. When my roornrnate and 1 would relax in our living room with the curtains open, we were

astonished on a regular basis at the number of people walking by, curiously peaking into our apartment. Embarrassingly, 1 now find myselfsurprised when my curiosity gets the best of me and 1 am caught looking into someone else's living room. For

The Art of Conversation it seems that Neumark, as she brought activities in to the open living room for all to see, she somehow allowed, and in fact encouraged, people to look. By inviting the voyeur to participate in what it was they were looking at however, Neumark created a situation through which they became who they were looking at.

Conclusion

1 have demonstrated with The Art of Conversation and 1 have arrived, 1 am home, that intersubjective and interobjective relationships are fostered such that different subjectivities collide and people recognize each other as different but also as equal political and social subjects. By deconstructing the bifurcation of public and private space and then questioning more specifically the public environments which are created for specifie social activities, Neumark has been shown to

60 advocate for a more tolerant behavior toward the Other. Art historian Miwon Kwon caUs for a relational sensibility involving art practices which involve not just an artist but also participants as part of the work of art. Using Homi Bhabha's theory regarding spatial experience, she explains that su ch collective art praxis, should address "the uneven conditions of adjacencies and distance between one thing, one person, one place, one thought, one fragment next to another, rather than invoking equivalencies via one thing after another.,,158 As such, these interventions can "turn local encounters into long-term commitments and transform passing intimacies into indelible, irretraceable social marks - so that the sequence of sites that we inhabit in out life' s traversaI does not become genericized into an undifferentiated serialization, one place after another.,,159 1 would add here that Neumark emphasizes those places that will necessarily mark our lives but even more the people we interact with in su ch spaces, such that our experiences are not merely one persan after another.

158 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: MIT Press, 2002 (166). Kwon defines collective art praxis as "a projective enterprise. It involves a provisional group, produced as a function of specifie circumstances instigated by an artist and/or cultural institution, aware of the effects of these circumstances on the very conditions of the interaction, performing its own coming together and coming apart as a necessarily incomplete modeling or working-out of a collective social process. Here a coherent re.presentation of the group's identity is al ways out of grasp." (154) 15 Kwon, 2002 (166).

61 CHAPTER THREE FLESH

l'm sure that many share my memory of picking daisies, pulling the petaIs off one by one and "asking the oracle": "He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not ... he loves me!" The final petaI would ultimately reveaI 'the answer,' but 1 remember trying over and over again until finally satisfied with an answer. This innocent game has become one of Western society' s little girl rituals.

The mantra or question exists aIso in French; "un peu (one petaI ...), beaucoup (a second ...), énormément (and a third ...), pas du tout (another ...)." It too is repeated until there are no petaIs left on the daisy. 1 have to admit that from time to time 1 am still tickled, and secretly indulge when 1 see one of those lovely, perfect daisies at the cottage, to slowly pull away at the petaIs and whisper under my breath,

"he loves me, he loves me not ..." Like me, Neumark indulged in this activity for her intervention She loves me not, she loves me (2001, fig. 10). Unlike me however, she did not sneak away alone and instead appropriated this game for an intervention which she undertook in the Place de la Paix in Montreal. Neumark decided to bring big bucketfuls containing thousands of white daisies to the park and place them around a bench. Throughout the course of the day, she invited anyone who so wished, to join her in 'asking the oracle,' and engage in the repetitive activity of posing the intimate question that seems to plague so many: "Does s/he love me?"

Either the intimate nature of the activity, or perhaps just curiosity itself, triggered

62 many participants to ask questions or exchange various thoughts and memories, sorne of which Neumark later recounted on her website.160

Repetitive activity was also at the core of a piece entitled The Four

Cardinals (2003, fig. Il and 12). The intervention161 served as Neumark's contribution to a world-wide event organized by PerfoPuerto.org, an artist-run centre in Chile. The purpose of the event, according to the organizers was to deal

"with the analogy between the four cardinal points guiding us spacely [sic] (N-S-E-

W) and the 4 main points in the dock guiding us in time (12-3-6-9).,,162

Participating artists from around the world were asked to engage in a "durational

h performance" of their own inventionlchoice, on Saturday September 2i , 2003 between the hours of noon and nine in the evening of their respective local time.

Neumark only posts two items on her website for this intervention: the email from one of the organizers, inviting her to participate and her own (email) response which describes what she will do for her performance. She explains that her participation will involve nine hours of full-body prostrations in her garden, kissing the ground with each one.

In the two previous chapters, 1 discussed the embodied intersubjective nature of Neumark' s interventions for aIl of the participants, that is how each participant co-constitutes a sense not only of her/his own subjectivity but also of

160 Devora Neumark, Being Home http://www.devoraneumark.com. in her discussion of She loves me not, she loves me. Last accessed June 2005. 161 The use ofthe term intervention for this piece will become clearer later on in this chapter. 162 Cami la Schliebener and Alexander deI Re, 4 cardinals!cardinales. PerfoPuerto, Chile. http://4cardinales.perfopuerto.orgl this is in an essay under the "south-east" cardinal. Last accessed June 2005.

63 "the subjectivity of others who are not themselves.,,163 It was also established that

Neumark experienced simultaneously her own interobjectivity as a "material

relation to the world (of people as weIl as things).,,164 Different intersubjectivities

and interobjectivities therefore became engaged in the interventions. But

Neumark's work, 1 want to contend here, provides a specifie materiality to these processes, one which can be related to a phenomenology of the flesh. Merleau-

Ponty has posited that it is through our own flesh that we are able to understand

ourselves as simultaneously subject and object, mind and body. He has further

extended this notion and defined "the flesh of the world," as the element which

allows for the reversibility of all subjects and objects and enables mutual understandings of our co-existence in the world, or intersubjectivity. Vivian

Sobchack has taken this notion even further and explained that not only

intersubjectivity manifests itself in the flesh, but interobjectivity as weIl. In this final chapter, 1 intend to build on the conclusions of the previous chapters in order to show that Neumark's interventions are this very "flesh of the world." First, 1 will examine how flesh is described in the phenomenological arguments of Merleau-

Ponty and as it relates to the interventions discussed until now in this thesis. Aiso it

will be shown that She loves me not, she loves me and The Four Cardinals take these notions further such that they have clear connotations as flesh. Next, 1 intend to draw from Sobchack's theory of intertwined intersubjectivity and interobjectivity

to argue that the two interventions in question bring together a responsible and

163 Vivi an Sobchack, Camai Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 2004 (314). 164 Sobchack, 2004 (296).

64 sensible attitude toward the world (of people and of things).165 Finally, based on the everyday nature of the activities engaged with in the interventions 1 discuss the repetitive or reproductive characteristic of flesh~ one whieh enables the performance to both paradoxically remain and disappear, and one which, as 1 will explain, necessarily implies difference.

She loves me not, she loves me and The Four Cardinals have precise characteristics in common with the other interventions that 1 have looked at in the previous chapters. This is not to say that these characteristics appear with the same intensities in each intervention, but rather with the same relevance in their relation to flesh. This thesis has progressed as step-by-step arguments, through whieh in this final chapter, drawing from the arguments in the previous two, 1 will expose the fleshiness of Neumark' s interventions. 1 have found it to be useful therefore, to go back to the previous works discussed in this thesis to understand how such notions are already at play so as to eventually sharpen the specifie contributions of She loves me not, she loves me and The Four Cardinals to flesh.

Being flesh

Until now, 1 have shown that Neumark's work breaks down any neat bifurcation of the categories of subject and object. As mentioned above, it is through the reversibility ofjlesh that Merleau-Ponty has contended that

intersubjectivity is even possible. In The Visible and the Invisible, he examines this notion of flesh by relying on the more obvious experience of touch, which he then expands to sight and visibility. Looking at the phenomenology of touching together

165 Sobchack, 2004 (299).

65 one's left and right hands, Merleau-Ponty notes how the flesh from both hands instantiates the "double sensation" of herlhim self as simultaneously touching and being touched. However, when touching another person's hand, the situation differs because both do not have the same consciousness. In order to explain this

Merleau-Ponty posits the "flesh of the world," or the mode of communication between viewer and visible, through which the person viewing recognizes herlhimself as visible as weIl. As such, slhe becomes "capable, by a singular reversaI, of seeing them - he [sic] who is one ofthem.,,166

It is useful here to back and examine how this phenomenon is literaIly put into play in The Art of Conversation, when Neumark set up her living room fumiture in the square in front of Frontenac metro station, and invited passersby to engage with her in conversation. 1 recall that my own experience has reveaIed that people strolling down the street past apartment windows are often tempted to peek in curiously at the privacy of the scene inside. In this intervention, Neumark allowed and in fact encouraged them to look. However by inviting the "voyeur" to participate in the activity, 1 posited that slhe, through the intervention, also sees herlhimself as the object of herlhis own penetrating gaze and recognizes herlhis own visibility. The participants in Neumark's intervention became simultaneously for themselves and for each other, subject and object. The intervention itself, like

Merleau-Ponty's "flesh of the world," served as the operative concept which enabled this phenomenon.

166 Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and the invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969 (135).

66 Such a recognition of one's own visibility is similarly enabled through

Neumark's other interventions as passersby decide to participate and recognize themselves the visible objects of a public display. However, visibility as it is described by Merleau-Ponty is a metaphor for the body. He has also posited, as per the title of his book, the invisible, which he described as idea, mind or thought. The invisible, is emphasized as "sublimation of the flesh," not the opposite of the visible, but rather "its lining and its depth.,,167 As such, Merleau-Ponty determined that ideas cannot be "detached from the sensible appearances.,,168

AIso, for Presence (fig. 1 and 3) and its exhibition as Une résistance certaine (fig. 2), which 1 examined in the first chapter, as Neumark activated precisely this notion. In the intervention, she crocheted a body-bag or cocoon which documented with the use of two different coloured threads, her interactions and conversations with passersby. Not pleased with the material remains of the intervention (the body-bag) which fell into a notion of an "art object," Neumark decided to unravel it as part of the exhibition. Such an art object would maintain materially visible, the intersubjectivities engaged in Presence. By unraveling it therefore, she didn't make it invisible, but rather exposed "its lining and its depth."

Sobchack expands on this notion by specifying that "the objectively visible stands as only one side of vision and needs to be thickened by the subjective and value-Iaden si de of vision that exceeds and enfolds vision's visible productions.,,169

She loves me not, she loves me and The Four Cardinals are unique particularly in

167 Merleau-Ponty, 1969. The last citation in full is: "No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible, in describing an idea that is not the contrary of the sensible, that is its lining and its depth." (145 and 149, respectively). 168 Merleau-Ponty, 1969 (149). 169 Sobchack, 2004 (181).

67 their emphasis of such an embodiment of vision that exceeds the visible. The situation in She loves me not, she loves me, is similar to the one in The Art of

Conversation in the way that passersby, in a public space, are invited to stop and participate in an activity with the artist. In She loves me not, she loves me however, the added element of the childhood game (pulling the petaIs from daisies and posing an intimate question), makes the participants aware not only of their visibility but also their own vulnerability. Additionally, a subjective dimension to vision is engaged as those passersby choosing not to participate and nevertheless grasping the reference to a chiidhood game that they might have played, respond affectively to the intervention. Taking advantage of the flowers at their disposaI, sorne of the participants also decided to use them as gifts to give one another, therefore introducing feelings associated with gift-giving, such as warmth and kindness, into the intervention (fig. 10, top image). Neumark recounts an incident that occurred between two men throughout the intervention and which in tum, implicated her in the fear she felt. She recalls a man who asked her for sorne flowers to bring to a woman across the street. In tum she offered him sorne flowers for himself.

Embarrassed, he refused and continued to observe the situation from afar. Neumark then writes:

Sorne hours later, ( ... ) another guy came up and grabbed a bunch of flowers from one of the buckets, without so much as a hello. Before 1 could even react, or think about how 1 would want to react or respond, the first guy, who had obviously been watching, came running over and said, "put those back, you cannot take flowers, they have to be given to you." The tension and sense of aggression at that moment was great. 1 felt an aimost overwheiming sense of risk and danger in the air. The second guy, who had taken the flowers, was clearly about to become even more defensive and offensive. 1 was flooded with feelings of violation, anxiety and fear. The moment seemed to hang forever between us. And somehow, something

68 shifted and ( ... ) the second guy tumed to the first, thrust out his hand holding the daisies, and with a laugh said, "but darling, 1 was taking them for you." They went back and forth offering each other the flowers and sharing laughter with us aIl. l7O

Tension, aggression, fear and finally a certain understanding or fondness is

exhibited throughout the incident and the intervention served as a site where

intersubjectivity is manifested beyond the merely visible.

Similarly, The Four Cardinals resembles 1 have arrived, 1 am homeI71 in the

mental connection that Neumark aimed to achieve with the participants. 1 have

arrived, 1 am home, discussed in the previous chapter, demonstrated the non-verbal

connections which Neumark made by meditating in a truck and inviting passersby

to participate with her. As Neumark contributed to The Four Cardinals alone in her

garden however, visibility didn't even enter into the picture, as it did to a certain

extent in 1 have arrived, 1 am home. Instead, she was aware of the other

coIlaborating artists in thought. As the organizers for the event explain on their

website, the event would "[circulate] around the dock and at the same time [move]

from every different latitude, also circulating geographicaIly, traveling the world in

only one day."l72 Like a relay race then, in which each team member passed the baton to another in order for the next leg of the race to continue, they aIl connected

through the cue of the earth's very movement around the sun, one artist after

another, aIl subjectively aware of each other. As Merleau-Ponty writes, "thought is

170 Devora Neumark, Being Home http://www.devoraneumark.com. under "Works" and in her discussion of She loves me not, she loves me. Last accessed June 2005. 17l This intervention is discussed in chapter two. 172 Cami la Schliebener and Alexander deI Re, 4 cardinalslcardinales. PerfoPuerto, Chile. http://4cardinales.perfopuerto.orgl this is in an essay under the "south-east" cardinal. Last accessed June 2005.

69 a relationship with oneself and with the world as weIl as a relationship with the

other.,,173 The intersubjective processes in She loves me not, she loves me and The

Four Cardinals, enable the interventions to activate a fleshiness as they "weave

together relations between bodies" and consequently "not only enlarge, but [ ... ] pass definitively beyond the circle of the visible.,,174

As Neumark's interventions en able embodied intersubjective relationships

among the participants, they serve as the flesh of the world which, according to

Sobchack has even deeper dimensions than mere intersubjectivity. Sobchack,I recall, broadens Merleau-Ponty's argument in her contention of the existence of a

similar "reversible structure of empathy and sympathy between our own subjective

embodiment and other body-objects," that is, interobjectivity.175 Complementary

and contrary to intersubjectivity, it exists through the experience of flesh and

defines the "structure of engagement with the materiality of other body-objects on

which we project our sense of what it subjectively feels like to be objective.,,176

Sobchack asserts that interobjectivity, when coupled with intersubjectivity makes possible "a deep and passionate recognition of ourselves and the objective world

filled with 'things' and 'others' as immanently together in the flesh - that is, as both materially and transcendentally real and mattering.,,177

It is useful to go back and see how to sorne degree, fleshiness was already at play in Dutch Woman at Large and S(us)taining, such that it can be contrasted to its

173 Merleau-Ponty, 1969 (145). 174 Merleau-Ponty, 1969 (144). I75 Sobchack, 2004 (311). 176 Sobchack, 2004 (317). I77 Sobchack, 2004 (318).

70 manifestation in the situations in The Four Cardinals and She love me not, she loves me. Neumark's interobjectivity, was demonstrated in Dutch Woman at Large (fig.

6 and 7), when she dressed as the seated woman depicted in a painting by Gerard ter

Borch (displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). She donned the entire attire

of the woman, including her tight corset and heavy gowns and spent the entire day

wandering around the museum and its grounds. Neumark only spoke when spoken to as she tried to imagine the objectification of the woman in the world that she was part of at the time. Furthermore, as she experienced the weight and the pain of the

clothing and corset that constituted her costume, she subjectively felt her own body's material objectivity. Similarly in S(us)taining, when Neumark peeled beets in order to gain catharsis from sorne of the difficulties she had faced throughout her

life, she awoke the next morning to the pain of charred hands, the juice from the beets having oxidized and burned them. Here again, she felt her body-as-object, reminded at the same time of her painful memories. The materiality of her own fleshy body took on the role of subject, which she emphasized in writing the following on her website: "my flesh and heart was speaking and reflecting back to me.,,178 As the costume and the beet rootjuice acted on Neumark's subjective body, they forced her, as an "intentional subject" to connect materially with

"nonintentionalobjects".179

In these two interventions, Neumark performed an activity and passersby could participate in it by posing questions or conversing with her. They did not participate by peeling beets with her or by dressing up in costume. In The Four

178 Neumark, Being Home, under "works" and in her discussion of S(us)taining. 179 Sobchack, 2004 (312).

71 Cardinals and She loves me not, she loves me, participants were involved however, in such a way that they all took part directly in the same activity as Neumark: playing the childhood game of pulling the petaIs from daisies, "asking the oracle," and contributing to a world-wide event by staging a durational performance. This direct participation is pivotaI to the fleshiness of the works. To be more precise, 1 hope to show that as the participants become interconnected in the fleshiness of the interventions they can potentially experience "the sanguine sense of not merely being-in-the-world but also belonging to it.,,180

Responsibility/ability and sensibility/ability

Like The Art of Conversation, She loves me not, she loves me also took place strategically in an economically disadvantaged area of Montreal, as

Neumark's intention was to question the gentrification which occurs in the organization of urban space of the intervention.181 By making use of the space differently than it is intended by the city and bringing people together, it has been shown that there was an implicit protest against this order. In the previous chapter, drawing from Elizabeth Grosz's theory of a causal interface between bodies and cities, 1 looked at the interrelatedness of intersubjectivity and interobjectivity among the participants as well as with regard to the urban spaces of the interventions.182

The intervention's association with flesh is deepened however, as the intimate and personal activity in She loves me not, she loves me, involved disclosing intimate secrets, one's personal feelings, and to use Neumark's own word, one's

180 Sobchack, 2004 (317). 181 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of She loves me not, she loves me. 182 For more detail on the simultaneous state of intersubjectivity and interobjectivity see chapter two.

72 vulnerability.183 This is further emphasized as she invited strangers, random passersby, to engage with her. She writes to this: "And so 1 come back to the question of rethinking vulnerability, not as victimhood but as a strength to be present and engaged without building and reinforcing walls of protection from what is inside and out there.,,184 And as the altercation between two participants ensued

(as described earlier), Neumark writes how she felt "an almost overwhelming sense of risk and danger in the air" and "was flooded with feelings of violation, anxiety and fear.,,185 Both the vulnerability and the fear that are engaged activate

Neumark's sense of responsibility for the intervention and for the space she has decided to create. The way that the two men ignored her in their altercation made her subjectively alert of her helplessness, her loss of control over the intervention, that is, her increasing awareness of "what it is ta be a material object.,,186 Sobchack writes that recognizing one's 'response-ability' intertwines indistinguishably in the flesh with aesthetic and material 'sense-ability,' or the capacity "to see the world's objects also as subjects.,,187 As Neumark creates the intervention, she demonstrates her (com)passionate engagement with urban spaces, such that they are warm and welcoming places for everyone. Furthermore, as the participants engage in the childhood activity and take it further by giving each other flowers, they express similar signs of affection. She loves me not, she loves me enables therefore an

183 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of She loves me not, she loves me. 184 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of She loves me not, she loves me. 185 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of She loves me not, she loves me. 186 Sobchack, 2004 (288). 187 Sobchack, 2004 (290).

73 active devotion and simultaneous responsibility/ability "to the flesh of the world

and others.,,188

An observation of how the relationship with space is expanded to a more

global one makes this notion even more significant in The Four Cardinals. With regard to this intervention, Neumark writes on her website that she found inspiration from the thirteenth-century Persian poem by Rumi, quoting him as he wrote: "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are thousands of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.,,189 As Neumark carried out the prostrations in her

garden, the effects of an interobjective engagement with the ground that she kisses

and recognizes therefore, as subject can be observed. The aim outlined by the organizers of the world-wide event was "a global idea, in a very literaI yet open

way; unlike the "globalization" concept we hear everywhere these days, this project

is based upon differences and the co-existence of aIl kinds of people." 190 The

ground that Neumark interacts with, stands symbolically for a peaceful and equitable co-existence of peoples in the world and the interobjective relationship is more of a global one. The photographs on Neumark's website which documented her own participation in the event depict Neumark rubbing the soil over her arms

and legs, showing a calm and peaceful sensitivity toward it (fig. 12, image bottom, left). She appears solemn and once again, vulnerable as she hugs her Hebrew shawl over her head and across her chest, as if protecting herself from the evils of the

188 Sobchack, 2004 (295). 189 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of The Four Cardinals. Also 1 had found who or what Rumi is; for more information see: www.rumi.net. 190 Camila Schliebener and Alexander deI Re, 4 cardinalslcardinales. PerfoPuerto, Chile. http://4cardinales.perfopuerto.org/ this is in an essay under the "south-east" cardinal. Last accessed June 2005.

74 world (fig. 12, image bottom, right). The pictures are furthermore reminiscent of imagery of passion of suffering as they depict the artist bent over, trapped within a messy tangle of vines (fig. 12, two top images). Sobchack defines the passion of

suffering as an engagement with our "response-ability," which causes the "body-

subject [to 'suffer'] a diminution of subjectivity and, in this diminution, cornes to experience - within subjectivity - an increased awareness of what it is to be a material object.,,191 Neumark writes about this engagement with "the first piece of land that [she is] response-able for."l92 Responsibility/ability intertwines again in

The Four Cardinals as flesh with 'sense-ability' in Neumark's obvious devotion and affection for her new land, which she demonstrates as she prostrates down to kiss it. According to Sobchack, this "aesthetic behaviour" enables "the possibility of appreciating - and caring for- the form and substance of 'things' extemal to ourselves.,,193 The manifestation of an interdependence of response-ability and sense-ability in The Four Cardinals, conveys what Sobchack designates "the world's existence in the fullness of its flesh.,,194 And Neumark's contribution, particularly in the way that she makes an effort to be in communion with the ground and by extension symbolically, the world, allows for an association of her durational intervention with "the flesh of the world."

191 Sobchack, 2004 (288). 192 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of The Four Cardinals. 193 Sobchack, 2004 (290). 194 Sobchack, 2004 (297).

75 Reproduction and difference

Until now 1 have contended and explained that She loves me not, she loves me and The Four Cardinals are actually flesh. They blur the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, bodies and the world, manifesting themselves through both intersubjectivity and interobjectivity, and implying a response-able and sense- able relationship to the world (of people and of things). In "Performance Remains,"

Rebecca Schneider has drawn from this phenomenological notion of jlesh, with what she describes as "its feminine capacity to reproduce,,,195 to explain how we can conceive of performance as not merely disappearing. She contends that performance remains through repetition, in the flesh, reappearing through non- original citations and across generations "in a network of body-to-body transmission of enactment.,,196 She cites the example of American Civil War re- enactors "who, often motivated by a mistrust of documents, consider performance as precisely a way of keeping memory alive - making sure it does not disappear.,,197

Reproduction additionally implies difference however. In fact, Gilles

Deleuze sees difference in what he distinguished as the folds and pleats of Merleau-

Ponty'sjlesh. 198 My flesh is not the same as any other person's flesh. Col our, texture, smoothness, among other characteristics is always different from one person' s flesh to another' s. Even as the flesh of two people cornes into contact, create a whole new and different flesh. Where flesh repeats itself or reproduces, it necessarily reproduces itself differently each and every time. Deleuze has

195 Rebecca Schneider, "Performance Remains," Performance Research 6, no. 2 (2001),104. 196 Schneider, 2001 (103 and 102). 197 Schneider, 2001 (102). 198 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 (64).

76 concluded that difference always inhabits repetition.199 And in his last posthumously published book, Rhythmanalysis, Henri Lefebvre wondered in this respect if "differences induced or produced by repetitions constitute the thread of time,?,,200 1 will show that She loves me not, she loves me and Neumark's contribution to The Four Cardinals reproduce past performances and have the potential to also be reproduced. Since reproduction is traditionally an inherently feminine capacity, it might be argued that this notion is problematic. However, as 1 noted in the previous chapter, social reproduction and intimacy are shown to be not limited to the private and by extension the feminine, but rather can take place - as

Neumark's interventions - in more public settings. This thwarts a gendered notion of the activities drawn from and performed in Neumark' s interventions.

Furthermore a discussion of the differences, which a reproduction of flesh presupposes, will be essential in emphasizing the heterogeneity in the public spaces of the interventions.

1 go back here again, to the everyday nature of the activities that Neumark draws from, to understand how it has already been at play in other interventions with regard to a notion of reproduction and difference. This will eventually sharpen the specifie contribution of She loves me not, she loves me and The Four Cardinals.

1 recall that Presence and S( us )taining were shown to draw from, or reproduce, traditionally daily feminine activities; crocheting and peeling beets to make a

Russian stew, respectively. Neumark appropriated these two activities for these interventions such that they would no longer be kept within the home and

199 Deleuze, 1994 (27). 200 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life. Trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore; with an introduction by Stuart Elden. London; New York: Continuum, 2004 (8).

77 unacknowledged, but rather that they should even be valued as art. In The Art of

Conversation,ZOI when the re-enactment of what was for her mere daily conversation in one's living room, became for her father, the re-enactment of a traumatic event in his childhood. Neumark has written about the effect on her of her father' s suffering in the Holocaust. She cites this as the repetitious intergenerational trauma which plays out "as the cycle of family violence, in particular child abuse, as a consequence of cultural and ethnie traumas."zoz The trauma of the Holocaust lived on through her father' s impositions on her everyday emotionallife. His revelation to her through the intervention created a type of stepping stone toward a positive renewal of their relationship.Z03 Accordingly,

Neumark hopes that her work will intervene and participate in the cessation of the transmission of abuse onto the future generations of her family.Z04 As a result, from then on, Neumark's future conversations with her father gained the potential to be more open, equal and understanding.

In The Archive and the Repertoire, performance theorist Diana Taylor, has posited that the repetition of actions and a transmission of knowledge through them, entails drawing from a repertoire which "both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning" and therefore "allows for individual agency."Z05 While Neumark's father was drawing from his repertoire, Neumark wasn't given agency. For the intervention however, as she drew from her own repertoire, she assigned herself

201 This work is discussed in more detail in chapter two. 202 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of (un)veilingslback pain. 203 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of The Art of Conversation. 204 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of (un)veilingslback pain. 205 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003 (20).

78 agency. Peeling beets, like she did for S(us)taining; crocheting, like in Presence; meditation, as for both 1 have arrived, 1 am home and The Four Cardinals; playing a childhood game in She loves me not, she loves me, conversation, in The Art of

Conversation, and even Iooking at paintings in a museum, when she took on the role of The Dutch Woman at Large, are aIl Ieamed and culturally habituated activities. Neumark sought to appropriate these activities, she addressed not only the pains of her childhood abuse, rules, and even more recent traumatic events in her daily life, but also gendered and - as 1 will show - heteronormative daily activities. In She loves me not, she loves me, and The Four Cardinals, Neumark undertakes the repetition or 'recycling' of a 'banal' activity, which she or others do regularly or have done before, and adapts it by changing the spatial and/or temporal boundaries. It is precisely the nature and the effects of this repetition in these two interventions that will be examined now.

She loves me not, she loves me highlights the relationship of repetition and difference with the identity-affirming potential of performativity, and contributes to the notion that the intervention creates a new and different kind of activity. In She loves me not, she loves me for example, Neumark made use of the actions in a culturally habituated game that many have played regularly as children. Here again, she changed the activity by engaging with it in an interactive adult setting and in the city rather than in the countryside. In his 1977 es say, "Signature, Event, Context"

Jacques Derrida clarifies difference within repetition with regard to the performative utterance. It was British linguist John Langshaw Austin in How ta do

Things with Words, first articulated the notion of "performative utterance" whereby

79 saying something is actually doing it.206 Derrida subsequently argued that in order for the performative utterance to be successful, it had to belong to a model based first on context but also on repetition as 'citation' or 'iterability' .207 He explains iterablitity by looking at it's etymology where: "iter, again, probably cornes from itara, other in Sanskrit, and everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity,,208 This implies that performative utterances are different each time they are 'cited' and that they can consequently have no "fixed origin.,,209 She loves me not, she loves me activates this notion as

Neumark plays the game, reciting "she loves me not, she loves me, ... " She ties the repetition to alterity as she thwarts the heterosexual implications of the childhood game, from a girl questioning the affections of a boy, to having homosexual or bisexual possibilities whereby women, like her, can inquire as to the affections of another woman. Neumark gives agency to that little girl who went along with the other little girls, and thought something along the lines of: "Hey, 1 don't care if he loves me, what if she loves me?!" The game was (and still is) for girls, asking if a boy loved the'm. It implies therefore gendered and heteronormative constraints on the activity. Queer theorists and especially Judith

Butler, have extended the notions of such performative utterances with regard to gendered identities. The repetition of an utterance, which is not heteronormative in

She loves me not, she loves me, demonstrates the desire on behalf of the artist to

206 His most famous and used example is that of the marri age ceremony when it is stated "1 do (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife)" J.L. Austin. Haw ta da Things with Wards. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962 (5). 207 Jacques Derrida. Limited lnc. Trans. Samuel Webber. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988 (18-19). 208 Derrida, 1988 (7). 209 Derrida, 1988 (18-19).

80 name a new phenomenon "into being.',2l0 The intervention as flesh therefore reproduces activities aIl in creating a new and different one.

A similar motif can be distinguished in The Four Cardinals, as Neumark

'cited' (to re-use Derrida's word) prostrations from the different spiritual activities

she had been involved with throughout her life. On her website she explains that

she would combine in her performance, "the simplicity of surrendering to gravit y, the full body prostrations of the Jewish High Priests on Rosh Hashanah (The New

Year), which faIIs this year on (of course!) Saturday, September 27, and the practice

of presence through qigong.,,21l By perforrning "the full body prostrations of the

Jewish High Priests,,,212 she repeated as a woman, what is traditionally performed by men. Through 'iteration,' Neumark therefore gave a voice to the silence of sorne

women in a patriarchaI tradition. Furthermore, through this activity she made evident her own ecumenicaI beliefs as she brought along with the Jewish prostrations, both "the simplicity of surrendering to gravit y," and "the practice of presence through qigong.,,213 As 1 had explained with She loves me not, she loves me above, Neumark appropriates again the different practices to suit what she had corne to believe in rather than what had previously been imposed on her.

She loves me not, she loves me and The Four Cardinals, as 1 have shown until now are a phenomenological "flesh of the world," which, based on

Schneider's argument, are the immateriaI and 'different' remains of previous

210 Judith Butler. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex, " New York: Routledge, 1993 (13). 211 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of The Four Cardinals. Also 1 found that qigong is a component of Chinese medicine that includes meditation, relaxation, "mi nd-body integration," and working with the breath. For more information see: www.qigonginstitute.org. 212 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of The Four Cardinals. 213 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of The Four Cardinals.

81 performances of daily activities. Neumark enables a shift in meaning as she exposes her fleshy (re)productions. The banal activities are shown therefore to have new weight and meaning. Performances which are often labeled as 'primitive',

'ethnie', 'popular', and by extension, 'feminine' and therefore disappearing,214 are instead acknowledged and in fact emphasized. In The Explicit Body in

Performance Schneider has shown that feminist performance artists expose their own flesh, or what she calls their "explicit body." Their flesh becomes therefore, a site of social markings, physical parts and gestural signatures of gender, race, class, age, sexuality - all of which bear ghosts of historieal meaning, markings delineating social hierarchies of privilege and disprivilege.,,215 Schneider explains her use of the phrase "explicit body":

as a means of addressing the ways such work aims to explicate bodies in a social relation. Interestingly, the words 'explicit' and 'explicate' stem from the Latin explicare, which means 'to unfold.' Unfolding the body, as if pulling back velvet curtains to expose a stage, the performance artists in this book peel back layers of signification that surround their bodies like ghosts at a grave.216

In the same vein, although Neumark does not literally expose her own flesh, she exposes the fleshiness of her interventions. As she creates shifts in meaning for everyday or seemingly 'banal' activities, she "unfolds" the differences that Deleuze had found in the "foIds and pleats" of Merleau-Ponty's flesh?17

Drawing from a repertoire of more or less common daily activities however, the fleshiness of each intervention has the further potential of being reproduced as

214 Scheider, 2001 (100). 215 Schneider, 1997 (2). 216 Schneider, 1997 (2). 217 Deleuze, 1994 (64).

82 weIl. Diana Taylor describes how similar performances reproduce in her account of an experience of rumba musicians in Central Park. She first establishes, like 1 have with Neumark's interventions, that the regular gathering of rumba musicians in

Central Park shows how "the archive and the repertoire combined to produce new, transcultured rhythms to respond to a new, transcultured reality.,,218 As she continues to recount the racial connotations when police officers broke up the festive event one Sunday, she describes the different performances that took place.

The rumberos weren't the only ones performing, so was the audience in their reception as weIl as the police officers in their intervention. Taylor notes however that "rumba plays on, in different street corners and bars throughout New York and throughout parts of the Americas, attracting new audiences. Racism, too, plays on, as does racial profiling, police misconduct, and official policies of exclusion.,,219

As Neumark, in a parallel way, engages with repertoires without a concern for

"maintaining 'authenticity' or tradition,,,220 the performances which play out through her interventions inevitably also "playon." Unfortunately however, like the racism of Taylor's police officers, this means for Neumark that child abuse remains, as does intergenerational traùma, if only in memory. However it also means that her protest of it remains as weIl, through other subsequent performances by the participants in the interventions. For ex ample , when 1 go to the country and spot a daisy, 1 now indulge in the game of "asking the oracle,,,221 with the reminder of Neumark's intervention. Like the rumba, and remembering Neumark's point that

218 Taylor, 2003 (267). Her description is similar to the tam-tams here in Montreal in front of the Cartier monument. 219 Taylor, 2003 (273). 220 Taylor, 2003 (234). 221 Neumark, Being Home, in her discussion of She loves me not, she loves me.

83 the childhood game has heteronormative222 implications, people will continue to wistfully pull the petaIs from daisies, posing the now politicized, but nevertheless still pressing question: "does slhe love me?" They will continue also to have spiritual beliefs which they too, will adapt inevitably to suit their own experiences.

The manner in which Neumark characterizes her work by drawing from a repertoire of her daily and lived experience, allows aspects of these interventions the potentiaI to be further reproduced through a sirnilar differentiating repetition; flesh of the flesh, the same and yet different, again.

Conclusion

Performance studies theorist José Esteban Munoz writes precisely to this in his discussion of ephemera as "aIl of those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself.,,223 He explains that: "ephemera inc1udes traces of lived experiences and performances of lived experience, maintaining politics and urgencies long after these structures of feeling have been lived.,,224 It is in this way, that 1 have shown Neumark's work to remain most relevantly and importantly. Through flesh, sensible/able and responsible/able relationships are created toward others, the world and toward ourselves. As Taylor posits, performances "reconstitute themselves, transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the

222 This term is explained in more detail by Lauren BerIant and Michel Warner in "Sex in Public." Critical Inquiry vol. 24, no. 2, Intimacy (Winter 1998),255. 223 Jose Esteban Mufioz "Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts," Women and Performance: Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (1996), 10. 224 Mufioz, 1996 (11).

84 next.,,225 What is instigated is a "deep and passionate recognition of ourselves and the objective world filled with 'things' and 'others' as immanently together in the flesh - that is, as both materially and transcendentally real and mattering.,,226 This flesh, as it is incorporated into the everyday, shows that everyday life is truly worthy of preservation?27 As Neumark 'officially' conc1udes her interventions, traces of responsibility/ability and sensibility/ability remain, are remembered and continue to be practiced as we, Neumark's witnesses and participants continue to think about the ways in which we want to lead our daily lives - sensibly and responsibly in the flesh.

225 Taylor, 2003 (21). 226 Sobchack, 2004 (318). 227 1 recall that this was examined in the previous chapter quoting Ann Cvetkovich in An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures, Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2003 "everyday life is worthy of preservation" (269).

85 CONCLUSION

Throughout this thesis, 1 have attempted to show that a discussion of the embodied experiences of social relations at the root of Neumark's interventions enables an understanding of how her work functions simultaneously as art and activism. Drawing from phenomenological theories established by Maurice

Merleau-Ponty and furthered by Vivian Sobchack and Rebecca Schneider, my discussion of Neumark' s interventions has relied heavily on their notions of a phenomenological flesh.

In the first chapter, establishing the importance of the experiencing body in the interventions was essential to explain how the relations among participants inc1ude a mutual recognition of each other's subjectivity. 1 examined how this happens as Neumark deals with abiding by the constructed nature of her own gendered body and by extension, identity. When Neumark plays with the reversibility of her body as both subject and object, she already activates Merleau

Pont y' s notion of "the flesh of the world." This notion has been seen to de scribe the element that enables this reversibility and furthers mutual understandings of our co-existence in the world. Sobchack's furthered specifications of a phenomenology of the flesh was also set in motion for Neumark, as she subjectively felt through her body-as-object, the effects of other objects (the beet juice on her hands in

S(us)taining, her costume as the Dutch Woman at Large). This was seen to be an interobjective experience for her. Flesh came into play therefore as the

86 interventions emphasized an intertwining of Neumark' s own intersubjectivity and interobjecti vity .

ln the second chapter 1 noted how Neumark draws from activities traditionally seen as taking place in the space of the home. By resituating the activities to urban or more public spaces, the interventions questioned not only the gendered bifurcation of spaces, but also the gentrification which occurs in the organization of urban spaces. Through the analysis of this critical interaction that

Neumark enabled between the participants and the urban spaces of the interventions,

1 examined the fact that their experience could be fleshy as weIl.

Finally in the third chapter, this idea led me to argue that since Neumark's interventions implicate an intertwining of their intersubjectivity and interobjectivity for aIl of the participants, the interventions could be posited as the actual phenomenological flesh. 1 deepened this idea by drawing from Schneider' s description of flesh as the body-to-body transmission and repetition of performance, conduding that it remains "in the flesh with its feminine capacity to reproduce.'.228

1 recall that Schneider redefines flesh such that it no longer stands in dear opposition to the bone, or Derrida' s theory of a "patriarchallogic of the archive," in which flesh falls away from the bone, disappears from the archive to come into being. Furthermore the interventions have been seen to actually facilitate this reproduction since Neumark draws from her everyday activities, which the participants have the potential of repeating later on in their own daily practices.

228 Rebecca Schneider, "Performance Remains," Performance Research 6, no. 2 (2001), 104.

87 Positing Neumark's interventions as flesh then, not only allowed for a phenomenological inquiry but also for an understanding that her work remains through repetition of the activities which are acted out in the interventions.

At several points throughout the writing process of this thesis, the question of what it is in the repetition of an everyday activity that renders it the continuation or reproduction of a performance was still stuck in my mind. 1 recall The Art of

Conversation, when Neumark set up her living room fumiture in the metro square to enable conversations with passersby. Although many of us hold conversations in our living rooms, does this mean that each of these conversations is a repetition of

Neumark's performance in The Art of Conversation? On a more personal note, 1 realize that many people knit as an everyday practice. When 1 engage in the

activity however, it is for me a repetition or a continuation of my grandmother knitting: something done on a regular basis, and which reminds me of her such that it is specifically her everyday activity of knitting that 1 am repeating (differently).

This discrepancy inspired me to choose for epitaph to this thesis a quote from

Quebecois writer Ying Chen's Les Lettres Chinoises. In a letter to her fiancé, one

of the characters asks : «Comment pouvons-nous apprécier le merveilleux sans être capable de vivre les banalités? Le merveilleux étant une perle, le banal est son

sable. Aurions-nous toujours besoin de nous éloigner du sable pour connaître la beauté de la perle?»229 As Neumark draws from daily activities, her interventions

strike an interesting and useful balance between the banal and the original. As she

229 Ying Chen, Les lettres chinoises Montréal: Leméac, 1993 (85). Sassa, one of the protagonists in this novel, living in China writes this refection in a letter to her finance who has moved to Montreal. (My translation: "How is one to appreciate the sensational without being able to live through the banal? The sensational is to a pearl as the banal is to sand. Must we al ways distance ourselves from sand so that we can perceive the beauty of a pearl?").

88 crochets and her cocoon slowly takes shape for Presence, the intervention begins with an activity that is not so strange and progresses into one that is unique.

Throughout each intervention, Neumark could probably have easily blended in with her surroundings. Nevertheless, something always made people stop, raise an eyebrow or pose questions. Such balance is what activates the fleshiness of

Neumark's interventions to be particularly effective. The everydayness of the activity cited in the intervention enables participants to potentially easily and almost unconsciously repeat its performance, and at the same time, the interventions somehow stick in one's mind and stand out of the everyday. Like Henri Lefebvre's theory of the musical rhythm:

In its relation to the body, to time, to the work, it illustrates real (everyday) life. It purifies it in the acceptance of catharsis. FinaIly, and above aIl, it brings compensation for the miseries of everydayness, for its deficiencies and failures. 23o

An understanding of such an aesthetic component in Neumark's interventions helped me just as 1 was getting frustrated with my thesis topic and wondering what point it would serve to posit her interventions as flesh. In a pivotaI analysis of The

Four Cardinals 1 finally understood the implications and practicality of Sobchack's theory that flesh enables an important balance of responsibility/ability and sensibility/ability.

In the introduction 1 revealed that 1 was initially motivated by the therapeutic approach that Neumark took in her art work. The field of art therapy is

230 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life. Trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London; New York: Continuum, 2004 (66). It is his emphasis both in bold and italics.

89 currently a flourishing discipline around the world and involves trained artists

"helping those with emotional and psychological difficulties to deal with their problems through a cooperative process of discovery.,,231 At several points in this thesis 1 have already discussed the cathartic element that describes the way which

Neumark's non-aggressive activism works in concert with an artistic practice. She treats socio-political issues as types of trauma which need to be healed, exposing sometimes the strengths and many times, her own as weIl as the participants', vulnerabilities. In this sense, she faces great risks as her interventions unfold. An interesting direction to take now with regard to research on Neumark's interventions would be to investigate how the discipline of art therapy intersects with that of performance theory as weIl as the phenomenology of the flesh that 1 have outlined in detail in this thesis.

1 have been particularly inspired by the way that Neumark pays tribute to her roots, aIl in appropriating them critically to her own beliefs and motivations.

Through repetition, what's bred in the bone will come out in the fleshiness of

Neumark's interventions, differently. Her work teaches us that not only should we be aware of our social responsibilities/abilities but that we should be sensible/able as we approach not just the big events in our lives, but also the ways in which we go about our daily activities. Such a conclusion regarding the fleshiness of Neumark's interventions is therefore particularly original for their function as artistic practices.

231 Concordia University. "Art Therapy." Department afCreative Art Therapies. http://art therapy.concordia.calar index.htm, last accessed: 10 August 2005. For more information about the field of art therapy, see a list of National Art therapy associations around the world at: http://www.arttherapy.co.zalassociations.htm.

90 Much politically-oriented contemporary art engages with political and social questions, or responsibilities/abilities, in order to make an impact on the audience.

This however is often at the expense of an aesthetic component of "active devotion:" a sensibility/ability which, as l have shown, is undeniably evident in

Neumark's work.

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95 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Unless otherwise specified, photographs and explanations are from the artist's website.

Fig. 1. Devora Neumark. Presence, 1997. Solo intervention / durational performance within the group project entitled Sur l'expérience de la ville: interventions en milieu urbain organized by Gallery Optica. View of Neumark pulling the resulting body bag over her head. Photo credit: Mario Belisle. Photographs and explanation also from Concordia University' s art history website (http://art-history.concordia.ca/eea/artists/neumark.html ) Montreal ...... 97

Fig. 2. Devora Neumark. Une résistance certaine, 1998. Oil stick drawings on gridded glass window panels and photographic reproductions temporarily installed as part of L'Art inquiet. Motifs d'engagement group exhibition, Gallery of University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM). Photo credit: PatrickAltman...... 98

Fig. 3. Devora Neumark. Presence, 1997. Solo intervention / durational performance. Overall view in front of Snowdon metro station. Photo credit: Mario Belisle. Photograph and explanation also from Women Artists in Canada website (http://collections.ic.gc.ca/waic/deneumldeneum10e.htm) ...... 98

Fig. 4. Devora Neumark. S(us)taining, 1996. Independent solo effort. Durational street performance at the site of 3612A Notre Dame Street West, Montréal, a commercial building that was destroyed in an act of arson on November 9, 1995. Over a period of six hours, the artist sat peeling beets in conversation with and direct engagement with the passerby's, local merchants, children, police, and persons displaced from the fire. Detail. Photo credit: Mario Belisle. Photographs and explanation also from Women Artists in Canada website (http://collections.ic.gc.ca/waic/deneumldeneum10e.htm) ...... 99

Fig. 5. Devora Neumark. S(us)taining, 1996. Detail of Neumark's charred hands. Photo credit: Mario Belisle. Photographs and explanation also from Women Artists in Canada website (http://collections.ic.gc.ca/waic/deneumldeneumlOe.htm) ...... 100

Fig. 6. Devora Neumark. Dutch Woman at Large, 1998-00. Durational street intervention. View of the Dutch Woman at Large looking at herself in Gerard ter Borch's Curiosity of 1660 (Oil on canvas; 76.2 x 62.2 cm) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo credit: Mario Belisle ... 101

96 Fig. 7. Devora Neumark. Dutch Woman at Large, 1998-00. Overall view of the artist in costume, in the gardens of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Photo credit: Mario Belisle ...... 102

Fig. 8. Devora Neumark. The Art of Conversation, 2000. Durational street intervention. Detail view of getting the living room together and overall view. Corner of Ontario and Frontenac for the group project entitled D'un millénaire à l'autre: Neuf interventions artistiques dans des espaces extérieurs à Montréal. Photo credit: Devora Neumark and Mario Belisle. Photographs and explanation also from Women Artists in Canada website (http://collections.ic.gc.ca/waic/deneum/deneuml0e.htm)...... 103

Fig. 9. Devora Neumark. 1 have arrived, 1 am home, 2002. Durational performative intervention. Overall view. Five hour standing/and or sitting meditation daily in the back of a cube truck, for a period of one week as part of the Dépossession project organized by Folie Culture (Ville de Québec). Photo credit: Denis Simard ...... , 104

Fig. 10. Devora Neumark. She loves me not, she loves me, 2001. Durational street intervention. Overall view of daisies being given as gifts and detail. October 13, 2002 during the day at Place de la Paix on Boulevard St. Laurent. Photo credit: Patrick Mailloux ...... 105

Fig. Il. Devora Neumark. The Four Cardinals, September 27,2003. Durational performance. Two detail views of the artist kneeling down and kissing the ground in the garden of her house, Cardinal Street, Montreal. Photo credit: John Mingolla ...... 106

Fig. 12. Devora Neumark. The Four Cardinals, September 27,2003. Detail views of the artist interacting with the ground. Photo credit: John Mingolla..... 107

97 Fig. 1. Devora Neumark. Presence, 1997. Solo intervention / durational performance within the group project entitled Sur l'expérience de la ville: interventions en milieu urbain organized by Gallery Optica (Locations in Montreal: The plaza at the Musée d'art Contemporain, in front of the Concordia University Library / McConnel Building, the Snowdon Metro Station, the Voyageur bus terminal, the base of Mount Royal, the Atwater Market, in a private home at 6846 St Denis.) Body bag made during the intervention with fine, pure cotton thread used for Yarmulkas. View of Neumark pulling the resulting body bag over her head. Photo credit: Mario Belisle. Photographs and explanation from Concordia University's art history website (http://art history.concordia.ca/eea/artists/neumark.html) and artist's website, Montreal.

98 Fig. 2. Devora Neumark. Une résistance certaine, 1998. Oil stick drawings on gridded glass window panels and photographie reproductions temporarily installed as part of L'Art inquiet. Motifs d'engagement group exhibition curated by Louise Déry at the Gallery of University of Quebee at Montreal (UQAM). Photo credit: Patrick Altman. Photographs from artist's website, Montreal.

Fig. 3. Devora Neumark. Presence, 1997. Solo intervention / durational performance. Overall view in front of Snowdon metro station. Photo credit: Mario Belisle. Photographs and explanation from artist's website and Women Artists in Canada website (http://collections.ic.gc.ca/waic/deneumldeneumlOe.htm), Montreal.

99 Fig. 4. Devora Neumark. S(us)ta in ing , 1996. Detail. Independent solo effort. Durational street performance at the site of 3612A Notre Dame Street West, Montréal, a commercial building that was destroyed in an act of arson on November 9, 1995. Over a period of six hours, the artist sat peeling beets in conversation with and direct engagement with the passerby's, local merchants, children, police, and persons displaced from the fire. Photo credit: Mario Belisle. Photographs and explanation from artist' s website and Women Artists in Canada website (http://collections.ic.gc.ca/waic/deneumldeneumlOe.htm), Montreal.

100 Fig. 5. Devora Neumark. S(us)taining, 1996. Detail of Neumark's charred hands. Photo credit: Mario Belisle. Photographs and explanation from artist' s website and Women Artists in Canada website (http://collections.ic.gc.ca/waic/deneum/deneumlOe.htm), Montreal.

101 Fig. 6. Devora Neumark. Dutch Woman at Large, 1998-00. Durational street intervention. View of the Dutch Woman at Large looking at herself in Gerard ter Borch's Curiosity of 1660 (Oil on canvas; 76.2 x 62.2 cm) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Costume design by Ruth Mills, Milliner, of Ottawa. Costume fabrication by Ruth Mills except for the corset, wool petticoat and satin skirt which were constructed by Edwina Richards, Costumer, Ottawa. Shoes designed and constructed by Joceline Chabot, Artist, Montreal. Antique lace on satin skirt cleaned by Eva Burnham, Conservator, Montreal. Hair-piece by Donna Gliddon, Ottawa). Photo credit: Mario Belisle. Photographs and explanation from artist' s website, Montreal.

102 Fig. 7. Devora Neumark. Dutch Woman al Large, 1998-00. Overall view of he Dutch woman at large in the gardens of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Photo credit: Mario Belisle. Photographs and explanation from artist's website, Montreal.

103 Fig. 8. Devora Neumark. The Art of Conversation, 2000. Durational street intervention. Detail view of getting the living room together and overall view. Corner of Ontario and Frontenac within the group project entitled D'un millénaire à l'autre: Neuf interventions artistiques dans des espaces extérieurs à Montréal sponsored by the Ville de Montreal's Service de la culture. Photo credit: Devora Neumark and Mario Belisle. Photographs and explanation from artist's website and Women Artists in Canada website (http://collections.ic.gc.ca/waic/deneumldeneumlOe.htm), Montreal.

104 Fig. 9. Devora Neumark. 1 have arrived, 1 am home, 2002. Durational performative intervention. Overall view. Five hour standing/and or sitting meditation daily in the back of a cube truck, for a period of one week as part of the Dépossession project organized by Folie Culture (Ville de Québec). Photo credit: Denis Simard. Photographs and explanation from artist's website, Montreal.

105 Fig. 10. Devora Neumark. She loves me not, she loves me, 2001. Durational street intervention. Overall view of daisies being given as gifts (above) and detail (below). October 13,2002 during the day at Place de la Paix on Boulevard St. Laurent. Photo credit: Patrick Mailloux. Photographs and explanation from artist' s website, Montreal.

106 Fig. 11. Devora Neumark. The Four Cardinals, September 27,2003. Durational performance. Two detail views of the artist kneeling down and kissing the ground in the garden of her house, Cardinal Street, Montreal. Photo credit: John Mingolla. Photographs and explanation from artist' s website, Montreal.

107 Fig. 12. Devora Neumark. The Four Cardinals, September 27,2003. Detail views of the artist interacting with the ground. Photo credit: John Mingolla. Photographs and explanation from artist' s website, Montreal.

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