(Dis)Identifying Female Archetypes in Live Art
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(Dis)Identifying Female Archetypes in Live Art A Practice as Research Thesis Submitted in Part Fulfilment for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Magdalena !imi" Anderson, B.A. (Hons), M.A. Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University May 2007 Author’s Declaration This thesis is my own, original work and has not been previously submitted elsewhere in support of any degree, qualification or course. Signed Dated 2 Magdalena !imi" Anderson, B.A. (Hons), M.A. (Dis)Identifying Female Archetypes in Live Art Ph.D. Submission May 2007 Abstract My thesis considers a feminist arts practice as a form of political agency. My research is practice-led. It consists of three performances/live art events (Medea/Mothers’ Clothes, Magdalena Makeup and Joan Trial), its documentation on three sets of DVDs and a written dissertation. Female archetypes, which have tended to be associated with the canonical, underpin my research investigations. Through my arts practice I intervene in three archetypal images of women that are representative of the patriarchal canon: Medea (the anti-mother), Mary Magdalene (the penitent whore) and Joan of Arc (virgin martyr). I juxtapose their ‘universality’ with the experiential, the local and the contemporary. I draw on the authoritative personal voice of the lived anxiety of the experience of motherhood (Medea), name identification (Mary Magdalene), spirituality/heroism (Joan of Arc) and the sense of ‘being foreign’, seen as ‘Other’. Working from my subject figuration of a ‘Foreigner’ (Croatian, living in Britain), my local community and experience of my daily life as a mother and artist-researcher in Liverpool, I (dis)identify with socio-culturally prescribed forms of the feminine, as conventionally represented by these archetypes. The production of my arts practice is understood as my political commitment to the world, a part of and an intervention into my everyday living. This thesis is situated and contextualized within the field of contemporary British Live Art practices, feminist solo performance and transnational arts practices. For the purposes of facilitating my agency as an artist, throughout the thesis I use postcolonial and transnational feminist studies as well as feminist discourses on the ‘politics of location’ and ‘lived experience’, particularly the work of Sara Ahmed, Atvar Brah, Teresa de Lauretis, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Doreen Massey, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Elspeth Probyn, Gayatri Spivak and Iris Marion Young. 3 Acknowledgements My deepest thanks to: Elaine Aston Also to: Geraldine Harris, Kerstin Bueschges, L.I.C.A. and Theatre Studies, A.H.R.C., Arts Council England and Jill Godfrey, Bluecoat Arts Centre and Cathy Butterworth, Art Workshop Lazareti and Slaven Tolj & Srdjana Cvijeti", Nuffield Theatre and Matt Fenton, Steph & Dom, ‘Women’s Writing for Performance’ and all its participants, L.A.D.A. and Lois Keidan, the Magdalena Project and Jill Greenhalgh, Oreet Ashery, Margareta Kern, Silke Mansholt, Tanja Ostoji" and Rosa Casado. All the mothers that participated in Medea/Mothers’ Clothes, my Dubrovnik family Nela, #eljko, Ivan, Zvon$ica, Gri%a, baba, Pavo for all their effort for Magdalena Makeup, Sonja Stahor, Dale Rathbone and Ross Dalziel for their support. And finally to: Gary, Neal and Gabriel. 4 Contents Introduction On the Title of My Thesis 6 Chapter One The Trouble with Female Archetypes 15 Chapter Two The Lived Experience of a Female Foreign Condition in the Local Community: Performing Homes with Indefinite Leave To Remain 33 Chapter Three Towards A Transnational Arts Practice 54 Chapter Four Foreigners Under the Umbrella of British Live Art 77 Introduction to My Arts Practice Performance Making Tactics 101 Chapter Five On Medea/Mothers’ Clothes: Medea/Mother Trouble 108 Chapter Six On Magdalena Makeup: Name Post Card Encounters Journey Home 123 Chapter Seven On Joan Trial: Performing Agency 147 Conclusion On the Politics of My Arts Practice 164 Appendix A Supporting Material for Medea/Mothers’ Clothes 177 Appendix B Supporting Material for Magdalena Makeup 187 Appendix C Supporting Material for Joan Trial 195 Bibliography 208 5 Introduction On the Title of My Thesis My research is a platform upon which I am allowed time, space, resources and finances to further my artwork and ask critical questions about the world and my arts making processes. Through much of my research I have been returning to a quote from Gayatri Spivak which inspired me to think about my being-in-the-world and my politics through an arts practice. Therefore, I would like to open the written part of my thesis with that quote: I wrote above that the will to explain was a symptom of the desire to have a self and a world. In other words, on the general level, the possibility of explanation carries the presupposition of an explainable (even if not fully) universe and an explaining (even if imperfectly) subject. These presuppositions assure our being. Explaining, we exclude the possibility of the radically heterogeneous. On a more specific level, every explanation must secure and assure a certain kind of being-in- the-world, which might as well be called our politics. (Spivak 1996: 33) My Ph.D. thesis is both my explanation of and my intervention into the world. I understand the production of my arts practice as my political commitment to the world, a part of and an intervention into my everyday living, and finally, as my own being-in-the- world. More specifically, in this research project, through my arts practice, I (dis)identify with socio-culturally prescribed forms of the feminine, conventionally represented by female archetypes, by employing my subject figuration of a ‘Foreigner’ (Croatian, living in Britain), my local community and experience of my daily life as a mother and artist- researcher in Liverpool. 6 I will start by elaborating on the title of my thesis ‘(Dis)Identifying Female Archetypes in Live Art’. Female archetypes, invented and appropriated by patriarchy, are undoubtedly the Master’s tools which in the words of Audre Lorde ‘will never dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde 1984b: 112). The very title of my thesis resurrects a patriarchal term, which categorizes women and myself, as a female artist. However, I am concerned to mobilize the terms female archetypes, as Master’s tools, through my arts practice, and contest the categorization of women into female archetypes. Gayatri Spivak looks at ‘phallocentrism’ as something ‘that enables us’ (Spivak 1990: 147). Since female archetypes are often read as something universal that anybody to an extent feels they have an opinion about, and possibly identify with, they are a fertile ground for contention. It is through female archetypes that I am ‘enabled’ in my agency as a female artist. Female archetypes provide me with a departure point, a way into the critique of ‘phallocentrism’ as the Master’s discourse. I have chosen three canonised, female archetypes as tactical departure points for my artistic investigation. The term ‘archetypes’ references the theories of Carl Gustav Jung (see Chapter One). By ‘archetypes’ Jung refers to thought patterns within the so-called collective unconscious. In his extensive writings and specifically Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Jung 1959), he claims that archetypes are inherited dispositions in the human psyche to form primordial images, that they are determined by their forms only and that they manifest themselves through various images, stories, myths and representations in specific cultures, religions, societies and finally individuals. In my thesis I deal with three such archetypal manifestations: Medea, Mary Magdalene and 7 Joan of Arc. Medea is the anti-mother, the monster who kills her children; Mary Magdalene is a penitent whore, both a sinner and saint and Joan of Arc is a virgin/martyr, who dresses as a man. All three belong to certain canonical traditions. Medea derives from classical Greek mythology, Euripides and Greek drama. Mary Magdalene is sourced in the Bible, religion and ‘master paintings’, whilst Joan of Arc is a French historical heroine, with links to romanticism, nationalism and modernism. Each one is somewhat of an anomaly who in her own symbolic existence destabilizes the patriarchal structures to different degrees. It is, therefore, not surprising to see these three figures in the realms of women’s international groupings inspired by cultural and global feminism like the Magdalena Project, an international network of women in contemporary theatre (see Chapter One for discussion of this point). However, it is important to remember that such powerful figures also aid the reading of real women through archetypes as presupposed ‘natural’ feminine categories. My understanding of the term ‘woman’ and the subsequent naming of myself as a female artist has been influenced by the feminist theorists Judith Butler and Denise Riley who have understood the term ‘woman’ contingently as opposed to ontologically. Butler defines ‘woman’ as ‘a site of permanent openness and resignifiability’ (Butler 1992: 16).1 Riley writes about the inconsistency of the category and inadequacy of the label ‘woman’ (Riley 1988: 111-112). However, ‘woman’ as a term is not to be abandoned, but used strategically. Riley argues that ‘it is compatible to suggest that “women” don’t exist – while maintaining a politics of “as if they existed” – since the world behaves as if they 8 unambiguously did’ (Riley 1988: 112). In the same vein, Gayatri Spivak calls for strategic essentialism: Since one cannot not be an essentialist, why not look at the ways in which one is essentialist, carve out a representative essentialist position, and then do politics according to old rules whilst remembering the dangers in this? (Spivak 1990: 45) This kind of strategic essentialism is useful in my work as an artist. Developing the artwork through female archetypes, I emphasize my own female gender as a departure point for my artistic interventions. Being a female solo performer working on female archetypes I am marked by my gendered difference, even if that difference is not necessarily essentialist per se.