pass some water through the hole and then you’ll see: modes of queer interconnectivity and visibility in practices of the fluid queer body

Kieran Bryant Thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

UNSW Art and Design August 2018 Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

!

Surname/Family Name : BRYANT Given Name/s : KIERAN JAMES Abbreviation for degree as give in the University MFA calendar :

Faculty : ART & DESIGN

School : SCHOOL OF ART pass some water through the hole and then you'll see: modes of queer Thesis Title : interconnectivity and visibility in practices of the fluid queer body

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

This practice-led research project examines how water, through its relationship with holes and orifices, can be a conduit of shame and regret in queered visibility and corresponding queer body dynamics. By exploring the interplay between situated wateriness and liquid autobiographical narrative, this project attempts to locate holes in and suggest alternatives to dominant viewpoints concerning queer fluidity, visibility and the body in contemporary arts and culture. It focuses on interpretations of constructed urban waterways as conductive queer sites that hold particular emotions as codes to a narrative of visibility. Further it defines the hole as an escape or portal within the queer body, and seeks to understand how it exists as a site to connect the differing aspects of a fluid body experience. This project will engage with theoretical frameworks of Astrida Neimanis, Sara Ahmed, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jack Halberstam, Jacques Lacan, Renu Bora, and Michel Foucault; and the artistic practices of Paul Meheke, Kilian Rüthemann, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mikala Dwyer, and Derek Jarman. The creative outcomes will manifest in a new body of work that combines video installation, text-based sculpture and performance to explore the stagings of water and the personal in a queer bodied experience.

Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation

I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).

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‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.'

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‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

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i INCLUSION OF PUBLICATIONS STATEMENT

UNSW is supportive of candidates publishing their research results during their candidature as detailed in the UNSW Thesis Examination Procedure.

Publications can be used in their thesis in lieu of a Chapter if: • The student contributed greater than 50% of the content in the publication and is the “primary author”, ie. the student was responsible primarily for the planning, execution and preparation of the work for publication • The student has approval to include the publication in their thesis in lieu of a Chapter from their supervisor and Postgraduate Coordinator. • The publication is not subject to any obligations or contractual agreements with a third party that would constrain its inclusion in the thesis

Please indicate whether this thesis contains published material or not.

This thesis contains no publications, either published or submitted for ☐x publication (if this box is checked, you may delete all the material on page 2)

Some of the work described in this thesis has been published and it has been documented in the relevant Chapters with acknowledgement (if this box is ☐ checked, you may delete all the material on page 2)

This thesis has publications (either published or submitted for publication) ☐ incorporated into it in lieu of a chapter and the details are presented below

CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION I declare that: • I have complied with the Thesis Examination Procedure • where I have used a publication in lieu of a Chapter, the listed publication(s) below meet(s) the requirements to be included in the thesis. Name Signature Date (dd/mm/yy) Kieran Bryant 24/08/2018

Postgraduate Coordinator’s Declaration (to be filled in where publications are used in lieu of Chapters) I declare that: • the information below is accurate • where listed publication(s) have been used in lieu of Chapter(s), their use complies with the Thesis Examination Procedure • the minimum requirements for the format of the thesis have been met. PGC’s Name PGC’s Signature Date (dd/mm/yy)

!i i Table of Contents

Originality Statement i Inclusion of Publications Statement ii Image List/Video Links iii Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1 narrative a) 5 goggles fog when you dive underwater. the fog of everything. you’ve been in the fog for too long

Chapter 1 10 grappling on the precipice of the squirt and the stream: narratives of queer visibility in artificial waterways

1.1 10 hold your breath and flow through the gap

1.2 17 rush through my watery hole narrative b) 25 you escaped, but did you? the residue coats your back. your legs. your head. your hole

1.3 32 heavy water narrative c) 37 crying and not knowing why. knowing exactly why and continuing to cry

Chapter 2 46 hole as sticky portal: connective modes of a fluid body experience

2.1 46 this is all kinds of shit narrative d) 51 telling yourself gets you halfway there. helping hands do the rest

2.2 57 one foot stuck in the hole and you start to know narrative e) 66 the water helps to float. floating in their reflection

Conclusion 70 the other conclusion 71

Bibliography / References 73 Image List

figure 1 12 Kieran Bryant, so you want us to get back in the water, do you? (video still), 2017, single-channel video, colour, sound, 00:09:05 loop.

figure 2 14 Kieran Bryant, wide and i could sink. and i sink, deeper. warm, and i shiver (video still), 2017, single-channel video, colour, sound, 00:08:38 loop.

figure 3 15 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled 1992-95, (install view), 2007, marble, water, 24 x 12 feet or 48 x 24 feet, Glenstone Museum, MD, United States, http://www.glenstone.org/art/outdoor-sculpture/, (accessed 20.07.18).

figure 4 18 Kieran Bryant, how do you think this is the deepest hole in the water? (video still), 2017, single-channel video, colour, sound, 00:08:58 loop.

figure 5 20 Kilian Rüthemann, Untitled (Valentine), (install view), 2011, steel, plywood, bitumen sheeting, water pumping system, 1200 x 980 x 190 cm, water jet: 600 cm, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, Germany, http://ruethemann.net/-download/Kilian_Ruethemann_e_web.pdf figure, (accessed 05.06.17)

figure 6 23 Kieran Bryant, this is that hose (install view), 2017-18, vinyl, particle board, rubber hose, water, stools, dimensions variable, Verge Gallery, Sydney, Australia.

figure 7 23 Kieran Bryant, this is that hose (install view), 2017, vinyl, rubber hose, water, video projection, ‘grappling on the precipice of the squirt and the stream’, Cité Internationale des arts Paris.

iii figure 8 33 Paul Maheke, Acqua Alta (install view), 2017, wood, printing on fabrics, adhesive letters, resin on fabric, glass sconces, threaded rods, soundtrack (14:48 min), 200 x 280 x 230 cm, Galerie Sultana, Paris, France, http://www.galeriesultana.com/shows/paul-maheke, (accessed 13.06.18).

figure 9 35 Kieran Bryant, how empty of me to be so full of you (install view), 2018, digital print on polysilk with cord, 200 x 135 cm.

figure 10 36 Kieran Bryant, I like a man who dresses for clamming (video still), 2018, single channel video, colour, sound, 00:09:00 loop.

figure 11 49 Mikala Dwyer, Goldene Bend’er, 2013, video and live performance installation, dimensions variable, https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/mikala-dwyer-goldene-bender/, (accessed 15.07.16).

figure 12 58 Derek Jarman, Prospect Cottage, 1986-94, Dungeness, United Kingdom, https://www.gardenista.com/posts/garden-visit-derek-jarmans-prospect-cottage-at- dungeness/, (accessed 08.07.18).

figure 13 62 Derek Jarman, Blue (video still), 1993, 35mm film transferred to digital file, colour, sound, 01:15:00, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/display/derek-jarman-blue, (accessed 24.07.18).

figure 14 64 Kieran Bryant, w-a (the waves) (video still), 2018, two-channel video, colour, sound, 00:05:13 loop.

figure 15 65 Kieran Bryant, w-a (the lamp) (video still), 2018, two-channel video, colour, sound, 00:05:13 loop.

iv Video Links

footnote 11 11 Kieran Bryant, wetness quartet, 2017, single-channel video, colour, sound, 00:34:18 loop, https://vimeo.com/246082006. footnote 47 35 Kieran Bryant, I like a man who dresses for clamming (video still), 2018, single channel video, colour, sound, 00:09:00 loop, https://vimeo.com/263172076. footnote 85 63 Kieran Bryant, w-a (the waves) (video still), 2018, two-channel video, colour, sound, 00:05:13 loop, https://vimeo.com/284685326. footnote 86 63 Kieran Bryant, w-a (the lamp) (video still), 2018, two-channel video, colour, sound, 00:05:13 loop, https://vimeo.com/284686133.

v Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to my supervisors Grant Stevens and Tim Gregory. This would have been impossible without their time, patience, guidance and kindness.

Special thanks to the following people who helped me both in this process, in my practice, and in my life. You are angels.

Beth Dillon, Lachlan Herd, Jake Gordon, Amy Mills, Caroline Lukaszyk, Spence Messih, Eugene Choi, Paloma Gould, Ben Strum, Claire Johnson, Samuel Hodge, Clare Powell, Marcus Whale, Meg Clune, Neil Beedie, James Gatt, James Nguyen, Chris Dolman, Elena Papanikolakis, Elena Paulina, Evan Dorrian, Robin Hearfield, Taloi Havini, Siân McIntyre.

Thanks to Performance Space, Mr Ross Steele AM, and Verge Gallery for the incredible opportunities that helped shape my research and work.

And a extra special thank you to Kelvin and Linda Bryant. I couldn’t have done this without their unwavering encouragement, support and love.

vi

Introduction

Asks how water, through its relationship with holes and orifices, can be a conduit of shame and regret in queered visibility and body dynamics.

we are watery bodies, leaking into and sponging off of one another1

“developing a new lexicon for thinking about identities outside of identity politics: water”2 .

Water can be approached as an abstract idea, to be situated or embodied within holes, and specific environments and materialities. Thus emphasising its critical and generative ability to reconsider connectivity and visibility, those holes and orifices can be thought of as points of entry and departure, spaces to be filled and plugged, or incomplete parts of a larger sum. This practice-led research project examines how water, through its relationship with holes and orifices, can be a conduit of shame and regret in queered visibility and corresponding queer body dynamics. This project explores the interplay between situated wateriness and liquid autobiographical narrative. It does this by attempting to locate holes in, and suggesting alternatives to dominant viewpoints within aspects of queer fluidity, visibility and the body in contemporary arts and culture. It focuses on interpretations of constructed urban waterways as conductive queer sites that hold particular emotions as codes to a narrative of visibility. Further it defines the hole as an escape or portal within the queer body, and seeks to understand how it exists as a site to connect the differing aspects of a fluid body experience.

The theoretical framework and research methodology presented throughout this paper give form to the key motivations and intentions of this research: a desire to discover the emotionally conductive properties of water, through its relationship with holes and

1 Maheke, Paul, 2017, Leakage, courtesy of artist and gallery sultana. 2 Luquet-Gad, Ingrid & Maheke, Paul, 2017, ‘Paul Maheke', Revue Zéro Duex, Issue 82 Summer.

1 orifices, in queered visibility and body dynamics. As an artist, I approach this research through studio and site-based field work to experiment with video, sound, text, body- oriented performance, and sculpture. My practice is situated in an emerging field of practice, alongside artists who critique this connection knowingly. My interest is in understanding how these artists use methodologies of material experimentation to critique the world around them; how they stage, present, and perform different narratives of body and space in the world. Through this research, I also create a space within the paper to engage with a series of narratives that form a loose autographical passage. These stylistic and methodological differences are integrated in the paper, where the passages aim to provide a floating snapshot of the project’s interiority. Through these different but connected methodologies my research attempts to find, flow and flex alternatives through the holes that are present inside dominant views of fluidity, visibility, and the queer body in contemporary art and culture.

This research paper provides an account of this process across two chapters, the first with three sub-chapters and the second two; and five fragments composing a narrative. A crucial methodological choice, this narrative not only re-frames escape from an abusive relationship but also re-contextualises that story into the research project. It exists within and alongside the body of the paper, leaving purposeful holes in both the structure of the paper and its connection to the research. The formatting of the narrative fragments allows for this hole-y looseness, with relevant references located after the body of the thesis. The chapter and narrative progression provide a framework into which a series of interlocking examinations can be inserted. This structure is designed not as a linear progression but as a system of analysis, connected through thematic cues.

This research project engages with theoretical frameworks provided by Astrida Neimanis, Sara Ahmed, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jack Halberstam, Renu Bora, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. In chapter 1.1 Neimanis’ and Chen’s writings about liquidity and the queer body will be discussed in Thinking with Water3 which considers the situating of water and how that effects its purpose or constructed intent. Alongside this theoretical investigation, I created a series of video works, wetness quartet, to consider, engage and ruminate with ideas surrounding situational water. These works

3 Chen, Cecilia, MacLeod, Janine & Neimanis, Astrida, 2013, Thinking with Water, ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=3332637, accessed 23.04.18.

2 were developed during a three-month residency program I undertook in 2017 at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris. I spent this time investigating surrounding urban water infrastructures and their links to queer liquidity. Halberstam’s Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies4 will then be employed to trace the re-adjustment of queer time and space in relation to altered queer sites. In chapter 1.2 these investigatory discussions surrounding liquid and the queer body are pushed forward via Ahmed’s Queer phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others5. Ahmed’s text is used to consider how to orientate visibility when discussing that situated water. In this way, this section seeks to understand how a queer body and queer thought flow through the gap that exists between heteronormative and repositioned intent. In chapter 2.1 the notion of the hole will be defined as a site of intent and production through interconnectivity with modes of desire found in theories of Jacques Lacan. Further examination of texture apparent in the hole will be defined by Bora in Outing Texture6. In chapter 2.2 Foucault’s heterotopia7 will be inserted into notions surrounding queered space creation.

This theoretical framework will ground an analysis of the work and methodologies of a range of artists including, in chapter 1, Paul Meheke’s Acqua Alta, Kilian Rüthemann’s Untitled (Valentine), and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled. My research examines how these artists engage with the emotional responsiveness of water and the ways in which water can be considered as subjective and affective matter, choreographing our relations with each other. Meheke is particularly important in chapter 1.3 where I discuss the relationship between image and text in the creation of textual liquidity. This section will then expand that focus in chapter 2 by analysing Derek Jarman’s Blue and Mikala Dwyer’s Goldene Bend’er. I pay particular attention to how these artists employ fluidity into thought and action and/or use autobiographical narrative as a generative and connective tool. In chapter 2.2 Jarman will be specifically discussed in reference to the inclusion of re-contextualised images, text, and sound from popular and contemporary culture in my video and text-based work, and how this can be used to

4 Halberstam, Judith, 2005, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York University Press: New York. 5 Ahmed, Sara, 2006, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University Press. 6 Bora.R, 1997, ‘Outing Texture’, In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, (ed) Sedgwick, Kosofsky, Eve, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 7 describes places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions (Foucault, Michel, 1986, Of other spaces - Diacritics, reprinted in 1997 David, C.and Chevrier, J-F. (eds) Politics- Poetics. Documenta X — the Book. Ostfildern-Ruit:Cantz Verlag).

3 frame the positioning of my own practice. Through this analysis, I will then consider how my practice engages with the holes between built and queer intent in urban waterways; shame and regret within those waterways; and queer visibility and interconnectivity. Also, how the tension fluxes between fluid body and personal narratives. The creative outcomes are manifested in a body of work that combines video installation, text-based sculpture and performance to explore the stagings of water and the personal in a queer bodied experience.

4 a) goggles fog when you dive underwater. the fog of everything. you’ve been in the fog for too long

what does water mean to me. what does it mean to you.

The crushing abyss The liquid pillar Pillar of the earth Pillar of the Ocean

A juggernaut of liquidity

Can you feel it Do you feel it

------I’m going to make you feel it

Stop! ask me again why I could never ___ you

Boy you got me blinded It’s not the way I planned it Show me how you want it to be

5 Put on the face, wear the mask for how a man wants you to be

did you ever feel like your life had turned into something that you never intended (-)

And karma for you is goin’ be who you end up with

------

Be Careful - Cardi B

6 18.04.17 I’ve been sad. Processing blue feelings. Wrote a big letter to Him (on His request). It was helpful to write them down. Those feelings. Why the ___ left. The reasons. Maybe I’ve needed this. To wallow.

- oceanic churn open a space between/in which lustness/lushness and dread merge. Total isolation of desire ————- relentless, almost sacrificial devotion, which seems to consume and replace the person giving it. If the perspective has totally collapsed and is flowing back and forth unconsciously less a documentary of something that happened than a kinetic sculpture of it, depicting an emotional vastness that floats somewhere beyond experience. (Brad Nelson, April 09 2017, Love Deluxe, Sade, Pitchfork Online)

I may have made it rain bad Please forgive me

My weakness caused you pain

?And it sucks my soul clean?

7 I’m not that person. He was afraid to lose me. I better work it out with Him. I’m so lucky to be with Him.

Reading my old thoughts of Him

“Well I’m sure He’ll be happy now” “He deserves it as well” “He can he happy without me in His life” who is this person. who was so tied to Him. a sad wet rag of ___.

to give so much to Him and nothing to myself - - - - - (sic)

Janet Jackson Interlude - Full ------

how empty of me to be so full of you

8 My screensaver was turned on and I didn’t see or I didn’t want to see what was happening.

But now I see.

And on a clear day you can see forever ______

I I I I I I I I I

Reflections still look the same to me As before I went under

Though the pressure’s hard to take It’s the only way I can escape It seems a heavy choice to make But now I am under

And it’s over and I’m going under But I’m not giving up I’m just giving in

Oh slipping underneath

So cold and so sweet

9 Ch 1. grappling on the precipice of the squirt and the stream: narratives of queer visibility in artificial waterways

Ch.1.1_hold your breath and flow through the gap_

“First, we love water. Water attracts us…..even puddles – have an undeniable sensual charisma”8.

Why water? Why water it is asked. Why the interest in these urban and human-made sites of liquidity? What is interesting about those massive superstructures of dams and waterworks? What is compelling about fountains both elegant and spurting – canal locks flush with pressure and moaning with droplets? Not existing in an abstract form water must take up a body or place, all water must be situated. Moreover, we are all situated in relation to water. We come to identify with the waters that we experience. The culvert we pass on the way to school; the warm embrace of bath waters, misting spray from a dam’s release. Situating water requires that we become aware of the encounters through which we locate ourselves in relation to water9.

In Thinking with Water Astridia Neimanis, Cecilia Chen and Janine MacLeod discuss this situating of water. They locate water in different ways to acknowledge and deny participation in community obligations enabled by those waters. The fashion in which urban communities are planned and built points to a specific mode of thinking of water. Urban water infrastructures channel our watery relations through taps and plumbing, chlorinated pools and drinking fountains, and harbours or waterside parks. The means in which we divert water have the potential to alter its presence and change its discursive representations in cultural and political contexts10. Flowing with fashioned

8 Chen.Cecilia, MacLeod.Janine & Neimanis.Astrida, 2013, Thinking with Water, ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=3332637, accessed 23.04.18, p.5. 9 Chen, MacLeod & Neimanis, 2013, p.8. 10 Chen, MacLeod & Neimanis, 2013, p.9.

10 intention from the infrastructure to the political. In articulating watery situations, the relations between our watery selves and our watery others can be shaped. Water may be a vessel; a formless thing that takes shape and gives shape to ideas. Holding, supporting and floating with and in itself. But within the body of work produced as part of this research project, it exists as a channel, a conduit for emotions shame and regret. The genesis of this work was while I was at the Cité Internationale des arts Paris during a residency in 2017. I went to the Cité with an interest in exploring the man-made watery sites of Paris and its surrounding areas; the fountains, canals, sewer systems and water supply networks of the city. As I spent time in the residency conducting field work, coupled with processing the recent aftermath, disintegration, and escape from an abusive relationship, the key analogies and analyses of the research project started to emerge and present themselves.

The first work produced was a series of videos that ultimately became wetness quartet11, a compilation of four singular works. a) so you want us to get back into the water, do you? b) how do you think this is the deepest hole in the water? c) how it spills, shallow. slick, and it can swallow. inwards, and look, holes. d) wide and I could sink. and I sink. deeper, warm, and I shiver.

In this work, my focus was to situate water within urban, human-made structures to create metaphors and analogies for the human body. I view aspects of built environments with an understanding that they could be stand-ins for the human body. That seems more interesting than having to accept our bodies as just flesh and bone. In wetness quartet I wanted to connect holes and orifices with water through sites of passing and escape; using water as a conduit for emotions shame and regret12. The

11 https://vimeo.com/246082006 12 In this paper emotions shame and regret are used autobiographically. They can also be located in a history of shame between orifices, queering, and queer theory. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity gives an example of this in a queer reading of Henry James’ writing (Sedgwick.K.E, 2003, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University Press, United States). The type of anal eroticism examined by Sedgwick in James’s text is centred in an unclean cavity, shamefully aware of itself as a packed bowel that had no agency as a space of queered desire. He is not consciously aware that his anus holds shame; unknowingly suppressed his interest in its faecal shame, its ability to both be penetrated and extrude, its queered associations. The conversation around this packed hole is never discussed with a sense of pleasure or desire but resistant shame. Internal body movements are dictated by the physical sensation of fullness and emotional heaviness of queered guilt (Sedgwick, 2003, pp.49-51).

11 point in a fountain from which the water gushes, the gap between a lock gate, the void of an entrance to a drain (figure 1); these structures become surrogates in my work not only for myself, but also for the audience, allowing bodies to grow, change, or respond in ways that exist outside normal limitations of form.

figure 1. Kieran Bryant, so you want us to get back in the water, do you? (video still), 2017, single- channel video, colour, sound, 00:09:05 loop

In his book Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Gaston Bachelard13 asserts that our concepts always depend on material metaphors for their expression. As abstract as they sometimes may seem, ideas cannot thrive without some reference to embodied experience; our thoughts are structured by our bodily past14. To recognise the materiality of metaphor is to acknowledge language as a more than human collaboration. Many fundamental concepts would be unthinkable without a language of flow, circulation, and depth; as aspects of critical theory enthusiastically court inspiration from the liquid world. Aqueous dynamics of ‘flux’ and ‘flow’ characterise qualities of indeterminacy and continuous change within many

13 Bachelard, Gaston, 1942, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (trans: L’Eau et les rêves), cited 1983 Bachelard Gaston 1884-1962 Bachelard translations series, Pegasus Foundation, Dallas. 14 Chen, MacLeod & Neimanis, 2013, p.10.

12 contemporary epistemologies, while feminist and queer concepts of ‘leakiness’ and ‘seepage’ have been used to identify holes in bodies and theories alike15. wetness quartet approaches ideas of queer wateriness by directing themes of identity signification and sensibility towards an examination of queer narratives inherent in built environments. Engaging with and queering those previously mentioned human-made watery sites by re-positioning the way they are viewed and experienced, my works alter their ‘built’ intent to include those ignored bodies that exist at the periphery. The works also include my own body engaging with water in its holes (figure 2), spliced into footage of a fountain as it bubbles just before it erupts, or a torrent of water right before tumbling down a spillway. The parallel between the body and these human-made structures is acute, as is the relationship between holes and water under pressure. Are the holes in service of the body/structure or are they central to their success?

figure 2. Kieran Bryant, wide and i could sink. and i sink, deeper. warm, and i shiver (video still), 2017, single-channel video, colour, sound, 00:08:38 loop

15 Chen, MacLeod & Neimanis, 2013, p.10.

13 Waters add very particular nuances and associations to the concepts they help to signify, and watery symbolism can be accumulated from both personal and collective experiences. To say one is ‘flooded’ with grief infers that the quality of that sadness gets mingled with the sensual and associative resonances of a submerged dike or levee– or perhaps the messiness and mould of an inundated basement16. The use of water in my work seeks to translate the emotions shame and regret, allowing for ample wallowing in grief, swept up in a cascade which then quickly sinks into a mire17. Though one possible passage is charted it is hoped and expected that the reader will find their own ways of traversing the streams.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ posthumous work Untitled 1992-9518 (2007) is an inverse example of the links that can be drawn between the intent of public works and their ability to be altered. Using his reoccurring ring motif, the work consisted of two adjoining circular reflecting pools, the sides of which touched just enough at a singular point to share an almost undetectable flow of water (figure 3). When this sculpture was exhibited at the 52nd Venice Bienalle in 2007 there was a definite evasion of Gonzalez- Torres' identity, namely his sexuality. It was unaddressed—a de-queering. For an artist whose work was heavily influenced and often inseparable from his queerness, his activism, and his ideas around grief19 this felt like an especially pointed erasure that pointed towards the uneven balance around visibility built into built environments.

“…a moment….a queer temporality that is at once indefinite and virtual but also forceful, resilient, and undeniable" 20

16 Chen, MacLeod & Neimanis, 2013, p.11. 17 There is a specific use of music in wetness quartet to aid in evocation of shame and regret. Particular songs from popular culture i) No Ordinary Love/Sade ii) I Want You/Madonna ft Massive Attack iii) Everytime/Britney Spears and iv) Sway/Bic Runga. These songs, which were digitally stretched beyond their normal length, were chosen due to their autobiographical emotional resonance. 18 Curated by Nancy Spector for the 52nd Venice Bienalle in 2007, in which he was the United States representative (Dillon, Claire, 2014, The Work and Legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Northwestern Undergraduate Research Journal, http://www.thenurj.com/theses/the-work-and- legacy-of-felix-gonzalez-torres, accessed 07.06.18). 19 “Contarlo todo sin saber cómo”, Exhibition dossier, Courtesy Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo. 20 Barber, M, Stephen & Clark, L, David, 2002, ‘Queer Moments: The Performative Temporalities of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’, Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, (ed) Barber, M, Stephen & Clark, L, David, New York: Routledge, p.304.

14 Image removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find image online via link: http://www.glenstone.org/art/outdoor- sculpture/

figure 3. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled 1992-95, 2007, marble, water, 24 x 12 feet or 48 x 24 feet Note: although discussed in this paper in its original Venice Bienalle install, this work (as pictured) is now permanently sited at Glenstone Museum, MD, United States.

Within these built environments I have discussed the alteration of sites towards a queered view. This can also be thought of in the sense of queer time and space. As Jack Halberstam explains in their text In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, a queer21 re-adjustment in the way time is thought about requires and produces new concepts of space. By articulating and elaborating a concept of

21 For the purpose of Halberstam’s discussion, ‘queer’ refers to non-normative logics and organisations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time. ‘Queer time’ refers to those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodemism once it leaves the temporal frames of normative reproduction. ‘Queer space’ refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage, and the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counter-publics (Halberstam, Judith, 2005, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York University Press: New York, p.6). The term ‘postmodernism’ is in relation to new forms of cultural production that emerge alongside what political theorist Fredric Jameson calls the "logic" of late capitalism in Postmodernism… (Jameson, Fredric, 1991, reprinted in 1997, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

15 queer time, it can be suggested that there are other ways of understanding the non- normative behaviours that have clear links to queer subjects. Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction22 . They also develop according to other logics of location, movement, and identification. Scholar Steve Pile refers to it as “geographies of resistance”23 . In order to create and maintain new spaces, queers need to firstly imagine such spaces24 ; we have to find out where they are, and how they can be sustained and supported. Secondly, we need to theorise these new spaces. Lastly, we have to avoid nostalgia for what has disappeared while creating a new formulation for future spaces and architectures. Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled 1992-95 managed to engage with this re-imagination of space, constructing a queered space that stood as its own; separate from the world. An architectural choice of abstraction that compresses queer time and space into a manifested object, rejecting normative recognition in place of a condensed complexity. My practice seeks to similarly achieve these forms of queered formulations in space, moving towards queered methods of visibility.

22 Obviously not all queer people live their lives in radically different ways from their heterosexual and heteronormative counterparts, but part of what can make queerness compelling as a form of self-description is the potential it has to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space (Halberstam, 2005, pp.1-2). 23 Pile, Steve, 1997, ‘Introduction: Opposition, Political Identities, and Spaces of Resistance’, In Geographies of Resistance, (ed) Keith, Michael, London: Routledge, p.6. 24 Berlant, Lauren and Warner, Michael, Winter 1998, ‘Sex in Public’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2, (Intimacy), pp.558-60.

16 1.2_rush through my watery hole_

“….saturating the space with bodily matter……as overflowing or flowing over…..It matters how a body arrives at a place.” 25

In the previous chapter 1.1, the situationality of water and its ability to act as both a locational conduit for emotions such as shame and regret was discussed in relation to strategies for queering specific built environments. This chapter continues this discussion by expanding upon themes of reframed and reconsidered intent in such human-made structures, to outline processes of orientated queer visibility. By moving towards an understanding of the gap that seems to exist between heteronormative26 space and queer bodies it raises the question: how do those invisible bodies and thoughts flow into that gap?

Familiarity is often shaped by the feeling of space or by how spaces impress upon bodies. The familiar is an effect of inhabitance; we are not simply in the familiar, but rather the familiar is shaped by actions that reach out toward objects that are already within reach. This requires a framework of orientation27 , which involves aligning body and space; only knowing which way to turn once it is known which way it is already facing. It is the means by which material bodies can impact each other, reaching towards and beyond a physical connection. In my practice it can be likened to a force with a gravitational pull, that brings things into its reach; a celestial force such as a

25 Ahmed, Sara, 2006, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University Press, p.11. 26 By heteronormativity it mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality not only coherently organised as a sexuality, but also privileged….Because homosexuality can never have the invisible and tacit rightness that heterosexuality has, it would not be possible to speak of ‘homonormativity’ in the same sense (Warner, Michael, 1991, Fear of a Queer Planet’, Social Text, no. 29, pp.3-17). 27 Philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his essay What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?, defines what it means to be orientated in the first place. Describing walking blindfolded into an unfamiliar room, he argues that to become orientated in this situation depends on knowing the difference between the sides of the body “Only by reference to these sides, can you know which way you are turning’’(Kant, Immanuel, 1786, What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?, cited in Casey, Edward, 1997, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Berkeley: University of California Press, p.20). Such a difference, shows that orientation is not so much about the relation between objects that extend into space; rather, orientation depends on the bodily inhabitance of that space.

17 black hole. In wetness quartet there are many examples of long gazing shots down into a void, the audience unsure of what lies on the other side (figure 4). Expanses of space that draw not only the physical elements of their surrounds into them, namely water, but also the viewers eye. Scale is often unknown, a spurt of water could be from a hose or a dam. The size of the hole can not be determined from its relation to water, and vice versa. There is no up or down, one orientates oneself in relation to that hole. The hole becomes the focal point in which all, not only flows to, but flows through. The work of inhabiting space like this involves a dynamic negotiation between what is familiar and unfamiliar, as such it is still possible for the world to create new impressions on us. Extending into space extends what is nearly familiar or what is nearly within reach. Space then becomes a question of ‘turning’, which not only allow things to appear, but also enable us to find our way through the world by situating ourselves in relation to such things28 . The concept of orientation allows us then to rethink the phenomenology of space— that is, how space is dependent on bodily inhabitance.

figure 4. Kieran Bryant, how do you think this is the deepest hole in the water? (video still), 2017, single-channel video, colour, sound, 00:08:58 loop

28 Ahmed, 2006, pp.1-3.

18 Phenomenology29 provides a set of tools for thinking about orientation. As a system of thought, it emphasises the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds. Working with a phenomenological model of emotions and objects, for example, shame is felt, through and relation to something/ other things. Bringing this model of emotional intentionality together with a model of affect as contact allows me to understand the way we are affected by what we come into contact with. So, we might feel shame for an object that approaches us. The approach is not simply about the arrival of an object, it is also how we turn toward that object. The feeling of shame is directed toward that object, while it also apprehends the object in a certain way, as being shameful. The timing of this apprehension matters. For an object to make this impression is dependent on past histories, a surface leaving an impression as of flesh30. Emotions can also shape what bodies do in the present, involving affective forms of re-orientation. Bodies are not just moved by the orientations they have; rather, the orientations we have toward others shape the contours of space by affecting relations of proximity between bodies.

This understanding of shaped space can be seen in Kilian Rüthemann’s Untitled (Valentine) (2011). This work is a room-sized installation that orientates audience passivity and sensitivity towards the emotionally loaded liquid at its centre. With a slowly curving mass of bitumen sheeted plywood set atop angled metal stands, the eye is drawn to a thin stream of water spouting from just underneath its surface (figure 5). The delicacy of the fountain erupting out of the overwhelming yet shallow sheeting combined with the nod to some romantic misadventure via the work’s title, gives a poignancy matched by its starkness. In this way, Rüthemann creates a space that alters how bodies are orientated. These orientations shape not only how space is inhabited, but how it comprehends shared inhabitance and re-positioned inhabitance.

29 Phenomenology is understood as a disciplinary field in philosophy, practiced through the works of such philosophers as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The discipline of phenomenology can be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness; literally the study of ‘phenomena’. Comprehending the appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things; thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. (Smith, David Woodruff, 2013, ‘Phenomenology’, The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, (ed) Zalta, N Edward, Stanford University Press, pp.2-3). 30 Ahmed, 2006, p.2.

19 Image removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find image online via link: http://ruethemann.net/-download/ Kilian_Ruethemann_e_web.pdf figure

figure 5. Kilian Rüthemann, Untitled (Valentine), 2011, steel, plywood, bitumen sheeting, water pumping system, 1200 x 980 x 190 cm, water jet: 600 cm, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, Germany

A queered phenomenology can reveal how social relations are arranged spatially, and how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths. By bringing what is behind to the front it can be possible to queer it, creating a new angle or slant. A queered phenomenology can start by re-orientating attention toward different objects, bodies or sites that deviate or are less proximate. Phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discusses such queer31 elements as ‘slantwise’ in his text, Phenomenology of Perception. There are moments in the text where the world no longer appears the right way up. Debating a number of spatial experiments that contrive a situation so that a subject does not see straight, he asks how the subject’s relation to space is reorientated

31 When Merleau-Ponty discusses queer effects he is not considering queer as a sexual orientation, but this thesis will. Turning to the etymology of the word ‘queer’, which comes from the Indo-European word ‘twist’. A spatial term, which then gets translated into a sexual term; a term for a twisted sexuality that does not follow a straight line (Cleto, Fabio, 2002, ‘Introduction: Queering the Camp’, Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, (ed) Cleto, Fabio, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p.13). Sexuality itself can be considered a spatial formation not only in the sense that bodies inhabit sexual spaces (Bell, David and Gill, Valentine (eds), 1995, Mapping Desires: Geographies of Sexualities, London: Routledge), but also in the sense that bodies are sexualised through how they inhabit space.

20 ‘‘After a few minutes a sudden change occurs: the walls, the man walking around the room, and the line in which the cardboard falls become vertical’’ 32.

This reorientation, which can be described as the ‘becoming vertical’ of perspective, means that a queered effect is overcome and objects in the world no longer appear as ‘slantwise’. It considers how subjects ‘straighten' any queer effects, asking what the tendency to see straight suggests about the relationship between bodies and space. By showing how structures of heteronormativity operate as a straightening device, which rereads signs of queer desire as deviations from the straight line33, it suggests that queer phenomenology may offer an approach to sexual orientation by rethinking the place of the object in sexual desire.

For Merleau-Ponty, the sexual body is one that shows the orientation of the body as an ‘‘object that is sensitive to all the rest’’34, a body that feels the nearness of the objects with which it coexists. A body in which the desire comes first, this must always exceed the object. His ‘sensitive body’ can then be queered, or it be suggested that such a body is already queer in its sensitivity ‘to all the rest’. Merleau-Ponty’s model of sexuality as a form of bodily projection can show how orientations exceed the objects they are directed toward, becoming ways of inhabiting and coexisting in space.

“What counts for the orientation of my spectacle is not my body as it in fact is, as a thing in objective space, but as a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal ‘place’ defined by its task and situation. My body is wherever there is something to be done’’ 35

The notion of slant-ness and the use of line and form to re-orientate queerness into space is a useful framework for discussing my practice. As part of my solo exhibition grappling on the precipice of the squirt and stream shown at Verge Gallery in Sydney in

32 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1945, Phenomenology of Perception, translated in 2002, Smith, Colin, London: Routledge Kegan and Paul, p.289 33 Noting queer universalism, which argues that queer is the starting point - rather than the deviation (Menon, Madhavi, 2015, Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism, University of Minnesota Press, p.127). 34 Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p.183. 35 Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p.291.

21 2018, I exhibited this is that hose. This work is a floor-based installation composed of a large sheet of black marbled vinyl with a tight white edging. Lying across this flooring is a tangle of grey hose, atop a puddle of water, evoking a slowly leaking watery system (figure 6) (figure 7). Nearby and skewly projected on the cornered wall in front, and mirroring the angle of the vinyl, is the video work wetness quartet. The entire space is in service of the slant, from the rigid lines of the vinyl edging, to the fuzzed-out lines of the projection as the images themselves contract and expand along the lines of the gallery wall, the sensuous snaking lines of the hose, and the soft murkiness of the almost imperceptible puddle. It all works as a form of opposition to the ‘becoming vertical’ as described by Merleau-Ponty. They create a space of resistance both within and before that idea; queer resistance orientated towards a heteronormative critique and also, a wilful denial of the straight36 . A space that, in comparison to other alternative forms of world-making within queer cultures, is knowingly settled for an allotted amount of time.

figure 6. Kieran Bryant, this is that hose (install view), 2017-18, vinyl, particle board, rubber hose, water, stools, dimensions variable, Verge Gallery, Sydney, Australia

36 In terms of a relationship between opposition and authority, scholar Steve Pile notes that "the map of resistance is not simply the underside of the map of domination” (Pile, 1997, p.6).

22 figure 7. Note: this incarnation of this is that hose was first installed at Cité Internationale des arts Paris 2017

As Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner suggest in Publics and Counterpublics, the ‘‘queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematised lines of acquaintance, projecting horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies’’ 37. That these queer spaces have to inhabit public spaces in lieu of privacy is inherently heteronormative, as only certain bodies are allowed to be private. As such queer spaces are both public and fleeting, they cannot exist in the same way private property can38. The gallery is one such space.

It is important that queer worlds are not idealised or simply located in an alternative space. If the spaces that are created are fleeting and marginal, then it is as much a sign of how heteronormativity shapes the contours of inhabitable space as it is about the promise of queer. As the two zones of visibility are now produced in the gallery are buttressed against each other it allows a gap, a slip in which visibility can pass through. A leak of thought and image that is queerly fluid is able to project itself into the space

37 Berlant and Warner, Winter 1998, p.558. 38 “Making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation. These intimacies do bear a necessary relation to a counterpublic; an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation” (Berlant and Warner, Winter 1998, p. 558).

23 and be reflected back. The projected video spills down onto the puddle of water, both reflecting its own image and capturing it. This slippage allows for multiplicities of visual queerness, rivulets collecting in pools and diffusing into the air, the leak eventually saturating the gallery. Merleau-Ponty judges something to be queer in that moment when it becomes distant, oblique, and begins to slip away. The question then becomes not so much what is a queered orientation, but how bodies are orientated toward queer moments when spaces slip. Is there a retention of these objects by bringing them back in “line”? Or are they let go, allowing them to acquire new shapes and directions?39 A queer phenomenology might involve an orientation toward what slips or flows, which allows a slippage such as water to pass through, gushing between the gaps of a sluice or into the gaping hole of a sewer drain. It functions as a disorientation device; not able to overcome the gaping dis-alignment in those human-made holes, thus allowing the oblique to open up another angle in a space.

39 Ahmed, 2006, p.68.

24 b) you escaped, but did you? the residue coats your back. your legs. your head. your hole

I thought it was nice. That’s all. I was trying to make things nice. You can’t. You just can’t all right. I’m sorry. Things aren’t nice anymore.

TRANSCRIBED FROM RABBIT HOLE (2010)

Do you really think that i don’t see him every second of every day? I will beat myself up about it forever i’m sure Just like everything else I could have prevented It feels like maybe I don’t feel badly enough for you Maybe I’m not feeling enough

25 I’ve lost the use of my heart

But I’m still alive

26 Still looking for the life The endless pool on the otherside

27 Spit in my mouth Spit in my hole | | |

Melancholic dread and desire

01.11.17 I have been struggling to keep the thoughts of what happened out of my head. I will go to therapy again when I get back. The trauma is deep. I had pushed so much down. Why does trauma act that way. Or why does the body respond that way……… 14.12.17 Thoughts of Him and what He did to me constantly swirl in my head. Amorphous shapes that flicker into life as quickly as they disappear. But that’s what they feel like - fleeting thoughts that I can half heartedly pretend didn’t happen. But they are changing. They are hardening. Solidifying. Taking form. They feel like keloid scar tissue tightening over my mind and body. Flaring up like some arthritic ligament or joint. I need a way out. The ‘safe place’ the therapist spoke of. The glitches that take me back to that reality are frightening and all too real.

I want control of my memories.

28 And He would be the one to hold me down kiss me so hard take my breath away And after, wipe away the tears just close my eyes dear

Into night I wander it’s morning that I dread another day of knowing the path I fear to tread

Into the sea of waking dreams follow without pride nothing stood between us And He won’t be denied.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Possession paraphrased

Sarah McLachlan

29 I awoke from the dream to turn around in my room with His face startlingly me. Another phantom. Another night terror. The spectre that haunts me in this life + my sleep.

Carrying my shoes, running from him, scared for my life or what could happen

It’s out of body, you’re out of your body. Who’s this body - running from his boyfriend. Who’s this person. I’m not him, that’s not me.

————————————————————-

Amy Schumer - Oprah Winfrey Supersoul Conversations 2018 prt 2 paraphrased

30 She left her husband. He was a horrible man. He used to beat her. It started right after their honeymoon. At first he was charming, tender. But it all changed. He said if she left him he would punish her. And he meant it. His punishments were terrible. He would never let her go. Said he could find her anywhere. She risked everything. Escaped. Started a new life.

How long did you stay with him?

Too long.

It’s easier to leave isn’t it?

No.

31 1.3_heavy water_

“I very often use a deliberately elliptical, almost poetic register and manner of address.”40

Flowing and forming letters into words, amorphous wateriness corralling itself into text, this chapter assembles water though text and text through water. Beyond situating water in physical locations and seeping into particular images, it can be placed with words to impart a liquid textuality. The use of text makes it possible to leave ajar the door of a type of comprehension which overwhelms the cognitive for the emotive, sensual and poetic. Liquid text can evoke a certain type of spatiality, and specifically, a queer use of space. Rather than representing, it is more a matter of expressing; experiencing rather than discerning, or at least trying to discern after having already experienced. The presence of the text-image can be seen to be neither one nor the other: neither text nor image. Folding, bending, cut or immersed, the writing is that of the trace, before the arrival of the word and the logocentrism which it inevitably entails. Liquid text opens up a spacing out in time and in the word, as well as an openness to the first exteriority encountered in the other41.

In a conversation with Ingrid Luguet-Gad in Revue Zéro Deux, artist Paul Maheke discusses his use of text-based work in his solo exhibition Acqua Alta (2017), and articulates water’s connectivity to text. The exhibition is part of a larger project «Becoming a Body of Water or How to Unlearn Resistance as Opposition» (2016-17), which occurred over a series of locations. Grounded in Astrida Neimanis’ research on hydrofeminism, and the scientific explorations of Dr. Masuru Emoto and Dr. Luc Montagnier into memory of water42, the space is awash in an amniotic red glow, fluid hangings erase right angles, and droplets lying on the smooth surfaces. It feels like everything is already in the process of liquefaction. Meheke uses properties such as transparency or sensitivity in objects like sheer printed text banners and decals to

40 Maheke, Paul, 2017, ‘Paul Maheke', Revue Zéro Duex, Issue 82 Summer. 41 Luquet-Gad, Ingrid & Maheke, Paul, 2017, ‘Paul Maheke', Revue Zéro Duex, Issue 82 Summer. 42 Fauq, Cédric, April-June 2017, PAUL MAHEKE/«Aqua Alta», Galerie Sultana, exhibition press release.

32 subvert their original function and evoke an atmospheric saturated space. His text plays a fundamental part in this. Cast on the floor and ceiling and in recesses, Maheke’s textual prints also oblige the viewer to become aware of the experience of a space (figure 8). He writes some and borrows from others; it acts as a means of opening the work up to a series of possibilities and other places. His sculptural pieces are almost pretexts for the texts to appear, they have the function of display and container to be able to show those words.

Image removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find image online via link: http://www.galeriesultana.com/shows/paul- maheke

figure 8. Paul Maheke, Acqua Alta (install view), 2017, wood, printing on fabrics, adhesive letters, resin on fabric, glass sconces, threaded rods, soundtrack (14:48 min), 200 x 280 x 230 cm, Galerie Sultana, Paris, France

“…..I always try to do things in such a way that these quotations and fragments are visually interesting”43

43 Maheke, 2017, Issue 82 Summer.

33 Maheke’s use of fragmentary writing, which proceeds by circumvolutions and lurks in the margins, immediately forces us to undertake a certain circuit in space. The writing implores us to look closely. Even when it is deconstructed, the sentence makes us decipher it; a circular way of looking, scanning the piece, is enough to embrace a textual panorama. These stories are already corporeal so that as we read by raising or lowering our heads they speculate about embodied stories and stories which are bodies. This datum of an already penetrated space of networks of power and knowledge, of motifs of exclusion and violence, knowingly acts like a back drop for the perception of his work44 .

“Making reference to water—an element which surrounds and forms our bodies—as a form of feminist, political and poetic matter, is obviously a strategy which I have adopted to define other ways and viewpoints for talking about these disempowered bodies, without stumbling into the pitfalls of victimization..…”45

Within my own practice, I engage with these penetrated spaces, using queer bodies, my own body, as a site of shame, regret and indeed, violence. Shown as part of my solo exhibition grappling on the precipice of the squirt and stream at Verge Gallery in Sydney, how empty of me to be so full of you is a text-based work that gives a glimmer of an underlying regret. The work is a banner that depicts a blown-out image of dark water, ocean waves at night. Water seemingly stretching endlessly. Nestled between the waves is the phrase “how empty of me to be so full of you” (figure 9), text taken directly from Janet Jackson’s Interlude - Full46. In the context of the surrounding work and themes of the exhibition it speaks of being inundated, flooded with the liquid presence of someone else. There is a point where you are so full that there is no room for your own being. This begins to touch on an underlying thread in this body of work which involves the escape from an abusive romantic partner; a partner that allowed for little to no self-representation, actively minimising one’s body and your emotions— draining your waters and sealing the hole. The mixture of obliqueness and directness in this text not only allows an entry point for the audience, when compared to the non- representational imagery presented throughout wetness quartet, but also enables the work to be understood with multiple readings.

44 Luquet-Gad & Maheke, 2017, Issue 82 Summer. 45 Maheke, 2017, Issue 82 Summer. 46 Jackson, Janet, 1997, Interlude: Full, Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopaedia (Online), https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Velvet_Rope, accessed 15.02.18.

34 figure 9. Kieran Bryant, how empty of me to be so full of you (install view), 2018, digital print on polysilk with cord, 200 x 135 cm

This use of text to elicit an emotional space and a queering of space, is continued in my video work I like a man who dresses for clamming47. This work consists of a supercut narrative taken from the film Sleeping with the Enemy48. It seeks to use the film’s melodrama as a device to examine the space between abuse and absurdity. Made with a watery eye and through an autobiographical lens, it is an exercise in re- textualising personal histories and pop cultural markers—putting them in reach of one another. Following the heroine’s journey of escape from domestic violence it clings to particular moments of trauma, providing snapshots via fragments of text (figure 10). Whether it be an abusive exchange between herself and her husband or a quiet moment of contemplation, these snapshots quickly and potently build a spatial story around the work and its intentions.

47 https://vimeo.com/263172076 48 Bass, Ronald, 1991, Sleeping with the Enemy, Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopaedia (Online), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_with_the_Enemy, accessed 22.06.18.

35 figure 10. Kieran Bryant, I like a man who dresses for clamming (video still), 2018, single channel video, colour, sound, 00:09:00 loop

36 c) crying and not knowing why. knowing exactly why and continuing to cry

“….it was only when I went to sleep that He took it.” [lie] Scared. I am scared of him.

Russian Roulette Rihanna ------Take a breath Take it deep Take a breath, take it deep

Even after marriage and kids, if she saw him anywhere - she would convulse and cry

On the rape of Natalie Wood by Kirk Douglas

37 //______I gave you \\ all I had inside And you took my ___ You took my ___

Keep crying Keep trying On this ___

Where? Show me! Where is this ___? I can’t see it. I can’t touch it. I can’t feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words…. But I can’t do anything with your easy words.

Closer (2004) ------

38 And you can see my heart beating—— Say a prayer to yourself That I’m terrified but I’m not leaving He says close your eyes I know that I must pass this test Sometimes it helps———- So just pull the trigger And then I get a scary thought

——————- That he’s home

Need I remind you how I worried? No - You reminded me enough the night I came back. You aren’t suggesting I enjoyed that? Oh God, no. That would make you a monster.

No…… Stop. No. Stop, please….. I can’t. I can’t. It’s not right. Stop! Stop it! Stop it! I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

God, what did he do to you?

Please go. Please. Please. Oh God, please. I’m sorry but you have to go.

39 - Leaves me numb after onslaught

40 What about the times you lied to me What about the times you said no one would want me What about all the shit you’ve done to me What about that, what about that What about the times you yelled at me What about the times I cried you wouldn’t even hold me What about those things What about that, what about that What about the times you put it in What about the times you kept on when I said no more please What about those things What about that, what about that What about the times you shamed me What about the times when you said you didn’t fuck him He only gave you head What about that, what about that

What about the times you swore at me What about the times you said I wasn’t enough for you What about all the abuse you’ve done to me What about that, what about that What about the times you broke my heart What about the times you tricked me with your mind games What about those things What about that, what about that What about the times I was asleep What about the times I woke up with you inside me What about those things What about that, what about that What about the time you pinned me down on the beach What about the time when I screamed no stop please What about when you said it’s what I wanted What about that, what about that

41 Tryin’ to get control Pressure’s takin’ its toll

Caught up in your show Yeah at least now I know

When I fell back asleep he raped me almost immediately in the dream. Just like reality. Grabbing me through sleep. He’s nothing if not consistent (——).

I don’t need eyes to see I felt you touchin’ me

Now that I’m wakin’ up I still feel the blow But at least now I know

If he’s asleep ----- that’s a no. I thought you knew

A rage that stays. You don’t lose that Push that anger down.

------

Amy Schumer - Oprah Winfrey Supersoul Conversations 2018 prt 1

42 17.05.18

I dreamt of him. Trying to hide. Running and hiding. change states - melt into a puddle

But he could always find me. He tracked me. He had a tracker on me. An app. I couldn’t escape. What did he want to do to me when he found me. Why am I still frightened? i know why When the dream ends and I wake up. I have that fear. It doesn’t leave.

waking out of it naked + begging ______You always told me I begged for it ______

43 How does it feel when your abuser loses interest in you so rapes you less but with more ferocity? interest? dis-interest? - I think even he was getting sick of the abuse by the end.

44 Oh baby baby, how was I supposed to know That something wasn’t right here

45 Ch. 2. hole as sticky portal: connective modes of a fluid body experience

Ch.2.1_this is all kinds of shit_

“My ‘little squirt’ has ceased to have more than a nominal use. The water either remains altogether or comes out as innocent as it entered”49 .

In common use, the word ‘hole’ is typically defined as an opening into or through something, a perforation of the solid50 . However, rather than simply being a useless void, or ‘lack’, a hole can be considered a site of escape51 . This chapter seeks to understand how the hole can exist as a portal within the queer body; as both a site to connect the differing aspects of a fluid body experience, and a site of shamed desire. Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories of desire are particularly helpful for understanding how the liminal zone of the hole and orifice can be negotiated.

When constructing our sense of reality we establish coordinates of desire to locate ourselves in relation to objects of desire. Desire relies on lack, distance, and imagination. To gain proximity to what we desire threatens to uncover the hole that is necessary for our desire to persist. Ultimately this Lacanian formulation of desire is most interested not in fully acquiring the hole but in keeping distance, thus allowing desire to persist. Because desire is articulated through imagination and fantasy, it is driven to some extent by its own impossibility. Lacan developed the terms ‘objet a’ or ‘objet petit a’ to describe the unattainable object of desire, which is comparable to a hole in its voidness. Lacan states "The hole of the lack of the objet a would be located

49 Sedgwick, 2003, pp.49-50. 50 Moore, Bruce, 1999, The Australian Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, p.387. 51 In this paper the content and structural form of the narrative series of text is inherently linked to the hole as escape or portal. Existing as an autobiographical escape from trauma, the rape- led abuse reconfigures the hole from a site of shame to a receiver of that emotion. The text is structured in a way that allows for gaps and slippage, the reader is not led but must find their own path through the holes.

46 at the intersection of the fields of truth and knowledge”52 . This definition locates the object or hole as a locus of probing production, and suggests that at the centre of this unattainable object it would be need to be constantly filled “…by the different objets a, the breast, feces [sic], the penis, the gaze or the voice, objects that are in themselves caught in imaginary substitutions”53 . Lacan talks of a surface where "desire and reality" are "the right and the wrong sides"; however, the passage from one side to the other is unnoticeable, as if there were only one side, because "the relation of texture does not entail any break”54 . The sameness or lack of singularity of the hole and its associated representations can be perceived as a recognition of solidarity, acknowledging its contextualised meaning to the bodily orifices. The anus existing in that slick non- singularity speaks to its role as a queer hole.

The anus is situated as the key site in a queering of the hole, as discussed in the writings of Guy Hocquenghem. In his text Homosexual Desire, Hocquenghem unpacks the ways that the queer body, specifically the queer anus, is denied anal pleasure and erotism. He postulates that in typical queered male sexual development it is sublimated, repressed, or otherwise transformed. His detailed analysis of the anus and its connection with erotic life leads him to focus on that moment in development when defecation becomes a private event. At this moment, it becomes asocial55 . Pushed aside it is driven into the unconscious, where it is supposed to stay. Hocquenghem suggests that this creates a paradox: being associated only with waste, experienced only through the act of evacuation, anal erotic desires are sanitised and their dangerousness is tamed. The anus thus becomes private, secreted, known in shame, and expelled from social relations. When errant anal homoerotic desire reemerges, it creates a dangerously destabilising subject56 . The queer anus becomes not only a site of aberrant desire but also of shame. The yearning that dwells within that orifice is tied to excretory-led feelings of pleasure and repulsion, a sticky mixture that is conflicted in both its intention and outcome.

52 Lacan, Jacques, 2003, Le séminaire: Livre XIII: L’objet de la psychanalyse 1965-66 [trans.], p. 3, http://www.lacan.com/seminars3.htm, [accessed 23 September 2016]. 53 Lacan, 2003, p.3. 54 Lacan, 2003, p.3. 55 Hocquenghem, Guy, 1978, reprinted 1993, Homosexual Desire, Duke University Press, United States, pp.15-30. 56 Guss, R, Jeffrey, 2010, ‘The Danger of Desire: Anal Sex and the Homo/ Masculine Subject’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, ed.11:3, pp.126-127.

47 This grasp of anal dynamics can also be seen, albeit with a more subdued tone, in Mikala Dwyer’s work that utilises the implicit shame that faeces extruded from that hole possess to explore its material and poetic qualities. Faeces are metabolic waste excreted through the anus from bowels inside the body. Like the hole from which it appears, faeces are seen to be hidden private objects that have a certain amount of abject revulsion tied to them. Mikala Dwyer’s work Goldene Bend’er (2013) seeks to extrude shit as objects of transparent truth and poetic movement, instead of objects of disgust. Consisting of a large-scale installation, set with sculptural forms resembling chairs, video projection, and sculptural pieces of varying sizes, the work is awash in shades of golds and browns. On opening night costumed performers engage in what she calls a “shitting dance”57 . Professional ballet dancers are deployed in a sequence of circular moves resembling musical chairs combined with toilet-training, the principal direction of which is for each dancer to claim a seat and then defecate into a transparent canister beneath (figure 11). In his text Divine Shit, Edward Colless argues that Dywer’s shit is a truth because it is logically clear in its materiality, and anything but impenetrable58 .

“The shit in this exhibition is instead a type of wondrous substance: lucid if unidentifiable, like manna or ambrosia. For like these foods of the gods, this shit is a substance without qualities, or more precisely is a substance for which qualities cannot be accounted for by mortals even as it is gifted to them. But it enriches and redeems”59 .

57 Colless.Edward, 2013, ‘Divine Shit’, Mikala Dwyer: Goldene Bend'er, exhibition catalogue, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, p.40. 58 Colless, 2013, pp.40-42. 59 Colless, 2013, p.42.

48 Image removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find image online via link: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/mikala- dwyer-goldene-bender/

figure 11. Mikala Dwyer, Goldene Bend’er, 2013, video and live performance installation, dimensions variable

Dwyer presents faeces as objects that are able to signify more than just disgust, or shame from their source of origin. In this work, the enrichment bestowed by this shit can be treated as essentially aesthetic: this human waste deposited by the performer into the chair-like object becomes something else; an indefinable lump similar to the small sculptures dotted around the installation. These deposits speak of an artistry of effortless plasticity, the anonymous materiality of compost forming in a cesspit. Yet they possess a lucidity that is like divine glory. The poetic qualities presented are formless but still allow for an exploration of the physical; outed texture and its impact on queer contextualisation of the hole.

“Liquidity/solidity, resilience/absorption, bounce/brittleness, glistening/dullness, rigidity/ softness, smoothness. coarseness ———“60

60 Bora.R, 1997, ‘Outing Texture’, In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, (ed) Sedgwick, Kosofsky, Eve, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p.107.

49 In his text Outing Texture, Renu Bora observes that to perceive texture is always to be “immersed in a field of active narrative hypothesising, testing, and re-understanding of how physical properties act and are acted upon over time”61. The textural interactions in Dwyer’s work are a result of artist and audience actively engaging with the ‘narrative hypothesising’ Bora speaks of, seeking to consider how the physicality of faeces impact the role of the hole in queer identity. Bora makes an interesting distinction between two types of texture, which he labels ‘texture’ and texxture’. ‘Texture’, defiantly or invisibly blocks such information, whereas ’texxture’ is dense with offered information about how - substantively, historically, materially - it came into being62. Dwyer’s work can have this textural distinction applied to it. Although heavily engaged with ‘texxture’, she uses it to subvert understanding back to ‘texture’. By seemingly giving enough information to the audience she is allowing them to construct a narrative that may or may not correlate with the artists intention. Dwyer is strategic in her use of textured information. In presenting faeces as lynchpins to the performance and sculpture found in the work she allows her audience to hold the same narrative. Ultimately wanting shit to be shit, its inherent poetics and materiality are as clear as the role of shame and its ties to the anus.

This focus on the shamed anus is a means to reclaim the hole, to make it public. A celebratory hole-y huzzah. There is a rich history of shame surrounding that orifice but it can be shifted, by discussing it. By wiping its muddy bud and shifting, not away but towards. Shame is a force that both Hocquenghem and Dwyer banished from the anus but my practice seeks to put it back in. Not as a repressive force, but a reparative one. The anus, and indeed the hole, functioning as that aforementioned conduit; capable of receiving shame (and regret), rather than being the source of it. The holes present in wetness quartet, both human-made and of human flesh, provide that space to pass into and through. Bottomless dam intakes, churning sewer grates, squirty fountain tubes, surging risen canal locks, my own anus filling with water from a douche. All different yet the same, each receives shame and engages with a shameful dynamic through the eyes of the audience. A melange of self-shamed holes.

61 Sedgwick, 2003, p.13. 62 Bora, 1997, pp.98-99.

50 d) telling yourself gets you halfway there. helping hands do the rest

It’s so tiring to be terrified all the time

51 Saying goodbye to old ghosts, you know.

Still spooked by ghosts huh? They’re all around me.

Closemic-edMic-edclose whispered : :

Let the bad days happen and know that tomorrow will be better But will it?

52 As my life flashes before my eyes I’m wondering will I ever see another sunrise So many won’t get the chance to say goodbye But it’s too late to (sic) pick up (sic) think of the value of my life

It’s on It’s on this day This day of all days His fate becomes clear to him.

------

Nicole Kidman As Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway (1925) as The Hours (2002) paraphrased.

53 At a point you have to say STOP. But how do you say STOP. And how do you not blame yourself for not saying and understanding STOP.

Jo Thomas paraphrased. Metro Arts. Brisbane.

I think about forgiveness. Forgiving myself. There is a part of me that blames me. Because I went back.

I allowed myself to be manipulated back into a relationship that only became moreviolentmoreabusivemorefraughtwithdangerandcruelty ——————————————————

I didn’t know though. I didn’t sign up for that.

I expected to be safe.

What I want is the relief,

The relief I’ll feel when hearing those things actually happened. I didn’t dream it. I’m not crazy. The acknowledgement,

54 05.03.18

I saw them They saw me. At a party. And I survived. I live. I’m still here. The heavens didn’t shudder and the earth didn’t swallow me up. Does that maybe imply that his spectre, his memory, is more dangerous and terrifying than he now.

He was shorter than I remember.

The lesson is ------____ doesn’t hurt. It’s not supposed to ______false

55 florrid (sic) fludity

Flushed feelings Rushed feelings

Don’t feel as though you need that. Fuck your white horse and a carriage*. Did you need that?

You can lie in a bed with a man and not sleep. Sleep but not fuck. Hold them tight and tender. Tender timings.

56 2.2_one foot stuck in the hole and you start to know_

“If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would be seen as it is.”63

As discussed in chapters 1.1 and 1.2, there is an artistic agency in re-examining and reconsidering sites of built environments by queering them; altering their ‘built’ intent to include bodies that were previously ignored. While that chapter focused on the properties of water and its literal insertion into re-positioned queer narratives as an agent of change, this chapter will discuss the notion of heterotopias64 as a product of ‘other’ space generation. New spaces of identity signification that contest the dominant identity forms that are generated and practice. Queered65 spaces that act with and within a dimension of resistance against particularly coded spaces, and actively keep areas open for practices of self-formation. To establish the relationship between sexual difference and (other)space, I am connecting the notion of heterotopia to the concept of the care of the self. This is simultaneously understood as an existential, aesthetic and political activity of creating difference. Stressing the dimension of resistance, the care of the self is interpreted as a queer practice that turns spatial politics of sexual difference into one of queering spaces66. This can be understood through activities that bend between heterotropic space, self-care, and the use of a queer body.

63 Jarman, Derek, 1993, Blue, courtesy of artist. 64 French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault used the term heterotopia, in his text Des espaces autres (Of Other Places), to describe places and spaces that function in non- hegemonic conditions. Existing as both a space of illusion that exposes real space, and to create real space - a space that is other. It is a physical representation or approximation of a utopia, or a parallel space that contains undesirable bodies to make a real utopian space possible. Using the mirror to illustrate the connection between utopias and heterotopias, Foucault described the mirror as a place without place, a utopia. However, as a heterotopia the mirror does exist, "where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy" (Foucault, 1986 [1997], pp.20-22). But a person can come back to themselves from this virtual place. It is both utterly real and utterly unreal, "since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there" (Foucault, 1986 [1997], p.22). 65 The term ‘queer’ can be read as heterotopic. It is at odds with definition and allergic to any kind of stabilising, as it tries to escape the settling discourses and forms of living and is tending “toward across formulations: across genders, across sexualities, across genres, across perversions” (Kosofsky Sedgwick, quoted in Ziarek, Plonowska, 1998, Gombrowicz’s Grimaces. Albany, NY: State University of New YorkPress, p.18). 66 Steyaert, Chris, 2010, ‘Queering Space: Heterotopic Life in Derek Jarman’s Garden’, Gender, Work & Organisation, Vol.17, pp.47-48.

57 In this sense, the concept of heterotopia is related to and developed through the garden and gardening practice of Derek Jarman (1942–1994). Blending painting, film- making, writing, designing and gardening, Jarman was a cross-disciplinary artist who explored spatial sensitivity as he worked to encapsulate the essence and experience of a particular place or event. In the last stage of his life, deteriorating with AIDS, Jarman moved to a place called Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent (1986-1994), where he designed and cultivated a garden (figure 12). This garden and the gardening it required formed a fluid space that allowed him to come to terms with his life and approaching death, and to remain artistically active. It can be used to illustrate how heterotopic space as theorised by Michel Foucault67 can help articulate queer space and to point especially at the subversive nature of heterotopism.

Image removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find image online via link: https://www.gardenista.com/posts/garden-visit- derek-jarmans-prospect-cottage-at- dungeness/

figure 12. Derek Jarman, Prospect Cottage,1986-94, Dungeness, United Kingdom

67 Foucault suggests that the heterotopia has a material presence as a ‘real place’ that is marked by a mixed joint experience. It becomes not only an axiomatic space of difference or otherness but also a radical inversion of other sites (Gandy, Matthew, 2012, ‘Queer Ecology: nature, sexuality and heterotopic alliances, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol.30, pp.6-7).

58 Jarman's garden may be characterised as heterotopic because it alters and upsets the concept of a garden itself. Seemingly not suitable for gardening, not only for reasons surrounding fecundity and infertility but because of its proximity to the Dungeness nuclear power station, the land is a sandy intermediate space which changes into the beach and the ocean. Stretching around the house the flat landscape is not a romantic scene, scattered with huts, pylons, overhead cables and power lines. But it is open “and it smells good….Mainly of the sea, of course, but also of flowers and plants in their season.”68 . Choosing a setting with no boundaries, where everything is an edge: shingle, sea, sun, wind all shifting and changing; it is fluid by design, having no clear structure or plan beyond Jarman's thoughts. He re-imagined this infertile parcel of no- man’s land69 with another use and another kind of garden than that expected. He created a human-made space in the shadow of urban detritus, altering the purpose of the area and how it can be imagined, and by whom. A space of heterotopic deviation; one in which living outside and against a societal norm became possible and from where Jarman reinforced his queer activism and political activity70 . A discursive methodological zone that contradicts or contests ordinary experience and how they are framed; this heterotopia points at the ‘other’ of familiar discourses71 by unfolding a non- place within language. With that in mind, it can be seen that the garden formed a compensatory space for the actioning of self-care methods surrounding a queer body.

In Foucault’s writings ‘the care of the self’ is implied to mean finding freedom within power relations. Always at the edge of our freedom, this freedom is at the edge of our limits. If power and freedom presuppose each other the autonomy of the subject is not presupposed in freedom, one has to work actively to gain freedom72 . There is only a context of power relations when subjects are free.

68 Lloyd, Christopher, 1996, Wollen, R. (ed.), The Jarman garden experience, Derek Jarman: A Portrait, London: Thames and Hudson, pp. 147–52. 69 Was the selection of this ‘no-mans land’ a sly wink and attempt by Jarman to queer the most unlikely of sites? 70 Steyaert, 2010, pp.48-51. 71 Steyaert, 2010, p.52. 72 Foucault, Michel, edition 1990, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, New York: Vintage Books, p. 83.

59 “[t]hought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem……We should permanently question the experience in which we find ourselves.” 73

Such freedom is an effect of relating to others and to oneself. By participating in ever- changing positioning, individuals have to find themselves in relation to others. That is why power dynamics cannot be frozen or fixed, but need to be liquid and ephemeral74., Gardening is interpreted as a caring of the self in Jarman’s case, something he undertook to deal with the new limit on his life. Faced with the promise of death, he seemed to make gardening into a meeting between his living and dying, where they could communicate and flow into each other until their walls of resistance had eroded.

This account of Jarman’s garden is one of queering space through interweaving personal, poetic and political elements into a heterotopic subjectivity. Heterotopias are also linked to slices of time according to Foucault; heterochronies75. Moments in which people radically split with traditional instances of time. Where time stands still or where one is in transition, for instance when walking through a garden. Other examples are libraries and museums that indefinitely accumulate time. Opposite to these are heterochronies linked to fleeting aspects of time, such as fairgrounds or festivals. They form spaces where change, transition and movement become possible76. Whatever form a heterotopia takes, the timing is based on “an ability to arrive at an absolute break with traditional experiences of time and temporality”77. Such a break with normal time was forced on Jarman by his health, which urged a new use of his time78. His last work Blue (1993) can be seen to have been created through this use of heterochronical time. An experimental autobiographical film, created a year prior to his death from AIDS-related complications, plays with the expectations of the visual and its expected revelations, its role within language communication, and memory. If a heterotopia can

73 Foucault, Michel, 1997, P. Rabinow(ed.), Ethics: Essential Works on Foucault: 1954–1984, Vol. 1, New York: New Press, p.117. 74 Foucault, 1990, p.90. 75 Foucault, 1986 [1997], p.270. 76 Foucault, 1986 [1997], p.270. 77 Soja, Edward, 1996, Thirdspace, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, p.160. 78 “I live on borrowed time. Therefore I see no reason in the world why my heart grows not dark. A cold wind blows tonight over this desolate island” Jarman, Derek, 1991, Modern Nature, London: Vintage.

60 and subverting away from normative expectations, then Blue aims to create a final other-ed space for the artist.

With Blue, Jarman abandons his collage-esque and exuberant film-making style to embrace an unchanging single screen of blue. As the auditory replaces the visual, our eyes swim through a pool searching out sound. It is a project that dramatically shifts from the prominence of the visual to the evocation of the visual in the mind through “sonic fragments and acoustic bricolage”78. In contrast, Jarman’s Garden79 offers little in the way of the auditory, instead relying upon a wholly visual narrative.

Blue opens with a black screen that slowly progresses to blue (figure 13). A bell tolls. All remains a solid blue. Instead of a collage of vision, a collage of sound, full and thick, which melts into the ear or violently stings, pricks and slices. We listen to blue hues: mechanical metallic sounds, a mournful trumpet, a crying oboe, the arpeggios of a harp, screeching cars, a coffee maker, whispers and aggressive angry taunts. Sounds of the sea and howling gale rip through the stasis of the blue screen. Sound and music act as a floating shadow to colour. Names of those who make Jarman feel ‘blue’ are reiterated over and over; the human voice intermingles with rasping electronic noises80. A fractured narrative starts to take place. We are presented with a scenario of being trapped in blue, forever awash in blue. Floating in the blue.

“Blue flashes in my eyes….the retina is destroyed, though when the bleeding stops what is left of my sight might improve. I have to come to terms with sightlessness” 81

78 Khalip, Jacques, 2010, ‘The archaeology of sound: Derek Jarman’s Blue and queer audiovisuality in the time of AIDS’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol.21: 2, pp.73–108. 79 Released in 1990 Garden is a virtually wordless 90-minute assemblage of turbulent images. It focuses on homosexuality and Christianity set against the backdrop of Jarman's home and garden in Dungeness, Kent (Maslin, Janet, 1991, ‘Derek Jarman’s ‘Garden’ Offers Visions of Decay’, The New York Times, Jan 17, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/17/movies/review-film- derek-jarman-s-garden-offers-visions-of-decay.html, accessed 07/08/2018). 80 Ashton, Jenna Carine, 2013, ‘Derek Jarman’s Blue: Negating the Visual’, Journal of Applied Arts & Health, Vol.3, p.296. 81 Jarman, 1993.

61 Image removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find image online via link: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/display/ derek-jarman-blue

figure 13. Derek Jarman, Blue (video still), 1993, 35mm film transferred to digital file, colour, sound, 01:15:00

In coming to terms with his loss of sight, Jarman turns to the aural. His film is seemingly empty of visual stimuli and yet it is emphatically visual. By leaving the screen a persistently unchanging blue, he is drawing attention to the problems of a cultural language that is directed by the visual. Disease; pain; suffering is not always visually apparent. Concealment is part of the social landscape, whether it be sexuality or abuse. The visual comes to take on a literal and heavily metaphorical meaning.

What then, is the aim of Blue, in its negation of the visual? The essence of easy apprehension and instant recall is lacking, quite deliberately. There can be no easy apprehension of the topic on which Jarman speaks; no single shot, or collage of moving images that can fully convey the diseased body in absolute decline. If the visual image disturbs, it emphasises that the absence of the visual is as equally powerful in its ability to trouble us. Not aiming to simply recall or represent a scene of pain and suffering, it aims to create a sensory experience within the viewer. Empathy, which may be felt on the viewing of an image is a passive response; we look, engage, but ultimately, we are safe in the knowledge that the image is just an image. Jarman’s

62 still blue screen, behind which unexpected sounds and voices emerge, offers no reassurance.

We place a great deal of faith in the visual in its ability to offer proof and evidence. What then of the blue screen? What ‘truth’ can we find in that? Essentially, none. None in the sense of normative historical methods, it is a different truth. Truth that exists outside those normative frameworks of representation, language and recognition. It is a truth, that while drawing from these systems, also distorts rather than focusing or revealing. All images exclude, something is always left out of the picture. The blue screen offers a statement; there are no images, no falsehoods, no limited perspectives to be found here. It excludes all83, and in doing so it offers the possibility of all to be considered, remembered84.

This is similar to the strategies used in my works w-a (the waves)85 / w-a (the lamp)86, a diptych of videos shown as part of a group show at Visual Bulk in Hobart. Although they use imagery, the images are reduced to a moment. Stretched out and slowed down, like scraping a memory along a muddy seabed. They carve out a watery space of their own with those memories, a heterotopic vision between the liquid. They depict shadowy ocean waves crashing against ominous rocks, slowly bleeding out of sight, and a scene from Sleeping with the Enemy, becoming gradually slowed. It is the moment when the heroine escapes her abusive husband by faking her own death in the surf and swimming to safety, guided by the lamp light from the beach87. These images are accompanied by my own voice, lowered in pitch and reverb, reciting text paraphrased from Janet Jackson’s What About88. Words describing the many ways in which she, and I, were violently treated by a romantic partner. The text here is invisible, no subtitles, an exercise in verbal tonality and texture. The words produce an aural sculptural form, giving a solid heaviness to the fluidity of the undulating images (figure 14) (figure 15). The theme of domestic violence and postscript introspection within

83 Jarman uses Yves Klein’s artificial ultramarine, IKB, International Klein Blue (Ashton, 2013, p. 301) in his own Blue. Yet this can be seen as an anti-Klein blue. It doesn’t try to include everyone under one umbrella, rather it demonstrates an exclusionary/inclusionary binary. 84 Ashton, 2013, pp.297-300. 85 https://vimeo.com/284685326 86 https://vimeo.com/284686133 87 Bass, Ronald, 1991. 88 Elizondo Jr.René, Harris III.James, Jackson.Janet & Lewis.Terry, 1997, What About, Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopaedia (Online), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Velvet_Rope, accessed 15.02.18.

63 these songs from Jackson’s album The Velvet Rope89 were key factors in the utilisation of the musical text in both works. The references to popular culture in this work, and throughout multiple other works, is a connective link to a series of text in this paper that form a loose autobiographical narrative, that not only re-frames escape from an abusive relationship but also re-contextualises that story into the research project. The text is composed of direct quotations and paraphrased excerpts from popular and contemporary cultural sources; and my own writings. These pieces of text borrowed from popular culture almost mimic a blue screen: operating as blankly loaded symbols of popular culture, intimately recognisable parts of an audience’s own personal experience in viewing that reference. They are multi-dimensional fragments which are layered with meaning to myself.

figure 14. Kieran Bryant, w-a (the waves) (video still), 2018, two-channel video, colour, sound, 00:05:13 loop

89 Jackson, 1997.

64 figure 15. Kieran Bryant, w-a (the lamp) (video still), 2018, two-channel video, colour, sound, 00:05:13 loop

The use of this text, and other modes of production in my practice, can be considered both a heterotopia within itself, and a connection to Jarman’s exclusionary/inclusionary binary. The text, the application of subtly guarded humour in the use of stock-footage of watery holes and popular culture references, the minimalist aesthetic, and personal performativity – these all combine to produce something that ‘excludes all’ but has multiple entry points. Light but heavy, silken yet rough, they work together to exist beyond a singularity. Akin to Jarman’s garden, the audience is ultimately confused to their place in space, if they are seeing and feeling the ‘right’ thing. Myself and Jarman’s heterotopias are invisible, not confined within tangible paradigms of physicality they could be walked right through without knowing. Yet they exist, operating and forming and re-forming. A queer space that exists in plain sight.

65 e) the water helps to float. floating in their reflection

It’s been hard for you. Honey, you’re gonna be fine. Inside, you always were. There’s nothing he or any man can do or say to take that away. You have yourself.

warm calm soothing balm sloughy supports like melt water

Helps against memory trauma like waves against mind hurricane storm “A storm is almost invariably pleasing when it is viewed at a distance of time through pictures or memories”

M.M. Strumia Moods of the Mountains and Climbers 1929

maybe this time

66 12.03.18

I was in a barn. searching for a way out. I turned the corner and He was there. Naked. Fisting a handsome man. More handsome than I. He looked at me. Knew I was there. Smirked. Smug while His hand pumped in and out. The handsome man seemed nice. He didn’t know what he was getting into. They finished and He came up to me. Preening. The handsome man put a shirt over his own head.

I just felt sad for Him. A dull pity. It was all He had.

I was at a sink. Trying to shove garbage down a waste disposal. He was behind me. His body pressuring my space. I focused on the waste disposal and knew that I was shoving my thoughts of Him into it. My fear, my regrets, my shames, my doubts.

Down into the disposal and out of my sink.

67 “I am strong. This happened to me. I didn’t cause this. I didn’t do it. This happened to me and it can happen to anybody”

Diane Sawyer ABC News Rihanna 2009

I managed to do it. Why didn’t I crumble? Why did I turn this horror into something? why how why how

And we both know all the truth I could tell I’ll just say this is “I wish you “Farewell”

68 28.05.18

The full stop has been placed at the end of the last sentence. And it was a sentence......

That avenue. Why did I move back. Three doors down. It was a halfway house. A dank swamp pit. It served a purpose. But it wasn’t great.

I hope that those memories continue to drift away, like mist across a peat bog.

I’ve been living water for the last 12+ months. Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink. I wouldn’t want to drink all that water that collected in the moisture trappers.

It’s silly but gulg gulg gulg It’s funny but those are the noises my old housemate made when he was looking the other way at what He was doing to me. In the same room as us gulg gulg gulg But wouldn’t say anything. Wouldn’t say anything when my head was forced down. Wouldn’t say anything. why.

So the water I live in is now only in me. I have a rising damp that is up to my tearducts.

But that’s ok. These waters aren’t stagnant.

69 Conclusion

This paper demonstrates how water, through its relationship with holes and orifices, can be a conduit of shame and regret in queered visibility and body dynamics. Through a combination of theoretical analysis of selected texts, critical discussion with varying artists’ work, and self-examination of my own practice, a discourse surrounding queer spatial situationally has been developed. By using human-made urban water systems as an extended metaphor for queer bodies, and situating those waters towards a process of examination that creates new sites of production and visibility for queer bodies, there can be a viable dynamic between queer orientated thought and heterotopic space and time. Placing text alongside water as liquid textuality has demonstrated to be invaluable in carving out emotional space, and a queered notion of that space. The hole, as anus, is demonstrated, firstly, as a locus of queer shame, then its receiver; whilst that shame is coupled with regret throughout the narrative series of text. This narrative series has acted as a surrogate internal dialogue within the paper, giving the reader a fleshy yet abstracted body to attach themselves to. The narrative flows through a maelstrom of an extended escape, both emotional and physical, to reach the calm waters of contemplative reflection. Through performance, found video, and popular cultural references I have developed a queerly fluid and minimal installation as well as process strategies for future works. Those of ambient recognition and realisation, wet with memory and forgetting, longing, loosing and letting go. As a source of queer space generation, the question can then be focused towards the generative powers of water and water’s flowing space through a hole to construct an understanding of queer visibility and embodied experience.

70 the other conclusion

will it ever stop has it stopped will my queerscape always be water damaged?

i’m ok, right?

sighing over the air ripples a hundred miles long wide the deepest ___ they say it’ll be ok so it must

this honestly helped.

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narrative a) goggles fog when you dive underwater. the fog of everything. you’ve been in the fog for too long

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78