Lewis Church, ‘My Womanly Story: Vaginal Davis in Conversation with Lewis Church’, PAJ 113, 38 (2016), 80-88
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1 No Discipline: The Post-Punk Polymath Lewis Alexander Church Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Department of Drama Queen Mary University of London May 2017 2 Statement of Originality: I, Lewis Alexander Church, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signature: Date: Details of collaboration and publications: Lewis Church, ‘My Womanly Story: Vaginal Davis in Conversation with Lewis Church’, PAJ 113, 38 (2016), 80-88. 3 Abstract Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz and Vaginal Davis are artists who each produced music, film, literature, performance, visual art and installation whilst participating in the subcultural communities of post-punk. This thesis frames them as post-punk polymaths, artists whose subcultural participation provides a link between their multiple artistic outputs. I position these artists in relation to the historical context of post-punk, and document its influence on both specific examples of their work and their artistic strategies more broadly. My original contribution is of a sustained process of attention to the work of these three artists that negotiates their personal antagonisms towards criticism and resistance to historicisation, the methodological challenge exemplified by their practice, and the critical potential of embracing this difficulty. Through an account of New York’s post-punk scene (the formative artistic environment of both Lunch and Wojnarowicz), I examine the way the material conditions of the subculture provoked an undifferentiated, multi-media practice. I explore Lunch’s work through this subcultural context, and the interrelations of her diverse outputs and intentional blurring of art and life in her public persona. Through the work of David Wojnarowicz, I explore the potential pitfalls of overdetermination, or confined articulations of his practice within popular criticism and academia. My third case study moves away from New York to focus on the work of Los Angeles post-punk artist Vaginal Davis, examining the responsibility subculturally invested artists may have in maintaining their own marginality, through a framing of Davis’s practice as self-sabotaging. My thesis therefore highlights the difficulty of rationalising these practices as objects of disciplinarily constituted analysis, the problematic nature of their omission or selective and incomplete engagement, and examines the potential of the term polymath to understand artists whose work fails to map on to the disciplinary remits of academic scholars, genre critics or popular historians. 4 Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 6 Chapter One - Lydia Lunch and The Lower East Side: Polymaths, Punk and Poverty 82 Chapter Two - David Wojnarowicz: Post-Punk and Political 159 Chapter Three - Vaginal Davis: Self-Sabotage and Subjectivity 242 Conclusion 321 Bibliography 334 5 Acknowledgements This project was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK (grant number: 1348881). Additional funds through the travel allowance program also supported my 2015 research trip to New York. Dominic Johnson supervised this project, and I am tremendously grateful for his insight, support and encouragement throughout. Thank you for everything. The Drama Department at Queen Mary is a very special environment to work in, and I would like to thank all the staff and students. To my fellow PhD candidates, it has been a privilege to be working alongside you. Extra thanks to Catriona Fallow and Eleanor Massie for reading parts of this research at varying stages of development, and Lynne McCarthy for study companionship in the final weeks. In New York, I offer my thanks to Marvin and the staff at the Fales Library and Special Collections of New York University for their expertise and conversation throughout my time there. Also to Kim and Carlos Sanabria, who make any trip to the city more fun, and to Lois Weaver, whose generosity allowed me to stay in the East Village I was writing about. One of the starting points for this project was a series of conversations with Ron Athey during my time working as his assistant, and I thank him for the opportunity and encouragement. Ron also introduced me to Vaginal Davis, whose artistic practice is a case study within this thesis, and I am delighted to now have as a pen- pal and count as a friend. I would also like to thank all my friends and family for their support, particularly my parents Martin and Fiona, and my sister Alice. Special thanks too to Dan Goodall, Peter Ballard, Sylvia Church, Anita Moss, Trevor White, Rebecca Fuller, Louise Mothersole, Lori E Seid, Nelly, Diana Damian Martin, Stacy Makishi and Rose Sharp. Finally, and most importantly, I thank Lauren Church, without whom none of this would have been possible and my life would be infinitely poorer. 6 Introduction: The Post-Punk Polymath In November 2016, I attended the opening of Capital Improvements at Emalin Gallery in East London, an exhibition of the work of New York-based artist Kembra Pfahler.1 The night ended with Pfahler screaming along to the sound of fingernails dragged across an amplified blackboard, to the few audience members who had remained until the very end of her performance. In this final moment, the artist was naked apart from thigh-high heeled patent boots and red grease-paint, which was rapidly sweating off under the bright lights of the tiny stage. An enormous black fright wig had been discarded earlier during her set of half-sung monologues, tableau vivants and group actions with her similarly painted and bewigged assistant performers. Pfahler is an artist who has been active as a producer of music, film, visual art and performance since 1978. This London exhibition was dominated by a plywood representation of the artist’s bedroom, lined with images of Pfahler in her trademark coloured body paint and black wig, unnerving children’s dolls similarly attired, a short video work, paintings, merchandise for her band ‘The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black’, and mugs adorned with stills of her sewn-up vagina from her performance in filmmaker Richard Kern’s The Sewing Circle (1985). A cramped stage was set up in the corner of the gallery, which a varied crowd expectantly assembled 1 Kembra Pfahler, Capital Improvements, 21 November 2016 to 21 December 2016, Emalin Gallery, London, UK. 7 before on the night of the opening from the advertised start time of six pm. Pfahler was listed as due to perform at around eight. The space rapidly became filled by friends, fans of her band, members of the established audience for live art in London and other artists, all of whom waited as the expected stage time came and went. As the delay extended past nine and the complementary beer ran out, rumours began to circulate amongst the audience that Pfahler had fallen asleep in her hotel room or was otherwise indisposed, and would not be on stage for hours. Pfahler finally took to the stage at around eleven pm, and proceeded to enact her series of short performative actions: first reciting a poem whilst perched on bowling balls taped to her feet, later performing a handstand whilst a co-performer inserted a large crucifix into her vagina. These actions were referred to by Pfahler throughout as ‘performance arts’, as in ‘here’s another performance art for you’. Pfahler’s idiosyncratic use of the term performance art suggests less a governing artistic principle, or claim to a formal identity as a performance artist, than a temporary exercise or momentary endeavour – here is some performance art, here is some music, over there is a painting. Whilst Pfahler may have created what she termed ‘performance art’ for her opening, her performance was an event that seemed to actually exist somewhere between performance art, the ironic appropriation of cabaret, a set by a post-punk band and particularly anarchic spoken-word poetry, whilst also not being fully accounted for by any of those descriptions. It would certainly be incorrect when examining the breadth of her 8 output to suggest that she is only a performance artist. No one form or medium represents her primary mode of expression or defines her artistic identity. Pfahler states a commitment to ‘express myself through interdisciplinary art’, and moves peripatetically between mediums and artistic forms whilst refusing to be defined by any one.2 This commitment to interdisciplinarity is one that she maintains alongside her stated desire to live ‘an alternative type of lifestyle’, one that has deep roots in the formative environment of her practice: the downtown post-punk New York scene of the late 1970s and 1980s.3 Pfahler’s performance at Emalin gallery usefully encapsulates many of the characteristics I identify in the practices of the artists I explore throughout this thesis. In its unfixed relationship to artistic medium it reflects post-punk’s general commitment to producing new models of practice, embodies a conspiratorial disregard for its audience (making us wait for what will come) and transgresses norms of propriety and taboo in its content and subject matter.