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Representation and Representability of Rape in Feminist Performance Art

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Representation and Representability of Rape in Feminist Performance Art Altered States No. 1 - Year 8 12/2017 - LC.1 [sic] - a journal of literature, culture and literary translation Ana Fazekaš, University of Zagreb, Croatia ([email protected]) (Auto)Biography of Hurt: Representation and Representability of Rape in Feminist Performance Art Abstract Rape is a crime so close and personal, a trauma so individual, yet an experience so grotesquely impersonal, collective and inherent in our culture that it has a distinct place in the artistic practice of many feminist authors fighting for a voice where the cry had been muffled, refusing to be reframed into another masculinist fantasy of violence. Resistance through performance art as a mode of expression, its power and limitations, is what this article attempts to approach and start to untangle. When it comes to the artistic mode that prides itself most on its closeness to life and body – when there is pain, the pain is real – this paper aims to answer the following questions: how does one approach a violent invasion of a person’s body and self in a culture that perpetuates the mass psychology of rape (Brownmiller), and what can it mean to those who stand by and watch? Key w ords: rape, feminism, performance art, autobiography, representation, representability, pain [1] 1. Intro: (R e )S taging F eminism and F emininity Rape does happen indeed. Its re-presentation, its translation into signs, images, signposts, posters, and pins, however, is an altogether different matter, closed off by quotation marks from the unspeakable experience, the full horror that cannot but remain absent, elsewhere, and real. (Sielke, Reading Rape 189) ISSN 1847-7755; doi: 10.15291/sic/1.8.lc.1 1 Altered States No. 1 - Year 8 12/2017 - LC.1 [sic] - a journal of literature, culture and literary translation Feminism and art have had a long and fruitful interaction, and performance art has a unique place here as a medium that women and feminists have been drawn to for multiple reasons, some of which I shall explore in the following text. Although performance art has its own long and not exactly gender-sensitive tradition, one which we could trace back at least to the historical avant- gardes – and further, depending on our definition of performance art – it blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s as a favorite medium among feminist artists, partially presenting an alternative to the dominant tradition of apolitical, non-figurative and in many ways low-key masculinist Conceptual and Minimalist Art. Women and feminists were drawn to the medium because it could put forward their gender and other identities, because it provided a site in which they could investigate and problematize the possibilities of the woman’s (self-)affirmation and subjectivity – not only take back their own body from the patriarchal constructs that reduce it to a more or less sexualized object but also form and use a position on the margins of the existing framework, which renders women not just as-yet-unrepresented but also un-representable[2] . It is this ambivalent space or space-to-be that offers, in the words of Jayne Wark, “evidence of lack or loss of presence because the transitory nature of performance undermines any secure relation between subjectivity and the body.” (8) What is also inherent in the form/medium of performance art is that it balances between “[R]eality” and fiction, which was for feminist artists so obviously a logical extension of the conviction that the personal is political as they aimed to introduce the politics of gender into the art world of their time, which had not perceived it as a form of politics, dismissing any and all references to the experience of women as self-indulgent and irrelevant (Wark 88). Feminist performance art was and, unfortunately, still is oftentimes perceived as not universal enough for the universe in which the universal is male ; it is deemed limited in its scope, not as germane to the discussion; however, its countercultural importance is unquestionable even though it still blossoms in the shade of the patriarchal blind spot. 2 . Art M eets Act: T ransgressive P owers of A rtistic R epresentation (Suzanne Lacy) ISSN 1847-7755; doi: 10.15291/sic/1.8.lc.1 2 Altered States No. 1 - Year 8 12/2017 - LC.1 [sic] - a journal of literature, culture and literary translation During the 1960s, and 1970s and onward, many feminists entered the art world, many artists became feminists, and many important feminist topics – one of which is the preoccupation of this article – found their way into the humble limelight of performance art. Performance art that attempts a representation of rape is interesting in many respects, and the intrinsic link between the theme and medium can be made explicit by connecting Wark’s insistence on the subjectivity that performance art provides to the female artist – who had been denied subjectivity, both universal and artistic – to du Toit’s argumentation that finds in rape the apotheosis of the patriarchal denial of subjectivity to women. In other words, what better medium to challenge that which underlines the patriarchal bias towards women more than anything else in the intense competition of means to oppress the second sex, than the medium in which the artist faces her audience, as herself, with her own body, her own wounds, scars, pains. Suzanne Lacy has dedicated much of her art to engaging the audience in crimes against women happening in their very own community; for example, Three Weeks in May (1977) provided a map of the city, on which every sexual assault was marked every day, as it was reported (along with marking the other nine assaults that had likely happened but were not reported). It also included thirty events involving various artists and a piece inspired by experiences told to Lacy by willing survivors, entitled “She Who Could Fly” (1977). The latter consisted of survivors’ stories told in the gallery for two days, then written down and attached to a map of the USA on the walls, marking the place where the rape occurred. On the evening when the gallery was opened to the public, the audience found as the central piece a lamb carcass with white-feathered wings, suspended from the ceiling, and four women squatting above it (artists who had themselves had an experience of rape and had prepared for the piece through a ritual led by Lacy), naked and covered in red paint. This series of events and works gained a lot of media attention, and though it used the somewhat problematic method of framing rape stories into narratives[3] , it also used guerilla interventions in the city to remind of the dangers we are likely to ignore in our everyday life and underline the ever-present threat that can be carried out at any moment, in addition to relying on the shock-provoking gallery piece, which turned stories into flesh and materialized the hovering presence of that which many are not willing to face. As one of several pieces by Lacy that addressed rape as a significant part of patriarchal structures – and not just as a rare case of an encounter with a psychopath – this project makes statistics palpable, ISSN 1847-7755; doi: 10.15291/sic/1.8.lc.1 3 Altered States No. 1 - Year 8 12/2017 - LC.1 [sic] - a journal of literature, culture and literary translation opens up the space for interaction, emotional exchange and, most importantly, the expression of feelings by survivors, an exit from the torture chamber that their body, mind and microcosm have become. The personal and the political sing in unison and, to quote Lacy’s own words about feminist art: Strong feminist art might or might not be obviously political; by virtue of its expression of an oppressed cultural experience, it will always in fact be political. In the most directed of such art its purpose (and contrary to the myth of functionless art as high art, it does have a purpose) is to provide information about women's experience, invite an exchange with its audience on the issues raised, and ultimately to transform culture. Feminist art is always concerned with communication with its audience. It cannot rest on prior assumptions or conventions about the nature of art; it must create its own basis for audience understanding. (70) Performance art approaches its recipients with the gloves off, so the link among the artist with her experience, the work that is the experience and the audience that experiences it is painfully tight. 3 . When Justice Fails (Tracey Emin ) Rape is far more than a matter of crime statistics and empathy between and for survivors; it is an important part of the patriarchal system, a screw in the mechanism of the dominant hegemonic dynamics which renders women less than human within the frame of humanism, others that form props and properties, sliding interchangeable objects. In general, women’s knowledge of their rapeability , the permanent threat of rape (of harm inflicted to the body, through the body and beyond the body) inscribed in the heteronormative code of patriarchy’s unlevel battle of the sexes, translates into the fragility of their sense of self, of being-for-self in the world (as Louise du Toit formulates it), and thus bears a heavy impact on all women’s relations with their others (du Toit 86). It is important to acknowledge that the performative aspect of rape reveals the rapist as subject and the woman reduced to a dehumanized object, her body restrained by force, threat and/or crippling fear, made into a prop, used to enact the rapist’s fantasy.
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