Performing ARTs: Technologies of Participation and Reproduction from Body Art to Bio Art By Kelly Ann Rafferty A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Shannon Jackson, Chair Professor Charis Thompson Professor Brandi Wilkins Catanese Spring 2010 Copyright © 2010 Kelly Ann Rafferty Abstract Performing ARTs: Technologies of Participation and Reproduction from Body Art to Bio Art by Kelly Ann Rafferty Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Shannon Jackson, Chair In order to articulate the contributions that experimental performance and feminist scholarship on reproduction have already made to one another and to highlight other fruitful areas for future engagement, I examine several key moments between 1991 and 2008 when two seemingly unrelated narratives have overlapped. These narratives concern (1) the development and implementation of reproductive technologies from the sonogram to in vitro fertilization to regenerative medicine, and (2) the expansion of a range of experimental performance practices in new media and bio art performance. The moments when these histories converge are marked by a series of performances by Deb Margolin, Critical Art Ensemble, Anna Furse, the Olimpias Performance Research Group, and the Tissue Culture and Art Project, and by a body of critical writings from the artists themselves and a group of performance scholars. This journey is also marked by strategic expeditions back into the 1960s to revisit and reinterpret foundational moments in the histories of feminist, activist, and new media performance. Moving between the 1960s and the 1990s/2000s, I use contemporary performance to re-imagine the relationship between gender, technology, and embodiment in some of our origin myths about performance art. I also use the historical performances to unpack the contributions and limitations of the contemporary work. In my analysis of these materials, I do two things: I tease out how the artists in question have used experimental performance to generate new theoretical, tactical, and physical ways of engaging with reproductive technologies. At the same time, I also examine the ways in which reproductive technologies – as a set of political, ethical, and representational issues and as material objects/practices – are pushing performance theory and practice in new directions, complicating our theorizations of participation and providing new avenues for spectatorial interaction. Positioning Carolee Schneemann’s Eye Body (1963) as the beginning of an unfolding of feminist corporeal interrogations of technology and technological 1 interrogations of corporeality, I argue in Chapter 1 that genealogies of new media and feminist performance must take seriously feminist performance’s long history of investigating the politics of technology. I then lay out the project’s topic, scope, and the secondary literature on notions of participation, reproduction, and technology within the fields of experimental performance, science and technology studies, and feminist theory. In Chapter 2, I present a close reading of feminist playwright and performance artist Deb Margolin’s solo performance Gestation (1991) alongside cultural histories of the sonogram. I pair these stories to show how feminist performance artists’ experience with technologies of representation became a place where important debates around technology, agency, and embodiment could be staged at a crucial time in the history of feminist theory. Intervening in ongoing debates within new media theory about interactivity and embodiment in Chapter 3, I detail the ways in which the tactical media collective Critical Art Ensemble crafted physical and affective structures of interactivity in order to engender certain forms of public resistance to in vitro fertilization in its groundbreaking 1998 performance Flesh Machine. In Chapters 4 and 5, I move on to analyze the risks and rewards that emerged from two long-term collaborations between art and biotechnology. In Chapter 4 I put British director and producer Anna Furse’s Glass Body: Reflecting on Becoming Transparent (2006-2008) in conversation with performance projects by the Olimpias Performance Research Group to demonstrate how collaborations with biomedicine reshape issues at the center of debates around social practice. In Chapter 5, I recast the Tissue Culture and Art Project’s 2002 bio art performance installation The Pig Wings Project within the tradition of feminist maintenance artists such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Betye Saar, and Mary Kelly in order to argue that together, this new constellation of maintenance artists has crafted a set of interactive performance practices which stage maintenance and the duration of performance in order to reveal the ways in which regenerative medicine disavows its dependence on feminized labor. 2 For Alfie i Acknowledgements In Anusara Yoga, as in many other yogic traditions, we use a Sanskrit term adhikara to talk about what it means to be a student. Adhikara is the quality of competency in a student, his or her capacity or qualification to study something. In this tradition, the student cultivates a balance between humility, creativity, drive, sensitivity, and stamina in order to prepare the ground for the teachings of the guru, the weighty presence that changes the things around it. For the past six years, I have been graced by the powerful presence of three gurus – Shannon Jackson, Charis Thompson, and Brandi Catanese – who each dance the balance of adhikara in ways that are at once awesome and deeply grounding. Thank you for teaching me. Writing this dissertation required participating in the process of imagining a “feminist future” for research on artistic work that bridges science, medicine, performance, and the visual arts. It meant finding labs and administrators in previously unexplored parts of campus, filing odd expense reimbursement forms, and learning how to talk to scientists. I thank Charis Thompson for helping me navigate the institutional and interpersonal complexities of this work. The process also involved using practice- based research methods to investigate the relationship between bodies, time, space, and technology. I was fortunate to be situated in a Graduate Program in Performance Studies that always tolerated and even generously encouraged my practical work. For the most patient and empowering guidance in these endeavors I thank Peter Glazer and Marty Berman. Each chapter of this project came into being with the support of brilliant and kind colleagues. For help sorting through the ideas at the heart of Chapter 1, I thank the Gender and Women’s Studies 2008 Dissertation Writing Seminar, especially Lowry Martin, Robin Mitchell, Laurel Westbrook, Christine Quinan, and Sonal Thacker. I am also grateful to the participants of the “Desire” Dissertation Writing Workshop that was hosted by the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Sexual Culture and Center for Race and Gender. I thank Deb Margolin and the Performance Studies Writing Accountability Group, especially Mona Bower, Charlotte McIvor, Joy Crosby, and Emine Fisek, for help with Chapter 2. Chapters 3 and 4 came into being with the help of Shannon Jackson’s 2006 Rhetoric Social Practice seminar and Charis Thompson’s 2008 Gender and Women’s Studies Transnational Science Studies and New Media seminar. In particular, I would like to thank Dalida Maria Benfield, Kris Trujillo, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Anna Furse, Petra Kuppers, and Erin Striff. The research and writing of Chapter 5 were generously supported by a Humanities and Social Sciences Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from the Berkeley Stem Cell Center. I am also most appreciative of the insights offered by Lily Mirels, Susan Foster, Lynette Hunter, and the 2008-2009 California Institute for Regenerative Medicine Fellows as I developed this material. ii For me, theater is, at its core, about community and chance to play well with others. Berkeley has gifted me with the most wildly creative and generous of playmates. Monica Stufft, Heather Warren-Crow, Joy Crosby, Emine Fisek, Charlotte McIvor, Brandon Woolf, and Jonathan Combs-Schilling, thank you for playing so spectacularly and for helping me clean up when things got messy. For teaching me how to breathe and for keeping my head, heart, and limbs wired together, I thank my running buddies (Shannon Rafferty, Joe Rafferty, Brandon Woolf, and Kate Kokontis),Team Bramwell, my yoga kula guru (especially Saraswati Clere, Abby Tucker, Darcy Lyon, Sianna Sherman, and Jennifer Johung). For teaching me why and how, I thank Joe, Beth, Joseph, Shannon, and Terence Rafferty. For showing up every day to say “Yes, and . .” I thank Alfie Turnshek-Goins (and Jelly and Scout). iii Chapter 1 Introduction The metaphors we use to describe the body are powerful performatives; they do things in the world. Take, for example, the metaphor of the body as a machine. Aristotle, like Descartes after him, turned to machines for analogies to explain human movement. The mechanistic theory of animation that Aristotle initiated did not, however, accumulate enough scientific plausibility until the seventeenth century when automata – machines fueled by an internal energy source instead