Enjoying the recombinant aesthetics of blood and piss - a personal, monthly observance - bends my mind to situations where this is ok(in private toilet cubicles; in the comfort of your woan home; bdsm play parties;) and where it is not (in public; as commercially compeditive art; enjoying). I hasten to add that I don’t mean this monthly bleeding is a divine right, a special woamnly thing. It might be a regular physical occurence for me, but lots of other people deal with this as work, in their social lives, daily bodily functioning, as queer desires, as consequences of violence, midwifery, various medical and or spiritual practices…the list could be as long as my arm (runs down my leg).
I’m not sure i’m a very good storyteller - each step of the way I like to shine a torch down other paths, wonder if they ever hook up again, imply whole other journeys with a syllable. Writing a report for uni yesterday reminded me of the shimmeringness of dreaming and how I like to think and dream while I’m reading. This is the quality that I want my writing to have, except I have a lot of psychological blocks to writing assessments these days and really struggle to complete simple assignments.
But…a recent art exhibition opening for “Avatar”, (at the Australian Centre for Photography) included an installation called “Havidol”, a spoof on lifestyle marketing of medication, featuring lots of images of conservative happy shiny white heteros with clean hair and teeth, and tennis. My younger sister made a surprise appearance as their interactive performative art - dressed as a Prozac nurse in trendy stilettos doling out mints from a large glass jar with a dental mirror. She works for ACP so her role may have more to do with the actual gallery’s value added production effort than part of the official artwork. I grimace when I think about this work, because it was boring and the kind of culture jamming that is no longer contentious, and there’s my sister having a ball dressing up and embodying a gentle critique of the feminised history of the nursing profession, and codes of feminine conduct in today’s late capitalist world.
Shortly after seeing her, I met a fine arts lecturer who made the unfortunate social gaffe of admitting her concerns that young artists today are discovering (20 year old) new media technique/ performance art as though they are the first to do so: “and you think, are they doing it for the right reasons?” An odd thing to say, but certainly related to what I was thinking. New media art history perhaps hasn’t been old enough to warrant codifying and retrieving “lost history”; indeed, perhaps they don’t want to be historicised or drawn into a grand narrative; the stuff and value of temporal artworks is often the inability to record them in halls of of the academe…maybe it’s even zooming ahead and can’t wait for academics to catch up?
Anyway, more platitudes later. For now, a provocative epithet: There is nothing so practical as a good theory, from a curiously named conference site: Balisage
