Often, when I’m out and about, I tell people I’m a performance artist, and struggle with the inevitable “oh, what kind?” or “and where do you do that?” that follows. Because, quantitatively, I work part time in an office, (21 hours per week, sometimes like three inconvenient days) I study part time ( 6 contact hours or less per week, and half again in class prep), and perform maybe 3-4 times a year (30 mins, annually). And this identification with a goal (performing artist) has been with me for quite a long time, but it’s been so personalised, and so close to the heart / bone, that I’ve found it very easy to shelve future plans or consider a realistic strategy while I concentrate on other apparently external projects (maintain the desk job -indeed, improve!, undertake a vocational MA (information management)).
I recently had cause to write little one liner bios for these various characters / persona / selves for the Imperfect Match fundraiser for Tutu Queer Space, and do you know, a little time spent defining and indexing can really have miraculous results. I can practically feel the clarity.

Sister Muscle Mary: Faggy Nun struggling with (against?) tensions between repressive monotheistic religions and the sequins and glitter of the gay scene. Often caught straddling the public private divide. Proud masculine aspirations, but not very strong, or toned for that matter.

Sister Mary Clancy of the Overflow: Soft Ungainly feminine character exploring self expression on stage.

Fagulous / Alice Cooper: Faggy thigh-sexual swaggering demeanour. Super-camp.

Gaylourdes: A queer voice, potentially works better on paper than in performance. More manifestation of queer desire than a stand-alone character identity.

It’s a little easier now, to get back to this blog. Over the coming months, I’ll be refining this site to be more representative of performances that I do, and include some documentation, and advance notice of shows etc. Big shoutout to S for suggesting this strategy in the first place. You could say i’ve got my hands on the wheel.

Imperfect Match
Tutu Community Queer Space
Price: $8 or $10 solidarity price.
Start Time: Friday, 28 August 2009 at 8:00pm
Location: The Red Rattler
Street: 6 Faversham st
Town/City: Marrickville, Australia
Email: tutucrew@gmail.com

Leave your name at the door for the chance to date one of the three ‘creme de la cremes’ of the Perfect Match scene:

SISTER MUSCLE MARY is a Faggy Nun struggling with tension between repressive monotheistic religions and the sequins and glitter of the gayscene. Often caught stradding the public private divide. Proud masculine aspirations, but not very strong, or toned for that matter.

FISTY SCENT is interchangeable she can be masculine he can be feminine. either way she’ll do whatever you want. he won’t ever say no. she wants to get a house and settle down if that’s what you want. or he wants to travel the world - isn’t that your dream? really he’s plasticine and moulds to what you want. chicken for dinner? no sweat! he’ll get baking. wanna go for a vegan dumpster dive - she doesn’t even need gloves! what movie does she
want to see? you’ll never know. what do you want to see?

and…? well stay tuned and after the add break we’ll introduce the Mystery Dreamboat…

Hosted by Regrette.

We will also get the answer to this plaguing question: Will Dexter the robot find their perfect match? Or will negative compatibility result in a dance war?…

There will also be Platonic Life Partner Commitment Ceremonies and a Feel The Burn Rejection Booth plus other installations.

DJ’s Huck Spin, Fisty Cuffs, Pony, and Okapi doing call outs and playing love and ‘I don’t need you babe’ song dedications.

This is a fundraiser for the Tutu Community Queer Space at 22 Enmore Rd. Tutu aims to strengthen and politicise the community through events and discussions happening within the space.

This night, as well as the Tutu space, is open to all queer friendly people.

wordle image of this post:

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

What I have come to like about exciting contemporary published academics is their ability to elucidate fine upstanding paragraphs from other authors and/or each other. And with the immediacy of blogging, and a reluctance to enter into the archiving ahead of me this afternoon at work, I am going to share with you a couple of paragraph quoted by Jean Bobby Noble in Sons of the Movement: FtMs risking incoherence on a post-queer cultural landscape, women’s press, toronto, 2006.

Peggy Phelan on nostalgia, or “the wound of wishing to return”:

…even at the seemingly simple level of the linguistic sign it is impossible for writers to convey the complete context in which a[n]… act occurs. To report it back, to record and repeat it, is at once to transform it and to fuel the desire for its mimetic return … Much of the writing [about performatives] is a record of a living relation between the writer and the artists she sees. This seeing is, necessarily, a distortion, a dream, a hallucination; writing rights it back towards reason by creating enabling fictions … The effort to “cite” the performance that interests us even as it disappears is much like the effort to find the word to say what we mean. It cannot be done. (Phelan 1993a:19-22) (ie from Noble 2006:59)

And Bahktin on words:

“When one finds a word, one finds it already inhabited … there is no access to one’s own personal ultimate word … every thought, feeling, experience must be refracted through the medium of someone else’s discourse, someone else’s style, someone elses’s manner … almost no word is without its intense sideward glance at someone else’s.” (Bahktin 1981:91) (ie from Noble 2006:71)

And finally a stellar bit from Noble himself:

“…Whiteness is marked and articulated - that is, made to work by revealing itself. If you think about the verb to articulate, it means to devide into words, to pronounce or utter. But it also means to connect or mark with joints - thatis, to be connected with sections. Thus, to articulate is to express fluently and to manipulate a site where component parts join (as in a knee or hip), to bring segmented parts together to enable functionality. These kings dissemble White masculinity, break it into parts, and then reassemble those parts to make them work differently, to render them dysfunctional. If White supremacy works best when it’s hypervisible and invisible, it cannot work in quite the same way when it is denaturalised, rearticulated, and most importantly, de-cloaked.” (Noble 2006:65)