Concerning bodies [stream convenors and panel chairs]

The 'Concerning Bodies' stream is a collaboration with Eric Daffron (USA) and Becky McLaughlin (USA) that is part of the London Conference of Critical Thought, Royal Holloway University of London, 6-7 June 2013. The stream has two parallel strands detailed below: Stream Title: Concerning Bodies This stream has two points of focus: firstly, the representation, and ethical implications, of bodies (both human and animal) in visual cultures and, secondly, the account of the body (and body parts) in Lacan and Foucault. Papers are invited that address any of the concerns detailed under these two headings: The Body and Ethics – Dead or Alive (Angela Bartram and Mary O'Neill): The body is an important site for analysis of the physical and the social condition. Whether human or animal, the body provides information and experience that communicates what it is to be alive – even in death. This has made the body a source material to be analyzed, scrutinized, dissected, and surveyed in the pursuit of knowledge. The human and animal body has historically been used in medical studies, art education, as a donor material, for reference, and creative practice. The appropriateness of the use of bodies in medical enquiry has historically been sanctioned because it has educational benefit. Could the same level of permission be applied to artistic enquiry? What legislates the appropriate use of the dead body in anatomy and biomedical classes and procedures? What informs the decision that the life room is a place for studies of the live human body only? What ethics govern artistic studies of the socio-physical body in art education and creative practice? We seek papers that discuss the role of critical theory in our understanding of the use of the body in visual culture both historical and contemporary, including, but not limited to: • somataphobia, • scopophilia, • scopophobia, • dissection, • necrophobia, • taxidermy Body Parts and Partial Bodies; Body Cuts and Cut Up Bodies: Lacanian and Foucaultian Approaches (Becky McLaughlin and Eric Daffron): Both Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault took the body as an object of critical inquiry but explored it in divergent ways. This panel will bring together scholars working from Lacanian and/or Foucaultian perspectives to interrogate not simply the body but, more specifically, parts of the body. Collectively, the papers selected for this panel will aspire to answer, among other questions: How do Lacan and Foucault cut up the body, what new forms of subjectivity emerge when we pay attention to particular body parts, and how can we bring Lacanian and Foucaultian theory to bear on ethical concerns about the body? Topics for paper proposals include but are not limited to: • fragmented bodies and bodily decomposition • mirror stage and self reflection • self-abuse and body cutting • disciplined and "docile" bodies • torture and punishment • "subindividuals" • sexuality, sexuation, and oversexed bodies • "technologies of the self" • the voice, the gaze, and the fetish • spanking and other sex games • amputation and disability • addiction and obsession, medicine and therap

⇔ (A ⇔ B means A is true if B is true and A is false if B is false)

⇔ Bartram and O'Neill Negotiating a collaborative relationship has enormous benefits: a sense of comradery, when the making of art can be an isolating process; the ongoing dialogue and critique that can add confidence to a work when it has been tested by two minds rather than one; the knowledge of shared responsibility. There are also huge risks that can be so great they often remain unspoken: trust, ownership, authorship. In a new work developed for In Dialogue Bartram & O'Neill will explore some of the complications of collaboration in a performance dialogue which will take place on a series of blackboards over the course of a day. This durational work will allow both artists and viewers to reflect on the issues raised by collaborative working through a visual dialogue. The work will take as it starting point a statement make by Bartram & O'Neill which will appear in a forthcoming issue of TAJ Q How is the collaborative relationship of Angela Bartram and Mary O’Neill negotiated? What is the aim? Who initiates, and who is the instigator in developing the work? Does it matter? Bartram: The collaboration transcends the boundaries between performance and its legacy, between the performer and observer, between author and interpreter. Rather than the documentation being produced by an onlooker outside the performance, the generation of an accompanying texts becomes integral to the performance itself. Thereby creating a text that is embedded in the physical experience of the performance. In the case of Oral / Response the repetition and rhythm of the action of crushing the sticks of charcoal and blowing the dust is echoed in the tat-tat-tat thud of inscribing the text on the shared surface. O’Neill: Communication and development are negotiated through a dialogue. The partnership is equal in its response to the varying methods and processes that make up its sum parts. Integral to this performance is the distinction between cooperation and collaboration as defined by Pierre Dillenbourg (1996). According to Dillenbourg, “cooperative work is accomplished by the division of labour among participants, as an activity where each person is responsible for a portion of the problem solving...” whereas collaboration involves the “mutual engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve the problem together.” (Dillenbourg, 1996) In collaboration the disciplinary ghettos of performance and documentation are abandoned in favour of a mode of practice that allows for a greater level of mutual critique. Performers work together towards a shared goal, the success of the performance, rather than focus on the individual contribution. To this end auto/ethnography enhances the processes of give and take, self-critique, and improvement that enhance the collaborative synergy

Response oral / response

This work in four parts offers the practice of Bartram O’Neill, a collaborative partnership between an artist (Angela Bartram), and an artist/writer (Mary O’Neill), as an alternative creative strategy to the binaries of theory and practice, academic and artistic, event and text. To borrow and extend Wallace Bacon’s shore metaphor from his canonical publication, “The Dangerous Shore: From Elocution to Interpretation” (1960), this essay in four documents represents an amphibious practice in which different stages of its life cycle require different media.[1.] The four parts are: a score written during the performance Oral/Response that forms part of the event; images of the collaborative performance of the same title at Greestone Gallery, Lincoln (2011); a prose piece written in response to the performance; and questions and answers that discuss the concerns of the artists and the collaborative relationship. Each mode has informed the others and is a response to different sites. A gallery, an academic journal, an artist’s statement – these are all “sites” not only defined by a physical location, but they consist of dynamic ensembles that also include the artists’ bodies, the anticipated audience, any objects being used, and the atmosphere. Bacon categorized the relationship between the text and the performance as a negotiation between polarized opposites using the metaphor of travelling through waterways. This negotiation exists in the territory where the distinction between land and sea is blurred, the alluvial plains where rather than prioritizing one form over another, each manifestation generates potential for further responses. The result is an ongoing work

Performance art, audiences and ethics

This jointly authored paper will explore the discomfort created by performance practice in terms of an ethical sacrifice; in sacrifice something is given up for a greater gain. The paper will discuss if comfort is sacrificed for the greater gain of the sensuous knowledge offered by performance works that may make the audience feel uncomfortable. In Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality, Zygmunt Bauman described humans as fundamentally moral beings, which he distances from the notion of goodness. Rather than being connected to the debate about the essential goodness of humans he suggests that to be moral is to exercise one’s freedom of authorship and/or actorship as a choice between good and evil. Discomfort can be brought into the reception of performance practice that makes bodily fluids visual and tangible. Art practice that includes the release and transfer of bodily fluids produces anxieties, and raises questions of health and welfare, safety and conduct. This sees the individual experiences what Bataille called 'impotent horror' as they negotiate the implied danger of the experience. This paper will make specific reference to Bartram’s performance work and its relationship to the audience, which uses saliva and the impact of its displacement at its core

She Works - She Writes (performance) and Research and Collaboration (artists talk)

‘She Works - She Writes’ is a work that simultaneously incorporates the narrative documentation of a live action as an integral element of its performance. It analyses the processes and methods of the body as archival record and interpretative account and explores the dialogue between the body politic, as the objectifiable property of performance, and its socialisation as documentary artifact. Effectively, it examines the ways in which the live can be denied being made static through documentation. In expanding and exploring the role of the documenter and their methods of communication in this way, a sense of narrative, of interpretation, is engaged. The document tells a story - it describes an actuality. Yet is it possible to take the document as a true account of the event being transcribed? This dilemma is explored in this work as the documenter will act as the communicator of a ‘hidden’ performance, a performance that only they can see. Beyond hearing the sounds of the ‘hidden’ performer, the audiences understanding of the work will be wholly reliant on the process of textual documentation. The documenter is effectively the sole observer of the methods and processes informing their narration, and they are relied upon to communicate the truth. Like looking through a lens that has been set up for someone else and responds to their viewpoint only, they are positioned to respond to the process of documentation and to analyse their relationship to it. The performer’s body will be denied politicization here, as its objectification will be denied. Instead the documenter, the usually veiled interpreter of the live experience, will trade places with the performer. In this way they will become the body of objectification by communicating the archival legacy of the live event. ‘She Works - She Writes’ is a development from ‘Live / Archive’ which was made and performed as part of a residency in Spring 2012 at Grace Exhibition Space, New York. The performance and accompanying talk titled 'Research and Collaboration', which discusses and details the varying approaches in our work, were scheduled by invitation from Miami International Festival

O/R

A woman crushes a stick of black chalk with a pestle and mortar, pinches the ground dust into a pile on the floor, leans down, inhales, exhales and blows the dust across the floor. The process is repeated through a grading spectrum of black to white. A second woman kneels beside her and writes on the floor in matching tones a record of the action taking place. They work in synch and in rhythm: one creates a physical action that the other interprets in words. Once the charcoal set is crushed to exhaustion the woman with the now blackened face sits up. Her documenter follows. The documentation of ‘O / R’ is as live as the performance itself. Each mode informs the other and benefits from the particular requirement imposed by a ‘site’. The site here is not just the physical location, but includes the artist's body, the anticipated audience, the environment, and the atmosphere. Rather than prioritising one form over another, each manifestation is seen as having generative potential for further creative responses. This reflexivity relies on the observation of each other’s movements and decisions throughout, and it is this construct that allows the problem of documentation to be analyzed. With no time to reflect, to square up a shot or rephrase a sentence after the event, the integral nature of the work’s document is exposed to complication and chance; it becomes as influential as the action it is intended to record. The ‘live’ context the work represents becomes threefold when exhibited by networked stream: through action, observation and record, and the mediation of these acts across digital terrain. 'O / R' is a five-minute adaption of 'Oral / Response’ produced as a new work exclusively for Low Lives 4 and performed and streamed 27th April 2012

Oral / response

The performance ‘Oral/Response’ joins an artist, Angela Bartram and a theorist, Mary O’Neill in research to analyse the dynamic, but often disjointed relationship between the live experience and its documentation by positioning both elements within the performance. Traditionally, the documentation of performance is a record left to stand for the work after the event that demonstrates an out of time viewpoint, which is a problem for ephemeral practice whose intention is to be ‘live’ and in the moment. The research in this performance offers a different strategy to counter this effect. To demonstrate this O’Neill transcribes the actions of Bartram as she performs a drawing by grinding charcoal to dust and blowing it across the floor. This simultaneous dialogue between action and text evidences how performance and documentation can be reflexive and co-dependent. By making the text as evanescent as the act it describes it presents a nexus of theory and practice that combines different languages, different ways of knowing and experiencing. The rules and regulations that direct and confine solo compositions in text and action become less rigid, more malleable and symbiotic in this way. Performances Oral/Response’ include Action Art Now for OUI York, BLOP Arnolfini, Environmental Utterance and the Future Can Wait. Published written analysis of ‘authored by the researchers can be found in Total Art Journal and Emergency Exit. ‘Oral/Response’ was selected for development through a residency at Grace Exhibition Space New York in 2012, and developed as ‘O/R’ for ‘Low Lives 4’ 2012. The collaboration developed from a shared interest in ephemeral practice and its interpretation as situated writing. The artist/theorist research began with the peer reviewed e-journal article, ‘The Sacrifices Made by Audiences: the Complicit Discomfort of Viewing Performance Art’ published by Interdisciplinary Press after presentation at Culture, Politics, Ethics staged in Salzburg in 2010

Translating rage

Two women stand either side of a screen and give a lecture. Projected on the screen behind them is a series of changing words. These words, abusive, vulgar, shocking and angry suggest an anger the historic etymology give meaning to the terms beyond the colloquial

Tall Poppies : Bullying behaviours faced by Australian high performance school-age athlete

Little is known about Australian high-performance school-age athletes’ experiences as victims of the tall poppy syndrome. Tall poppies are successful individuals bullied by those who are less successful in order to “normalize them.” Nineteen current or previous national or international high-performance school-age athletes were interviewed (12 females and seven males). NVivo 10 was used to analyze interview data. Findings indicated all 12 females were bullied at school and this had a detrimental impact on their school life and well-being. No male athletes reported being bullied and their failure to mention this warrants further investigation. Parents and teachers require a greater awareness of tall poppy syndrome behaviors, and schools should promote an antibullying culture that includes resilience training for talented individuals