6 Comments

• #1.   Sands1974 04.06.2007

  This action is as important as anything the Viennese Aktionists did, and / or Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (which was in it’s own right an absolute coalescence of righteous anger and rage and passion)…it’s on the level of Valie Export’s Genitalpanik too…I think it’s down to this documentation and the actual texts being accessible, finally…Thank You Lorraine and the WACK! organizers to make us even more aware of the slippages of Istory/ies…These Actions and Events bolster our fight for equanimity in this world, they are as vital to us I feel as the earliest cave drawings (also made by female documentarists/-ians?). This work should be reproduced in its entirety in every revolutionary publication. Thank Goddess it’s now online!

• #2.   Sands1974 04.06.2007

  Just want to clarify that the masculinist bias of the Aktionists makes me want to say that this work is MUCH MORE important and effective than the Aktionists, what I was referring to was the most extreme performative acts of pure righteous anger that have been expressed in the last century, and the wish to document and honor culture and humyn progression, ach I think it’s clear. This work is just radiant, spiritual, mandatory like breathing for life…and it has positive and freeing power for the constraints we are still living under, the injustices, the pains…at the same time it is celebratory of life, jubilant and life affirming (like Schneemann and Export for instance).

• #3.   Zac 04.06.2007

  I agree and disagree with the above comments. On a whole I am gald that the Noire performances were done. And the courage that exposes, on the lone wolf’s part in doing, is commendable… but, and I want to be serious about this statement, I feel that it is still in a (masculine) mode of identification.

  The audience, the performer’s costume, her bare life eeks out.

  The aktionists were terrible, there is no denying that (rather we should watch the PETA films, or a recent documentary: “Our Dailybread,” to get a representative sense about the state of human ritual). Schneemann is a reaction to the structuralist/minimalist oeuvre at the time. Export’s genius for me is in her expanded cinema pieces.

  But can’t we come further. Something a little less about the individual as she is given a face by the spectators. To go home and be forced again to contemplate her face.

  Can some genuine role smashing take place? Please

• #4.   Sands1974 04.06.2007

  “A feminism that privileged gender over class and race and for which “revolution” often seemed to mean primarily “sexual liberation.” –I think that this statement by Lorraine O’Grady needs to be looked at again when evaluating this piece and comparing it to revolutionary actions by artists like Schneemann and Export, who are personal friends and from them I know that the anger that propelled them to do their respective actions went far beyond reacting to mild cultural semantics and petty aesthetics and boundaries in the art worlds–They were (and I think still are, and rightly so) ANGRY at the obliteration and phobia surrounding the vulva/vagina and these were occassions where their anger found form, lucky for them. Their work is Political as is O’Grady’s and this is my point.
  In any case, I didn’t want to get sidetracked off Lorraine O’Grady’s pivotal and obviously revolutionary actions. The point again I was trying to make, and for some reason the brutality, because ritual is brutal, came up in my mind frame, has to do again with the quote from O’Grady here above. Firstly the privileging of a “sexual revolution” over a racial and/or class one, and secondly to emphasize the Wild Courage it takes, the Utter Bravery driven by desperation and incomprehension it seems to take to prompt an action like this. This goes beyond the individual in my opinion.
  Simply because I think, and in any case those I admire, that the most sensitive artists like Lorraine O’Grady and many of us today are still damn angry (and often sad) if we have any sense. Her statement above has absolutely monumental implications and (as I’ve said before) if taken to heart could change the world. Individuals often embody the angers we all feel in all walks of life, art is sometimes the place where this gets documented.
  I tried to make my point by admittedly an intuitive and bad example (bad on multiple levels), apologies…I think I wanted to place her work in a European context immediately as well, and thought of artists who come after and as a reaction to the groups mentioned such as Elke Krystufek in Vienna.
  Again, your last sentence is persuasive to me, but I still don’t see the problem with anger coalescing in one person (there are countless other good examples)who is then given credit for expressing what many of us feel. I guess it is a question of perspectives…Perhaps no examples and/or comparisons were necessary, excepting to say that O’Grady is as good as any other famous / infamous contemporary artist–the point is that it happens to be she who’s made such a clarion call for justice, and that Race+(/Class) is the point! Yeah!

• #5.   JeanUlrick 04.09.2007

  This work needs no other feminist references-it goes beyond this. It is a legendary work of which i have heard of for meany years in mere fragments and am happy to see it delineated on this MOCA site. It leaves me wanting more. This work remains relevent today as it did when it was concieved. I fear that it may be historicized or pigeon holed into feminist or black performance theory studies.
  It stands along side performances of note such as Ms.Pipers (the infamous cards) or Mr.Hammons (snowballs at Cooper Square).
  As a westindian having lived in Paris and New York the element of ‘class’ within the work and the readings of the (self) flagelation are dead serious- as all great art is.

• #6.   Sur Rodney Sur 04.09.2007

  it’s interesting to me how schneemann’s “interior scroll” has become so central to her performance identity to the exclusion of so much of her biography.
  i’d always thought that was most at cause to the use of her vagina for the most part divoriced from her intentions and the text. i recall being brought
  into a meeting when the fales library and carlo mccormick had curated scheemann into a section of their new york art scene 1974-1984 exhibition with a
  sexualized title that included “interior scroll”, along with charlotte moorman as a topless cello player, and karen finlay as a nude body covered in chocolate.
  all without any content outside of the titilation of a visual.

  as for MBN’s appearance i do not sense that it is [ONLY] about the individual — but truly [IS] much bigger than about the individual as she is given a face by the spectators.
  i recognize it as about something much much larger and brave, when one considers the time and place in the artworld when and where she staged her invasion more than a quarter of a century ago.
  here we are today, 27 years later, and it STILL resonates. what is that saying? it still freaks spectators out once the visuals are put in context with the poem for the historical record.

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