Marina Abramović: pain, presence, art and kink

I’ve been pretty silent here for a while. There are reasons, of course; there always are. But I would like to be saying more in this space. It’s just that the things that are happening to me in the kink realm seem increasingly private, and it’s hard to talk about them in a space where so many people know my real name.

Instead I’ll talk about the woman in the Firefox window I’ve had open for a month, Marina Abramović.

I read about her first when Cal pointed her out at the closing of her recent exhibition in New York.

For those who don’t know (because I certainly didn’t), Abramović is a performance artist who began her career in the 1970s. Her work was explicitly about the body: what it can take, and to whom it belongs. She did work that was grueling, painful, and sometimes close to lethal. In what was likely her most famous piece, Rhythm 0, she stood completely passive and silent for six hours near a table full of objects: chains, feathers, olive oil, razor blades, cameras – and a loaded gun. Audience members were invited to do whatever they liked to her, and while at first people were reluctant, by the end a spectator was holding the gun to her neck until another group of audience members stopped it.

Throughout her career, she has demanded that the audience engage with the art directly – and she has demanded endurance and discipline of herself which, reading about her, made me think of the most extreme forms of submission and service. In this latest exhibition, she sits in a chair, completely silent, and stares into the eyes of whomever cares to sit across from her and look. She did not speak for three months. In older works, besides the extremity of Rhythm 0, she played the point of a knife between her splayed fingers as fast as she could, sometimes missing and cutting herself. When she would complete a cycle, she would attempt to repeat it exactly – including the cuts. With her long-term partner, Ulay, she did a piece where he held the string of a bow, with an arrow pointed at her heart; she held the bow itself, and the two of them leaned back, balancing each other. (A video of this and other pieces is here.) She did a piece in which she lay in the midst of a burning five-pointed star, and one in which she lived on platforms raised high above the gallery floor for twelve days without eating or speaking. The only way down was via ladders, the rungs of which were upturned butcher knives.

The dedication and grace with which this great artist has put herself through privation, suffering and humiliation are admirable in a stark way, that moves me as a person interested in the extremes of human experience. It offers, to me, another window into why we do what we do. Sometimes – often, in fact – it is about sex. But not always. Sometimes, it feels to me, we are reaching for something more: a spiritual cleansing, a direct encounter with our own limits, the kind of fear that allows one to walk the line between life and death without falling in, because the guide, your partner, is there. Watch this to get a sense of that peculiar terror, the predicament that you’ve entered into willingly.

She performed these pieces to say a number of things: about the body, about limits, about Communism and the terror under which she grew up. But it still strikes me, the way we still do these things ourselves: the way we subject ourselves to suffering in order to learn something about ourselves and what we can take. To show ourselves that suffering has meaning.

Because we all suffer, each in our particular way, from the most abject to the most privileged among us. Not many of us can claim the kind of suffering Abramović endured under Tito – but perhaps that’s exactly why we put ourselves through what we do.

I don’t believe, as some do, that kinky inclinations are the result of a diseased mind. But I do imagine that most kinky people are in semi-privileged positions – and for those of us who have never known what it’s like to starve, live in war or occupation, or really hurt people for a living, it can be very intriguing to get close to violence, to put yourself through the kind of challenge that humans who live indoors and have TiVo are rarely called to anymore.

Sure, kink is sexy. Sure, power play is hot. But for me, at least, there’s something more to it. It’s about overcoming fear – or about seeing that fear in someone else’s eyes. It’s about seeing how much pain I can take before I break. It’s about finding my limits. It’s about knowing myself – and stretching the definition.

More of Marina here.

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The Slutcracker and radicalizing burlesque

I saw The Slutcracker a couple of weeks back, for its second annual run. For those of you unfamiliar or reading from your RSS feeder at work (naughty, naughty; I love it), The Slutcracker is a burlesque version of the classic Nutcracker ballet; a filthy fantasia of dirty old grandmothers, vibrator princes, stripper queen fairies and Bacchanalian beauties.

Burlesque has seen a massive revival in the past ten or so years, and has been widely hailed as a celebration of sex-positivity and expressive sexuality on women’s terms. In its original days, burlesque was home to women of all shapes and sizes, and big girls were all the rage. These days, the nouveau-burlesque troupes are tooting that horn again: the women in this production are thin and flat chested, fat and curvy, athletic and supple, and everything in between. The big things they have in common are talent, and an enthusiastic engagement with the work they’re doing that you’ll rarely see on a stripper bar stage. One of my favorite moments was watching a bevy of women do a Busby Berkeley move, forming a circle facing outward and spinning. I could not believe the incredible variety of breasts that passed my eyes, all wearing identical pasties. Not to mention the massive, genuine smiles.

All this being said, I find myself somewhat discouraged by the burlesque revival as I’ve so far experienced it. I’ve not seen many shows, but the ones I’ve seen have a major thing in common that I find distressing, and yet which largely explains the revival’s mainstream success: male sexuality is still wildly underrepresented, and the female sexuality presented is largely for the benefit of the male gaze.

It must be difficult, I imagine, reviving an old form, comedic and sexy as it is, and changing too many of the rules. But I couldn’t help but notice that in The Slutcracker, the first year I saw it, the few men involved either kept all their clothes on, or, if they stripped at all, did so only to comedic effect. This year, there was a nice concession to those of us who might want to see something different: two tango couples emerged, then switched partners so that the men danced together and so did the women. This, to me, was the sexy highlight of the show this year: the two men were both masculine and beautiful, shirtless with pasties (fairness!), and their plain sexual tension in the dance was not played for comedy. (It is notable, however, that they also put a female dancing couple on the stage so that the straights wouldn’t be too put off.)

Every other moment involving a man, though, was: even the romantic Slutcracker Prince – essentially a life-size Rabbit Pearl vibrator in a tacky pink tuxedo, complete with ruffles – never got down to skivvies or did anything other than present Clara as the object of the gaze, just as in classical ballet. And the other men were basically buffoonish – if very funny – stereotypes of straight guys ogling the women.

Now, granted, these stereotypical characters are shown as insensitive, and only are rewarded in the end when they are able to open up to their women’s broadened sexuality. But as yummy as the huge pile of women of all sizes and shapes (with a few guys) at the orgiastic curtain-call was, it was still frustrating to see the same tropes play out as they have for centuries: women are for looking at, men are there to look. (Men who are there to be looked at, of course, are meant to be looked at by men.)

The few moments of queerness in burlesque that I’ve seen, other than the tango described above, have been disappointing: I was very put off when I watched an apparently butch/femme duo perform in a Boston showcase not long ago, and they both stripped down to identical femme underwear. Why not a jock for the butch, and bound breasts or pasties matching her butch attire? Or, why not flip the femme as well – have her strip to butch nethers? Something, please, other than defaulting them both to the endless burlesque finale of the frilly breast reveal.

I know that this is one of Maymay’s big hobbyhorses, and it’s one of mine, too: I want to see men’s bodies sexualized more. I want to see real queer sexuality, and I want to see the variants on straight sexuality, too. It’s rather unsurprising that the burlesque revival is so successful under these circumstances: for the most part, it’s entirely unthreatening to the status quo. It’s likely I’m showing my ignorance, though, of the larger picture: can anyone point me to burlesque that showcases more than heteronormative sexuality as a matter of course, or that showcases male artists without being directed specifically at gay men?

Do TraniWreck and All the King’s Men count as burlesque?

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