PERFORMA05: Innovations on the periphery
Lisa Paul Streitfeld
Despite their location on the periphery of the media-hyped PERFORMA05, the first biennial of live visual art performance, Marni Kotak and Laurel Jay Carpenter were central in redefining performance art as a vital medium for transformation. These two performers provided an immediate and vital experience of the emergence of the sacred feminine to the collective consciousness.
Utilizing the transformation of the everyday object that originated with Marcel Duchamp, who pioneered eroticism in the 20th Century, Kotak and Carpenter have invigorated the discipline with radically original approaches to audience interaction. Their performances played off the dynamic between physical presence and emotional memory embedded in the "readymade" object. As their performances elevated this live interaction into symbolic, laden ritual, they revealed that the more individual the performance, the greater is the potential for universality.
The Erotic Symbol
Laurel Jay Carpenter’s Red Woman has been performed at various locations in New England, including the University of Connecticut where it injected a feminine identification with Eros into the academy. PERFORMA05 brought the performance to New York for the first time. At Nurture Art in Williamsburg, a spiraling train of 100 red dresses snaked up four flights of dark stairs. On the top, Carpenter stood in the shadows beside a door leading to the roof and offered individualized spiritual blessings to breathless participants. This urban ritual brought the sacred feminine up from the ground and into the heart charka (the fourth level) through the ascending spiral, an ancient symbol for the goddess and holism of life.
At Artists’ Space the day after the official close of the festival, Marni Kotak developed a new and unpredictable multimedia form with her trademark Found Performances located in the body. Utilizing her body as raw material to create a sacred space inside the gallery out of the material of daily life, the configuration she created was a hexagram, representing the hieros gamos, or sacred marriage of opposites.
Found Performances
Kotak placed a sandbox with plastic pails at the center of the matrix formed by six sets: a Barbie doll house; a radiator with a checkerboard floor (an homage to Duchamp); a mirrored dresser with electronic gadgets for hair styling; a domestic scene decorated with a body target; and a cardboard table projecting a home movie in which various assembled found objects on the table were used to make lewd gestures.
The audience surrounded Kotak as she stripped naked to enter the sandbox to make a heart with her body and then followed the performer from one set to another. Changing female personas with her clothes each time, the performance revealed how patterns instilled in youth are repeated into adolescent play and adult relationships. The emotional power that Kotak brought to her Found Performances ranged from primal screams to rhythmic chanting, thereby engaging the audience in the transformative power of the dark feminine.
Here we have something new in performance that contains lived experience as a body book with separate but interconnected chapters. Inviting the audience into the matrix of the hexagram makes them complicit in the performer’s goal of transcendence. The experience proved to be both powerful and empowering.
The Readymade in Performance
Kotak and Carpenter sum up female experience in America at the turn of the millennium where the search for integration is linked to the unconscious desire for Eros to integrate and unify the opposites. The emotional and visual immediacy of their performances transcended the personal and the cultural to establish a universality in which the heart, as a central symbol, becomes a vehicle of transformation.
Here we have the authenticity embedded in the "readymade" adapted to performance art. Kotak achieves this through a process that allows the everyday object to trigger the emotional memories embodied in her sets. Carpenter does so through the emotional memories embodied in her collaborative icon in which 100 women donated their personal memories of Eros for the spiraling Red Woman.
At PERFORMA05, Kotak and Carpenter renewed performance art by reaching back to its origins in order to deliver Duchamp’s underground eroticism into the 21st Century. They reinvigorated the "readymade" into authentic and immediate emotional experience serving as raw material for a transcendent art form addressing the challenges and conditions of our time.
