Are zombies dangerous?
‘Magical’, a solo performance of the French performer Anne Juren and the American director Annie
Dorsen, performed by Anne Juren, is a truly disconcerting work. You could call it ‘Performance art in
the age of its immediate availability on Youtube’, after Walter Benjamins ‘The work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction’. But this does not prevent anyone from appreciating it as well as a
shabby pornographic show, posing as a magic show. Or would you rather see a feminist pamphlet in
it? The image keeps oscillating between these poles. It demonstrates in an ironical way that the
internet keeps the legacy of performance art alive, be it in a zombie state. This transubstantiation
sheds a completely new light on the subtext and the weaknesses of the original works .
Walter Benjamin argues in ‘The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ that the work of
art loses its ‘aura’ once it is reproduced on an industrial scale. ‘Aura’ , for him, is linked to the
immediate presence of an object –and by extension a performer- with its history and uniqueness
(‘singularity’, one might say these days). He explains that the loss of ‘aura’ goes hand in hand with a
shift from the ritualistic value of art –art being a magic object- towards its exhibition value. He also
notes that art, under these circumstances, should become a player in a totally different –politicalfield. This implies that Art is no longer the sole producer, nor for that the best, of images or objects,
but finds itself in a critical position towards this production.
The explicitly female performance art that is reiterated in ‘Magical’ had a strongly ritualistic as well as
an outspoken political (feminist) strain. This may seem paradoxical, as the first one refers to an age
old conception of art, while the later is modern in the way it considers art as a specific field in society
that questions the way things are signified. The ‘ritualistic’ strain however serves a double aim. No
doubt, an artist like Carolee Scheenmann or Marina Abramovic tries to tap into ‘primitive’ or
‘essential’ forces that surpass our daily concerns. But the fact itself of doing so is also a strategy to
oppose a radically different logic to the one governing late-modern civilization (i.e. a logic that
subverts the obsession with progress, accumulation of capital or consumerism in which the male,
objectifying gaze is dominant –the number of related themes can be expanded interminably). In that
way it was certainly consistent with the ‘critical’ approach inherent to the practice of performance.
On a formal plane anyhow, it is important to note that both of them were played out in the
immediate relation between performer and spectator. This was of capital importance. The direct
confrontation to sometimes shocking imagery prevented the public to sit back in a merely
judgmental position that is typical for film or TV (or, to be in line with the period’s ideology, it
confronted the male gaze on the female body and way of being) but required an active response to
the person in action, the artist. The performance indeed had no predictable outcome, as the
spectators were part and parcel of it. They were absorbed by it. In a film situation, the opposite is
true. The work is absorbed and ‘put at work’ in any way a viewer might seem fit. The more
performance art is getting into the bloodstream of popular culture through mechanical reproduction
(i.e. through its presence on internet) and art commerce, the more its original stakes are forgotten
for its spectacular and entertainment value. Its ‘magic’, ends up as a ‘magical show’.
There are many reasons for this. The first one of course is that these films and images do exist. This
may have been for documentary reasons (an artist such as Adrian Piper refused this explicitly
however). Later, these recordings inadvertently acquired a commercial meaning: there was obviously
no other way to sell the work and so to earn the artist a living. But even then the conditions for
showing this documentary evidence remained more or less controlled for a long period of time. This
enabled the artists to frame the work in a way that did justice to their intentions. Nakedness,
aggression and gore indeed can be pointed at as strategic devices within a larger frame. The usually
poor quality of these films in that sense already says out loud that what you see is merely
documenting an event that in essence was meant to be experienced live and, more importantly, was
tied to a broader societal context. If this framing is absent, something else happens. The image
becomes available to a different kind of scrutiny, that could for instance be interested in specific
body parts and actions. In this, the poor quality of images can suddenly serve different ends, such as
even a fetishist voyeurism, as the images tells us then that the images were captured secretly (and
are viewed from a secluded, private spot). That is the case when these events are viewed on
Youtube.
But there is another sting. Performance art showed a remarkable structural weakness in itself. The
means deployed by performance artists are closely tied to an epoch. Consider for instance Carolee
Schneemann’ s ‘Meat Joy’. The benefits that were supposed to come out of happenings such as these
are all but lost upon a present day public. We see a very predictable mixture of transgressions, which
may have served a liberating discourse at the time, but look to us rather naïve, not to say sullen and
boring (except then, again, for any perverse feelings of lust that might be had out of it). What they
lack is a form, a score, a frame that would enable the action to go beyond any simple shock effect or
any simple idea of ‘new rituals’ for unleashing our primitive energy. As Marcel Duchamp said wisely:
a work of art hardly ever outlives its birth by more than 20 years. In some cases, its after-life can be
stretched eternally, but that requires a lot of explaining and usually gets lost upon the average
spectator. Especially if the work itself is rooted so strongly in a direct experience and an epoch. All
we can experience now, watching ‘Meat Joy’, is a sense of wonder at how this might have affected
the mind of spectators and performers alike. But even if we would meticulously reenact it now, the
outcome certainly would be different.
Thus the ‘re-mediation’ of these works leaves them behind ‘naked’ in a metaphorical way, as actions,
or more precisely film images, which can serve any other goal, private or maybe even public without
conveying any of the original impact or intentions, or worse even, by obscuring them. At the same
time however it allows these works to claim their place in cultural history, even if in all but a zombie
state. But there is a price to be paid. The artists concerned tend , actually have no other choice than,
to become ‘stars’ and ‘personalities’ instead of persons who develop a critical view on the production
of societal images. ‘Magical’ is exemplifying this whole process of annihilation and recirculation
through a secondary ‘re-mediation’, back from the screen to the stage, by adding some slight
distortions to the original work. By making it into the ‘magical show’ it actually already was to the
‘uneducated’ eye.
(There is a simple proof that indeed the presence on the internet propels the artists concerned into
eternal fame. It’s even a personal fact. If I can list the performances that ‘Magical’ recycles, this is not
because I am an expert on performance from the ‘60ies and ‘70ies. I actually new only three of them,
but the program notes and the showing of a short Youtube film of ‘Meat Joy’ by Carolee
Schneemann (without any reference however) did the rest. This scant knowledge sufficed to recover
and view in less than half an hour all the film footage about the performances at stake. Just try for
yourself what happens if you type ‘Martha Rosler + Kitchen semiotics’ in Youtube. Almost
immediately, all the others will pop up… Actually, my little exercise will add to the fame of these
artists: the blind algorithm of Google and Youtube will push them a little further up in the rankings
and will testify once more of the relations between them).
But now for ‘Magical’. The most obvious distortion it inflicts upon the works is that the presentation
context is altered radically. They are transposed, beyond any doubt, in a theater setting. Not only
because of the location (Odeon, Wien) but more specifically because the stage design by Roland
Rauschmeier explicitly refers to it with its scaffolding for the white curtains and its conspicuous stage
floor, a set of metal plates defining a restricted space. All in all, the stage is because of that the
spitting image of a huge puppet theater, a place of magic and make believe for children. None of the
artists conjured up would ever have considered or even allowed to present their work in such a
semiotic context1 . In a very general way, performance art in the ‘60ies and ‘70ies was rooted in the
visual arts of that period. That is why it scorned the institutional context of the museum to connect
to a society in upheaval, in much the same way as Arte Povera, Pop Art etc. did. In this way, it would
have made no sense to trade the one institution, the museum, for the other, the theater 2 at the risk
of being degraded to entertainment!
But in ‘Magical’, we are no doubt dealing with theater, entertainment even. A true magical show! In
an almost exaggerated, defiant way. There even is a magical overture! The curtains open to reveal a
copper box that seems to float by itself over the shimmering metal stage floor, voicing a text by
Carolee Schneemann (Unfortunately, at the Viennese Odeon, the text was hardly understandable. It
probably spoke about her views on the female body, the meaning of a vagina and the relation of her
actions to an audience3, but this was completely lost upon the audience). It is not the last time that
‘Magical’ will tinker with the source material. Each and every time, a bizarre twist is given to the
reenactments, so as to change it beyond recognition into pure entertainment or even an almost
pornographic event.
After the overture, the curtain closes and opens again, showing now a primitive kitchen in which
Juren comments on all the objects present. This unmistakably starts as a meticulous reenactment of
Martha Roslers ‘Kitchen Semiotics’ (1975). Next comes ‘The cut piece’ by Yoko Ono (1964), after
which Juren is stark naked for almost all the rest of the evening. ‘The cut piece’ is followed almost
without transition by Marina Abramovic’ s ‘Freeing the body’ (1975). Juren uses the scraps from the
dress of Ono’s work as the head scarf that turns her into the anonymous body moving to entrancing
rhythms the way Abramovic did. Abramovic’ s action however lasted six hours, here it is reduced
here to some 10 minutes . ‘Meat Joy’ by Carolee Schneemann is somehow a break in the
1
If it is true that Marina Abramovic did adapt some of her work to a theatrical context, with the help of
directors such as Michel Laub, it is obvious that she thinks of these theater adaptations as completely separate
from her ‘real work’.
2
Theater, as an art form, also had a bad name amongst artists at that time for it was based upon the notion of
‘make-believe’ and smelt of entertainment. Even if performance art was quite opposite to the views held by a
critic like Michael Fried, a firm believer in the immanent qualities of the art object, it is symptomatic that the
latter in the ‘60ies condemned minimal art for its theatrical bend.
3
On Schneemann’s own website, you can find a text like this one: "I thought of the vagina in many ways-physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of sacred knowledge,
ecstasy, birth passage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an
outward model: enlivened by it' s passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiraled coil ringed with the shape
of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual power. This source of interior
knowledge would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh in Goddess worship." That gives
more or less the spirit of what is to come…
performance, but a telling one. This performance from 1964, done by a large group of male and
female performers, is shown as a You Tube film only. It is followed by an action that could be labeled
as a free improvisation on the theme of ‘Interior Scroll’ (1975), another work by Scheemann. In this
work, Schneemann, covered in mud, produces a text band from out of her vagina and reads it. After
this the curtains close. As the public starts applauding (cheering even, for reasons that will be
obvious later) , the curtains open again, not for the performer to bow however, but for an epilogue.
Juren now wears a black shirt and trousers, but the latter are cut open at the crotch so that her sex
is visible. Intentionally, as the violent swinging of her hips denotes. The work cited is ‘Genital Panic’
by Valie Export. In a sense, this is a double citation. The original performance records only consist of
a series of blurry pictures. Marina Abramovic gave it a second life when she incorporated it in her
‘Seven easy pieces’ (2005), a series of six ‘historical’ performances by herself (Lips of Thomas, 1975)
and others such as Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys , Gina Pane and so also Valie Export.
These performances were presented on 7 consecutive days and were concluded on the 7th day with a
new work by Abramovic, ‘Entering the other side’.
As I tell this now, ‘Magical’ might only sound like a series of reenactments in an odd context. Nothing
is less true however. You only have to look at the reenactment of Roslers Kitchen Semiotics to
become aware of that. (This one performance being also the exception to the rule of ‘magical’ that
live performances are reenacted: this one was conceived of as a film right away, but was not
intended to circulate on TV but to be shown in a gallery). The film shows Rosler in a kitchen,
demonstrating the use of all kinds of kitchen equipment in alphabetical order with a deadpan
expression on her face. She starts significantly enough with ‘apron’ – putting on one- and going on
with ‘bowl’, ‘chopper’, ‘dish’, etc. At the end of the list, from U through Z, she gives up to find the
proper objects for every letter, but just indicates them with a fork and knife. Every now and then,
you can detect a suppressed sense of frustration in the action. When showing a fork, she stabs away
vehemently in the air, if still maintaining a bland facial expression. The same is true for her
manipulation of a knife. When she shows a measuring bowl or a large spoon, she suddenly throws
away its imaginary content, suggesting in a similar way that she is fed up with her submissive role as
a housewife. No doubt about it: this performance is an accusation of the role society reserves for
women as the selflessness provider of food and comfort for others.
Now look at what Juren does with this. In one way, she meticulously repeats any and every action of
Rosler’ s. But then, she also completely doesn’t. Putting on an apron the way Juren does looks almost
like an act of seduction as she smiles enticingly to the audience. Quite soon, she adds a few
‘inventions’ of her own. Showing a jar of water –with real water in it- she pours the water into a cup
that she puts away in a pot. When she takes the cup out, the water happens to be magically
transferred to the pot. This trick is repeated a few times, detracting the audience’ s attention. One
focuses no longer on the original intention of the performance, but on a magic trick and, not in the
least, the attractive presence of the magician. This is what magicians always do: they draw attention
to something that only seemingly matters, in order to hide what is really going on. Presenting an
action so attractively that its meaning disappears. It’s in a way the summary of ‘Magical’. This
woman-magician does no longer, as Rosler did, reveal the subtext of the kitchen. She explicitly draws
attention to her own accomplishment. Art becomes ‘artistry’, the artist an entertainer. The focal
point is the person, not the ‘message’ (which anyhow was a bit simple to begin with).
She doesn’t stop at this at however. She turns thework into a pure parody –in the original, musical
sense of the work: maintaining the melody of a composition but changing its text and use . If Rosler
condemns the idea of women as ‘kitchen goddesses’, Juren acts as if she takes total delight in a
‘magical’ performance of it. This comes to a peak when she produces a funnel (absent in Rosler’ s
film) to pour milk out of her breasts, or when she suddenly opens her legs to grab an egg out of her
vagina, to the utmost fun of the public that, by then, has all but forgotten what Rosler might have
been about. One more magical trick follows when all these ingredients are put in a pot to produce
ultimately… a bra. As if to prove the proverbial truth that the love of a man goes through the
stomach. This woman cunningly uses the kitchen to get what she wants. Sex for instance. No
selflessness here! In that way, the performance also questions of course the claims Rosler made
about the ‘victimisation’ of women. Not that this is explicitly stated. The implication of this magical
show hovers in the air, leaving it to the spectator to see what he wants in or ‘behind’ the sheer
entertainment while the curtains close for a moment.
When they reopen, Juren is sitting on the floor in a dress much like the one Yoko Ono wore for her
‘Cut piece’. But again, the original performance is subverted in a significant way. Originally, Ono
wanted the audience to cut up her dress, making them extremely conscious of the latent violence in
the male gaze upon the female dressed up body (which in some cases led to a lot of embarrassment
among the audience, in other cases to an all too enthusiastic cooperation). Nothing of all that here. It
is Juren herself who performs the cut up action, observing however the slow transition from a shy
first intervention to drastic cuttings aiming at denuding the body. But by now, she already has given
the public some idea about who she might be (playing). It certainly does not see someone bothering
the audience with moral judgments about the feminine position in society. In this way, the action
could be read now as a transference in a psychological sense. It is as if she demonstrates her own
fantasy about being stripped naked. The action no longer defies the gaze, but is actually fulfilling its
intimate longing, making real what is implicit in the confrontation between female performer and
male spectator. It just took a few slight twists: changing the context –from gallery to theater (or
cabaret) and changing the course –and so the logic- of the action. This exactly demonstrates how the
afterlife of performance art in the media can completely detract from its original ideas to put to the
foreground the spectacular side of it, turning its celebrity performers (and Ono certainly has become
nothing but a celebrity…) in a spectacle too.
Another celebrity, without any doubt, is Marina Abramovic. The way she is coupled in ‘Magical’ to
Ono is cunning, almost viciously critical. For the scraps of the dress of the ‘Cut up piece’ now serve to
wrap Jurens head, so that she is reduced to an anonymous body without a face, just as Abramovic’ s
body was in ‘Freeing the body’. The original 6 hours (or even 8, according to some sources) lasting
performance was accompanied by intense percussion. Abramovic danced on it until she fainted from
sheer exhaustion. One is free of course to consider this, in line with Abramovic’ s own statement, to
interpret this as a search for the limits of physical endurance, but nothing could prevent a spectator
from reading it in other ways. The transference could be not as much about endurance but about a
insatiable erotic drive (on either side of the curtain). This subtext is not to be found in most
comments on the performance, but ‘Magical’ almost stumbles upon it bluntly, just by changing the
music for an equally entrancing one. Because Juren did her ‘homework properly. She tried out the
whole six hours before condensing it to a manageable (and easy to ‘sell’) ten minutes. Only, the
music is not a percussion improvisation, but a clever adaptation of Led Zeppelin’s hit ‘Whole lotta
love’. However famous it is, you do not recognize the soundtrack immediately, as it manipulates and
extends the drum solo that precedes the famous guitar solo by Jimmy Page. Only the specific
lingering sound of the cymbals give away the origins of the percussion score you hear. But when
suddenly the rest of the song is given away in small sound bites, you understand what you are at.
And if that doesn’t help, the lyrics that come at the end say without any trace of doubt what you see.
‘You need coolin', baby, I'm not foolin' / I'm gonna send ya back to schoolin' / Way down
inside, honey you need it / I'm gonna give you my love / I'm gonna give you my love, oh /
Wanna whole lotta love (x4) / You've been learnin', baby, I been learnin' / All them good
times, baby baby, I've been yearnin' / Way, way down inside, honey, you need ah (etc. etc.)
The transference that is provoked here is drastically different from the one supposedly present in
‘Freeing the body’. But again, the image is exactly the same, the shift occurs only in context and
framing.
And it goes further ‘Way down inside’, indeed. Whence the egg in ‘Kitchen semiotics revisited’ came
from… Because now, it is time for Carolee Scheemann. First, as said before, with a short film excerpt
from ‘Meat Joy’. To be short, after Peter Brook4: ‘The sadness of a Bad Happening must be seen to be
believed. Give a child a paintbox, and if he mixes all the colors together, he result is always the same
muddy browny grey. A happening is always the brainchild of someone and unavoidably it reflects the
level of its inventor: if it’s a group, it reflects the inner resources of the group. This free form is all too
often imprisoned in the same obsessional symbols: floor, custard pies, rolls of paper, dressing,
undressing, dressing-up, undressing again, changing clothes, making water (…) You feel that if a
Happening became a way of life then by contrast the most humdrum life would seem a fantastic
Happening. ’ Scheemann prefers dead meet to custard pies, but apart from that, the description is
quite accurate… Now maybe, maybe, something might have happened once, but the film footage
certainly does not make that evident.
The following live action certainly does better in arousing an interest. Ever seen a naked magician on
a table producing a tiny pink scarf out of her ear or vagina? The most striking difference however
with Schneemann’ s ‘Interior scroll’ is that Jurens naked body is not smeared in mud (‘earth’, ‘pure
matter’), but clean and well proportioned as as a puppet’ s or a stripper’ s, except that she saves us
the routine of undressing to go immediately for more real ‘magic’ –in every way. It is actually only
when she produces a long band of colorful tissue out of her vagina that you might see the reference
to Schneemann, but then, that artist produced a text roll she read aloud. A chant about the secrets of
femininity in a revolutionary setting, instead of a magical trick in an erotic setting. Immediately, the
reference to Scheemann disappears again, to force us to focus on the magician again, because she
now also produces batteries and a string of light bulbs out of her vagina (in strange contrast to the
egg that came up before in the Rosler parody; the woman on stage now provides electricity instead
of fertility. The meaning of which might not be lost on the interested spectator). . All this leads to a
finale in which Juren holds between her legs an object which looks at first like a flash light but proves
to be a tiny projector. It seems to be magically stuck between her legs. The image is ambiguous, to
say the least. It looks as if a dazzling light image is pouring out of her sex to be projected on a curtain
and on the audience, blinding it in the event. But undeniably, the object could also be read as a
prosthesis for a male member. The applause and cheering that follows is very similar to the cheering
4
In : ‘The holy theatre’, second chapter of The empty space, Peter Brook, 1968, , p 62 in the 1972 Penguin
edition.
in a stripper’ s tent. Et pour cause. Even if it is finally ‘spoilt’ by the ominous ‘Genital Panic’ by Valie
Export.
It does not take much not to see that this ‘Magical’ is (also) about historical performance art and is
quoting it. Except for the video of ‘Meat Joy’, this is not clearly stated. Only the program notes lift a
tip of the veil. You don’t have to know this however to ‘see’ something which could be easily
qualified as a ‘camp’ magical show with an undeniable erotic or even pornographic undertone. It is
even in its own right a comment on the way the female body is used in entertainment as a hoax or a
trap. Or you could simply enjoy watching this woman perform. For a good performer she certainly is.
However awkward her situation might seem for any average person, she holds her nerve as if she
never did anything else in her life.
But then, how to read this? What does ‘Magical’ convey? The piece certainly doesn’t deplore the
loss, the misreading or the abuse of an art form, even if it presents a clear cut case in that respect. It
does not go to accuse the entertainment industry or art commerce for it, even if it does not seem to
be too happy about it. ‘Magical’ actually confronts us on the one hand with our penchant to look for
the entertaining side of things, even while paying lip service to arts, but on the other hand
demonstrates how little resistance the work itself offers in that respect. What was groundbreaking
40 years ago is commonplace today. It shows that a reenactment, some 40 years after the facts,
leaves next to nothing of the works, only by resetting its context. It raises the painful question if this
performance thing ever really meant something or if it was only a renewal of Dadaist shock
treatments with a ‘female’ twist at a moment when much more shocking events were setting the
world on fire in the ‘real’ world. Except then maybe for the fact that this ‘Magical’ itself would never
have been possible without precisely the provocative work of that period.
In short, ‘Magical’ is not as much melancholic, evoking an irremediable loss of sense, as it is ironical,
because the show constantly oscillates between presenting and obliterating the work it is based
upon. It does not give an opinion, it makes you ponder endlessly. The remarkable thing being
however that this work is presented at a time that major museums such as Tate Modern in London
or Moma NY feature performances as an integral part of their program. Think only about Abramovic’
s ‘The artist is present’, that attracted hordes of spectators, desperately hoping for their moment to
be in direct, ‘real’ contact with the profundity of the artist. That, to say the least, can be considered
ironical as the kind of narcissism involved is totally opposite to whatever ‘prise de conscience’ would
have been at stake in the 70ies. Not to speak about her paradoxical ‘Institute for the preservation of
performance art’ . It will carry her name because, as she mentions with striking honesty: ‘I feel like I
have become a brand, like Coca-Cola or jeans. When you say Marina Abramović, you know it’s about
performance art — hardcore performance art’. But could anyone also explain what that is then? Or
why suddenly nobody seems to care anymore to distinguish it from ‘regular’ theatrical performance?
Why, for instance, Rosas is suddenly also performing in Moma and Tate, next to Performance Art? As
if the stakes and procedures in the two art forms were ever equal (not to speak of the economy of
either of them). Lots of questions, hardly any answers. ‘Magical’ raises them, however. That is a
merit in itself.
Pieter T’Jonck