Futures and Fictions Page 3
Audition interview Revisiting Genesis tape 2 — Julia Warr
I had an art career, I still do, and then I moved to America and I was always worried about getting it again. But I had two more children, naturally, so I was worried and I wasn’t worried, but tried to keep stress low. And then moved to America — that’s high-stress, with a family of three kids, moving house and all that. So, or not so, I got it again. Same breast. This time the Americans took everything out of me and I went with it. Bilateral mastectomy, chemotherapy, and that took five years for me to stop being angry about agreeing to something that was actually just done as a precaution. But that’s a sob story you don’t want to hear anymore about that. But two weeks ago I had my ovaries out, just as a precaution, and I am still getting over that. That’s a weird one, two ovaries and two tubes, little things (showing with her index fingers and thumbs in both hands, two pea-size hole-shapes).
Audition interview Revisiting Genesis tape 3 — Joel Sines
With my condition, the really scary thing for me in it is that I can be talking right now and then fall, fall off, dead. Just boom (clicking his middle finger and thumb), not seeing it even coming. But this is kind of a blessing, because it could be something that I could see coming. I can imagine cancer, something that you see it coming, you see your identity being lost to that condition, right? I feel that that must be much more (clicking his middle finger and thumb), difficult to deal with. But I have no problem talking about death, it is what it is. I was thinking about it the other day, 90% of us are going to die without knowing and we are not going to take care of those details (online accounts, social media, digital content), we are not going to close our accounts. Does Zuckerberg close the accounts of people who die? Do the Microsoft guys get information through our accounts when people have just passed away? Do they think, let’s send it to some twisted archive? I was thinking about that. I was in the hospital this week, I had a major pain in my head, but it turned out to be a breakdown, and I posted (wiping his eyes with his hands) I posted “Forever Young” by Alphaville (holding his head in his hands). Watching the sky, I find it beautiful, we don’t have the power but we never say never, I like those sentences.
Poo
Heterotopic spaces are places of performance where dirt and purity are one and the same, defining each other in medical and spiritual rituals. The main set for the web series is Genesis’ place, or non-place; it has white floors and walls and it is completely empty, indicative of Genesis’ condition. The only object in the room is the sideshow projection > we will need a 15,000-25,000-lumen projector in order to have a bright white light throughout the shoot and retain a saturated projected image. At some point I plan to have poo on the floor. Who’s going to bring the poo? Where from and who’s going to clean it? Genesis’ friends will be joyous to discover the poo, it means that Genesis is active, functioning, she’s still alive, there’s still hope. Failing that, someone will trip over a cup of tea left on the floor and a brown liquid stain will linger over the whiteness.
The question of patients’ agency became paramount when I spoke to palliative care doctors and nurses. Those preparing for death are often caught up with conflicting family, carers and the health system’s agendas, as bit by bit they face the loss of their agency > they told me how important it is to maintain the patient’s agency for as long as possible > this presented me with a conflict > Genesis has no agency, she never speaks in the script and we rarely see her. Her there-and-not-there presence is intentional and governed by the wishes of those around her who care for her. There is always something messy in trying to order someone’s life, especially someone we care for, especially when they are ill. Mary Douglas states in Purity and Danger, “when chasing dirt, decorating, tidying, we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea”.
I went to see Castellucci’s Son of God > a play about a son who is forced to look after his senile and incontinent father > the surreal and gradual spillage of the excrement over the pristine white stage is like motion painting > every evening before the curtain goes up, various vessels of steaming brown liquid must be churned in order to get the texture, consistency and the smell exactly right > the Barbican Theatre, 2011, stinks of poo as if it’s been pumped through the air vent > Castellucci described it as “a play about the spirit of the shit” > the smell of how hard it might be to look after our parents is overwhelming > the stomach is churning, a reminder that we might not be fully up to it > some people feel faint and leave the auditorium.
Women Disappear
Woman’s death is not any old death
a woman’s death is not normal
Let us make a woman disappear
into a flat black smudge
You seem stitched up in the net
she smiles and cries in the deep deep web
chased, erased, stay in bed
how we live is how we die
Maybe more so
Trolls make goose bumps come alive
Trolls make goose pups come alive
roll and troll and troll and roll and troll
with a laptop on your back
Theses lyrics are from a Kaddish prayer for Genesis, a prayer for those who have died and the last episode of the series > the story of Genesis is the story of the disappearance of women.
In Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit talks about the many forms of female non-existence.
Wonder to Death is a performing arts project on femicide — telling and retelling the stories of the global pandemic of women who are killed based on their gender, mainly by lovers, partners, former partners, seeking the most extreme forms of erasure.
Some women get erased a little at
a time, some all at once.
Every woman that appears wrestles with the
forces that
would have her disappear.
(Rebecca Solnit)
In her book Citizen: An American Lyric, the poet Claudia Rankine describes how Serena Williams’ body continuously > over and over again > is being called out to disappear by the media and the umpires. In the racist imagination Williams’ body and its gestures do not belong on the tennis court. It is that “again-ness” of those calling-out instances that makes it difficult to distinguish when the umpire’s decisions are in fact justifiable or yet again prejudged against Williams.
Rankine describes how the Danish player Caroline Wozniacki performs an impression of Williams by using stuffed towels in her tennis uniform’s bra and underpants. Williams responded that she and Wozniacki are friends and said that she does not see Wozniacki as racist, but, she said, “I don’t think she’ll do it again”, and she also said, “So many times I’ve been mimicked in a racialised way”.
I am thinking about the complex ways in which women disappear into women, in this case racially. This is not a case of racism between strangers or competitors only — as Williams explained, they are also friends. Who is disappearing into whom, why and how? Is Williams disappearing into Wozniacki, as some would wish, by the act of racist public humiliation? To quote Rankine, “At last, in this real, and unreal moment, we have Wozniacki’s image of smiling blond goddess posing as the best female tennis player of all times”. Or is Wozniacki disappearing into Williams, not only by the sheer visual and symbolic allusion to becoming Williams through body towel bumping, but also through the direct exposure of white privilege? Williams’ refusal to disappear is the trigger for white fear, anger and shaming.
Women disappearing into women > racially, economically and otherwise > inevitably, those displays of woman-to-woman disappearances are acted out within the patriarchal superstructure. When I look at the various video clips depicting Novak Djokovic “doing” Maria Sharapova to the cheering of the tennis court audience, I cringe.
In a recent Guardian interview, the artist Camille Henrot said of her drawing series My Anaconda Don’t, 2015—“The dance (in Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda”
music video) is quite shamanistic and entrancing — she is challenging us to embrace our primal nature”. In response, Morgan Quaintance wrote in an e-flux text:
But for all this, Grosse Fatigue (a film by Henrot) displayed a troubling and dated tendency. It treated non-white bodies as anthropological curiosities, as examples of the exotic, otherworldly or primitive against which whiteness as rational, modern, cerebral and desirable could be constructed, measured and defined. What’s more, it wasn’t an isolated instance.
And later on in the same article on Henrot’s Minaj: —“But isn’t the objectification of black female bodies, reduced to the abstract physiological markers of breast and bum, a centuries-old device of dehumanisation enacted by what bell hooks called ‘white supremacist patriarchy’?” Is Henrot’s My Anaconda Don’t—the reference, disappearing into Minaj’s “Anaconda”—the referent, through the performances of fetishised racial appropriation and cultural vulturism?
Another incidence of woman-to-woman racial disappearance that caught my attention was the disturbing images from the Suffragette (2015) film premiere > the stars wearing t-shirts saying: “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave.” Kirsten West Savali writes in The Root:
Pankhurst’s full quote may be important, but within it lies both the freedom of choice and the choice to be free. The message that Streep and company are co-signing with their grinning faces and suffragette tees is that one cannot be both enslaved and a rebel; and tucked between those lines lies the erasure of a dual existence that black women have been forced to navigate in one form or another throughout history.
How to Make Women Disappear Two
In the art world women retain a state of semi-visibility through a relative lack of representation in public collections, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions, gallery representation, magazine covers and reviews, gender-bias reviewing, gender-bias prices, reviewing, prices reviewing, monographs, monographs (2.7%), art books, representation, exhibitions, public collections representation.
Representation, as opposed to self-presenting, is part of art-cultural value. For artists > minorities especially > posthumous legacy becomes a re-written cultural and monetary commodity.
A Facebook post by Penny Arcade:
My biggest nightmare is that after I die some hideous skank will end up writing my obituary or worse some deluded academic or pathetic curator will ‘explain’ my work to the public. Now I understand why Jack Smith begged me to burn his work on his deathbed. Jack always was right.
Alexis Hunter, Dying on Facebook
I have been following Alexis Hunter’s posts on Facebook > obsessively > courageous notes oscillating between descriptions of her deteriorating health and her artistic legacy. Her posts, describing a precarious existence, inscribed themselves onto me. How women artists live > is how women artists die. Often semi-visible > often poor and precarious > and often with an artistic legacy left in a mess. Hunter’s posts are a perfect synthesis of the themes in Revisiting Genesis, women artists’ careers’ durability, friendships, care, and posthumous online presence.
16 August 2013
“New show, Wall Street International Magazine, Alexis Hunter and Jo Spence.”
17 August 2013
“I am getting more dependent on mechanical things as I weaken. Think of that character in Doctor Who who has just a brain connected to tubes when they took apart a monster.”
21 September 2013
“feminist art in auction, VALIE EXPORT, Jo Spence and me.”
23 December 2013
“Today I had a shopping trip in a wheelchair, the rain was glorious on my face and the wind was terrific, buying food I cannot eat for my family, and the Carer having to huff and puff me up Haverstock Hill.”
16 January 2014
“I have my carer wash my face, as I don’t want to look in a mirror and see the ravages of disease on my face.”
30 January 2014
“Feel better today, met with film director who is doing film about my feminist work this morning.”
4 February 2014
“I have been looking at interviews I have done over the years and who is this woman I hardly know...”6 February 2014
“Exhibition: The Weak Sex — How Art Pictures the New Male.”
15 February 2014
“going to hospice on Monday.”
16 February 2014
“At the bed bath stage now, put it off as long as possible, but now my personal privacy is not worth the struggle.”
18 February 2014
“Morning in hospice. I have two little Japanese nurses taking me to the toilet one on each arm I feel like an empress.”
18 February 2014
“Nina Kellgren the cinematographer visited me this morning with ideas for the film we are making about my feminist artwork from my good friend Julia Whitcomb Cahill. At first I could not cope with a conversation but after a shower by one of my hand maidens I could.”
23 February 2014
“This is it. My breathing had [sic] got shallow all the time not sometimes. This is how you die with MND, your breathing just gives out, my neighbor in the hospice has turned the colour of the wall! Magnolia.”
Hunter died a day later. Her Facebook page has turned into a public memorial space and an online legacy stakeholder; a textual form of expanded mourning and celebration.
25 February 2014
“Alexis Hunter died at 4:30 pm on 24 February. Alexis was brave and strong until the end. We know how much she loved writing posts on Facebook and the reactions she got. It made dealing with the disease easier. RIP Alexis xx”
25 February 2014
“Farewell to my Facebook friend Alexis, an intrepid and talented artist that changed the world and shared her hospice experience right up to the last day.”
Alexis Hunter’s physical archive, currently at the special Collections & Archives at Goldsmiths Library, comprises of six boxes. On one of the boxes, full of slides, there is a post-it note with Hunter’s handwriting saying — “What shall I do with these, throw away?”
Hunter’s digital archive on Facebook occupies the public space of remembrance and forgetting, the physical archive is a personal artwork of artworks > handwriting as drawings > smell as posture > weight as an assemblage > autonomous.
I continue to read Facebook posts about artists I know who passed away: Ian White, Monica Ross, José Muñoz, Alexis Hunter and very recently a post from Nooshin Farhid about the death of Paul Eatchus who was my tutor, and stayed in her flat for the last three months of his life. They were close friends and neighbours > I admire the care and can only imagine the effects of the absence on Nooshin.
Bambi and the Emerging Death Industries
Bambi’s story resides in the scripted and improvised meetings between nurse Jackie and Bambi. Jackie tries to resolve Bambi’s digital will and posthumous presence while he still can > Bambi softly resists the intervention. This creates space to contemplate one’s attitude to current discussions around digital assets, such as online accounts and subscriptions, websites, blogs and social networks, as well as posthumous presence and emerging technologies of death such as AR (Augmented Reality) gravesites or the developments of supposedly death-defying person-simulated avatars, to quote the robot Bina 48 from a YouTube clip: “Death is optional, we don’t have to die! We are futurists!” (Bina 48 (Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture) is a humanoid robot who is modeled on Martine Rothblatt from more than a hundred hours of her compiled memories, feelings and beliefs. Nurse Jackie shows Bambi the clip in an attempt to persuade him to join a similar avatar program to ensure his posthumous presence.)
In one of their meetings nurse Jackie tells Bambi to consider keeping his online presence alive after his death by making his partner Tom his legacy contact:
Bambi: Are you kidding? My internet presence is going to help Tom and my mum and everyone to mourn better?
Nurse: Well, according to our research, digital environments for mourning can pro
ve useful in helping the bereaved cope with their loss.
Bambi: Why should grief be public? It’s intimate, isn’t it? Poor princess Diana.
Nurse: Digital platforms open the mourning process out to all users, including those outside normative family structures. People can share despair, empathy, advice, even rage. Maybe it could provide some relief.
Bambi: So if someone is feeling worse, then it makes someone else feel better? That kind of sharing?
Nurse: There is nothing wrong with sharing, it’s human. There are very few safe public spaces to share grief without being judged. Digital environments help! It’s a fact.
Figure 2. © Oreet Ashery (2016) Revisiting Genesis video still, Bina 48.
Revisiting Genesis started with my growing awareness of artists around me falling ill or experiencing deep stress and exhaustion, discussing the issue only in private, so as to not expose temporal or chronic professional vulnerabilities. How often have artists “threatened” to stop being artists because it is too precarious, too hard? The fantasy of withdrawal in the face of demands for continuous exposure is evermore appealing. Living artists are under continuous pressure to self-present and promote themselves on established and emerging social networks, for the dying and the dead the same expectations apply.
There are companies that offer afterlife digital-assets management. This includes digital-will services, where one’s digital content is dealt with in the same manner as material possessions, this also includes digital storage space and managers, where a person who is dying can assign a trusted digital legacy contact to then have access to all the deceased’s digital life. An emotional service includes the delivery of pre-empted video messages from the deceased to friends and family for the span of twenty-five years (see https://www.safebeyond.com). Other companies offer services that will erase all digital content of the deceased from the World Wide Web within a short and limited period — to erase one’s digital presence and online accounts from the internet can be a lengthy and a tasking commitment. Questions of access to digital content became more ethically challenging in cases of familial access to social networks, in cases of teenage suicide, for example.