Dissections and Reflections

Dissections and Reflections 1 Adolescence I was sitting on the floor of my tiny carpeted bedroom. [ The room at my parents house where I spilled yellow candle wax that time in Middle School from a ​séance​. We were trying to summon Elvis. Our ​séance​s were just elaborate excuses to do impersonations of famous people. This still scared me. ] I was looking at myself in the mirror.

[Something I did all too often at that age of 15 and 16] It was a mirror attached to the outside of my closet door, an entry point to a room within a room.

[Often I would isolate myself in that closet space if I needed to feel like I was totally alone; taking out all of the clothes and boxes to bring in a conspicuously large plastic CD player and my budding music collection.]

That day, I decided that instead of drawing the usual self portrait of my face, I would draw my torso and my chest. {{{{ {{{{ {{{{ {{{{

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I did this in baby steps. I could only commit to drawing one breast at first. It felt like a huge leap to be doing it at all. After I drew myself, I felt like I had really gotten somewhere. I didn’t know what it meant, but I think it was similar to those moments when you realize that you’ve formulated an opinion or an observation that you really believe in. Though I had no plans to share this little drawing, the exchange I had with myself felt like a glimpse of empowerment. I had drawn my own image with my own hand in the company of my own reflection. It was the first action I ever took to consciously chip away at whatever guilt I had before about my body.

2 Charlotticus thurmanaria My senior year in undergrad I created a piece that was in essence, a dissection of my body through other people’s eyes. I pinned numbers to my body. These numbers corresponded to comments--some positive, mostly negative--that I had received and retained through memory

over the years about my body. I made a pseudo-scientific diagram to correlate the text with the specific bodily area. In a performative act, I stood behind glass in all black, and invited people to scrutinize me and read the comments. It was a way to separate these things from myself. To show the blatant objectification that others feel they have the right to place on others bodies. To highlight how our personal narratives are dictated so much by others, and to discuss the inadequacy of scientific structures for their “objective” reasoning. When I showed this piece in my portfolio to a visiting artist, she said that it was cowardly not to have done this piece in the nude. I was talking about my own body, I should have shown everyone what it was I was talking about. Of course, I had considered that option, but I ultimately decided to wear all black (mostly because there were more than a few creepy guys in the class, and I didn’t want to give them that satisfaction). If I had made a cowardly decision, than it was one that put all of the blame onto me. It is often women who are blamed for the reactions of men. But I couldn’t articulate that at the time. I felt like I was not going to be taken seriously as an artist, especially as a performance artist, if I couldn’t be nude in my own art.

3 Serious I made the piece again a few years later, but this time I was fully nude. I was lying on a wooden table, some sparse bundles of herbs hung on the wall behind me. I was like some early anatomical model or the unlucky subject of a witchcraft experiment. I was a frog in Biology class. I thought, “Now that I’m doing this nude, I can be taken seriously.” I included it in my grad school application. It was on my website. Some people saw it. I thought it gave my practice integrity and an edge. The first month of Grad school, my studio-mate slyly and knowingly brought up the images. He said that after he met me in person, he didn’t think that it could have been me in the piece. He didn’t think that someone with my personality would make that kind of work. I’m not sure what to make of that, except that it’s that same kind of reasoning that compelled me to create the piece in the first place--the tendency for some men to project their own narrative onto the lives of women.

4 Oral Fixation My first foray into video art, was a series of ten, one-minute clips of myself performing actions indicative of someone with the textbook signs of an oral fixation. It showed close-ups of my mouth as I smoked a cigarette, ate sunflower seeds, put on chapstick, chewed gum, licked a lollipop, etc. The audio was of myself reading Freudian psychoanalytic theory using a tape machine. I was really interested in how grotesque the mouth looked once it was segmented and isolated. How mechanical and alien it could be. I was also interested in this framework as a type of catalogue for mundane actions. As I was explaining all of this to my boyfriend at the time, he stopped me and said, “Ok, I guess I see all of that. . . but you do have an oral fixation. Right?”

That comment sort of stopped me in my tracks. “I’ve never really thought of it,” I answered. It was a complicated question. On the one hand, art is an extension of the self. Why would I make

this work if I didn’t have a natural proclivity towards it? But in some ways, I felt that his comment diminished my message. Having an oral fixation could be as simple as the fact that I liked to chew on pen caps and straws when I was thinking. The implied sexual nature of it was not in my headspace when I created the piece, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t in the headspace of others.

5 6,066 I started to put my video work on Vimeo about 7 years ago. In the beginning, none of my early videos got very many views, except the “Oral Fixation” one. People added it to their video collections; people with names like, “XXXVideoSultan” or “TacoBaby69.” I made up those names, but I promise they were similar. The Oral Fixation video is by far my most liked video. It currently has 6,066 views. I’m guessing that not everyone who watches this video has a critical vocabulary to discuss trends in contemporary and feminist art.

6 Shelter Maybe living my life within the confines of the “Art World” and academia has made me naive. It’s sheltered me from certain realities. Here I am, supposedly a “Master” at decoding media, symbolic structures, and aesthetic spaces, and I assumed that my video would somehow make others realize how mechanical our bodies are? That people would see it as “Performance Art” and not just a young girl’s mouth. I’m not sure why I was so shocked by this misconstruing of my artistic intent. Now that I am a teacher, I worry much more about my public image and the work that I share openly online. I’m still struggling with this.

7 Still Objects Female performance artists in the 1960s and 1970s were using the medium of film/video and performance to reclaim control of their own image. Nudity was an important part of this process, as was being alone with the camera. I realize that not everyone knows or thinks about these things. However, when I made the video and shared it, I was certainly thinking of this history. I was actively aligning myself with the values of women artists before me. I wanted to think critically about, and to participate in, shifting “the gaze.” Sometimes, no matter how much you call something serious, or art, or a meaningful performative act, people will still just see another nude figure. Did taking that leap from drawing myself ​for ​myself in my bedroom, to performing publically nude, negate the power I had over my own form? I felt so liberated that day, drawing a small portion of flesh, a part of myself that I happen to live with every single day. Once my image was in public, online, and viewable by the press of a button, something changed. Had I willinginly turned myself into an object? And did this serve to prove my point--or did it immediately lose all potential for nuance in its interpretation? Was it yet again, in the realm of being less serious as art?

Appendix of Images 1

Self Portrait, missing or buried

2

Charlotticus thurmanaria, in black

3

Charlotticus thurmanaria, nude 4

Oral Fixation, video stills

5

Joan Jonas, From “Mirror Pieces” (1968–71)