“Filth is my politics, filth is my life.” Divine – Pink Flamingos (1972) Porca Miseria, literally ‘Pig Misery’ was performed at Gay Shame, the 9th Annual Festival of Homosexual Misery, produced by Duckie – ‘Legendary purveyors of progressive working class entertainment.’ It was a Rabelaisian circus sideshow, a durational performance installation, inspired both by Divine’s famous dictum from John Waters Pink Flamingos and Porcile, Pasolini’s 1969 savage, sacrificial parable of the underlying horror of a society whose dominant trait can be clearly described as the maximisation of economic profit, in which the son of an ex-Nazi industrialist is devoured by the very pigs, whose company he seems to prefer to that of his fiancé. The carnival of Gay Shame offered, by turns, a grotesque parody and a gently mocking critique of the vapid banality and brutal materialism of the urban gay economy. Upon arrival visitors were issued with pink ‘Duckie’ pounds, which they could spend on the (F)unfair of Shame, featuring everything from... Religious Nutcases to Gay Bashing, Polemic Art to Naked Lesbians, Mechanical Bears, Tea & Sympathy, Comedy Bigots, Bare-knuckle Transvestite Boxing, Toffee Apples, Punk Rock, Paganism, Very Unimportant Peoples Area, Pornography, Radical Knitting Circle, Balloon Modeling, Closet Costuming, Interesting Animals, Cup Cakes... and much, much more... The programme noted wryly, “It’s a nightclub. It’s a theatre event. It’s a rip-off. GAY SHAME: Neither useful nor thought provoking. GAY SHAME: No Fats, No Femmes, No Fun.” For Porca Miseria I collaborated with installation artist Robin Whitmore to create a ragged, end-of-the-pier style peepshow, ringed with a semi-circle of private cubicles separated by vanity screens. “Perverts Pay Here: Half-Man Half-Pig” stridently proclaimed the banner above the entrance, in the manner of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century traveling fairs that exhibited deformed animals, human oddities, famous hoaxes or medical anomalies. Inside I prowled a pigsty covered with stinking straw, lit with a single red bulb hanging from a bare wire. I wore a pig mask and crumpled suit, zipper undone revealing a hyper-realistic strap-on dildo. For five hours I performed a shamelessly obscene, though parodic travesty of an erotic peepshow, which had an implicitly ironic, though distinctly autobiographical resonance with the kind of voyeuristic, pornographic “Desiring Machine” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972) I worked in, during the late 90s, in a preOlympic Sydney, Australia. “The veil of modesty torn, the shameful parts shown, I know – with my cheeks aflame – the need to hide myself or die, but I believe by facing and enduring this painful anxiety, I shall, as a result of my shamelessness, come to know a strange beauty.”
“Porca Miseria was in certain respects a banishing ritual, an exorcism, and a revolt against shame”
(Genet, The Thief’s Journal, 1949: 132) Customers entered small curtained-off booths, arranged around the perimeter of the pigsty. They could then attract my attention by ringing a bell. I would open a small hole at waist height, through which they would pass rolled-up currency. Once the fake cash had been deposited I would pull back a curtain to reveal a viewing hole at eye level. I would then initiate a series of indecently exhibitionist acts – performing as “a figure of unruly biological and social exchange”. (Harpold, 1990). If more cash was offered I could engage physically with any of the visitors via a series of holes drilled through the walls at strategic positions. I was groped, stroked and masturbated by dozens of people during the course of the performance; my strap-on was mauled so severely it had to be re-attached several times. Porca Miseria was in certain respects a banishing ritual, an exorcism, and a revolt against shame. Born of “a furious desire … to drain to their utmost dregs the most violent and the most bitter of carnal vices.” ( Huysmans,1884) This “morose delectation” (St. Thomas Aquinas), hovered somewhere between the space of a confessional and a monstrous freak show. With it I was attempting to examine the “dialectic of shame and grace”, (Hanson, 1998) in search of the mystical “strange beauty” to which Genet refers. In retrospect, Porca Miseria can be read as a manifestation of what William Haver (1999) has called “The Pornographic Life” an incidental residue of “art’s work” rather than a work of art per se. The performance amounted to a queer travesty on several levels, in that I frustrated the financial/libidinous exchange by wearing a prosthetic penis. Not only was the half-pig part of me a sham, but the phallus itself was counterfeit. The visitors were offered only simulacra, a piece of plastic trash. An elaborate apothecary of illusions sustains the economy of desire in perpetuity. Unfulfilled longing throbs with an eternal ache. Whilst researching Porca Miseria I discovered that the demise of the traveling freak shows around 1940 came about as mysterious anomalies began to be scientifically explained as