Brenda O'Connell on Spit Spit, Scrub Scrub
Live at Dublin Contemporary 2011, 12 October 2011, 2pm – 5pm.
Performers: Amanda Coogan, Sinead Corcoran and Ciara McKeon.
It is 3pm, the second hour of a live durational three hour performance in Dublin Contemporary 2011, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2. Performed mostly in silence, the three performers ‘dance’, via sharply choreographed movements to a mixture of Handel’s music, birdsong and silence. It is a loop performance of approximately twenty minutes or so (I observed for one hour).
As a trained painter, Coogan uses bold colours as a brushstroke in her work. Here, the three women inhabit a blue room, in three beautiful blue silk dresses, all wearing identical bright red lipstick, drawing the eyes to the mouth, which is deliberate. The material flows and covers the entire room, and they bob up and down, almost as if in a beautiful blue ocean. Their movements are slow, deliberate and interactive, becoming more intense as the music swells. Since directing Beckett’s Breath for Bedrock Productions in 2006, Coogan’s work has been increasingly influenced by Beckett and in this performance all three are disembodied from the waist down, echoing Beckett’s Winnie in Happy Days. The room itself is a very interesting use of space. Coogan deliberately picked this small room, which is off the main corridor on the second floor of the building. It is, in fact, quite difficult to locate due to the labyrinth nature of the building itself. The door frame is no bigger than the entrance into a bedroom and this puts a clear distance between the audience and the performers. There is a lot of negotiation on the part of the audience to allow other viewers observe as only three or four people can view the performance at any one time. There is a clear space in front of the performers, albeit it is covered in the blue material, but there is no invitation to cross the wooden saddle board. In fact, one observer asked me if I thought there was an invitation to enter the room and we agreed that there clearly was not.
The movements are slow, deliberate and beautiful and the audience is temporarily duped by this until they observe that these women are, in fact, dribbling from the mouth – or spitting, to be precise. Those familiar with Coogan’s work will be reminded of such works as Yellow (2008) and Yellow Re-Performed (2010). In these performances, Coogan washes and scrubs a voluminous skirt over six hours, producing frothing soap that falls down the front of the skirt. Then she puts the material into her mouth and stretches it between her teeth, producing suds which drip off her chin and down the front of the soaking dress. In this performance, the dresses, or props (the dresses are in sight in the room between performances and the performers ‘get’ into them) as Coogan refers to them, have never been cleaned since the performances began six weeks ago, and they are therefore wet and stained right down to the floor. This provokes a reaction from the audience, as intended by Coogan. A group of teenage students giggled and laughed (nervously) at this, unable to decipher the meaning, if any.
Judging from the stains on the dresses, there has been a lot of controlled bodily functions by all three performers. This caused me to consider the notion of abjection, as theorised by French feminist Julia Kristeva. In her work, Powers Of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva deals with abjection and it manifestations. She defines the abject as ‘that psychical process that draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’. The horrors of fluids, which infiltrate and seep are particularly associated with the horror of femininity and an old-fashioned neurosis with the female body. This abjection does not produce understanding but is an encounter with something that resists signification and throws us into a sense of disgust and horror. Abjection is that which one cannot bear to look at or engage with and represents all that is repulsive about the human body:
These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly, and
with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as
a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such waste
drops so that I might live, until from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire
body falls beyond the limit....
Judging by the reaction of some of the audience, this controlled spitting clearly caused unease. As Kristeva argues, abjection happens when ‘I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.... I give birth to myself’. Coogan is totally in control of her art and her trademark transgressive performances disrupt patriarchy, challenging what Laura Mulvey refers to as the active/looking, passive/looked-at split. In this performance, as others, the women, using the corporeal body as sign, directly confront the audience in non-verbal communication, thus challenging the viewer and forcing them to consider their own physicality in response.
I leave the performance at 4pm with one hour to go, feeling energised by what I have witnessed. A foreign student asked me to ‘tell them that’s nice’.
Brenda O'Connell, October 2011.
Performers: Amanda Coogan, Sinead Corcoran and Ciara McKeon.
It is 3pm, the second hour of a live durational three hour performance in Dublin Contemporary 2011, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2. Performed mostly in silence, the three performers ‘dance’, via sharply choreographed movements to a mixture of Handel’s music, birdsong and silence. It is a loop performance of approximately twenty minutes or so (I observed for one hour).
As a trained painter, Coogan uses bold colours as a brushstroke in her work. Here, the three women inhabit a blue room, in three beautiful blue silk dresses, all wearing identical bright red lipstick, drawing the eyes to the mouth, which is deliberate. The material flows and covers the entire room, and they bob up and down, almost as if in a beautiful blue ocean. Their movements are slow, deliberate and interactive, becoming more intense as the music swells. Since directing Beckett’s Breath for Bedrock Productions in 2006, Coogan’s work has been increasingly influenced by Beckett and in this performance all three are disembodied from the waist down, echoing Beckett’s Winnie in Happy Days. The room itself is a very interesting use of space. Coogan deliberately picked this small room, which is off the main corridor on the second floor of the building. It is, in fact, quite difficult to locate due to the labyrinth nature of the building itself. The door frame is no bigger than the entrance into a bedroom and this puts a clear distance between the audience and the performers. There is a lot of negotiation on the part of the audience to allow other viewers observe as only three or four people can view the performance at any one time. There is a clear space in front of the performers, albeit it is covered in the blue material, but there is no invitation to cross the wooden saddle board. In fact, one observer asked me if I thought there was an invitation to enter the room and we agreed that there clearly was not.
The movements are slow, deliberate and beautiful and the audience is temporarily duped by this until they observe that these women are, in fact, dribbling from the mouth – or spitting, to be precise. Those familiar with Coogan’s work will be reminded of such works as Yellow (2008) and Yellow Re-Performed (2010). In these performances, Coogan washes and scrubs a voluminous skirt over six hours, producing frothing soap that falls down the front of the skirt. Then she puts the material into her mouth and stretches it between her teeth, producing suds which drip off her chin and down the front of the soaking dress. In this performance, the dresses, or props (the dresses are in sight in the room between performances and the performers ‘get’ into them) as Coogan refers to them, have never been cleaned since the performances began six weeks ago, and they are therefore wet and stained right down to the floor. This provokes a reaction from the audience, as intended by Coogan. A group of teenage students giggled and laughed (nervously) at this, unable to decipher the meaning, if any.
Judging from the stains on the dresses, there has been a lot of controlled bodily functions by all three performers. This caused me to consider the notion of abjection, as theorised by French feminist Julia Kristeva. In her work, Powers Of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva deals with abjection and it manifestations. She defines the abject as ‘that psychical process that draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’. The horrors of fluids, which infiltrate and seep are particularly associated with the horror of femininity and an old-fashioned neurosis with the female body. This abjection does not produce understanding but is an encounter with something that resists signification and throws us into a sense of disgust and horror. Abjection is that which one cannot bear to look at or engage with and represents all that is repulsive about the human body:
These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly, and
with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as
a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such waste
drops so that I might live, until from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire
body falls beyond the limit....
Judging by the reaction of some of the audience, this controlled spitting clearly caused unease. As Kristeva argues, abjection happens when ‘I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.... I give birth to myself’. Coogan is totally in control of her art and her trademark transgressive performances disrupt patriarchy, challenging what Laura Mulvey refers to as the active/looking, passive/looked-at split. In this performance, as others, the women, using the corporeal body as sign, directly confront the audience in non-verbal communication, thus challenging the viewer and forcing them to consider their own physicality in response.
I leave the performance at 4pm with one hour to go, feeling energised by what I have witnessed. A foreign student asked me to ‘tell them that’s nice’.
Brenda O'Connell, October 2011.