[-empyre-] Aesthetic of Skeletons (forward from Lessa Bouchard)

[naxsmash]

  This post got lost in my shuffle.  Here is a contribution from the  
artist  Lessa Bouchard. I recently met Lessa in Chicago where I had  
the privilege of working with her and other interdisciplinary MFA  
students at Columbia College/ Center for Book Arts.     http://coreprojectchicago.org/artwork/679584_Lessa_Bouchard_Guest_Artist.html

-cm



Aesthetic of Skeletons


Warner's “A world making project”… an aesthetics that addresses  
relationship and exchange…. I think that this is a compelling   
conversation for all of its subject object tangles and difficulties,  
perhaps because of them. Thanks for being inclusive, offering the  
opportunity to read so many interesting responses, and to learn and  
think about the rich trove of referenced works.

While this conversation ranges all over the map in terms its  
implications, I have a particular work that I would like to share  in  
the context of this conversation.  Perhaps it’s because it was one of  
my first works in video that it dug at so many little splinters all at  
once, but I think it resonates with this theme.

My video work, Skeletonwoman: dreaming (2006) is based on the Skeleton  
woman story as I remember from Marissa Pinkola Estes collection… I  
tell it here because I think it lends a deeper understanding to the  
description of this piece.

There is an Inuit story about a woman cast away into the sea by her  
father for her disobedience. She lies at the bottom of the sea for  
many years, wasting away until all that is left are her bones. One day  
a fisherman brings his boat to the area where she is lying beneath the  
waves. His hook catches in her ribcage and thinking he has caught a  
mighty fish, so he uses all of his strength, excitedly pulling her to  
the surface.  When he is confronted with her skeleton bursting from  
the water, he screams, drops the fishing rod, and rows the boat to  
shore as fast as his oars will carry him. The frightening creature  
continues bobbing behind him no matter how fast he travels. Even up  
onto the beach and all the way to his humble fisherman’s hut she  
follows : bump bump bump. Finally, it is quiet. He pokes his head out  
of the door to his hut and sees his fishing line tangled in her bones  
at his feet.  She hadn’t been following him, he had dragged her behind  
him tangled in his line. Laughing at his own foolishness, he leans  
over to cut the line. He feels a sudden surge of pity for the creature  
and brings her next to his fire, sorting out and untangling the mass  
of bones and hair.  Finally he grows tired and out of his own  
loneliness, he covers them both and lies down next to the skeleton to  
sleep.  While he is sleeping, a single tear trickles down his cheek.   
The skeleton smells the familiar salt water and leans close to him to  
drink the tear.  The beating of his heart like a drum pulls her closer  
to him until she takes his still beating heart from his chest and  
sings the flesh back onto her bones. Once she is whole and firm again  
she places his heart delicately back into his body and curls up close  
to him. In the morning the fisherman wakes to find a beautiful, warm,  
living woman wrapped in his arms. They live together happily ever after.

Huh.

I deeply enjoyed revisioning/queering this relationally gendered story  
of making and unmaking, of fear and intimacy. In my story, a Woman  
(not a fisherman, or a Fisher Woman but a longhaired self defined  
Woman seeming person  looking for peace of mind, played by me) is  
swimming in Lake Michigan, and is dismayed to find chicken bones  
caught in her hair.  Once she overcomes her initial fear and  
revulsion, she cleans them off and takes them home. She organizes  
them, vertebra by vertebra, into a sort of chicken human hybrid on her  
bed.  She finally curls up next to her bony partner and falls asleep.  
While she is sleeping the rhythm of the rain mingles with her beating  
heart and she dreams of holding a human sized mammalian heart (played  
by a sheep’s heart obtained from a Chicago stockyard) in her hands.  
When she wakes, her legs are tangled with those of a real live human  
lover (legs and feet played by my lover).

I created this work as a way of negotiating my own heterophobia, my  
internalized femme phobia, and my anxiety about marrying a male  
partner.  My bisexual orientation actually manifesting in a  
heterosexual marriage was startling and unnerving to me and to the  
queer community with which I had surrounded myself. My hope is that I  
had an essential longing for intimacy that was physical but not so  
necessarily bound up in the trappings of a particular gender form.  I  
hope that I and others can celebrate the gift of having found someone/ 
anyone  and  being their scary bony find as well. My fears run along  
the lines of having given in to a certain kind of patriarchal  
conditioning, of being sucked into a controlling, illusory and  
monstrous killing machine.

I do believe that each of us, no matter what gender, creates barriers  
to intimacy, and is strongly affected by the expectations of the  
people around us. How we decide to navigate these things, how we  
decide to arrange the bones we pick up along the way, and whether we  
feel rewarded or traumatized by what they become is a unique and  
complex experience.

It is exciting to me to work like this, to poke at the soft places  
that we are unsure of, that are in between and tender. Sometimes it’s  
enough to know they’re there and figure out what it means honor them.



naxsmash
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christina mcphee

http://christinamcphee.net
http://naxsmash.net