[-empyre-] love-machine

Mon Jul 20 12:28:31 EST 2009

Hi All,
Thanks for inviting me to participate in this month's discussion.  
Christina asked me to reflect on my practice and present my work to  
the list and suggested that Micha’s comment might be a good lead-in to  
my work.
> so i wonder
> if we can think of it as more of a love-machine that breaks down by
> binding and reconfigures relationality along new configurations?

In my videos and performances I typecast myself as theoretical and  
cultural transvestites from pop music, competitive sports, and weird  
science. In 2002 I founded The Society of Biological Insurgents (SBI),  
an embryonic cell organization that wages strategic operations to  
overthrow institutions of compulsory gender. I have other projects  
that fit well within the discussion of violence but in terms of a love- 
machine I’m going to introduce examples of earlier work (PYT and  
Putting the Balls Away) in order to help frame conceptually and  
technically what I plan to do in Men With Missing Parts a current work- 
in-progress.
In 2004 I produced PYT, a short music video.In the tradition of the  
pantomime the lead role of peter (the principal boy) is played by a  
woman. JM Barries’ Peter Pan was written in the year 1903. So there is  
a long line of peters beginning with Nina Boucicault who played Peter  
Pan in the original London production. I was really moved by what  
reviewer Denis Mackail had to say about her performance, “others will  
be more boyish, or more principal boyish, or gayer and prettier, or  
sinister and inhuman, or more ingeniously and painstakingly elfin, but  
miss Boucicault was the Peter of all Peters…she was unearlthy but she  
was real. She obtruded neither sex nor sexlessness.” In the spirit of  
Boucicault, I perform PYT as Peter Pan (as Michael Jackson) in order  
to throw codes of masculinity into crisis.
http://www.taramateik.com/index.php/projects/details/pyt/
In Putting the Balls Away, I reenact the 1973 tennis match between  
Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in the famed battle of the sexes.  
Formally Putting the Balls Away is executed in three distinct ways: an  
interactive performance, a single channel video, and a video  
installation. The Battle of the Sexes was the most-watched live  
sporting event of all time in 1973 that pitted chauvinist against  
feminist when women tennis players demanded equal pay to that of their  
male counterparts.  During the performance video of one player is rear- 
projected opposite the live performance of the other. I perform both  
Billie Jean and Bobby.  After each game the competitors "switch  
sides" (contruction/deconstruction of gender). The match is enacted  
shot for shot. It's is important for the action can match the  
commentary. Excerpts from the sports commentators, Howard Cosell and  
Rosie Casals, exemplify the spirit of the match:

HC: There’s the velocity that Billie Jean can put on the ball and  
walking back she’s walking more like a male than a female.

RC: I just wonder whether Bobby would look better in a tennis  
dress . . . better than the shorts maybe.

HC: Billie Jean of course won the first set, to the absolute delight  
of all of the women in the arena. They actually stood and gave her an  
ovation and I suspect many in their living rooms did the same thing.

http://www.taramateik.com/index.php/projects/details/putting_the_balls_away_performance/
This footage is from a performance at the Guggenheim. I also performed  
it one other time, in Houston, the original site of the match.
In 2008, I made a single channel for the anniversary of the event and  
aired it 35 years to the day on tv and on the web. This video has a  
different structure—most notable are that there is not press  
conference or oral history with Rosie Casals the only female  
commentator of the match. Instead there are commercials from the 70’s  
and a music video. The medium changed the content.

http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?PUTTINGTHE

Last year I also made a video installation that was included in The  
Mood Back Home: an exhibition inspired by Womanhouse. I hung a JVC  
videosphere monitor (manufactured  from 1970-1974 after the U.S.  
landed on the moon) in front of a tennis court that played the match.  
There are a few images here.

http://www.taramateik.com/index.php/projects/details/putting_the_balls_away_performance/
I'm curious what people think about the same project existing in three  
states and the concept of transfeminism.

In Men With Missing Parts, I resurrect Dorothy as a Diana Ross  
impersonator in a live performed and video hijacking of The Wizard of  
Oz and The Wiz. Men With Missing Parts, is a send-up of the  
fantastical “realness” in Oz. Diana Ross’s greatest hits, sung live,  
punctuate a queer narrative of the “friends of Dorothy,” The  
Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, and Cowardly Lion all of which I perform.

So I begin the performance/video as Dorothy but the role of Dorothy  
transitions. During Missing You, the first song, (replacing Over the  
Rainbow) I hand off the role of Dorothy to a Diana Ross impersonator  
and she finishes the song  during the spoken part “There was so much  
you gave me/ To my heart/ To my soul/ There was so much of your  
dreams/ That were never told/ You had so much hope/ For a brighter  
day/ Why were you my flower/ Plucked away.”

There’s lots of cultural transvestism here and perhaps this fits with  
“a love-machine that breaks down by binding and reconfigures  
relationality along new configurations?

Dorothy Gale was one of the first female protagonist in American  
children’s literature in 1900. The Wizard of Oz musical moved to  
Broadway in 1903 (the same year as In Dahomey, the first full-length  
musical written and performed by an all-black cast on Broadway). In  
1939 MGM the film version premiered. In 1975 The Wiz, the all-black  
version of The Wizard of Oz, came to Broadway. In 1978, Sindney Lumet  
directed the film version of the Wiz with Diana Ross and Michael  
Jackson).

But I keep thinking a lot about the Tin Woodsman. This is from the  
script.

Scene 4 Love Hangover/Diana discovers the Tin Woodsman

Dorothy finds the Tin Woodsman standing still holding a labrys (a  
symbol adopted by lesbians). He is wearing short jean shorts spray  
painted silver with a lavender hankie (likes drag queens)in his back  
pocket.

DOROTHY
Why it's a man, a man made out of tin. Yes.

TIN MAN
(muffled)
Oil can.

DOROTHY
Did you say something? (to the audience) He said oil can. Where do you
want to be oiled first?

TIN MAN
My mouth, my mouth.

Dorothy oils his mouth.

TIN MAN
My, my, my goodness I can talk again. Oil my arms please, oil my elbows.

Tin Man falls forward with one chopping motion.

DOROTHY
Does that hurt?

TIN MAN
No it feels wonderful.

DOROTHY
Well you're perfect now.

TIN MAN
My neck, my neck. Perfect? Bang on my chest if you think I'm perfect.   
It's empty.

(I’ve had a double mastectomy.)

Music for “Love Hangover” begins.

TIN MAN
Ah, uh, mn
If theres a cure for this I dont want it Dont want it
If theres a remedy Ill run from it, from it

http://www.taramateik.com/index.php/projects/details/men_with_missing_parts/

tara

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