In continuation of the CROSSOVER process CMR presented a performance intentionally without any name during Serving Fish, an event held at Addington House, a late Georgian home of a former Mayor of Margate, UK, curated by Fräulein Bitte (Sepake Angiama & George Henry Longly) as a course menu of artists’ performative recipes. Accompanied by Jean Baptiste Biche, a make-up and drag artist, and architect Sam Causer, they built up across two rooms a stage of mirror- tables on which naked, mermaid-like, half human female sculptures, half sport-socked fetishists read Bataille’s Story of the Eye and worshiped feet mutually. The project took inspiration from Olga Desmond, an actress that successfully fooled the Victorian restrictions of nakedness in theatres by painting herself as a white marble statue and staging tableaux-vivant of erotic classical motifs, creating scandal; and from a scene of Luis Buñuel’s film The Golden Age, a surrealist commentary of bourgeois life in which a couple of kissing lovers hide behind a statue and end up licking its toe. The artists stressed the act of cannibalising involved in art consumption by feeding the eyes of the audience with nude bodies. They used Bataille’s regurgitating text as a quote of its auto inflicted therapy to overcome the traumas of a catholic middle class upbringing in which he links the eye, the testicle and the egg in an extreme exploration of sexual emancipation. Initially CMR wanted to call the act Serving Fish, a colloquial expression amongst drag queens to describe stereotypically female performativity, but preferred a complete absence of naming in recognition of invisiblisation, and restriction.
Documentation of the project became the material for a performative sculpture under the name I have the right attitude to life, all I need is experience (a quote from poet Mayakovsky at a young age) for a group show in the Modern Art Museum of Bogota in October 2012.
Photos © Jake Banfield
http://salivastring.tumblr.com/post/74011112497/fraulein-is-a-project-by-sepake-angiama-and-george
Intersections: Following Up Artists in Residence
MAMBO - Modern Art Museum of Bogota, October - December 2012
More photos: http://salivastring.tumblr.com/post/103497392731/intersecciones-seguimiento-a-artistas-en
Intersections : Following Up Artists in Residence
MAMBO - Modern Art Museum of Bogotá, October - December 2012
More photos: http://salivastring.tumblr.com/post/103498027206/intersecciones-seguimiento-a-artistas-en