Documentation of Absolution 1 & 2

October 20, 2009

Here’s documentation of Absolution 1 & 2 performed at TINA B. – Prague Festival of Contemporary Art in Prague, Czech Republic on October 9, 2009.

For this performance, which I developed for TINA B. 2009, I wanted to address the Festival’s theme of ‘NEW ERA’ by looking at themes of servitude, gender, political power, the subversion of cycles of geopolitical conflict and the sacred/ profane dyad. Absolution 1, performed with Czech artist Tomas Ruller, began as an exploration of pollution taboos of the lower half of the body (traditionally associated with sex and abjection) with the ‘clean’, ‘pure’ upper half of the body (associated with the mind). The performance combined the archetypal action of Christ’s (spiritual) washing of the 12 disciples’ feet with that of the Magdalene’s sensual action of wiping of Christ’s feet with her hair. As the performance developed, it became a way to to test the emergence of intimacy from an act of servitude, the limits of giving & receiving, and the interpenetration of sacred anointing and sensual pleasure. After this performance, I then performed Absolution 2 (an homage to Janine Antoni), in which I mopped the expansive marble floor with my hair of the Parkhotel Prague lobby. Using a white maid’s cleaning bucket I dipped my head upside down in hot, soapy water and scrubbed away until physically exhausted (about 45 minutes). In the process, this action created a great deal of speculation from 100 or so tourists as they were eventually ‘mopped away’ from the hotel lobby. As the floor became cleaner the dress became progressively gray. Absolution 2, takes the subject of exhausting manual labor as a starting point for re-imaging women’s political role in the new era as leading the way in providing a deeper political cleansing for a world desperate for a change from violent political methodologies of revenge.

Filed under: New Works, Recent Exhibits