Vote YES to sex?

As the federal election is announced, all the parties rush to get the unenrolled to vote. Including the Australian Sex Party. Here's their ad:

Here's why I like it:

1. It's sexy
2. It's funny
3. It's provocative, over the top and in-yer-face
4. It will get noticed
5. The woman-subject of the image is speaking, rather than being spoken about

Here's some questions I have about it:
1. Does it reinforce the notion that it is sexier (cos it's dangerous) to be barely-legal? Ari Reid, the model, social worker, and South Australian who is running for the Australian Sex Party looks barely legal
2. Or is it provocative cos it questions societal fear about the sexualisation of young people and women, asserting them as able to sexualise themselves.
3. Is it wow-serism (like the sex party is against), or does it subvert by making obvious, wowserism?
4. Would this ad still work if Ari was: black (or non-white), fat, ugly, not-blonde?
5. Is it more subversive becasue Ari IS white, skinny, pretty and blonde?

Should we have a go at making our own?? Subvert the subversive message??

I can't stop thinking of Anastasia in bed

I had to go back to Anastasia Klose, to see if she was still curled up in bed, to see if she was still writing, to see if she was cosy and warm on this cold day, to see if her writing really had improved.

She was still there. I sat and watched her, ate a Mars bar.

She didn't notice me, or she pretended not to. Or she was concentrating on her writing. I still wanted to get in bed with her, or share with her somehow. I don't know how I can, other than eating that Mars bar and waiting for her to say something JUST TO ME.

But then my phone rang and I had to leave and I'm worried that I distracted her writing. I left her a message, told her to come to this blog, if she wants.

Ana - I'll write something JUST FOR YOU.

Review: Anastasia Klose's 'i thought i was wrong but it turns out i was wrong'

Today I went to the opening of Anastasia Klose’s i thought i was wrong but it turns out i was wrong at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide. This piece of performance art asks who is performing, and who is reflecting? It looks to the role of the artist in contemporary life, and the position of art in a hectic society.

i thought sees Klose sits in her single bed, writing her autobiography on her laptop. The text she writes is projected onto the wall behind her. Klose writes that she likes a patrons’ shoes. She writes that she needs a drink, and the bathroom. She writes about the bright pink brothel near the Croydon train station, with the small sign out the front: ‘looking for work’. She writes to her Mother, apologising for not ‘going deep enough into the work’. She grapples with writing something interesting, something reflective, something worth coming out on a 7 degree July evening for. She struggles to entertain us, to remain interesting. We watch her not wanting to be watched. We watch her prefer to pretend she is not being watched so that she can be more authentically reflective. We watch as Klose reveals words that emanate from her silent body, and our quiet watching.

Throughout her artistic career, Klose has worked variously with video, performance, and instillation. In 2007 she was awarded the Prometheus Visual Arts Award for a video in which she walks around the streets of Melbourne wearing a white wedding dress and holding a sign which says ‘Nanna I am still alone!’. Yet perhaps more infamously and provocatively, Klose is known for her lo-fi film In the Toilets with Ben, in which she is having sex with Ben in the Victorian College of the Arts toilets. A second film then features Klose sitting on the couch with her mother and watching In the Toilets.

This most recent performance, i thought, which takes place on a bed, may also be seen as evoking the erotic and the confrontational. Within the tradition of ‘bed performances’ also sits John and Yoko’s days of bed-bound interviews, Tracey Emin’s messy bed art, and even the Freudian couch. Yet Klose’s bed is more comfy than erotic in i thought, and more reflective than revelatory.

In fact, i thought is more reminiscent of Marina Abramovic’s House with an Ocean View. In this ‘living instillation’, performed in 2002, Abramovic lived on stage at the Sean Kelly Gallery, inviting spectators to sit with her, and sleep in a ‘dream room’ next to her. Abramovic created House in response to the attacks of September 11th. She wanted to give citizens of New York a place to mourn, to be still. She wanted to give people time.

Like House, Klose’s i thought gives spectators time. Time to reflect, to stop for a moment and think. Yet unlike Abramovic’s House, Klose does not search for intimate connection with her audience, even writing that she cannot ‘look into anyone’s eyes’. Instead, Klose’s reflection is personal; we do not connect with her , but with our own act of reflection. As Klose reflects, we are invited to reflect with her. Klose reflects on the act of writing, of performance. This reflection is not pre-conceived, but immediate, and so we are invited into the act. Klose writes that she’s already used all her best material, and doesn’t feel prepared – hence we receive the un-premeditated and the un-rehearsed. We receive the art as soon as it is created.

Klose writes and writes for two hours (other than a break for speeches). Her focus invites spectators into her world. An inner world attempting to reflect on an outer world. i thought allows spectators time to think, an opportunity apart from the chaos to pause, and wonder.

Is sharing a bed intimacy?

This is Tracy Emion's bed.

Check out Anastasia Klose, performing in a bed this Thursday at the Experiemntal Art Foundation, Adelaide. She will be writing her autobiography as she lays there, and we can watch.

Maybe she will write about us? Maybe we will censor her? Does she perform for us? Or do we perform for her?

Why performance as rape prevention?

Well I gave my talk at the AGWSA conference on Emerging Spaces: New Possibilities in These Critical Times. I spoke about performance as rape prevention. Why do I think that performance can be used in rape prevention? Why not good ol' fashioned self-defense? Or law reform? Or street protests? Well, I reckon we've tried those things, and so far, they're not working.

In fact, rape convictions have been falling since second-wave feminism begun a concerted campaign against rape. Last year, only 1% of all rape reports lead to a conviction. Less than 1 in 7 incidents of sexual violence are actually reported to police. If you're Indigenous, have a disability, or are young, then you're at greater risk of rape. the Australian component of the International Violence Against Women survey found that 10% of women had experienced physical and/or sexual violence in the past 12 months.

So, I reckon it's worth looking for some more ways to prevent rape. This is some of what I said at AGWSA on looking to performance as a tool in rape prevention.

Why performance?
Performance may not simply ‘envision a new future, but also perform this future’ (Nicola Gavey 2005). As Augusto Boal puts it, performance can offer opportunities for the make-believe to ‘make-belief’ (Augusto Boal 1995).

Performance may be an emerging space in the field of rape prevention due to its potential for transformation. As a space distinct from everyday social realities, performance may be able to deconstruct, re-imagine, and embody alternatives to the rape script. In occupying this in-between space performance may be an innovative tool in rape prevention.

Performance may be uniquely positioned to transform the rape script, with its opportunity for the theoretical to become embodied consciousness, witnessed in a social arena. On the stage, different subjectivities can be located and played with, creating slippages within the script of rape. Performance may not only critically assess social realities, but also invent and embody new ways of being within these.

The stage can offer people a place to create, and enact alternative scripts that construct gender and relationships differently to those imposed by the rape script. Performance can be ‘a ‘safe space’ of fiction….[to] not only find, but also use a voice to effect change’ (Prentki 1998:419). On the stage, people are offered opportunities to literally let their selves go.

Frighten Rape Culture to Death

It seems there's no way out of rape, that it's just part of our lives. When I look to law reform, it doesn't seem to have made any difference to rape convictions nor to the actual occurance of rape. As a woman, I am just supposed to be afraid, to learn to live with the fear, or with the lack of freedom that fear imposes upon my life. I don't want to live with that. I wanna frighten rape culture to death.

Here's some theory that I've been looking at that may offer another way to look at rape, and be used in a politics of prevention.

Sharon Marcus writes of rape as a 'script'
Analyzing rape as a script, rather than a determining reality of women’s lives, allows for it to be thwarted. Sharon Marcus writes that rape is not an individual act, but instead a process, a social script.

In this script, one person takes the role of perpetrator and moves another into the complimentary role of victim. The rendering of women’s body as victim is not permanent nor inherent, but instead a process that can be studied and averted. Within the dominanat framework, women's bodies are constructed as vulnerable, passive, and receptive. Men, on the other hand, are considered to be active instigators. The rape script relies upon these characterisations. Rape is then a ‘series of signals and steps that both maintains, and is maintained by social configurations of gender' (Marcus 1992:395).


Rape must NOT be seen as an invasion of a precious, interior space

A politics of rape prevention redefines rape as something other than an invasion of precious interior space. Marcus writes that: ‘Rape engenders a sexualised female body defined as a wound’ (Marcus 1992:397). Women are constructed as a wound made real through rape. So, Marcus asserts that rape is neither a taking of oneself, nor an indelible act of violence. Women's bodies must be reconsidered so that rape does not steal a precious, interior sexuality, an object of mystery and fragility. So that women's bodies are not constructed as 'rapable', and men's bodies as able to rape.

Australian Women's and Gender Studies Conference

It's day 1 of the Australian Women's and Gender Studies conference in Adelaide.
And no, I haven't actually finished my presentation yet...... (giving it well, tomorrow).

This uni (UniSA) is so swish, built all in circles, that I've spent half the day trying to make it back to the refreshments (I did)....