Housework

Sandy Orgel, Linen Closet, Womanhouse, 1972. Photo courtesy Through the Flower Archives.

In 1972 a group of artists in the Feminist Art Program took over an abandoned house in Hollywood to create Womanhouse, a seminal work in the history of art. The women collaborated to transform the space through site-specific installations and performances drawn from their personal experiences as daughters, wives, and mothers. The living room served as the theater where Faith Wilding presented Waiting her solemn meditation on female isolation and longing. Other performances included Cunt and Cock Play, a power struggle between husband and wife over housework and Maintenance where women enacted household chores to reference the never-ending demands of domestic labor.

In her essay After the Revolution, Who’s Going to Clean up the Garbage?, Christine Wertheim discusses the complex system of relationships between the woman and the house:

Within this space, Womanhouse seems to say, woman-as- housewife is trapped home alone, infantilized, her body becoming at one with the house and furniture, turning into a nurturing carapace in which “she” as a subject with her own needs and desires disappears. In this strange space of the home, simultaneously a workplace (for her), a leisure place (for her husband), a space of nurturing (for the children, the sick, and the aged), and a sexual place (for the couple), the woman-as- housewife is far more than merely a sexual being (object or not). She is a worker, a caregiver, a nurturer, a cleaner, a teacher, a drudge, and a hostess. She is also idealized, fantasized, trivialized, and isolated.

The history of advertising portrays most idealized images of the housewife as a beautiful, beaming lady who is overjoyed by the prospect of sweeping floors and doing dishes. Womanhouse defied this image of perfection and revealed the realities of women’s lives, like menstruation, the demands of beauty rituals, and the exhausting and alienating pressures of homemaking. Thankfully, we have a come a long way since the 60s and 70s, we are no longer defined through the roles of wife and mother, we have been liberated…

So what's up with the new series of TV spots for Target’s The Everyday Collection? Laundry shows a glamorous blissed-out woman floating through space as silky ethereal fabric and a bottle of Tide circle around her. An off-camera sultry female voice says “we all long for something…” “…and that something is the other sock”. While the message is cheeky, it also diminishes female desire to the most vacuous and mundane level.

In Bake Sale, a Mom struts down a catwalk, whisk and egg in hand as boxes of cake mix erupt around her. She crushes an egg with her bare-hand in a show of sheer power. The aforementioned disembodied lady voice echoes “dominate that PTA bake sale”. This Mom is kick-ass (in the kitchen) as all of her potential power is channeled into the home. Like the mechanical brides of 1950s advertising, she must play the role of the good mother, she must consume, and her pretty red-lipped smile is evidence of her contentment.

Cowgirl, one of the more distressing ads, shows a high-heeled Mom in lily-white cowgirl gear straddling an infant as she changes a diaper. She slings wipes and diapers, but there is no sign of spittle or shit in the spotless space. She is flawless, she defies the signs of childbirth like stretch marks and weight gain as she poses like a coy pinup girl. There is a weird sexual current caused by the mix up between innocent little girls playing dress-up and sexy mommies role playing as fetish cowgirls.

The sexual content of Under Pressure is more overt, as a self-assured woman wields a hose with a gushing stream of water. She makes a stand and takes aim. Is she fighting crime? Extinguishing a five a alarm fire? No, she is making oatmeal!! The throbbing rock soundtrack with the exalting lyric “woman you got to be a woman…” adds to the illusion of her strength. In the end she is pleased with herself as boxes of Quaker Oats slowly turn atop pristine pedestals.

All the ads in this series, feature a beautiful “empowered” woman and the product she “needs.” According to the Target corporate blog, The Everyday Collection marketing campaign is “cutting-edge” “fusing high style with food and other essentials”. Selling women products through the allure of glamour is nothing new, it’s an old trick well used since the rise of the ad campaign in the 1960s. So why does this mode of advertising still exist? Is it necessary to continue to sell women the virtues and pleasures of housework? Do these ads create or reflect the status quo? 

The statistics bare out that housework still falls heavily into the hands of the lady of the house. A 2012 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey reports " On an average day, 19 percent of men did housework-- such as cleaning or doing laundry-- compared with 48 percent of women. Forty percent of men did food preparation or cleanup, compared with 66 percent of women."

Painting

Last weekend, a large crowd turned out for the opportunity to hear art lumineres, Barbara T. Smith, Carolee Schneemann, Judith Bernstein, Theo Altenburg (artist and long time friend of Otto Muehl) and Paul McCarthy speak on the topic of painting. The panel was presented in conjunction with the exhibit Painting and was moderated by Principal/Curator of The Box, Mara McCarthy.

Installation view of Painting, The Box 2012, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

The show Painting is an odd mix of works, many of which were created in the 70s. The show, conceived by Paul McCarthy and his curator daughter Mara sought to challenge traditional notions of painting and includes artists who have maintained intimate connections between their life and art practice despite the influences of “the art world”. The blurring of art and life brings to mind Fluxus art and the history of women's art made within and in reflection of domestic spaces. Artists like Schneemann, McCarthy and Muehl, used mundane and found materials like tin cans, broken glass, dirt, and ketchup in place of honored substances like oil paint. There is an immediacy to much of the work bore out of insistent surfaces that threaten to fall apart before our eyes. Michael Henderson's Castration of 1968, is literally torn away from the stretchers. McCarthy explained that the two Henderson works included in the show are the only two pieces that survived a fire that consumed the artist’s early work in 1985.

Michael Henderson's Castration, 1968, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

As is often the case with panels comprised of a group of stellar artists, the dialogue was unfocused as each artist took the reigns to discuss their own ideas. One of Mara’s most interesting questions  “what is the relationship between your painting practice and your work in performance?” went unanswered, but lead to some compelling personal reflections around female sexuality and power dynamics.

Barbara T. Smith shared her continued dismay over the misinterpretations of her 1970s performance Feed Me. For the work, part of an evening-long performance event, Smith took up residence in the ladies’ room. The space contained an oriental rug-covered mattress, a sink, incense, body oils, shawls, books and music, a taped loop played the words “Feed me." Smith was nude and accepted one person at a time into the private space. She said the work grew from her personal experiences of being continually harassed by men in public. She wanted to regain control and establish an exchange where the viewers (both men and women) had to ask permission for her attention. She was nude and seemingly vulnerable, but she held the power to affirm or deny the desires of her interlopers.

Barbara T. Smith, Feed Me, 1973 

Smith’s intentions got turned upside down when rumors spread that she was having sex with each visitor who entered the ladies’ room. Her power was stolen as Smith was transformed from artist into whore. Smith was criticized by many of her fellow feminists for her supposedly obscene actions. The rumors around the performance took hold and were perpetuated in countless texts and art history books. It’s distressing to consider how the impermanence of performance can allow for wildly inaccurate histories.

Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, 16mm film, 18 minutes, 1965

Carolee Schneemann also shared troubling responses to her erotic work. Her 1965 film Fuses has been censored countless times and was even arrested in El Paso in 1985. Fuses is a masterpiece of experimental filmmaking that records Schneemann and her partner James Tenney making love. The work is anything but pornographic, as the film becomes the sensual surface that is cut, colored, and imprinted by desire. Schneemann mentioned that her  most known work Interior Scroll has also been censored in recent years, revealing that female sexuality may still be taboo in proper culture.

Judith Bernstein. Five Panel Vertical, 1973.

Judith Bernstein discussed her on-going body of work that addresses power dynamics in art and culture. Her monumental gestural drawings portray phallus/screws that dominate and threaten to take over the space. She shared her passion for raw humor with a political edge and more than once let out a jibe about “size mattering”. She has also been "marking her territory" with giant signature works that claim space as she boldly inserts herself into the ledgers of history. Like many women artists of her generation, Bernstein is a late bloomer in the museum world, her first solo museum show Hard is currently on view at the New Museum through January 20, 2013.

Judith Bernstein, recreation of Signature Piece, of 1986 for her solo show at the New Museum in 2012.

I didn't I gain any new insights about painting, but I was happy to hear the passion that still pulses in Smith, Schneemann, and Bernstein. All these women are over 70 and continue to engage in serious art practices. I am in awe of their strength and courage and inspired by their undying devotion to art making.

The exhibit Painting is on view at The Box until January 26.
Read reviews of the show on Notes on Looking and at the LA Times.

Last Years News

Here is a list of my favorite exhibits of 2012 in no particular order.

Hirokazu Kosaka, Untitled, performance, 1972

It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angels 1969-1973

Pomona College Museum of Art, August 30, 2011- May 13, 2012

Part of the Pacific Standard Time initiative, this series of exhibits and performance events highlighted the hotbed of creative activity on the Pomona campus between 1969 and 1973. The three exhibitions revealed the fertile community which grew from fluid exchanges between faculty, students and curators. Artists such as Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, Chris Burden, Judy Chicago, Robert Irwin, William Leavitt, John McCracken, Allen Ruppersberg, James Turrell and William Wegman engaged in experimentation that influenced the future of conceptual practices. 

Installation view, Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone

Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972

Hammer Museum, February 5- April 29, 2012

This first American survey of works by little known Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow featured figurative sculptures that resonated with erotic and mortal weight. Fragmented and diseased parts longed for touch and psychological reunion with their lost host. There was a distinct ache in the visceral surfaces rendered through resin, rubber, raw wool, paper, and other tactile materials. Like Eva Hesse, Szapocznikow's oeuvre is haunted by the shadow of cancer that took her life at age 46.

Installation view, Rebel Dabble Babble, 2012

Courtesy of the artists and The Box, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

Paul and Damon McCarthy's Rebel Dabble Babble

The Box, May 11- July 7, 2012

This ambitious collaboration between Paul McCarty and his son Damon, took the form of a multi-room installation of video and objects. The project, part of James Franco's Rebel show, was based on rumors about the time Nick Ray, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, James Dean and Dennis Hopper, spent at Chateau Marmont during the filming and rehearsal of Rebel Without a Cause. The videos oscillate between the fantasy of Hollywood and the lurid under belly of violence and power. Natalie Wood was only sixteen years old when she became embroiled with both her 44-year old director and co-star Hopper. The videos often focus on the vulnerable and over-sexulalized Wood character who craves constant attention from the eye of the camera and the grotesque men behind the lens. 

Self-Obliteration (Net Obsession Series), c. 1966. Photocollage on paper,

Collection of the artist. © Yayoi Kusama. Image courtesy Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.

Yayoi Kusama

Whitney Museum, July 12- September 30, 2012

The Yayoi Kusama retrospective spanned the artist's long and on-going career, from the tortured floral forms painted at age 20 to a room of vividly colored paintings from 2009. The show highlights Kusama's multi-disciplined practice that includes painting, installation, performance, film, fashion design and media publication. Vitrines were filled with remnants of the artists infamous free love works from the late 60s and reveal Kusama's happenings as precursors to contemporary works in relational aesthetics. The show also featured, Fireflies on the Water, one of Kusama's stunning light installations. 

Gertrude Abercrombie, The Courtship, Oil on masonite, 1949

 Photo © Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, by Nathan Keay

In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States

LACMA, January 29, 2012–May 6, 2012

This exhibit featured well known Surrealist practicioners, such as Louise Bourgeois, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo, but also introduced the work of lesser known artists like Gertrude Abercrombie. The exhibit raised interesting dialogues between the works around issues of female agency and sexual identity. It was also a nice surprise to see Marcel Duchamp menaced by a phantom noose in Maya Deren's Witch's Cradle, which looped on a small monitor.

Alberto Burri, Sacco (Sackcloth), 1953

Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962

MoCA, October 6, 2012- January 14, 2013

This show serves as a companion to Paul Schimmel's  seminal 1998 exhibit Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979. Like Out of Actions, Destroy the Picture favors process and impermanence over the primacy of the precious art object. The show features a global roster of artists including the often overlooked artists of the Gutai movement. Works verge on collapse and reference the dark and formidable vacuum left in the wake of WWII. Artists like Alberto Burri, Robert Rauschenberg, Shozo Shimamoto, Lee Bonticou and Yves Klein, cut, burned, slashed and stitched surfaces fashioned from quotidian materials to produce a dark and poetic realism.

Sharon Lockhart, Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets by Noa Eshkol, 2011.

Sharon Lockhart / Noa Eshkol

LACMA, June 4, 2012–September 9, 2012

In this show, Sharon Lockhart turned her documentarian eye on the visionary work of Israeli choreographer and textile artist Noa Eshkol. Conceived as a two-person show, the exhibit featured Eshkol's carpets, dance scores, and drawings along side Lockhart's five-channel film that captured a selection of Eshkol's dance works derived from the universal notation system she created with architect Avraham Wachman in the 1950s. In Lockhart's film, young and old dancers moved together through a series of simple gestures synchronized to the metrical tick of a metronome. The sparse regulated motions created a mesmerizing display of bodies engaged in the translation of a kind of sacred language. 

We don't lose Anything by being born, still from video document, 2000

Regina José Galindo: Vulnerable

Museum of Latin American Art, May 24 – September 30, 2012

This show featured a selection of the powerful and distressing performance works of Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo. Presented through video documents, the works explore issues of power and agency, especially in relation to the role of women in culture. Like body artists of the early 70s, Galindo places her own flesh in harms way to speak of literal and metaphoric violations of the body. Read my full-review from earlier this year here.

She seas dance, 2012, Iridescent, white and gold PVC, Louver styrene, 3 channel projections

Photo credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Wangechi Mutu’s Nitarudi Ninarudi

Susan Vielmetter, Los Angeles November 3- December 22, 2012

Wangechi Mutu’s recent solo exhibit followed threads of her previous bodies of work  portraying the monstrous-feminine rendered through her signature brand of glimmering magic. The new collages showed two-headed creatures encrusted in thick layers of dirt and glitter as meditations on memory and identity. In the front space of the gallery,  a room-sized structure loomed like a shimmering mirage. Made from layers of gold streamers, the interior of the space served as the surface for a three-channel video projection that showed a woman's glamourous disembodied eyes opposite a woman's private and languid dance.

Anne Gauldin, Photo collage for the Woman's Building Newsletter, 1982-83

Don’ It in Public, Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building

Ben Maltz Gallery, October 1, 2011 - February 26, 2012

Part of Pacific Standard Time, this show focused on the legacy of feminism and collective practices centered around the Woman's Building, a locus of the feminist art movement from 1973-1991. The exhibition featured objects and ephemera as well as an extensive on-line archive of first-person narratives on art and feminist communities in Los Angeles in the 70s. Founded by Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Arlene Raven, the Woman's Building became a refuge for women who traveled from across the country seeking a community built through sisterhood. I wish such a place still existed today! For more on the history of the Woman's Building, see Terry Wolverton's excellent book Insurgent Muse.

Into the Woods

When I was a graduate student in the mid-90s, I took a performance art class with Gagik Aroutiunian called Experimental Directions. I was drawn to performance through the intense monolouges of Karen Finley and Holly Hughes, but was intimidated by the theatrical focus of their works. I was shy and totally inept in the art of the stage (I had never even been in a school play). Gagik opened an entirely new realm of possibility to me when he introduced the Body-Object-Ritual project. The assignment had a simple premise; interact with an object in an unexpected way.

My body was shaking the day I presented my first performance to our small class. I sat down in a wooden chair and began stitching small black "hairs" onto the palm of a white cloth glove. I pushed the needle through the stiff cotton and brought it to my mouth where I held it between my lips as I cut each thread. I became calmer with each stitch and fell into the pure rhythm of process. That year I made a series of performance works derived from silent, intimate and repetitive gestures.

Through working with Gagik, I came to recognize the deep relationship between my performances and the tactile, process based works I had been exploring in the studio. I knew my art practice related to my Mother and Grandmother's incessant domestic production of garments and toys made through sewing, knitting and crochet. But, it wasn't until I found performance that I started to realize a connection to my Father and his love of hunting.

As a kid, I was always mortified when I arrived home from school to find a deer hanging in the garage slowly leaking blood onto the cement floor. I felt sad and I couldn't understand how an avid animal lover could hurt an innocent creature. When I started performing, I began to see hunting as a ritual; as a primitive process between man, nature and death. My Dad was a serious and ethical hunter who knew how to deal a fatal blow with swiftness to spare the animal undue suffering. He spent hours crouched in a tree stand waiting and listening. As is the case with all ritual, the body, space and time are authentic and present. My Father spent his life hunting a small radius of land between his birthplace and the house he had built with his own hands. Those woods were his sanctuary and he held a deep and intimate knowledge of that place.

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.        --John Fowles                                                                                            

It was in graduate school that I also met Ron Cubbison who was my advisor. He confided that the graduate review committee thought my work was too political. He fought to get me in the program and became a steadfast champion of my work. I often thought of him as my "art Dad" because of his attentive and unconditional support. Like my own Father, Ron spent his life growing and making within nature.

Ron's art practice grew from his traditional training as a painter and he made works that captured beautiful and sensitive views of the natural world. He despised the sentimental and placid vistas found in conventional landscape painting. Ron's landscapes vibrated with the sensual violence of nature and the ever present process of death and decay. After he retired from teaching, Ron returned fully to his work and began making a series of intimate pencil drawings. I remember his eagerness to show me the new work which he felt was a breakthrough in his efforts to capture nature. The drawings were comprised of layers of gyrating marks like a tangled forrest floor breathing on the page. There was a metaphysical resonance and a purity to the gesture as if the image had been channeled directly through his body onto the surface of the paper. 

That series proved to be Ron's last as he fell ill and passed away in the fall of 2008. I was shocked by his death, as I had always imagined him at age 100, walking the woods and climbing foreign mountains. He was an avid traveler and he arranged an exhibition that would award five travel grants to his former students after his death. I admire that Ron wanted his legacy to remain in the realm of teaching and that he gifted his students with the opportunity to experience the world through travel. Ron had a profound impact on my life as a teacher and an artist and I hold his memory close to my heart.

Last week I lost my Father. He had been fighting cancer for two years, but the end still came more quickly than expected. It was difficult to watch him suffer and return to a state of dependance not unlike infancy. We moved him from the hospital to a serene hospice room with doors that opened into the woods. My family took solace that he was in the woods, the place where he felt most at home. My Father was a laborer, a man who worked hard, who took pride in what he could do with his hands. He was outdoors everyday until the past year when he was often too tired to head to the barn to take up some new project. I will remember a man who rescued abandoned opossums and raccoons, who fed strays and wouldn't sleep until all his cats were indoors at night. I will remember a man who in his 70s still chopped wood, climbed trees in need of trimming, and tended his large garden. I will remember a man who understood silence and the solemn poetry of deer prints on a newly fallen snow.

Mouth to Mouth

Athina Rachel Tsangari's film Attenberg opens with an extended scene of two young women awkwardly French kissing in front of a stark exterior. There is no passion, as their bodies barely touch and they aimlessly jab their tongues into each other’s mouths. The session erupts into a spat and it becomes apparent that we are witnessing a kissing lesson between best friends.

Attenberg is a coming of age film centered on Marina, a twenty-three year old virgin who lives with her father Spyros. She is a late-bloomer, who at twenty-three, is finally examining her ambivalence about sex. Marina likes the breast more than the penis, but doesn’t desire men or women. She is perplexed but not desperate about her situation. Her days are filled with the tedium of real life, as she accompanies her father to his cancer treatments or drives the scenic but deserted roads of her small Greek town. Marina is obsessed with David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries and she often goes wild mimicking animal sounds and movements.

As Spyros’ illness advances, a shift begins in Marina’s psyche and she becomes more open to the possibilities of sexual intimacy. She seeks out a visiting engineer and begins a nearly clinical investigation of lovemaking. Tsangari's sex scenes are injected with a raw awkwardness and the body is tangible and imperfect. Like sex in real life, there are elbows and limp members and too much worrying.

Throughout Attenberg, there is a focus on the pure physicality of the body. Tsangari’s characters are mortal and they evolve through a kind of haptic knowledge. There are tongues in mouths kissing and fingers in mouths to pull out bones during a fish dinner. Marina feels her body in space, flailing about, dancing to music or imitating animal gestures with Spyros. At one point, Marina cups Bella’s bare breasts, as a test of arousal, illuminating the possibilities of a non-sexual physical intimacy. 

The film is punctuated with scenes of Marina and Bella wearing polka dot spattered dresses moving arm and arm down the sidewalk like Siamese twins joined at the hip. They enact synchronized gestures like marching, kicking their legs out, or grabbing their crotches. They are distinctly unladylike in their gestures and in their conversations about Bella’s dream of a tree strewn with male genital. They are subversive in their play and experience the intimacies and annoyances of sisterhood. 

Marina and Bella are reminiscent of other cinematic girl duos like Celine and Julie and the two Maries from Daisies. All of these girl-women are fearlessly independent as they forge their own identities outside the limits of proper society. They play around and make their own adventures. They are not motivated by the lure of romantic love and they take comfort in the warmth of their sisterly bonds. Men may come and go, but sisters are forever! I can imagine Marina and Bella as old ladies, still arm and arm kicking up their heels and spinning naughty tales.

Attenberg is infected with a sense of loss, one that is existential rather than sentimental. Near the end of his life, Spyros laments that he hasn’t taught his daughter anything. He worries that his own misanthropy has left her with a faithless and isolated future. We know that Marina will be lonely, but we also know that she has found resilience through her body, that she will go on growing into the world through her own ritual and inquiry.

Action Films

Performance art is potent because it is alive. A performance happens with real bodies in real space in real time. A photograph or a video document is not the same as the live event; a performance cannot be mechanically reproduced. Performance is only happening when it’s happening and then the work lives on in the often-unstable memories of both the artist and the audience.

Filmmaker Kurt Kren eschewed the pitfalls of documenting live performance by generating entirely unique cinematic works from the ritualistic enactments of the Viennese Actionists. A selection of these films is currently playing in Mubi’s online film festival. Kren began working with the Actionists in the 1960s and produced experimental films that captured the chaos and debauchery of their performances. Kren’s films are not documentations of the live events as is made clear through the manipulated temporal structures produced through quick cuts and repetition. 

Leda and the Swan, a film produced from Otto Muehl’s 1964 performance, features a reclining nude woman who is doused in various liquids and coated in layers of white feathers that fall upon her body like snow. Muehl describes the performance action as follows:

Leonardo grates a large cucumber over Leda with a grater, squashes 10 tomatoes and cracks 5 eggs on her. He places a bottle containing a rose between her legs. He scatters breadcrumbs and coffee powder over her. Leda sets her upper body upright and draws in one leg. Leonardo places a large, uninflated plastic swan between her legs…

Kren captured the messy erotic nature of the work as he developed an odd dreamscape through his editing techniques. He shatters time by freezing the frame for seconds at a time or through rapid-fire flashes of repeated imagery. The result is a flickering, fragmented, surrealistic montage.


The Viennese Actionists are known for creating psychologically disturbing works that express the abject through ritual and symbolism. They simulate body fluids such as blood, piss, semen and excrement through use of food substances, though sometimes they used the real thing. The works are reliant on what I call “visceral substitution”, the act of using a material or substance to stand in for the body. In his novel, Story of the Eye, Georges Bataille interchanges eggs for eyes throughout the sexually explicit narrative. He relies on the tactile and visual similarities of the objects as a source for metaphor and substitution.

Otto Muehl, ACTIONISM Material Action Nr. 14 Cosinus Alpha

I once witnessed visceral substitution in action during a group dinner in a French restaurant. A whole cooked fish was placed in the center of the table and my friend plucked the black olive out of the eye socket and popped it into his mouth. Nearly all the guests gasped in disgust. They weren’t disturbed that he had eaten an olive, but that he had seemingly eaten a fish eye. For a split second, the eye and the olive were indistinguishable.

Primal human responses to symbols of the body, sex, and death are central to the works of both Kren and the Viennese Actionists. The film, Mama and Papa captures footage from another Muehl action. This work is more sexually charged with flashes of a female torso being covered in red sauce, milk, and flour, intercut with among other things, images of a hand cutting into boiled eggs, a couple kissing, and what appears to be a man urinating. The images repeat like bad memories moving between recognizable imagery and abstract piles of goo. The speed of the cuts mimics the rhythm of sex and near the end of the film, a couple enacts the movements of intercourse as they violently move to pop a large balloon that is trapped between them. The tension rises until the frenetic gyrations cause the balloon to burst and release a cloud of feathers. 

One can see the legacy of Kren and the Actionists in the performances of the Kipper Kids and Paul McCarthy, as well Cindy Sherman’s untitled “vomit pictures”. McCarthy engages with disgust through Actionist strategies, as he smears his naked body with mayonnaise and ketchup. His flesh becomes the site of perverse ritual and bodily degradation. The body is absent from Sherman’s vomit-scapes, and instead we are left with the disembodied debris of gluttony and excess. 

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #175, 1987

The works of Kren and the Viennese Actionists retain their power to disturb and shock because they tap into our primitive knowledge about the fragile boundaries of the body. In sex and in death, there is always the threat of loosing corporeal integrity through dissolution or consumption.

...Eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns, I repeat, of the regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals... The stirrings within us have their own fearful excesses; the excesses show which way these stirrings would take us. They are simply a sign to remind us constantly that death, the rupture of the discontinuous individualities to which we cleave in terror, stands there before us more real than life itself.

Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality, 1957