Throughout yesterday, 1st December 2020, the first phrases had circled my mind all day but not landed, like a small flock of birds in flight the words were in motion with one another but my linguistic flock did not assemble and land into proper sentences. Too much air, sky and space separated them for proper coherency. And yet they were there, as starting points troubling space.
The pathway towards making the performance art work that was Blood Humours /Affected (1998 - 1999) included legacies of HIV/AIDS and the sea change that irreparably altered how bodies and their intimate distances were couched in distance, proximities and latitudes.
Affected
/
Have you been affected?
It must of been on or around World AIDS Day 1996 or 1997 (I suspect the former but I may well be mistaken) There was some kind of an event or campaign at Howard Gardens in Cardiff where I had studied for a BA in Fine Art , the gist of it was not only to address not only those directly impacted by HIV/AIDS though prevention methods and support for those who were positive, but also to recognise those on the tiers of being affected in other ways, as friends, colleagues, lovers, family and so on. The approach was I suppose to draw the perimeters of the effects as much larger, various and expansive through the registers of affect.
I don’t remember much, except the placement of the stall with the literature and helpful people in the light filled foyer near the stairs in the art college at Howard Gardens, my approach, and then words dissolving into floods as I became a body of tears. And one of them, a woman I think, simply coming to be beside me. I think there was little she could do, but her presence and actually her witnessing was everything could of needed in that moment. I had had no idea.
Why it had taken so long, so many years for this acknowledgement to come from within (my body) I do not know. But whatever it is takes time, takes years. I wept and I learnt something as the opening within myself revealed itself.
The bodily utterance, the weeping never went into the explicitness of language, of telling, there was too much. The contents exceeded the possibilities I had at the time in speech. And at the time I was entirely preoccupied with the occupation of the other strata, those beneath, before and between language; the pre-linguistic, the dance beneath and between grammar and syntax, the agenda of identifying and being within the spaces through with language resided but were not language. The dance of the hysteric as proto-feminist, her performance of fluid uncontainmentment, her masquerades, how with her body she would embody resistance - not in a consummate performance but in that of a renegade mavericktrix. The annals of psycho-analysis in the hands of feminist cultural theorists and philosophers pushed and pulled apart the semiotic and semantic territories for me for the bodily dance.
I say dance purely to indicate dynamism, action, moment - not to suggest any canonical, discursive discipline of dance in any shape or form. It’s a word that has been misunderstood in respect to my work in the past, but it still serves me so I use it.
In the wake of the opening thus discovered through the recognition of the state and stature of affectedness, I sought to donate my blood and to have it returned to me. I knew through the pre-blood donation screening questionnaire that mine did not qualify on several counts. It was categorised as were deviant dangers might reside, haunting of past lives were implied. It was always vexing as testings had proven negative, but the spatial arrangements of proximities and intimacies presided. So to anyone but myself it was rubbish blood. Personally I was very grateful for it, every last drop of it. I loved it and thought it’s versatile vitality exquisite. I thought the gesture of offering it and having it returned would articulate the complexity of the navigation of the affects I sought to work with. I of course understood, appreciated and endorsed the basis of the refusal, the ‘waste of time’ and material resources. And I suppose what might of been viewed as an entirely unnecessary intrusion into a body that bore no relation to the larger operation of medicine and health. However my logic persisted, if threaded in this direction.
I was not unfamiliar with ‘illegitimate' blood practices, and the regular suspension of the supposed boundaries of inside and out. The skin threshold was only one perceptive border. Transgressing it as a necessary gateway had been a habitual practice during other stages of my life. Whilst I was by no means compelled to enact these border crossings in my then current private life, I recognised a powerful conceptual direct that I wished to pursue as an art student and artist. I was quite convinced of that, of the legitimacy of my bodily transgressions within the conceptual and philosophic frame, that ’there was something to it’, this suspension of inside and out.
I was undeterred in this investigation, by its relation to the tropics of affect, and the non-linguistic utterance, the action, gesture.
I want to make work through means that simply cannot be put into words.
I was familiar with the state of something being ‘on the tip of my tongue’, of not having words for something, of my own verbal inarticulacy that always found fluency in gesture, action, the visual. Visuality and action were not separate. The image might come to mind, but as an embodied action (including stillness) - moment - time based, happening - in time. I had no pretentious to theatre per se, that was no my project although I was inherently transdisciplinary. I felt entirely right within the auspice of a fine art degree but in my case it was one that demonstrably embraced the dimension of the temporal with its inclusion of department dedicated to Time Based media.
My GP pragmatically explained how blood had been used during her former days as a useful product for the garden, waste blood - excess blood was given to the roses. She had no issues whatsoever with my working with my own blood in artworks, her only concern was that I observe basic aseptic methods. She held no agitation in respect to my ‘mind’. My therapist neither, because hers was the project of my entering into language, of story telling and her supporting my narrative each week within our shared space of a talking cure. Her confidence perhaps came from our rigour and commitment to how wellness was defined within the logics and illogic of myself. I had at one point early in our endeavour challenged her and a perceived psycho-therapeutic mission of ’normalising’ to which she countered with a magnificent and rather fiery testimony of her own marginality and outsider status. I was certainly satisfied with her alliance with the integrity of my journey, as defined and understood by me on the terms of my own. Her rôle, in which she was deeply consistent was to hold up both a lamp, and a mirror. I did not require the approval of these ‘experts’ instead I enjoyed their collaboration and the latitude of their range, their smart, intelligent far seeingness.
Although mostly parsed within the histories of feminist body based practices and the arching figuration of the fin de siecle hysteric, Bad Humours / Affected was never not an action made without deep recourse to these legacy states of affection born from HIV/AIDS. The hyphen was the suspension, the indeterminacy of inside and out and though which events, tides and histories are comprised of these intimacies of our selves, and where we merge and dissolve with others.
A heartfelt acknowledgement to Kathy High who some years ago now observed that she recognised this and other works by me as operating within this sphere of HIV/AIDS affects, her observation and questioning of me on this was of tremendous help. It had come as some surprise as it seemed these art works were so buried in the past and seemed to be forgotten, irrelevant somehow to 2017 when she asked and it’s beyonds.
While these are the words that I wanted to say today, of course there is much more to say about this work including of the artists whose example encouraged me, particularly Ron Athey and Franko B, whose work I saw live in 1997 at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff as part of the Body Radical season curated by Gordana Vnuk. .