AC Discussion | pr0xy-fl3$h: requiem
On June 14th, Rainy M., Lee Emma Running, and Lauren Simpson sat down for a conversation about positioning creative practice as an investigative tool to explore the relationships between power, touch, consent, and control.
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Read through an abridged transcript of their conversation below, and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Title of Discussion: pr0xy-fl3$h: requiem
Panelist 1: Rainy M.
Panelist 2: Lee Emma Running
Moderator: Lauren Simpson
Date of Discussion: June 14th, 2024
List of Acronyms: [RM] = Rainy M.; [LR] = Lee Emma Running; [LS] = Lauren Simpson; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser
Transcript
[PF] Welcome everybody. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started. My name is Peter. I work here at Amplify and it’s great to have you all here for tonight’s Alternate Currents panel discussion to celebrate the closing of pr0xy-fl3$h: requiem with our panelists Rainy M., Lee Running, and our moderator, Lauren Simpson. They’ll introduce themselves to you in just a minute.
Before that, for anybody who’s joining us for the first time, Amplify works to cultivate resources for artists, organizers, and cultural workers to incubate liberatory ideas that challenge dominant systems and move our community forward. Alternate Currents is one of our cornerstone programs and is designed as an alternative to a conventional MFA, in which cohort members work together to understand how justice in the arts is interpreted, documented, and enacted.
Tonight, our panelists will expand on some of pr0xy-fl3$h: requiem’s themes and think through how we delineate the boundaries of direct and implied consent between artist, materials, and audiences. They’ll be in conversation with each other for about 30 minutes before we open the floor to questions and conversation with you all.
Thank you all again for being here. We really appreciate your participation and willingness to engage in critical discussion with us. Thank you to the Nebraska Arts Council and Nebraska Cultural Endowment whose support makes Alternate Currents programming possible. And with that, I’ll pass it over to Lauren.
[LS] Thank you all for being here. We're going to start with some introductions. Rainy, will you begin?
[RM] Certainly. Hello everybody, my name is Rainy M. I use both she/her and they/them pronouns. I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and I'm very happy to be here today. I am an interdisciplinary artist. I studied painting and sculpture mostly in college. But my primary focus is on experimental performance art and noise. I make videos as well about the body, about being disabled and queer. I am very interested, kind of obsessed, with death and mortality and becoming comfortable with it. And finding the love and the softness in that and in the ways that we relate to one another, and communicate and understand each other, while embracing the inevitable thing that unifies us all.
[LR] How do I follow that! [Laughter]
I'm a sculptor, and an installation artist. I'm based here in Omaha, Nebraska and I'm incredibly grateful to be here and to have come into a very generous community of artists here, which has been a real gift. I've only been here for about four years, and it's really changed my life to live here and be in this community. I work with a lot of materials. I'm really interested in primary materials like iron, glass, and paper. But I also work a lot with animal bone. I work with roadkill deer bones. I'm very interested in the interspecies relationship that happens between us and deer, and how similar the skeletal structure of a deer is to a human skeleton and the violence that we see every day on American roadways. I’m interested in finding meaning in the fact that deer are the same size as us and that we are their greatest predator, because we have removed all of their other predators from the landscape, and what that says about the American roadways in the cultural imaginary and our relationship to wildness.
[LS] Thank you. My name is Lauren Simpson. I primarily work with the body in dance and movement is my background. And I'm a choreographer and a teacher. More recently, I’ve been thinking about how arts communities are formed and I do a bit of that thinking through Amplify Arts. My art making, and who I am, is shaped by a lot of the different geographies and places where I've lived. I started my career in Minneapolis. I lived in Boston and in San Francisco. I've lived here in Omaha for a little over four years where I continue to do choreography and movement. I worked on pr0xy-fl3$h: requiem, which has been very rewarding. I’m interested in questions related to perception and sensation in my work and, broadly speaking, our relationship to space, materiality of the body, and what happens to bodies and things in spaces when we offer them agency.
Today, we're going to talk about consent, and the role it plays in creative work, so I'm going to start by asking you, Rainy and Lee, to talk about what consent looks like and your practices and the relationships between power, touch, consent and control.
[RM] I'll hop in on that one. This is actually something that I think about a lot. I've been doing noise performances for close to 20 years now. And I've obviously grown and evolved a lot through that process. But I am also very interested in finding the limitations of my own physical body and going right up to that edge and then seeing how far I can push past it. I do a lot of ritual healing spells in my performances as well, activated like healing rituals. And my performances involve a lot of physicality, touch, confrontation, shoving, altercation. I have a lot of close friends in my community that also do what might be considered violent or transgressive performances and they choose to go all in.
For me, usually I start a performance with an obnoxiously long monologue. I talk a lot, if that's not obvious. I don't get into all the details of what’s coming, but I express that I am interested in physical connection, and moving and activating the body and the space together. Lately, I've been on this grief kick about finding the softness in your grief and feeling it in your body. I think about how we embody grief differently if we forgive ourselves every day, every moment of every day. We've all done things that we think we think are unforgivable. I wonder what happens when we choose to forgive ourselves and heal and, and grow from that. I think the catharsis that comes with touch plays a part in activating forgiveness and so I acknowledge that I move around a lot during my performances and I express to audience members that if they feel moved, they can touch me. If they come near me, I am probably going to touch them. Some performances can get a little confrontational because of that. Some are more soft. Whatever the dynamic, it all comes from a space of love and processing and healing. I will say, I think when you enter an art space, specifically to witness a performance, at the very least, you are consenting to the idea of remaining open to some sort of experience that transcends the physical boundaries of your own body, but I still like to give people the opportunity to opt out of being touched.
I started working this way after my divorce process started. My marriage ended when I began my medical transition and it was really hard. I used my body in performances as a vessel to process that. I was cutting my body up with an amplified sharp metal box and shredding my thighs and my stomach while I was very close to people. Everybody was really close and moving around. I thought I was doing this work to heal, but after a while, I realized I was actually just self-harming, and using the context of this healing through performance as an excuse. It hit me that a lot of people who come to noise shows like, people who are interested in noise, many of them carry some kind of internal struggle with them, whether it's depression, autism, recovery, self-harming. And I thought, people who carry those things are not going to feel good about what they're witnessing and I need to reframe this work. Coming to that realization, I felt really bad, but I did the forgiveness thing and turned it into an opportunity for growth and expansion to deepen my own practice of relational engagement and connectivity with friends, strangers, lovers. I just think it's important, necessary even, to give some level of context for what is going to happen, especially if you are doing something with pain, touch, or confrontation.
[LS] What's interesting to me about this is that it’s pulling me into a question I should have asked you both earlier. What is your definition of consent and how do you define it as a term in your work?
I’ve been spending a little time with a book written by a psychoanalyst who talks about aesthetic experiences and the difference between limit consent and affirmative consent. And I'm not an expert on this, but I will say that I thought there was an important distinction. Affirmative consent is more of a conventional paradigm that we use to control our own situation and control other people's situations. We know what we'll say yes to, what we’ll say no to, and we're almost guaranteed affirmative consent. Limit consent is a bit more of what you're talking about, Rainy, the value of pushing physical limits in our work, which I appreciate. It has more to do with knowing your limits by approaching your limits. Maybe at the outset, you think you think your limit is in one place but then experience helps you understand that it’s actually more fluid and consent isn't fixed and it might change depending on the conversation, who you’re with, where you’re at in your life. Maybe those things make you think differently about what your limits are. I think what is true in so many arts contexts, like you said, Rainy, on some level, we are going to be changed. We are there to be changed and there has to be some dysregulation of ourselves for that transformation to happen.
[LR] I've learned a lot about consent from the state, which sounds unusual, but you have to get permits for roadkill, and so I get to know my county supervisor. I get to know the people who work in the Department of Transportation, to be able to collect the bones that I do. I get permits, and I do that work. So those limits of consent are interesting to me. When is it okay to touch an animal that's been killed by a car and when is it not? I'm interested in repair. I work with the skeleton and any parts have been broken, or eaten by raccoons, or taken away, I make a glass replica of that, and then reassemble the skeleton. To me, it feels like an act of atonement, or some trying to make whole again this thing that was rendered so broken by violence, and I'm thinking a lot about what that means. I think the impression of an audience is that they're going to come to something that's very gory, and you come to something that is, in fact, very beautiful. We used to understand bone as a material in our lives. We used to eat from bone tools, we used to wear bone buttons, and we had this relationship with touch. To me, that is something that feels very important. We've become okay with putting plastic in our mouths. But we don't think it's okay somehow to put bone in our mouths. Where did we lose track of that material relationship?
I think our biggest skill as artists is often to observe and listen and touch to really engage kinesthetically with the world, and I feel like that role is so vital. Often my job as an artist isn't so much in what I make, but it's in what I noticed. That happened with deer. Once I saw them, I couldn't unsee them. And then they were everywhere. I was counting their bodies by the roadside. It felt irresponsible to not make those acts of witnessing and seeing and touching transferable somehow.
[LS] I am not sure we could have asked for two better panelists. There are some powerful connections in the work you’re both doing around violence, death, and healing. I love hearing you describe your work.
I want to talk a bit about the work that we are doing later on tonight too in pr0xy-fl3$h: requiem. We bring in smaller groups of people and ask the audience to give us permission through nonverbal cues to guide them through the space. Rainy, can you talk more about how you give audiences permission to touch you and what your relationship to audience looks like?
[RM] For me, in a performative space, consent moves both ways. I am asking consent for you to allow me to enter your very personal space and your energetic body. At the same time, I am consenting to be completely open to becoming a vessel and relinquish control of what happens during and after. If you come to one of our performances, and you are willing to engage, I am offering you a tiny piece of my heart to take with you and keep and what you do with it is out of my hands. But I think about that with any sort of transformative experience. What happens after? Do they think about it? Or do they remember it? How does it change them? Do they relate and interact with people and their worlds differently? Part of that means being very open to every single person's grief, or pain, or joy, or love. It can be incredibly taxing and overwhelming and overstimulating. There's a lot of trust involved in that process–I am going to hold you through this experience and you are, in turn, going to hold me. We're going to hold each other and get to the other side where there's some sort of expansion.
[LS] To follow up on that, Elaine Heumann Gurian describes art spaces as “safe spaces for unsafe ideas.” And this gets to the question of context, like you were saying. There's the context of an institutional space like a museum. There's the context of this space. There's the context of DIY spaces. There are all kinds of art spaces. So, I'm wondering about this phrase, “safe spaces for unsafe ideas.” What’s your take on that assessment? What are some of the possibilities or constraints of exploring complex issues, like consent, in the context of an art space?
[LR] I think it's unbelievably important. I want there to be spaces where there isn't a black and white situation, I want there to be space for complication. I really value art spaces as spaces where that can happen, without being prescriptive. I don’t think artists are policymakers, we are not people that have solutions to offer. We are great questioners. I think there is such a power in being able to witness and identify questions in art spaces. I want the work to do that internally and externally in asking audiences to engage in a relationship. Art making isn't a one way task. It’s a relationship. So much of the information we get is delivered abruptly, without opportunity for much dialogue. I think art, in contrast, is a slower information delivery system that encourages questions and thoughtful interpretation through discussion. I think art has to be that.
[RM] I would agree but I also struggle with this one. One, if you ask 100 people to describe an “unsafe idea,” you're going to get 100 different answers. So, what does that mean? Two,if we're talking about more formal institutional pinkies up art spaces, they exist as inherently capitalist spaces. They're there to make money and they're there to keep that money in the bubble of people that can afford to be in those spaces. So there's a barrier reinforced by the fact that a lot of these spaces are not interested in providing or holding space for “unsafe ideas” that deal with transgression or heavily politicized bodies. I've lost opportunities in so many places because of that. I think about my friend, Ron Athey, who was ostracized from the United States for a long time because his work is so visceral and intensely homosexual. Art spaces, and big art institutions more specifically, are often not willing to deal with the push back or support practitioners making more challenging work. So I struggle with this one because I don’t think a lot of art spaces are actually equipped to hold space for unsafe ideas.
[LS] They’re unsafe spaces for safe ideas.
[RM] Right, exactly.
[Audience Member] I wonder what it means to shift perspective with this question. Artists need spaces where they can share challenging work, of course but I wonder what that means from a viewer’s or audience member’s perspective. Can art spaces be safe spaces for viewers to have unsafe ideas–ideas that they might not have been encouraged to think about in other spaces?
[LS] I think so. I teach a movement workshop called Horseplay. It's guided movement exercises for the course of two hours and oftentimes people don't know each other. There's a lot of touch built in slowly over time. I find it my job as an artist to put a limit in place, work toward it, and then maybe push it out even more. There's always an option to opt out, but part of what I'm doing in my craft is building this arc of an experience. Sometimes I build the arc and realize nobody wants to follow it. That’s when the group steps in with all their different limits as individuals to make a shared experience where we get to test the collective limits of our social contracts. We touch and lean and pull and swing with one another, and all these over time help us find these tiny cracks within ourselves and with each other, where ideas start to grow. Folks engaging directly with the work start to find some kind of interior change or a new way of processing ideas. I love the reframing of that question.
[Audience Member] I think we have to acknowledge the role whiteness plays in the discourse around “safe spaces” and what it means to create them. A safe space for a Black person or a person of color or other people that deal with institutionalized discrimination might look very different.
[LS] Thank you for that. That's a really important point and a wonderful way to illustrate the imbalances of power, belonging, and justice that exist even in consent based spaces. It’s understandable when we label something as a “safe space,” we can ignore the things that are hiding out there in plain sight. I want to tie that to the idea that consent is easily politicized in different spaces where consent means different things.
[RM] I think one of the struggles is, as a general rule, when we think about the word consent, we immediately go to physical touch or something sexual, but that’s a very limiting and narrow definition. We can’t confine it to a bodily or a physical thing. The challenge, I think, is finding ways to communicate and foster a broad understanding that creating consent is far more expensive than that. It can be about feeling welcome, or feeling like you belong, or being open to experiencing new ideas and those things might not have anything to do with touch. But they have everything to do with consent and showing up and being willing to be here and be present. I think, specifically in the DIY scene, there's a lot of abuse that happens and a lot of abusers that find their ways into these kinds of spaces and are enabled to take advantage of people because of the language we use around safe spaces until community comes forward, identifies the problem, holds people accountable, and works to repair. I think the idea of consent is so intimately tied to circumstance and situation, rather than a broad strokes willingness to receive information.
[LS] Yes, such a great question. Thank you. I wish we could keep going but I think we’re at time. This is one of the richer conversations I've had. Thank you all for being here and if you’re able to stick around, performances of pr0xy-fl3$h: requiem will begin right after we reset the space. Thank you for your questions; thank you, Rainy; thank you, Lee and looking forward to keeping these conversations going.
*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
About the Panelists:
Rainy M. (she/they) is a queer interdisciplinary artist from Pittsburgh, PA. She holds a Master's Degree in Painting and Sculpture from California State University, Northridge. She is best known for her noise projects; farrah faucet, disappearing, and Piss Fits. Through the lens of their own sick, queer body, Rainy uses sound and video to create healing rituals, performances, and objects that examine concepts of identity, modes of relation, permanence and decay.
Lee Emma Running is an artist creating arresting sculptures with roadkill animal bones, kiln-cast glass, and precious metals. She also fabricates monumental public installations on windows. For the last 15 years, she has been using this work to engage audiences in conversations about the impact of human-built systems on the natural world.
Lee is a 2023 Resident in the Arts/Industry program at Kohler and a 2022/23 Artist in Residence with Opera Omaha. She was also a 2017/18 Iowa Arts Council Fellow.
Permanent installations of her work can be viewed at the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs, the Bernheim Arboretum, and Upper Iowa University. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, National Taiwan University of the Arts, Taipei, Taiwan, Form and Concept Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, and PACE Gallery, Council Bluffs, IA. She has also been a speaker with TEDx, Omaha.
Lee was a Professor of Art at Grinnell College from 2005- 2021 and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, and a BFA from Pratt Institute. Her work is represented by Olson-Larsen Galleries.
About the Moderator:
Lauren Simpson is an Omaha-based choreographer and educator. She created Moving Truck, a mobile and socially-distanced show performed on front lawns at residences throughout Omaha in 2020. Recent projects include Smithereens, a site specific performance in Joslyn Art Museum with music by Omaha musician Miwi LaLupa, Celestial Real Estate, a collaborative performance at Generator Space gallery featuring local artists Nick Miller (painter), Celeste Butler (textile designer), and Dereck Higgins (musician), and Self-Leveling a performance at ODC Theater San Francisco in collaboration with dancer Galen Rogers and visual artist Emma Strebel. Collaboration across disciplines is at the heart of her art making.