Critical closeness, intimate distance: encounters in the Love Art Laboratory

ABSTRACT

This article will consider the intertwining of closeness and distance as critical modes, focusing on the public sharing of their intimate relationship in Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens’ Love Art Laboratory project (2005–2011). The article highlights the encounter with the work and its contingent effect on the act of critical interpretation. The risks of uncertainty and ambivalence in the writerly introduction of the personal perspective are discussed and, in part, enacted in a process of critical engagement that follows the emotional, as well as the intellectual movements of the work. This is troublesome for conventional analysis in so far as it multiplies possibilities rather than fixing art practice as paradigmatic of a theoretical ‘position’. Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens’ practice is expansive and mobile enough to carry many views, and becomes the basis for an exploration of both personal and public intimacies, both in their performances and as part of the enterprise of critical writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• ambivalence
• gay marriage
• intimacy
• performance
• the personal

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jo Morra and Emma Talbot for the original invitation to contribute to the Intimacy Unguarded project, which generated this article. Many thanks to Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens for their help and generosity with the images. Special thanks to Christabel Harley for her many careful readings of the text. And also to Gavin Butt and Kate Love for helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jon Cairns is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Recent research has explored the ambivalence of affect, specifically in the context of the performance work of Adrian Howells. This forms part of a broader project on emotion, intimate interaction and the critical encounter with art. Earlier work has looked at questions of value in the context of recession (Visual Culture in Britain special issue 2013); while previous collaborative practice with artist Julia Spicer has included online work and curation, centring on explorations of the fictive and the fabulatory.

ORCID

Jon Cairns http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7806-2768

Notes

1. First shown at an installation of the pair’s work at Digital Love, M’ARS Centre of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2005.

2. Curated by Tina Butcher at the Artists’ Television Access Gallery.

3. ‘Extreme Kissing: The Pleasure, Politics and Art of the Kiss’ was a workshop and ‘kiss-in’ conducted during the run of their theatre show, EXPOSED: Experiments in Love, Sex, Death and Art, at the Chelsea Theatre, London. The show ran from 19 to 22 September 2007.

4. My previous writing on the work of performance maker, Adrian Howells has explored the critical value of ambivalence (see Cairns 2012, 2016).

5. See, for example, Rugg (1997) on Philippe Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’, which constitutes the contract between the writer and the reader that equates the name of the author with the protagonist. See also Eakin (2008) on the rule-governed nature of autobiographical discourse (partic. 31–51)

6. This crucial aspect of Love Art Lab has continued since the formal end of the initial cycle, with further weddings since. There have been 18 to date.

7. In the early productions of EXPOSED in 2006, Sprinkle was completely bald, as was Stephens, who shaved her hair in support as part of their ‘Hairotica’ piece.

8. Linda Montano’s practice is a more intensely disciplined meditative practice, but focuses on the routine repetition and organisation of daily life, mediated through the colours representing the chakras (dictating what she wore). In the first of her ongoing cycles of 7 Years of Living Art, from 1984 to 1991, she met once a month in the window of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York with her audience for art/life counselling.

9. See Machon (2013) on the emergence of specific, contingent events and experience within the duration of performance in a ‘live and ongoing present’ (44), and on the simultaneity of the ‘live’ and the ‘lived’.

10. For example, Deborah Bright, Tania Bruguera, Luke Dixon, Cheryl Dunye, Geoffrey Hendricks, Del La Grace and Linda Montano (loveartlab).

11. The fan-dancer was Jonathan McCloskey; the Oxford ringbearer, Clare Cochrane. John Paul Staszel and Erin Marie Paun, and Sarah Stolar, respectively, at Ohio. The mermaids were billed as Maggie Tapert, Bettina, Esther-Maria and Daggi (loveartlab). See Diana Pornoterrorista’s (Diana J. Torres) account at pornoterrorismo.com. She successfully emitted her fluids with a shower of piss in Barcelona for the Silver Wedding to the Rocks in 2011.

12. The dancer was Michael J. Morris. Mountain top removal mining is a destructive form of coal-mining currently used in the West Virginian Appalachians by Massey Energy Company. For details see Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2013).

13. By contrast, Bird la Bird’s performance, Up Your Art with the Society for Cutting up Couples (2009), is more vehement in its comic critique of marriage and coupledom. Bird la Bird is the queer femme performance persona of Kath Noonan, co-founder of Bird Club, in London’s east end.

14. This was at the Purple Wedding to the Moon, Farnsworth Park Amphitheatre, Altadena, Los Angeles, October 2010.

15. Information on the Love Art Lab website tells us that the organisers, including Mario Kovac, the festival director and wedding emcee, received a death threat (loveartlab.ucsc.edu).

16. The constative utterance – Austin’s counterpart to the performative utterance – describes or reports what is external to the utterance itself (see Austin [1962]1976). Kipnis (2004, 41) complains that ‘even gays – once such paragons of unregulated sexuality, once so contemptuous of whitebread hetero lifestyles – are demanding state regulation too’. She goes on to say that there is no need for compulsion when the demand for state regulation of all marriage is overwhelming. Informal compulsions work just as well in the context of extreme acquiescence and compliance with the norm that ‘social resources and privileges’ are allocated on the basis of marital status.

17. See, for example, Butler and Kotz (1992, 84–85) for a discussion of ‘miming’ and ‘displacing’ in relation to ‘parodic repetition or reinscription’ of the forms of power that you are implicated in even while you might explicitly oppose them.

18. See, for example, Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, Athens, 23 October 2016 (Youtube). Sprinkle: ‘[W]e’d done sex for thirty-something years, so thought it was time for a change’.

19. See Freeman’s The Wedding Complex (2002) for an elaboration of this position.

20. I’m in sympathy with Muñoz’s (2009) critique of the negation of futurity in one vein of queer theory (best represented by Lee Edelman’s No Future, and Leo Bersani’s Homos) (see 11–12, 91–95).

21. Lauren Berlant’s concept of the ‘juxtapolitical’ is useful here, offering a criticality that is open to politics, but outside of it, refusing the political’s ‘status as determining the real of power, agency, or experience’ (2008, 267). See Tea’s (2009) performance memoir of the Venice Wedding to the Sea in 2009 which captured some of its messy diversity, bringing to life the non-archived, behind-the-scenes moments, the off-kilter details, the lesbian gossip, the slippages and interruptions

22. Rebecca Schneider explicitly foregrounds this in her foreword to Hardcore from the Heart (Cody 2001, vii–x). Many writers have responded to Sprinkle’s challenges to critical habit. See, for example, Williams (1993) and Straayer (1993) for sex-positive takes on her work. See also Kapsalis (1997) for her commentary on Sprinkle’s Public Cervix Announcement.

23. By contrast, in a moment of realism in one interview, Sprinkle referred to the fact that she and Stephens had committed themselves to the project very early on in their relationship, and that it could have gone wrong: either they might have split up with the end of the project or half way through they might have found that they ‘couldn’t stand each other’, in Sprinkle’s words (Kelley 2011). This was one of the few admissions of doubt, amidst the regulation Californian positivity that attended the project. It signalled the possibility of an alternative trajectory.

24. For more on their ecosexual activism, see their documentary Goodbye Gauley Mountain (2013).

25. See Freeman in Time Binds on how queer artists ‘min[e] the present for signs of undetonated energy from past revolutions’ (2010, xvi).