‘I’ve been as intimate with him as I have been with anybody’: queer approaches, encounters and exchanges as live art performer training

Abstract

Considering Live Art’s resistance to conventional structures of power and performance practices, this article argues that Live Art affords more egalitarian modes of training to emerge. Focusing specifically on the cross-generational artistic exchange between performance artists, Martin O’Brien and Sheree Rose, it is this article’s contention that it is through peer-mentorship and not a one-directional form of master-led training, that knowledge can be seen to be shared and nurtured. With their generous, egalitarian and familial approach, O’Brien and Rose offer multilateral opportunities to train the body beyond the confines of conventional heteronormative training paradigms. Considering O’Brien and Rose’s engagement with BDSM practices in their performances, this article highlights how a different kind of discipline, generosity and training can develop alternative opportunities to train the body and disseminate knowledge. Thus, this article repositions perceptions of preparation and structure within discourses and practices of Live Art. By both engaging with and beyond texts and discourses on psychophysical performer training and queerness, this article theorises a departure from the phallocentric privileging that is evident in some of the performer trainings, performance practices and processes developed in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Keywords:

• Live art
• performer training
• BDSM
• Martin O'Brien
• Sheree Rose
• queer theory

Notes

1 It seems pertinent here to highlight O'Brien's original training at Dartington College of Arts for his BA in Devised Theatre and Choreography; followed by his MA in Practising Performance at Aberystwyth. The Devised Theatre course in particular, and O'Brien's navigation of it, offers an interesting context for his subsequent development as an artist: the course privileged heterarchical (rather than hierarchical) models of making work, the embodied/ experiential, intimacy, and collaborative processes of devising as 'mutual training' and cross-fertilisation. Dartington’s alternative approach to training explicitly contested the kinds of master-led heteronormative training paradigms that I argue are challenged by O’Brien’s practice. I thank Professor David Williams for this comment.

2 A six-minute, forty-one-second-long video installation based on this performance followed in 1991. Rose has also produced a photographic series under the same title in collaboration with Flanagan and Kelley, which contains one-hundred images of anonymous individuals being spanked.

3 Just prior to Thank you Ma’am, O’Brien had completed a two-day durational performance, entitled Mucus Factory (2011), and his buttocks were still covered in glitter from that performance. O’Brien describes Mucus Factory as ‘a durational performance which appropriated medical practices and placed them in the gallery space. I performed physiotherapy, a treatment for cystic fibrosis which loosens mucus on the lungs, over long durations. In a repetitive cycle, I used the mucus, which I had collected, as hair gel; as an adhesive to stick glitter to my body and as lubrication to insert the mouth piece of a nebuliser up my ass’ (2018, 60).

4 At the invitation of O’Brien I was able to observe the first five hours of filming. I also had the opportunity to participate in a brief section in which O’Brien, Rose, Aarons and I shared a meal off a disused mortician’s slab.

5 The Viewing was a twenty-four hour performance, which saw O’Brien, Rose and Aarons complete a trilogy of works begun by Rose and Flanagan in 1995. Only the first performance was completed before Flanagan’s death in 1996; O’Brien completed the second part in 2015, in a performance entitled Dust to Dust. Joe Turnbull describes the performance: ‘The three performers were in “the crypt,” a bare space with O’Brien seemingly inanimate. In a separate “viewing room” there were four images of Flanagan’s corpse: a close-up of his face, two of his chest and one of his genitals. A corresponding four-screen live feed of O’Brien’s face, chest, scrotum and one wide angle view of the whole set up was transmitted to it, keeping audience and performers once-removed’ (2016). As O’Brien lay in a coffin, and the performance progressed, Rose and Aarons exacted more demanding and punishing acts onto O’Brien’s body.

6 Other examples of such mentorships and partnerships are evident in Ron Athey’s guidance of O’Brien for O’Brien’s performance of Mucus Factory (2011), and Poppy Jackson’s mentorship by performance artist and bodybuilder, Cassils, in preparation for her performance of Site (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kieran Sellars

Kieran Sellars recently completed his doctorate in Performance Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester, where he is an associate tutor in Drama. Kieran’s doctoral thesis explores queer challenges to normative gender ideologies in live art and how these performances reconfigure the dominant heteronormative gendered landscape. His research interests include gender and sexuality, feminist performance art, and the male body in performance. Email: [email protected]