Fickle Cheese and Performance, by David Berridge

"The Modes of Al-Ikseer"

Harminder Singh Judge,

Shunt Vaults 13th & 14th April

There’s no telling what might turn up in some corner of Shunt Vaults, the huge network of railway arches that comprised the venue for the Triple Bill. After the woman painted in gold, and the man urinating whilst stood in a bucket playing the saxophone, there was a bit of standing around on Triple Bill night, before heading off to another dark corner, where Harminder Singh Judge rounded off the evening stood in a lake of slowly curdling milk.

Judge was in the middle of the lake of milk, slowly rotating on a small round wooden disc. Around his waist was a girdle of neon writing. For maybe forty-five minutes he slowly rotated, churning-tubes dangling from his body into the milk, drone-music blaring, the durational hook for the audience of slowly making out the sentence of neon words as he turned.

It was absorbing, if demanding stuff at the end of a long evening. Judge had a serious, focussed look throughout and there was a definite, challenging sense from the off that this was it for the duration. How long does it take to make cheese I wondered? I had no idea. Were we here in Shunt until this sloppy lake became a hard cheddar-like mass? It seemed unlikely. But duration is tricky to relate to necessity - on the second night the show was shortened, I heard, by twenty minutes.

At the end of an evening of intense, focussed performances I was finding it hard to concentrate. But maybe that was the point of such a performance. One’s mind wandered and drifted and when and if it returned there was Judge, another twenty degrees on, the sentence a few letters closer to revelation, if you hadn’t forgotten what the bit before had said and needed to wait for the whole thing to come round again, like me.

I’m being deliberately a bit flippant about this. There was a serious and challenging presence to this work, an engagement with rituals and Hindu traditions I knew nothing about, but which also were well aware of the slightly ludicrous situation in which they found themselves, both SPILL and Shunt Vaults and performance art more broadly. This isn’t my flippancy alone I’m talking about here - it’s how the piece worked the flippancy into both its seriousness and its wannabee cheese.

So somewhere in Shunt there was the Hindu myth of Churning the Milky Ocean, where Mount Mandaranchai was the dasher (churning tool) and Vasuki, King of serpents, was the churning rope (thankyou Wikipedia). If Singh’s body formed one layer of commentary on this source, there was another accretion in store. Two figures in white appeared at the lakeside, barefoot, wearing drums. They stood calm and posed, although around them stewards were busy spreading out blue hand towels, ready for drying their milky feet when they re-emerged.

I was struggling - whilst watching and again, now, whilst writing - to find another vocabulary for this - that acknowledged the specific types of drums and clothing. But I didn’t have the words. Then it happened. Revelation! Transcendence! Well, actually, no, or, rather, yes, if transcendence relates to a sudden soundtrack shift into Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, the two white robed guys playing along on their drums. It was a dramatic shift, hugely energising. The man next to me was mouthing along happily; feet were tapped; time became more familiar again. It was up to Judge to maintain the continuity, keeping the same mental focus, rotating, churning, same as ever, absorbing Dave et al into his concentration.

As well as enormous well-being, it was curious to think what happened in this shift towards Basildon’s finest. Partly, it was, after Jeremy Deller and Nicholas Abrahams feature documentary The Posters Come From The Walls, further assertion of Depeche Mode’s art-world renaissance. It was an assertion of connections across cultures and styles, the continuities and the differences. It also functioned as the eventual punch line to a long and drawn out joke, as, too, a sense of the age of the 1980’s as the great Thatcherite age of cheese production. I imagined the same performance crashing into a Stock, Aitken and Waterman track.

All well and good, but still no cheese. It was curdling more the second night, apparently, and I should have known better than to expect actual full scale dairy production from performance art. The performance ended with Harminder still the same as ever in the middle of the lake.

Feeling a bit of a Peeping Tom, I hung around to see how he made it out, the mundane after the ritual. I won’t tell you. There was no need to do this, really, other than a kind of backstage nosiness. His performance had itself explored this kind of interconnection, whilst avoiding any of the pitfall binaries such as on-stage and off, west and east, process and product, milk and cheese.

Becoming a child or a lamb? By Alex Eisenberg

La Nourrice (come drink from me my darling)

by Samantha Sweeting
Part of Visions of Excess

Shunt Vaults

12 April 2009

Photo: Richard Andersen

Exploring Shunt Vaults during Visions of Excess, I round a corner where there is this small arch - not enough room to stand up in. It makes you crouch and so you get smaller (or shrink). It feels like a safe place, antithetical to the expanse of the rest of the vaults, a haven or a womb. Outside the arch is a video showing a woman bent over on all fours with her breasts out whilst a small lamb attempts to suckle on them. There is an obvious moment of confusion but also intrigue – how does the lamb know to suckle on this woman’s nipples? Is it real (breast) milk? Is there any milk at all or is this just some form of stimulation for the woman? But most of all, I wonder how it feels, not only for the woman but also for the lamb. And already, I know I want to find out – how does this feel?

Inside the arch is Samantha Sweeting, wearing a virginal white dress (‘her performance gear’). It’s almost a nightdress, but also a farm girls’ dress (she is ready for action). The setting of the brick arch begins to evoke a sense of fantasy; it is dreamy, dimly lit and calm. Samantha is sitting on a milking stool, smiling and gentle. There is raw sheep’s wool on the floor, perhaps there was also a spinning wheel in the corner? I can’t be sure…as I was there less to observe or watch the ‘scene’ but rather to place myself firmly within it, to become part of it and, by default, to become the work (and the lamb), with Samantha.

My mother breastfed me for a relatively long time. I can remember breastfeeding. I can remember suckling on my mother’s nipple. I can remember this as comfort. I can remember this as warmth. I can remember this care. I can remember this love.

Thanks Mum.

And now, 25 years old, a gay man, I sit on the floor, getting ready to suckle (again).

BUT

How to sit?

How to suckle?

How to be in this space?

There is not much conversation. Samantha asks me to make myself comfortable but I already am – the wool is soft and her knee provides a gentle rest for my head. She strokes my hair. She is wearing some sort of mechanical breastfeeding system (I think it’s called a nursing system) though I barley notice what is in fact this prosthetic extension to her chest, since a sense of regression is already present. She reveals one breast and, of course, even though I thought I didn’t, I know what to do:

The first moment I notice that there is no sign of milk. (I am not sure how much to expect). The man-made mechanics of the nursing system rupture the moment as she has to adjust the flow rate of the milk. Breastfeeding is a delicate business and the conditions have to be right.

Then, this memory creeps in about how it tasted back then - like orange juice or chocolate milk or whatever flavour you want it to be? This milk is apparently almond flavour – only the faintest hint though – this milky almond flavour. Then, this quick idea about the size of her nipple and the subsequent comparison to my mother’s nipple. There is a difference – I think? Perhaps it has something to do with my grown mouth but there is the idea, at least, of a different size. And in some small way I am yearning for that original size. Through this active and intimate engagement with Samantha’s body and particularly her nipple, I am I am finding myself almost unavoidably going back to what I know, to what I knew – it seems almost innate. The act itself sets the stakes high by being so intimate, by making a physical connection and thereby inducing an undeniable presence in the audience of one – in this case me. The suckling goes on for a while, but I end too early. I end before I allow myself to regress too deep into memories of childhood, memories of nipples and all that that entails. The process of becoming a child (or a lamb) only lasts for as long as I allow it to - for as long as I suckle. I am in control here. I leave the arch and emerge.

There is a small break before the next person goes in.

Stood there, outside the arch, the act of suckling appears to me to be evocative, generous and beautiful, however as I leave its disappearance yields a further journey, since it is in the comparison between the memory of being a child and being present during the suckling event itself, that La Nourrice... operates. This comparison can only happen afterwards, as there is little room to process whilst suckling. So, walking away from the arch, I compare the potentially erotic act of suckling on a women’s nipple with a situation that evokes the purity and innocence of childhood - breastfeeding. I compare the innocence of the lamb with the idea of bestiality and amidst all of this I find Oedipal echoes unsettling me, as I compare me now, to me then and all in relation to a mother figure/Samantha. I ask again, how does it feel?

As I look back to see the next person going into the arch, the work continues to expose itself and in the process it exposes me. Only now does La Nourrice... begin to raise its ethics. I am left with the burden of having placed myself in this situation in the first place, of having made the decision to play, to take part in this ‘out of the ordinary’ act. How does it feel? Now, rather than some sort of fantasy journey motivated by curiosity, into childhood or into my relationship with my mother, the work evokes feelings of embarrassment, trauma even. A small but complex interplay is present between my complicity in the act of suckling and the politics of engagement with this work. I find myself asking questions about the objectification of women, the notion of motherhood and my own relationship to all of this. This is lingering work, which doesn’t and cannot ever entirely satisfy. I continue to ask myself - how does it feel?

Thanks Sam…

Alex Eisenberg is an artist making performance. He is helping to coordinate SPILL: Overspill over the course of the festival.

Overspill : Visions of Excess

Visions of Excess is curated by Ron Athey and Lee Adams. The event, at Shunt Vaults, stages 12 hours of intense gestures, images and performances on the subject of death, eroticism and the forbidden.

Overspill: Visions of Excess was a collaborative writing event initiated by SPILL: Overspill writers Alex Eisenberg and Rachel Lois Clapham. The project involved both writers setting up a public writing station in Shunt Vaults, working over the course of the 12 hour event to produce live critical responses to the work experienced. This writing, which included dialogue from audience members and artists, was simultaneously projected into the space for the duration of the event.

The night was full of fun frolics, close encounters and highly charged performances, and lots of people participated in Overspill: Visions of Excess. An edited transcript of the evening’s activity will be available on Thursday.

Meanwhile, if you want to read more about Visions of Excess, Rachel Lois has written two ‘preludes’ to the event, musing on two different aspects of extreme or explicit live performance: the first prelude is on porosity, or the body without limits. The second is the contract between audience and performer in explicit performance.