Episode 3 of VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising
This is a three-part audio series documenting the event VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising. Initiated by Monash University Museum of Art in Naarm/Melbourne, VERS took place over two days on Kaurna Country in Tarntanya/Adelaide at Samstag Museum of Art and ACE in June 2022. VERS was developed by a curatorial panel consisting of Arlie Alizzi, Frances Barrett, Archie Barry, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jeff Khan and Melissa Ratliff, and emerges as a response to their collective discussions and deliberation on queer artistic and curatorial practices. A group of attendants including arts workers, artists and curators from across Australia were invited to come together to reflect on these questions and the title themes of pleasures, embodiment, kinships, fugitivity and re/organising. Seated in a circle, the event was structured around a rolling conversation and a series of performances. For full details on each attendant and theme, please download the VERS program.
This is the third episode of VERS, which includes a recording of a performance by Archie Barry called ‘Dilated Mind’; the second half of the conversation, which addresses the themes of embodiment and pleasure; and concludes with performances by Sione Teumohenga and Harriet Fraser-Barbour, which took place at ACE. It took place on 18 June 2022.
This episode has a strong language warning and Archie Barry’s performance includes recordings of a sexual experience.
Credits
This project was commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art and presented on site and in association with Samstag Museum of Art and ACE. It has been supported by the City of Adelaide. VERS graphics by Hana Shimada. VERS performances curated by Frances Barrett. Audio setup, technical support and recording by Mosaic Audio Visual. Podcast editing and production by Tilly Balding, Solstice Podcasting. This podcast is supported by Solstice Podcasting, Monash University Museum of Art and Samstag Museum of Art.
Transcript
This is a three-part audio series documenting the event VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising. Initiated by Monash University Museum of Art, VERS took place over two days on Kaurna Country in Tarntanya Adelaide at Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. VERS was developed by a curatorial panel consisting of Frances Barrett, Archie Barry, Arlie Alizzi, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jeff Kahn and Melissa Ratliff, and emerges as a response to their collective discussions and deliberation on queer artistic and curatorial practices.
A group of attendants, including arts workers, artists and curators from across Australia were invited to come together to reflect on these questions and the title themes of pleasures, embodiment, kinships, fugitivity and re/organising. Seated in a circle, the event was structured around a rolling conversation and a series of performances. For full details on each attendant and theme, please download the VERS program from the MUMA website, the link to which is in the episode description.
This audio series is structured in three parts. This is the third episode of VERS, which includes a recording of a performance by Archie Barry called Dilated Mind. The second half of the conversation, which addresses the themes of embodiment and pleasure, and concludes with performances by Sione Teumohenga and Harriet Fraser-Barbour, which took place at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Archie’s performance includes audio recordings of a sexual experience. My name is Frances Barrett, and I hope you enjoy.
[Short music clip]
Archie Barry:
[Repeated humming-like noise]
[Archie performs live over recorded vocals in the voice component of the following performance. They draw out certain vowels in words and there is a singing quality where sometimes the live voice sings or speaks at a different octave and melodically over the recorded voice.]
Okay, it’s like this:
Capitalism redistributes your senses, and that’s why it’s important to sense differently.
Listen to noise, music, sing with other people
Have surgeries
Talk to spirits
Reclaim your attention
There is nothing sexier or more frightening than attention
Attention doesn’t come in spans
It cannot be divided
The notion of attention span is an empirical invention
The western epistemology of attention is one of deficit
Attention is permanent
Attention is undying
Attention is the inheritance of those forced to learn about their oppressors
Mild headache front of skull
Sit silently and do nothing
Embrace your pain tenderly
The pathos of incommunicability is what you came for
Deindividuate into the commons of affect
Sensations are the interface between us
End individualism, decentralize
Unpossess forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever
Whatever is inscribed can be reinscribed differently
Oh oh oh. Mm mm mm
Enable some madness, something asystematic
We’re all learning how to get through the isolation of emotional pain
Don’t lie to yourself
Don’t lie to yourself
Don’t lie to yourself
Don’t lie to yourself
Lie down by yourself
Lie down by yourself
Lie down by yourself
Lie down by yourself
Be beside yourself
Be beside yourself
Be beside yourself
Be beside yourself
[In this section, a feminine voice is heard that Archie performs with]
Mwah mwah
It’s blowing me kisses right now.
Oh
She’s going to have that arsehole singing by the end of this
Singing a lovely song
[Outtakes of breath, sighing.]
Just slide my cock back and forth in between those arse cheeks
And look for that little crevice
Where is it, that little hole, there’s a little fucking hole there, isn’t there
A little indented place where Mistress can just go shove that dick in there
Just shove it in
Look at that
All the way in
All the way out
All the way in, mm just hold it there
And all the way out
Straight in
Look at that
No resistance whatsoever
Just a nice gaping hole for Mistress to fuck
Now, where are we?
[At this point the recorded feminine voice stops and Archie continues to perform with their own recorded voice]
A loose body might have had its sternum stroked
A loose body is one that has access to pleasure
Enough food, enough rest, enough change
A loose body is likely one of medial socio-economic standing
Not overworked, not underpaid, but, supple in its comfort
Maybe unconscious of its comfort
Yet the folds and the sphincters are in all of us
Let these words stretch between your mouth and your arsehole
Singing can be a way to snap out of the tension
Forced upon bodies
By external systems
As every choir of disadvantaged minorities can attest
You have three sphincters for singing: your larynx, your pyloric sphincter and your anus
A sphincter is a ring of muscles that regulates the passage of fluids
When singing, sphincters regulate metaphysical substances
Elation
Peace
Rage
Grief
To sing, open each hole, from the bottom up
Most dilated mind
Breathe into your colon
Burst a dam in your stomach
Pipe up your open throat
Get blown backwards
Allow a room into your body
Reverse fart through
The tubes and the tracts
Be played by the atmosphere
The urban planning of the air
Music is charming; that is why it survives
Most dilated mind
[Applause]
Frances Barrett: And so with that performance, Dilated Mind by Archie Barry, we might enter into the second half of VERS where we will address the themes of embodiment and pleasures. I might start with embodiment, which we’ve proposed as defining foregrounding embodied experience as a mode of knowledge production. What are the lived realities of being in a body? Does the… any of the speakers want to respond by choosing one of the questions in response after that performance?
Nikki Sullivan: I will say something. I don’t know if it’s a response to any of the questions, but listening, watching, being in with whatever, that... Or being exposed in a sense there, and again, last night to Brian’s response to your question, which was not a response in the conventional sense of words, that last night has kind of stayed with me because it really graphically, I think, illustrated the sense of unbecoming with that we have, that we are, and that we’re always imbricated in.
What I like about so much of what’s going on here today is that it is about acknowledging something that is not really articulable in words, but that is about - that being exposed to the carnal materiality of being in the world with others and how that resonates. So much of what you were doing there was about resonating. Our bodies resonate together and with and against, that when we go away from here, it’s not about thinking, what did that mean? It’s about being moved to somewhere where... And I was thinking this about Brian’s response last night, where I feel like it gave me permission in a way to bodily respond to things in ways that I might never have thought of before.
Frances: Maybe my response to you is also the balance in this context, between giving and then listening, and listening as being a reciprocal action or a receiving of other bodies as well, so sometimes the idea of silence or sitting back and listening as being equally valid or equally of weight as to the speaking voice.
I was thinking, there is a range of positions and roles that we bring to this event. Maybe just as a simple question, what is the role of the body within each of our practices and how does that inform what it is that we do? In our roles, how do we think? How does the body inform our thinking or our actions in our practices?
Verónica Tello: I’ll go first. I’m probably one of the few people that’s not an artist here. As a writer, and particularly as someone trained in art history, you’re trained to be very disembodied actually in a very undesirable way. The idea is that you’re trained to have an objective relationship, critical distance to the object of study, which is - it could be a person, it could be an artwork. Through that, because you have an objective, critical distance, the idea is that you’re then meant to have the capacity to have a universal determination as to whether or not that artwork or body of work is good or bad to be simplistic.
In that sense, that disembodied objective viewpoint really is how I’ve been trained by working at an art school. I’ve just been working towards having a much messier, intimate, embodied encounter with artworks. So I guess for me, embodiment is about being present, being accountable, being community driven as well, because therefore, you are accountable. But yeah, it’s kind of um... How do I put it? It sounds quite simple, but it’s actually quite hard to do within the structures of art history, which have particular forms of arguing, making an argument, being convincing. In that way, it’s also meant that I’ve had to find different ways to appear in the text. I’ve been writing quite performatively. Basically, I’m just stealing a lot of tactics from artists and performance artists to make the kind of art history that I want to make there.
Frances: Could you elaborate on what is performative writing?
Verónica: Yeah. To be transparent about the position from which I speak, the gaps in knowledge that exist, because I don’t yet have the discourses or vocabularies to attend to the questions that I’m asking about a particular topic or artwork, and to let just the doubts and the unknowns be part of the narrative as opposed to having, embodying authority and totalising knowledge and conviction. Being performative allows you to navigate through the number of different quagmires and unknowns in a vulnerable and hopefully relatable way, because I think that’s how we all experience art and the world.
Archie: Responding and piggybacking off that and thinking about the way that people are trained to write, and there’s terminology that gets coined and then just repeated because it just becomes a condensed inference for something. I feel like the body is one of those things, and I’m like, who is the body? Whose body is the body? Inevitably, in my mind, that evokes the dominant body, the young, white, able bodied, cis hetero body. It seems to me like there’s always a striving for specificity to pull away from that sinkhole.
Verónica: The languages we have to write are a very particular body, which is not everyone’s body.
V: I respond to your vocality and also to Brian’s as a way to speak a body, to speak having a body, being a body, because to speak a body is kind of impossible. And to speak the phenomenology and the ontology of each and every specific body is something which exists outside of dominant linguistic structures, semiotics and so on. I can only find the experience of embodiment through a kind of annihilation of the symbolic order of linguistic structures, of dominant structures of language.
So the annihilation of the order word into sound or noise, non-signifying [makes throat noise] vocal expression, that unleashes affective resonance that hits and then travels through bodies and around objects and within spaces, and bounces off the walls and the ceilings and takes on the shapes of the chairs and our shoes, and then exits the building and then continues to travel around the world, eventually coming back and occupying the body again.
Nikki: I’m really interested in what you said because I feel like being here... In the break, I was talking to my friend in the corridor about being here and the fact that on the one hand, what I’m finding so fulfilling about this is that unbecoming with experience that you just so nicely articulated, but there’s also kind of a discomfort that’s registering in my body, which is the fact that I am the internalisation of those systems that are, you know, all about productivity. So I’ve got this other voice in my head saying, ‘But are people understanding? Are you doing enough?’ Which is all about outcomes, and that is registering in my body in all sorts of ways as anxiety. There’re these tensions playing around and through your very carnality that is fascinating, that says so much, but that is so difficult to articulate or even really be aware of in any sort of critical sense.
Frances: And I guess a lot of this event has integrated performance and performativity, but how do we think of the body outside of these performance practices? How does the body operate without performing for others?
Archie: Can I… [Laughter] Like, when are we not performing for others, maybe? I’m reminded of Brian last night performing and the performance was how not to perform, how not to perform, how not to perform, how not... And that’s like the stalemate, maybe.
Frances: How did you understand, how not to perform, how not to perform, how not to perform?
Archie: In my body, I didn’t understand it cerebrally. I just was like, yes, I feel this. Yeah.
[Laughter]
Frances: And for the recording, Neika just stepped on the microphone.
Neika Lehman: Apologies.
Troy-Anthony Baylis: I’ve got a slightly… It’s not quite the avenue, but - obviously, I do some stuff that is my body. But also, and I’m sure I’m not the only artist who does this, but a lot of my object works in a sense represent bodies or at least they have an agency about them. So, yeah, in that way they um… so I suppose in a way they represent disembodied bodies, if that’s such a thing. I’m having a neologism. Yeah, and sometimes intersections of those bodies can... And maybe it’s part of an Aboriginal way of being and knowing oneself and imagining future and imagining ourselves as something like my Mimi works, for example, and Mimis - certainly where my cultural lineage… they’re genderless, and they’re elongated and tricksters. So there’s lots of fertile ground. We explore pasts as well as futures. So it’s beyond my own body and I can utilise those powers to represent those that have not been represented, certainly not since colonisation anyway. So yeah, it’s a bit of a adjunct to that. And just a little thing I want to say, it’s sort a bit humourous really, but in terms of drag, I remember I was asked on a commercial radio station once when I shouldn’t have agreed to the interview, but it was like, ‘Oh yes. So what do you do with it? What do you do with it? Where do you put it?’ And I just said, ‘It’s deep inside me where I live’. I’m sure there’s something in that for all of us.
Frances: And I just wanted to pick up on something you said Troy-Anthony and maybe pass it to Debris in terms of the term disembodiment, because you mentioned that earlier in the introduction. So I just thought, yeah, how might you receive that?
Debris Facility: Well, yeah, I also appreciate that you talk about the materiality or I don’t know. Yeah, non-human agency is something that we’re also dealing with. I think we understand embodiment without disembodiment, that we are working within, what is the organisational body, the social body that we’re constituting here and now? And I think maybe that form of embodiment or an expanded form of embodiment is what I’m more invested in than a singular human subjectivity as a nexus point for embodiment, which doesn’t necessarily lead anywhere in particular. But I think this fractured, atomised notion of embodiment is what I understand the context that we’re working in.
Frances: And maybe for people who aren’t familiar with the Facility, could you talk about how maybe that plays out in-
Debris: Sure. Well, yeah. I conceive of my practice as an employee of the Debris Facility Proprietary Limited, which is a paracorporate entity. So I was interested in the legal structure a body can include a corporation. So in pointing to that as a kind of… The lineage of the post-human thinking of that is really rich. And I was interested in the contradiction of like, how do you create an anti-capitalist corporation? Or approaching these modes of contradiction was really key to understanding this, or that I got to let go of my single subjectivity through the multiplicity of multiple bodies, like an organisational form as a way to organise a practice, which yet involves a versatility of roles and responsibilities and materials, that things come in and out consistently from the practice too. And I think those materials or the line between human, non-human or the levels of agency at play has been a real driving point for what we’ve been doing.
V: I think that that model or framework of thinking about how a body is constituted is really useful for people who experience a range of ways of being in their bodies. Sometimes their bodies might… We all have bodies that work differently. And I think, maybe, understanding that we are constituted by those social, political and institutional structures is a way for us to also forgive ourselves somehow. Because, yeah, if we understand that our bodily responses sometimes are really appropriate responses to the times and conditions. Like the pandemic or social isolation or just living in late capitalism and so on, that things like, for example, panic, is an appropriate response to living under such fucked conditions. Sorry I had to articulate that correctly.
Debris: And I think also V with your kind of work, that we are constitute of also the micro, that we have more microorganism cells within us than, quote-unquote, human cells or the way that we constitute a body is always already multiple. Which I think you’re attuned to or draw out in your work as well.
V: Yeah. And so I guess then in terms of my work, if I’m going to talk about bodies and my work, then I would say that it’s polyvocal and that there are a multiplicity of voices. So I need to be able to express the ineffable and the voices of the unknowable. Also, a vocality of the gut, a vocality of what I would call the shimmer body, which is like an evacuated subjectivity. So this kind of spectral presence, which always accompanies me 24/7 for my whole life, which I understand is this kind of... Say when I’m having a panic attack or something like that, there’s this complete evacuation of subjectivity, where... And Samuel Beckett has this line, which is my body doing its best without me. And I think about my body as just this meat puppet. It’s making faces of horror or panic or disgust or fear. And somehow this shimmer body exists out here, but this body is just doing stuff. Jerking, limbs, the biochemical and the electricity components of this meat body are just doing stuff. And my subjectivity is elsewhere. So how does the shimmer body speak? What is the vocality of the shimmer body? And I think that’s a question I was interested in for Brian as well is what is the vocality of the ghost? Because I guess I think of this spectral presence that accompanies me always this creep that’s just creeping on me 24/7. This panic creep spectral thing. And it’s like, what is it vocality? How does it speak? How do I express urgency and agency when all I feel is emergency? How do you up reap agency out of emergency and crisis? And what is that voice?
Frances: I think as well, we were talking earlier, Simona as well, about isolation over the last two years. And I was wondering what does it mean to come together into this space at this point in time? What does it mean to bring bodies into a space when we’re still cautious, when we’re still sort of unsure? I feel, unsure.
Simona: Well, yeah. I think in the last month of my PhD I started to understand that my practice is actually about world building. And within a speculative practice of music and architecture that I’m creating these worlds with which I can connect with people through music. It’s like when I’m performing on stage, I was talking outside about how as a singer and a drummer, when I’m at a show, I want to sing with the singer and I want to dance with the band and with the music. So it’s like that’s what I’m trying to activate as a performer. I’m also trying to be a drum machine at the same time, so I’ve got to really keep up about it. But I’m singing about these conditions. I am asking people to dance about architecture. And I heard someone on the radio go, ‘Oh, you know, that’s a really difficult thing to do’. And I’m like, well no, that’s literally what I’m asking people to do.
So, I’m trying to create, I guess a space of shared catharsis, whereas if I don’t know all these people in the audience or if I don’t know these people that are listening to my music, at least I’m communicating about... And I’m building a world within which to communicate, I guess an idea. Whether I’m singing about my feelings or whether I’m singing about how difficult it is to pass through an airport. I’m creating this world and inviting people into this world within which to understand their own context, within which to understand that their own body and how that does have a relationship to things like administrative violence or their own navigation of the cis normative paradigm of relationships or anything like that. Which is something that as a trans person, I have to deal with that every day.
I am really singing… not only about, I am singing I guess… The one thing about lockdown was when you’re stuck in your own head and you’re stuck in your own house and you’re on your own, it’s like, wow, I’m just going to sit here and riff with my infamous smallness. And that was a time, and that’s probably what my next album is about. That’s what it sings about, that’s what that work’s about. So yeah, this idea of world building I found as a really empowering way of thinking about what I do in my relationship with other people.
Frances: And that might lead us to the next theme, which is pleasures. That’ll be facilitated by Mel.
Melissa: Pleasures. Finding joy in what we do, within ourselves and with each other. Pleasures being feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction, just to remind us of the basic definition. I’d just like to ask this question, second question on this list. What is the pleasure in your work? Simona, would you like to continue as your voice was just being exercised? Maybe it’s easier to continue.
Simona: Well, I remember my mum coming into my room when I was about 16. I had all of the lights off and I was listening to New Order’s movement, which is their most darkest album, released in 1980. And it’s a very, very depressing record. And my mom just said, ‘What on earth are you doing? Will you turn on the lights? You’re so depressed.’ And I just went, ‘I’m actually having a really good time’. So I find this real enjoyment in listening to The Cure’s Pornography or Disintegration or really fucking sad music. If I can nail an emotion that I can’t explain, or if I listen to a song or something like that and it’s like, wow, you’ve articulated something that I have not been able to feel and just the release that gives me. Because I am a sad person and I am a lonely person. And so if I hear that articulated by someone else or if I can be that person who can articulate that through song, I find enjoyment in that in some way.
Melissa: Well, that reminds me a bit, V, of some comments you’ve made last night. Which made me think about the spectrum of joy and pleasure and that there’s a lot in that, it’s not just turning it on or off. There are different experiences of those things. And I think you spoke a little bit about that now.
V: Maybe I did.
[Laughter]
Melissa: It doesn’t mean you need to continue now. What about you Liz? Where is the pleasure in your work, or what, or who?
Liz: Oh, I think last night there was a little talk about pain and pleasure and the difference between the two. And for me, I’m usually in pain or uncomfortable a great deal of the time. So, pleasure is a little nice thing that’s happening on top of that. But there’s that pain and that weird body weariness or discomfort most of the time. And the same thing happens if I’m performing, I was so jealous of you singing just them, because, I’m having a wonderful time, but I’m also a little bit like anxious and I would love to just sing. Let’s all sing together. No, let’s not. But there is… yeah that discomfort that is there. And that happens when I perform as well when I’m singing on stage and people will be like, ‘Sit down, sit down. Why don’t you sit down?’ I’m like, no, I’m getting older. I need the strength that you get in your voice when you’re standing and you can really feel the power from the ground coming up through you. But it’s also, ah… it’s pleasurable but it’s also painful. And then there’s the pain after the performance as well. There’s the payoff of the pain of pushing your body too far and the rest that’s necessary afterwards, which is also an access point, recognising the access that’s needed after events as well in terms of recovery time, to relax and recharge. Yeah. How’s that for some random words?
Melissa: Pretty good. Other people welcome to bring something into this topic.
Debris: I’m also just interested in the other pleasures, maybe not necessarily within our work, because I think it’s also sometimes a neoliberal chapter that you’ve got to love what you do, especially within the arts, you gotta suffer with a smile on your face. But maybe the other pleasures that exist outside of the work. I mean, if we’re in a queer context, I mean, yeah like, the interpersonal affective pleasure of intimacies or I mean, I don’t know, yeah, drugs, partying. I think these things which are also, I think are integral to cultural production or queer cultural production, which inform them, sometimes create conditions or aesthetic frameworks for us to work within. But I think they’re often invinsiblised and I think that’s also fine for there to be a difference of work and play.
Melissa: Also de-legitimised, those embodied knowledges, you could call them. That are usually not allowed into these discussions, at least the ones that are more academic type.
V: I just started to think about Daniel again. Hi Daniel, up there. I don’t know whether Daniel’s currently having a pleasurable time, but I’m really interested in that. I’m also interested in these ways of legitimising slash delegitimising pain and pleasure and those embodied experiences and their acceptability or validation in institutional contexts. So I’m thinking about how discourses around, say for example, okay, so I’m thinking about On Our Backs and early lesbian magazines and porn stories and so on were back then not considered as appropriate topics for research or didn’t have any kind of empirical value. So, those things are delegitimised in a research context and how now, because they’ve been given an institutional or academic title, like, for example, container like auto theory, I was just talking about this with someone before that. Now, this is current cutting-edge academic research and it’s great to talk about your body and it’s pleasures and it’s pains within, I mean, if you think about Paul Preciado or Maggie Nelson who are the flagship auto theory authors, although I would say that Cherríe Moraga and - sorry - the bridge is my back, the back is my bridge-
Frances: Gloria?
V: This, and, yeah-
Verónica: Gloria Anzaldúa.
V: Yeah, and Cherríe Moraga. So they co-edited that anthology that… you know, they were some of the first auto theoretical works, if you like. And now that there’s an academic container for that kind of work, that it is valorised and considered to be, you know, valid research and empirical data. Anyway, that was just a bit of... I don’t know if that made any sense at all.
Troy-Anthony: This probably will make even less sense. I don’t know. Now I forget, who am I? No. Oh yeah, that’s right. It’s about academicness and pleasure, pain and beyond the fine line of pleasure and pain that oscillates wildly. There is obviously Foucault - this little part that Foucault wrote about the play of sadomasochism and what we constructed socially is this, sort of, extreme sex. And I think there’s a lot of queer people, you know we sometimes, at certain times our lives, some of us have related these ideas to, I don’t know, being all the negative associations about being queer. And then I just… reading that for Foucault, right back then - Roco Foucault, granddaddy Foucault - said that it’s just play. And these are play and relationships and they don’t have to be associated with trauma or any of those things really. It just completely shifts it around. And I love going to Foucault conferences and they’re all talking about power and the institution, which is obviously super vital. But yeah, there’s just these little bits about pleasure and pleasure for pleasure’s sake that doesn’t have to be associated with being controlled in terms of trauma. So I just love that as a text.
Melissa: Thank you. I was thinking about the comments on collaboration and how that’s really sustaining and pleasurable from previous discussions, and I thought maybe Neika, I don’t know if you wanted to mention anything about being collectives and what the pleasure is in that for you?
Neika: I mean, yeah, I guess it factors into it, but in a very small but like rich way. Whereas I immediately thought of a show that myself and two cousins did back home in Nipaluna, Hobart, where we didn’t really have a plan, but we were just going to stay in the space for five days leading up to the exhibition period. And I mean the pleasurable part of it was really just making kelp water carriers and baskets. The pleasure was just in that. Yeah, it’s nice to collaborate and blah blah blah. But that, I think actually, we might have been talking about it earlier, I feel like it’s more akin to - not survival, it sounds kind of extreme, but it’s the way to do things.
And so I don’t think that pleasure is this really inherent part of the way I think about collectives or collaborations, though of course it’s there and you probably, it would suck if it never happened, actually, if it was an unpleasurable place. But I don’t know, just when I’m listening to us all talk about pleasure, I think I automatically think about it as something that’s quite extreme. And maybe it’s not. I’m just like, do I ever get pleasure when I’m doing work? Not really. Maybe, I don’t know. Like I get pleasure when I eat. That’s very very pleasurable. But I think that when I’m thinking about art and being a writer, it’s a balancing out actually of pleasure and pain than it is... Because I also have multiple chronic illnesses and I also experience pain a lot. And I also experience intense fatigue. And so a pleasure is when my brain is being what once I would’ve considered normal. I can think or I don’t have to have heaps of coffees to think or whatever. For me it’s the state of what probably would be called pleasurable is just a balance. And balancing out is something that happens through breathing or being on Country and sitting on the sand and just listening. They’re the kind of closest spaces to feeling pleasure, but it’s not just pleasure, it’s something larger than that.
Melissa: Maybe the word doesn’t have as much texture and meaning in it than some of the other things you were describing then.
Simona: I wanted to pick up on one of the things that’s in the list and it’s panopticon. I wrote a song about panopticon and basically it was this very self-critical song about how for a while I was really relying upon Instagram to give me hits of dopamine by putting so much of my life on social media and revealing so much about my emotions or myself or posting selfies, all that sort of bullshit. To the point where I felt like I’d bought into this system of surveillance that it was like, oooh, what have I bought into? What have I done here? And I became so addicted to this hit of dopamine by getting likes or getting followers and all this sort of stuff. And it was like, oh my God, this existence in the URL sphere. And ever since, I’ve just been, I’m so trying to get back to this tactile world.
It’s difficult as an artist and as a musician and as a queer artist and queer musician. I need that space in order to exist, in order to promote and be part of that machine and all that sort of shit. And I hate it, but trying to just remove myself from that and actually get dopamine hits from real relationships and all that kind of stuff is the task. And yeah, it was really interested in Foucault’s idea of the panopticon and what we’ve sort created for ourselves in that sense. But anyway, it’s just a segue.
Melissa: You reminded me of the term positive obsession that we had from reading Octavia Butler’s novels. I don’t know if anyone’s read those, Parable of the Sower and of the Talents? The protagonist Lauren Olamina and how she needs her writing, to continue. Troy-Anthony you’re smiling. You know the novel?
Troy-Anthony: I’m just smiling. It’s better than a resting bitch face.
[Laughter]
Melissa: But positive obsession, riffing of what you’re saying about addiction as maybe not being positive.
Simona: Well, as it started off as this thing like, oh, I love this. And it was like, oh my God, I’ve just revealed so much about myself, that this is just terrible.
Melissa: Not terrible. It’s a condition that everyone - probably many of us can speak to.
Angela Bailey: It’s like sometimes being pleasurable with being just grumpy.
Melissa: Go on, Angela?
Angela: No, just that state of grumpiness. But I was just going to say about pleasure and it’s so associated, I guess with pain in how you think of it. But I guess in terms of pleasure that I’ve found recently is just working out how to look at stages in my life that have been painful, but then I guess with time and what you would say, but just then being able to look at them quite differently. The way that I left home, quite traumatic, quite painful, but I’ve just felt just in the last two years that I’ve been able to suddenly look at it differently. And that has been quite pleasurable in terms of realising that maybe I don’t have to live with that painful thought forever, as an instance.
Melissa: Emma you were gesturing. Emma, just a bit closer.
Emma Webb: That’s better. Mic swap.
Melissa: Swap mic.
Emma: Just thinking about the role of constant work and even if it’s work that’s actually with community or is cultural work that you’re supposed to love, but work never loves you back, and just thinking about how to actually reduce the value of, or having to see everything as the work, I guess. And just finding ways to increase rest and reduce pain and increase care. All of those things feel much more meaningful to me than pleasure in and of itself.
And I guess one of the things that I been thinking about in relation to the climate stuff, and this came from some fantastic artists that we’ve worked with, Pony Express, that some people probably know of talking to Lauren about the idea of, like if we applied the lens of palliative care to the climate crisis and how we deal with, and I kind of feel that you can apply that to your whole life really. If you consider yourself to be in a kind of process of potentially palliative care, what happens under palliative care in terms of what do you then prioritise? Palliative care can really transform communities and families and time alone and health. How you think about health. How you think about time and urgency. What gets prioritised as care?
And so I just found that a really useful way to think about not only that feeling of we are really in an existential crisis with the climate, but also that sense of how you might prioritise something if you considered your life through a stage going into palliative care, in a broad sense.
Melissa: Yeah, that’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because it’s immediately, what right relationship do you want to be in - to use the term that adrienne maree brown uses all the time - do you want to be in for yourself, but with your environment? That’s quite ecological, the way you’re speaking about it. It really spirals out to all of our relations as well as how you really want to be, be living.
V: I think the PhD destroyed my dopamine receptor. I just do. I wonder how you kind of carry on under certain conditions in a time of extreme dopamine deficit. How do we carry on? I don’t really know. Why the fuck do we do the things we do under such shit-full conditions? I don’t really know, because I want some kind of validation at the end of it? And it’s like, that’s a really long way away. And why do I even want to be validated by a structure that I abhor anyway, somehow? Why do we do the things we do within academia or within the arts? These incredibly long term projects where maybe you have a $200 artist fee and you’re trying to create a masterpiece and then you’re just really fucking anxious because you have to get the next grant and then in order to get that grant you have to produce the new and the new new and the new new new. And then you do that for $200 and then where’s the fucking pleasure? And there’s no dopamine rewards in that equation at all. I literally don’t know how we carry on or why we carry on. I don’t have the answer to that. At the end of the seven year PhD, I… about on panic, I don’t have the answer to that. It’s just fucking horror.
Simona: Well, yeah, without being toxic positivity about it.
V: Lol.
Simona: Look, three months out from the end of my PhD, I’m just like, look, am I going to hand in a list of grievances? And I was close, and then all of a sudden I just went, well, hang on, let’s just really nestle into this idea of queering and transing. And I started to think of those as verbs, as doing words. And I started to really understand that these were processes of imagination, of speculation, of futurity.
And this idea that as a three year old imagining my trans life did get me to four, it did get me to 14 and to 24 and to 44 and to now. And that is the nugget that I was talking about earlier. And from that point, I didn’t hand in a list of grievances and I actually thought, wow, I don’t have to go back into professional practice as an architect. I can actually like… There’s a reason why when I was seven Blade Runner changed my life, because without a musician and an architect that flyover of Los Angeles wouldn’t have been anything to me. It wouldn’t have changed me. It’s just kind of like, how can I embody trans and queer ideas into what I do, but at still remaining true to what I’m doing, but doing them through a completely different medium of practice, you know. And that was what gave me this inspiration, not only to finish the PhD, but to think of what am I doing beyond this point? And without that, I’d be still hunting for likes on Instagram. There’s nothing in that.
V: I mean I think, I don’t know how long you were in your candidature for, like how many years, but I think to get to that nugget that you’re talking about, I’ve been doing it for seven years and probably took me six years to go, ‘Ah’, six and a half actually, to find hyper focus and then a potential nugget.
Simona: My hyper focus is just like, shit, it’s got to be in next week.
Archie: Can I speak, I feel implicated to speak about pleasure and work, given the performance that I just performed, and want to maybe question this idea that work can’t love you back. And I feel like the way that I’m making artwork increasingly is about feeling good, wanting to, doing it because it feels good. And I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t feel good.
Yeah, I suppose if anyone would find their own avenue into that idea through their own repertoire of practice. But I suppose in a very literal or obvious sense, this work that was just performed was an invitation, not only in working with a professional dominatrix whose voice is part of the interlude in the performance, but also looking back at who are the writers, artists, philosophers who contributed to the way that I understand the world and who have given me permission to exist fundamentally and threading those people’s words into this performance.
I think it’s nice also to be able to say that after performing it, that the words are not only my words, but the words of other theorists and artists and theologians who, if not bringing me pleasure, they bring me meaning. Making a context for being. I’m done. Thank you.
[Laughter]
Neika: No, I think that kind of makes sense. It’s similar to what Simona was saying. I think about world building in a way like reading. I used to work in a bookstore and I sound really [laughs] like I’m just an advertisement straight out of the store, but reading is world building and it’s that something more that’s happening. And when you’re reading a theorist and it’s like, oh this is making me feel really amazed and good. And then incorporating it into your own work and what you just said about the context and meaning growing. It sounds very similar to me. And maybe, if we’re in our own ways struggling to figure out what it is that’s pleasurable, but ultimately we’re all doing it because it makes us feel good as artists. Yeah, maybe it is about that. However small, building, world building.
Simona: There’s great, there’s great power in building a world, where someone’s built a world you can see yourself reflected in that and you’re like, ‘ah’. That’s where you can see.
Nikki: I think it is the ‘ah’ though, isn’t it? I mean, when you were speaking then, really made me think about Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text and intertexuality is that connection. Like you are in me. After that performance, we aren’t separate anymore. That this event is about us connecting with each other, not so much so that we can kind of go, oh, how much pleasure did you get out of today? Tick box one to 10. It’s not about pleasure as a measurable thing, it’s about an effect by which one is moved to a place you weren’t at before.
It’s that process of becoming and unbecoming, that when we talk about it as pleasure or as pain or as something that is kind of definable, we’ve lost that. The sort of affect the thing that’s, that isn’t graspable about what just happened or what’s continuing to happen right now. And will continue to happen after we leave.
But that’s the trouble with evaluation, isn’t it? If you did give us all an evaluation sheet, what did you get out of today and how much did you… That’s the world that we live in that asks us to think about these things that to think about affect in those kinds of ways. And when you try to grasp affect and put it into those kinds of boxes, you’ve lost it.
Melissa: So we’ll just quietly rip up those evaluation forms. Great.
[Laughter]
Simona: No KPIs. No KPIs.
Melissa: That didn’t happen. Just a really big thanks again, thanks to our hosts of this building, Samstag and to ACE and to my co-conspirators. Thanks everybody.
[Applause]
[Performance by Sione Teumohenga with vocal experimentation and electronic music begins and runs for about 11 minutes followed by an atmospheric and melodic music performance by Harriet Fraser-Barbour that runs for about 16 minutes]
[Short music clip]
You’ve been listening to VERS, recorded at Samstag Museum of Art on the 18th of June. This audio document is supported by Solstice Podcasting, Monash University Museum of Art and Samstag Museum of Art. Edited and produced by Tilly Balding in Tarntanya, Adelaide, September 2022.
[End of transcript]