Over the next few weeks, as I approach making a new work falling asleep with a pig, at Cornerhouse as part of INTERSPECIES produced by The Arts Catalyst. I’m going to try and blog some of the thinking behind the piece and the development of the work.

Many of the instances I refer to in the previous entry, of moments of collapse and flickering between bodies of different species, i.e. human and pig have been some of the genesis of this work. There is also an ongoing response of a kind to seeing pigs and other animals in large animal research facilities, as well as the ecconomies of species we use as other kinds of resource - like meat. I’ve wanted to make a very small, and gentle piece that examines the power and play between these two species - and with a living pig. As an emailer wrote to me in protest of my using dead pig bodies in my work:

"You can easily work with a live pig by the way.

They are very wonderful beings. Truly. "

Here is an early proposal for the work:

A sleeping action/installed performance by a female human animal and a female non-Human animal.

Human animal: Kira O’Reilly
Non-human animal: Female pig, yet to be selected.

Background:

This is a proposed new work that emerges out of previous research and art works that explored interspecies metamorphosis and mergences. These were developed whilst working with primary cell cultures of pigskin within a bioscience context and subsequent actions/performances with female pig carcasses. The investigations and the performance inthewrongplaceness, generated a variegated set of engagements with the actualities of working with animal as resource, animal within art practice and the troubled practices of both.

The notion of dream states suggests a common ground of consciousness and possibility, between myself and the pig, as species and beings.
We dream together and imagine our dreams interweaving and exchanging, girly pig and piggy girl.

The notion of the one on one encounter allows for an audience engagement that is singular, individual and potentially intimate. The is an incredible tenderness that I would like to bring to this work that can be more facilitated by the situation being framed and constructed as private and particular.
 Bodies touching, breathing, simply being in this altogether out of the ordinary event. Sleep is mysterious and ubiquitous.

The work is documented with both video and stills for further exhibition and dissemination and a writing that locates and articulates the ethical issues.

The work is an enquiry, there is not a fixed position from which I am trying to articulate a position and it is troubling in many respects. Much of the research and development so far has been about how to make a work that is the least stressful and taxing for the pig in question. An animal expert (wrangler) has been consulted, as has the RSPCA, Animal Welfare and DEFRA, considerable thought and ideas are being discussed as to what kind of pig will be OK alone with a human in an unfamiliar space. How can the gallery space be made suitable to accomodate her, me, health and safety and how will the large amounts of piss and shit be processed. The animal wrangler began our meeting with handing out copies of the 5 Freedoms:

1. Freedom from Hunger and Thirst - by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigour.
2. Freedom from Discomfort - by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area.
3. Freedom from Pain, Injury or Disease - by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment.
4. Freedom to Express Normal Behaviour - by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind.
5. Freedom from Fear and Distress - by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering.

He suggested working with a Vietnamese Potbellied pig and located one at Matlock Park Farm. I went to visit last week. She is small and dark, with black fur, her face not at all like the shape of the pink, piggy pig I had been thinking of. We took some photos, she didn’t seem to mind particularlry although both she and I got too cold. It became very clear that the work I am making is not and cannot be just about any generic notion of “animal” and “species”, it will also very much be the (in)precise encounter of two biocultural contingent entities being constructed by the specifics of their/our contexts, those that have made them and those that currently shape us.

Eva Hayward references Haraway observing that

Species exist in taxonomic differences (Homo sapiens sapiens is not the same as Octopus vulgaris), but species are also always already constitutive of each other through the spaces and places we cohabit—this of course includes language and other semiotic registers.

More Lessons from a Starfish:
Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves
Eva Hayward
WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly
Volume 36, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2008

She is known as Deliah, here she is:

Someone asked me how I am going to get her to sleep. I’m not, she and I will spend some 36 hours in the gallery space and perhaps, she and I might fall asleep together at the same time.

 The Art of Helen Chadwick

at Factual TV

Until her unexpected death in 1996, Helen Chadwick was amongst the most sparkling, provocative and distinctive of artists. Her sensual and rigorously intellectual works explore desire, sexuality amd the body.
Produced alongside a major retrospective exhibition, organised by London’s Barbican Art Gallery, this film provides a rare opportunity to to reflect on her art. Important installations are featured, such as Ego Geometria Sum, which uses photographs of her own naked body, and the Baroque fantasy The Oval Court, as well as more controversial pieces, including Cacao, a fountain of hot bubbling chocolate, and the Piss Flowers, sculptures made by casting the holes left after urinating in snow.

It is just a delight, to revisit Chadwick’s work. My seeking her out was inspired by my recent visit to Mexico City and Adam Zaretsky’s vibrant DNA extraction workshop - so full of gorgeous sumptuousness, it reminded me of Chadwick’s vibrant 1992 tv doco about Frida Kahlo, and her seizing of a particularly chaotic, tactile unstable energy as she make a shrine to Frida with fruits and plants.

Adam’s DNA extraction workshop used a litany of plants, flora, fauna and  anything from anywhere that contains DNA during Accidente Controlados at Ex Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City. It set up bawdy propositions of  porous contingent bodies that seemed to spill out of the strange hybrid skewering of realities at play in Mexico City. (Kathleen Rogers writes on my Facebook profile: Hi Kira I well remember Ex Theresa it’s a haunting place near the Zocalo and the Aztec ruins and everything else that’s hybridly alive in Mexico. Hybridly alive - her words put her finger on it precisely) The shrine he constructed before the workshop included the pig I had used in the version of inthewrongplaceness the previous night. Here’s a photo.

inthewrongplaceness

all photos by Antonio Juárez

13a Muestra Internacional de Performance “Accidentes Controlados”
Ex Teresa Arte Actual, México 2008

This version of inthewrongplaceness was made in the side chapel at Ex Teresa Arte Actual for small groups, 3 to 5 people. Like past versions, people were told they could touch both the human and the non human animal bodies, they were given latex gloves and an ethanol spray for their hands - a passing reference several times removed to bodies in biological contexts. They were given some 10 minutes to be in the space. it was cold, the 4 hours duration was shortened to 3 1/3.

The 48 kg female pig’s body, freshly slaughtered, bled and emptied of soft tissue, arrived some 20 minutes before the work, transported by car, and carefully places onto a gurney like a patient being assisted out of a small ambulance - an inverse of Beuy’s arrival in the US and transfer by ambulance to the gallery for I Like America and America Likes Me. I was aghast, she was not just empty of stomach, lungs etc but sliced entirely open, top to bottom, her entire self falling open and inside out like a book, her head sliced almost off. She became meat - and some spreadeagled anatomy lesson, all spine and bone. I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to move her in that state - that she had departed too much from allmostthesame and those momentary flickers of whose who and what’s what. For a few panicked moments we attempted to staple her back together - which felt wretched and desperate and didn’t work. However her severely butchered state generated a whole array of new movements and engagements. I performed mirroring of her body, opening her partially and myself, legs scissored and chest open, like she and I are dancing girls lying on the cold stone chapel floor. I wrapped her into herself to make her whole and seemingly complete and then allowed both our bodies to be unfolded and opened, sometimes by me, sometimes by someone visiting the piece.

Many, many touched took place, I was the most touched I have ever been making this work, some were tender and curious, others made deliberate attempts to warm me and express tenderness. One or two took apart in carrying the pig lady body with me, her dead weight and unwieldy flesh topping and spilling out of our hands. Not many times I managed to carry her alone, across the floor, junctions of my bones supporting her on me and our awkward movements. At times a kind of penetrating anatomic, pornographic gaze of open, open and open some more delivered strong and uncomfortable moments; my legs being opened and then being turned upside down, my arse in the air, arse hole quivering and the spectator’s cool gaze. He seemed to play out some kind of scene - from his end anyway, entirely unegotiated and without consult - no thought as to a rough handling of naked flesh on stone floor, interesting. I was concerned that my silence would be read as passive meat rather than my curiosity driven  co-operation. I decided to get up, and decline his further interventions. His been witnessed by the other spectators created a layer of complexity.

The inclusion of the pig’s body in the DNA extraction workshop became both collaboratory  and celebratory as she became the centre piece in the shrine, pale green catus leaves on her scapula, like weird mutations, (a Pig Wings moment). Someone sliced apart of her to enter into the mash up DNA hybrid.

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
(b.1914, St.Louis, Missouri - d. Lawrence, Kansas, 1997)

‘LIFE-FILE’

Opens Monday 15 December - Saturday 10 January

The author of Naked Lunch continues to have an overwhelming effect on artists, writers and musicians who relate to his cut-up logic, non-linear lifestyle and all round ‘looseness’. Riflemaker mount their second exhibition of William Burroughs visual art when ‘Life-File’ opens to coincide with the exhibition ‘Burroughs Live’; part two of the Royal Academy’s GSK Contemporary series.

Bryon Gysin’s Calligrafitti of Fire at October Gallery

Brion Gysin, Calligraffiti of Fire, 1985, acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of October Gallery, London

Exhibition preview - Brion Gysin: Calligraffiti of Fire, October Gallery, London, December 11, 2008 - February 14, 2009

See article here.

3 December 2008 – 28 January 2009
Lady Barber Gallery, University of Birmingham.

Jack Kerouac:
Back On the Road

The original manuscript scroll of Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel, On the Road, goes on display in Europe for the first time .

More details here.

 I’m going to present at the symposium that is part of

Touch Me Festival 2008 - Feel better!

Feeling They have to Touch (Fingering)

I have no idea what it’s going to read like, it’s being written on the hop, ad hoc, on the run and on the boil, in between assessing students, tissue culture, meetings with pigs, writing proposals, train journeys, lab meetings, photo shoots, yoga classes, searching for missing cells, reading ultra trash mags, bits of Haraway, Acker, an interview with Courtney Love, listening to 1st year art students and science reserachers debate my next performance work (see INTERSPECIES link in entry below), too much time on Facebook.

Feeling they have to touch (Fingering) will be a performance text/lecture that will knot and tangle unlikely (and unwanted) pleasures from an art practice that moves in and out of the borders of the laboratory.

Performed and spoken in cut ups, lab book notes and messy meshed threads it will speak of:
Lab shoots
Tequila shots
Shot guns
Dead things, living things and being undone.
Piggy bits, girly bits and strange powers.
Carnage and carny in vitro
(and why they took their clothes off and got into the hood)

From my position as artist and maker in a bioscience context, the texts testy irreverence will attempt to utter and tease connections and frustrations, desires and pleasures between the various points my own body and other bodies occupy within the without the laboratory, as I prise, prod and prevaricate through layers of tissue, and architectures of time and interfaces between the material and the metaphorical. My textual investigation will attempt to hit (and miss) and engage a visceral and performative action in the reading and attendant hearing, of bodies at their most unstable.

Touch Me Festival 2008 - Feel better!

Feel better! Art at intersection of technology and science

19.12.2008. - 23.12.2008.
Student Center, Zagreb

This year’s festival has a name with connotations of pleasure − Feel Better!. Touch me festival is still testing out how the individual can be bound into the network of mechanical, electro-mechanical, electronic and cybernetic aids and biotechnology, and the non-critical attitude of society towards ethical issues that the changes in contemporary technological reality open up. The topic of this edition of the international festival is related to the imperatives of happiness, pleasure and hedonism, and draws upon paradigms that explain how in the contemporary social and political system the issue of stability and control has been diverted from the area of power and repression

to the area of happiness and fun. It starts off from the proposition that being down, gloomy, depressive, uninterested is equivalent to being socially unacceptable. Some of the pieces in the festival thus attempt to cheer the visitors up, to shift them into a state of short-lasting hedonism, provide them with all kinds of sensual and sensory pleasures, known and unknown.

INTERSPECIES

Private view: 6pm Friday 23 January 2009
24 January – 29 March 2009 (open Tuesday to Sunday)

Cornerhouse
70 Oxford Street
ManchesterM1 5NH.

Touring to London and Edinburgh

‘Interspecies: artists collaborating with animals’ consists of four new commissions by artists working closely with different species of animal, and three existing works, stimulated by the anniversary of Darwin’s birth.

 In the lab I am surrounded by people spending allot of time in (wild, wild) Western Blot production, making smudgy representations that indicate the presence or absence of specific proteins with the help of antibody markers. Moving tiny amounts of colourless liquid around in the search of the miniscule sub cellular agents that are the nuts of bolts of molecular biology reuires serious attention to methods of detection and revelation.

See here for a great page on the ‘what is’ - skip the audio though, it’s wonderfully unhelpful.

http://www.molecularstation.com/protein/western-blot/

The horseradish bit comes at the very end of the process, there’s an enzyme in the horseradish root called Horseradish peroxidase that allows for Enhanced Chemiluminescence - it generates light. It binds with the anitbody that binds to the protein you want to detect, the light is a signal - which can be developed - like a chemical photo - establishing a visual trace which can be read - to the consternation or delight of the scientist out there blotting in the lawless land of the west. I cannot help wondering if it’s the same tricky enzyme that blows the top of my head off when I eat the stuff neat with blood sausage - I just love it and have been moved to tears by it’s intensity, especially with blood sausage. I wish it was possible to buy the root in shops here in the UK rather than heavily diluted sauces, but I’m told it grows wild everywhere - I’ve yet to master recognising and harvesting it.  Actually a quick Wikipedia glance tells me that the crown blowing/sinus exlopsion substance is of course not the same enzyme, the herbivore defence effect is from Allyl isothiocyanate CHCH₂NCS + KCl. Not to be deterred I see no harm in a bit of horseradish consumption before during and after a Western Blot protocol. It can’t hurt .(“I might as well spit in it,” I overhead one chap say when his blots refused to display the protein he was on the hunt for, and  it sure has a definite a lo-fi appeal  as a method for creating a visceral enzymatic intervention.)

Nowadays most of the stuff needed is bought commercially, in kits, or otherwise, commercially synthesised and acquired. However there was a time when alot more of these materials, antibodies for instance, would be developed in the lab, on one hand making things alot more time consuming, however it also meant that these practices and enquiries exisited outsde of commercial economies and their drivers. As Prof. Alaistair Strain put it, we “used to share stuff we made, not buy it”.

This add was pointed out to me, FREE red lab coat for first 1000 orders above £1,000

http://labclone.blogspot.com/2007/09/free-red-lab-coat-from-invitrogen.html

Something close to my heart: