The Adam Zaretsky conceived and realised Vivo Arts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd. Stills taken during the series of actions made in the V.A.S.T.A.L. Glovebox, at Waag and Stedelijk museum Bouwkeet on tour 2009
The VASTAL Virginarium is a six person Glove Box artistically designed by Adam Zaretsky and Mason Juday for Bioart Laboratories and public performances, which revolve around cultural interpretive issues of purity, sterility and cleanliness. Much like a sterile hood used in biology for pure culture technique, this glove box has Positive air pressure.
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The VASTAL Virginarium Is a Collaborative Cultural Containment Stage For:
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Sterile Field Inter-Public Body Art Performances
Various performance artists will be ritually cleansed and enter the Glove Box one or two at a time. Various performance artists take turns in the box interacting with the public or other actors reaching into them with the gloves. This is experimental Body Art with a Biological theme that references experiments, lab animals, the pure and the impure as well as the distance (or presumed distance) that objectivity implies. A glove box is a techno-purified place, but as an artistic/creative aseptic arena, the VASTAL Virginarium is purely for cultural production. It represents a return to ourselves as animals, experiments, faulty and in disarray but also as changeable and in process.
There is ultimately no absolute chastity or true cleanliness, passage is from one form to another into another again. But, through emulation of purification and altered versions of artistic isolation we will try to help garnish public acceptance of the imperfectability of living in this uterine world.
Design Credits:
Adam Zaretsky and Mason Juday
The artists brought together by Adam Zaretsky were:
Kira O’Reilly
WARBEAR
Jeanette Groenendaal
Zoot Derks
Boryana Rossa
Oleg Mavromatti
Sarah Hamilton
Jennifer Willet
See here for video stills from the entire festival including more from my own Bureau of Decayed Visions/collective DNA extraction.
Small amounts of body tissue was collected from self electing members of the audience. Conversations made up a great part of it and somehow they informed the mix as well. My attire was both glamerous hostess and and show girl, black feathers and vast expanses of tulle. The organic materials were blended together and a lo-tech DNA protocol was performed using only ingrediants form the supermarket and the bar. The subsequent extraction contained in a plastic tube, was then held inside me by me as I inverted myself upside down and became a human repository, holder or perhaps incubator for this collective material coding. My work merged with Dominic Johnson’s performance Transmission, he came out of his installation covered in earth, blood and glitter and performed the placing of the test tube into my vagina as I disappeared under my tulle skirt.
all video stills by Nans Leiding.
A most heartfelt thanks to all at Warehouse 9 especially Miss Fish and Christian, Bernardo Verchelli.
And a special thank you to Dominic Johnson and our first artistic collaborative venture.
Thanks you as ever to Lee Adams and Ron Athey, it’s privilege to be included within the transformative dimensions you invoke
*communion with the ragged spirit of Georges Bataille, exploring the “scatological philosophers” key themes of death, eroticism and the forbidden.
This is a small selection from the Webskin series. It is a development form the Finger webs which I did by myself when collecting webs and used my point and shoot camera.
For these Mel Grant and I visited a friend of Mels here in Birmingham, Laura Hunt who has a copious amount of spider webs in her garage.I wanted to see if I could improve on the Finger Webs series with the help of a better camera. I also wanted to try out placing webs between joints like my elbow.
I rather like the girly delicacy of them - although I don’t want to make Cocteau Twins album covers - I don’t want to loose any bite!
I do like the suggestion of stocking tops, the hairs on my skin which mimic the hairs on the spiders and all of that stuff about hairy femininities, - you know how glossy and super airbrushed mainstream super femme body is, so I like the up too close and personal of the saggy skin of my body and the saggy skin of the webs on it.
Surfaces layers. it makes me think about an Oz based artist Paul Thomas talking about those covert spaces inbetween body and clothing. I like the idea of them being set against the profound beauty and implicit violence of the egg/embryo and the holding technologies of the cable ties. Like riffling though a private chest of drawers in someones bedroom and finding unexpected transmorgrifying indeterminant objects in the discreet domestic, maybe if Cronenburg met Angela Carter. We did the shoot at Mels’ friend Lauras’ who is a secondary school teacher. She is currently marking essays that touch on the gothic, so we were discussing Dracula and Angela Carter of whom she is a big fan (as am I). So it was rather lovely to have these literary conversations and references of the mutable and destabilised against the performing of those concepts.
I’m also reminded of the web being an extension of the spiders tactile zone, it’s delicate hairs sense the threads movements as they vibrate and move. The hairs on my arms function similarly but are amplified with the extreme delicacy of the webs and the cold that creates goose bumps and erect hair follicles. This working with layering and spanning on my own skin creates an extended meshing of these ideas of super fine touch and a distributed sense of self and selfing, both entirely responsive and entirely indivisible from my environment. Felt textures and textual feelings form a inter and intra mergings.
The punning on felt is another story. Mel, who is a great crafts person and makes alot of felt, has suggested we try and create some felt with spider silk.
I posted these images onto Facebook where there is a very lovely circulation of thoughts, support and resonance between my work and that of UK based artist Liz Atkin, and US based academic, theorist and writer Eva Hayward and I.
Jennifer Willet and Kira O’Reilly (2009). Photographer: Bernd Bohm.
With special thanks to Adam Zaretsky who conceived and realised the glovebox and initiated the invitation and opportunity for us to use it. Thanks also to WAAG Society who supported and facilitated the venure:http://www.waag.org/news/6019
My own very particular thanks to Jennifer who invited me to collaborate with her again on our second photographic series. She was also responsible for some of the fundraising that supported my visit to Amsterdam as was the case with our previous collaboration. Both situations emerged from a convergence of methods in our respective practices of similar visual and performative methodologies with respect to our presences and activities within the laboratory and the biosciences. But equally both methodologies have developed from somewhat different processes and discourses but with very similar sets of concerns. These lively convergences and divergences of thoughts, actions and language are largely what allow and create such a layered set of meanings in our brief encounters in the actual period of making. Several years of professional dialogue and friendship beginning whilst both artists in residence in SymbioticA and continuing despite very brief periods of actually seeing one another laid a foundation for these works.
Shots taken through the black dark room curtain that cloisters the window of the door of the ‘room of appearances’ or the tissue culture room that is part of Janet Smith’s lab and where I work.This room has been very carefully conceived and considered by Janet, it’s feel and tone altogether different from the other tissue culture labs I’ve been in.
St Veronica wiped the bloodied face of Christ on calvery, her veil took up his imprint and some centuries down the line, she became the patron saint of photography. The blackness of the darkroom curtain of course absorbs all light, all appearances, it cannot reflect back but is the negative and this case the occulting figure in the camera obscura (dark room), the obscurer. The play between light and dark, development and appearance often seems analogous to the appearance and development of the cultures that are cultivuated within - and to the technologies of appearance that are used to display and interpret cellular and molecular information. From microscopy, to histology staining, to western blots. Exploitations of lucida be it optical, objective, fluorescence, antibodies, bioluminescence.
These are recordings of small actions of trying to capture spider webs between my fingers to create connections between my skin, it’s topography and the silken structures. I was also thinking about gaps, bridges, spannings, attachments. Alot of nothing and alot of something.
I took the photos of my left hand with my right hand with my trusty point and shoot Canon A480 & I haven’t done anything except crop them. Another person taking the photos with an SLR - and some delicate photoshoping would improve the precision of viewing the filigree threads attachments to the skin terrains.
However I’m pleased with them as small performative enquiries that allow me to move between scale, different focus, orientations and notions of body. These actions very particularly work with touch and the felt as well as sight. There is a way of trying to see spider webs when hunting for them, a slight defocusing of the eyes onto a nearer plane in the search for the giveaway glints and catches of light that betray the almost but not quite invisible presence of fresh gossamer.
