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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2010
This article examines catharsis in recent one-to-one performances I shared with UK-based artist Kira O'Reilly. Focusing on my inter-experience of My Mother (2003) and Untitled Action: NRLA, The Arches, Glasgow (2005), I argue that both performances can be read as troubling and elucidating ideas about the presence, nature and affect of catharsis. I raise questions and reveal my responses to felt states such as risk, intimacy and confession, and draw on hysteria and Kristeva's concept of le vréel to articulate the embodied knowledge of my close encounters with O'Reilly's visceral body artworks. Ultimately I propose that O'Reilly's performance practice adopts cathartic strategies that activate aesthetic, formal and material kinds of feminist political responsibility in her performance ‘other’.
1 Kira O'Reilly, biography e-mailed to author, 29 June 2009.
2 Kira O'Reilly, unpublished interview with the author, Bristol, 3 November 2004.
3 Moreover, ascribing an aesthetic to the performance works is something I have chosen to do. Such an action – intended as grounding rather than prescriptive – is not undertaken by the artist herself.
4 Kira O'Reilly, unpublished interview with the author.
5 Kristeva, Julia, ‘The True-Real’, trans. Roudiez, Leon S., in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Moi, Toril (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 214–37, here p. 216Google Scholar.
6 Lois Keidan in Manuel Vason, Lois Keidan and Ron Athey, Exposures (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2002), p. 6.
7 I am borrowing this term from Dominic Johnson, who cited it in a keynote paper he gave on ‘Intimacy and Risk: Performance after Operation Spanner’, Extreme: Visual Representation and the Body, Anglia Ruskin University, 26 June 2009.
8 Dominic Johnson has discussed the explicit relationship between one-to-one performance and sexual encounter (I Confess . . . University of Glasgow, 13 and 14 June 2009), and in a recent interview Franko B (17 July 2009, unpublished) spoke to me at length about his understanding of one-to-one practice being predicated on the shared experience of ‘intercourse’.
9 Kira O'Reilly, unpublished interview with the author.
10 The writing in this article responds to O'Reilly's works as inter-experiences, sliding between psychoanalytic theory and social phenomenology under the influence of R. D. Laing: ‘Social phenomenology is the science of my own and of others’ experience . . . That is, with inter-experience. It is concerned with your behaviour and my behaviour as I experience it’. Laing, R. D., The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1960), p. 16 (Laing's emphasis)Google Scholar.
11 Phelan, Peggy, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p. 59Google Scholar.
12 It seems important to state that I am not unfamiliar with performance works that test the body in visceral ways such as body cutting/piercing/scoring. I have witnessed scoring and marking of the skin and indeed I made a group performance in which my skin was scored. As with Scarry, Elaine in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, I would agree that imagined pain is much more difficult to digest than the experience of (my felt) pain.
13 Since her third performance work entitled Wet Cup (performed between 1999 and 2002), O'Reilly has incorporated the procedure of ‘cupping’ in her performances. A tool of medical aid for treating blood diseases, cupping consists of cutting a small incision into the skin followed by holding a flame underneath a cup, to create a vacuum. The cup is then fixed to the area around the cut and via the suction inside the cup the ‘diseased’ blood is drawn out. The positioning of the incisions is organized in relation to the particular ailment, though they are usually around the chest/trunk area. O'Reilly has publicly performed this conventionally private ritual in several of her performance works.
14 Kira O'Reilly, unpublished interview with the author.
15 Historically, in the light of cathartic medical practices dedicated to the cleansing of the ‘diseased’ blood of the hysteric, it is not surprising to find female impurity recorded as a disease in Bonitz's Index Aristotelicum: ‘(Its entry for) katharsis contains just seven references to aesthetic phenomena – and over sixty to menstruation’. John McCumber, ‘Aristotelian Catharsis and the Purgation of Women’, Diacritics, 18, 4 (Winter 1988), pp. 53–67, here p. 57. In this essay McCumber responds to this misogynistic record by referring to Aristotle as ‘the most classical anti-feminist’, and critiquing catharsis as the (male) purgation of woman. Ibid., p. 55.
16 The female hysteric who suffers at the hands of the male doctor takes on a quite literal meaning in certain types of treatment, one of the most (in)famous examples being that of the late nineteenth-century neurologist and anatomical pathologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Working in his clinic at the Salpêtrière in Paris, Charcot was responsible for ‘staging’ his self-titled ‘Theatre of Pathology’ in his public Tuesday lectures at which his female patients were required to perform their ‘female malady’. Hypnosis and the physical pressing of body parts (sexual parts especially) were used in Charcot's ‘hands-on’ approach to having these women replay their hysterical ‘episodes’.
17 Smith, Sidonie and Watson, Julia, eds., Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/Performance (An Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 49, my emphasisCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Diamond, Elin, ‘Mimesis, Mimicry and the “True-Real”’, in Hart, Lynda and Phelan, Peggy, eds., Acting Out: Feminist Performances (An Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 363–82Google Scholar, here p. 377, my emphasis.
19 The image shown is taken from the performance Untitled Action for Bomb Shelter (2003). This was the first in the series of O'Reilly's ‘untitled actions’, performed in a disused bomb shelter at the Anti-Contemporary Art Festival in Kuopio, Finland. For Untitled Action: NRLA, The Arches, Glasgow O'Reilly simply substituted the name of the performance venue, losing the original site of the bomb shelter as a meaning-making point of reference for her audiences of one. As a title, Untitled Action: NRLA, The Arches, Glasgow offers a much more ambiguous framing of the encounter; it is much harder for a spectator to take meaning from it.
20 Belfiore, Elisabeth, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 339Google Scholar.
21 Fisher, Philip, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 60Google Scholar.
22 See Bronfen, Elisabeth, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
23 Ives, Kelly, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism (Maidstone, Kent: Crescent Moon Publishing, 1996), p. 94Google Scholar.
24 I borrow the term ‘Sk-interfaces’ from the name of a multidisciplinary exhibition that took place in Liverpool, UK, from 1 February to 31 March 2008. Launched by FACT (the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), O'Reilly was invited to participate in this exhibition, curated to ‘reflect the progressive feeling of uncertainty and “inbetween-ness” which we encounter in the age of technological extensions’ (http://www.fact.co.uk/news/?=128, accessed 15 September 2009).
