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KAY LAWRENCE Dr Kay S Lawrence is an associate researcher at GCCAR. In her cross-disciplinary practice she engages with the poetics of space and materiality of mediums to examine contemporary issues, layering concepts, abstraction, metaphor. From a feminist paradigm, she researches the materiality of bodily

experience, and its potentially transformative effect on these issues. Kay investigates fractures and dislocations of the time/space continuum and the

fragile and ephemeral nature of life. She has exhibited in Australia, China, Iceland, Singapore, Lithuania, USA, and Japan.

THE BODY AS DRAWING INSTRUMENT IN FEMINIST ART PRACTICE. Performance drawing is the quintessential feminist art activity, enabling the embedding of feminist narratives simply by virtue of using a female body, while addressing diverse issues such as ecology, identity, and ethnicity. Depiction of a body that reads as female introduces physical, social, and cultural metaphors that provide a particular set of aesthetic, political, and embodied conditions and characteristics. This paper discusses three interdisciplinary artists whose performance drawings use the body as a tool for understanding our place in the world.

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The Body as Drawing Instrument in Feminist Practice Today many artists identify as interdisciplinary—freely using performance, digital

photography, video, sound and multiple mediums in innovative ways that they classify as drawing practices. The 2011 exhibition On Line at MOMA examined

how in the twentieth century the traditional concepts of drawing were subjected

to critical interrogation and expanded the medium's definition in relation to gesture and form. Where previously drawing was typically characterised by lack

of colour and reliance on paper as support, it now encompasses movement and connection between contour lines in a blank field, extending the metaphorical space of drawing into a new spatial dimension. Performance drawing works now traverse four dimensions also embracing time, with documentation returning ephemeral works to two dimensions, with the conceptual nature and documentation considered equally important. I contend that performance drawing is the quintessential feminist art activity, enabling the embedding of feminist narrative simply by virtue of using a female body, while addressing diverse issues such as colonialism, ecology, identity, ethnicity. In performance drawings the body’s actions and utterances are abstract interpretations or subversions of particular concepts and ideologies. While

abstract painting has traditionally been considered a purely masculine domain, feminist performance artists use abstraction as mediation between conceptual

use of the body and drawing by the body. Significantly, how we conceptualise the body forms and limits the meaning of the body in cultural contexts. Embodiment refutes the concept of the body as

inert matter and acknowledges the plurality of aesthetic and political constructs,

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which a body purveys (Meskimmon 2002, 390) and uses to fabricate its own

social environment. In contemporary cultural theory, the body’s anatomical materiality is largely ignored. As abstracted matter, its psychological, cultural and political inscriptions are of far more importance (Dixon 2007, 213).

The trend toward performance art was begun by male artists but

commandeered by female artists in the 1970s as an expedient way to examine

female subjectivity and identity. Women embraced performance art because it was an art not bound with restrictive traditions, prescribed materials or content,

or an overshadowing history. It was therefore open to experimentation, with no historically, culturally, or socially defined roles for women (Dawson 1995, 115). The revolutionary 1970s were followed by a period in which use of the body receded from the position of avant-garde. Since then, performance art has infiltrated mainstream art with the body frequently used in a manner that is not abject or confrontational, but may nevertheless address distressing, confrontational, or political views. Feminists moved beyond the second-wave feminist legacy of the body’s abjection and association with bodily functions, to using the body as a tool for understanding our place in the world. Amelia Jones states that since the 1990s, performance theory has reinvigorated feminist theories of representation and expanded theories of how meaning is transmitted

in culture and human experience (Jones 2010, 47). This trend continues with feminists using their own bodies as image and medium in drawing, sculptural and photographic forms.

This diversion of interest from gender and sexual difference is in accordance with feminism’s broadening ideological base, embracing matters of race,

political equality and ecology. Jill Orr, Ana Mendieta and I have embraced the larger vision of feminist art as an agent of social change. To use a female body

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to make activist works which highlight environmental and social issues which

have arisen mostly through the operation of patriarchal culture, is a powerful strategy adding another layer of critical conceptual content. Martha Wilson’s experiences as feminist performance artist, gallerist and writer led her to

contend that performance artists are the ones who “hope to change the world”(Wilson 2011, 198).

Orr (1952-) is an internationally acclaimed Australian artist whose performance drawings have traversed the past four decades of political and social change.

Her work centres on issues of the psycho-social and environmental where she draws on land and identities as they are shaped in, on and with the environment be it wilderness or urban localities. Mostly her body has been clothed in costumes of neutral colours although some early works did utilise her unclothed body. Bleeding Trees (Figure 1 and 2) is an early environmental work where Orr used her body as an 'emotional barometer' to empathetically engage the viewer with the natural and unnatural life cycles of trees (Orr 2015). Whether addressing humans’ relationship to land or settlement of Australia by various ethnic and refugee peoples, Orr embeds allegorical qualities that entice the viewer to supply their own missing elements of the narrative—the specifics with which they are familiar. Frequently Orr’s works involve bodies of water, salt

lakes, rivers, oceans. The dreamlike qualities of the carefully crafted images are arresting yet they retain their elemental connection to drawing practice through her attention to line, composition and limited colour palettes. Southern Cross –

To Bear and Behold (Figure 3 and 4) demonstrates how Orr’s works engage her

audiences through the mythical qualities instilled in her performance documentation.

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Figure 1: Jill Orr, Bleeding Trees 1979, 35mm slides, (1 of 21 images), © Jill Orr

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Figure 2: Jill Orr, Bleeding Trees 1979, 35mm slides, (1 of 21 images), © Jill Orr

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Figure 3: Jill Orr, Southern Cross – To Bear and Behold - Burning 2007, inkjet print

on crane silver rag archival paper, 94 x 160cm, © Jill Orr

Figure 4: Jill Orr, Southern Cross – to Bear and Behold – Missionary 3 2007, inkjet

print on crane silver rag archival paper, 94 x 160cm, © Jill Orr

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This performative series features a dramatically beautiful natural salt lake. The

mirror-like surface of the lake reflects the figure trudging through the black oozing clay with fire held aloft. Also featured is the missionary nun from another series Faith in a Faithless Land, stumbling through the same bitter landscape

encumbered by the cross on her back. In this work we realise that the past is always present, so is the future. The mirrored lake reflects both the present and

the past—what is present and what is absent.

Mendieta (1948-85) was an American artist who fled Cuba during adolescence.

She used her body to address gender, social and cultural history issues. She animated the territorial boundaries between artists and audience, male and female, body and spirit (Blocker 1999, 10). Her work challenged the philosophers of the 1970s edict of dematerialisation of the art object, by the sophisticated manner in which she repeatedly transformed her own body into an art object. Mendieta’s Silueta series 1973-1980 (figure 5), constituted a dialogue between the landscape and the female body as she searched for origins and a homeland, alluding to her exile from Cuba. Mendieta’s work, classified as ethnic and feminist, disclosed a strong identification with the landscape. The entropy inherent in Mendieta’s earthworks and vegetal manipulations underlined the ephemerality of her works and the body, decreeing the necessity for documentation. Her body is a consistent feature of Mendieta’s oeuvre appearing

in sculptural, performance and photographic works. A number of critics have analysed Mendieta’s works from a psychoanalytical point of view deeming them to be reflective of a troubled sense of self (Blocker 1999, 14). In many works her

body “disappears”, yet it is visibly female. It seems that she invokes the tenets of

feminism while simultaneously summoning her loss of identity and averting the male gaze.

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Figure 5: Ana Mendieta, Image from Yagul (First Silueta) 1973, lifetime colour, photograph from 35mm colour slide, 52 x 34cm © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy Galerie

Lelong, New York

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Figure 6: Ana Mendieta, documentation of Tree of Life 1976 (Old Man’s Creek, Sharon Center, Iowa). 35mm colour slide © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy Galerie,

Lelong, New York

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In Mendieta’s 1977 Tree of Life (figure 6) series, her naked body is covered in

mud and stands arms upraised, at the base of a gigantic tree. Mendieta’s goddess figure demonstrates a metaphorical union with nature. We do not exist independently of this earth. We draw our existence, strength and power from

what nature endows.

Figure 7: Kay S Lawrence, Bending to the Light#1 2012, archival digital image on

photo rag, 50 x 89cm, © Kay S Lawrence

Many of my own works emanate from research into the troubled nature/culture relationship. While resident in Japan in 2012, I made daily observations of the trajectory of slowly moving shadows that traversed the floor and walls of the

studio. The elegant dance of shadows through the vast, clean, white space

seemed symbolic of a relationship where nature was forced to negotiate the conditions imposed by culture. Yet, nature continued to strut its presence in

brief, graceful, balletic journeys of transient beauty. These observations evolved into a performative series of images, Bending to the Light (figure 7), where I attempted to emulate this daily recital using my body. In this series, the drawing

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space became both metaphor and container of the body at its limits. The works

question the permeability of self, the boundaries imposed by nature and those of cultural constructs. The body’s sustained effort to draw the shadows produced by the architecture articulates issues of domination, control, futility, vulnerability,

submission.

This struggle is metaphoric of the bigger picture—the world at large—as well as

for the struggle between the polar opposites of the Cartesian dualistic segregation of our lives; the struggle between nature and culture, body and

mind, emotion and intellect. Imbricating the body with the environment promotes a reconsideration of the body in relation to culture and nature, which allows for multiple meanings and overlapping significations. In this case, the female body suggests a mutability that a male would not.

Figure 8: Kay S Lawrence, Separation Anxiety 2014, archival digital print on photorag, 55 x

84cm, © Kay S Lawrence

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Separation Anxiety (figure 8), an extension of the Bending to the Light series,

further investigates the relationship between nature and culture, using the body in dialogue with a dead tree branch. The pictorial body is partially present, metonymically represented by a partial arm and leg, and a shadow. Shadows

have a dual character, both defining and contradicting the body, thus linking presence and absence.

The current unstable state of humanity in nature is echoed in the instability of the body in the Bound (figure 9) series. The body is incomplete. Through digital

drawing processes the limbs have been truncated, the facial features secreted. The boundaries of the body are rendered indistinct, with concomitant destabilisation of the body. Cutting away the body to produce a new drawing provides a new dialogue between the body and the space. This abstraction of reality mirrors the theoretical concepts underpinning the drawing: the body as metaphor for the natural world and the instability being thrust upon it.

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Figure 9: Kay S Lawrence, Bound#1 2012, archival digital print on photo rag, 94 x

57cm, © Kay S Lawrence

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Conclusion These three performance artists, Orr, Mendieta and Lawrence, demonstrate a

profound affinity with the natural world. Their performance drawings are positioned in the context of the feminist critique of the relationship of women to

dominant power structures and systems of representation. Their performances

transgress the dualistic attribution of females as passive, with the body always assuming an active role. Of all manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body

is the most vulnerable. Since there are parallels between the vulnerability of the environment and society, and the human body, as a result of human intervention, it is valid that these connections are investigated through the use of the body to convey its vulnerability, fragility, ephemerality and mutability.

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Reference List: Blocker, Jane. 1999. Where is Ana Mendieta?: identity, performativity, and exile

London: Duke University Press. Dawson, Sally. 1995. "Women's movements: feminism, censorship and

performance art." In New feminist art criticism, edited by Katy

Deepwell, 111-118. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dixon, Steve. 2007. Digital performance : a history of new media in theater,

dance, performance art, and installation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Jones, Amelia. 2010. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. London: Taylor & Francis Ltd.

Orr, Jill. 2015. Accessed 1 July 2015. http://jillorr.com.au/. Wilson, Martha, ed. 2011. Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of

Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces. New York: Independent Curators

International

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Image List Figure 1: Jill Orr, Bleeding Trees 1979, 35mm slides, (1 of 21 images), © Jill Orr

Figure 2: Jill Orr, Bleeding Trees 1979, 35mm slides, (1 of 21 images), © Jill Orr

Figure 3: Jill Orr, Southern Cross – To Bear and Behold - Burning 2007, inkjet print on crane silver rag archival paper, 94 x 160cm, © Jill Orr

Figure 4: Jill Orr, Southern Cross – to Bear and Behold – Missionary 3 2007,

inkjet print on crane silver rag archival paper, 94 x 160cm, © Jill Orr Figure 5: Ana Mendieta, Image from Yagul (First Silueta) 1973, lifetime colour

photograph from 35mm colour slide, 52 x 34cm © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

Figure 6: Ana Mendieta, documentation of Tree of Life 1976 (Old Man’s Creek,

Sharon Center, Iowa). 35mm colour slide © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

Figure 7: Kay S Lawrence, Bending to the Light#1 2012, archival digital image

on photo rag, 50 x 89cm, © Kay S Lawrence

Figure 8: Kay S Lawrence, Separation Anxiety 2014, archival digital print on

photo rag, 55 x 84cm, © Kay S Lawrence Figure 9: Kay S Lawrence, Bound#1 2012, archival digital print on photo rag,

94 x 57cm, © Kay S Lawrence