The Daily Write: Disgusting (July 21, 2012. 12 minutes)

Note: I write for 12 minutes from a prompt as part of a daily writing practice. I don't edit the pieces (except maybe for typos). This one talks about a performance I did in Toronto in 1999 called Intake. Intake was complete, the writing below is not. That's how prompts work. I've decided to publish my writing in this manner to keep me inspired to keep going. I plan to come back to many of these pieces and write more.

Intake

Disgusting

I sniffed garbage on my hands and knees while naked with two pig tails on either side of my head. That someone brought tampons for the trash pile was a little over the top, but then, Chris Burden having himself nailed to the top of a Volkswagen in the 60s wasn't exactly mild mannered. This was performance art. Performance art must include the uncomfortable, the unthinkable, the averse reaction.

I decided to go for my Jungian shadow side. You know, the one that is always lurking just under my surface telling me what a lazy, stupid and ugly pig I am. The one that screams at me from the automatic search I have feeding my email from google each night on "overweight Americans." I figure it's better to go after the negativity than be surprised by it. I think this has always been my tactic. I'm that person who will tell everyone goodbye before I drive from Richmond to San Jose, on the chance that I be killed in a horrible car accident. I'm the one who will call herself a fat pig and then roll around in mud with mini marshmallows in my mouth if I think it will do the trick.

I am not sure exactly what attracts me to extremes. Perhaps it was a lifetime of being looked at, through, down upon. Perhaps it was going between parents, relatives, entire worlds. I'm insatiable for experience and always afraid to die. I spend hours thinking about being beautiful or wishing I was more of whatever I think that might be, and the rest of the time fighting the beauty paradigm. I will pose in one cute outfit after another and then take self-portraits as ugly as I can make them.

I once conceived of a performance art piece where I would collect my own feces in glass jars during a 24 hour period and display them after eating in public to create the shit. My hypothesis being that fat people defecate more and in larger quantities than thin people, and enjoy the release, and that this is part of our shame. Either that or it's the Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

I never did that performance. It was more than even I could take. And I wasn't sure what the point was except for maybe extreme masochism. And sadism too for that matter. I've always been one for punishing my audience. I need them to feel the weight of their own projections. If anything, I suppose performance art is an act of vengeance.
 

Pork Baby

I used raw meat in performance - the first time as a window of festering innards from which the viewer would gaze into the gallery where I performed obsessive activities for 24 hours. The second time I had swaddled a pork roast and put it in a cradle - a rotting thing of grotesque proportions. I guiltily ignored my pork baby for the rest of the piece, afraid of contracting a disease.


















Photos by Paul Couillard

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JENNY STRAUSS's performance INTAKE was presented in Toronto as part of TIME TIME TIME, a 12-month series of durational performance art works by artists from the UK, US and Canada.

TIME TIME TIME presented works ranging from 12 hours to several days. Ritual, endurance, attention span, community-building, altering states of consciousness, boundaries between public and private, narrative, linearity and transformation were explored in the series by artists presenting their compelling, urgent visions of ourselves and our world at the end of the 20th Century.