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Stanley, Throw Me a Bone
3 Channel Video and Performance
"Whacked", Practice Space, Los Angeles, CA — November 9, 2002
DVD Performance Document [4:17] - 2003

Peformance Description:
Splitting herself between two visions of "space", one interior and one extraterrestrial, the performer unravels the coincidental image-making between director Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey and a recent TIME Magazine issue "The Miracle of Life". Both are shown to be imaginings of the sublime, which refer to the feminine but are suspiciously void of any representation of the female body. 

Displayed on video monitors to either side of the performer, man searches for an image of the beginning of "life". She, meanwhile, is seen repeatedly slicing up the middle of a tracing paper apron upon which chromakey landscapes from 2001 are being rear-projected between her legs. As the screen layers accumulate like an exposed uterine lining, the woman's body receives short shrift in the videos. It is paralelled with every cliche in the book - from the sublime moon to "bunnies and kitties in the lab", but is never materialized. The performer is overwhelmed by the failure of technology to represent her body and the way her body's labor is made invisible through these narratives. A quote from TIME neatly illustrates this fact: "At 54 weeks, construction [of the fetus] is almost finished." The word "woman" doesn't appear in the article until the last paragraph. 

Through a miracle of low-fi technology the performer is finally able to "flash" the audience her re-cut version of 2001. This B-version of Kubrick’s film, in the genre of such early sci-fi classics as Mothra and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, collides familiar scenes with unfamiliar footage - in this case, a spaceship-eating cunt-vortex. An orgy of terrifying scale changes and low-grade special effects render the vortex triumphant and the quiet and sterile explorer ship of 2001 now useful to a new narrative in the cosmic reproductive cycle as an interstellar tampon. No longer disappeared by the misogyny of the lens, the performer takes her SONY CPJ miniprojector and disappears into the audience to assault unsuspecting viewers from behind.