Taking as its starting point the first-ever retrospective exhibition (2021) of performance art icon Jess Dobkin, the book reflects on the internationally acclaimed artist’s playful and provocative practice as performer, activist, curator, and community leader. At the same time, it grapples with a question that is vital for art and performance studies: How do archives perform?
More than a discrete showing of a single artist’s work, the exhibition, including its new staging in book form, is a large-scale research experiment in performance curation, investigating what it might mean for art institutions to take seriously the embodied and communal nature of performance art in their practices of archiving and museological display.
In Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective, a cast of renowned international performance theorists and artists dive into this exploration alongside Dobkin, curator Emelie Chhangur, and performance theorist and dramaturg Laura Levin. These contributions appear alongside a riot of full colour photographs, providing access to Dobkin’s celebrated artistic productions from the last 30 years.
What happens to contemporary dance costumes when the show is over and their surrounding legacy slips from view? How might costumes be mobilised towards representational repair, post-performance? Located within Lea Anderson’s choreographic archive, this book charts a series of hands-on interventions with the fabric remains of her companies The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs. Centred on practices of Disintegration, Preservation, Transaction and Display, they offer provocative modes of engaging with the physical leftovers of performance, the degrading of memory and legacy around pre-digital theatre work, and the temporal material transitions of artefacts enduring outside of traditional museological contexts.
How might we regard these mercurial items? As precious relics to be protected in museum holdings, ghostly harbingers of residual performance histories, or inconvenient detritus? The book travels from props-makers’ studios to auction houses and galleries, incorporating film-making, artefact handling and curation along the way, in lively dialogue with perspectives from dance history, material culture, sociology and performance studies. The choreographic archive is envisioned as repository of the awkward, scattered remains of legacy blown apart into fragments. Smithereens, which can, if we allow them, demand an alternative after-life that disrupts the vanishing inflicted on these costumes and the companies who danced in them.
This chapter is a conversation between Nao Nagai, H Plewis, and Marisa Carnesky, where Carnesky asks the other artists about their experience working on the show Dr Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Women. They discuss their involvement and creating performance material. They also talk about menstruation rituals and what it means to be a showwoman.
This chapter is a conversation between Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, and Marisa Carnesky. They reflect on the relationship between the show, activism, and ritual. They also imagine Sprinkle and Stephens' ecosexual ritual in a war-torn landscape if given the possibility. They introduce the idea of earth as a genderqueer Showwoman.
In this chapter, Amy Ridler reflects on meeting Marisa Carnesky and how she influenced her life career. She discusses her ideas of what a showwoman is and how it is to work together with other showwomen. Amy talks about the projects she was part of within Carnesky's company such as Dr Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Woman and Dystopian Wonders.
The Department of Feminist Conversations is a collective exploring feminist modes of gathering and exchange. In this chapter we approach Marissa Carnesky's ‘Live Archive’ as a creative inspiration for writing about the politics of memory, loss, identity, migration, gender, and belonging.
In this chapter, Daniel Oliver recalls the time he saw Marisa Carnesky in a documentary called XXXTripping on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom in 1998. The documentary was about sex, death, magic, transgressive art, and underground culture and included short sections from her performance with the Dragon Ladies, entitled ‘Ballad of the Bloody Pearl’. Oliver discusses how it left a big impression on him and showed it to his parents as inspiration of what kind of performance artist he wanted to be.
This chapter is about Marisa Carnesky's performance Penny Slot Somnambulist (2000–03). It was selected by Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis for their co-curation of the first UK Visions of Excess festival (2003). In this chapter, a comparison is made between Carnesky's performance and ORLAN's Le Baiser de L'Artiste (The Kiss of the Artist, 1977). Penny Slot Somnambulist binds the histories of fairground and performance art together to invite the audience to interact with the art.
Marisa Carnesky's Finishing School has shaped over a decade of performance makers of all ages in the early stages of their careers. Since starting at the Roundhouse in 2010, pupils have been admitted into what has been described as an ‘esoteric St Trinian's for the queer cabaret generation.’ This chapter takes five key lessons in ‘Doing It Together’ which considers the pedagogic processes at play in Carnesky's classroom.
This chapter is a conversation between Tai Shani, Geneva Foster Gluck, and Marisa Carnesky. They discuss their creative process and their artistic visions. They talk about rituals, political work, and how their heritage influences their art. They also reflect on being showwomen and the complex politics of showwomanry.
