Reflections on Milo Moiré's PlopEgg Painting (With a Note on Heide Hatry's Expectations)

Milo Moiré: PlopEgg (2014)

Photo by Peter Palm

milomoire.com

 

 

I. 

 

British art critic Jonathan Jones really doesn't like performance art and he wants the world - or at any rate his Guardian readership - to know it:  

"Performance art is a joke. Taken terribly seriously by the art world, it is a litmus test of pretension and intellectual dishonesty. If you are wowed by it, you are either susceptible to pseudo-intellectual guff, or lying." [1]

Obviously - and by his own admission - he's overstating things for polemic effect. But still it's clear that he's not a fan of contemporary performance art which, in his view, lacks power, fails to take any real risk, and reveals the extent to which today's practitioners are distanced from "real aesthetic values or real human life". 

 

Practitioners, for example, such as Swiss artist Milo Moiré, whom followers of Torpedo the Ark will recall I have discussed in earlier posts which can be found here and here. 

 

 

II. 

 

Performed at Art Cologne 2014, Moiré's PlopEgg, involved the expelling of paint filled eggs from her vagina on to a canvas, thus creating an instant abstract work of art. At the end of the performance, the canvas was folded, smoothed, and then unfolded to create a symmetrical image resembling one used in a Rorschach test.    

 

Dismissing Moiré as simply "the latest nude egg layer from Germany" [2], Jones denies that PlopEgg is an interesting feminist statement about female nudity, fertility and creativity; it is, rather, "absurd, gratuitous, trite and desperate". 

 

The thing is, even if Jones is right, and Moiré's conceptual work uniting painting and performance is all these things and succeeds only in perfectly capturing "the cultural inanity of our time", what's wrong with that?            

 

And, actually, Jones is not right: PlopEgg resonates in many ways on many levels for many of us; we think, for example, not just of female genitalia as represented in the history of art and of relatively recent contributions to this tradition by Judy Chicago, Annie Sprinkle, Jamie McCartney, et al, but also of Bataille's astonishing novella L'histoire de l'œil (1928) and the famous scene in which Simone inserts a soft-boiled egg into her cunt (as she does later with a raw bull's testicle and, finally, a priest's eyeball). 

 

We think also of Leda, the Aetolian princess, who was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan; the union resulting in an egg plopping out of her vagina, from which the beautiful Helen was hatched. And we even recall with a smile the beautiful jade eggs that Gwyneth Paltrow encourages women to insert in order that they may gain a greater experience of ther own bodies and increase their feminine energy [click here].      

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Jonathan Jones, 'The artist who lays eggs with her vagina - or why performance art is so silly', The Guardian (22 April, 2014): click here to read the article in full online. All quotes that follow from Jones are taken from this piece.  

 

[2] Jones doesn't specify who else he is thinking of when he refers to these egg layers from Germany, but one possible candidate might be Heide Hatry and her ambiguous performance piece entitled Expectations (2006-08), in which she too squeezes an egg out of her vagina. 

      In one variation of the work, Hatry, dressed as a businesswoman and carrying a laptop, throws the egg directly at the lens of the camera which is filming her, almost as if she wants the viewer to look foolish or feel embarrassed by what they're waching (i.e. to know what it's like to have egg on their face). To discover more about this work, click here. 

 

  

Lobsterfuck: Notes on Marine Biology and Art Porn

 Video still from Masshole Love (2013)

dir. by and starring Rebecca Goyette as Lobsta Blue

rebeccagoyette.com

 

 

I.

 

Marine biologist Marah J. Hardt has a particular fascination with the wet and wild sex lives of sea creatures, including lobsters, which, apparently, are more promiscuous than prawns and far kinkier even than crabs ...*

 

For example, in order to seduce a larger male lobster - which is an aggressive and territorial loner by nature - a female lobster will first moult her shell, releasing pheromones into the water as she does so, and indicating by her display of naked vulnerability that she represents no threat, but is only looking for a good time. 

 

As the male comes closer to get a better look, the female lobster will then piss in his face, her urine acting as a potent aphrodisiac. 

 

After playing this erotic game over a period of several days, the male lobster is completely smitten and the female lobster's scent has a transformative effect on his behaviour, turning him into an amenable lover desperate to get her back to his place - usually just a hole in the sand - so that they might mate in oceanic bliss. 

 

During coition, the male lobster turns the soft-bodied female over, mounts her, and inserts a modified first pair of pleopods (known as gonopods) into the receptaculum seminalis of the lucky lady. Having double-dicked the object of his affection, the male then uses a hardened structure located on a second pair of pleopods to help push gelatinous globs of sperm into her semen-storing structure. 

 

The male then deposits an additional gooey material to the outside of the female's receptacle which hardens within a few hours and effectively forms a plug, thereby ensuring no sperm will dribble out (this spunk plug falls off after several days).  

 

Once the deed is done, the female flips her tail out from under the male and he releases her from his tender embrace.       

 

 

II.

 

Inspired by the reproductive activities of our deep sea friends, New York based interdisciplinary artist Rebecca Goyette (aka Lobsta Girl) has produced an interesting body of work that she terms Lobsta Porn and which explores human sexual fantasy (and sexual violence) in light of the love lives of lobsters and from a feminist perspective.   

 

In Masshole Love (2013), for example, a short film shot primarily in Provincetown (MA) - a favourite coastal destination of artists and members of the LGBT+ community - Goyette plays the role of Lobsta Blue, a woman who confronts a past history of sexual abuse by dedicating her life to erotic performance art whilst dressed in a bright blue lobster costume. 

 

In this work, as in others, Goyette offers a magical mix of burlesque, street theatre, psycho-sexual therapy and lobstasexcitation, in order to encourage audience members to discover their own marine sexual identities within the deep blue sea (the latter imagined as a polymorphously perverse space or queer universe).

 

 

III.

 

Unfortunately, I have the same kind of concerns, philosophically speaking, with Goyette's lobsta porn as I have with the ecosexual project devised by Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle: click here and here, where I express these concerns in some detail.

 

In short, I fear that her sex radicalism, like theirs, is ultimately just another form of moral idealism and remains - no matter how you dress it up, be it with flowers or lobster claws - human, all too human ...

 

Having said that, if it makes Ms Goyette happy to produce and exhibit this faux-transgressive work and other people pleased to view and to buy it - and if no actual lobsters are harmed - then what do I really care? 

 

I would like to know, however, what she plans on doing after the aquatic orgy ...?    

 

 

* See: Marah J. Hardt, Sex in the Sea, (St. Martin's Press, 2016). Readers interested in listening to her 2019 TED talk on this topic can do so by clicking here. 

 

 

Ecosexuality Contra Necrofloraphilia (How Best to Love the Earth)

Black and Pink Floral Skull design 

sugarskullbedding.com

I greatly admire Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle for endeavouring to think ecosexuality and questions concerning broader human culture within a nonhuman and inhuman framework. And I fully approve of their attempt to encourage people to form connections with not only other life forms, but also inanimate objects, be they real or virtual, natural or artificial. 

But this isn't as easy as perhaps they imagine. For it's not just a question of sharing space and sharing affection with the things that you love, it's also a question of establishing a zone of proximity and entering into some kind of strange becoming. And it means abandoning all anthropocentric conceit and all traces of vitalism which posit life as something more than a very rare and unusual way of being dead.      

What I'm suggesting is that ecosexuality must shed itself of its moral idealism and become a more daringly speculative and perverse form of materialism. For the fact is, the earth, however you wish to metaphorically think it - as mother, as lover, or both - simply doesn’t care about the life that it sustains. Rather, it is massively and monstrously indifferent; just like the rest of the universe.  

In attempting to make an eroticised return to the actual, ecosexuality is ultimately fated to discover that it’s not an affirmation of life, but a form of romancing the dead; i.e., necrophilia. Thus it's really not a question of how to make the environmental movement sexier and full of fun, as Stephens and Sprinkle suggest, but queer-macabre in a deliciously morbid manner. And if you genuinely want to indicate the ecological entanglements of human sexuality then you must sooner or later discuss death as that towards which all beings move and find blissful unity in an orgiastic exchange of molecules and energy. It's death - not sex - that is radically (and promiscuously) inclusive.   

As for the 'twenty-five ways to make love to the earth' listed by Stephens and Sprinkle, which include dirty talk, nude dancing, skinny dipping, recycling, and working for global peace, if this is the best they can do at constructing a green lover’s discourse or an ars erotica then, to be honest, I’m deeply disappointed; all the multiple pronouns in the world don’t lift this above banality. 

One might - provocatively - suggest that there are other, more explicit, more obscene, ways of loving the earth; that our ecosexual relationship is actually a violent, mutually destructive type of amor fou in which the earth displays her passion with volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and earthquakes and we, in turn, display our virility through displays of power; mining for coal and drilling for oil, deforestation, dredging the seas, the erection of hydro-electric damns and nuclear plants, accelerated species extinction, etc. 

Perhaps it’s these things that turn the earth on – mightn’t global warming be a sign of arousal?

See: Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, ‘Ecosexuality’, essay in Gender: Nature, (MIHS), ed. Iris van Der Tuin, (Schirmer Books, 2016).

Note: This text is taken from a much longer commentary and critique of the above essay by Stephens and Sprinkle (emailed to the authors on 23 Nov 2016). 

On Ecosexuality

Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle

Here Come the Ecosexuals

For those of you who don't know, Elizabeth Stephens is an interdisciplinary artist, activist and academic whose work explores themes of sexuality, gender, and politics.

Former prostitute and porn star Annie Sprinkle, meanwhile, played an important role in the sex positive feminist movement during the 1980s and has since built up over thirty-five years of experience in erotically charged entertainment, education, and performance art. 

Today, Sprinkle and her partner Stephens are committed to queering the environmental movement and to this end have declared themselves to be ecosexuals. They have also written an ecosex manifesto and established a new field of research and aesthetic practice called sex ecology.

Central to their philosophy is the notion of replacing the metaphor of Earth Mother with that of Earth Lover, in the hope that this might "entice people to develop a more mutual, pleasurable, sustainable, and less destructive relationship with the environment". This means not only treating the Earth with kindness and respect, but also engaging in libidinal relationships with the material world; hugging trees, caressing rocks, being pleasured by waterfalls, etc.

Now, you might be thinking at this point that, as someone who has written enthusiastically on floraphilia, I would happily and unconditionally offer my support to Stephens and Sprinkle - but you'd be mistaken. Unfortunately, I have a number of problems with their project, but these might, for the sake of convenience, be boiled down to just two: firstly, I don't share their idealism and, secondly, I don't like the way they attempt to impose a unified and recognisable sexual identity upon a diverse range of paraphilias and polymorphously perverse practices.

Let's examine each of these points in a bit more detail ...   

1. Like many others before them, including nature worshipping Romantics and blood and soil loving Nazis, Stephens and Sprinkle quickly fall into idealism and, related to this, anthropocentric conceit as they project their own egos (their own politics, their own prejudices, their own peccadilloes) into everything; not just the Earth, but the Sun, the Moon and the Stars to boot. Their ecosexuality is thoroughly - and disappointingly - allzumenschliche.

They would do well, in my view, to learn from Lawrence on this, who, with reference to the case of Thomas Hardy, warns that to try and subject the earth to your own idealism always ends badly - not least of all for you as an idealist. He writes:

"What happens when you idealize the soil, the mother-earth, and really go back to it? Then with overwhelming conviction it is borne in upon you ... that the whole scheme of things is against you. The whole massive rolling of natural fate is coming down on you like a slow glacier, to crush you to extinction. As an idealist.
      Thomas Hardy's pessimism is an absolutely true finding. It is the absolutely true statement of the idealist's last realization, as he wrestles with the bitter soil of beloved mother-earth. He loves her, loves her, loves her. And she just entangles and crushes him like a slow Laocoön snake. The idealist must perish, says mother-earth. ...
      You can't idealize mother-earth. You can try. You can even succeed. But succeeding, you succumb. She will have no pure idealist sons [or, in this case, daughters]. None.
      If you are a child of mother-earth, you must learn to discard your ideal self ... as you discard your clothes at night."

Put simply, the Earth doesn't want to nourish you like a child nor accept you as a lover or spouse; it is massively and monstrously indifferent to your existence and your longings.

2. One of the joys of floraphilia is that it's a paraphilia and not a legitimised form of love; the prefix para implying not only that it exists alongside the latter, but that it's abnormal. And that's how I like it and want it to remain. To be pollen-amorous is to allow one's desire to free float on the passing breeze; it is to become-flower, which is to say, beautiful and soulless. It's not about constructing some new form of sexual identity and of tethering the latter to an essential truth.

Foucault, of course, brilliantly analysed the dangers and disadvantages of this with reference to the birth of the modern homosexual, arguing that homosexuality only "appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species" subject to an entirely new discursive regime.

I'm sure Stephens and Sprinkle are aware of all this and so it surprises me to say the least that they insist on positing ecosexuality as a primary drive and identity, or some sort of ontological category into which all other sexual positionings - GLBTQI - can ultimately be collapsed (because we are all natural beings and all sex is ecosex).

I wish them well, but I also wish they'd exercise a little more philosophical caution and nuance ...       


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's "Two Years before the Mast"', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998). 

Readers interested in knowing more about the work of Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle and reading their ecosex manifesto can visit: sexecology.org

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