Went to a really great talk about blood which was organised in part by the good people over at LADA. Someone we hadn’t really had much knowledge about before was Marisa Carnesky. This is most probably due to her being more in the cabaret area of live art but all the same we’re happy to have been exposed to her work. The best bit was when she was discussing her PhD thesis and referred to Jesus as a menstrual figure due to the talk being in a chapel. This being because Christianity stole the magic of womens’ menstruation by transforming the bleeding womb into Jesus’ bleeding wounds. As if Mary’s virgin birth and the punishment of Eve weren’t already insult enough. A favourite aspect however was where Dr Dominic Johnson was discussing the various methods of using blood in performance and one of the ways was blood as suggestion. During this portion of the talk he brought up Anna Mendieta’s ‘Moffitt Building Piece’ which is a work where she poured (animal) blood and rags on a sidewalk, reproducing a trace of (domestic?) violence in a public place. Using hidden cameras, she surreptitiously filmed and photographed the reactions of passers-by to a puddle of what looked like blood and gore, seeping from under the front door onto the pavement.
Some look, some poke it with umbrellas, some just walk by. This goes on until the man next door (the storefront window bears the name H. F. Moffitt) comes out to clean it up. Always beneficial to find more works which deal with the power of the viewers imagination over what is actually on show. Found a great quote by William K. Everson which completely captures this, “Nothing that the camera can show can possibly be as horrible as what the mind can imagine”.
