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64 Camera Obscura
Through readings of the work of porn-star-turned-performanceartist Annie Sprinkle (b. Ellen Steinberg) and the younger Canadian artist Diane Borsato, I will explore how looking with pleasure
at porn can help us understand the peculiar mechanics of the
performance documentation image, as well as the desire on the
part of contemporary artists to make these images live again. What
is the relationship between the performance reenactment and the
document of a past performance artwork? And what is the specific
cartography of pleasure associated with reenactment from documentation? In Sprinkle's 1981 film Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle (US),
masturbation appears as an activity in which the phenomenon of
spectatorship and the performance of pleasure become blurred.
Similarly, in performance reenactment, viewers of the documentation of past performance become performers themselves, creating
a constellation between document and body in which the document, originally a recording of a past event, incites the production
of new, live affects.
Sprinkle and Borsato are feminist practitioners whose performances may superficially seem to have little in common. Sprinkle began her career in the mainstream porn industry in the mid1970s, gradually transitioning to directing her own films, such as
Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle. In the 1990s, Sprinkle tnoved increasingly
toward creating films, performances, and publications that were
explicitly feminist and that engaged in a playful and experimental
way with women's, queer, and transgender sexuality. These works
include various self-help-style videos, such as Annie Sprinkle's Amazing World of Orgasm (US, 2004) and The Sluts and Goddesses Video
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es, and a silver corset. Reclined with her head on a pillow and her
exposed vagina facing the viewer, she brings herself to multiple
orgasms using an electric vibrator.
In her later autobiographical film Herstory of Pom: Reel to
Real (US, 1999), Sprinkle focuses extensively on Deep Lnside and
specifies the importance of the masturbation scene: "Now in this
scene, I wanted to show a REAL woman's orgasm. You know, a lot
of people, including most porn directors, they didti't believe that
women really had real orgasms. And if they did, well, they weren't
itnportant anyway. But now I was directing, I wanted to show a real
orgasm." In Sprinkle's comments, the idea of realness is positioned
as a challenge to masculinist porn production practices that negate
women's pleasure. Throughout the scene. Sprinkle constantly
addresses the viewer, inciting her or him to pleasure in a way that
explicitly eroticizes the technological mediation of the film that
connects her orgasm to the viewer's projected orgasm:
I like to spread my legs for you ... Do you like to look at my thighs and
my pussy?. . . Would you like to .see it? I'll show it to you ... I can feel
your eyes all over it. I can feel your eyes on it, and it feels so good having
you watch me like this ... Why don't you just tingle yourself like this with
me. I want you to become very very clooose. 1 want you with me. I want
you getting hot with me ... Tickle my asshole. Tickle my asshole and
stick myfingerin it. Oh, I love doing this for you ... I want you to get off
with me ... Oh, I wish you were going to fuck me. Btit nooooo, I just like
having you watch.
In this monologue. Sprinkle gets off noisily to the idea of "you,"
the projected viewer. It is not the specific characteristics of "you"
that Sprinkle says she finds erotic but the negation of the viewer's specificity into an empty and general viewing posidon, made
possible by the fact that this is an image document and not a live
event. You, the desired affective receiver of Sprinkle's performance, are structurally unknown to her, and the other bodily
sites in which her performance has been received are unknown
to you. Working with the specificity of the filmic medium in her
mode of addressing the viewer. Sprinkle positions her approach in
opposition to mainstream discourses that see the activity of viewing porn as inferior or secondary to having real sex. As Eugenie
Brinkema notes about John Stagliano's The Adventures ofButtman
(US, 1989), a film in which a man masturbates to televised footage of a scene to which he appeared indifferent when viewing it
live, porn involves the eroticization of the process of framing and
mediation itself'
In the masturbation scene from Deep Inside, Sprinkle
appears to take pleasure in the disintegration of the boundary
between what she does to herself, and what the gaze of the camera
does to her. This can be seen in the line "tickle my asshole and stick
my finger in it," where there is a slide between what sounds like an
order to the viewer, and an action that we see Sprinkle undertake
herself Annie wants you as the viewer to get off with her: she wants
to create a performance in which the document will allow a transfer of pleasurable affect between her body and yours. She wants
your activity of looking to be a masturbatory one, one not only
accompanied by literal masttirbation but also taking pleasure in
the doctiment in and of itself, making the document live again by
creating affect in your body. Your body becomes an affected prosthesis of the document, a document that aims to recreate affect in
multiple, temporally and spatially scattered bodily sites. The performance becomes history, but the document, which preserves a
trace ofthat history, keeps producing affects in which another body
undergoes a similar performance. In Deep Inside, masturbation is
something that unites looking and experiencing and draws closer
together the roles of the performer and the viewer.
The ways in which Deep Inside as document can create new
clusters of affect are indissociable from the different modes of production and distribution of the moving image the film has gone
through since its creation. In one scene. Sprinkle enters a movie
theater in which a film of hers is playing and proceeds to have sex
with a number of the men watching the film. Notably, there are no
women in the theater. This scene stages the locale of reception as a
crossover between document and live erotic experience on the part
of the viewer. That crossover is one I achieve differently, less publicly, by downloading Deep Inside and watching it on my MacBook.
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reut for Seven Easy Pieces, but the affect and sensation of a scar are
different from that of a bleeding wound). As sucb, performance
affects must be repeatedly recreated in tbe present, generating new
events tbat may be connected conceptually tbrotigb documentation from tbe perspective of performers or witnesses, but tbat are
nevertbeless ontologically unique.
In contrast to Seven Easy Pieces, tbe mainstream porn films
in wbicb Sprinkle starred during tbe 1970s were documented
performances designed to create a repetitive affect in viewers
tbat was mimetic to tbat experienced by tbe actors/participants.2'
Tbat mimetic affective relationsbip bas formed tbe basis of the
expansion of Sprinkle's practice into forms frequently involving sex
education and sexual modeling, a practice at tbe heart of which
lies masttnbation. As stated above, masturbation breaks down tbe
distinction between staging and reality, in tbat one can decide
bow and wben to stage an act of masturbation and really bave an
orgasm, tbougb its moment of arrival remains at least somewhat
spontaneotis. Sprinkle's later work in particular encourages people
to see that staging/reality as empowering and to use it to explore
their subjectivities. Additionally, ber works since Deep Lnside bave
been engaged in refuting the idea tbat the porn star is simply an
actor, by flesbing otit ber own ptiblic persona as a porn star into a
performance of complex, reflective, desiring subjectivity. In Sprinkle's work, tbe relationsbip between exteriorly manifested bebavior
or action and individual experience is not fixed but kept in an
irresolvable tension. Tbat tension botb presents tbe porn film as a
document of experience, instead of only a tbeatrical performance,
and leaves room for an indeterminacy in terms of wbat the viewer
understands the performer to be experiencing. In this respect, the
experience of viewing Sprinkle's porn becomes increasingly one
in wbicb "viewers are forced to engage deeply witb tbis particularized subject wbo so dramatically stages ber work and/as berself,"
as Jones writes of Yayoi Kusama's art.22
Since Deep Inside, orgasm bas occupied an oppositional
position in Sprinkle's work, in tbat sbe presents it as cballenging
tbe dicbotomy between real and not-real tbat characterizes various
discourses on women's sexuality.^s In her book Post-Pom Modem-
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As can be seen in the differences between Sprinkle's performances in Deeplmide and in "Sex Magic Masturbation Ritual,"
and also in her comments about these performances quoted above,
t he way in which she deploys the notion of realness in order to create this opacity varies depending on the audience and discursive
context. Brinkema provisionally defines pornography as "a series
of formal codes that highlight unsimulated sexual intercourse
as the profilmic event of the work with the intention of producing a sexual affect in the spectator."26 This is a useful definition,
but I want to stress how Sprinkle reveals the separation of those
codes from any reality of the profilmic, and foregrounds the
way in which the codes can be tactically manipulated. Sprinkle's
practice, throughout its trajectory from mainstream porn to art
performance, einphasizes how porn's production of self-pleasure
has always involved layered and contradictory assumptions on the
part of different producers and audiences about what constitutes
the real of a certain body In Deep Lnside, a woman's real pleasure
becomes the basis for challenging the masculinism of male porn
directors, whereas in "Sex Magic Masturbation Ritual," an assertion that a real orgasm is not the point pushes back against the
performance art audience's demand to know the real frotn the
fake and to draw conclusions about Sprinkle's subjective experience based on that distinction.
Self-Pleasuring Performance
In both Sprinkle's and Borsato's performances, the notion of a
similar performance occurring elsewhere, whether in the future
(for viewers of Sprinkle's porn) or in the past (with the older performance works Borsato reenacts), acts as a structuring fanta.sy
that shapes the present production of affect in performance. Masttirbatory spectatorship, in which looking easily slides into reenacting, may start with a fantasy of another performance occurring
elsewhere or in another time, but it does not end there: it is about
creating a different form of pleasure in the present instead of perfectly replicating another scene.
performance, 85
minutes, Caixa de
Pensiones, Barcelona.
Marina Abramovic.
Image courtesy of
Sean Kelly Gallery,
New York
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tbe floor, tbere is a bicycle in the back left, and the performance
is framed by a clotbes rack on one side and a dresser on tbe otber.
Abramovic's Dragon Heads is reenacted in front of a somewbat disorderly bookcase, witb sketcbbook drawings and a picture of a cat
tacked up on one wall. Borsato sits in a ctisbioned, 1970s living
room cbair, wearing wbite flip-flops tbat matcb tbe icy snow surroimding ber seat. Public Lunch is reenacted in a kitcben, not in a
cage, witb a fridge on tbe artist's left and a sbelf to her right holding
dry goods.
In all three segments, Borsato's small, plump cat plays the
role of the wild animal used in the original performance. Tbe artist
states that one of ber goals was to "propose a critical complication to the artists' ideas about nature and our relationsbips to (or
distinctions from) animals." Tbe cat as domestic animal literally
domesticates tbe risk implied by tbe animals used in tbe original
performance: Beuys's and Abramovic's works carried a degree of
real danger for tbe performers, a danger spoofed and rendered
comical in Borsato's video. Tbis, in combination witb tbe cat's total
lack of awareness of its participation in tbe video, is tbe piece's
major source of bumor. Simultaneously, tbe cat's demonstrable
affection for Borsato gives tbe work a subtly moving quality. In the
Beuys-inspired piece, it refuses to be berded with tbe cane, preferring instead to snuggle, a desire to wbicb tbe artist ultimately gives
in. In the Sherk work, it is totally uninterested in the steak presented
for its consumption and instead jumps on the table from which
Borsato is eating ber genteel luncb. In tbe Abramovic reenactment,
tbe pussy lies on its back on Borsato's naked tbigbsrigbt in front
of tbe artist's pussylicking itself contentedly.
Abramovic has recently started calling berself the "grandmother of performance art," and indeed, Borsato's performance,
one tbat redoes vintage Abramovic and also emulates the older
artist's own turn toward reperformance, would seem to give credence to this claim. However, Abramovic's claim to occupy tbis
role in performance bistory is a complex and power-loaded one. I
would argue tbat Borsato's Three Performances inberits as mucb from
Sprinkle, the (still sexy) grandmother of feminist porn, as it does
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In Borsato's Three Performances, the cat constitutes an important nonhuman bodily presence whose performance forms almost
a greater point of interest in the video than does the artist's own.
In the reenactment of Abramovic's Dragon Heads, the video image
fuses the cat, which lies on Borsato's naked lap, into a sort of assemblage with the artist's body The video makes Borsato and the cat
seem less like individual actors interacting in an enclosed space, as
in the Beuys and Sherk reenactments, and more like a single body
that performs as one. Borsato has stated that in the Abramovic
reenactment, the cat "licks herself ttnconsciously in a perversely
erotic context."''"
This poses the question, what exactly is so erotic here? Is it
just that this reenactment involves nudity and the others do not?
Was the Abramovic work inherently more erotic than the other two
to begin with? I aigue that what is erotic in this perfortnance is the
becoming-masturbatory of experiencing performance documentation. As stated above, in this work Borsato reenacts Abramovic
twice, both redoing Dragon Heads and employing a mode of reenactment similar to Seven Easy Pieces. But her performance might also
be read as a teenacttnent of Sprinkle's Public Cervix Announcement,
in which Sprinkle uses a speculum to open her cervix to viewing by
audience members. I return to Jones and to her comments about
the importance of this performance for Sprinkle's depiction of her
own subjectivity: "While Sprinkle can't illustrate herself as a full
subject of pleasure and desire, she can situate herself in relation
to us in such a way as to reclaim her own 'look' (the gaze of her
ctmt), if only momentarily, from the voyeuristic relation. Sprinkle's
performance of self poitits to the always already mediated nature
of embodied subjectivity as well as the sexual pleasure that gives
this subjectivity 'life.' "'"
Sprinkle explicitly eroticizes technological mediation of the
reception of erotic performance. Her momentary reclaiming of
the "look" of her cunt, a reclaiming in which she stages the voyeuristic relation in which she is viewed, is the result of an embrace
of her body's technologized relation to the generalized viewer as
an empowering relation. In Three Performances, the cat becomes
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Notes
2.
3.
4.
88 . Camera Obscura
of the power of acting, for the body and the mind alike." Gilles
Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philo.sofjhy, trans. Robert Hurley (San
Franci.sco: City Lights Books, 1988), 49. For Deleuze's more
extensive analysis of affect in Spinoza, see Deleuze, Expressionism
in Philo.sophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (Brooklyn, NY: Zone
Books, 1990), particularly chap. 14, "What Can a Body Do?"
5.
6.
Eugenie Brinkema, "The Title Does Not Ask, but Demands That
You Make a Choice: On the Otherwise Films of Bruce Labruce,"
CnYicMTO 48, no. i (2006): 99.
7.
8.
9.
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external signs of the inner states triggered by it." Erika FischerLichte, "Performance Art: Experiencing Liminality," in Marina
Abramovic, Seven Easy Pieces (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2007),
34. For Fischer-Lichte, Abramovic's performance of the 1970s
explicitly severed affect from emotion or experience, categories
that are often conflated. The goal was to produce an affective
change in the body and display that body in its altered state, not
to probe the artist's subjective experience.
16. yimxv MiVAVCioVxc, Seven Easy Pieces, 15.
17. See feminist performance theorist Peggy Phelan's classic
articulation of performance's "ontology of disappearance"
in "The Ontology of Performance: Representation without
Reproduction," in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Vxtnaon:
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29. For detailed discussions of Davis's work, and the way in which
it intervenes in politics of embodiment and identity, see
Jos Esteban Muoz, Disidentifications: Queers ofGolor and the
Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999), and Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics
ofDesire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
30. Diane Borsato, "Three Performances (after Joseph Beuys,
Marina Ahramovic, and Bonnie Sherk)," dianeborsato.net/
projects/three-performances-after-joseph-beuys-marina
-abramovic-and-bonnie-sherk/ (accessed April 2011).
31. Jones, "'Presence' in Absentia," 16.
32.
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