Zanna Markillie

Recently I staged a performance piece called Lineage of Making (2016) in The Roland Levinsky Building at University (see image above and below and video documentary on the film page). It was a development from a previous performance The Nature of Sustaining. I placed two sculptures of life-size women’s legs near one another and used them as platforms to make clay coil pots from. I sat behind the sculpture legs to make the pots and invited the public to also sit behind the legs, to either roll a coil of clay to add to the pot I was in the process of making, or to make their own. I wanted to use performance as a site of social exchange, as both an opportunity to connect with the public and confront them with social taboos.

The ‘taboo’ in my performance was the fact that the vaginas were visible on the sculptures of the women’s legs – this is potentially confronting for people. But by inviting the public to participate in the performance I am asking them to make physical contact with the sculpture legs and by this I’m constructing them as accomplices. This is similar to how Ana Mendieta constructed her audience as witness in Rape Scene (1973). Like Coco Fusco in The Postponed Event (2000), I wanted to give ‘material’ to this social exchange. She wrote letters of which the audience could take; I invited the public to roll a coil of clay to add to a pot. I felt that this gave substance and a reference point to the connection between the public and myself as artist.

Two of Fusco’s ‘encounter performances’ - Two Undiscovered Amer-Indians Visit the West (1992) and Mexarcane International (1994-95) were particularly interesting to me.  These pieces toured America and Europe and were presented in public spaces such as universities, museums and shopping malls. In them Fusco uses her body to explore the ‘function and agency of cultural representation and social inscription’ (Vercoe, p,231). I love how these performances interrupt people going about their everyday lives. I feel that because the audience are essentially unprepared to view the work their reaction would be less filtered, and more spontaneous. I want to explore this type of interaction and participation with the public and bring art into public spaces. This desire motivated me to take my performance into a public space at university. Like Fusco, I want to explore and critique the social realm through performance and participation and to confront the public with an alternative legacy. 

By placing myself behind the sculptures of female legs I aim to interrupt the ‘male gaze’ in the same way that I feel Mendieta does in her piece Untitled (Body Tracks) (1982).  Laura Mulvey, a British feminist film theorist, introduced the concept of ‘male gaze’ during the second wave of feminism to describe the gender power asymmetry in film. Virginia Woolf also writes of the gender imbalance in the arts and the society in which she lived in her extended essay, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). Both writers wrote of the invisible apparatus of the patriarchal system, of which I want to expose or disrupt in my performance. The reason why Untitled (Body Tracks) (1982) is such an empowering and striking piece to me is because I feel Mendieta completely inhabits her gesture as a woman; she is the author and maker. By placing myself next to the sculpture replica of my legs I strive to reclaim my feminine form and reassert the feminine as maker and creator over and above a represented sexual object.

The artistts that I researched during this series of performances are: Ana Mendieta, Coco Fusco, Tania Bruguera, Carolee Schneeman, Pipilotti Rist, and Andrea Fraser.