Title: Raging Balls

Curator: Xi Yu

Date: June 12th – July 12th, 2010

Opening: 3-6 pm, June 12th, 2010 Live interactive performance

Artists: Oreet Ashery

Raging Balls asks how should artists and audiences deal with politics, increased state control and real life, as insiders and outsiders, and how we are experiencing rage today.

Ashery started to think about Raging Balls after she witnessed three policemen using unnecessary force against a person who had nothing on him, as part of a ‘Stop and Search’ procedures. Influenced by Giorgio Agamben’s influential work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Raging Balls is about being a biological body, as opposed to a body with rights, outside the law. Palestinians under the Israeli occupation, are a good example of the homo Sacer, they are controlled by the state, yet, there are no laws to protect them, or even consider them citizens.

Raging Balls talks about the complex relationships between increased global state control and security apparatuses, and the illusion that art can somehow protect us from this. In a schizophrenic manner Raging Balls also talks about the art world’s obsession with reality, war and conflicts. Political art comes under scrutiny in an ambiguous manner.

Raging Balls asks how should artists deal with politics and real life as insiders and outsiders.

Extracts from the Essay

Every Alter Ego has a Different Memory

by Stephen Wilson

Extracts from the same name Essay

Published by the Live Art Development Agency, in Ashery’s monograph Dancing with Men, 2009

In adopting the use of alter egos, fictional characters and various biographies, Oreet Ashery constantly reminds us how the very existence of multiple selves is a liberator of difference. Yet Ashery’s individualism triumphs over the varied representations of meaning attached to her characters. Her interactive performances and other works, over the last ten years demonstrate a predilection for characters that are both standardised within community settings as well as being unorthodox. Throughout this period, she has been cultivating a viewer’s perception of the probable function and use of an alter ego as one of the underlying premises of her practice. She rather conspicuously creates a global view of anti-social misfits who are in fact a creative bunch,1and even more majestic is that they somehow represent authentic lives with or without the authoritarian consent of art and life.

…

2.

When encountering Ashery’s Angry Drum, one’s first reaction is to wonder what the drum is angry about. Apart from its exquisite little face drawn by Ashery, the drum, has an outer ring – chequered in red and white paper and glued to a frame – that includes the words “Made in Syria” typed to a scuffed sticker. Drums are the subject or the object of continual battering – no wonder this one is angry. Knowing Ashery’s political concerns, one can safely assume a metaphoric link (and especially after 9/11) to Western perceptions of the Arab world. Moving away from the Syrian reference, it is not possible to discern a specific gender to the drum, neither can it hear anything, as it has no ears, drawn or other wise. This leaves one guessing as to how anger might be represented. What is sure is that anger is readily represented and the viewer is compelled to partake in the burden of the drum’s responsibilities.

The Angry Drum is no more than a prop that sits - for the most part – on a wall in Ashery’s home, and yet occasionally it is used for the purposes of art. I am personally fascinated by its angry and grumpy face. When gazing into its flatly drawn features (done by way of a permanent marker), one becomes engaged with a steadfast but vacuous stare whereby the inanimate nature of the drum (and the silence attached to this exchange) invites a troublesome query into the nature of personal commitment to the project of anger or indeed to any other forms of identification. The anger seems to subside into an abstraction to the point that it is no longer clear what the anger is alluding to. While looking into the penetrating eyes there exists moments where you forget that this is an angry object of contention. In many senses the drum is not angry at all, but pulls the viewer cleverly into the speculation of anger that is ultimately charged with assumptions; assumptions which any viewer will admit to but rarely face. Whether cultural, personal, or political, Ashery’s work is highly engaged with these concerns and how we locate them. At times it appears that its engagement is so consuming, so active, that the balance between what is understood as an art practice is under constant scrutiny. It is not new to occupy diluted yet inclusive forms of socio-political narratives, and register co-existent thematic ties while at the same time exert feelings of resentment. The Angry Drum appears as a beautiful portrait, even if it does centre on a misleading face; a gender-less being; a figure who will not listen; something tells us that it is right to be angry.

3.

Raging Balls, comprises a performance and a video, and importantly employs the audience as active participants. This culminates in a type of anti-social experiment. The work is created in part as homage to the posthumous artist David Wojnarowicz and his performance diatribe on the mismanaging of the American government’s policies regarding the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. As Ashery writes about the performance, ‘…set amidst the speech are the live interactive limits of audience/performer-instructed exchange and participation, deeming the event an experiment.’ Ashery is inspired by the potent handling of anger, loss, illness and pain in Wojnarowicz’s frustrated tirades, but in the process, and many steps removed, discovers that perhaps, nearly 30 years on, the subject of anger and rage is not as readily available to her in such a raw form. However, she is determined to find her contemporary version. As Sylvère Lotringer adds in an interview with Wojnarowicz, ‘Rage is a terrible thing to waste.’

Raging Balls presents a deliberation between Ashery and the masculine overtones of Wojnarowicz; principally Ashery’s position – from a female perspective – suggests that the notion of anger is potentially more devastating and suggestive than the act of anger itself. Raging Balls does not pretend to show anger or fictionalise it through a character (unlike Ashery’s other works), but instead reverses the imaginary process by using the face, voice and presence of a male, Chris McCormack - who appears in the video and during the performance – to convey Ashery’s speech. Wojnarowicz was an artist and activist, as well as a writer and performer; his work combined photo-montage, paint and mixed media that often referred to the material sufferings of the poor through science fiction, news and environmental decay. Like Ashery, he combined diverse strands of art and politics using means of expression that often stemmed from associations of conflict, depravation and loss.

The speech in Raging Balls, which is delivered by McCormack in monotone epitaphs, readily obliterates its very own inquiry. The inquiry appears to be searching for meaning in a “stop and search” kind of process. The video work, which can be considered as divided into two parts, portrays the image of the actor’s face projected on a large screen. A band of light illuminates the centre of his face – however the framing is slightly off-centre so that the left side of the face is a fraction more in shadow.