Separate
(1998)
With Kim Dawn.
Performance at Galerie Oboro, Montréal, May 1998 as part of Counterposes, curated by Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher.
Thursday May 7th, 5-8pm
Friday May 8th, 3-8pm
Saturday May 9th, 12-5pm
Text by Kim Dawn and Christof Migone.
Published in catalog of Counterposes, eds: Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher, Montréal: Oboro / Display Cult), 2002.
Scroll down for REVIEWS.
lights bare, ready to electrocute. lights fadein fadeout. lights breathe. break. she counted in her head, seconds, minutes. she watched the lights reflect in the milk bubbles. she watched the honey pour down his face, sicken, thick, gooey, shimmery. she worried about his eyes, offered her shit napkins to wipe his honey eyes. honeymilk. honeymitts. lights flickered. rose. fell. like them. fell. fell. fell. blackout. swimming in their shit. the sticky. motor for the homemade light dimmer motor hums slightly in the background.
weaklight, brighlight, weaklight… breathe into balloons. trembling in stillness. i have no age, no time, all the time in the world. sacred punishment time. it’s the only thing i know how to do. sound of plum meat flowing, diarrhetic. pile of plums turns inside out, turns vile and bile. swallow. choke. putrid. juice. spit. chew. snickers bars. stop looking at me. opening the skin’s surface pull apart the openings. peer. i don’t know if she’ll ever eat plums again. i am no longer hungry. famished. honey bucketful.
turning in from the inside out. either or none. all surface simultaneously. no openings left. all taken, plugged. dip head into. inside iam. enveloped. smell overwhelms. nauseates. pretty plum throwings upon his face. my vomit cools his steaming honey eyes. i am a slow moving still. a slow river moving still. am nowhere. i feel eyes on me, i can’t see. the honey stings my eyes. i become viscous and keep going into the bucket, can fit more and more of myself inside. head, hands, arms, elbows, shoulders. more plums more plums.
hold mouth closed with sticky fingertips. gag. try to stay present. we’re merging with our materials, flowleak, leaking bodies. our bodies are stains. bleached. broken. dripping. chewing. red up red down. redin redout. our body stains. honey condom. rationirrational. a still swallow persists. a slow fear leaks. separate. scared baby hands. scared baby mitts. we squish, we stick. children jerking off playing can’t keep their handsouttatheirpants. feeding off their own. disgust turning pleasurable then back againagain. fearcomfort. desirerepulsiondesire.
dissociation. blowing bubbles through a straw in milk. thick. clotted. spoiled. recite the abc’s in head. count to a thousandthousand. i’m gone. i’m there. saturation. chew. chew. chew. ouch. spit. spit. spit. save spit. precious vile. sexy deceptive honey. molasses. thicker. darker. sweeter. gag. chill running throughveins. sickness. breathe. rhythm. white. white. robbers. raccoons. she bubbles a bowl of milk for hours, we smoulder. we swell. we soak.
she’s in the world. where air becomes liquid. she’s lost it. looseconsciousness. blow. blow. blow. breath. sickening beautiful honey man. giving ourselves permission for. punishment. playing with our own shit. work mouth into spit. then buildup spit it into a longthinbottle. by now there are more fluids on us than inside us. the juice oozing from the pile of prune meat has seeped everywhere, it stains our white meat. bloody plums. clothes drenched.
damaged goods. goodwill pure. never pure. white is dirty. dirtiest. pretend pure. purity, only to announce its absence. it exists in loss, to announce its impossibility. honey decomposition. choke. nauseate. drowning in our own vomit. piss. saliva. menstrual blood. wipe tongue dry. perversion clinic. clinical perversion. present shit to audience on a silver tray. damagedgoods. ‘o sweet puppy. her tongue weapon. save spit. spoiling. going.
going. gone. the hospital has lots of jigsaw puzzles. it’s important to wash wash wash your hands. i have become viscous unspeakable. this screams louder than words. it pierces through with no need for language. it devours your intestines, colon, stomach and anus. you are no longer with organs or organic. you are about to leave disgusted, then you turn around, look again, and leave for good, this time with wound.
REVIEWS
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Art Action 1958 – 1998, ed. Richard Martel, Édition Intervention, 2001, 302-304. Review of Separate in “Three Modes of Canadian Performance in the Nineties” by Bruce Barber.
[…] During the late nineties East Coast artists Christof MIGONE and Kim DAWN collaborated to produce a number of complex, technically sophisticated, and frequently abject and/or haptic performances. Working mostly in Montreal, Halifax and now New York MIGONE has produced audio work for CD’s, live audio performances for radio transmission, as well as published theoretical essays and printed matter works. Kim DAWN has singly performed a number of simple but extraordinary works in Halifax and London (Ontario) and collaborated with MIGONE for a period of three years. In one performance in 1996 DAWN walked for several hours around the city of Halifax, dressed to kill in a tight fitting green skirt, high heels, flaming red hair, dragging and spanking her garden rake behind her on the pavement, enacting a kind of latter day Rake’s Progress.
In My Dirty Tongue, a work performed in November 1996 at The Palace at 4:00 a.m. an alternative space in London Ontario, DAWN engaged in several activities wearing a pink see-through nightie/house coat from the sixties. With eyes closed she crawled around a rectangular space filled with white sugar crystals (6 x 40 kg bags) outlining the space with pink crayon. And then sitting in the sugar she clipped the tops off plastic chocolate and honey bear containers releasing their contents on to the floor and several beige nylons stuffed with teabags. (endnote 16) DAWN writes stream of consciousness prose and considers her writing to be performative and (loosely) therapeutic: “through writing I attempt to unleash the knots in m traumatized body.” Echoing ARTAUD’s all writing is shit, she writes that for her “writing is a process of pleasurable defecation on the page.” (endnote 17)
One of MIGONE and DAWN’s most ambitious collaborations was staged as part of the CounterPoses performance programme curated by Jim DROBNIK and Jennifer FISHER for Oboro Gallery in Montreal. In this work titled Separate the artist used their bodies, buckets, pots of honey and stewed plums to engage the topics of sexuality and desire and the continuous relationships between purity and danger, pollution and taboo. A small self-published text documenting the event contains twelve photographs of the artists dressed in disposable white suites wearing panda eye-blacking, seated on a floor area covered with aluminum foil and lit by two casually hanging naked light bulbs. DAWN alternately gorged on and spit up stewed plums, while MIGONE doused himself with honey, immersing his head in a bucket of it and occasionally inflating a balloon/condom. The slow motion performance evoked the erotically charged atmosphere of David LYNCH’s Eraserhead or Guy MADDIN’s extraordinary film Tales of Gimli Hospital. The artists’ accompanying bookwork contains a stream of consciousness text that underlines some of their abject intentions:
lights bare, ready to electrocute, lights
fadein, fadeout,
blackout. they breathe, she
lost consciousness
from time to time. she started to hate
people watching her
disease. she counted in her head, se-
conds, minutes. she watched
the honey pour down his face, sticken
thick, gooey,
shimmery. she worried about his eyes,
offered her shit
napkins to wipe his honey eyes.
honeymilk. honeyman.
honeymitts. lights flickered
unpredictably. rose. fell. like
them. fell. fell. fell. swimming in their
shit. their sticky.
motor for the light dimmer hums slightly
in the background.
The rear cover of the book contains a quote, and abject reverie from the book Inner Experience by the renegade surrealist George BATAILLE.”I stick my tongue in the hole…there’s a piece of meat there, a blood clot getting larger, starting to protrude. I spit it out another follows. The clots have the consistency of snot, taste like food gone bad. They’re glugging up my mouth. I decide that by falling asleep I’ll get over my disgust, won’t be tempted to fuss with them or spit them out. I drift off and wake up at the end of an hour.” (endnote 18)
ENDNOTES:
16. Described to the author in a conversation.
17. Artist’s statement, 1998.
18. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, New York: SUNY Press, 1994.
•
Fuse (vol. 21 no.4, Fall 1998), review by Stephen Horne.
[…] Last in my trajectory, but by no means least, was the fabulously viscous performance of Kim Dawn and Christof Migone. Those feelings of revulsion that so mark our fears of becoming fluid are given a very precise embodiment in this provocative and rigorous work. Presented in a small dark room into which electric light intermittently flickered from an almost dysfunctional single overhead bulb, Separate could disturb Kristeva herself with its evocation of dangerous fluidity, of flows, pollution and loss of stability. while one participant immersed himself headfirst into a bucket of slime which could only have been honey, the hooded co-performer sat mutely, slowly carving round and round a book-shaped piece of material with a large knife. equally obsessive, this same performer peeled fruit, perhaps plums, sucking and drooling the viscous body of the fruits. In slow time, this performance entirely permeated the space and the bodies of anyone watching. Separation was impossible; the persistence with which it oozed through pores, under my/our skin was an entirely captivating argument for ‘intersubjectivity’ as a way of understanding the reciprocity of relations between maker and made, of self and other. In fact, McFarlane’s and Dawn/Migone’s works manifested what I take to be the primary relevance of the ‘Counterposes’ event, that is, to open a reconsideration of the banishment of performance because of its emphasis on artistic presence, on the body as subjectivity. […]
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Lola (No.3 Winter 1998), review by Jack Stanley.
[…] One of the more enigmatic works came from Kim Dawn and Christof Migone. Separate was a surreal ritual-like performance where the artists engaged in infantile activities, like sucking, chewing, spitting, and smearing food all over their bodies. They sat on a blanket in the center of a darkened room with honey, molasses, milk, and fruit spread out around them. Both wore white hooded costumes and black makeup around their eyes, which gave them a toy animal appearance. Even though they didn’t interact with the audience or with one another, there was an acute sense of intimacy between the two –an embodied sense of companionship. There was also something extremely sensuous about their gentle and deliberate action, which appeared both repulsive and comforting all at once. Adding to this sensory experience was the smell of rotting food that permeated the room, making me palpably aware of the inevitability of impermanence and change. […]
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Mix Magazine (vol.24.2 Fall 1998), review by Valérie Lamontagne.
[…] Visitors returning from a final back room are warning me, ” Don’t go in there, it’s disgusting.” I determinedly move on towards the room’s gleaming lights and enter a psychedelic picnic where my olfactory senses are immediately assaulted. Two raccoon-eyed humans are crouched on the floor in a debauched display of consumption. They are breaking every table manner and rule of etiquette – playing with their food, eating with their mouths open and spitting it out again. Their menu consists of chocolate bars, fruit, milk, and a large bucket of honey that one of the performers occasionally dunks his head in. Kim Dawn and Christof Migone’s Separate embraces the fissure between animal and human, food and feces, where the body’s exterior and interior boundaries spiral into one.[…]
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P-Form (No.46.2 Fall 1998), review by Aaron Pollard.
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Parachute (No. 92, octobre-novembre-décembre 1998), review by Johanne Lamoureux.
[…] Au terme de l’exposition, sont inscrit deux projects plus près des préoccupations inter-esthétiques des conservateurs. Womens’ Rites: Sifting de tarin chaplin et Separate de Kim Dawn et Christof Migone délaissent la problématique du regard et de l’interaction au profit de mises en situation du corps dans sa plus troublante organicité: le corps consommable (le corps enfariné chez chaplin, corps-pâte, corps-pain) et le corps consommant dans la prestation de Dawn et Migone annoncée, dès le haut de l’escalier, par un odorama de miel, de fruits germentés et de lait suri. Les performers y transgressent, dans une espèce d’autisme jubilatoire et oppressant, un des grands interdits de l’enfance : jouer avec la nourriture. […]