Geoffrey Schmidt, The Atrocity Exhibition¹

by Robert Lort

"The performance explores the inner and outer landscapes. The character is schizophrenic, his landscape is splintered and magnified. His ambiguous personas pursue their fetish existence, magnification of human surface, sexual fulfilment through metal objects penetrating, encasing or touching soft flesh. Objectifying and isolating body parts to medical terms and purely functional commodities. Measurement, manipulation and study of body postures as answers to psychological questions. Science as Pornography."²

Geoffrey Schmidt enters the stage and stands behind a semi-opaque screen. He is wearing black leather S&M trousers, on his head is a revolving helmet. Behind him, on the wall above his head appears a large computer animated image of a blue head revolving against a blue sky. To the left and right of this central image are slides unfurling fetishistic and perverse imagery. Further to the left and right of the slide images are two video monitors which depict close-up images through a screen which Geoffrey is behind. Like voyeurs our eyes penetrate eagerly through the screen. A soundscape of freeway noise, birds and machine noise pervades the entire performance.

The performance develops as Geoffrey begins to moves his fingers over his back. He pulls and caresses at his skin, centring on the edges of the tattooed spine on his back, loosening the skin as though the skin might eventually separate from his inner flesh, as though the tattooed spine might pull out and release his body in some way, disentangling it from its organic configuration. He progress by attaching long black feathers to the soft flesh on the underside of his arms and evoking a common S&M practice he attaches lines of pegs to himself which pinch the skin of his chest. Seemingly demonstrating his completed shamanic becoming or alterification, he outstretches his arms/wings. He then detaches the pegs and feathers from his body and transfers them to the helmet. The performance itself, in the context of its schizophrenic allusions, tends to evoke what Deleuze and Guattari delineate as a process of becoming, in this case, a becoming-bird. The schizo-transformation is quite evident in the way the pegs become plumage in the final chimerical form.

The performance probes the myriad of sexualities present in The Atrocity Exhibition, a book by J.G. Ballard. The performance specifically probes the way that sex exists in the "inbetween", mediated through a third but distant component, plugged into depths of alterity and surface/depth-becomings. The way that the characters sexual desires for each other become intensified and stimulated, by way of their partners contiguous sexual liaisons. How their desires do not exist in binary isolation, but are intricately connected to vast external networks of criss-crossing and mutating desire. Where each desire becomes fragmented and displaced as it is infused in and between other desires. The intensification of desire is fulfilled through the alterification and subjective becomings of the partners. In Crash, it is emphasised in the way that Catherine pursues a sexual fantasy of Vaughan, via an imagined homosexual encounter between her lover and Vaughan. It traverses the inbetween, where her lover is becoming Vaughan, as much as she is becoming her lover. And similarly how Catherine's lesbian fantasy with her secretary Karen, becomes inserted into the sexual relation between her and her male lover. It is the enigma and perversity of the situation that inspires them.

Geoffrey Schmidt's performance points to the way that the schizo-body becomes a surface. This surface is punctured and penetrated, bruised, pierced, concealed and marked with tattoos. It is a surface which is nolonger invalidated against the overriding significance of the principal sexual orifice. These surfaces are allowed to desegregate and merge into one another; surfaces of motorways, chromium auto-surfaces, surfaces of human bodies. By conceptually demolishing the surface of the skin, by pulling it apart and puncturing it like a metal vessel, the schizo manages to blur the segregation between what is internal to the self and what is external. The surfaces can then merge and fold in on one another; self and non-self, biological and technological, viscera and motorway. A Deleuze/Guattarian Body without Organs is produced, a body that consists of nothing but depth.

As Ballard points out in The Atrocity Exhibition, in the face of AIDS desire becomes ineluctably entwined with death, which has the effect of displacing sexuality amongst new loci. Sexuality increasingly becomes conceptual and displaced into a detached perversity. When genital penetration becomes life threatening, desire is forced offcourse into ulterior spaces. Desire when it breaks with it's genital fixation, it becomes heterogeneous. "...it's an interesting question - in what way is intercourse per vagina more stimulating than with this ashtray, say, or with the angle between two walls?"³ In accordance with this, the organs are abandoned, and desire is compelled to extend, stretch and delve into new intensities. It is the schizo sexuality that abandons monomorphous sexual desire (ie desire constrained to a single sense, a single desire and a single outcome) to encounter a realm of polymorphous sexual desire (ie desire that functions as an assemblage of surfaces, as zones of depth and intensity, eliciting innumerable outcomes and movements of becoming). Monomorphous sexuality is characteristically linear, in this instance, desire repeatedly follows a normative and defined sequence of events and spatial encounters, functioning according to pre-defined stages and levels of intensification. A polymorphous sexuality is by contrast directly engaged in and productive of a non-linearity, that engages directly with movements of duration and spatiality, employing these elements as variable and heterogeneous components of the intensification. The schizo's production of a multiplical sexuality, engages a poly-perversity that continually strives to encounter and produce different feelings, different events, arrangements and outcomes and the unending evolution of its complexification and sophistication. It is a sexuality of transitoriness, that emerges in complex and proliferating impulsions and segmentations.

Geoffrey Schmidt's performance is also directly impregnated with processes of becoming and mechanisms of subjectification. These are processes involving the transformation of "self" - Deleuze and Guattari have described these as becoming woman, becoming child, becoming animal and so forth. These processes of subjectification are adjoined and not dissimilar to those associated with perverse sexual acts, where participants adopt set personifications. For Geoffrey, as it is for the characters in The Atrocity Exhibition, these processes produce a splintering of the "self", a facelessness, a subjectivity that functions by displacement, intensification, forgetting of self and abstract fetishization. The heterogeneity of these processes are however constantly threatened by oedipal impasses, which coerce them into becoming formulaic and fixated, imbued by oedipal identifications, phallo-centric fixations, reduced of their plurality through a retracting into dominance and submission dualisms. There is always the danger that these negative effects can take hold and jeopardise things, plugging the flows and potentially reterritorializing the vivaciousness of the engagement.

Imaginary sex organs that sprout up anywhere, a visceral cut-up of flesh, interchangeable features that flicker and heave amidst moving mirrors, frenzied excrescences that flourish in surface cracks, clattering noise and electronic murmurs, organs having neither continuity of function nor conformity of positions and subject-relations, a changeling surface, dynamically transforming structure and re-configuring enhancements in swift machinic fluctuations, instantaneous modification and non-stop adjustment. Desires bursting and coming apart, projecting, swelling, congealing, coalescing and unfolding.

When the body nolonger has a surface, as when the surface is penetrated, (physically and abstractly), the skin nolonger functions as partition between what is of the self and what is not, and the body becomes suddenly immersed in zones of depth and nearnessness, the body is intensified and no longer impermeable to the flows of desire, other bodies penetrate it, and it others, coexisting and merging with the foreign parts. Other bodies become incorporated in and fill our bodies, just as our bodies become dissociated and dispersed between others. A schizo sexuality brings forth a non-human sexuality pervaded by imaginary sexual perversions and the production of paradoxical sexual assemblages. Foucault envisions S/M as, "the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure... I think it's a kind of creation, a creative enterprise... These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations, and so on."⁴

Duchamp's, The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even/The Large Glass, is a complex and perplexly/perversely wonderful contraption, it demonstrates how Duchamp could envision sexuality in terms of networks of surfaces, volumes, movements, flows and assemblages. These desiring-machines elicit desires that traverse outside the dominant oedipal and patriarchal desires. They make possible the production of surfaces of intensity, of strange appendages and the synthesising of desires as yet, impossible and seemingly paradoxical.

Obsessions with modern violent death, recalls Vostell's 1958, Das Theatre is auf der Strasse II (The Theatre is in the Street II) where, the "sculpture is made by putting all the parts from an automobile accident onto the street or at a busy intersection and repeating this act, "with accident after accident until traffic is impossible"".⁵ By analogy, one could almost imagine multiplying vistas of fake sex acts, repeated one after another, until `real' sex is impossible.

In the schizo-terrains of The Atrocity Exhibition, (both Geoffrey Schmidt's and J.G. Ballard's) we are confronted with the production of amorphous, fluid, inchoate and indeterminate sexualities. Sexualities, where desire is not essentialised but actively produced through processes of experimentation, creativity and interconnection, rather than as something that "is", as an immutable individuated "truth," that is supposedly liberated and succumbed to. Desire is nolonger rigidly confined and repeatedly played out within a narrowly bounded territory, but immersed in its own becoming, as a perpetually evolving experimentation and augmentation, that nolonger separates the sexual from the asexual. It assembles desire where the outcome or conclusion is not known in advance. It is a fetishized assemblage, a multi-erogeneity that evokes a pre-sexual and non-human sexuality, that probes into the raw, fleshy and ontological depths.

Notes

1. The germination of this piece originally came from a review I wrote of Geoffrey Schmidt's The Atrocity Exhibition, a performance art event, performed at the Queensland Art Gallery on 27 and 28 th April 1996. My review, although initially accepted for publication, was unfortunately never published.

2. Artists statement by Geoffrey Schmidt

3. J.G. Ballard Re/Search The Atrocity Exhibition, San Francisco, 1990, p. 61

4. Foucault, "Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity," in Foucault Live, New York, Semiotext(e), 1996, p. 384

5. Schimmel, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979, MOCA Los Angeles, Thames and Hudson, 1998, p. 80.

Copyright © 1999 Robert Lort. All rights reserved

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