Honey's Dead: Surface Tension

Audrey Baldwin at CoCA, August 11-29

Audrey Baldwin poured honey over her naked self in front of an audience of a hundred people. Before anything else, the sheer courage of the action has to be recognised. It took nerve and control to walk naked through that whited space, to sit before that mirror, with one's back to the crowd and to do and to suffer as natural persons. For it was being seen by the audience that made the act interesting, made it a performance invested with meaning. Without the audience, Baldwin was merely being a bit odd, and really rather wasteful of good food; with the audience, it was different.

This sort of work is rather hard to understand, in the simple sense. Clearly, there were a series of references to art: to Velázquez's Venus at her Mirror, to Beuys and his fat and felts. There were a series of references to theory: to Laura Mulvey's work on voyeurism, to Judith Butler's notions of the performativity of gender. Kristeva and Abramovic seemed to peer out from the mirror. Indeed, the mirror was a very nice part of the iconography, suggesting feminity and self-absorption, providing both a symbol of the seemingly private action we are watching, while also letting Baldwin return our gaze. There is no doubt an over-theorised paper to be written on Voyeurism in the Performances of Audrey Baldwin, with references to Lacan and the subject/object division and the social construction of gender.

But at the same time, such readings collapse when faced with the fact that they function as reductionist devices which take the discomfort and tension of the moment of alienation and turn it into a series of theses about the nature of voyeurism about Lacanian theory and the nature of the mirror scopophilia gastrophilia and about the creative tension of the Fall. But no matter how opaque the prose gets, no matter how many references to daft European philosophers and repetitive English playwrights and repetitive English singers run through this, no matter how much repetion and pretension intrudes,the fraught atmosphere can not be reproduced, and the attempt to do is merely wasting time.

For at the core of Baldwin's performance was the relationship between the performer and the audience, which is not something that I can write down. She took a group of people and divided them very precisely, affixed a gulf between herself and the audience, and then told us to look into that abyss. It was very well done, with skill and verve, and sadly, it was a skill that can't be written down.

Audrey Baldwin is very talented. If you get a chance to see her perform, you should take it. Part of her talent is her versatility; she is equally at home with grand machines like Never Have I Ever -- or this piece -- and with what I suppose you could call smaller works like Sweet. I personally preferred the quiet intimism of Sweet to the larger works, but Baldwin's ability to use the performance as a medium is unquestionable, no matter what she is doing with it.