Hugh OâDonnellâs has been creating installation, video and performance works since receiving his MFA in Fine Art from the University of Ulster. His performance practice is informed by drawing, found and made objects. Often of an auto-personal nature, OâDonnellâs work is material-based and conceptual, and is concerned with notions of gender and sexuality. Hugh OâDonnell is based in Belfast, N. Ireland and his performance work has been exhibited in Ireland and internationally in Switzerland, Serbia, Romania and Quebec City. Currently he works with Bbeyond, a Belfast based performance organization established to preserve and promote performance art exchanges within Ireland/N. Ireland and abroad. This will be Hughâs first performance in Toronto.
The choice to reference Northern Ireland in the works presented in Toronto seems indicative of the suspended effects of trauma. Or perhaps being out of one’s familiar surroundings has allowed these artists a different perspective on their normative environment. Ex-patriot artists are faced with this distancing effect over long periods of time as themes of cultural divergence often become preoccupations in their practice. Perhaps, when an artist uses their body as the medium, this distancing effect has an added dimension; even if the artist does not intend to consciously examine their material (the body) in its original context, it is inevitable that it reacts differently to new surroundings or, conversely, that its usual modes of being will be more noticeable out of its comfortable element.
As a spectator of this work, in this space framed by the window, I felt like a performer for the other spectators â those serendipitous and accidental â who were passing by the gallery window. Theorist Vivian Sobchack, although she deals primarily with cinematic performance, describes this conflict between the self, as it is lived by the subject, and self as imagined as an object, in phenomenological terms. â[…] insofar as we subjectively live both our bodies and our images each not only informs the other, but they also become significantly confusedâ (36). This negotiation becomes complicated when the body is expected to abide by rigid societal behavioural expectations, such as gender roles. Judith Butler has examined this conflict, concluding that gender is always performatively expressed based on binary gender constructions. She uses drag to indicate this thesis, âIn imitating gender drag implicitly reveals the intimate structure of gender itself â as well as its contingencyâ (187). She concludes that an original archetype of this imitation does not exist; gender exists in a paradox as an semblance without origins.
This negotiation between body identification and image is central to Hugh O’Donnell’s past work (he is known for playing with cross-dressing alter egos) and his performance at TGF that night, entitled Invert Two (previously titled Being Gay in the GAA, short for Gaelic Athletic Association) is no exception. Starting its life as improvised work created in 2008 and performed in various manifestations, it is an examination of his struggle to maintain a facade of heterocentric masculinity in a traditional and highly religious community. Specifically, it is an expression of Hugh’s childhood and adolescent struggle to align himself with the expectations of his father by conforming to the hyper-masculine sports hero archetype. The soundtrack of the work, a loop of Hugh’s voice done in one take, evokes white-picket-fence suburbia. âMe me me mmememememe. Vagina vagina vagina. I love short hair. Suited and booted. Cut the grass, cut the grass, cut the grass…â Hugh’s droning voice at first is comical, but, with repetition, takes on a rather sinister tone. When asked about it he explains the impetus of creation as motivated by childhood memories, âI thought I was mentally ill. I thought if I said [vagina] enough I would start liking vaginas.â The hair and grass-cutting statements are directly related to his father; âcut the grassâ was his way of saying âdo the things you’re supposed to.â He makes little separation between the audio and the other materials he uses (including his own body) saying, âI don’t see the audio as a separate thing, it’s just another material, just as the painted man boob is.â
Hugh’s piece was presented in the back gallery of TFG and as the audience enters this darker and more private space we are confronted by this audio soundscape and the smell of burning liver. Hugh is seated on a chair, legs splayed, with a metallic gold women’s purse over his head. He is wearing black athletic clothing and black boots. On the front of his T-shirt is the acronym N.A.R.T.H (National Association of Research Therapy for Homosexuals) and on the back of the T-shirt is the acronym P.A.T.H (Positive Alternative Treatments for Homosexuals). There are props placed in the space; several electric frying pans containing liver, a pair of cleats, blue paint, a tin of sugar, a chair and a bucket of water. He considers these materials ingredients in his performance, to mix, remix and match as he pleases. Several of these objects have metaphoric meaning for Hugh and are not necessarily apparent to the audience (for instance, in the UK and Ireland a cut piece of fried liver is known as a faggot).
After removing the purse from his head and seeing the audience for the first time there is frenzied energy as he busies around with his âprops,â putting on one cleated shoe and pouring sugar on the floor, delineating a line between where the audience has chosen to stand against the walls and leaning on the stairs in the space. He writes two words, as large as he can, with blue paint on the gallery walls; first âinvertâ and second âstoic.â The former he says was borrowed from Freud’s descriptions of homosexuals and is a word he imagines being used in a derogatory manner. âStoic,â is written because in Hugh’s words âI’m not being stoic.â He cuts a hole in his shirt, exposing a blue-painted breast. He pours milk from a paint tin over his exposed breast, then angrily smashes the remaining milk against the wall, trapping the milk inside the center of the O in stoic, making an allusion between his own body and the drawn âbreastâ on the wall. There is also a nod to Freud in this gesture; it seems a rejection of the normative family. His deportment throughout the work is hyper-masculine, he staggers around with wide strides as if on a soccer field; however, he also appears to be emotionally and physically drained by this âperformance.â
In the climax of the work Hugh pours a circle of salt around himself, separating himself from his viewers. He spins in a circle, faster and faster, frantically, until he is too disoriented stand. He staggers around the space running into some audience members who help him regain his composure. Pulling down his pants we see his has also painted a blue stripe down his ass. The work concludes sadistically, with Hugh demolishing a chair against the concrete wall. Collaged over the word âstoic,â this violent act is a further metaphor for his break from the traditional family, as outlined by Freud. The domestic illusion of normality has been physically shattered, but it still leaves its mark on the psyche. Plunging his head into a pail of water, as if drowning himself repeatedly. It seems like a self-inflicted initiation ritual. The memory of this masculine physicality expected by the GAA will never be totally expunged from his body.
The audience leaves with the smell of burnt meat clinging to our clothing. In his interview Hugh describes this as part of the performance, saying that it’s a reminder that the queer community is here to stay. He says, âWe are everywhere. We are in your face.â The lingering aroma is analogous to the persistence of geographical violence to impact the people who live in its vicinity. Even though the O’Donnell’s were not specifically subject to extreme violence growing up in Dublin in the 70s and 80s, the reverberations still remain (Belfast was the site of several of the most violent conflicts in Northern Ireland, particularly in the 70s). Performance artist Sandra Johnston, who performed at the Toronto Free Gallery in September 2009 often works directly at sites of trauma. Interestingly, in her Toronto show she found herself less influenced by the space and more by personal emotion (her grandmother had recently passed). One could interpret this shift for Johnston as another indication that the body, out of its normative context becomes a focus; the trauma of the space, in this case, became a preoccupation with the distress held in the body.
I was left wondering how it is possible for an individual to vanquish trauma. Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917), discusses how mourning the loss of an individual is similar to how we collectively assimilate grief. He asks us how can a larger group of citizens, in which its members do not necessarily know each other but have ethnic or religious commonalities, become a community susceptible to perennial mourning? And, when and why does normal grieving become prolonged mourning? The individual, while mourning the loss of a loved one, will often attempt to make the characteristics of them our own. This could include certain personality quirks, figures of speech, mannerisms, or even the physical objects that the deceased owned. To extend this question of purging, how does the collective body expunge grief? Sociologist Paul Connerton suggests that monuments are devices that assist collective memory acting in lieu of the personal objects of the individual (How Societies Remember, 1989). Performance artists like Johnston have addressed this question by creating ephemeral monuments through their work in these sites of trauma. In her Toronto performance, her work which was usually concerned with collective experiences of spaces, became preoccupied with mourning the loss of her grandmother. Her physical movement could be considered an inhabitation of the deceased’s mannerisms.
In the case of Hugh’s work, when the subject matter is traumatic, the body represents a medium through which catharsis occurs, ritualistically channelling trauma â certainly for individual freedom â but also possibly as a collective reaction. Hugh, who uses many found objects in his work, selected objects to represent his alienation and dis-identification with hetero-normative society. Although he is not mourning the death of an individual, one could say he is mourning the death of an image, a way-of-being. These words, describing Freud’s analysis in Mourning and Melancholia seem to correspond to Hugh’s relationship to this work.
Accordingly, the love and hate (ambivalence) that originally connected the mourner to the lost person or thing now turns the mourner’s self-representation into a battlefield. The mourner now feels the struggle between love and hate within the the self-representation that assimilated the ambivalently related mental representation of the lost item through a total identification with it. This results in depression, which has its own typical physical symptoms […] When hate towards the assimilated mental representation of the lost object becomes dominant, some mourner may even attempt to kill themselves (suicide) in order to ‘kill’ the assimilated mental representation. (Volkan 95-6)
The self-flagellation through drowning, near the end of Hugh’s performance is indicative of this very desire to kill the representation of Hugh’s ideal image, the heroic athlete his father would have liked him to be, an image that was never a reality. The physicalization of this âdeathâ is a metaphor for the mental process of letting go, which is how the performance is cathartic for Hugh and possibly the audience by extension. Perhaps performance, as ritual, has the power to dispel that which we wish to exorcise from our individual body and collective psyches. Maybe living in a healthy society is synonymous with having a healthy body.
Works Cited:
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. 1917. Trans. Shawn Whiteside. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Sobchack, Vivian. âScary Women: Cinema, Surgery and Special Effectsâ Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.
Volkan, Vamik D. âNot Letting Go: From Individual Perennial Mourners to Societies with Entitlement Ideologiesâ On Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia.’ Ed. Bokanowski, Thierry, Leticia Glocer Fiorini and Ethel Spector Person. London: Karnac, 2007.
FADO Performance Art Centre urges you not to miss this evening of new performance works from two of N. Irelandâs new generation of performance artists, Hugh OâDonnell and Sinead OâDonnell, in an evening we are calling Spotlight on Belfast.
This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?
