the ’sham

A short post simply containing two vignettes: I fill in Tully on the nature of the jelly-wrestling-gone-wrong (which he had missed); I hang out with Vanessa.

It’s funny to look at these posts one year on. Both these people I met during my residency, and both of them I now number among my best friends.

Tully, if you recall, had participated in the hot debate surrounding the male/female chauvinist gaze and the jelly wrestling shermozzle. Despite being heavily involved in the build up to that event, “for some reason he didn’t make it to the Jelly Wrestling on Wednesday night”. Of course, with hindsight, I know that this is no anomaly. Tully is like that. He’ll show up or not, irrespective of how much excitement was generated in the planning and plotting. This moment on the blog simply captured my very first impression of that Tully phenomenon.

Vanessa, too, I now realise, laid her essence out for us blog readers very early on. In this episode, we sit and discuss our relationships with our parents, and she shows me a book about maps. In these maps, geographical locations are overlaid with emotional metaphors. A river, in a map of the path to hell, has a creek running off it, leading nowhere in particular. It’s called the tributary of sloth.

A map is a powerful tool. It has the potential to influence how we encounter a territory, how we anticipate what the place will be like, the routes we choose to reach our destination. It enables us to do something that we could never do: be simultaneously on the ground, and in the air.

But Vanessa and I used maps in quite different ways. When I did my border walks, I used a map to guide my absurd plottings of the limits of the ’sham. My project was fairly literal (”find the edges”) and it allowed chance occurrances to take place and be incorporated.

Vanessa, on the other hand, (in a project she designed during my residency) took a small portion of Parramatta Road and invested it with great meaning, imagining what it might have been like 30 years ago. She used a map clipped from a local paper in 1976 as her stimulus, and then let her mind run with it. Her imagination - and her words - were powerful enough such that, when we actually went on a tour to the shopfronts she had written about, we were able to “map” onto them different lives, in a different time.

Listen to the podcast here.

Read the original post here.

Following the first expedition to the jelly wrasslin’, Lisa was keen to get a posse of chicks along to stack the gender balance of the audience and thus shift slightly the atmosphere of the event. This episode, recorded with Lisa in my kitchen, reflects upon our failure to achieve that. Some other things transpired, and as it turns out, they were entirely related to the gender balance within the audience. You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out exactly what went on…

Thinking about this event now as a kind of performance, the first thing that comes to mind is the relationship between this audience and “performance art audiences” which we’re used to. One event took place in the back room of a pub, the other generally happens in a gallery. One had a charged (and, for some, erotic) atmosphere of danger to which performance art often aspires. Or if not danger, a kind of “present-ness” - a feeling like we’re not just going through the motions - something is happening live, here right now, and we don’t know how it might end.

At least at a superficial level of appearances, the wrestling shares something in common with classic examples of performance art (think of, say, Schneeman’s Meat Joy): nudity, fluids, bodies writhing and folks surrounding the action watching it. I know, I know, totally different intentions with each work…but if I’m not wrong, Schneeman has had to deal with the eroticism inherent in her work right from the start - actually, it was a key part of it: can a woman be an erotic subject (and not simply an eroticised object)? She tackled this question (how successfully? how would we know?) back in the 1960s, using her own body:

Schneemann: For “Naked Action Lecture,” in 1968 I lectured from the stage of the ICA in London—on perception, the fractured planes of Cézanne landscape—while asking the audience, “Can a woman artist be a nude and an art historian? Can a woman painter be an art historian and a nude?” as I constantly dressed and undressed. I was naked under overalls filled with oranges, these I threw to the audience while dressing and undressing, projecting slides of my body art juxtaposed with Cézanne’s nudes.

And, of course, the jelly wrestling shares performance art’s key problem: how to document, analyse, and discuss exactly what went on “in the ring”. The comments section at the end of this blog entry is something of an attempt by folks who were there (and others who weren’t) to tease apart the ethics of the performer/audience relationship.

Listen in here. [13mb, 30 min, mp3]
Read the original posting here.

This morning a bunch of locals had breakfast down at the big brekkie. Lisa and I returned to my living room to record the jelly wrestling episode: the one where we finally worked up the courage to go see the jelly wrestling at the Oxford Tavern.

Listen in here [22 min, 10mb, mp3]
Read the original posting here.

Here we go again. That’s what I was thinking. Yet another trip to the Oxford for jelly wrestling. Could I bear it? I certainly wasn’t carrying with me the “fresh anticipation” I’d felt just two weeks ago: the curiosity of trying out something new, the concrete experience of seeing something for yourself which is so locally famous. To run through the whole routine again? The strippers doing the same set of yogic maneuvers? The traipsing back and forth between main bar and back room? The fake cheering for the fake contest between fake opponents, narrated by the fake MC? How to experience this anew?

This trip was organised by the Sydney Ladies Artists Club, following Lisa’s gender-conscious ponderings after our last visit. Her idea was to get a significant posse of ladies together - just enough to tilt the mood of the room and slightly shift the event. We had observed, from our previous expedition, that the five girls who came along with our group had a positive impact on the enjoyment of some of the performers. I think the performers felt a certain solidarity when they saw women out in the audience cheering them on.

As it turned out, last night the mood certainly did tilt, but not at all due to our “intervention”…
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A message from Lisa del Nord, for anyone who has been following the plans for another visit to the Oxford Tavern for Jelly Wrestling this Wednesday night…

She writes:

there will be a spot about this Sydney Ladies Artists Club/Bilateral Petersham excursion on community radio 2SER’s Overdrive program today, Monday the 8th of May around 4pm, with a special playing of interviews with the Sex Bomb jelly wrestlers from a radio documentary on the topic made by host Daz Chandler… tune on in!

For those outside Sydney, you can listen to 2ser online. To stream the radio through your internet, visit
http://www.2ser.com/radio2ser/stream

The following is lifted from the SLAC (Sydney Ladies Artists Club) website. For those of you who missed last week’s Jelly Wrestling Extravaganza, we offer you a second chance!

The idea, cooked up by Lisa, was to try and get as many ladies into the pub as possible. We reckon this will change the entire dynamic of the event. It’s a valiant demonstration of the power of audience participation! So keep next Wednesday night in yer diary, ladies! (Of course, men welcome too…)

It’s wet, it’s wild, it’s the contentious gender spectacle of live jelly wrestling!

SLAC joins forces with Bilateral Petersham for a second round of soft-porn sightseeing at the infamous Oxford Tavern. Soak up the view (& flying jelly) from front row in the back room. Enjoy strip shows between rounds by consummate performers with truly impressive command of their hamstrings. But best of all, be there as we collectively effect a subtle intervention in the event dynamics and displace the primacy of the heterosexual male gaze… we’re going to stack the joint with Sydney Ladies, Artists or otherwise!

where: The Oxford Tavern, corner New Canterbury Rd & Crystal St Petersham
when: Wednesday 10th May 9pm
$7 door charge

bring your lady friends!

[NB: the following blog post has been rated M: for Mature Audiences. It contains Nudity, Gambling, and...Adult Themes.]

Go on. Admit it. You’ve been past there dozens of times. You’ve joked about it. You’ve used it as a landmark when giving directions between Leichhardt and Marrickville. You’ve admired the neon signs. You’ve “always wanted” to go in - to see what Jelly Wrestling at the Oxford is all about. But you just never quite got around to it, did you?

Well, last night, a brave contingent of locals and ring-ins alike finally breached the threshold of Petersham’s Oxford Tavern.

To be fair, some of us had been to the Oxford before. But on that occasion, the pub’s front room was closed off, and we perched uncomfortably in “Rita’s Late Nite Lounge” between the pokies and the door, feeling rather cheated (but also mildly relieved) at how tame the whole thing had turned out to be. The full Oxford Experience was yet to come.
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This Wednesday night is Jelly Wrestlin’ night at the famous Oxford Tavern. The action starts at 9pm. We will be there. Feel free to come along! If you like, join Jim and Shimada and me* at the Portuguese Tapas Bar on Audley St for some “throwdowns”** and a snack, from 7pm, before the Jelly slinging begins! Send me an email if you need further info…

*grammatical correction [thanks to camperdowner. Previously, this sentence read “…join Jim and Shimada and I…” Essentially, what I mean to say here is “join us for a drink” therefore the pronoun should be “me” not “I” (I wouldn’t say “join I for a drink”, would I?!)

**”throwdowns” - the small bottles of beer they serve at the tapas bar and gloria’s. It’s good, cos they stay cold.