Interior View of Library: Visitors never saw this as they were not allowed to view within; their options were to speak or listen at the exterior.

Library for (the land of fuck)
as performed at CCS Bard/ Hessel Museum
May 1-22, 2011
Project website: doublesession.net

Construction headed by Matt Bua, and assisted by Athena Kokoronis and Natasha Marie Lorenz. Built with cast offs from locally felled and milled trees, the materials have been incorporated into structures at this contemporary land art site, b-Home studio.

You will enter the library next to the library. There will only be room for you alone to sit. Once seated: slide on the headphones. The librarian will address you. She is behind the wall. She will ask you what you are seeking within the holdings. She will give you options. You will choose and listen. She will stay behind the wall. You will stay seated. Listening, you will notice others walking into the museum and its adjoining library. They can see you as well. Rain may blow in a little or sunlight will fall; as the front wall and door is a blanket made of felted wool and it is lifted up when the library is open.

All of the libraries holdings (songs and texts) are preoccupied with how utopia and dystopia are in a headlock. One citizen's utopia is another's dystopia. The Land of Fuck operates like a lever...what starts as a fuck can end fucked.

Above we see a page from the index of "The Third Reich of Dreaming." Journalist Charlotte Beradt gathered Germans nocturnal dreams from 1933 to 1939. The desires of the regime structured its citizens' dreaming; the future as imagined by the Third Reich surfaces there. Drafted into sleep, the regime's utopia was others' dystopia. A visitor to the library will hear these dreams amongst other holdings.

They could be read. They could be sung.

You drank liquid from a plastic orange jug.

You raised it up over your head and poured it into your mouth without touching the spout.

One of you poured it in your hand and slurped it from the palm.

One of you dripped it down your shirt.

You were not visible to the woman behind the wall but the people walking into the museum watched you drink.

You were informed: the elixir would affect your body.

You were told that you would be contacted in the future and the results would be revealed.

You were not told how it would alter your internal physiology but it was indicated that you might feel that the result was somehow related to your own notions of Hell or Heaven, Distopia or Utopia.

It was hard to say, without knowing you, whether you would feel that this intervention was ideal or invasive.

This image was wheat-pasted directly to an interior wall within the legitimate institution (CCS/ Hessel), in this case the museum, and destroyed with cessation of show. The visitor recognizes the wood pictured, realizing that a performer is within the illegitimate structure on the lawn; they still cannot identify the body within.

Sometimes there is a sensation of a swelling army of female performance artists: is it a naked, visible army or something more akin to the ghost women marching the hills in the final scene of Von Triers' Anti-Christ? (Later we shall have to determine whether that is sensation or a fact. Are there really that many and are they real?)

This time, the female performer's body is invisible, and in this instance something is to be gained by denying a sight-line to the woman performer. Once, Vito Acconci lay under the floor of the gallery (Seedbed) masturbating. His visual absence was central. Santiago Sierra (Person Remunerated for a Period of 360 Consecutive Hours) 'paid a low-income worker his usual wage to live behind a brick wall' constructed within the museum gallery; 'food and drink was passed through a narrow slit' at the base of the wall. The disappearance of a body is the work. But the disappeared male body is not swappable for a female form. Many female performance artists eschew invisibility because female disappearance is depressing: sex-selection that results in a global deficit (surpassing a million) of women; over 700 femicidos of maquiladoras in Juarez since 1993; 14 out of 250 countries in the world are headed by women, and 1% of the world's assets are in the hands of women. A reversal of medium, or say, a libratory erasure of the female is a complicated endeavor.

Susan Mogul (Take Off, 1974) 'covers' Vito Acconci's fatuous Undertone (1972) (both performers agog in voyeurism and gender). I sloppily 'cover' Duchamp's Etant Donnes/Being Given (1946-1966), a work that is simultaneously holy and unholy, flashing between kooky and gorgeous, as well dumb and keen. In my cover, peepholes are swapped for earphones. A silent but visible female figure that hovers between post-coital and post-mortem is exchanged for a hidden living-breathing woman. A door becomes a wall. Lantern is played by headphones; a poor man's waterfall is the human voice. But what of the mannequin's hairless, off-kilter vagina (off-centered and malformed)? I fail to attend to this weird wound.

In Library for the Land of Fuck, denying the female body to the viewer is not simply because the title was in excess, but more importantly, because It was curious to what could be constructed outside of the viewer and performers' initial physical assignation and attraction/repulsion. Instead, to aim for a clean, clear relation without sexual negotiation. The participant sat at the walled exterior front of the Library, donned headphones, and spoke into the microphone. Together, the performer and participant determined what would be read and understood. It was not clean.

Several participants confessed that the interaction was 'sexy;' the visual absence of the female body enabled the participant to reconstruct it into an idealized version that surpassed the performer's real charms. I had not foreseen that excerpts from the writings of Theresa Cha Hak-gyeong and Franz Kafka (amongst others) would become another's phone sex. Visual objectification was severed from the gaze and yet intact.

I had planned to call back each participant in a month: "Hi, I'm calling from the Library for The Land of Fuck...no, it's named after a phrase coined by Henry Miller. We talked through the wall last spring. Please don't hang up. You drank the elixir beside your seat, remember? I'm calling to let you know what you drank and why you drank it. I'm calling to let you know what you listened to."

But once I understood that the female body may not be able to strategically disappear in the manner that a whitened male body can and does, the closeness of the phone call seemed difficult to bare.