Performative installations by Jay Younger
Scene One. There was a terrible mechanical din, a clanging of chains and a scrapping of surfaces. Everything creaked as if it were about to break at the seams. A cacophony of
1960s' style 'duchesses' (dressing tables) hung from the ceiling on swinging chains.
They had been coated in magenta glitter to recreate the jewels of a girlie childhood. The top right hand drawers were filled with black ink and a fountain mechanism ensured that the liquid spurted upwards.
Black, glitter-coated books were suspended above the fountains so that the fluid slowly erased the text. The artist explained:
The underlying premise here is the immense mystery of bodily knowledge and experience and how the power of mystery is at times destroyed by analysis. The pools of black ink in each drawer represent the intangible, fluid, unformed, intuitive and unspoken power of bodily experience and knowledge.
Like old drag queens in pantomimes and B-grade night clubs the duchesses and their contents sang offkey, threatening at every moment to tip their excess into the audience's space. A precarious balance had been created between material object (the bedroom furniture) and the fluid it contained. The liquid literally held the objects in balance.
The excessive bodily fluid that seeps between clean sheets, the secret secretions of the boudoir, opened the visceral spaces of the private-unclean onto the public space of the museum and its audience. The dark fluid spurting from the objects as the uncontainable, hysteric 'other', permeated the materiality of the space. Like the unconscious soiling the stable objectivity of the conscious mind, the blood-like fluid spilled onto the concrete floor of the art gallery which was strewn with electrical wires.
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