Jill Orr’s Ritual Performances
On the borders of our own dwelling, thresholds will prepare a meeting with the other: thresholds on the horizon of a world allowing us to leave it and to welcome the other, thresholds also on the border of oneself, if it is possible to distinguish between the two.1
Sharing the World is one of those utopian texts that have become popular in the light of the hope propagated by philosophers of new materialism. Of course, Luce Irigaray is not really a new materialist, she rose to fame as a radical [feminist] psychoanalyst in the heyday of post structuralism and post modernism, but her work has survived the negative reaction against the cultural turn and the theoretical overload that many associate with that period. For a new generation of feminists she is compelling because of her work on sexual difference, but Sharing the World reads more like a secular parable about how to care for each other—woman, man, child / self, same, other. It talks about the abyss between us, and the difficulty of bridging the divide, crossing the boundaries, and borders that we create, inherit and maintain.
The practice of ritual-like performance art has explored some of these relations over several decades. Although ritual is conventionally used to mark social rites of passage, in the hands of artists it has a broader spectrum. Some women artists who have explored female experience through the body, or alternative histories, stories and practices associated with the roles of women in society, have used ritualistic actions since the 1970s.
In Australia Jill Orr established her place as a pioneering body artist with a suite of work produced in 1979, including Bleeding Trees... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline