“Traumatic Encounter Forever!” originated chiefly out of two literal and theatrical works that I passionately identify with and, at the same time, mock. One is the Comte de Lautreamont’s farcical text concerning a lonely hermaphrodite, dreaming of her fulfillment of love in her sleep. The other, a Japanese traditional puppet play “Double Suicide,” in which lovers, entangled with various social constrictions, seek death as a refuge.
Both the text and play examine how one associates fulfillment of love with annihilation of the conscious self: sleep and death. Georges Bataille observes that lovers’ ultimate desire is to transform their discontinuous beings into one continuous being, which is an impossibility that leads to self-annihilation.
Originating from lovers’ absurd longing to eradicate their own discontinuous beings, “Traumatic Encounter Forever!” examines our passionate aspirations expressed in the conjunction of aesthetics, politics and religion. Why do we aim for transcendence or sublimation through art? Why do we believe that art could bring social change? Why do we think that art should affect society?
“Traumatic Encounter Forever!” does not offer answers to those questions, but rather examines the symbolic structure that generates such questions. The revealed is the construction of western subjectivity, deranged from the perspective of a racial and sexual other.
The entrance to the performance/ installation space is blocked by a makeshift wall. The tv screen plays a looped video, in which a scene of a tennis player’s solitary practice develops into a strange conversation between Ocean and Chorus that both prohibit and encourage the audience to enter the inner space. Audience must crawl in order to enter.
The solitary practice of Tennis Player against wall, which exhibits a quality similar to durational performance, is disrupted by the tennis ball, which goes astray over the wall. The scene shifts to the found-footage of Japanese animation, which shows a boy going through the wall, helped by a cat. The video culminates in a dialog between Ocean and Chorus.
The audience coming into the performance/installation space through a tunnel.
Wounded artist lies and slowly rotates on dismembered body of Bambi. Angel mourns over the site of double suicide. Audience is encouraged to crochet the threads that come out of Bambi's wounds. Angel is performed by Chloë Bass, and Wounded Artist by Kikuko Tanaka.
While a live-chicken wander across the space, a cook with a chicken mask offers chicken BBQ and sake to the audience. It reflects my interpretation of relational aesthetic "food serving performance" that has practiced for a few decades as a contemporary secularized Eucharist.
His genital levels with the chicken meat on the BBQ grill, and reminds of castration. Idea of castration, Eucharist and Bacchic festivity merge here.
Creature and Rabbit. They wander across the installation and ask donation from audience, holding a picket with an absurd phrase "Donate today and help the troubled artists! You can make a difference!!!" Creature, derived from Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, is a utopic nightmare of dismembered bodies assembled together: the oppressed's longing to be one collective body of the Sovereign.
Lovers’ ultimate desire is to transform their discontinuous beings into one continuous being, which is an impossibility that leads to self-annihilation. Community thrives on a public sharing of such desire for a sense of continuity, which manifest itself as “double suicide.” Welcome to our community: Castration Paradise! We are spectators and performers of "the spectacle of pain."
This fountain is used as a part of the installation or by itself. It corresponds to the ending of the performance, which is trigger by the museum announcement that warns of museum flood and urges audience to evacuate.
After the museum announcement, in the middle of audience's evacuation, the sound of water rises and culminates in the demise of "the Crystal Palace."
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"Traumatic Encounter Forever!" is created by generous participation and collaboration of many other artists and general audience. The bellow is the list of the participants.
Wounded Artist: Kikuko Tanaka
Angel: Chloë Bass
Chicken Cook: Raymond Fun
Tragic Photographer: Masaki Hori (SUNY Old Westbury) Eric Heist (Vox Populi)
Creature: TJ Hospodar
Charitable Rabbit: 0h10 M1ke
Officer: Phillip Gulley
Photograpic Documentation: tasha dremus (Vox Populi)
Videograph: Sonia Ostrovsky Wainer, Hiroshi Shafer