I presented a paper at the Postgraduate Conference at NCAD
in September 2006. This is the text:

A live art autobiograph

I want to look at the performance of identity with the aim of communicating self, intimacy and personal experience in connection with audiences.
I will make a series of autobiographical performance works – works that enact my life
I want to examine how performance can create new forms of relationship (between selves/subjectivities and community) and links between discourses.
I will use cultural theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis and feminism as tools to explain and elaborate contemporary constructions of selfhood, community and performance.

Life folds back upon itself
I was here at 20, 20 years later I am here, 20 years later I will come back
Each 20 years is a mirror to the next
Each event the inverse of its mirror twin

I am my mother's mother's daughter's daughter
I am my mothers daughters daughters mother

I speak a self that is all selves
But only if there is a relation that involves a form of being with the other ,a reciprocipal recognition as Irigaray writes… we 'come to presence through a capacity for entering intro relation' (85) (88 way of love)
I can speak a self to all selves only if I give myself away
Surrender the self to you in a dual dispossession
I don’t want to own it anymore, in some form of self-custody

Identity as Event
This event is the experience of the other, of becoming the other
I am pre-event tranself, we are all transidentity
We repeatedly transmutate our bodies into the other
I can be a virgin again after childbirth
I can be a 17 year old boy on Bebo
A new face is transplanted onto a living scull in Cork

We don’t enact roles anymore, or project identities, we become them totally, perfectly
Desperate for authenticity in a world of appearances
We translate ourselves
From one language into another



Identity is unfixed, a refugee between boundary transgressions
Is there a vertigo in our culture
A falling into the void of plural identity – too many ways of being too many choices
The emptiness of a society drunk with the wealth of having everything and being nothing
In Saturdays Irish Times, a young victim of attempted suicide speaks about why her generation are so much at risk
'there's a certain social pressure to be successful on every level. People are disorientated about where they belong and don't know their identities. Friends and lifestyle are important but you need to feel part of something, but if you are in any way 'different' its hard to fit in. Its more than loneliness…'

There is a need for reflection on being and what our connection to others means.
Anathema to us who enact fast and serial relationships
We need reflection into self
Into our own archives of lived experience
The actions of being, its outcomes, its failures balancing its pleasures



"The whole body
The whole being is a theatre"
(Helene Cixoux)

"The root of artistic practice lies in subjectivity"
(Nicolas Bourriaud)

The purpose of this writing - elucidate subjectivity, its expression and representation within the expanded area of live art practice.
My aim is to explore contemporary ideas of selfhood, presence and performance of the subject, making new declarations of self available both through this theoretical writing and also through practical performances I make for this project.
The ultimate aim of this work is to generate new forms of relationship between subjectivities.

Experience and enactment
In life, we live experience, we do not represent it. In art we represent experience but in live performance art we live it too; the representation becomes a modelling of life and a matrix of potentialities arise from that modelling
The value of this intercourse is to give life a vital observation-post; art functions as a distancing device, allowing for non attached involvement. Another benefit to our understanding of life (as presented, modelled through art) is to open up its range of expression into the fullest of what it is to be, to exist and what social being is, or can be. In this interchange, art receives the richness and immediacy of raw life, lived experience not a parody or a pretension of life.

My purpose in constructing this project, this seeking to open up one life as content, as a surgery of form and framing, is the hope it relates to all lives within principles of authenticity (many types of truth) and integrity (multiple parts of self) and with the ultimate aim of creating new forms of relativity (out of subjectivity and intersubjectivity).
This work is created to seduce and make sacrifice (as Mieke Bel believes is the 'most theoretically interesting form of speech act'

As Hannah Arendt writes:
Human community
Openness to others
The precondition of humanity is
Truly human dialogue
It differs from mere talk or even discussion
In that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and what he says

Self as a Question
I will introduce two of the areas of theory I am submerged in at the moment:

Zigmunt Baumann, the Polish sociologist writes about the 'privatization of self' as it is expressed in postmodern culture.
In his writings he shows how culture is full of expert promises of how to live a life free from ambivalence but where multiple ways of being are bought and sold. Products supply surety, constancy, security. We secure our individual existences with private insurance (not public health care) private cars (not public transport). In conversation with Milena Yakimora, published on Eurozine website 2002,
He defines the times we live in via modernity;
"From the start, modernity deprived the web of human relationships of its past holding force; "disembedded" and set loose, humans were expected to seek new beds and dig themselves in them using their own hands and spades, even if they chose to remain in the bed in which they germinated "
He defines our conditions now in postmodernity as highly uncertain and insecure,
we can never prove ourselves as the winning posts are always changing,
we can never rest on our status or possessions as everything (including our roles and positions) immediately becomes obsolescent and is transitory.
There is the "ever more evident frailty of social bonds and the progressive individualization of life challenges".

Bauman reveals the postmodern world to be one of a multiplicity of potentialities for being and the drive to privatization/individualization is only one choice among many ways we can order our lives.

He shows the ambivalence of our culture by the observation that where once we had answers (in modernity, in my father's time where there were clear moral paths, the 'cold war' and Dr. Spock's strict prescriptions for family health) now we have questions. This is both the enigma of our times and the hope for new conceptions of identity and self.

Bauman shows there is a postmodern indifference to identity construction (once a modernist's project, the building of the self, the 'self-made man') that identities are lost and found at a whim. He employs the metaphor of liquidity to express the condition of being and society now, he explains
""liquid" makes salient the brittleness, breakability, ad-hoc modality of inter-human bonds." In modernism, we tried to make things solid and stable – now all is in flux.
Self and relations to others have no foundation, but this may be liberational.
He thinks these forms of (open ended, ambiguous) self understanding provide opportunities for new answers to emerge from questions which seem impossible to engage with now such as issues of genetic engineering, cloning, artificial fertilisation technologies or the future trajectories of radical terrorism.

Another area of theory I really like is Queer - which in the 1980's issued from Judith Butler's thinking about gender and her revelation of the limiting assumption in our culture that sex and gender should somehow be aligned. Queer theory ran with her concepts and moved into the realms of desire, emotional passions and the self constituting elements of identification that Butler overlooked in her critique.[3] Arising out of her thinking on gender, sexual orientation became a signal for change in understandings of identity because it stood in opposition to the mainstream heterosexual. By contrasting it, homosexuality exposed the apparatus of being orientated.
Orientation means facing one way, it implies there is another way we are not looking.

The rise of gay liberation in the late twentieth century promoted a distinct sense of personal sexual identity, equal but different, often using the theorisation and rhetoric of feminism.
The idea that different identities can co-exist at the most intimate and primal level of sexuality in the individual, helped allow difference to be acceptable in other manifestations of identity, especially marginal ones such as disabled, class or cast identities.
The idea and image of Queer rejects the division between normal and otherness, it is pluralistic, multidimensional and open ended, inclusive of all potentials for difference.

Queer asks the question can the self not do without identity categories – like gender - altogether?
Moving between categories, inventing new ones at will, becoming the other are options in our culture. Sex change or gender corrective surgery (as though one gender can ever be correct in a Queer ontology) has enabled theory into practice.
The plural identity culture has become manifest at the level of body organs, structure and fluid chemical networks.
We can be multiple, but like polygamy, it is hard to have everything at the same time, a serial identity multiplicity has become our wish, our expectation.

Plastic surgery has become an essential tool in the cosmetic kit required to attain an acceptable standard of appearance and being (both interchangeable according to Baudrilliard) alongside the ability to 'transform'.

Becoming Another Self

A very current response to the postmodern, decentered, split self (who nevertheless craves a unity, an order) is the attraction for 'trans' identities – transsexual, transvestite, transnational as Ariel Levy, American social scientist shows in the realm of gender as identity construct, we see a huge rise in the numbers seeking sex change operations (the growth area in US plastic surgery, for example 'top surgery' is now customary for New York and San Francisco butch/boi lesbians). There is a trend in Queer cultures for being 'pre-op transexual'; individuals claim this identity to gain extra success in professions such as prostitution. On a recent trip to central London, I picked an ample selection of various 'pre-op transexual' call-girl/boy advertising fliers off the street.

Is it better to be a self between selves – in transit – moving between boundaries, transgressing boundaries. We wish to move from one way of being to another, perhaps exposing the ambiguity of selves that drive us to literalise ambivalence.
The image of the ambiguous being is seen to be desirable, being between genders is somehow fascinating and seductive, it is a question waiting for an answer.

This shifting across boundaries is a liberating state, one freed from the rules, the conditions of one side or the other.
But we know identity is very contingent, the girl I spoke of earlier wants to belong, to know who she is and is disorientated…we know who we are in relation to another, we orientate ourselves in an environment where there are landmarks, in a society where there are relationships.

It seems to me new types of relationship are needed to mirror new ways of being and this invention (through live art and performance) is what I hope to achieve in my project.