Patrick Staff works with film, installation, dance, and performance to investigate dissent, labor, and the queer body. In this conversation with Sara Cluggish, co-director of FD13 residency for the arts in Minneapolis/St Paul, Staff discusses their most recent film, Weed Killer (2017), the early stages of new performance Bathing (Drunkenness) (2018, to be performed March 1, 2018 at FD13), and the tension between internal and external experiences of the body.
Based in London and Los Angeles, Patrick Staff’s work has been exhibited internationally. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2016); Spike Island, Bristol, UK; and Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK (2015.) Staff’s work was included in the British Art Show 8, and they received the Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Art in 2015.
Sara Cluggish (SC)
What is the starting point for your most recent film Weed Killer?
Patrick Staff (PS)
Weed Killer began with Catherine Lord’s memoir The Summer of Her Baldness (2004). The book is an account of Catherine’s experience of breast cancer, radiation, and chemotherapy, and the resulting effects on her body and relationships. In the video, I use a section of the book that reflects upon this chemically induced devastation of the body. The work explores the intersection of gender, illness, and contamination, as well as the meeting of my own biography with another person’s. It ultimately becomes a reflection on what it means to survive on one’s own terms.
SC
I love the phrasing “to survive on one’s own terms.” I think of survival as being born out of necessity and circumstance beyond the realms of personal control.
PS
I use this phrase with some trepidation. I hope for the work to trouble the usual, neoliberal demands of enthusiasm and optimism that we attach to narratives of self-determination. I thought a lot when making Weed Killer about the proximities to violence, illness, and exclusion that our means to self-determination can entail.
SC
Can you speak further about the intersection of your voice or biography and Catherine’s?
PS
I was initially taken by Catherine’s descriptions of the semiotic transformations her body underwent throughout cancer treatment. It resonated with how I have thought about the semiotics of my own trans body. In some ways these are tenuous connections, but my hope is that our subjectivities begin to unravel one another, rather than enact the usual processes of empowerment associated with work on identity.
SC
Watching Weed Killer again recently, I was especially struck by the emphasis on skin and surface within the first few minutes of the opening monologue. Debra Soshoux, the actress who recites the words you have pulled from Lord’s book, speaks lyrically of “finely crafted metallic skins,” dosage being calculated by skin area, of “the envelope of the skin,” and sensations of skin burning and cracking. At the same time, you have chosen to utilize a thermal imaging technique that allows one to see heat radiating below the surface of the skin.
PS
I’m glad you noticed this. In the second half of the work, when artist and performer Jamie Crewe is singing in a nightclub, she also wears a chainmail-like metallic mesh over the top of her dress which connects back to these lines. It was definitely a conscious choice to repeatedly invoke skin in the ways you describe while also troubling the surface of the image itself. I wanted to draw the viewer’s attention to the dichotomy that I think we all experience of an inner and outer self. This is where the thermal images become critical to the work.
SC
What is thermal imaging typically used for?
PS
These cameras are most commonly used with medical and engineering professions. They use heat sensors to identify inflammation, tumors, and breakages to bones, or they can pinpoint the specific area where a machine malfunctions. Most of us associate thermal images with surveillance and warfare. I wanted to leave all of these associations open to the person viewing the work. It can produce a sense of unease but paradoxically is also quite beautiful, giving complex life to the surface of the skin and possibly the literal surface of the image. It draws our attention to how alive and active this skin is, the membrane that separates our outer and inner worlds. I am interested in trying to evoke this aliveness and porousness in the literal surface of the image.
SC
The tension between the inner and outer self, or inner and outer worlds, also exists in Leslie Thornton’s short film Strange Space (1993) which will be screened alongside Weed Killer on February 22 in the Walker’s Bentson Mediatheque. Can you give a short introduction to the work in your own words?
PS
Strange Space is a collaboration of sorts between Thornton and Ron Vawter, an actor largely known as a member of the Wooster Group. The video alternates between the voiceover of a doctor assessing Vawter, portraits of Vawter himself and imagery of astronauts on the moon. After the doctor speaks and sounds of medical machinery drift into the background, the soundtrack primarily focuses on Ron’s voice. He reads a poem by German writer Rainer Maria Rilke, speaking of the strangeness of “no longer living on Earth” and the permanent anxiety of being “inside a broken toy.” This is connected to Vawter no longer feeling in control of his body following his diagnosis of HIV.
SC
Why did you choose this piece from among 300 titles available in the Ruben/Bentson collection?
PS
I was not so aware of Strange Space before making Weed Killer, but it feels like a natural precursor. I was particularly struck by the experience of watching it now, knowing of the context it was made in and considering its meaning amidst the aids crisis. I think Weed Killer also deals with the ambiguities of collaboration, a dichotomy between the inner and outer self, and the social dislocation that can occur as a result of illness. I wanted to be able to focus in on the relationship between the two works, so it felt natural to play them as a double bill rather than add in further titles from the Walker’s moving image collection.
SC
While in residence with FD13 here in Minneapolis, you are developing a new performance, Bathing (Drunkenness) (2018), your first work choreographed and performed for a live audience in five years—although that is a bit misleading as your films often incorporate lush choreographic sequences. Can you speak about the ways in which this new performance grows conceptually from Weed Killer?
PS
The new performance comes from a desire to continue exploring ideas of contamination. I want to really explore how contamination, intoxication, and pollution can happen within a work—an image is dirtied, language polluted, materials are transformed—but can also become a reciprocal, dirtying process between work and viewer. This has been a subtext of other pieces I have made, such as an artist book which accompanied my film The Foundation (2015), where the pages all had dirty fingerprints on them. I wanted there to be a subtle sense of porousness in Weed Killer between the audience and viewer, and I hope to push this further.
SC
Can you describe what will take place during the performance of Bathing (Drunkeness), keeping in mind that the work is still being developed?
PS
It is a solo for one dancer with a shallow pan or basin of water. The performer will be moving both in and out of this shallow pool. In some ways it is a movement study into washing, drinking, drunkenness, and transformation. The dance works I make are generally minimal and postmodern in style, often misappropriating structures from theatre and classic choreography. In Bathing (Drunkeness), I will be combining these contemporary references with current research into the classical figure of the bather, the drunken revelry of bacchanalia, and spiritello figures, which are the little pissing cherubs generally seen on fountains. It is useful to be able to use the residency to pull on strands of research in a project. I have also been watching YouTube videos of drunken partying. I am interested in the intoxicated individual as a particularly queer figure, and the potential pleasure within being fucked-up. Anne Pollock’s essay “Queering Endocrine Disruption,” on question of queer environmental toxicity, is an important influence too.
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