Photo: Kelly Campbell
Back when I was a babydyke and still in the "everything queer is automatically awesome" stage, I bought my then-girlfriend a copy of Holly Hughes' Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler, which is a collection of the lesbian performance artist's early work. Other than that I enjoyed it, all I remember is thinking that The Well of Horniness was one of the best play titles I'd ever heard; most of the draw of the book in general came from its titles, really. "Clit?" I thought. "Count me in!"
But it turns out that Holly Hughes is quite the esteemed performance artist, not just somebody who throws around words like "horniness" in order to draw in the dirty-minded. And this year she's been a visiting professor at Northwestern University, where she performed a solo piece this past Friday (along with solo performances from two of her students). The performance, titled "A Sapphic Sampler," was a one-night-only short show benefiting local LGBT theater group About Face Theatre.
Mugsie Pike started the show off with a piece about her relationship to a very specific part of her body: her boobs. Less than a minute into her show she was topless, red target signs painted onto her breasts, and two volunteers from the audience were sticking relevant magazine clippings to her mammaries. Pike took the audience through a journey that centered on her early and spectacular breast development:
"I loved my boobs! I named them Brian and Justin because I wanted them to be together forever!"and the way people reacted to her breasts through these events. Pike, a budding lingerie designer, has to deal with these issues perhaps more than most, and in a world where women's relationships to their breasts could be seen as conquered territory--artistically speaking, anyway--she made some apt observations. Have you ever noticed how many Hallmark birthday cards focus on the downfall of aging breasts? "Panic! Saggy tits!"
Pike was followed by Spencer Gartner who used a banana to illustrate detailed instructions on how to pee standing up. After the near nudity the audience had already seen that evening, I almost expected a real phallic sighting when the performer reached into his pants, but it turns out that sometimes a banana is just a banana.
Main event Holly Hughes started off her part of the evening by comparing said banana to Carolyn Schneemann's infamous interior scroll, but she quickly got down to business. Hughes was one of the NEA Four, a group of artists who were awarded funding from the National Endowment for the Arts in the early 90's and then had their funding removed due to the "obscene" subject matter that their artwork centered around, in Hughes' case specifically sexuality. ("Holly Hughes is a lesbian and her work is very strongly of that genre," she intoned sonorously, mocking the words that had been thrown her way during the debacle.) In her performance piece, Preaching to the Perverted, Hughes deconstructed her trip to the Supreme Court for the NEA Four hearing and placed it in a larger political and personal context, laughing (sometimes bitterly) all the time.
Early on, Hughes referred to the Supreme Court as "avant garde environmental theater," comparing the noise of people entering the Court and trying not to speak to "the sound of someone speed walking in cheap pantyhose" and bitching about how hard it was for her to get tickets to her own hearing, and that quickly revealed itself as one of the central themes of the piece. Her presentation of it certainly resembles one (if a rather dark example of the genre), from Justice Ginsberg, who declared during Hughes' hearing that "We don't deal with abstracts" (like, um, the law?) to a scene where a beanie baby falls out of her purse onto the conveyor belt in security and she imagines everybody in the room thinking that she uses it to lure in and fondle Girl Scouts' badges because she's a perverted lesbian.
Where is the line between performance and reality, and how do we recognize those differences? The piece ended on a somber note, with Hughes and her masculine-appearing girlfriend making out at a luau in a swanky Polynesian-themed hotel and being read as a straight couple by the other straight people around them. "You can only see what you want to see," Hughes said. The push to control public representations of self is central to Hughes' performance. If we have to buy tickets to watch the Supreme Court deliberate on the meaning of obscenity, is that any less of a performance? Gender might be a drag but so is the Supreme Court. It is to be hoped that Holly Hughes will keep showing us these fault lines for a long time to come, exploring, as she termed it, "the space between the rules and the desire to break them."
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