Performances

Project: CATCH THE RABBIT!
Date: September 27, 2005
Location: Museumsquartier, Vienna, during the opening of the exhibition "To Eat With Eyes/Desire and Weariness (Mit den Augen essen/Begehren und Überdruß)"

The performance was conceived as a game where the playful handling of ambiguous looks and physical attraction invites the visitor to change his/her role, thus responding to the exercise of revealing the banality of the sex industry. In daily life, although women are not dressed up like Playboy bunnies, they still have to deal with sexual harassment, depending on a set of social codes determining acceptable behaviour and deviant taste within a given society. A physical attack is not always necessary to be evidence of truly aggressive behaviour towards women. The aggressor’s real motives are often occulted upon direct confrontation. Yet women’s reactions are often ridiculed since the rules of the game of seduction tend to change in time and depending on different countries’ social habits. It is often difficult for woman to express their utter disgust about being chased after like animals, especially when it comes to explaining it to men using word, gestures, and looks.

During the performance, the degrading stereotyped female role of a Playboy bunny is corroded by the participation of men also dressed as bunnies. Refusing the clichéd role of an object of sexual desire - a bunny - while having to look like one is not easy to achieve.

At the entrance of the exhibition hall were instructions to the visitors to the performance:

Tonight you have this incredible possibility!

You are asked to touch the bunnies during the performance, even though it is against the general etiquette of the Playboy clubs.

If you fulfill your duty, you will receive a little present from the bunnies! Touching stickers are applicable everywhere.

Performance by Barbara Philipp In collaboration with Bahar Naghibi, Annette Tesarek, Igor Ivan, Birgit Beermann, Leopold Schuster, Erwin Riegler, Edith Heiss, Mariella Müller, Otto und Iris.

Ten bunnies (six women and four men) make their grand entrance to the sound of suggestive music. They form a circle to display themselves in the middle of the space and then mingle with the public until the music stops. The visitors are then asked to choose a bunny and to touch him/her. This is, of course, explicitly against the rules of the official Playboy clubs, where any physical contact with the girls is strictly forbidden. What the visitor ignores is that once he/she has touched a bunny, he/she has become one himself/herself. The haptic moment of the encounter with an “object of desire” consequently brings about the transformation of roles and, little by little, the visitors become involved in this catching game. The visitor receives bunny ears and can then be touched. Covetous looks towards the bunnies can also be refused. If the physical approach is gentle, the visitor receives a “caress button” which is applicable everywhere on the body where the visitor wishes to be touched.

At the end of the performance, most of the visitors are no longer paying attention to the performing bunnies since they have become bunnies themselves wearing bunny ears on their heads. The onlookers have gradually become the "looked upon."

Each person experiences what he/she makes the other endure. Since words are perhaps not always enough to understand someone else’s viewpoint, the visitor experiences it through imagined or concrete forms and by changing roles. On the outside the illusion of the "game" is maintained, but an inner shift may have occurred causing a new point of view.

"Man" and "woman" are merely social constructions, created along the biological difference of "male" and "female." But whereas these biological roles are fixed, social roles can evolve, and do. The realization of the performance through the public’s involvement and readiness to play is proof of a greater sensitivity to the unfairness with which social roles are presently distributed. It questions the perpetual necessity of turning women into objects by a male gaze.

spoonfeeding nr.1
Performance realized at Infact in Paris, France on November 9, 2003

In an empty room, five different bowls containing various dishes were placed on a table. Five performers with five different professions waited for visitors to arrive. Using small spoons, they started feeding the audience. Everyone could taste a spoonful of each dish, without knowing whether they were being fed by a priest, a journalist, a prostitute, a politician, or an artist.

The five participants were not selected for their physical appearance. Only the authenticity of their profession was deemed important so that the audience could not easily recognize them in their street clothes, nor from their specifically assigned dish. Only the contact and exchange between the spoon-feeders and the visitors could solve the mystery of their identity. Were people seduced by their appearance or by the taste of the food? How many compromises were made to satisfy impulses? How could one judge a person's views by being fed?

At first, a certain uneasiness might have arisen among the audience due to the paradoxical situation with which the performance confronted them: feeding someone and being fed are deeply intimate gestures, presupposing an existing relation of confidence between the two participating people, an act more likely to be found in the private sphere of a mother feeding her child, or of lovers feeding each other playfully. But in this case, feeding suddenly became an act performed in public, and moreover, those who fed and those who were being fed were far from having any kind of relation. They had never met each other, they knew nothing about each other, and yet, the one being fed had to trust the feeder and vice versa. Others were watching, commenting on the food, and the whole scene was being filmed. Thus, the line between commonly perceived domains of 'private' and 'public' was blurred.

Proposed dishes:
lentils
pureed potatoes
light cheese with fresh mint leaves
raw meat (steak tartare)
tiramisu

Duration of the performance:
approximately one hour

opening
Performance realized in Frankfurt, Germany on February 27, 2002

The performance took place in an undecorated room with bare walls. The visitor's gaze was first drawn to the opening buffet placed in the middle of the room.
Usually during an opening, miscellaneous comments are made, such as private conversations, remarks on the works exhibited, different critiques (read or heard), political conversations, etc.

Examples of these types of comments were typed on white edible wafer paper and normal paper and inserted into the food presented at the opening, making the food and the comments the work of art. The participants at the opening could eat the wafer paper without being aware of swallowing the paper.? Upon discovering the commentaries, they could choose whether to eat them and thus appropriate them or to spit them out and reject them.? As a participant or as an artist showing his or her work, what are the reactions and interactions during an art show opening?? Do we choose to accept these remarks or not?

An opening is always a moment when the art world's power structures (i.e. its attending members) are openly displayed by who is present among curators and the media : who is going to write or talk about it? Informal relations are as important as the work that is shown. Strangely enough, openings are not a place where people talk exclusively about art. It is a social event, worldly and entertaining, a play spontaneously staged by its participants according to non-explicit rules. Those who know the codes of representation set the standards. They are part of the art world and each opening is an occasion to confirm the position of its existing actors. It is a ritual performed to create interior cohesion among its initiates and also to consider new members.

The variety of phrases injected to the food reflected the opening's social importance as well as its not necessarily art-related character, emphasized by the absence of displayed artworks that visibly did not affect the usual conversations and acting-schemes. The event is in itself its only raison d’être; works of art are secondary.

Proposed plates:
-Different kinds of quiches in which paper messages are inserted
-Cookies with chocolate chips and typed commentaries on wafer paper

In collaboration with Nina Levinthal, Albertine Trichon and Tabore Rector

Life Love Death

This performance was realised from the 8th to the 10th of February, 2002, during the exhibition “Städel Rundgang“ in the “Städelschule“ (school of Fine Arts), Francfurt on Main, Germany.

Description:
There are three boxes of the same size at hip height of the visitor’s hip, in a dark romm. The person who comes in, can not figure out what the boxes contain, it is only possible to perceive the forms and little bowls into the boxes.

People are asked to take one bowl of each box and in each bowl he will find an other taste. Then, he is asked to answer this question: Which taste means life, which taste means love and which taste is death for you? The subjective perception is registered by an objective process of documentation. The active behavior of the visitor determines the performance.

First day: asperges with ham, mussels, dried pears and prunes.
Second day: chinese mushrooms, cooked meat, strawberries with gelatine.
Third day: various sweets, smoked ail, marzipan.