Need Thoughts

By Taryn Lee

Suffocating, freeing, traumatizing, comforting- this performance encapsulated all of these thoughts into one event. Need took so many years from my own narrative of experiences but was carried out in less than one week. Making art had been a struggle for me in an age of stifling imagery everywhere you look. What was an artist to use if the eyes had already become blind to the synthetic media of everyday life? How do I capture how our wants have been transformed into needs? Enlivening the space with the presence of my own body and the materiality of the fleshy dough mended together human connections made in real time. 

In this appropriation of Kazuo Shiraga's work, Challenging Mud, I wanted to evoke the same feelings regarding the uncertainty of humanity that incessantly plagued the minds of the Japanese post-war nation- and the world. However, it was more severe in Japan due to the drastic shift from the mindset of being violent dominators to becoming the victims of severe violence induced by two atomic bombs. There was so much instability regarding what was "true" since their very nation was obliterated in a moment. People could no longer trust the rationality and technological reverence that gave way to the atrocities of WWII, so everything was met with suspicion and anxiety. Shiraga was part of the Gutai collective whose members strove to recreate a direct connection with nature and the subjective experiences of the war that was all too censored at that time. In Challenging Mud, the artist activates the materiality of the mud and they become one: the mud particles scratched him and he fought back. With no true "winner" in this challenge, Shiraga opened a personal and cultural avenue for discussion by using the doronko (mud) matsuri as a metaphor for the futile violence in war. 

In the same way Shiraga questions the world around him, I wished to convey that same exploration into the uncertain grounds of contemporary times. Media that feeds into the insecurities of men and women alike have inevitably shaped generations of humans into believing they must meet some type of societal expectation in order to be considered of any value. Using my own experiences as a woman I challenge the societal pressures that have shaped most of my life: women are mere child-bearers, hair length indexes gender, submissiveness is more attractive, women aren't in control of their image, and so on...

This piece was extremely personal to me as I have always felt an uneasy, but constant, discomfort from these constructs since the moment my subjectivity veered from the social "norm". Searching for the possibility of a world without such boundaries has led me to this piece. In struggling with the dough and kneading the various personal items, painful memories came to surface and I became increasingly desperate to work it all into the dough just as the brain whirls when those unanswerable thoughts we have plague our every waking hour.

Panting, flexing, working the dough, I had the sudden urge to just bury myself in it all. Pulling the dough up and over my body and head, I had hair in my mouth and was stifled by the dense mass above me. But I was at complete peace. The futility of it all became clear to me as a necessity of life, to struggle and not find any closure is okay. There is an ironic peace found in the acceptance of nothingness. A nothingness that was preceded by tumult and action isn't nothing at all. It is merely a temporal feeling as is everything else. The performance lasted a few minutes and will never be the same nor recreated. However, the collective memory of challenging universal struggles will live as moment of time rings true for all those who were present.