CurdleD- Invitation

CURDLED -INVITATION

By the blistered nipples of the Virgin you are instructed to get thyselves
prepared to be CURDLED at the closing night performance and party for Zoo’s latest and greatest lactation installation!

Make your merry Milky Way to Don’t Look Gallery on Saturday the 19th of April 2008. Marvel at the magnificent manifestations of ten days of mammary manipulation! Poetry, prose and philosophy performed by the magical majesty of moistness, Necrotitties! Fluxing fluid filmic fun from a dazzling duo of dampened damsels! A slippery slideshow sideshow of pretty photographs from a glitzy galaxy of sharp yet slimy shooters! Be entranced and entertained by the Wondrous Wet! The Spectacle of the Soggy! The Mysteries of the Milk! The Licking of the Liquid!

419 New Canterbury Rd, Dulwich Hill.
Doors open 6pm, fun and games from 6:30 until they’re finished, or we are.

Inducing Endurance Piece

Am thinking of upping the ante with the induced lactation project, and see how far I can push it. Its hard to find time to pump and drink milk thistle and take meds on time when working on other things- always having to sneak into toilets in your lunchbreakwith your pump in your backpack is difficult and irritating to manage. So, I am proposing that I undertake the following endurance piece. Here's a very rough sketch:

Two weeks locked in a gallery space. The first week will mostly be about the inducing itself, but hopefully by the second week I will be producing enough milk to start using the time inbetween inducing acts to make other objects and interactions.

Inducing
Pump every four hours 24/7, for 30 minutes at a time.
Take maximum amounts of motillium (2 x10mg) at six-hourly intervals. Plus fenugreek tablets.
Drink one pot of fennel tea a day.
Drink one pot of milk thistle tea a day.
Consume at least 2 litres of water a day, on top of the tea intake.
Change to SuperLacto Diet, including large amounts of foods believed to be beneficial to milk production. Such as porridge, and beer.
Public can watch at any point during opening hours.

Other possible acts
Invisible Ink- see if breastmilk can be used as invisible ink. Write with quill/brush: Jeanette Winterson quote re milk-ink, Helene Cixous' 'white ink', or thoughts that have occurred to me during project. Let dry. Iron to reveal text. Record all of this in a series of black and white photographs.
Audience participation- Not sure how this will work. Can't actually feed it to them because of hygeine issues. Perhaps I can make a series of 'milk blots' to give people, or seal it in small glass capsules, like some sort of religious relic? Refer to the medieval (?) milk relics, especially the cave where folk would scrape the chalk from the walls and mix with water and claim it to be The Virgin's Milk.
Random milk art- eg Milk Graffitti (When released on last day, run around back streets and spray 'tags' on walls etc) and Milk Mirror (Using milk to trace my features on to a mirror).

Documenting
Measure and weigh breasts daily at same time. Photograph?
Make a chart of amount of milk produced.
Photograph any colour changes or unusual occurences.
Freeze milk specimens for analysis (if can find someone to analysise it): end of first week, colustrum- if produced again, end of project.
Keep diary- mood changes, physical changes etc.

Other points
Should I be costumed, or just in everyday clothes?
Will I be 'on stage' all of the time, or just at the points where I am pumping or doing something specific? Would prefer as much time as possible, want to highlight the banal moments as well as the obvioulsy interesting ones.

Requirements
Suitable gallery space- access to water, electricity, toilet, shower, space to sleep.
Futon/air mattress and blankies.
Tape measure and kitchen scales.
Comfy chair for pumping, preferably a rocking chair.
Digital camera.
Motillium, fenugreek, milk thistle and fennel teas, kettle, teapot and teacup.
Beer, porridge, and other 'milk making' foods.
Art supplies, as projects dictate eg iron and iron board, blotting paper, mirror.

Presentation
Scrapbook of journal entries, photographs, ink blots, invisible ink texts, milk chart, chart of breast measurements and weight, milk analysis reports, motillium prescriptions etc.

Flow Shows

This is a series of performance pieces I sketched out for a project in my honours year, and have not done much with yet. The Isadora piece is one I will hopefully be working on with a friend from UTS, to realise it as a short film by the end of this semester. Have posted them as they originally appeared:

Performance piece for Chapter One. This piece is a bit confusing to me still. Basically it ties to permitted/ forbidden uses of milk.

A woman is seated at a writing desk, penning a letter with quill and ink. Her breasts are full, spilling over her gown and leaking milk into the inkpot. She continues to write, and we see that as her pen flows across the page the words disappear underneath her hand. In the next scene a housewife is doing the ironing with a baby at her feet when there is a knock at the door. She takes delivery of the letter, opens it and stares at the blank page. Returning to her post she places the letter on the board and runs the iron across it. The message appears, and the audience reads it: 'Please burn after reading'.

Performance piece for Chapter Two. This piece draws its inspiration from the film La Strada. In this Anthony Quinn plays a carnival strongman, with a specialty of breaking himself out of the chains that confine his chest by flexing his muscles. I will attempt to draw the correlation between the strength inherent in these two monstrous bodies- the traditionally 'strong' body and that of the lactating body. I have deliberately made both characters in the piece male, as to either show a lactating woman or a gender-swap is not only rather obvious but defeats the notion of sameness/aberrance in the one body. This will be echoed later when discussing Bakhtin's carnival's 'sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low' and so on. These links may be made more blatant in the final piece if I feel that they are not easily readable.

The setting is a freak show of the old Barnum and Bailey kind. In scene one, we are shown a strongman standing in front of his audience. His arms are behind his back and his torso bound in chains. Huffing and puffing he flexes his chest, and the links begin to break one by one until he frees himself and the chains lie ruined at his feet. We then move to the next tent, another man is bound in exactly the same predicament. His chest is bare, and his nipples poke through the restraints. Huffing and puffing, he flexes the muscles in his chest. Milk begins to pour from his breasts, and as he writhes against the chains the lubrication allows him to slip from his shackles. The chains lie on the floor, intact yet defeated.

Performance piece. This piece is based on the Isadora Duncan anecdote quoted earlier, and also the 'money shot'/climax device in pornography. It is intended to provide some cohesion and summary of the three key themes of the paper.

A woman is on stage, or perhaps not, as we cannot see the audience or surrounds. She is wearing a 'classical' tunic-type dress, and she dances slowly. The music is either Patti Smith's 'Summer Cannibals' or an African drum piece. As she dances, stains begin to appear at her breasts. The music becomes faster, her dancing more furious. The dams burst, her milk courses in rivers down the front of her dress, makes the fabric cling, forms puddles on the floor, she slips and slides but still keeps dancing until the music stops. She collapses, her resources spent. Dried up.

Milked Dry

Oh dear, looks like I didn't post this piece when I wrote it. Pretend it is April 24th.

On Friday I gave a paper at the Somatechnics conference held byMacquarie University. It was a highly personal account of my inducedlactation project, part blog entry, spoken word piece, anecdote,reflection on my motivations and musing on things I had read and founduseful or provocative. It was well received, and I had many a flattering comment and mind-melting question from the brilliant andvery generous audience of academics and activists. I stumbled my way through question time, and came out with much to consider in terms ofwhere my research should be directed. Currently my thinking is that I need to read a LOT of work on body art and performance and see if I can angle my thesis in that general direction.

Then it was time to head off to do my Divine Bovine show at Hellfire.The visuals didn't work, the cling wrap didn't cling, and my left tit proved Mayhem's theory that it is indeed the shyer of my breasts by refusing to squirt milk AT ALL (just a mere dribble, even after heatpacks and threats and grovelling, though was working fine the nextday). But somehow it came together well in the end, and as my friend and collaborater Mimoiselle told me later 'Consensus says 10 out of 10hot chicks agree your performance was awesome'. Certainly I seemed to get an incredible amount of feedback from the crowd afterwards, all of it positive. For those who didn't make it, or were so bewildered by it that you can't remember what happened, here is a brief run-down:

First song was Patti Smith's 'Summer Cannibals'. Came out dressed inblack and white paper mache cow mask of my own making, blue/red/whitestriped butcher's apron, tail, half-white half-black wig with wired plaits. Walked through the crowd, then across stage on all fours,stood up on my back legs, danced about. Grabbed a meat cleaver, waved it around, threatened a sweet young audience plant with it and then lifted my apron to reveal cow-bells haging from my labia piercings and made her 'go down' on me. My cohort in crime, Hunter, resplendent in white shirt and half blue/white butcher's apron, chased me about the stage with a meat tenderiser and gave my arse a little pounding. I stripped off my apron to reveal that I was painted up like a side ofbeef with MEAT written on my left tit and CARCASS down my right thigh(thanks to Y for the artwork). Then I pulled on some black latexgloves, grabbed a scalpel and cut the word EAT across my stomach.Hunter tried to wrap me in cling wrap, but it was all too slippery and didn't work- but still got the point across I think? MeatZoo. Second song came on, The Cramps' 'Strychnine'. Ripped off cow mask to reveal face all drawn up like meat too, danced about, sprayed milk at the audience, on me, in my mouth, on glass window at back of stage, over Hunter, fed Hunter etc. To conclude the show I proceeded to grab three milk bottles, only half full, that said 'Have You Seen MooZoo? Call1800-Divine-Bovine' on one side and 'Pick'/'Your'/Poison on the other.Downed the milk, dribbling it everywhere, pouring over myself etc.Last bottle ('Poison') was full of pinky-red milk which I tipped over my head. Still had a few seconds left of song so rubbed my wounds and milk all over Hunter's lovely white shirt.

Afterwards was a complete maniac, hyped up and bouncing about wildly from one person to the next, holding thoughts for approximately 5 seconds if I was lucky, babbling and generally acting scatty in post-performance-shock. When I was finally able to articulate mythoughts a little I remarked to Nattie The Flattie that I felt like I had been flayed alive. Totally vulnerable and exposed, emotionally, physically, mentally.

This is not academia, this is not performance. This is ZOO, me, withskin and mind and nipple leaking my secrets to the world.