‘Wounded Parties’ (2024) by David Fenton

‘Wounded Parties’ (2024) by David Fenton

‘Wounded Parties’ (2024) NTRO Rationale
The research field is Performance Studies, specific to the practice of live art, and within that field the theoretical concerns are the monstrous feminine, post-humanism/new materialism, queer theory and performance ontology. All are central to the question(s) of the research. The methodology – which also informs the research question(s) – are interdisciplinary, intermedial, autoethnographic and process art based.
The primary question is ‘In what way does “Wounded Parties” (2024) by David Fenton maintain its ontology of performance when presented as an artifact?’ Sub questions that are concerned with the work are ‘In what way can the monstrous feminine intersect with post-human/new materialist and queer theory conceptions in digital performance to form a new expression of the artist’s own contingent masculine monstrousness?’ and ‘In what way can the auto-biographical images collected in the form of wounds (over time) operate as auto-ethnographic data?’
The theoretical context of the practice includes theories of the body in/through performance and theories of form and methodology. They are…
• Live Art: ‘Live Art is a cultural strategy to make space for experimental processes, experiential practices, and the bodies and identities that might otherwise be excluded from traditional contexts. Rather than a description of an artform or discipline, Live Art is a way of thinking about what art is, what it can do, and where and how it can be experienced. Some may experience Live Art in a gallery, others in a theatre, and others still in forests or town squares, or as a process in which they are involved’ (What Is Live Art?, n.d.).
• Intermedia: Chapple and Katenbelt describe intermedia in relation to theatre as ‘a hyper medium offers a staging space where such realities in-between performer, computer-generated realities and the audience perception of those realities is realized in performance’ (2006, p.19). Further (Fenton, 2008) in reference to Bolter and Grusin (2000) notes that ‘intermediality can work very simply in performance, merely as a convergence of media through a prosthetic relationship, where one media extends the meaning and aesthetic language of the other through remediation’ (pg. 110).
• The Monstrous Feminine: In Creed’s work The Monstrous-Feminine (2015) she harnesses Kristeva’s psychoanalytic framework to explore multiple archetype subject to the abjectification of the female body which are ‘crucial to the functioning of the patriarchal order’ (pg.166). The ‘monstrous feminine’, is a feminist move towards a post-human deconstruction of object/subject. Creed’s positioning envisions an alternate reconstruction of patriarchal hegemony, which has implications for masculinity studies, wherein the masculine is destabilised and provisional.
• Post-humanism/New materialist: ‘A post-humanist account calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of “human” and “nonhuman,” examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilised and destabilised…’ (Barad, 2003: 808). While new materialism ‘…a term coined in the 1990s to describe a theoretical turn away from the persistent dualism in modern and humanist traditions whose influence are present in much cultural theory’ (Dolphijn et al., 2012, cited in et al., 2012, cited in Sanzo, 2018). Specifically, Barad, through a post-structural feminist lens, emphasises ‘how matter comes to matter’ (2003). In this new materialist approach Barad recommends the operational paradigm of performativity. Barad states, ‘A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the re-presentationalist belief in the power of words to represent pre-existing things. Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real’ (Barad, 2003: 2).
• Autoethnography: The work is autoethnographic and follows in a tradition of Live Art and Process Art performance which is then mediatised. Autoethnography, is a method which ‘make[s] the researcher's own experience a topic of investigation in its own right’ (Ellis and Bochner, 2000: 733). Significantly, this study is a performative autoethnography, ‘the critical stance of the performing body constitutes a praxis of evidence and analysis’ (Spry, 2011: 19). The site for data collection is the performance process in its entirety. Thus, the conceptualisation, embodiment, material crafting, presentation, and digital refinement are all processes that hold autoethnographic data. Importantly, ‘Autoethnography seeks to communicate the mechanisms of the [performers] “inner world”’ (Holt, 2003: 5). Specifically, the type of autoethnography implemented is ‘estrangement autoethnography’, in this case an autoethnography based on uncomfortable everyday accidents (and or formal medical procedures) that wound or draw blood. Hughes and Pennington define estrangement autoethnography as a method ‘in which the researcher purposefully performs in countercultural ways, thinking and acting in ways that are counter to the status quo, the norms and rules of the dominant culture. In this way, the autoethnographic researcher can critically and reflexively examine …in an estranged state and respond to the theoretical body of knowledge on the area being studied’ (Hughes and Pennington, 2017: 19).
• Process Art: ‘Process art emphasizes the “process” of making art (rather than any predetermined composition or plan) and the concepts of change and transience, as elaborated in the work of such artists as Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Alan Saret, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and Keith Sonnier. Their interest in process and the properties of materials as determining factors has precedents …’ (Process Art, n.d.)

‘Wounded Parties’ (2024) is a series of photographs of wounds the artist/researcher, David Fenton, has incurred and recorded over since 2023, stitched together to create a digital composition which is accompanied by a QR code of the process of making the work. As such, the work is presented as both artifact and performance – overall the combination of artefact/performance constitutes ontologically the work as a performance.

The background of the work stems from a series of works called ‘Field: White-card’ (2023/4), which commenced creation and investigation in late 2023. ‘Field: White-card’ has had three iterations all of which have investigated de-anthropocentric performance. The most recent NTRO was called ‘Field-Canvas’ (2024) and was a transitionary work that started to challenge how the presentation of a traditional artefact could also maintain the ontology of its original intent as a performance. New knowledge that informed the artist’s methodology was the inclusion of a QR code along with the artefact that operated as Bolter (1991, p. 25) describes hypertext as “Electronic writing [which] is…not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topic[s]” [original emphasis]. This writing with place leads the viewer into more in-depth performative understandings of the work’s construction and as such alternative meaning through alternative perceptions of the stability of the work. This was applied to the ‘Wounded Parties’ (2024) and the artifact as well as the QR code (leading to the performative process of making the work) were included in the ‘Resilience’ exhibition at St Andrew’s Toowoomba Hospital August 2024.

Performance Ontology: New knowledge manifests materially in two ways within the work. It is the first digital collage the artist has attempted/performed. This is a new formal application for the artist who has predominately worked in ‘live’ performance. Here the live performance of the work is mediatized at least three times. Firstly, through its original capture, second through its digital collage manipulation and third through the QR code conveying the performance of the whole process. As such, this has become an interdisciplinary foray into a deeper understanding of intermedia for the artist. The work troubles the field by troubling the ontological status of the artifact, destabilizing the primacy of its reception as a static object and reconceiving the work as a work ‘in a performative process’. It contributes as it were to a significant debate concerning the ontology of the still image. For example, in Derrida’s notion of hauntology he expresses the ontology of the photographic image as an operation of metonym, a substitution, for what was or what may have been. Derrida proposes that the ‘living present divides itself’ ( Derrida and Stiegler, 2002; 51). The photographic referent has no ‘presence’ of itself after itself, but rather exists as an ontological paradox, a process of disappearing and becoming. In this way a work that has been mediatized three times plays with the notion of presence, plays with the ontology of performance through multiple ‘re-mediations’ (see Bolton and Grusin 2000) and as such, a multiplicity of readings and experiences become available to the percipients – those who ‘perceive’ the work.

Monstrous Post-humanism: With regards to content the work is akin to live art, often informed by the monstrous feminine. Here, however the work examines the wounded masculinity of the artist. Deconstructing, repeating, and reframing that masculinity through a queer theory lens. As such, the work can be seen as both body parts (fingers) but also genitalia. This would seem an inevitable consequence of ‘Filed: white-card’ that endeavored to destabilise the body’s primacy of performance so that (through a new materialist imperative) the body operated as an equal inter-actant in the assemblage. Instead, here in ‘Wounded Parties’ (2024) the artist/research has placed the body central with primary status. Here the masculine wounded body is not denied or reduced to mere material but forms the entire landscape of the material of the work. This is a breakthrough into a new form of expression for the artist, where before the body was interacting with other material objects, in an endeavor to reduce its primacy (i.e. de-anthropocentric performance) here the body in the digital intermedial form can only interact with itself, forming reconfigurations impossible to form through live performance.

The work contributes to its field in as much as the content continues a conversation concerning the necessity to reframe the masculine through feminist notions of the body in performance. It is also significant as it is an affirmation of post-human positioning of the male body (wounded, incomplete and provisional) in response to itself i.e. intar-subjectively. Here there are other practitioners in the field who have performed in this monstrous and queer territory and indeed have had their performance re-mediated from the live to the mediatised. For example Paul McCarthy’s early Live Art works, which trouble the ongoing concerns of what is permissible, between live acts and the audience. Additionally, the performance oeuvre of other artist’s work such as Hermann Nitsch, Franco B, Ron Athey, Karen Finley and Holly Hughes, in the 21st century still remain transgressive and shocking. They trouble the boundaries of the body as it performs itself, with its own fluids, food and other substances.
Regarding the form, the work is significant to the field as it attempts to destabilise the form in an interdisciplinary, intermedial manner while maintain the ontology of performance. This destabilisation of both content and form challenges the perception of the viewer.
The work was not funded, there were no collaborators nor have there been any peer reviews as a result of the exhibition at St Andrew’s Hospital Toowoomba.
There was some concern that the work might be too incendiary or grotesque and it with reviewers by the curator Dr Rhi Johnson and the UniSQ School of Creative Arts Head of School Dr Kyle Jenkins and it was deemed appropriate for the exhibition context. In this respect it has been reviewed by two significant artists.
The work is exhibited alongside other significant artist such as Kyle Jenkins, Rhi Johnson, David Usher, Rachel North, Linda Clark, and Danish Quapoor (to name but a few).
The venue itself is significant to the UniSQ School of Creative Arts they have a Memorandum of Understanding with the hospital and the work forms part of the overall school’s research agenda in Community Health and Wellbeing.

References:
• Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321
• Bolter, J. D. (1991) Writing Spaces. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R. (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
• Chapple, F. and Kattenbelt, C. (Eds.) (2006) Intermediality in theatre and performance. Amsterdam: International Federation of Theatre Research.

• Creed, B. (2015). The Monstrous-Feminine (0 ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203820513
• Ellis, Carolyn and Bochner, Art (2000). Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject. Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd Ed.), [online] pp.733–768. Available at: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/spe_facpub/91.
• Fenton, D. (2008). Unstable acts: A practitioner’s case study of the poetics of postdramatic theatre and intermediality. [Queensland University of Technology]. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/16527/
• Holt, Nicholas L. (2003). Representation, legitimation, and autoethnography: An autoethnographic writing story. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2, 18-28.
• Hughes, Sherick A. and Pennington, J.L. (2017). Autoethnography: Process, Product, and Possibility for Critical Social Research. doi:https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483398594.
• Spry, Tami (2011). Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315432816

• Process art. (n.d.). Wayback Machine Internet Archive. Retrieved September 17, 2024, from http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/glossary_Process_art.html
• Sanzo, K. (2018, April 25). Https://criticalposthumanism.net/2018/04/25/. Geneology of the Posthuman. https://criticalposthumanism.net/2018/04/25/
• Stiegler, B. (2002). Derrida and technology: Fidelity at the limits of deconstruction and the prosthesis of faith. In T. Cohen (Ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (1st ed., pp. 238–270). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483134.013
• What is Live Art? (n.d.). Live Art Development Agency. Retrieved September 17, 2024, from https://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about-lada/what-is-live-art/

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