Beach Ball: a performance with benefits
Concept Note: Beach Ball was born from a genuine sadness about the state of the Fort Cochin Beach. Donning designer silk and tiara, matching gloves and crocs, Beach (with her wonderful friend and helper Mahin) sets off to the beach on her scooter most mornings to collect and bag the rubbish along the foreshore. Along the way she has been commandeered to launch the Mahindra Clean Beach Campaign, has educated a few of the locals, and distributed gloves to the government workers.
Enter the work of Di Ball which crosses the tropes of performance, writing, comedy and visual art.. Di “seeks to validate the ideal of multiple selves, genders and personae,.”2
Her itinerary of personae each have ‘boundary stories’ to tell - how they came to be here - and roles to play in both virtual and real life.
These personae include a country and western singer, a fortune teller, a match-maker and a feminist academic and on the most part utilise Di’s surname, Ball. They represent various of Di’s subjective and embodied experiences. In short, as Di claims, “all my work is about me and the things I’ve done.” Given this, the personae are not merely masks, but rather biographic renderings emerged from a really ‘out there’ life. Clearly, this work is not predicated on ‘I think, therefore I am’, a revelation of a universal subject, but rather on ‘becoming’ or partiality, perhaps even driven by that most irrepressible of pleasures, jouissance. Di evokes the autobiographic ‘I’, which Sidonie Smith claims is available to women for appropriating the position of the self-narrating subject.3 In Di’s ongoing project, the question is not about ‘who I am’, but about ‘how many I’s I can be/come’.
By evoking these myriad avatars, Di is asking whether it is possible for anyone to really ‘know thyself’, despite the Apollonaire doctrine which commands it, because the multiplied self is constantly in flux. Subsequently, in the presentation of this cacophony of personae, Di deploys technologies of self, gender and subjectivity. Through these practices by which individuals fashion their identities, 5 she evokes a partial subject or self which talks back in many voices, and laughs in the face of the universalising discourses of self and subjectivity.
While Di’s various personae might be her technologies of the self, Di invites us to interrogate and enjoy the slippage and pleasure that occurs in practices of complexity, to inquire into what it means to know, enjoy and be yourself.
1. Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and The Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century, Indiana Press, 1993, 21-22
2.Sandy Stone interviewed by Frances Dyson, ‘Liquid Identity’, Transit Lounge, op.cit., 109
3.Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and The Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century, Indiana Press, 1993, 4
4. ibid., p 20 .
5. Michel Foucault, interviewed by Rux Martin, ‘Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault’, Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman + Patrick H. Hotton (eds), Technologies of the Self, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998
2.Sandy Stone interviewed by Frances Dyson, ‘Liquid Identity’, Transit Lounge, op.cit., 109
3.Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and The Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century, Indiana Press, 1993, 4
4. ibid., p 20 .
5. Michel Foucault, interviewed by Rux Martin, ‘Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault’, Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman + Patrick H. Hotton (eds), Technologies of the Self, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998
IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a reworked version of an essay by Linda Carroli entitled Krystal Clear written in 2000 for a catalogue essay.
Venue: Fort Cochin Beach
Support: Beach Ball would like to thanks Australian labels Foxton Danger for the wonderful kaftan and Easton Pearson for the tiara. A girl has to look her best at all times.
Dates: 7th November 2014- 29th March 2015