Meeting/Eating Meat Joy: Productive (mis)understandings in feminist performance art legacy and self-authorising critique through the video essay
by Chloé Lavalette
My research trip to New York at the beginning of 2017 closely followed the brutal and unexpected death of my 63-year-old father Christian Lavalette. He was a recently-retired man, a graphic designer, a painter, engraver and editor, and died in three days from a septicemia while he was himself on a trip through Thailand, and his death was a mixture between the fatal encounter with the wrong bacteria – probably hidden inside one of the delicious Thaï meals he was discovering – and ignorance of the dangerous side effects of his prescription-free medication Immodium. Before stepping into a hospital to check the pain in the bowels he was filming and sending my mother incredibly beautiful images from the surroundings of Ranong, and he had just taken part in a diving lesson. My father chose paradise to disappear from the Earth.
When I saw the video archive of Meat Joy for the first time, on the fourth floor of the Bobst Library in Washington Square, I already had a glimpse of it in Mette Ingvartsen’s show 69 Positions a few years ago. I guess (with a retrospective interpretation) that I was completely overwhelmed by the echo I found in the fascinating and confusing mixture between death and beauty, vitality and morbidity, presented by this stream of images. As Georges Didi-Huberman says, I was looked at by these images more than I was looking at them; I was both intimately called to interpret them, to respond to them from my own situation as a 27-year-old white cis feminist woman – and was incapable to do so, as I was completely deprived of the necessary words and conceptual tools. I was educated as a theater studies specialist and though I always worked with the legacy of performance art in contemporary scenes and in my own artistic practice, it was the first time I was really confronted with such an object of research.
At this time I was also a young researcher – it was the second year of my PhD studies and my first experience with US performance and theatre, without any introduction other than my own readings. Although I began my stay in New York with an interview with Richard Schechner, I did not have anybody to talk with in order to build my own method.
Meeting Meat Joy was my first encounter with the vertigos of epistemology. Meat Joy – or what was left of it, since I merely had access to its ruins through the film Schneemann had remixed in 1995 — was a mysterious work of art, both richly open and hermetically closed. Both qualities can be apprehended in Schneemann’s written description, which was tirelessly repeated and paraphrased in all the books I found about this work:
Meat Joy is an erotic rite – excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic – shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience.
Imagine you have to meet a person who is ‘at any moment … sensual, comic, joyous, repellent’. Would you not be confused? Meat Joy is precisely a performance that you cannot eat. It is properly indigestible. And it does speak to your own ‘psychic imagistic stream’, although on a more intellectual layer of thinking you may be annoyed by some of its binary-gendered dramaturgic choices, and strive to build a judgement, an interpretation, with whatever discourse could disarm it. When I met Sophie Delpeux, a French specialist of performance art, and told her my first impression of Meat Joy as a critic – trying to construct something like a rational and contemporary interpretation or analysis of this work, rather than one of a historian – contextualising, describing, letting the past be the past, she just laughed.
I could not eat it, so I tried to meet it. And I thought that it might be easier to meet Schneemann herself first. At least the author might give me some elements to build my own reading of her work. But I was not aware of Schneemann’s reputation in her old age, and it revealed itself as another new, terrific, initiatory encounter. During the videoconference I was literally seen and incapable of seeing. She could see my image on the screen and I could only hear her voice. The next day I was so upset by this new meeting and some of the words she had said (reacting to what I had just said): ‘crap! – crap, crap, crap, this is crap’. I was so confused by this double misunderstanding about my reflections on Meat Joy that I asked her for advice on continuing my work as a researcher. ‘Just do the things that make you feel alive.’ I decided that only another performance could be the adequate act of response to Meat Joy.
I was as new as an artist as I was as a researcher. My first cycle of research-creation projects was called ‘crap’ as an ironic way to reverse stigma: if my own attempt to develop my personal ‘gaze’ as a researcher and artist in 2017 was ‘crap’ – in fact Schneemann had incorrectly interpreted my interpretation of Meat Joy as a vegan stance against the use of fur in her performance – let it develop itself under the comic sonority of this word I barely understood when I first heard it.
In my first trial with ‘Crap, a research incident’ (un incident de recherche) I was onstage, replaying a cut of the interview while committing myself to perform impossible or difficult tasks onstage, like juggling or licking my elbow, as attempts to translate the multiple obstacles to interpretation and dialogue in this epistemological experience. The second performative trial consisted in an opening of my questions and reflections. ‘The Interpretation Room’ (la chambre d’interprétation) was an installation in which I had asked a group of artists and designers to craft manipulable, hardly understandable, multiply-interpretable works. We invited the audience to visit the installation and try to interpret, meet, relate to, play with, fall in love and hate and invent new futures with the works they chose.
This is also when I made the film which I called Meeting Meat Joy. It was played on a computer inside a small tent at the exterior of the exhibition. This time we ate Meat Joy. We extinguished its shrill soundtrack, masticated its gaudy images, and transformed it into slow pixelated spectrums superimposed over the cut of the interview. I provided a narration of the encounter, which turns into a poem.
A few days before the opening I was bold enough to ask Schneemann for her approval to use her video archive. I rapidly presented the intention of the work and she said she was okay with it. But her producer noticed the title of the work was ‘Crap’ and she took it personally, though agreeing to reconsider her decision if I chose another title. This is how I learned how gross this word was for English-speaking people, and I retitled the work as ‘scraps’, an acronym for the French ‘selection of falls [chutes] recycled into performative adventures’.
I was nevertheless a bit overwhelmed by this new misunderstanding in my quest to approach Meat Joy, and I did not find the energy to inform Schneemann of this evolution of the work until she died. Meeting Meat Joy is a contemplative self-mocking nervous video essay about how providing an interpretation of an ancient and respected work, assuming your own way of looking, authorising yourself as a critic, is a dangerous task. It is about the legacy of feminist performance art, and about how interpreting and translating are always confronted with (sometimes comical and cheerful) failure and betrayal. It is about the artificiality and fragility of borders between art and life, research and life, art and research. It is both an act of piracy and a femmage.
Author
Chloé Lavalette is a French theatre maker and researcher, currently working as a temporary teacher and researcher (ATER) in the performing arts department at Rennes 2 University. Their work explores the intersections between the representation of bodies in performance and the cultural construction of ‘ways of looking’ with a particular interest in nudity, spectatorship, and the epistemological issues arising from the power dynamics of the gaze. Their PhD thesis is titled ‘Looking at naked bodies’ and was defended in the SACRe (Sciences Arts Creation Research) program. As a performer, author, and dramaturg they developed s.c.r.a.p.s – a multimedia compost of their research materials, comprising a performance installation (the interpretation room), a film (Meeting Meat Joy), and a solo performance (la peau2), which they performed on various stages (La Briqueterie Val de Marne, La Gaîté Lyrique, HumanTech days, STARTS).