My Body is an Act of Service (2026)
A performance art piece exhibited as part of the Borders exhibition at Push Up Gallery.
The performer is costumed in multiple layers of tights so as to exhibit variable skin tones, with wigs at the shoulders a blindfold on and multiple sets of handmade ropes. They are then suspended upside down while in the background a field recording of bells, a drone in G major played on synthesizer, and a co-performer plays a shruti box. After a brief speech (text below) the audience is allowed to pull at the ropes and manipulate the body of the performer, now become object of the performance rather than subject. This continues until the audience grows tired or an audience member or co-performer puts an end to the performance. In the inaugural performance the latter of these two options occurred. The performance lasted approximately 12 minutes.
Text of My Body is an Act of Service
This is not the end, it never even began.
As we have grown to understand more and more about the universe in which we as humans inhabit, the greater our sense of unease about our ability to correctly understand it. Our theories for the creation of all things have become more precise- rooted in a natural science of experiments, measured with tools inconceivably precise and mathematical proofs perfectly beautiful and perfectly complicated. And hence the dread: the more we learn about the cause and effect of our world the more we realize that our senses, the innate tools with which we observe the universe, are ill fitted to the task. We cannot understand the why of the world on our own, our perception is a source of error and contradiction rather than truth or knowledge.
Without an objective truth we are in a chaos of subjectivity. A gorgeous and excruciating abject; all truths can be possible. Your truth exchanges blows with hers and warmly embraces theirs while his throws everything off its balanced course. We rely upon consensus to assuage the fear of being caught in delusion. There is safety in numbers, and we can believe that we can understand that which we have made ourselves.
An anecdote: Performers are invariably, unconsciously drawn to objects. A single chair on set will exhibit a curiously powerful gravity. The nervous reaction of adrenaline pushes those of us onstage to reach for a physical grounding in the world. Suspending one’s own persona to embody an other produces an anxiety that we attempt to assuage with a physical tether to subjective reality. One could imagine that this is just nerves, pre-show jitters, but in my experience this frantic energy does not diminish, it builds upon itself. After eight hours locked in a cage in the middle of the financial center of the world I was ecstatic! Desperate for anything that could ground me. I knew that I could drift away and my body would be acting only on impulse or routine, the path of least resistance. Acting upon an object is an assertion of our humanity to the universe. We prove ourselves real in this world through effect.
And so this is why I am here. I want to help, I want to be kind. The crisis of subject-object relations lies in the conflict of understanding that we are objects to each other; that our models of truth and reality are endlessly challenged by others who shift from object to subject and back again as we observe them. I would like to halt this shifting, if only for a moment. I wrote that a performance is essentially an enclosed reality where the artist having control over the events plays at being God for the duration of the Moment. I don’t want this for me, I want it for you- For your opportunity to be the arbiter of truth and know that you are real.
When the last of the drones has begun and I say “now” I will be gone. I will have left momentarily and you can control my body as you like. The ropes that are dangling will make it easy. Go ahead and grab one.
Okay. I’m ready. Now.