Amanda Millis Art practice

I begin by trying to understand encounters in my own body and interactions with anOther(s). 

    As I lay floating, enveloped in a hot spring, the mask of my face barely bobs above the waterline. Reading this verse, you aren’t experiencing this sensation of being carried by the warm womb of this pool. But, you know what it is to feel water on your skin. You also know the feeling inside yourself, of your ‘intuitive gender’— it’s the part that exists underneath exposure to the symbolic world. Describing intricacies of this feeling with discourse will never be the experience. I use a,“queer methodology” (as Jack Halberstam puts it). Combining art making with theory that, over time, changes semiotics. 

    Genre-Énoncé (2012-2016) began by my collaborating with Faux Pas le Fae after coming into connection over mutual mental health difficulties. We conversed about what it is to be queer gender queers from conservative Texas backgrounds, and from these conversations, created multi-media, performative exchanges, emanating non-linear communication. 

    Swerving from the rigidity of our religious childhoods, I imagine that Faux Pas and I are, in multiple bodies, queered pieces of sacred existence. I’ve written the mythology of our heritage and combined this 12,000-word sacred text with feminist psychoanalysis and gender theory. <https://www.academia.edu/30245026/Genre-Énoncé_Wading_Through_Material_Identities_to_Express_the_Gender_Intuitive> 

        Our oral and written exchange inspired a choreographed ritual where we strip off gendered costumes to reveal our current, queer manifestations— which stay kaleidoscopic. As symbolic borders separate us, Faux Pas’s communion was filmed at her studio in Brooklyn while in London, I performed in front of her projection.

Media: Performance, Video, Exploratory Collaborative Interview, Experimental Writing.

I feel through trauma bigger than me and also inside me, and in this public vulnerability, I find others feeling their way through too.

In 2001, my dad unexpectedly died one night on our bathroom floor from AIDS complications— nobody knew he was positive. A few years later, I created Inherit-Inherent (2007-8), a body of work which utilises the memory of places. I traveled to various cities across the southern United States— locations that hold the memory of my dad. They whisper moments of the story of his life. I took molds of pieces of each of these places, shipped the molds to my studio, and cast translucent resin into them— to visually portray my memory pieces. This is my inheritance. This 11-piece project has been shown at an HIV/AIDS community centre and cruising spot in San Francisco and at a leather bar in NYC.

Stump is of a tree stump in Helen, Georgia where my dad and I sat for a picture when I was 16. I found the stump by driving around the southern town with only the printed photo in hand to piece together the experience of that day, 10 years prior.

Medium: (w70 x h30 xd30 cm). Cast Resin.

Home is the memory of the redwood panel siding and brass address numbers from our home at 3530 Yupon Street, Houston Texas, 77006 in Montrose— the gaybourhood where my dad raised me.

Medium: (w40 x h35 x d7 cm). Cast Resin.

Stone is the final piece in Inherit-Inherent. 

Medium: (w50 x h35 x d20 cm). Cast Resin.

I feel through trauma bigger than me and also inside me, and in this public vulnerability, I find others feeling their way through too.

Womxn’s Work began in a womxn and femme rape survivors’ sewing circle.

I came out as a rape survivor in a variety of public spaces throughout NYC, each time negotiating psychological safety while hand-to-hand delivering letters as well as verbally discussing Women’s Work in order to organise project participation. Once in place, we used wool pieces felted into water soluable embroidery backing along with embroidered text to create a textile sculpture of a female nude, sewing the pieces of our bodies back together. We then showed this work alongside our survivor stories in galleries and museums. This exhibition included a performance where viewers were encouraged into the silent space to cast my nude body with felted wool. As they did so, written identities the patriarchy has placed upon me disappeared.

This textile sculpture is a felted mold of my nude body. I needle felted unspun wool into Solvy— a water soluble embroidery stabiliser. The Womxn’s Work collaborators then used this fabric to create the mold. The process was incredibly labourious as I would have to sit for hours, barely breathing, while the wet material dried into shape. To complete the work, the collective and I sewed the pieces of our body back together, using embroidered text— depicting what it is to survive— that we created during our suvivors’ sewing circle.

Media: (w55 x h100 x d35 cm). Body cast made out of needle-felted wool and embroidery backing; Embroidered text. 

During this interactive performance, viewers were escorted into the silent space by a project participant who had her mouth taped over as was mine. She could move about the gallery while I could not. She used non-verbal communication to encourage viewers to cast my nude body with felted wool. As they did so, written identities the patriarchy has placed upon my body— slut,   whore, bitch, liar, debtor, psycho-bitch, cunt, faggot, too fat, too thin, mentally ill— disappeared.

This image shows one of the galleries at the beginning of the performance. The textile sculpture is installed on the far wall, and the text-scrolls flow down into the right side of the picture. Against the green wall on the left, hang two textile pieces. These were hung throughout the gallery and cut to the height of each project participant. Bunches of needles protrude from these at the height of each participants’ chakras. I lay nude with shapes of felted solvy around me. My performance partner and gallery guide kneels by my side, awaiting viewers to enter the space.

Media: Performance, Installation.

My work involves layers overlapping one another in ongoing processes of different materials—

I birthed Courtesan (2012-13) with two other women from different parts of the world while we discussed our similar experiences with the simultaneous exploitation and under-use of feminine labour as a resource, drawing out similarities of the Texas oil industry, the history of Korean ceramic production and Alberta, Canada’s connection to the Keystone Pipeline. We connected our conversations with ceramics history and environmental research that drew on the concept of ‘resources’. We created a collaborative creative writing piece, revealing the destruction of the earth with the vanishing of the femme that is also hidden. We worked in “low-art”, femme-craft— ceramics and textiles. This view features my dad and John Cattelani, his lover just before coming out as gay in the Texas oil industry.

Media: (w35 x h50 x d35 cm). Ceramic Sculpture, Acrylic Paint.

 This is a detail of the ceramic vase, picturing a notable Trans-god-dess.

Media: (w22 x h13 x d2 cm). Ceramic Sculpture, Acrylic Paint.

For the Courtesan installation at Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Projects, I combined our words and morphed images of the vase onto printed pieces of textile. I then performed the text live during the private view. This image is of the vase with the textile prints in the background and an example of what is printed on the textiles.

The writing details the story behind the creation of our large vase, and our vase, in 3 intertwining sections, is covered in a painted relief depicting images that tell the story of its own creation. I then performed the text and displayed the writing morphed with iconic images from the surface of our sculpture, printed onto 60x90 cm pieces of fabric.

"She is of the earth; we made her, made love to make her, beautifully crafted her earth-sculpture with our feminine fingertips. We laboured, and she exists."

Media: Installation, Printed Textile, Ceramic Sculpture with Acrylic Paint.

I wandered around the gallery space for three hours, reading snippets of our collaborative story at louder and softer volumes. A hidden mic projected my words at the volume of someone next to you talking from the sculpted vase.

Media: Performance, Sound Installation.

I was invited by the Tate Modern (2015) as part of their Cicuit Programme and the Tate Collective to debate another artist as to whether or not the artist has a responsibility when representing conflict. I am of the opinion that the artist DOES have a responsibility, but wanted to reframe the meaning of responsibility to think, how can we have, as Ettinger puts it, a "co-responsibility" when representing conflict? How can we talk about ethics without holding a power structure over another or owing anything to another?

We moved from room-to-room of the large-scale exhibition for 2 hours, delving into the ethics of art making.

Medium: Performative Lecture

**Commissioned by Young People's Programmes Tate London, as part of Circuit funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

In June 2016, I joined 200 sister protesters to disrupt the VIP private view for the Tate Modern’s opening of their new building. Carl Andre’s work was featured at the opening as well as Ana Mendieta’s. However, while Carl Andre was able to attend the party, Ana Mendieta is unable to be there. The Tate holds both of their works in their permanent collection, but Andre’s work is regualrly on display while Mendieta’s has been underground in the archive for at least the past 5 years. 

Pictured here is the cover of the free zine we published and my reading of my contribution at the protest that spurred more actions in London and Berlin.

WHEREISANAMENDIETA is an ongoing and expanding archive, documenting the eradication and removal of women from histories, be it through institutional erasure or brutality and murder. They intend to create a platform where people can safely create politicised work without risking institutional backlash or being blacklisted for political involvement.

My writing: 

Ana Mendieta started an impressively eloquent career— she was alive. She was making art. She was in love, and the man that was supposed to be in “love” with her haulted her making with multiple attempts of abandonment throughout Mendieta’s career and eventually by murdering her. Today is a day of absence. We are in the abyss without identity, and from here, I will talk about what it’s like to be a woman trying to stay alive making art. I want to be in love and define love similarly to what Bracha Ettinger terms, “copoiesis”— several subjects in co-creative-creation and “wit(h)nessing”— “cultural awareness and a potential, through the aesthetic encounter, (for) a passage from the traces of trauma”. 

With my priviledged upbringing in the U.S. in the 80’s and 90’s, I have been raised to go to a good university to get a good degree to catch a good enough husband. I have to be pretty enough, skinny enough, and young enough to make white, christian babies or my vagina will shrivel up and not be worth anything. But I have been taught that the first time I was raped—at five years old—my vagina became worthless anyway. All of the times I’ve been raped since only assert the worthlessness. (“In a 1999 longitudinal study of 3,000 women, researchers found that women who had been victimized before were seven times more likely to be raped again.”) 

As Rosalyn Diprose says, self- identity "is built on the invasion of the self by the gestures of others, who, by referring to other others, are already social beings” , and I no longer wish I could separate my gender identity from being a rape survivor— I ONLY WANT TO STAY ALIVE MAKING ART, to wit(h)ness, to be in love. 

Ana Mendieta was also raised in the U.S., but her upbringing was not as priviledged as mine. She and her sister were sent to the U.S. by her parents because they thought it would be safer for them than Cuba. The were in care homes and endured years of racist and mysoginist violence. These descriptions of what we were taught, of how we were raised, they illustrate how we are set up to find comfort in abuse. It is when we are in love, making art to move out of this abuse that we are at risk of being silenced— that we are at risk of someone pointing to this art making and this movement out of abuse as the evidence for our hysteria. 

Ana Mendieta started an impressively eloquent career— The first time Mendieta included her body in her art practice was in 1973 with her work Rape Scene. “Finding the apartment door slightly open, the visitors entered a darken room [in Mendieta’s apartment] in which a single light illuminated the artist from the waist down, smeared with blood and stretched over and bound to the table...” Ana Mendieta’s work is further evidence pointing to the fact that she was murdered by Carl Andre, rather than evidence that she killed herself as her artwork has been used to unjustly and ficticiously prove. 

We have a deep connection to Mendieta’s life, art and understand her abusive relationship. We know that once love and abuse are combined into one act or come from similar sources enough times, the abuse itself actually feels comfortable and feels like veiled love—leading the victim to seek out or stay with the abuser(s) to be able to feel love. This process plays out again and again with more intensity each time until it becomes fatal or the cycle is painfully broken with excruciating discomfort. The discomfort of learning to feel love when actual loving is happening (in life and in art) feels so confusing that it goes against the very identity (soul, gender, and body) of the victim/ survivor. So, the process of leaving abuse is hazy, and in this haze, it takes long periods of time to grasp the reasons for and method of leaving. I won’t go further into the decades of psychoanalytic knowledge we have on human attachment or trauma bonding here, but this knowledge along with the evidence surrounding Mendieta’s life and death shows that CARL ANDRE MURDERED ANA MENDIETA. 

The London underground ads for the new building of the Tate Modern state, “Art Changes. We Change.” In the new building, the Tate is featuring works by the man that murdered ANA MENDIETA, when the Tate posesses a number of Mendieta’s works that are never displayed. 

We felt it when Mendieta was murdered in 1985. We asked where she was at the Guggenheim Soho protest in 1992, and 24 years later we are still asking: 

Dear Tate Modern,
Where is ANA MENDIETA? Your advertising is false. We request change. We know that is can be hazy and confusing to leave the production of abuse so we are offering you a clear method: We request that you exhibit ANA MENDIETA in place of carl andre. We ask that you work to exhibit art— making, creation, wit(h)nessing and change. We ask that you move forward from being in the business of violence.

In Love,
WHERE IS ANA MENDIETA 

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/31568/1/protest-hits-tate-over-exhibition-of-alleged-killer

https://news.artnet.com/market/where-is-ana-mendieta-new-tate-protest-518960

https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/liv-wynter/why-i-stormed-tate-modern-in-protest-against-violent-men

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/06/tate-modern-protesters-call-cuban-artists-work-be-displayed-0

Media: Protest, Writing, Performance.

The following is a piece of arts journalism I wrote for Polyester Magazine, reviewing women's shows at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe:

It foolishly feels like you are cutting accomplishment out of me when you gain successes similar to my seeming desires. Creative competition: the falsehood of obtaining achievement, is typified by this masculine, symbolic system— the fantasy of patriarchy in which we really live. Jealousy, deceivingly   labelled as “feminine”, cuts— spilling more blood than we consented to let when we initially exposed our artistic intestines.

I hope that the following judgements are both emotively influenced (as every considered artistic criticality ought to be) and somewhat outside reviewing work as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

I only attended shows led by womxn as this is a good starting point to experience influential acts of unforgettable words said aloud or internally inspired. Performance has the power to invoke inspiration. Work that stretches knowledge beyond what seems to be real (but is in actuality only partly true) is the most artful. I am interested in art. Training the brain by exercising the feminine erotic with education and creation grows human understanding outside of the governing rules of society to a truth that is sometimes seen as mystical in that it is possibly but not easily understandable. Once seen as witches, we are reclaiming the inhumanity of our mysticism with an ongoing theme in the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe and womxn’s creativity globally: the sacred feminine.

Shows at Fringe cover wide-ranging points on the developing web of feminism. I define feminism here as an intersectional movement that addresses the acute crisis of global violence towards and genocide of subjugated people: POC, Womxn, Queer…  Feminism honours the feminine in all human creatures to shine a light on the root causes and irrationality of oppression. In the 12 shows I viewed during my 3.5 day journey in the madness that is the Fringe programme, I witnessed some works I would not  now revisit as they are in need of repair while others were so intricately beautiful, I hope my words can articulate a glimpse of their gleaming fractals. Most were somewhere amongst these positions. In the following, I will comment on 3 of these 12.

…

Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat 

*****

Witnessing a miracle happening before you is an ecstatically disorienting experience, and if the particular flavour of spirituality you’ve been awaiting is the second coming, the glory of that revelation is upon us as Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat.

The purpose of religious morals are, at their best, lessons in loving each other, yet these stories, since their creation, are many times in contention with the loving humanity of feminine

creatures— women of all genders. I am not, however, a total cynic when it comes to lessons on love attempted by doctrine. Many religious interpreters of sacred texts are motivated by healing humanity, and with the unfettered perseverance of feminism and queerness, there are some intersectional bright spots amongst theological practices and human rights. McCormick’s embodiment of the sacred is one of these auras.

Her work touches me personally as I was shipped off to Christian boarding school in Bible-Belt, USA where we were made to go to chapel twice a week as well as take a Bible module, all compulsory towards our qualification. In a progressive move then and still, my Bible teacher was an Episcopalian Woman-Priest, Reverend Janet, who reservedly allowed for critical exploration of Jesus’s teachings. Achieving all ‘A’s’ in my studies, I was suddenly expelled for cocaine use and lesbian activity— this halted my theological inquiry.

When watching Lucy McCormick and her two angels, Ted Rogers and Sam Kennedy testify, I had an epiphany— I am not alone in my pain. McCormick picked up right where I had been severed from Reverend Janet. This work is a much needed contemporary take on the New Testament with the amelioration that the trajectory of sacred-feminist-queer performance has provided us.

Only a feminist can conduct the power of light existent in the world to a degree strong enough to get fingered in the ass, leap up to Carmina Burana and instantly inspire a Bryan Adams sing-a-long, all in less than 2 minutes. Triple Threat’s soulful eroticism complete with magical dance feats and emotional power ballads add to the light and healing of the world— healing the time I was beaten for editing the church bulletin text into sexual innuendos, healing being raped by those boys on the church playground when I was little, and healing that time, a couple months ago, when my date kept sticking his dick tip on my face after I told him I didn’t feel like blowing him. This show is part of that transgressive, feminist-light-healing-network that allows me to be aware of sexual assault when it’s happening and enables me to enjoy consenting sex without shame as soon as the next day.

When McCormick’s congregation joined in the nightly hymn, Bryan Adam’s “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”,  I thought of that scene in the 1991 film Robin Hood Prince of Thieves where Maid Marian is forced to marry the Sheriff of Nottingham and then her clothes are ripped off to a shear, white linen robe— revealing her penetrable pubic mound. It was a scene that used to make my 11 year-old pussy wet. Despite Marian’s feminine attempts to fight against patriarchal violence, she needed penis-having Kevin Costner to save her from being ruined by rape. McCormick shows us, through her ownership of her glorious feminine erotic— that sacred and permanent light that is present throughout the complex webs of abuse and aphrodisiac—that no Kevin Costner is necessary. She shows us through kinaesthetic learning, climaxing in a lesson on collaborative consentual touch of the feminine body, how to connect with our own personal Jesus.

…

Moving through the manifestations of monotheism as possible paths to portray permanent truths,

I came here to review

“Just Let the Wind Untie my Perfumed Hair…” or 

Who is Táhirir

*****

and

It’s proper etiquette to develop poker-faced judgement

sit in the second row

to incarnate a stoicism that I can’t muster

as if emotions don’t exist

until the end.

when I escape to enclose my crying

in the ladies’ stall

that feels so cramped I want to hurry out

but where I am also comfortable spending too much time-

I pretend I’m changing my tampon every day of the month.

…

I used to be ashamed of scribbling in a dark theatre on torn pages of ten-year-old sketchbooks

because what if I die?

and my feminine feelings are found

revealing that not every entry was a work of high art

How can torn pages of scribbles in darkness be art

or truth?

We have been conditioned to be scared of revealing untrue womxnhood

forcibly hidden behind imposed veils and criticised for implementing veils we desire.

Creatures with blossomingcrevasses cannot possibly know.

or even,

create?

White, western feminists have a tendency to enact advocacy with the belief that we have a cornerstone on the fight for womxn’s rights. In “Just let the wind untie my perfumed hair…” or Who is Táhirih, Delia Olam reveals the herstory2 of an Iranian feminist who lived from 1815-52, preceding the concept of ‘feminism’ as a verbalised movement. Zárin Táj, this early 19th-century Muslim feminist, transcended: ‘smart-for-a-girl’, ‘female poetess’ and ‘devout woman’ to: intellectual creator that lived her words. She marked this transformation by changing her name to the word which she would be executed for, Táhirih— ‘The Pure’. Táhirir lived truths: we are connected and because of this, the glory and the creativity of one elevates us all.

Before the word ‘pure’ was uttered in dialogue, it psychically entered into my mind’s eye while beholding Olam’s talent: her portrayal of Táhirih’s story, the acting of multiple characters so seamless you forget it’s a one womxn show, poetry that reaches into your being, and a musical score that includes that perfect, soulful song that you are incessantly searching for on Spotify but can never find. Olam delivers poetic translations of Táhirir’s writing with a bluesy alto. She is the song silenced by the noisy dictations of the world— the parts of religion, politics, culture and economy that are materially telling us what we should do, against our loving nature. I challenge theoretical concepts of materiality here. The survival and self-healing, creative aspects of nature are economically immaterial and therefore permanent. Materiality in capitalism then perpetuates the cycle of destruction and obsession with lack, and it is incessantly vocalised by symbolic systems.

The key to equality, to knowing this truth of equality is to listen to the voices that are being silenced both within and around us. Listen also to the silences, for even after the death of the subjugated or subjugated pieces that every human possesses, when there are no more words, there are still silent, permanent voices that can never be oppressed. In Who is Táhirir, Olam gives her voice, singing to this posthumous symphony.

…

Penny Arcade: Longing Lasts Longer portrays solid entertainment like the ‘greatest hits’ album to which you always return.

****

Penny Arcade exudes unapologetic bitterness entangled with uncompromising gratitude. Hailing from the New York City everyone is homesick for but no longer exists, she is a performance art legend.

I was reminded of Arcade some months ago when I was trying to find love on the internet but instead ended up acting out daddy/daughter role play in a decrepit art deco apartment surrounded by a bit of forgotten English seaside. For foreplay “Daddy Folkestone”, as I’ll call him, told me about staying at Arcade’s house once in New York, and he kept name dropping all the famous feminists he knew. He pontificated his feminist expertise while slyly insulting me the the entirety of our “date”. He wore his meanness like an insecure mask that he knew was there but was incapable of taking off. I want to want to never see him again but have a soft spot in my heart for the moments of his honesty and pathetic attempts at desiring to be kind but not knowing how.

I remembered his cock more than his face during Arcade’s show as she covered all the topics of every PhD proposal I’ve ever written in my head. The theme that struck me most was her ability to express the life-sustaining necessities of gratitude and optimism while debunking the neoliberal co-options of gratitude and optimism in our inescapable “integrated spectacle”. It is not an easy task to reveal the doom of our symbolic reality and still hold onto hope, and Arcade accomplishes just that with her enthusiastic delivery of politically evocative narrative complete with carefully curated theme music.

Too often, I see the young left interpreting any form of gratitude and optimism as being neoliberal without understanding that there must be a commodifying and privatising of services that provide for human needs to equate to neoliberalism. Don’t get me wrong, positive outcomes— either advertised as attainable if you sign up to this or buy that or sold to us as the solution to fix the human suffering that is exploited in advertisement to raise funds for most NGOs— are used to grow privatised aid. This takes social responsibilities away from the state and deregulates such into the hands of the benevolent owning class. However, not all optimism is neoliberal. Humanity makes that an impossibility.

Penny Arcade is beautifully human— contradictory and ultimately honest. If you want to learn the biology of how to think and even maybe think your way out of suicidal depression, go see Penny Arcade.

The ability to create enables potential for truthful revolution. We can move through the developmental cycles of feminism to sometimes even bleed together.

http://www.polyesterzine.com/features/bleeding-together-at-edinburgh-fringe-2016

Media: Arts Journalism, Poetry, Digital Illustration.