Drawing on the canon of queer and radical feminist
performance art, Lauren Barri Holstein’s Notorious
at the Barbican Centre is a slap in the face of convention. Alternatively known
as ‘The Famous’, Holstein pushes, prods and (literally) pisses on formal
representations of the female body in an anarchic, brash cacophony of saccharine
pop, feathers and vaginal secretions; foregrounding the abject.
The stage is a greyscale, decadent assembly of chandeliers
and velvet drapes soundtrack to a looped clip of a crackling gramophone. Nestled
in the Barbican’s basement Pit theatre, Notorious
is tucked away sub-street level like a naughty secret, driven to the
underground whilst some lofty Shakespearean production takes place several
metres above our heads.
Notorious opens
with plumes of smoke and three witchy corpses hanging behind the weighty curtains;
humming and groaning in and out of harmony with each other. Ghostly legs protrude
from beneath uniform dresses styled from tresses of grey hair extensions. “So
there are rumours going around about me- have you heard them?” Holstein purrs,
in hushed Kardashian tones. Her face is projected in real time, luminous green onto
feathered curtains. The curious backdrop gives the projection a textured distortion,
amplifying her exaggerated features. Holstein parades the video camera, the LED
screen reflecting a mirror image back towards her. She confesses stories of
sleeping in forests, decomposing corpses and animals penetrating her vagina-
all delivered in a thick, breathy whisper. Her words are laced with conspiring voices, blurring
the distinctions of truth and reality in performance and systematically critiquing
her exaggerated gender performance.
She surveys the audience and thanks former students for
attending, momentarily dropping the valley girl guise to assume her reality as an
academic at Queen Mary University. Holstein convulses erratically, sound
tracked by Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop”, madly jerking at her pubis and imitating
a crudely explosive orgasm somewhere between twerking and electrocution. The final
flourish is a jelly snake emerging from her vagina whilst gyrating, gazing into
the audience and subsequently eating it. Holstein is unsettling, brash, and
quite frankly- punk as fuck.
Her wig falls off in the frenzy, unabashedly revealing an
exposed flesh coloured skull-cap that mutates her complex gender identity. What
follows is a series of shrill confessions, “I know that I can be a whore
sometimes and also I’m really sorry for being such a slut [...] last night I
snuck into your flat and replaced all of your garbage bags with female condoms
because they’re roughly the same size”. A grizzly series of apologies follow
from Holstein’s spooky minions (Krista Vuori and Brogan Davison), charting bestiality,
abused tampons and vomit-related blunders, drawing on audience members to
project their pleas for pardon. These become more and more farfetched, questioning
feminine exteriority. “I’m really sorry about my face” grins Krista,
maniacally. She proceeds to imitate her own suicide, hanging to her “favourite
song” No Limit by 2 Unlimited. After
a minute or so, Krista tires of the hanging and starts feverishly bounding in
time in to the music.
Holstein dons a squid wig and a dress made of beads and
braids that expose her bare breasts. Retrieving the video camera, she fishes
the lens between her labia before asking “familiar?”. Soon we notice an
artificial eye has been placed inside her vagina and Holstein twists her legs, making
the lips of her labia open and close imitating a winking eye. “Vaginas are
hilarious you guys” she snarls, before placing the ball in her mouth and sucking,
chewing and spitting the putrid orb to the beat of Nicki Minaj’s “Starships”. Holstein
starts to deconstruct her fishy headdress, pulling it tentacle after tentacle
and smacking them against her own body in an act of voyeuristically motivated
self-flagellation. A lone tentacle flies into the audience, she kisses the residual
legs. The track loops and Holstein is suspended and bound and passing on the remaining
tentacles to her minions she is lightly whipped. Thereafter, Brogan is told to “incorporate
a lesbian sex scene” and delivers an x-rated monologue, fancifully inconsistent
and aligned with the male gaze of contemporary pornography. The absurdity of
the story reaches its climax as Brogan screams of being “furiously fisted with
pizza”.
Holstein is suspended again, this time with the cry that “I
need to purify myself”. She inserts test-tubes of coloured paint, confetti and coins
into her vagina to the tune of Disney’s “Let it Go” and Miley’s “Wrecking Ball”.“Are
you feeling better now? I’m feeling better” smiles Holstein, in-between gasps
for air. What’s interesting about all of the evening’s physically intense skits
is that despite the formal dance training of Holstein and her troupe, they are
thoroughly exhausted and breathless following each rendition; complaining and
swearing unrelentingly.
“You’re here so I
have to do something I suppose” she sighs, changing into her final incarnation;
a sickening agglomeration of a Lolita-style crop-top and skirt, topped with a
Rococo wig that she parades giggling, drinking soda and hula-hooping. As the
hoop presses against her diaphragm Holstein erupts with burps that intersect
her girlish giggles. She whines for want of a piss, spits out her mouthful of
soda, curtsies and projects a resounding belch.
Retiring to an armchair in the corner of the stage Holstein
reflects on her multiple forms, drifting between theatricality and presented reality.
“You guys, this is the real me, the pure me, I’ve been resurrected as a sexy
baby. This is how you should remember me... as I truly am.” This final form is
a “rebirth”, cultivated by the audience’s desires to witness a woman being
punished for her sexual agency because as Holstein rightfully articulates, “it’s
really enjoyable to feel pity”.
The performance culminates in an act of public urination over
a small heap of popping candy which Holstein eats (“I just had to!”). She submerges
her body in it, before finally assuming a highly dramatised “dead” pose, framed
by her two underlings as the gramophone crackle resumes and then swells into
Britney Spears’s “Work Bitch”.
In sum, Lauren Barri Holstein’s Notorious was born to unashamedly incite disgust. Holstein is no
stranger to hitting the press for her radical performance art, gaining
notoriety in The Telegraph in 2015 for showing clips from her production Splat! during her time as a first year lecturer
at Queen Mary University. Notorious
delights in Kristeva’s notion of the abject, and clumsily, stickily, meshes the
perverse with the intimate. But does it promise anything less? Of course not.
Despite critical lambasting from conservative publications, Holstein is making a
stern comment on the socio-cultural implications of hyper-sexualisation in the
post-modern age and interrogates the taboo and stigmatism that still pervades
the female form.
Notorious takes
the road:
18th November-Tjarnarbio, Every Body's Spectacular, Reykjavik, Iceland.
23rd November- Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Brighton, UK.
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