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  • Cross-Currents in Water-Based Performance
  • Daniel Rothbart (bio)

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Klaus Dauven, Hanazakari-Matsudagawa Dam, Japan, 2008.

Photo: Courtesy the artist.

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Water is a complex and contradictory medium that is both innate and foreign. An intimate part of ourselves, we are surrounded by amniotic fluid in the mother’s womb until birth. Water constitutes sixty percent of our bodies but is also incomprehensibly vast, covering seventy-one percent of the earth’s surface. Our daily existence depends on this element. Chlorinated drinking water pours from our taps and cleanses our bodies. Dammed rivers provide hydroelectric power and we traverse oceans to harvest fisheries and trade goods. But water can never be fully dominated, and human attempts to exploit it have proved disastrous. Recent events like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (2010) or the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown (2011) contaminate coastal waters. Global warming causes worldwide droughts and portends devastating changes for the Southern Hemisphere. From the awesome power of a storm at sea to the gentle surge of a subterranean spring, water also possesses mystery. Unpredictable and hidden qualities of water have made it an important theme in performance, both sacred and secular, since early antiquity.

Shaped by wind, tides, and currents, and infinitely transformed by changing light, water embodies the spirit of movement and flux. But the formless, reflective properties of still water also have great potency. By revealing surface and concealing depth, water suggests a doorway to the unconscious. Narcissus became enamored of his likeness in a pool of water, ultimately consummating his love through drowning. Ludwig II of Bavaria, a great patron of the arts, emulated the Narcissistic personality disorder by drowning both himself and his psychiatrist in Lake Starnberg in 1886. Some thirty years later, the protagonist of Jean Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète breaks his reflection, passing into a state of poetic consciousness through a water mirror. So water reflects, distorts, and consumes. It embodies danger and uncertainty, movement and free-flowing associations, memories and sensations. Water speaks to birth through our emergence from the womb but also contains the seed of death.

In numerous cultures, water takes on a feminine identity and has produced mythology around the dangerous allure of water-women. Aphrodite was borne from sea foam and sirens of mythology were wild, sexualized half-women and half-birds who sang mariners to their death and represented the seductive and threatening qualities of feminine energy. Shakespeare’s Ophelia is a powerful embodiment of [End Page 2] the water-woman archetype. Spurned by Hamlet, Ophelia drowns herself in a brook, first buoyed by her garments and then drawn under as they become “heavy with their drink.” She represents innocence lost in an oppressive, patriarchal society from which her only escape is madness and suicide. Cuban artist Ana Mendieta sought to capture and channel this powerful feminine energy through numerous performance works that privilege nature and myth over male projections. In Untitled (Creek #2) of 1974, Mendieta floats downward in the live, burbling water of a stream in San Felipe, Mexico. Is so doing, she becomes one of her Siluetas and a symbol of womanhood, which, like the water around her, gives and sustains life.

Environmental issues such as sustainability, global warming, and pollution are prescient themes in contemporary art and performance. Uranium Decay, a video work by artist Eve Andrée Laramée, responds to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Uranium-238 released into the environment has a 4.47 billion-year-half-life, changing into “uranium daughters” that flow into other elements before stabilizing as Lead-206. Cross-dissolve overlays of men in HAZMAT suits interact with topographies, which morph into unnatural new landscapes, at times mirroring one another and then transforming into radioactive seascapes. Ultra-violet clouds waft over oceans and into water glasses, human beings, and wildlife. Through digital animations and the filmic devices of Sergei Eisenstein, Laramée builds awareness of the devastatingly far-reaching impact of human error in our time.

Newton and Helen Harrison are pioneers of the Eco Art movement who seek to democratize global warming information. If all the ice melted, oceans of the world...

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