TQW Magazin
Claudia Lomoschitz on GOO GOO MAK by Doris Uhlich

Goo in folds

 

Goo in folds

Standing under the arcades of MAK’s columned hall, the spectators look at the empty space in the middle of the room. The body of performer Ann Muller stands out from the terrazzo floor of the social order – body norms coagulate in the museum. In Doris Uhlich’s GOO GOO MAK, the wobbling materiality of the human body runs rampant and animates the substance. Goo manifests itself in sticky consistencies, slippery with bubbling blisters, as edible jelly or mucous cell aggregates. Organic goo, or mucus, serves as a source of life in the form of a lubricant, protective layer and/or adhesive; processes such as reproduction, locomotion, defence and healing are permeated with mucus.[1] Even oceans and deserts are coated with a thin, gelatinous membrane not unlike a mucous membrane, that regulates the exchange of air with the atmosphere and protects against evaporation.[2] As a biological material, mucus combines the properties of liquids and solids. Mucus passes through the interior of the body and drips viscously from body orifices such as the nasal cavity, the auricle, the mouth opening, the respiratory tract and the sexual organs. Highly specialised mucus cooperates with the immune system and exposes the illusion of the individual. To think like mucus is to consider how mucus makes the complex composition and fluidity of the body possible.

Goo drips from the mouth in slow motion. The mucous realities of bodies are vividly palpable in GOO GOO MAK. An ideation of microbial primeval slime covers the museum and the spectators. In black plastic buckets, slime of various consistencies awaits the performer, Ann Muller, among the historicist stone columns. The unclothed body of the performer walks through the hall and takes a heavy glob of slime from a bucket, holds it lovingly in her arms and presents it to the audience up close. Later, Ann Muller lies down on the stone floor, goo becomes a pillow. In slow motion, her cheek and ear sink into the slime, which takes on body temperature. A dialogue develops between the slime and the body. Goo starts to think independently – body, matter and forces collaborate.[3] Goo as a co-actor wobbles beneath the performer’s feet and initiates a multitude of intertwining gliding movements. Goo spreads across the room and turns into a protective layer deadening the performer’s repeated impact on the stone floor. Slapping sounds of skin and slime echo through the room. The performer sits on the slime, slides across the slippery surface. The slime and her body manifest themselves in their constant change and synchronicity. Goo quivers on a molecular level, rises and falls along with the performer’s rib cage.

The body’s substance and the goo vibrate. An oversized lump of slime wobbles on the performer’s belly. The snot, the cracked amniotic sac, the arousal, the memory – viscous as slime. The independent existence of buttocks, testicles and bellies – goo. Fat and slime merge into slippery choreographies. The slime runs across the performer’s face and absorbs her shouts. The slimy substance sticks to the skin and becomes productive, revealing its agency in reciprocal resonance. “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.”[4] Slime as a viscous mass creates habitats, unfolds, collapses, coalesces. In GOO GOO MAK, slime provokes the emotion of disgust and reveals its social code and internalised rhetorics. For centuries, women were discriminated against as the mucous sex, and to this day right-wing opinion-makers intentionally use emotions of social disgust to exclude certain groups. Eva Illouz even goes as far as identifying “disgust as the key emotion of racism”[5]. In an era of social exclusion, examining the subject of mucus acts as a social bonding agent. A critical approach to the feeling of disgust allows the textures of disgust to be experienced first-hand in GOO GOO MAK. Social norms become viscous. The disproportionate accumulations of goo illustrate the fluid boundary between the me and the you, between the performing and the spectating body. On a molecular level, microbes and bodies merge into a community of goo. There are no goo-free creatures. Goo becomes an affective body, there is life in goo.

 

Claudia Lomoschitz works as a visual artist, choreographer, and performer. She graduated from the University of Hamburg with an M.A. in performance studies and went on to study at the Royal Danish Academy of Copenhagen and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she currently teaches. Her works have been shown at brut Wien (CUMULUS 2022), Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna (PARTUS Gyno Bitch Tuts, 2021), Tanzquartier Wien (G.E.L., 2021), Belvedere 21 (Amazon, 2019), and Kampnagel Hamburg (Induced Lactation, 2017).

 

[1] Susanne Wedlich, Das Buch vom Schleim, Berlin 2019, p. 56.
[2] Ibid., p. 220.
[3] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham/London 2010, p. 8.
[4] “‘Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.’ Interview with Karen Barad”, in Rick Dolphijn, Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Michigan 2012, p. 54f.
[5] Eva Illouz, “Disgust as the key emotion of racism”, lecture held at the virtual congress of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik und Nervenheilkunde, 26-28 November 2020.

 

 
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