She Taketh Away

Allison Fall performing in ANTINOMIES: GEGENSÄTZE at gallery OPEN on Sunday

I saw two performances at galerie OPEN yesterday. In both, women destroyed their work.

Madeline Stillwell broke through and demolished the white box shelter that she had built for “hibernation.” Allison Fall filled and stacked the porcelain dishware she’d cast until the pile was so heavy that each new plate broke the one underneath it with the bright scream of china. They climbed on top of their Towers of Babel until they laid them flat, and both creator and creation lay mumbling on the floor.

Madeline Stillwell performing in ANTINOMIES: GEGENSÄTZE at galerie OPEN on Sunday

Neither woman seemed to have much regard for keeping her body intact. Boundaries between work and worker were breached through Madeline’s covering herself in the clay that enforced her structure and gargling clay water. Allison covered herself and her sculptures in coco bean pigment and spit up porcelain goo. The body’s fate was locked in with that of the work and it was clear that the entropy of each piece would play out until there was no more energy to work through. When Allison sat high up on a column of shattering porcelain, I couldn’t help but gasp as glass and flesh came down in a tangled pile.

There were aspects of ritual in each – especially in Allison’s piece. She started in a pure white dress holding a cup up to us as an offering and prostrating herself on the floor. Before she took each new basin of liquid porcelain, she would hold it up as if in recognition of a sacrifice.

We could think of these artists (or artists in general for that matter) as the creators of their own small universes. The construction of the sculptures was the generative half of their duties and what we witnessed was the part where she taketh away. What was white and whole became sullied and oozing. We came full circle and were left to wonder, what goddess destroys her children?

The answer, of course, is most of them. Goddesses from all over, especially in polytheist religions, are not just the creators, but masters of destruction as well. I see Madeline and Allison’s performances as a rejection of the pure Virgin Mary style maker who is at odds only with exterior world evils, and relating to the complex feminine archetype of the goddess who deals in life and death and doesn’t always have her shit together.

Since we are in Germany, we can look to Freyja. She takes care of the love stuff, fertility and childbirth, but she also commands the Valkyries who chose which men die on the battlefield and watch over them in the Realm of the Gods. She is a warrior but often finds herself broken by the long absences of her husband and is known for crying red gold tears. To cope, she finds other lovers or shape shifts into different forms in which she wanders earth in search of him.