MARY COBLE’S BODY was electrically shocked repeatedly on Friday, May 18, 2007. She was hooked up to electrodes and shown images of both hetero- and homosexual situations that became progressively more erotic. Electric shocks were administered when she was exposed to images of women. The shocks intensified as the images became more sexually explicit, causing Coble’s hand to jump from the chair in response to the severe stimulus. In retrospect, she remembers feeling relief when confronted with images of men, since she was assured that no shock would ensue.
Mary Coble is a Washington, D.C.-based performance artist. This latest work, Aversion, was performed live, including a live webcast, at Conner Contemporary Art (a D.C. gallery) to a full house. Its purpose was to address the history—and, apparently, ongoing use—of electric shock therapy administered to gays and lesbians as a means of changing their sexual orientation. After the recorded performance (archived at connercontemporary.com/audio), there followed a conversation between Coble and Andy Grundberg, chair of Photography and Photojournalism at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, a session that gave audience members a chance to comment on experience of the exhibit.
This is not the first time that Mary Coble’s body has been the site of performance art. In a 2005 performance called Note to Self (which I covered in this journal, Jan.-Feb. 2006), Coble responded to a history of violence against the GLBT community by tattooing the names of the victims of hate crimes on the back of her body. This was done without ink so that the names rose to the surface of her skin in blood, a reference to the horrific practice of carving homophobic and gender-violent epithets into the bodies of victims. She has also bound and unbound her breasts repeatedly with tape, to her audience’s great discomfort, as well as her own. She has had the words “girl” and “boy” tattooed on her, again without ink, and then documented the subsequent physical healing process of these verbal labels. Nor is Coble working under the radar of mainstream attention: her Global Feminisms showed recently at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, one of several recent stops in New York City. Mary Coble’s body is also a queer archive. She’s attempting to enact and record a wide range of the social and cultural realities of being queer, from daily discomforts to outright torture. The unpleasant, daily experience of negotiating gender norms, somethingthing most people take for granted, is a site of political action for Coble. She uses her body to create a new kind of archive about the body politic. Points of suffering and agitation become proactive strategies with interesting political flexibility. There are clear parallels with the proto-performance art of the 1960’s and 70’s, which was also a response to collective trauma. Assimilation into mainstream society, once an impossible dream, is now seen as a double-edged sword, even as sexual, racial, and gender differences seem to create finer and finer categories instead of stronger political alliances. If electric shock therapy is no longer regularly practiced, coercion to disrupt the individual’s desires and attractions is certainly alive and well. After the night of the performance, video documentation of aversion therapy as practiced in the past is played in the gallery in the presence of the now empty chair. Joey Orr is a Chicago-based independent curator and graduate student in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
