ORNAMENT
Suspended above the audience on a turning trapeze, McGlinchey’s mirror-covered body becomes a living disco ball —a dazzling ornament that both reflects and exposes. Ornament investigates the politics of turning the body into a surface: a gesture that both empowers and dehumanises. The thingification of the female body engages with histories of decoration, objectification, and the image of “woman as surface.”
Reworking Oleg Kulik’s Armadillo for Your Show (2003), McGlinchey returns the disco ball-body from the museum to live performance, shifting from detached observation to spectacle and desire.
“In Armadillo for Your Show Kulik pursued his interest in the capacity of performance to strip the body of its ‘humanness’ by enacting forms at odds with humanness itself such as the animal or the inanimate. In Armadillo for Your Show he becomes a disco ball, transforming his body into a light-filled object available for public observation.
In this work I would like to follow his desire for objectification transforming my skin into a reflective surface, becoming a disco ball, a light show, an ornament. I would like to explore what the potential of this gesture could be on a choreographic level, working with suspension and rotation of the body. Equally, I want to revisit the gesture of ‘becoming a disco ball’ to explore the meaning it could take on today.
In Ornament I will enact the desire to become a generic surface stripped of context and I will seek the extraordinary through the body’s objectification (a conscious falling out of the human horizon). In revisiting this gesture I would like to highlight the predicament of desire and motivation in our times: One might willingly make one’s body available for and seek out objectification and, at once, be alienated by doing so.
Ornament is een productie van Kunstenwerkplaats. Gemaakt in opdracht van Horst Arts & Music en later gepresenteerd op KAPUT in de Filipijnen.