Pedro Morais
Onanism Sorcery 2021
Epidemic auto-sexuality
In the recent book Magic, from the thematic series Documents of Contemporary Art - Whitechapel Gallery, Jamie Sutcliffe traces a constellation of influences that capture artists' renewed interest in magic, witchcraft, shamanism or queer spirituality. Rather than a blissful attempt to re-enchant art, he considers these artistic practices to be part of an interest in the self-organization of care, inscribed in a counter-history of feminist and queer practices (from the Weird Sisters to the Radical Faeries) against the authority of the medical and psychiatric sciences (of which Florent Gabarron-Garcia wrote a brilliant alternative version in his Popular History of Psychoanalysis). This is part of a long history of the shadow, the repressed and the exclusions of Western rationality, which has often called these practices "esoteric" or "New Age", keeping track of an overhang towards non-Western cultures or a contempt for the role of affects. This paradigm of "critical magic" has been the subject of many recent exhibitions: "NEO-PAGAN-BITCH-WITCH! ", Organized by the artists Lucy Stein and France-Lise McGurn (Evelyn Yard, London, 2016), the conference" Witchy Methodologies" organized by the artist Anna Bunting-Branch (ICA, London, 2017)," Possessed " curated by Vincent Honoré (MO.CO., Montpellier, 2020)," Sâr Dubnotal" by Céline Poulin and Damien Delille (CAC Brétigny, 2020) or "Bonaventure", the 2021 Ricard Prize chosen by Lilou Vidal. Vincent Honoré's exhibition in particular brought out the importance of thinking the body, those "resistant and excluded" whose ritual power to appropriate what is deviant "only has meaning when performed". Laura Gozlan's "Youth Enhancement Systems" video series (2019) incorporated this exhibition with a staging of herself, in a female character with a transgender voice, in a trance state, smoking a water pipe coming out of 'a mummified head - the artist summoned at the same time the fantasy of immortality, the industry of slowing down the age process and the parallel communities of the darknet (which make indistinct the border between reality and fiction around "zombie drugs" with devastating effects on the body). It would be tempting to associate this character with one of the major figures of the current feminist struggle - the witch - but the very precise interest of Laura Gozlan for the contemporary vocabulary of the technologies of the body and the post-human of the necropolitic industries, brings her closer to the figure of the cyborg. What is immediately striking is her ability to not place herself above her subjects, with judgment as a result. Laura Gozlan seems to let herself be sucked in by her objects and experience them, which gives her works a contaminated, impure character that does not allow for peaceful reading. Her work lies within the disorder.
During her exhibition at 40mcube, her character, MUM, appears to have aged, summoning an old age hated both by representations of healthy culture and a young bloodthirsty art world. Moreover, by associating old age with desire, sexuality and the libidinal autonomy of older women, the subject then becomes unbearable. Laura Gozlan frontally tackles one of the most enduring taboos in patriarchal culture: female masturbation. But we must rather think here of an auto-sexuality freed from all the classic patterns of heteronormativity: a non-human erotic that unfolds in surfaces, materials and objects, without an imposed quest for productivity, reproducibility or climax (" beyond the omnipotence of orgasm ”, adds Gozlan). If the artist associates the character of MUM with the “monstrous feminine” of the theorist of feminist cinema and horror Barbara Creed1, it is through the overflowing figure of the “archaic mother”, who reproduces herself through self-generation and self-doubling, or through the figure of the female vampire, associated with lesbian desire, which arouses male panic of menstrual blood. If, for Barbara Creed, horror cinema has the capacity to generate a zone of emancipation allowing reparation by returning to the trauma, Laura Gozlan's video installations at 40mcube carry a power of affirmation, transforming loneliness into enjoyable autonomy. Taking an interest in Aleister Crowley's texts on "sexual magic" capable, according to him, of transforming the perception of reality, the artist reclaims this patriarchal voice from a feminist point of view. There is also a lot of talk about voices in this exhibition, on the premise that "language is a virus", as William Burroughs put it in The Soft Machine. When MUM penetrates the horn of a gramophone with her hand, it is less a question of a sexuality confined to the organs, to the throat, than of the invention of a "trans" space for epidemic, contaminated bodies. "When otherness is voices in your head, you can look for otherness in your own body," says the artist. Masturbation then becomes a policy of re-learning oneself.
1 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine – Film, feminism, psychoanalysis, 1993
︎Onanism Sorcery