The mute arsehole – Dum Dum by Ben Terakes
This essay was published in the catalogue that accompanied Ben Terakes’ exhibition Dum Dum at Locksmith Project Space in September 2009:
I’m panting. Then wheezing. My mouth is open and my throat is clogged. Stuck. I cough to clear it. A post-coital cough followed by a post-coital snore. Gargling and burbling. My mouth is still open. I can’t breathe through my nose. I breathe through my mouth.
Prehistoric art historian Michael Lorblanchet eats ochre and spits on stone walls to recreate rock paintings. He is painting a horse. Lorblanchet says that breath is possibly the most important part of a human being. Breathing in and breathing out. Lorblanchet says that when the stone-age artist spits paint, he is projecting himself onto the rock surface, and by doing so, the artist becomes the painting. The artist becomes the horse.1
Terakes’ Performance Stains look like orifices. Sometimes an arsehole. Sometimes a cunt. But mostly a mouth. The inkblot ambiguity of the Performance Stains lends itself to a uniting of all the orifices. An image that fulfils the engineered utopia of William Burroughs’ Dr. Benway who ‘believed it is possible to increase the efficiency of human physiology by uniting the body’s orifices in a single, poly-purpose orifice.’2
Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.
After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.
Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.”3
Terakes feeds himself tubes of paint and presses his lips against cloth. He presses himself against his ornamental handkerchiefs. He does not breathe. He does not spit. He does not puke primary colours ala Mike Parr. Terakes is not the ochre spitting caveman. He does not project himself. He does not become the painting. He does not become the all talking, all eating, all shitting and all fucking orifice. He just presses himself against it. He is a painted lipped caveman pressing his face against a cave wall. A sad clown failing to force his body through stone, leaving only an imprint of an orifice that won’t be entered. Leaving only a stain.
In his 2008 performance Sometimes I miss the comfort in being sad, Terakes feeds himself paint in a glass box and smacks his oozing lips against the glass, walling himself in with his orifice imprints. Terakes is watched by an audience’ that he has had painted up as frowning clowns. Pierrot, the embodiment of the sad clown, was a failing character in the Commedia dell’Arte who was struck dumb by unrequited love. The joke of the sad clown is that the sad clown couldn’t enter an orifice.
Terakes taunts his watchful sad clowns with his wet lips and orifice imprints. The clowns watch passively. The orifices that cannot be entered multiply. The clowns swig their beers and talk amongst themselves. Terakes is seeking to revive Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, creating an event where ‘there are no guests, no spectators, only participants,’ but it founders – the clowns are impotent. Terakes serves up impenetrable orifices because he knows the carnivalesque is spent – there can no longer be Bakhtin’s ‘victory over the oppression and guilt related to all that was consecrated and forbidden,’4 there can no longer be a liberation by degradation.
[To degrade is] to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into a world of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb and it is always conceiving.5
The carnivalesque is spent because the body’s lower stratum has learned to speak. It has identities. It has rights. It gives orders. It wants to be kissed just like any other mouth. Terakes wants an art that mutes this arsehole. Dum Dum. Dumb. He doesn’t want an art that keeps talking shit. He wants an art that straddles him, grinds against him, mouth open wide, inarticulate, drool hanging from its lips, dripping onto his. An art that feels. An art that fucks. An art that has disentangled itself from its poly-purpose orifice. An art that has separated the act of conversation from the acts of defecation and copulation. An art that is ‘becoming-animal’ and attempting to separate itself from language, as Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘Language is not life; it gives orders. Life does not speak, it listens and waits.’6
Terakes listens and waits for his lover in his cave, the quilt shelter (gulgong), a quasi-womb where he can sit in silence, finding sanctuary from the arsehole’s angry chatter. He carves out more empty silent spaces in his Suicide Deaths, performing celebrity lobotomies with a pen knife. Deactivating areas of the page just as areas of our brain are deactivated when we fuck and fall in love.
It has been shown that he area of the brain that distinguishes between the self and the other is switched off when we are in love7. It is cut out. An empty space. The gaping wound of a dum dum bullet. When we press ourselves up against our loved one we can enter their wound and they can enter ours. We can ‘obtain an imagined unity-in-love.8’
Yet when we look up at artworks hanging on white gallery walls we are hardly looking into our lover’s eyes. Art cannot fuck. Art cannot feel. Terakes knows this. He isn’t a stone-age stump becoming a horse. He gives us impenetrable orifices and impotent clowns. Leaving only stains and sketches. Mementos. References and directions to our own performances.
The morning after I wake with my mouth still open. I close it. Keep it shut. Dead breath. She is awake. She keeps her mouth shut. We press our lips together and soon collapse. Mute.
Terakes may press his lips up against walls but he still presses his lips against lips. Rendering his orifice mute.
1 Lorblanchet cited in The Cambridge illustrated history of prehistoric art, 1998
2 Pounds, The Postmodern Anus, 1987
3 Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 1962
4 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 1965
5 ibid.
6 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1987
7 Zeki, The neurobiology of love, 2007
8 ibid.