Believing that “one of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later” with the advent of new technology, Walter Benjamin once wrote that “Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial – and literary – means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.” Dadaist art makers, he asserted, desired to produce in their audiences the effects which have become achievable only through the innovation of a new technical standard: film.
Photography by Miguel Libarnes
“In its aesthetic of excess, in its indulgence which surpassed pleasure and transpired into pain, and in its ballistic tactility, “WHIPPED” embodied the plethora of auras that comprise [the MIX] festival in one fell stroke.”
Believing that “one of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later” with the advent of new technology, Walter Benjamin once wrote that “Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial – and literary – means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.” Dadaist art makers, he asserted, desired to produce in their audiences the effects which have become achievable only through the innovation of a new technical standard: film.
Insofar as Dadaism, according to Benjamin, “sacrificed the market values … in favor of higher ambitions,” concerned itself with “the studied degradation of [its] material…” (for example, poems made of ‘word salad’ containing obscenities and every imaginable waste product of language) and; insofar as Dadaism aspired to be “an instrument of ballistics… (“It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality”)… The MIX Festival unquestionably represents the contemporary fruition of early Dadaist desires. Indeed, this festival, featuring primarily experimental film, demonstrates how the technological innovations of our time enable us to achieve the assailing tactility to which Dadaism aspired.
MIX NYC is a whirling flurry of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Taking place in what its promotional materials call “a honeycomb cathedral of queer ecstasy,” this impressive pop-up festival, now in its 27th year, features queer experimental film as well as installation and performance art. The great enclosure in Gowanus is wallpapered by impressive sculptures of paper flowers, rainbow fabric, mesh, tulle, glitter, beads, gemstones, video projection and macgyvered lighting fixtures. String curtains translucently enclose an eight foot box of pillows near the center of the apiary; Hanging from a ceiling twenty feet above, they form a meshy obelisk. Attendees garbed in absurd and indulgent ensembles — and some wearing nothing at all — lounge on bean bag chairs and cushions strewn about the place. And from a source I was never able to detect, surprisingly gourmet meals kept appearing all around me on paper plates, their delicious smells wafting enticingly hither and thither. The Dionysian drive is in full force here.
If the events that transpired as part of “WHIPPED,” a performance art piece by Whip Whippensten on Friday night, were inconsequential amid this flurry, they also neatly epitomized its chaos.
In its aesthetic of excess, in its indulgence which surpassed pleasure and transpired into pain, and in its ballistic tactility, “WHIPPED” embodied the plethora of auras that comprise this festival in one fell stroke.
An announcer told us, “The bodegas for four blocks in every direction are completely sold out of shaving cream, and here is WHIPPED,” and then it began.
A figure appeared — not Whip himself, but a master of ceremonies, or a matador, perhaps — in a completely transparent clear vinyl suit with ironic black outlining. The Masked Mess Master. The back pockets of his pants perfectly framed his butt cheeks. Face completely obscured by fabric, this executioner churned a great vat of something with the cadence of a milkmaid in an S&M dungeon.
Whip entered in a head-to-toe spandex bodysuit with only his penis exposed, protruding flaccidly from the only hole in his silky shell. He quickly disrobed, stepped into an inflatable kiddie pool and sat down.
Almost immediately the vinyl-clad master of ceremonies lifted his vat, coming to stand behind Whip who sat facing the audience, and slowly tipped the bucket forward. A sludgy, gooey seepage glopped down onto Whip’s skull. The goop trickled into his eyes. Stalactites coagulated beneath his chin and then plopped down onto his chest. In no time at all Whip’s flesh was completely suffocated by an oozing, mawkish coating.
A second bucket was poured. And then a third. With each new bucket — each a different color than the last — the human form beneath the mirky mire was more obscured. One layer of goop covered his eyes; The next filled in the socket-shaped concavity where his eyes had been… Until ultimately the ooze was being poured atop a swelling globe — perfectly spherical without the protruding traces of a human nose or mouth.
A video projection above his head showed a nearly identical scene: Whip in a bathtub covered in thick white gunge the texture of shaving cream. In both the background and the foreground Whipped rubbed paste on himself, spreading it smoothly across all surfaces of his skin.
From gray to orange, pink to blue, and blue back to a slightly lighter gray, the swamp thing lethargically changed color before our eyes. At one point he looked more like a candle than anything else: thin waxy trickles streaked his torso different colors, all emanating from his scalp, where a wick might have been.
When a paper plate holding a pie-like substance of an unprecedentedly foamy consistency was smacked onto Whip’s face, the texture of the whole thing changed.
A garland of paper plates, I then realized, surrounded the kiddie pool. A plated chocolate cowpie hit him in the face with a satisfying —fwap.
No plate in hand, the faceless presider spanked him, generating the same fwap, and gradually a writhing human form re-emerged from beneath the formless ooze that had been sitting there before.
The audience jeered him on. Some even joined in. Slapping and rubbing, they swirled the doughy brine of increasingly different textures, but decreasing colors — grayer and grayer with each swirl.
A firm smack, a spatter of paste, Whip was enjoying it.
At some point the smell of cake batter became overwhelming — had it smelled this way from the beginning but I was just noticing it now?
I couldn’t be sure.
The slapping with its Pollock-ing splashes and its dual sound effects of squish and clap! soon gave way to rubbing, which in turn, gave way to, surely the only possible outcome of this splooge-bonanza: Whip was masturbated to orgasm, his ejaculation a necessary and fitting addition to the creamy amalgamation in which he lay.
Finally, a great breath of fresh air, the Masked Mess Master showered Whip in a gallon of what, at that moment, seemed to the be the most cleansing, pure, odorless, and thirst-quenching liquid of all: milk.
