Review of ArtBound
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| Art Show | Artbound |
|---|---|
| Location | Jem Studios Bldg., Seattle, Washington |
| Date | Sunday, April 9, 2000 |
| Cost | $10 |
Art: a formal aesthetic applied to a pre-existing craft.
Bound:
Artbound: the craft of physical restraint developing a native aesthetic and thus emerging from the closed world of afficianados into the open world of artistic expression.
A man dressed in black vinyl pants and tight fitting black shirt paces the stage, graceful, watching the audience attentively. He's explaining the rules. "Don't touch the art," he says. "The art is not for sale." The art is a woman dressed only in a black thong, black high heels and black tape on her nipples, bound with hemp rope, hanging from the ceiling.
Shibari, the Japanese form of human bondage, originated centuries ago as a genteel method of martial restraint. Warriors who practiced conquest according to strict social rules used rope to hold captives harmlessly, almost gently. Even in this early utilitarian rope work, aesthetics were important: captives were bound with colored rope and tied in different positions depending on the seasons of the year.
Rope bondage develped into an art form in Japan in the 1950s. Now, web sites proliferate with artistic shots of women tied in difficult positions. One of the pleasures of Artbound was that, while it did indeed include beautiful bound women, that was not the focus of the event. Each piece revolved around a concept, an idea whose execution added to the artistic vocabulary of performance bondage.
James and Gwen: Japanese Style Rope Bondage
James moves rapidly but surely, tying the hemp around Gwen's long thin arms and legs. In a single smooth, breathtaking moment, he lifts her off the ground and ties off the rope. She hangs, breathing slowly, deliberately, her sculptured face the epitome of beauty in suffering. James lowers her, sweeps the rope into a new position, and suspends her again. Tonight his bondage is an athletic, choregraphed dance. His hands rest on Gwen much of the time, and even when he steps back his eyes never leave her, protective, affectionate, proud.
Bondage art is unquestionably performance art. A European tradition, performance art is rooted in Italian Futurism, which challenged conventional ideas about what constitutes art, emphasizing change, originality, movement. One definition of peformance art is that it occupies a specified enviroment for a specified period of time. It's difficult to censor, as it isn't obvious ahead of time what the art will actually look like. It unfolds in time: once the performance is over, the art vanishes. Performance art involves the audience with more senses than the visual. It's not just to look at, but to taste, touch, share air with, live through.
J. Pike and Micah: Contraption of Restraint
A man encased in black leather head to foot stands perfectly still, centered in a metal ring bolted to a frame. Micah exhibits the incredible patience of a bondage subject. The artist, J. Pike, meticulously ties tiny bright blue thongs through loops in the leather suit, anchoring the suit to the metal circle. When he is done Micah looks like a fly in the center of a web. The spider steps back, surveys his work, and then very slowly and gently pushes the circle, which MOVES, spinning Micah so that he hangs suspended above the floor. He hangs there for a long, long time.
The opportunity to watch six different interpretations of bondage was extraordonary. All presenters were masters of their art. Some were well known and appear in public frequently; others were hidden masters, emerging from deliberate seclusion especially for this event. Seeing this many performances at once allowed understanding to emerge slowly, not just from an individual presentation, but from a growing comprehension of the aggregate.
For example, it became apparent that the element of time matters a great deal. Some performances were brief, others lasted hours. The suspensions tended to be quick, while Micah lay trapped in J. Pike's contraption for much of the night.
My companion Ted noticed that some pieces seemed static, fixed in time, while others seemed kinetic, flowing dynamically. I suspect that the tension between the still and the moving is one of the primary dynamics of bondage performance art. Gwen is caught at the moment of suspension, while James moves around her, constantly circling around the still center of the piece.
Ice and Company: Concept Rope Work
A woman in a flowing white dress lies on a table. A man and a woman stand patiently while Ice creates elaborate rope structures around them. What is it? What's she making? At last she calls out, "Heave!" and pulls the woman up in the air. Suddenly the whole scene clicks into shape: it's a square-rigger ship. Ice unfurls a flag from her human mast. Out of hours of patient immobility emerges this dynamic moment of unfurling. The crowd laughs and applauds. It's the good-natured, humorous climax of the event.
The setting for this event was perfect--the Parlour Room in the Jem Studios building, with painted walls, soft couches, red and black decor, candles in black candelabra, and Malixe's startling, sexy BDSM photographs on the walls. A techno beat filled the room with vibrant energy. The atmosphere was lush, close, visually sensual.
As an aside: sadly, this was slated to be one of the last exhibitions in this Pioneer Square studio, as the building is one of those scheduled to be converted from artist lofts to dot com office space.
But for now the night sparkled with a very special Happening. Spectators filled the room, completing the picture, decked in satin, velvet, leather, and mostly in black. The art crowd mingled with the fetish crowd. I ran into an artist I know, Jennifer Spear, who confessed she'd hesitated to come, fearing there would be violence in the scene. Instead she was finding that bondage art is more like a meditation. As a painter who creates glamorous images of the female nude she's had personal experience with disapproval of her work. She turned out partly to show her support for the event. "It's about freedom of expression," she said.
Daniel and Craig: Leather and Rope
Craig sits in a chair, bound, immobile, until Daniel moves him, just a little, and ties him again. Craig sits, Daniel watches. It's a silent, patient piece. Daniel loosens one rope, tightens another, infinitesimally altering the pressure Craig is withstanding, like a rock holding him in place.
Bondage is practiced not just as an art form, but as a human interaction which inspires emotional and sexual arousal. Members of private BDSM and sex clubs sometimes include bondage as part of a public scene, or even its main focus.
Bondage art is erotic art. Restraint is inherently intimate. The one who ties watches the one who is tied, breathes with them, touches them. Framing a bondage scene usually played out in a private sex club as art to some extent objectifies the bondage sub (subject, submissive). But for master practitioners the line between bondage as display of beautiful shapes and bondage as intimate interaction can be very thin. It can vanish in an instant.
Gary and Amy: Suspension and Rope Bondage
Amy has been up and down all night. Gary has been folding her, binding her, and hoisting her to the ceiling in a twinkling, where she smiles at the crowd like a soaring angel.
Now, though, it's late, the crowd has thinned, and Gary's mood is different. He grabs Amy and kisses her. "Are they going to scene now?" someone says in a low voice next to me. Gary's tying this time is a little roughter, a little tighter. Amy is breathing, processing the sensation, working with it. Gary blindfolds her. Is there an image of trust more compelling than a blindfolded woman bound and lifted into the air?
What impact do the artists intend to have? What stance is appropriate for the audience? Where scenes like this are normally played, in private BDSM and sex clubs, the interlocking relationship of exhibitionist and voyeur is necessary and clear. Here, the roles are different; the exhibitionist is an artist, the voyeur an appreciative audience. The rules are a little different too. The arousal stimulated by the performance is more visual than visceral, more cerebral than sensual.
Peformance art by its nature challenges the assumptions of the audience. It isn't meant to be comfortable or familiar. It's meant to challenge. It's meant to look a little different. A little scary. A little dangerous.
FetishDiva Midori: Elegance and Rope
Stunningly beautiful in a tight red latex dress, Midori spends an hour tying an intricate lacing around her boi's head. They laugh, sharing some secret joke. When she's finished it looks just like one of those nets surrounding a Japanese fishing float.
That's not her main performance, though. Eventually she begins to contemplate the space she means to work in. The most experienced afficianados in the crowd sit to watch her, fascinated, drawn into her contemplation. What will she do? Will she pull it off? There's a bit of brinkmanship in her style, an offhanded grace. She climbs on a chair, asks for a length of board. The contraption she eventually fashions of bungee cord and wood allows her to send her boi flying through the air. It works. It does work. The crowd leans forward. Now what? Midori sits on a chair, pushing her boi with a high heeled shoe, holding a knife so that the boi swings toward it. Art on the edge. The boi is clearly gone, in another space, trembling, caught, immobile and yet moving, moved. Midori smiles.
James' enthusiasm for his art brought these six artists together for an unforgettable evening. The venue was appropriate, the audience respectful, the atmosphere sparkling and sexy. Tickets sold out a week before the event. By any measure it was a success.
His web site mentions that the event may occur again next year. It would be interesting to see a program in which the artists explained, even in a paragraph, the intention of their work, using the language of words as well as the language of the body to write their art. Clarifying with each performance the direction the bondage is taking.
It's clear that the Pacific Northwest is graced with a number of stunningly talented artists. Perhaps it's too soon to talk about a movement, the Northwest School of bondage art; but, should such a sensibility eventually emerge, events like Artbound are the venue in which it can grow.
For more information about Artbound and Japanese style suspension, visit James' website at: Nawa Shibari.
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