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| Generation
Airbag Suzanne Boccalatte Performance Space Gallery 6 February - 1 March, 1997 Sydney |
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Suzanne Boccalatte, |
Tits are the
most visible signifier of an embodied femininity. Yet for
some reason breasts have not inspired the voluminous
literature like other body parts. Perhaps its because
breasts represent a significant anxiety for a culture
which obsessionally disjoin woman as mother and woman as
sexual object. Serving as loci for both motherhood and
sexuality, breasts rupture the stability of the
categories they are meant to delimit: in one imagining
the breast is cloaked, covered by the head of a suckling
child, in another it is revealed and fully fetishised in
magazines like Hooters and Big Ones.
The domain of the fetishised breast is the territory of Suzanne Boccalatte's Generation Airbag. Within the pornographic economy where a drive to excess continually ruptures the parameters of the normalising gaze, a pert 36C (itself an oxymoronic construction) will not do. This is the realm of Tawny Peaks, Heidi Hooters, Terri Torpedoes and above all, Belgian porn phenomenon Lolo Ferrari. Generation Airbag is physically structured as an altar to Lolo. The exhibition consists of 16 mirror-finished bronze cast breasts positioned on the floor which forms a strangely doubled phallic passage towards a hugely blown up picture of Lolo Ferrari. In this context, Lolo's breasts are an almost perfect disavowal of the threatening mother - they are complete pornographic objects inasmuch as these tits are all sex and no reproduction. In a seeming mock commentary on Irigaray's fluid metaphysics of female desire, Lolo has had 23 litres of silicon pumped into her breasts, yet this bountiful fluid does not result in process only more product. Something that was once subject to the instabilities of gravity and chance are now stable, hard and above all big. By juxtaposing the brass 'prosthetic' breasts on the floor with Lolo's brazen image, Boccalatte brings together disparate discourses operating around the breast. Firstly, those of medicine in which doctors augment the breast or cut it off. Secondly those of morality which figures the cancer patient as victim and augmented porn queen as indulgent. Each brass breast arranged in front of Lolo has been 'branded', a name faintly stamped into it which can only be read closeup. While each name is carefully individual it nevertheless adheres to the objectifying stance of tabloid nomenclatures like tit, hooters, funbags or jugs. Thus in this altar to chest puppy perfection each tit can be read as a clone dropping off the mother tit or as a discarded body bit that doesn't make the grade (indeed casting 'imperfections' have been left intact). Either way, the strength of the work is the way Boccalatte brings together the disjunctions of pain and pleasure, loss and gain, mastectomy and augmentation, and consumerist discourses of medicine and pornography. Boccalatte's Generation Airbag is not a simplistic judgement on the 'horrors' of female disfigurement, nor is it a celebration of Lolo the feminist bad girl, whose hyper femininity comments on and subverts the braless, freeswinging, and ultimately maternal breast the 70s feminist good girl. Rather Boccalatte's work explores a tension between these 70s and 90s feminist discourses. Her work is not necessarily that of the rebellious 90s daughter rejoicing in the 70s mother's angst, but a more serious use of irony in which Lolo's enactment of the hypersexualised female may be seen as slipping between complicity and subversion to the same excessive desires.
Gillian Fuller © The artist and |
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Suzanne Boccalatte, |
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Suzanne Boccalatte, |
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