A split-screen DVD (English and German versions: 34 minutes) edited by Mirco Sanftleben, pixel2motion was produced in 2009 – original material lo band Umatic from Hi8 source 1991.
Trailer 4 minutes.
Concept, performance: Tanya Ury
Intimacy, the split screen video and touch screen pieces combine material filmed in 1991 with written text citations taken from “Intimité” (Intimacy) 1939 from “Le Mur” (The Wall) by Jean-Paul Sartre, Modern Voices, Hesperus Press ((UK) ISBN: 1 – 84391-400‑x and Hanif Kureishi’s novel of the same title “Intimacy” 1998, Faber and Faber ISBN 0−571−19437−0. The Intimacy works are a homage to Sartre and Kureishi’s analogous works.
The visual data was filmed between Xmas and New Year 1991, in Reading, where I was living at the time. A male lover and myself engage in sexual activity filmed by camera on a tripod, the action taking place against an arbitrary heard background of the BBC1 television play “The Lost Boys”, about J.M. Barrie, the author of “Peter Pan” and TV advertisements for the film “Truly Madly Deeply” (directed by Anthony Minghella in 1990) and other programmes. This recorded bedroom material, filmed a couple of years after my own marital breakdown, was not originally intended for use within a public art context but I feel it represents well the sentiments personified in the Sartre and Kureishi texts — the utopian idea of marriage fails and is replaced by multifarious sexual practice in fleeting encounters.
The Senses – a collection of works:
The Senses: Play in Camera (sense of sight)
The Senses: Play it by Ear & An Ear for You (sense of sound)
The Senses: Ô d’Oriane (sense of smell)
The Senses: Zucchini (sense of taste)
The Senses: Intimacy (sense of touch)
more
1989, I spent several months living with my grandfather Alfred Unger in Cologne of the Rhineland in Germany and discovered the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s fiction in his library. Having read the Trilogy “The Roads to Freedom” I continued with Sartre’s only collection of short stories, entitled “The Wall”, written before his confinement as a German prisoner of war for 9 months from 1940 – 44 — he had been drafted into the French army 1939. One of these short stories was entitled “Intimité” (Intimacy).
“’Then we started talking; I wiped his lips with a towel and told him I was fed up, I didn’t love him any more, and I was leaving. He started to cry and said he’d kill himself. But it won’t wash any more: you remember, Rirette, last year, during that business over the Rhineland1, he sang the same old tune every day; there’s going to be a war, Lulu, I’ll have to go, and I’ll get killed, and you’ll miss me, you’ll be sorry for all the pain you’ve caused me. ‘Don’t worry,’ I kept telling him, ‘you’re impotent, it’s grounds for exemption from military service.’”2
“’Intimacy’ continues to explore the ever-fascinating terrain of psychopathia sexualis: husbands who can’t (or, as Sartre would presumably say, won’t) do it, and lovers who can, but leave a mess on the sheets. The sickly sweet sensations of a bare leg encountering a snail-like trail of semen have rarely been described more brilliantly – Sartre, yet again, masterful in his oozy evocations of the slimier aspects of life. ‘Intimacy’, the story’s title, is a negative word for Sartre: it implies nasty secrets hidden away, festering in bourgeois bedrooms or in the ark recesses of the psyche.”3
Just over 10 years later I ascertained that Hanif Kureishi (son of a non-practicing Muslim father from Karachi and an English mother4) had written a novella with the same title as Sartre’s short story. The features shared by Sartre and Kureishi’s “Intimacy”’s are marital breakdown and the flight into sexual compulsion. I have however, discovered nothing to suggest that Kureishi wrote his “Intimacy” as a tribute to Sartre’s original text.
“This, then, could be our last evening as an innocent, complete, ideal family; my last night with a woman I have known for ten years, a woman I know almost everything about, and want no more of. Soon we will be like strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.”5
I was inspired to make a piece on intimacy and the sense of touch incorporating the writings of Sartre and Kureishi before being aware that these texts had been interpreted in film: 1994, Dominik Moll set Sartre’s “Intimité” to film in France; Kureishi’s “Intimacy” was filmed in London 2001 by Patrice Chereau (of the two films I have since only seen the latter).
“Kureishi’s (original) story, Intimacy, was controversial because of its fictionalizing of his real-life marital breakdown. The text was concerned, more interestingly and productively (than the film — TU), with the mixture of courage and cowardice needed to walk out on a marriage. There were unforgettable passages in it, such as the quandaries of middle-aged masturbation: doing it without waking his sleeping wife, doing it in the bathroom while trying to ignore the sharp pain in his side from carrying the kids.”6
“Discussing his collaboration with French director Patrice Chéreau on the film Intimacy, Kureishi comments: If our age seems “unideological” compared to the period between the mid-sixties and mideighties; if Britain seems pleasantly hedonistic and politically torpid, it might be because politics has moved inside, into the body. The politics of personal relationships, of private need, gender, marriage, sexuality, the place of children, have replaced that of society, which seems uncontrollable. (“The Two of Us”)”7
Both “Intimacy”’s were written during different epochs, the pre war avant-garde, modernist; and the pre-millennium, post-modern era. The subject matter is the same but the approach is in each narrative typical of its time; these are written by men from the male perspective but a female voice is included though its meaning and implication has changed with time. Sartre chose to meditate on the issues of sexuality with “Intimacy” in 1939 from an absurdist perspective.
“The stories in Le Mur (The Wall) emphasize the arbitrary aspects of the situations people find themselves in and the absurdity of their attempts to deal rationally with them. A whole school of absurd literature subsequently developed.”8
If Kureishi states that our age seems “unideological”, for Sartre the World War 2 years were spent together with his partner, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, supporting a group organising resistance activities. “The Wall” was written 10 years before de Beauvoir was to publish the quintessential feminist treatise “The Second Sex” on women and female sexuality in a man’s world. At this time the contraceptive pill was first appearing on the market.
Although the 60’s brought with them a liberalisation of sexual attitudes, in the West at least, a backlash has been underway — the demands and consequences of desire are still disregarded by the church (the Roman Catholic Church in particular, urges youth to remain abstinent before marriage and abortion is outlawed). So it is particularly potent that Kureishi chooses to stage extramarital sex as the main subject of his book; after all, the fears surrounding expressed sexuality since the comparatively recent emergence of AIDs at the beginning of the 80’s, rage just below the surface of any man or woman’s skin, whatever age, colour, creed or gender grouping they may belong to.
In all of Kureishi’s writings he frequently pays homage to classic literature; in “Intimacy” Jay the key figure affirms:
“How utterly the past suffuses us. We live in all our days at once. The writers Dad preferred are still my favourites, mostly nineteenth-century Europeans, the Russians in particular. The characters, Goriot, Vronsky, Madame Ranevskaya, Nana, Julien Sorel, feel part of me.”9
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Play in Camera, Ô d’Oriane and Red Hot Pokers are all pieces of mine where lines from two different pieces written by diverse writers have been appropriated and put together to create a third text with a different but similar logic:
Play in Camera (a video installation) combines lines from Sartre’s “In Camera” (No Exit) and Samuel Beckett’s “Play”.
Ô d’Oriane (a photo and text series) combines lines from Primo Levi’s “The Mnemogogues” 1990 and Italo Calvino’s “The Name, The Nose” 1972.
Red Hot Pokers (a video documented performance) consists of freely read texts from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Colour” 1950 and Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” 1924.
With most of these pieces I have employed English translations of the literary works. Red Hot Pokers has alternatively been performed in German or English.
Tanya Ury
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The restrictive mores and taboos surrounding sexuality in many parts of our world make intimacy a subject that, beyond its natural appeal, is still important to engage with:
“South Africa may be the only country in the world to have enshrined lesbian and gay equality in its Constitution, but a rash of brutal murders of lesbians last month has underscored how the country is undergoing an epidemic of hate crimes against LGBT people, triggering protests from Cape Town to New York City — including from an openly gay South African Supreme Court of Appeal Justice… Speaking this Tuesday at a meeting called by the student LGBT group Rainbow at the University of Cape Town to protest widespread anti-gay violence, openly gay and openly HIV-positive Supreme Court of Appeal Justice Edwin Cameron said that there is ‘rampant inequality and prejudice against gays and lesbians’ in South Africa, and added, ‘We need to reach a point where everyone is protected in their lifestyles.’” Outrage at South African Lesbian Murders by: DOUG IRELAND
08/16/2007
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“Pegah Emambakhsh is an Iranian woman who sought asylum in the UK in 2005. Her claim failed. She was arrested in Sheffield and is being held in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre pending deportation on Tuesday 28 August 2007 at 21.35 on British Airways flight BA6633 to Iran. If returned to Iran, Pegah faces imprisonment and possibly stoning to death. Her crime in Iran is her sexual orientation — she was in a relationship with another woman. Pegah escaped from Iran, claiming asylum, after her partner was arrested, tortured and subsequently sentenced to death by stoning. Her father was also arrested and interrogated about her whereabouts. He was eventually released but not before he had been tortured himself. Pegah has a more than well founded fear of persecution if she is returned to Iran. She belongs to a group of people — gays and lesbians — who, it is well known, are severely persecuted in Iran. According to Iranian human rights campaigners, many lesbians and gay men have been executed since the Ayatollahs came to power in 1979. According to gay rights group Outrage ‘The Islamic Republic of Iran is qualitatively more homophobic than almost any other state on earth. Its government-promoted and religious-sanctioned torture and execution of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people marks out Iran as a state acting in defiance of all agreed international human rights conventions.’ A change of president at about the time of Pegah’s first refusal on Appeal in Autumn 2005 has since led to a more conservative and hard line régime in Iran. In 2006 a German court ruled that an Iranian lesbian could not be deported as she risked death because of her sexuality. The UK Border and Immigration Agency (BIA) have chosen not to believe that she is in danger if returned to Iran, even though the UK government are well aware of the terrible situation that gay people face there.” www.indymedia.org
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“A major component of Poland’s homophobic witches’ brew is misogyny. Abortion is banned, and there are a number of cultural and economic constraints on women and queers alike. Female artists who deal with sexuality have been hard hit by censorship. Some, like Dorota Nieznalska, have also been physically assaulted. Members of the League of Polish Families attacked Nieznalska verbally and physically at the Gdansk gallery where her ‘Passion’ installation was being exhibited last year. The work, an exploration of masculinity and suffering, shows a cross on which a photograph of a fragment of a naked male body, including the genitalia, has been placed. The League also sued the artist. Last July, a court found her guilty of “offending religious feelings” and sentenced her to half a year of “restriction of freedom” (she was specifically banned from leaving the country), and ordered her to do community work and to pay all trial expenses. When the judge read the sentence, members of the League of Polish Families packing the courtroom applauded ecstatically. The artist has been trying since to get the sentence overturned on freedom of speech grounds. Dorota Nieznalska’s conviction prompted more than 700 artists and intellectuals from Poland and abroad to sign a letter of protest that said: ‘The principle of freedom of expression has been totally violated. The artist is the victim of an ideological vision of a religious state, which the League of Polish Families is attempting to impose on Polish society. Civic freedoms are not established in order that they may serve one ideology. We all have the right to live and function in this country and to express our own views freely.’” WARSAW, JAN. 12, 2004. The Gully online magazine, 01.9.2007 Europe, Hope for Love in Poland? Gay movement grows in Poland despite far-right surge. By Tomek Kitlinski and Pawel Leszkowicz
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“…Much of the anti-gay sentiment that is sweeping Russia has been whipped up by religious leaders. Threatening violence against Moscow Gay Pride, the chief mufti of Russia’s Central Spiritual Governance for Muslims, Talgat Tajuddin, said: ‘Muslim protests can be even worse than these notorious rallies abroad over the scandalous cartoons.’ ‘The parade should not be allowed, and if they still come out into the streets, then they should be bashed. Sexual minorities have no rights, because they have crossed the line. Alternative sexuality is a crime against God,’ he said, calling on members of the Russian Orthodox Church to join Muslims in mounting a violent response to Moscow Gay Pride. Russian Orthodox leaders responded by lobbying Mayor Luzhkov to ban the parade. A spokesperson declared that homosexuality is a ‘sin which destroys human beings and condemns them to a spiritual death’. Not to be left out, Russia’s chief rabbi, Berl Lazar, said that if a Gay Pride parade was allowed to go ahead it would be ‘a blow for morality’. He stopped short of calling for violence, but warned that the Jewish community would not stand by silently. ‘Sexual perversions’, he said, did not have a right to exist. Lazar declared that Gay Pride marches were ‘a provocation’ similar to the cartoon depictions of Mohammed…” Peter Tatchell 24.5.07 Guardian comment is free -
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“Rabbi Walter Rothschild (from Yorkshire) was sacked after he took out a condom packet and offered this prop in the synagogue as an example of what Jews should not be thinking about during the special days of Rosh Hashanah. ‘They didn’t like my sense of humour’ he said, a little wounded; but he’s vowed to fight on and continue with his ‘impossible job’”. Jewish Berlin rises again — with Russian help Wednesday, 15 November, 2000, 20:20 GMT
1 “The reference (p. 97.) to the Rhineland suggests a date for this story, as the demilitarised area of the Rhineland was occupied by the Nazis in March 1936.”. Andrew Brown’S Notes in 2005 publication of “The Wall”, Modern Voices, Hesperus Press ((UK) ISBN: 1 – 84391-400‑x
2 P. p. 97 Ibid 1
3 Andrew Brown, Introduction to 2005 publication of “The Wall”, p. xvi ibid 1
4 The Films of Hanif Kureishi, Mo Shah, December 19, 2004 www.egothemag.com
5 P.3 – 4 Intimacy, Hanif Kureishi 1998, Faber and Faber ISBN 0 571 19437 0
6 Peter Bradshaw, Cinema, Arts Guardian Weekly August 2. – 8.2000
7 Politics of Intimacy in Hanif Kureishi’s Films and Fiction, The Literature Film Quarterly, 2004 by Cone, Annabelle
[http://findarticles.com]
9 P. 41 ibid 3
Trailer
Presentation
2012 (11.6) Tanya Ury is the featured artist with new works in the June edition online of Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, University of Alberta, Canada, with Videos: Intimacy, cement & dark room; a series of 17 concrete poems, the photograph Alibijude, Selection from the Who’s Boss series, and 8 photos from Soul Brothers & Sisters, also 3 photos of Occupy in Strasbourg, from the Fading into the Foreground series; furthermore 5 toned poems (sounds, music and sound mix Kasander Nilist) and a peer review interview (text and Skype video) with Claude Desmarais, (CA)
Publikationen & Presse
Publications & Press
Artist’s Writings & Publications
2009 (1.11) The Senses on the Arkadas Theatre, Bühne der Kulturen (Stages of Diverse Cultures) website Cologne (D)