Leaky Bodies: Performance and Pain in the Work of Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau

How can I get any writing done while I’m in so much pain?

It feels like a line that might have come out of one of Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau’s works, but really it’s just one thought that’s going through my head as I try to write this article. See also: How can I write during a pandemic? How can I possibly write when there’s so much work to be made? I think about all the deadlines I’ve missed, for this article, for other writing, for grant reports. I think about the art I’ve made while unable to focus on deadlines: the amount of art; the kind of art. I think about Lum and Desranleau’s art, and I go back and look at it again. 

As an artist working in performance and installation, and as an artist with a bad body, I feel an affinity with Lum and Desranleau’s work. Disability and chronic illness are experiencing a well-earned (and hopefully sustainable) moment of visibility in contemporary art, though I think the art world is ill-equipped for the conversation. We’re better equipped to talk about it as subject matter than we are the realities of production, and of living as chronically ill artists, with which this subject is inextricably linked. The realities of our neoliberal drive toward productivity place increased pressure on those artists whose bodies are inherently less “productive” than healthy and beautiful and normative bodies. That pressure is powerful because it comes not just from outside the art world but from within it, where we like to think we’re extra critical of and resistant to such pressures. I take a nap. 

Les choses sont contre nous; things are against us

My own research has focused on performance in the absence of the artist’s body, sometimes using objects as stand-ins for the artist’s body. I’m particularly interested in Lum and Desranleau’s use of objects and how they employ them as performers in the work. These objects do not merely serve as stand-ins; they actively participate in the performance of the work, not as props but as characters and extensions of the performers’ bodies. In An Autobiography of Air (2019), the disimpassioned and nonsensical movements of the people enacting the work cause them to read less as performers and more as vehicles for the real performers: the objects that litter the performance space/installation. Even the costumes, rather than adorning the people, are performers filled out by the instruments that would manipulate their movement through space. Considering the artists’ concept of object agency brings to mind Resistentialism and its slogan, “les choses sont contre nous.” A parody of existentialism, humourist Paul Jennings invented the philosophy to describe a world in which inanimate objects hold ill will toward humans. In “The Plot Against People,” Russell Baker expanded on Resistentialism, classifying objects into three major categories: those that don’t work, those that break down, and those that get lost. The recurring themes of entropy, failure, and the grotesque in Lum and Desranleau’s work map well over this philosophy. 

In conversation with the artists about their relationship to object agency, they elaborated on their history with materials and their performative potential:

Lum: I’ve personally never encountered Resistentialism until this very moment, which is interesting and surprising as I’ve been so embedded in various readings on object and material agency. It doesn’t describe the relation we’ve developed with our materials, though I can recognize some of our very early frustrations in the days when we had started screen printing posters in large volume, and it seemed like we were often fighting against the limitations of the medium or the weather. We very quickly embraced a philosophy of “good enough” and started to make our posters in consequence, so that if the paper or ink “did what it wanted to,” we would still get satisfying results. Years later, as we moved into doing installation, we continued to push this idea, that each material had its inherent and often shifting properties, and it was best for our sanity to embrace that and plan for different possibilities. It’s been useful for us, both in shifting material and beginning to work with interpreters, to choose certain materials, processes, or even people for what they already do well and find where our intentions meet, rather than impose our own will. We’ve long posited our materials and objects as collaborators, and I’d say the further we get in our practice, the more familiar we are with their habits, and also the more space we can allow them to surprise us and suggest new takes.

Desranleau: It’s interesting as a concept, Resistentialism, as it does connect strongly with Thing Theory in a way—although Bill Brown doesn’t essentialize our relationships with things to antagonism, but he writes that we discover their essence or their broader reality when objects—and I loosely quote here—break down or don’t behave the way they were programmed. In 2015, when we really started working with performers in our works, one workshopping method to write choreography was to have performers discover reactions, movements, correlations to the props we were giving them, outside seemingly “normal usages” they could associate with them depending on their shape or material. The idea was to provoke a level of unpredictability in the reaction of the human performers that was similar to the unpredictability in shape/reaction from the objects themselves. This was indeed a sort of working and compositional method pulled from our experience working with paper as a main material early on in our installations, where even in the more controlled environment of the gallery, the breathing quality of paper gave us challenges to compose with.

So, the thinking issued from these processes really brought a new context and understanding about our collaborations; first, our own working relationship, but also our relation with our collaborative objects and human collaborators: indeed, the challenges brought in by our relations with others, instead of limiting us, allowed us to broaden our discourse and knowledge.

I was introduced to the idea of Resistentialism through the work of Cheli Nighttraveller, whose work has influenced my own theories of performance, particularly as it relates to the performance of objects. Of her work, she has said, “I have been given the potential to view objects differently, changing my hostility or ignorance to them into…’empathy.’ Through this objective empathy, I am beginning to appreciate and find a different measure of value within my current relations with the objects around me.” I trip over my cane as I get up to make a snack. I sit back down.

As usual, I’m exhausted

This line is, in fact, the title of one of the duo’s works from the series Stills from Non-Existent Performances (2019-), a series of installation works featuring printed banners containing text and photographs of performers interacting with various handmade props.

Lum and Desranleau’s biography references their interest in the “transformative potential that bodies and objects exert upon each other.”  I think about the tip of a knife snapping off after being plunged into a chest and hitting the ribcage. I think about a head making a dent in the pillow, which is flattening one side of the head’s hair. I think about going to bed. 

The line between human and not is barely a line at all. / It’s a porous line. / Wavy, starts and stops. /  Is it firm? Of course not! / Leaky bodies / mirroring leaky bodies / mirroring leaky movement / movements escape / and spread themselves / a line in the sand to be erased / by the wind or washed away by the tides.

Harnessing objects for their potential productivity is a way of circumventing the moral imperative to harness our bodies for production; there are obvious parallels between the failing body and entropic materials and installations. The concept of decay or devolvement as production seems to me to be particularly hopeful; it posits the productive value of death. Performance and video artist Mikiki has described his performance NSA (2019), in which sauerkraut plays an important role, as being about the queer transformative potential of rot. Seeing queerness as a rotting of the normative does not have to be a cynical or derogatory view but perhaps a liberating and productive one. When I heard that, I felt it so hard; I’m feeling Stills from Non-Existent Performances so hard. Queer theory and disability theory share the same roots and many of the same references; disability and chronic illness are often viewed through the lens on queer (non-normative) bodies. Lum and Desranleau’s early installation works are feats of production and installation, and of physicality. I remember my early performances and installations, how they too revelled in their feats of physical exertion. Lum and Desranleau’s newer works are feats of collaboration and teamwork; it’s a necessity that is also visible within the content of the work that has rotted their work into a celebration of failure.

How bad must it be to be pain instead of pain-adjacent?

From the script for Lum and Desranleau’s What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest? (2018)

Chloë Lum identifies as a person living with chronic illness. As is often the case with disabled artists and artists dealing with physical limitations of all kinds, pressures on modes of production eventually make their way into the content of the work; sometimes conceptually, as in their increasing relationship with object performers and expanding their notions of performance, and sometimes literally, as in What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest? From Stones:

I am always careful to not overstate pain,

to not overuse the word.

I know what doctors think of complaining women.

It’s not in my head,

rather it’s in my spine, my legs,

the soft fleshy bit

between my thumb and index finger.

I keep dropping things.

I keep breaking things.

My thumb and finger

each twitch and shake;

I look at them

I look at them as if they belong to someone else.

I look at them as if they belong to someone else.

They do.

it keeps me awake and keeps me dumb.

Keeps me slow and slow me slows.

Slowly, slow me so slow.

The inside of my skull is hollow and heavy.

I’m as heavy and damp as unfired clay.

I wonder about how Lum and Desranleau, separately, view their body of work through the lens of chronic illness. I asked Lum how chronic illness changes her relationship to making, both as an individual and as part of a collaborative duo.

Lum: Living with chronic illness has changed my art making and life in many ways, largely in that I have gone from being a strong, physically capable person with lots of energy and the ability to spend long hours at the studio to being someone who is often too unwell to work at all; and even when I am well, just the trip to get to the studio will often leave me completely exhausted. I think it was largely to adapt to this, and largely to adapt to collaborating at a distance when I was in Toronto for grad school, that we started working a lot more with text, scripts, and scores, and working a lot more with interpreters and technicians. I’ve found working from text, from directions, from music, has allowed me to shift to doing much of my work at home and then complementing it with shorter bursts in the studio. Working on performance, both live and for video and photography, transfers a lot of the intense physical labour I did in the studio and gallery to highly capable performers, and both of us can take a more directorial role. There [are] definitely giant advantages for me in working in video or photography, in that we can stop time between tasks. I’ve found it to be a lot more flexible than presenting live works. 

Yannick, what is your relationship to the art in the context of chronic illness?  

Desranleau: A major impact of chronic illness in our daily production routine has been the frequent contribution of studio assistants in the fabrication of our work, to alleviate some of the physical tasks I have to do now that Chloë can’t collaborate on this aspect. As much as we found ways to diminish or limit direct physicality in the production of our work of late, by introducing video and photography, outsourcing production, and re-using previous props (which we consider “recurrent actors” stepping into new roles every time they get recast into a new body of work), a lot of it still has to happen in the studio. The changes in our sculpture production methods allow for this kind of collaborative handiwork: the shapes, surfaces, and blobs that populate our installations are made in a way so it can accommodate the hand of any maker, despite keeping in line with our signature aesthetic.

Is there a way you two conceptualize your larger body of work through a lens of chronic illness, rather than just work which takes it as explicit subject matter?

Lum: As far as the role of chronic illness in our work, I’ve found a lot of interesting parallels with becoming ill, and having my body become foreign to me, spending a lot of time in medical environments with our interests in decay as a form of material performance. I really relate to objects and materials under stress, though I’m not sure how legible this is for the viewer or how legible it really needs to be. We never really sought out to have our body or work be about the impact of chronic illness; it’s just I became ill, and the parallel with our interests in the life of things and the influence of objects on bodies and vice versa was just too clear and interesting to ignore. 

How does chronic illness shape your relationship to audience, or your process relative to your imagined audience? 

Lum: I’d say the biggest way this impacts our relationship with audiences is insisting on accessibility in presenting our work. I’ve found it extremely frustrating and alienating to see video art where there is either no seating, or the seating is uncomfortable or is a cushion on the ground. Same with the seating or lack thereof at many performance events and venues. It’s extremely humiliating to have to sit on the floor and not be able to get back up unassisted, and it will cause a symptom flare for me over time. I think a lot of art and performance spaces still don’t think about accessibility for people with chronic pain or reduced mobility. There are these very narrow ideas of what accessibility is and a lot of things get overlooked.

I insert a placeholder for the conversation above, resolving to finish it tomorrow. I go to bed. 

How do you know if your body is toxic?

Bridget Moser’s recent exhibition “My crops are dying but my body persists” contains the line, “We’re living on this meaningless island and I think it’s getting sick. Maybe it’s already very unwell. How do you know if your body is toxic?” Her use of ridiculous objects manipulated by the body to create formal compositions, and her focus on failure, echoes that of Lum and Desranleau. I’m thinking about the concept of accessibility in their work; that accessibility isn’t all about the physical. Seeing otherness reflected in conceptual ways, in the subject and production of contemporary art, is an act of enhancing art’s accessibility to broader audiences. 

Like most of us in the arts, Lum and Desranleau have had their fingers in many art world pies, known for years primarily for their two-person screenprint poster design collective Seripop, and for their noise rock band AIDS Wolf. I wonder how their roles have shifted over the years if accessibility to a multiplicity of audiences eventually gives way to the need for one’s own practice to be accessible to themselves. 

Desranleau: Yeah, we are still musicians, but we act more as composers lately, contributing directly or as consultants to the music of our recent performances… As for Seripop, we moved away from the name to affirm our authorship, and especially Chloë’s, after we noticed that it tended to erase her contribution… Seripop is still “active” per se, although we associate the name much more with our previous design works; it is the name that allowed us to build up our contemporary art careers. 

We’ll rest in death / We’ll rest in days / We’ll rest in weeks filling every inch of space with all the noisy gestures that we make…

I can’t afford to be lazy, I can’t afford to rest. The stakes are high, the rent is high, the commutes are long and time is precious.

I take a break from writing this article to edit two other articles, and take a day to work on a small commission. I go to the doctor. I go to physiotherapy. I come back to the writing just as my cat curls up on my chest for what has become a rare cuddle. I peck out a closing sentence over his purring body, and close my computer for the night.

Cindy Baker is a contemporary artist based in Western Canada whose work engaging with queer, gender, disability, fat, and art discourses draws upon 25 years working and organizing in her communities. Baker has exhibited and performed across Canada and internationally, and continues to maintain volunteer leadership roles across her communities.

Feature image: Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau, My Need For Civility Impedes This As I Shot Harsh Looks Towards Those Who Can’t Seem To Follow The Rules from Stills from Non-Existent Performances, 2019. Inkjet print on polyester, painted steel, painted aluminum, urethane rubber; 238.8 x 315.6 x 114.3 cm. Performer: Winnie Ho.

This article is published in issue 37.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue