One Way To Form A Bond 2006
| One Way To Form A Bond is a performance exploring the bond which purportedly exists between a man and their gun, and in relation to that, investigating the nature of my own attraction to weapons and military culture. My goal in One Way To Form A Bond was to stage a complicated and compromised version of a bonding ritual which would question the sexualized, hetero-masculinist culture around guns. Beginning in a tent and then moving into the crowd, this performance worked through an escalating series of caresses—rubbing the butt and barrel of the weapon, working my mouth over its parts—sustaining a forced eroticism as far as I could take it. My display of desire and attempted gratification described an absurd relationship with the weapon, and through its explicit physicality, placed the audience in a position of uncomfortable, complicit involvement in my actions. Rather than taking possession and ownership of the weapon to establish power over the audience, my interaction with the weapon compromised my position, inverting the typical hierarchy surrounding the weapon |
In lieu of other means of forming attachment.
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This performance was part of the Sundown Salon #27, the middle event of our three cities show, Where.