[Laura Levin, editor]
Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective: Constellating performance archives
Toronto, Canada/Chicago, USA: The Art Gallery of York University/Intellect Books, 2024
192 pp., 26 x35 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown
In a 2021 review of the Wetrospective exhibition, Hyperallergic likened Jess Dobkin's practice to "Marina Abramović on The Muppet Show”. It’s not a fatuous claim.
Dobkin transformed her breasts into marionettes in 2003, by affixing strings to her nipples and painting faces on them. Titled The Two Boobs, the comical performance featured a backdrop with two holes cut out, with the artist animating the puppet breast characters to negotiate “the complexities of their relationship.”
That same year, Dobkin debuted Six Degrees of Lesbian Nation, a puppet show about “the inescapable web of lesbian community”, presented on a hand-painted stage affixed to her torso - recalling both Punch & Judy plays, and Valie Export's Touch Cinema.1
Being Green (2008) makes the comparison clearer. Naked but for some green body paint, Dobkin becomes the quintessential Muppet, Kermit the Frog. Puppeteer Jim Henson is portrayed by Lex Vaughn2, her lubed and gloved hand inside Dobkin, as if operating her, while she performs Kermit’s melancholic signature song "It’s Not Easy Being Green”3. It’s both a live embodiment of a Joan Rivers joke about a promiscuous celebrity having more hands up her dress than Miss Piggy, and a heartfelt performance of a song about self-acceptance and the difficulty of finding a sense of belonging in the world.
Combining fisting with a beloved children’s character makes the culture war over Drag Queen Story Hour seem quaint. But apart from a few confounded Reddit threads, the performance did not seem to generate an inordinate amount of controversy. Despite the provocative nature of the piece, it mostly reads as sincere, and funny.
How Many Performance Artists Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb? takes it’s title from a joke often attributed to Performance Art legend Martha Wilson (the punch line: “I don’t know, I left before it was over”). The 2015 work is dedicated to Wilson, who appears at the end of the four hour long event, to screw in the bulb. I missed this part, because I did leave before it was over, but only because my partner was unwell.
I recall the epic performance as functioning partly as a retrospective of Dobkin’s earlier works, and both a celebration and parody of some of the tropes of the genre.
Her work will often refer to and build on performances by her predecessors. Annie Sprinkle invited viewers to examine her vagina with a speculum and flashlight5, Dobkin offers hers as a pencil sharpener6. Carolee Schneemann removed and read a text from her vagina7, Dobkin turns hers into a “Clown Car”, from which she removes a procession of tampon-like clowns8.
The exhibition Wetrospective continues this irreverent approach of addressing often sensitive subject matter (trauma, mental illness, sexual violence, etc.) with a lightness of touch and an abundance of humour.
Museum retrospectives have a bad track record of failing Performance.9 They are often sterile environments with photo and video documentation attempting to trick the viewer into thinking they were there.$ Or worse, they contain “performance residue” like some shaving cream left on the window or a disrupted mound of dirt. A mess that means nothing to anyone other than those in attendance at the opening event.
Wetrospective avoids these pitfalls by presenting a dense, colourful, immersive experience that takes over the entire space of the Art Gallery of York University, including the front lobby. It’s maximal, gaudy and playful. A disco ball vulva illuminates the room, which is soundtracked by upbeat dance and circus music.
Rather than simply transpose a live medium into a static exhibition space, the artist and curator Emelie Chhangur clearly tasked themselves with finding novel ways to overcome the temporal limitations.
Instead of works in vitrines, the exhibition employs latrines - pink Porta-Potties repurposed to present some of the same ideas Dobkin explored in her signature performances.
For example, Lactation Jane refers to the artist’s breakout work, The Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar, from 2006. Inspired by her inability to breastfeed her child10, the performance involved serving guests human breast milk in shot glasses, while audio interviews of the milk donors played on nearby monitors. The work garnered international press coverage and reportedly prompted Health Canada to issue a national warning against the online sale of human breast milk.
Newsstand Jane refers to a year-long public project in a Toronto subway station. At her own expense, Dobkin took out a year-long lease for a disused newsstand kiosk and maintained regular business hours for the duration. Under Dobkin’s control the kiosk became a kind of theatre, hosting parties, readings and performances. It also functioned as a proper newsstand, selling soda, confectionary, tissues and Tums. Instead of newspapers and glossy magazines, the stand sold artist’s publications, such as books, zines, buttons, and silkscreened tea towels.11
Other Janes in the exhibition include Clown Jane, Poop Jane, Basement Jane and Dyke Bar Jane. A “free and confidential” confession booth from 2006, mirrors the domed shape of the lavatory displays of the Janes.
Wetrospective celebrates over thirty years of Dobkin's compelling practice, from cabaret performances to unannounced interventions.
I was always partial to her incursions into artworld gala events, which include arriving at art fairs naked or dressed as a clown, and attending Toronto’s Powerball in a menstrual blood-stained dress, or distributing business cards offering blowjobs for a hundred dollars to the well-heeled patrons in attendance.
They bring to mind the brilliant Performance Art scene in the otherwise disappointing Ruben Östlund film The Square: where tuxedoed elites are unable to mask their discomfort at the evening’s confrontational ‘entertainment’.
Wetrospective the book restages the exhibition in print. Designed by Lisa Kiss, the oversized volume features full-bleed colour images on almost every page, as well as writings by Chhangur, editor Laura Levin and a large cast of colleagues. It also includes illuminating drawings and writings by the artist.
Jess Dobkin is hands-down my favourite Canadian Performance Artist. Her work is bold, thoughtful, resonant, and accessible - deftly balancing confrontation with comedy. Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective: Constellating performance archives is the first comprehensive survey of her work, clearly produced by all involved as a labour of love.
The book launches tonight in New York City at the NYU Hemispheric Institute at 20 Cooper Square, on the fifth floor. Dobkin will be present, alongside editor Laura Levin and designer Lisa Kiss, as well as “surprise toasts from collaborators, conspirators, and queer luminaries”. It takes place from 5 to 7pm.
The title is available from Art Metropole, here, for $50 CDN.
1. Tap and Touch Cinema was a 1968 street performance in which Valie Export invited passersby to reach through the curtains of the makeshift cinema strapped to her chest and touch her breasts. The piece was part of her notion of 'expanded cinema’, works which replace the sequence of images reproduced on celluloid, with an immediate and tactile experience.
2. Lex Vaughn is a filmmaker, comic, visual artist, and musician (Peaches, The Hidden Cameras, etc.) She was crowned Toronto’s “Art Dyke” of 2001.
3. Apart from being performed several times on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, "It’s Not Easy Being Green" has also been covered by Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Van Morrison, Tony Bennett, Andrew Bird and countless others.
4. In January of 2003, UrbanDictionary.com defined the term “Sweater Puppets” as "(n.) breasts, specifically large, jiggling, bouncy breasts. Example: Check out those sweater puppets!”
5. In her legendary “post-porn” 1990’s work Public Cervix Announcement, Annie Sprinkle was seated on stage with a speculum, inviting audience members to examine her in an attempt to demystify and normalize female anatomy.
6. Jess Dobkin’s 2006 work Fee For Service involved gallery goers purchasing an unsharpened pencil from the gallery receptionist, who also booked an appointment for the sharpening from the artist’s “vagina dentata”. The sharpening takes place behind a screen and afterwards the participant is encouraged to use the pencil to leave comments in the gallery guestbook.
7. In 1975, Carolee Schneemann first performed Interior Scroll by extracting a manifesto from her vagina and reading it to the assembled audience. The text reflects on Schneemann’s treatment by male colleagues. It is the artist’s best known work, and one of the most notorious in all of Performance Art.
8. Clown Car is a 2008 performance for the camera featuring a cartoonish cardboard car placed between her legs, from which she pulls out a series of tampon clowns. “It turns out,” Dobkin writes, “that I like putting things in my vagina. And there’s plenty of room in there. I’ve been able to get twenty-one clowns up in there so far. But how much clown is too much clown?”
9. In Notes on Bendy Time from 2022, Dobkin writes “Documentation and archive are positioned antagonistically in relation to live art. They create tangible traces, evidence.”
10. Dobkin has observed “where I would have been quite shameless about breastfeeding in public, I felt apologetic nursing with a bottle in the open”.
11. Disclosure: Dobkin commissioned me to produce a newspaper to be distributed from the Artist’s Newsstand.
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