Vital
Statistics - New & Improved!
Once
More With Feeling
Tate Modern - 27 June 2009
Performed with Aaron Williamson & Marja Commandeur
Photos by Manuel Vason
Performed as part of an evening of feminist re-discovery and new work organised by The Women's Art Library/Make and Feminist Review at Tate Modern, my re-enactment of Martha Rosler's Vital Statistics (1977) highlighted the arbitrariness of the standards by which we judge ourselves and one another. Martha Rosler’s Vital Statistics isn’t solely about measuring up physically but about conforming in terms of life choices and mental attitude. More specifically, it is about women having to fulfil certain roles as determined by patriarchal western society. According to Rosler’s monologue, women have become masochists in their attempts to conform to society’s expectations. The narrator also states that the men who invented the standardisation of physique and the tests to judge and measure the body were trying to prove their own race’s/gender’s superiority. In this sense the measurements are arbitrary. I find the standards by which disabled people are judged when they go into the public realm have no relation to who they actually are and are therefore also biased. For this piece, I worked with my regular collaborators Aaron Williamson and Marja Commandeur to create a farcical, uproarious re-enactment of Vital Statistics informed by contemporary disability black humour.