Ursula Martinez’s performance pieces
about individual identity, roles and perceptions make great use of
intimacy. Sometimes this is visual intimacy as in her signature routine
Hanky Panky, a
magic/striptease act in which she keeps producing a silk handkerchief
from ever more private areas until, totally naked... exactly. A video
of this act is the fulcrum of her current piece. Before it, she spends
20 minutes or so reading out various anecdotes from her past. The
English half of Martinez’s blood is to the fore in her verbal
presentation: she has that cheery yet semi-apologetic air in common
with fellow performance artist Bobby Baker. Consequently, the material
she reads always feels light, and only a couple of seconds later do we
double-take that she is mixing humorous stories of her own childhood
with recollections of, say, her grandfather’s adultery or even her
father’s recent death.
The same affable tone runs through the second part, but there it is
much more problematic. After a video of
Hanky Panky appeared online,
Martinez began to receive fan emails, some of them being outright
sexual propositions or other fantasies. She now reads a selection of
these, accompanied by photographs of the senders (in one or two cases
thoroughly explicit). The lightness of the reading, together with a
selection of funny accents as if she were presenting a pervs’
Points Of View, keep the audience
laughing. I, however, was writhing. Martinez’s programme note complains
that these mails “stripp[ed] me of my ordinariness as a human being”,
but she either does not realise or does not care that she is doing
precisely the same to them, and moreover doing so in public. Her own
intimacies are hers to peddle; other people’s, even if sent to her
unsolicited, are not. That reading manner implicitly directs us to a
response of derision of these men. (All the senders she presents are
men. I suppose it is possible that Martinez has never received such a
dubious email from a woman, though given her own sexuality and the
constituency of much of her performance work I find it unlikely.)
Perhaps either the senders have subsequently consented or the material
is fabricated, but in that case the presentation is bogus. With
intimacy comes great power and, as the amazing Spiderman notes, with
great power comes great responsibility.
Written for the Financial
Times.