Description of my reconstruction of the 7000 year old Woman piece for Oriana Fox's "Once More with Feeling" Show

7000 Year Old Woman
Blurb for Oriana Fox's accompanying Pamphlet to the exhibition by Me, Lucy Thane:
Once More with Feeling, Tate Modern June 27th 2009

The Sculptor Betsy Damon created the 7000 Year Old Woman in NYC in 1977. She wanted to transform public spaces by utterly disrupting the expected role of women within them and to try to imagine an alternative world experience in which the roles, behaviours and assumptions that define gender were otherwise or not prescribed.

She painted herself white from hair to toes (wearing white shirt and knickers and black lips) and had multicoloured bags of flour attached all over her body. Her collaborator(s) painted or marked spirals in sand on the ground or sang in a protective circle around her. The 7000 Year old Woman then slowly walked these circles and broke open or handed out the coloured flour bags attached all over her body. Variations on this theme were performed on a Lower East Side street, on Wall Street and in Cayman Gallery, also in New York.

My intention is to make a number of faithful as possible re-creations in equivalent spaces in London. These performances will be videoed, and if feasible, displayed during my final performance outside the Tate Modern on 27 June 2009. This performance will be my own interpretation of the piece based on my experiences to that point. I am curious to discover how my experience may differ or be similar to the original, bearing in mind that we are in a very different time and place and also different people. To my cynical early twenty-first century instincts the “spirals” and “protective circles” of the original performance seem so ’70s feminism. How interesting that I hold prejudice against my predecessors, and now that I have begun to rehearse the piece I am reminded of the perfect possibilities inspired by spheres.

Of course “’70s Feminists” were also often similarly nonplussed with us. People are rarely appreciated by their Children as much as by their Grandchildren. I met Betsy Damon’s primary collaborator, Su Friedrich at the Kitchen in NYC in 1993 at an event called “Punkilingus”. I met her in the bar to which she said she had retreated as the films had given her a headache; we did in fact establish that it was in my film about the Riot Girl band, Bikini Kill that had been culprit. The Spiral may be jagged and interrupted but is it not a spiral nevertheless?

“Jealous Girl Love” read the sticker left behind by a visiting Riot Girrl in 1993. How brilliantly honest I thought, but then I realised that the sticker had stuck to itself and as I peeled it away it was revealed instead to display “Jealousy kills Girl Love” My heart sank.

Women and girls are often suspicious of each other and mess each other up over and again and Feminist ideals are seldom lived up to for long as women soon corral themselves into cliques of parenthood or cultural identity. Feminism and other activisms seem to demand of their adherents a pristine absolutism that brooks no human weaknesses and contradictions. Therefore the moment one slips a little one slips away. In my experience many of my friendships with men have stood far better the test of time as men seem more often able to hold onto a consistent identity of their own. Feminism’s (and other ’70s ’isms) battles are not yet won though many gains have been achieved. I think that we could benefit from honesty about our sometimes brilliant contradictions and from questioning the hegemony of instantly gratifying but ultimately divisive and destructive identity politics.

I also acknowledge that I am heartily entering this work because of the Sisterhood my previous paragraph has possibly trashed. Thank you Oriana Fox, Betsy Damon, Su Friedrich. Thank you my contradictory Sistahs.