Clover Leary / Toxic Titties
Toxic
Titties is a collaborative group of feminist artists who have been
working together continuously for the past two years. Our practices
include video, performance, photography, installation, event planning,
and net.art. A central area of investigation in our work is the problematics
of identity politics. We perform different roles in each of our pieces
in order to produce an indeterminate subject position. Through camp
and hyper-performance, we denaturalize femininity's relationship to
the female body. The practices of 70's feminism, especially those
centered in performance and body art, have been a touchstone in our
work.
Toxic
Union (April 23, 2002):
This piece was an investigation of the types of legal contracts that
the Toxic Titties have access to, and what types of contractual relationship
are legally and culturally rewarded. Toxic Titties enacted the signing
of their business contract in the form of a wedding ceremony in order
to celebrate our construction of alternative structures that allow
us to access some of the same legal, financial and immigration benefits
as marriage. Traditional wedding ceremonies have the function of actively
involving ones community, drawing them together as participants and
witnesses of a legally and socially acknowledged union. This "wedding"
was a highly performative queer spectacle which brought together members
of our art and queer communities and asked them to acknowledge the
significance of a very different kind of union. The frame of the gallery
allowed for our Toxic Union to function simultaneously as a real event
and as a performance.
Promise
(2002):
This work consists of a 3 channel video installation, three silver
rings engraved with the word "promise", a copy of the Toxic
Titties General Partnership Agreement, and the invitations to the
Toxic Union. One tape shows an hour of us negotiating the terms of
our contractual agreement. This is opposed by a second tape, which
frames our relationship within the tropes of romantic love. A third
tape consists of us each individually reciting lists of the best and
worst things about collaboration, and the best and worst things about
being in love. The contract served as a way for us to negotiate the
terms of our collaborative relationship. The contract as a performative
document comes out of a tradition of male conceptualism, but the content
of our agreement is part of our feminist practice. This practice is
one committed to the development of alternative discursive, artistic
and economic structures which can sustain our work as Toxic Titties.
Camp
TT (2001):
In 1998, the F-word symposium attempted to bridge the gap between
the current generation of feminist students and the participants in
Womanhouse and the Feminist Art Program at CalArts in the 1970s. Because
the history of feminism at CalArts is rarely addressed in the normal
course of our education, the Toxic Titties felt that there was a need
to revitalize community interest in feminist and queer issues. Toxic
Titties is committed to continuing the legacy of the feminist art
program at CalArts, and expanding the discussion to include the whole
CalArts community. We are entering into a time of increased conservatism,
which intensifies the need for political awareness in all areas of
cultural production. This current cultural climate requires a different
approach to activism and politically motivated work. Toxic Titties
made a hybrid between a symposium and a summer camp as a way to present
our issues in a way that was compelling for the CalArts community.
We strategically used the tactics of pleasure and play as a way to
involve audiences who would not normally find questions of feminism
relevant to them. By housing Camp TT in a gallery space, we framed
this event as a conceptual art work. Formally, we followed in the
tradition of non-object based work employed by artists such as Carolee
Schneeman, Yoko Ono, Valie Export and Adrian Piper. We attempted to
use the gallery space as a forum for feminist discourse rather than
a place to house objects.
The IKEA Project (2001):
In 1994 IKEA aired the first advertisement ever to depict an explicitly
gay couple on American network television. We took the script and
editing structure of this advertisement and replaced the middle class,
hetero-normative gay male couple starring in the commercial with the
Toxic Titties. This series of nine 30 second videos starts off with
the Toxic Titties dressed as IKEA’s target market and transforms
with each iteration in order to exaggerate the original ad’s
idealization of domesticity and traditional constructions of family.
The second component of the installation is a 4’ x 5’
gilt “family frame” featuring six photographs of the Toxic
Titties posing in the domestic retail sets of IKEA Burbank. In this
Photo series the Toxic Titties double as an alternative family structure,
and a potential target market.
