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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.
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Title: Toxic Titties
Show: Chinatown (Performance)
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