Find an event
Second Site
A performance artist uses a stand-in to work through her illness.
In 2004, Julie Laffin was enjoying a career that, by the precarious standards of performance art, could only be called flourishing. Constructing and donning her elaborate signature dresses, in colors from gray to blood-red and with trains extending 50 feet, Laffin collected signatures (Census Dress), kissed the ground (Kiss Piece) and became a living red carpet at the Museum of Contemporary Art (The Red Gown Perpendicular). As she entered her forties, she’d gained international attention. Then she started preparing a fateful anti-war piece.
“I was laundering 40 military blankets in my basement studio,” the artist and curator of the Chicago Cultural Center’s annual Site Unseen performance festival recalls in a phone interview from her home in Harvard, Illinois. The blankets had been stored with mothballs; the pesticide volatilized, permeating the studio with toxic fumes. A couple of months later, she says, this exposure was compounded by a hotel stay in which odor neutralizer was pumped through the ventilation system. “At that point,” Laffin says, “my tolerance for chemicals was gone.”
As with many sufferers of multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), or environmental illness, the exact etiology and prognosis of Laffin’s resultant symptoms are not entirely clear. Perhaps most familiar from Todd Haynes’s 1995 film Safe, MCS causes debilitating responses to low levels of environmental toxins. Patients face a bewildering array of potential treatments along with outright skepticism; the chemical industry has long lobbied against recognizing MCS, and the disease’s clinical status remains controversial.
Regardless of controversy, Laffin’s symptoms are enervating. Minimal exposure to plastics, fragrances and other petrochemical compounds leads to arrhythmia, tremors, blurry vision and seizure-like episodes. Seeking protective isolation, Laffin moved with her husband to rural Harvard. As she researched her condition, the Wisconsin native looked for an avenue to allow her artistic work to continue.
“My work, my life, my thinking was so focused on the body,” she explains. “I never believed that working remotely could be satisfying or comfortable. It’s my relationship with Clover that makes it possible. She understands my illness so intimately.”
“I’m the live body when she needs one”: That’s how Clover Morell describes her ongoing collaboration with Laffin, which began in 2007. The 35-year-old Art Institute alum resembles a younger Laffin, and they both describe their joint projects, in which Morell not only represents her partner but also strives to convey the performance experience to her, as verging on the telepathic.
For Site Unseen 2009, Morell will channel Laffin via Skype. “I’ll be listening and translating what she says in real time,” says the assistant curator, describing their contribution, Remote Intimations, which will allow audience members to question Laffin through Morell. “The audience will hear Julie as though she’s coming through me.”
Their piece is one of eight works exploring this year’s theme, disabling conditions. For May I Have, street-theater veteran and monologist Judith Harding worked with Still Point Theatre Collective, some of whose members have developmental disabilities, to create a shadowy waltz. “Over the course of three hours, their formal wear decomposes—or shall we say, deconstructs,” Harding relates. “Because no matter what your disabilities, we all face life in our skivvies.”
As Site Unseen continues to explore the boundaries of performance in its sixth year, this edition’s assembled pieces address questions with deep personal resonance for its curator. Laffin poses them in a tone at once straightforward and haunting: “If we’re not our bodies, what are we? If this is what it’s going to be like, how can I turn it into something worth embracing?”
Site Unseen takes over the Chicago Cultural Center Monday 9.
