disorientations.com

Last Friday night, Tennessee Claflin gave his first ever public performance in Berlin at STYX Project Space. Entitled Sunday Morning, the piece took as its departure point the passage from Genesis 2:7,

And then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

This passage was scrawled across the artist’s naked body, only the word “dust” was replaced by “dirt,” as the audience soon came to see why. Entering the space wrapped in a plastic sheet and carrying a bucket, the artist immediately shed the sheet to reveal his nude, graffiti’d body. A projection of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir illuminated the back wall and a soundtrack of bizarre tribal rhythms and incantations flooded the gallery, as the artist proceeded to cover himself in dirt from the bucket, earth that apparently came from the cemetery next door.

After covering his naked body in filth, Claflin proceeded to writhe around and gyrate in front of the projection to the arrhythmic rhythms – a sort of self-exorcism dance rite that came to a halt as quick as it began, at which point the artist recovered himself with the plastic sheeting and exited the gallery.

It could be said that the performance is an extension of the ongoing self-created legacy of Claflin, as is the Tennessee persona. The name Tennessee Claflin is borrowed from a real-life familial ancestor, a rumored sex worker and radical suffragette who eventually married into royalty. That there are numerous parallels with our modern-day Claflin in this mythic story is undeniable. Sunday Morning is thus a tenable invocation of the Tennessee Claflin parable, one which also mines the artist’s own mythography as a subject debased in his estrangement from the raw matter of his born identity – as Mormon, white American, and Cherokee Indian.

What’s most compelling about the piece, however, is its elemental simplicity – through rhythm and movement and projected imagery, Claflin confronts the Christian dichotomy of corporeal filth vs. the purity of eternity, a dichotomy the audience must choose whether to affirm or reject.

All photos by Mario Dzurila, Copyright 2008