The Prosperity Poems of Erin Scott’s Mouth-Shroud in '9/3' // Norah Bowman
An interpretive essay on Erin Scott’s 9/3. Generously donated to the Alternator by Norah Bowman
“I invite you into my private world, but you are also not welcome there. We can meet at the top of the hour and make love to the land, but you won’t understand the language I speak . . .”
-Erin Scott, “Cornfield and Buntata,” 9/3
Who gets to gaze upon whom, for what, for how long, and under which conditions? Can I look at your face as long as I desire? Can I see your wet mouth parting and closing and parting and closing? Can I watch your children fly above your private trampoline? Can I stare? I don’t know you and you don’t know me - what gaze is safe?
The very idea of art is about the gaze. Gazing back, being the artist whose gaze is celebrated, being invited to be a gazing spectator, being the spectated-upon person of “looked-at-ness;” in particular those of us whose bodies feel particularly looked-at, the women and girls and feminized bodies of this cultural regime constantly tangle and untangle our relationship to gazing. From Cindy Sherman’s glassy-eyed feminist self-portraits of the 1970s and 80s to Martine Sym’s queer urban 2023 iphone compositions, feminist art pushes the viewer and the viewed to swap gazes. Erin Scott’s show 9/3 works from the centre of the feminist gaze.
“The very idea of art is about the gaze. Gazing back, being the artist whose gaze is celebrated, being invited to be a gazing spectator, being the spectated-upon person of ‘looked-at-ness;’ …”
9/3, titled in reference to Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 parts (1959), is composed across three gallery screens. The first screen plays a series of nine video-poems with film shorts. In these films the viewer sees some of Scott’s children, the city and land she lives on, Scott’s wet face, and her own half-naked body. It’s already uncomfortable, knowing the show screens the artist’s breasts, face, and young children in the same room. But I figure, knowing Scott’s poetry and previous performances like the deeply awkward and gripping performance Truth or Consequences (2018 - 2022), that her show will ask me to do something or feel something I’d rather avoid. Let’s go the first screen.
FIRST SCREEN
Entering the gallery, my first decision is how long to engage with a video, a zoomed in shot of a shuddering flower on a 5 x 7 foot screen. The long pink petals have twisted into tubes so that they present as bundles of holes, grotesque, flimsy, and glowing with an early day light. As the camera moves, slightly, the flower is overlaid with the artist’s mouth. The mouth speaks some numbers I can’t quite discern. The number of holes in the flower, the numbers of screens for this vision, the number of bodies afloat in these flower tubules; I don’t know what I’m counting. Something is counting something, and the mouth moves over and through the rolled petals.
I ask Erin Scott what kind of flower this is, but she doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Fair. Whatever flower it is, it gives me trypophobia, and just as I feel I must look away, I must fill my gaze with anything but the many pink holes of this massive flower, Erin’s face overlay returns to rescue me from the sheer moist pink horror of the many tubed flower holes.
Over her face, the show is introduced: this is the 9, another overlay, text written in green marker on a portable whiteboard. OK, here are the 9, and this screen is one of 3.
I share my concern at the gruesome flower holes with Scott. She says the flower and it’s holes is meant to bring the viewer to sex or sex/adjacent thinking. Scott knows that the rows of pink holes, overlaying her wet face, invoke a feminized body horror.
the holes you want / the holes you shudder at
the holes that shudder / the feminized body as a body of holes
other bodies as other holed bodies and to feel the horror
desire at once as we turn a corner and enter the gallery
come to the
SECOND SCREEN
Turning away from the flower/face screen, I come into the gallery’s main room, to a a full-sized film screen. There is a bright airy shot of Kelowna’s Ben Lee Water Park. Water sprays from colourful early 2000s faux trees, Seuss-like spraying sculptures that tower over delighted children. The children are running in and out of the cold water on what must be a hot day. Their little limbs cut across the foregrounded wet concrete.
Overlaid, a poem, the words titled across the waterpark, and the poet’s voice advises on heat, and water, and fire. This poem, and others, call forth themes of climate change and forest fire, the fear of burning and the exhaustion brought about by months of smoke; playground water cooling the children frictive against the memories of burning forests.
Abruptly the film cuts to the artist, the same close shot seen in the first screen, but now water streams down her face while her lips open and close. The light is clear, probably noon, outside, bright reflections pooling in the in shiny streams of water along her cheeks and chin.
Scott is in the gallery when I first see this shot of her wet face. I tell her that i am uncomfortable with the water streaming past the lips (which are always wet) and how her lips part to reveal the gap between her front teeth; it’s too erotic, I can’t tell whether I like it or feel aroused or find it kitschy. Scott seems excited by my response. She says of course, yes, it is erotic, and I’m glad you are uncomfortable. That’s what she is going for: the sorrow of the fires, the concern at the vulnerability of the children in bathing suits at a public park, the wild eroticism of her own wet mouth. Nothing fits together, everything fits together. It’s climate change, it’s misogyny, it’s sex, it’s art.
The film cuts to another scene, beginning with a slow close shot of an empty plastic applesauce cup. I know this cup, I’ve bought, packed, and cleaned hundreds, as has Scott. It’s an object known to parents of small children. Being a literal piece of garbage, it snaps me away from the erotic into domestic tedium. The cup is overflowing with red jelly, and if I listen to the poem, I will understand that this jelly is animated, that it is pretending to be clotted endometrial lining, also known as period blood.
Summer is over, because the cup is sitting in snow, the crusted old snow of a mid-winter day that is, say, -2 degrees Celsius. Incoming, a little foot, the sweet fat of childhood around the toes, presses the red jelly into the snow. The way the jelly bulges up between the toes and out from the sides of the foot, the way it leaves itself all over the snow, embarrassing, engrossing, whether it is blood or jam; Scott’s animation of snow and jam evokes birth (of a child, foot first, from Zeus’ snowy body) and death (of all of us, our final jam pushed out of our bodies into the earth). Our gaze is brought back to the plastic container. It sits clean, mouth up, another upsetting hole, surrounded by the freezing mixture of snow and blood (jelly).
In another shot, we hear beautiful singing (not Scott’s voice), perhaps a child’s voice, singing a Scots Gaelic lullaby, as Gaelic words flow across long shots of sage and grass hills in the summer. These interludes of Gaelic singing break up the video poems, I can’t understand why or how they relate to the poems about holes and blood and children and Scott’s mouth, but they do feel like a relief, like a break from the struggle.
It’s summer again, we are in a forest, tall firs, twisted beach arbutus, that grey-green light filtering, and an overlay of a young girl running along a forest path, like a ghost, like a youth. Now, after the blood, and the breasts, and the wet face, I’m scared.
A coastal forest / i feel nauseous because / overlay /
it is overlaid with the figure of a girl running
When i see a girl running in a forest, especially a
ghost girl overlay, i just need to cry so BADLY
but i can’t
But all the girls and women and queers running
through all the forest and i just want to lay down
under these trees and sob
The film returns to shots of Scott’s children laughing and flying above a trampoline. i just can’t with their preciousness and the terror of their flying. I find myself rooting for them to fly off the screen, out of the forests, into the gallery, to be the viewer and not the viewed, to be the human and not the holes in the flowers. And maybe this exhibit is meant to make me feel something else, but I feel desperately protective towards Scott and these children - I know she has more children who aren’t in this film because they did not consent - I know her entire practice is about consent and finding ways for women’s bodies to live.
A title runs across the screen: “How Will Beyonce Sing Through All this Smoke?,” and the film runs the poem that I like the most from the accompanying chapbook and the show itself. And as the poem text comes across the screen, Scott is the poem’s Godiva, bare from the waist up, a red chiffon scart over her head, her own arms slowly pulling the scart to each side so that it tents over her head and neck and breasts. It’s like red petal, and Scott is the stem, her serious, damp, naked body sweating in the heat of the red light, her face showing and not showing as the scarf hides and reveals, hides and reveals. The poem mourns damage caused by “fracking and fucking for decades” - true of the fires, also true of our bodies, and the holes in the earth made by fracking, the holes in our bodies made by births and fucking, the red shroud like the red sky when the forests are on fire here, as they often are.
And even in this, under the red shroud, she parts her lips and closes her eyes, the red shroud winging back and forth from her face to the wall, like a red breath, and her cursed erotic teeth - another hole where we don’t want to see a hole - the hole between the teeth and the holes of climate change. Here is the gaze to the viewer being presented, withdrawn, withheld, and the viewer is challenged to look at the artist as the artist and as the naked subject.
Between the forest fires caused by rampant consumerism, the dangers of living anywhere in this climate, and the context of this film in Scott’s entire body of work, the exhibit becomes a climate-change-feminist-consent crisis. These are the crises of 2024, and of being a woman or girl or any-gender vulnerable person at all.
“Just like women can’t really consent to leg-shaving, skin-building, perineum-tearing in the context of the patriarchy; that’s right, art-viewer, this show is a problem and you aren’t going to walk away with a solution.”
The French anarchist collective author Tiqqun, in their 2012 treatise “Preliminary Materials for a Theory of a Young-Girl” theorizes the figure of the young-girl in western consumer culture as a “vision machine . . . [w]hat each of us does with this vision machine will show what we’re worth” (14). The chaotic elements of youth, eros, vulnerability, and power in consumer-ready images of young girls can be weaponized against patriarchy and capitalism. The young girl on a trampoline, in Erin Scott’s poem-videos, the young-girl feet squishing jelly animated as menstrual blood, the young girl voice complaining “I don’t want it I don’t want it in my mouth,” and the woman voice answering “OK Don’t have it then” harnesses the terror of the young-girl image for our discomfited art experience. It works, the images of Scott’s children work, and while Scott maintains that she has her children’s consent, we know that children can’t really consent, can they? Just like women can’t really consent to leg-shaving, skin-building, perineum-tearing in the context of the patriarchy; that’s right, art-viewer, this show is a problem and you aren’t going to walk away with a solution.
THIRD SCREEN
At the back of the main gallery room, a projector sits on a bench about 24” from the ground, accessible for people of all heights and reaches. Translucent plastic sheets and colourful markers are scattered across the bench. A small sign encourages visitors to draw or write on the plastic sheets and use the projector to show their work to the gallery on this third screen.
Visitors have produced:
[ Red flames
A red and yellow dog in a curled position, tail between back legs
A page of multicoloured squiggles, like chromosomes and stars and spirals
The unmistakeable energetic line vortexes of a young child’s drawing
A few portraits of people
A page with the word PLEASE repeated 48 times, large, small, in a range of handmade fonts ]
I set the page with child’s drawing on the projector, it lights up the screen, it is wildly comforting.
I see that the red chiffon scarf lays on the bench next to the projector.
It has become a living object. It has a Walter Benjaminian object aura. But no, let’s instead call it a Ruth Ozekian time-object spirit - it’s spirit troubling me as my eyes move back to the second screen, to the artist’s mouth-hole, shroud-hole, word-hole, over to the pile of translucent visitor drawings, and finally to the third screen where the child lines are projected, joyfully.
Norah Bowman is a writer living on the unceded territory of the syilx Okanagan Nation. Her recent book, Breath Like Water: An Anticolonial Romance, published by Caitlin Press in 2021, is a meditation on the complexity of settler colonial love and loyalty to land. Her next book, My Eyes are Fuses, coming out in the spring of 2024 with Caitlin Press, is about the life and art of Niki de Saint Phalle, Empress Agripinna, and Nicole Smith.