5. ANTONIA
TRANSCRIPT
Potreto Hill, San Francisco, 21.11.12, 6:52pm PST
[Antonia Stefani switches on the camera and then sits down. She speaks directly to the camera. We see her face and shoulders.]
ANTONIA: I believe in perfection. There are much worse things to believe in. Take this video camera I’m using, for example. It’s High Definition and the picture quality is two hundred percent better than the quality of twenty years ago. In twenty years' time, I’m sure that picture quality will improve by another two hundred percent to the point where you can see the smallest blemish on my skin. As a result, I think they will have to find models two hundred percent more beautiful than the ones we currently have. We will need to breed them if we do not have them. Technology demands it and then delivers it, a constant process of evolution as we head towards perfection.
[Antonia picks up the camera and spins it slowly around the room.]
This is where I take my shot at perfection, a small ugly studio in Potreto Hill. Note if you will the damp in the top corner of the room, which my landlord denies exists. Note also the pizza box from last night from Pizza Hut; Pizza Hut will not be sponsoring tonight’s performance. Note finally the absence of any posters on the wall. I never really moved in. The same is true of most of the rooms in which I’ve tried to live my life. I never really moved in.
[Antonia returns the camera to its original position and then sits down.]
That was my flat, soon to be available for $750 a month. Not perhaps the ideal place to achieve perfection, but if you want to be artist at the cutting edge and you have lofty ambitions, you cannot expect to be paid well for your work, if at all. The work is its own reward, the chance at immortality. Immortality is of course now more likely than in previous eras, as the ability to save material has increased to such a degree that nothing in theory is ever destroyed. The irony is that with so much recorded work, an endless stream of dross, you may well receive the longevity of immortality but without the joy or the fame of it, forced to wander forever as a ghost in unread archives.
I used to be against the idea of a canon but as I get older and realise just how much bad art is created in any given era, I’ve realised that a canon is really not there for the protection of privilege or the veneration of famous old male skulls. Those things are incidental. Its main role is to cherry pick the best of art in each generation for the benefit of all future generations. Art isn’t a democracy. Anyone can create, take pleasure from it, but at some point we have to decide what we keep and what we praise and that can’t just be a popularity contest. Democracy is a popularity contest, crippled by its obsession with the here and now, and it’s the worst possible template for artistic endeavour. We should be arguing over what the best is, fighting for our favourites, aiming for perfection, rather than arguing whether the best exists and pushing ourselves to the front of the queue just because we exist at any given time. Leave that to the politicians. Your constituency is much wider than theirs.
[Antonia picks up the camera again.]
I need a cigarette, so you’re coming with me.
[We move through a corridor, then through the door of her flat, then through the front door. Outside, we see a row of residential houses, some with their lights on and others not. The street itself is empty and the streetlights are on. Antonia sits on the porch and puts the camera down by her side.]
I may edit this bit out of the film later. I’ll see how it goes. It’s a nice view, anyway.
[The click of a cigarette lighter is heard. Antonia smokes, talks, smokes.]
I’m sorry for the stilted delivery. It’ll surprise you to learn that everything I do tonight is scripted. I might take up a riff now and again and run with it, but most of this piece was written some time ago. I’m not an actress. It might be better if I was.
Where was I? I think I was talking about access. The opportunity we have, as women, to create art in this era is something we should treasure. It wasn’t guaranteed in previous times, so the fact we’re moaning about some kind of glass ceiling or not being able to sell as much or not receiving the recognition we deserve seems an act of incredibly bad faith. We’re not comfortable with the idea of competition yet, which is natural after being told for centuries that we aren’t even allowed to compete, but that’ll change with time. The real artists are in a constant battle with their own work, to make it the best they possibly can. This other battle isn’t about access anymore. It’s about success, which again seems a political thing to me. I’ve never had anyone hinder me when it comes to making art. I doubt the sisters have had many problems either. If they want to talk about the repressive regimes in Iran or Turkey or the way Catholicism works in South America, then I’ll be their fiercest supporter, but there’s an air of comedy about them evoking the same language to describe barriers to the arts.
[A teenager on a skateboard rides past. He raises a hand to Antonia in greeting.]
That’s Darwin. His mother is a liberal and wanted to make sure that her son was a liberal, so she named him Darwin. It’s a clever idea, but he’s started telling people he’s named after the city in Australia, so I’m not sure it’s going to work. He’s a good kid.
[Antonia picks up the camera and returns into the house. She replaces the camera in its original position and continues to talk.]
You’ll notice that I’m not wearing anything special for this film, no make up, no earrings, scruffy hair. It is important that you see me first as a human being, then as an artist, then as a woman. All are essential to the performance, but I wanted to strip away any hint of sex because the more easily distracted members of the audience often can’t see beyond that. Sex has lost a lot of its power to shock but it will never lose its power to distract. With that in mind, this is who I am.
[Antonia rises from the chair and takes off her top, then her bra, then her skirt, then her panties. There are a handful of scars on her legs and arms. She then returns back to her seat.]
Congratulations. You’ve got through the talking bit and arrived at the naked bit.
[She holds up a breast, then lets it fall.]
Nothing special, but then that’s the point. It’s only when you strip back every layer that you get to the heart of the matter.
Someone asked me a few weeks ago what was still taboo, if even the outer edges of sex are no longer controversial. Violence is the obvious answer, because it has no boundaries and smashes through the ideas of respect and consent. We spend immense resources suppressing violent impulses, while at the same time titillating ourselves with art that glamorizes it. We have reduced violence to an aesthetic rather than having an open discussion about what place it has in our modern society and our natures. It is rife in our casual language - attack, threat, abuse, debase, beat, murder, smash, terminate, break, crack, assault, the list goes on and on. This is how I think we are able to watch acts of extraordinary brutality in art because we have normalised, sanitized, the idea of violence.
Anyone who has seen my previous work will know that I’ve cut myself on camera before. I’m clear in my own mind the reasons for doing it, but I can understand if people see it as crass and over-simplified. The way I see it is if I can, in some small way, get people to reconnect with violence and show them what it is they’re joking about, laughing about, downgrading, then I think it’ll be worthwhile. If you want to enjoy violence, fair enough, that’s your bag, but I think that you then have a duty to see it as it really is or you will see rape, murder, war as just something that happens to other people in other places. We hide ourselves away from the world. America hides itself from the world.
[Antonia gets up and changes the focus of the camera. She returns back to her seat. We can now see her entire body. She rocks back and forth, then starts to talk again.]
That’s what I meant when I said perfection, not beauty. That was a joke. Perfection is realising something in its entirety. The artists who I most admire pursue their chosen topics to the end of the world and beyond. Sometimes they fail horribly, but it doesn’t matter because when they succeed, they are like nothing else.
So here’s my shot at perfection. There’s a perfect line from life to death and no matter what we believe happens afterwards, we all walk that line. Very few people get to choose when they die or the ceremony surrounding it because we’ve sublimated our knowledge of that absolute event into other achievable events, like dating, or marrying, or having children, or simply being a patriot, all of which keep us alive. Just as with violence, though, we are cowards and ignorant if we do not look death full in the face.
I am going to die for America. I’ve heard that it’s a popular thing to do, dying for your country, wrapping yourself in a red white and blue shroud. That man in Tunisia, when he realised the horror of his situation and the impossibility of change, set himself on fire for his country. What do we do? We criticise America, of course, but we do not despair; our lives are not full of despair. We live the lives of adventurers just like those first explorers, but without the same meaning. We change the world to a more palatable place in our minds, we tour, carefully we tour, we despair at the fate of other people, and then we get on with our lives.
[Antonia opens up a drawer from behind her and brings out a switchblade, which she flips open.]
This is my protest.
[Antonia makes a long but shallow cut across her belly.]
I’ve taken a lot of painkillers earlier on today, so you shouldn’t flinch when you see each cut. This is not about hurt. Treat it in the same way you would watching an animal being killed for food, painless, a necessary evil, and just concentrate on my words.
[Antonia makes a second, deeper, cut across her upper arm.]
The main flaw in our society is we have placed money at the centre of our moral framework. I believe in capitalism. I enjoy shopping. I like the idea that if I earn money, I can do things which enlighten me or make me happy, like going to the cinema or smoking a joint or playing volleyball badly. I don’t resent the fact that advertising takes up 20% of my mental space, because that’s the nature of the marketplace: the loudest and the most seductive voices enjoy the most success. Besides, I enjoy the idea that if I work harder, or if I use my intelligence, I can earn more money and live in a nicer place, meet nicer people. So I’d say all in all, I’m a good capitalist.
[Antonia stabs herself in the ribs, gently at first but then she eases the knife further until half the blade is inside. She then brings it back out. Her hands are shaking.]
What should be apparent to anyone barring the most selfish and heartless is a nation that bases its moral or ethical principles on the market is Darwinian in nature. We have infused our government, our health care, our immigration policies, our religion, our personal relationships, with money as a value system. We crush and suppress large parts of our society and tell them that it is their fault they don’t have a voice.
[Antonia slashes herself just above her left wrist.]
I sincerely believe that one day the outrage we feel at the slave ships or seventeenth century witch trials, we will one day feel towards the way we treat the poor in our own country. We’re even too scared to walk the streets of cities like San Francisco at night for fear they might strike back at us. The bitterest irony is that the system is so diseased and part of our subconscious that the poor themselves see their own annihilation as just. America is no longer a Christian country. It no longer has the right to claim that. It burns its poor.
[Antonia slashes herself just above her right wrist.]
We applaud ourselves for emancipating women, gays and African Americans, but what we’ve really said is come join our club. Conservative, liberal, republican, democrat – they’re flavours of ice-cream, not political creeds. Our writers and poets content themselves with empty critiques of social mores because they’ve bought into the same myth that we’re a heightened civilisation. America confuses money with achievement and achievement with life. You pride ourselves on our individualism but the difference between boy A and boy B is wafer thin. Your true community is money. There is no alternative.
There’s a video going around the internet right now asking the kids of America to campaign against an African warlord who kills and maims children. It makes me sick to the stomach that we play these games with Africa, this playpen of horrors from which we pick and choose to make ourselves feel better.
[Antonia slashes herself deeply across her right wrist. The flow of blood is such that she is forced to rise and get a towel to cover her arm. She returns to her seat but her speech is increasingly slurred.]
Here’s the line between life and death. Can you see it?
[She closes her eyes.]
I ask anyone who watches this video, watches me die, to try to understand one fundamental point – your life is more important than that of a homeless person or the life of an African child or the life of We have set the system up that way. The moment you realise that fact, [she shouts] REALISE THAT FACT, you have the choice to leave this system. It might mean leaving your nice comfortable life, it might mean doing without the lovely things around you, it might mean giving most of your income away, but from the day on which you realise that fact, realise it at the gut level, you will no longer be able to see yourself as a good person. If you can still manage to see yourself that way, you are a liar and a hypocrite. This country is rotten to the core. Enjoy your freedom. This is my salute to your freedom.
[She opens her eyes again and, with difficultly, slashes her left wrist over and over. She puts the towel over both wrists. She stares at the camera for two minutes.]
I didn’t want to do this. I had to do this.
[Antonia continues to face the camera but finds it hard to keep her eyes open. She lunges up from the chair at the camera but only gets a few steps towards it and falls to the ground, off camera. We hear her crying.]
Help me. Help.
[After a few minutes, the sound of Antonia’s crying stops and the camera continues to film the room.]