Mutual Recognition System (Concerning Max Factor)
Mutual Recognition System is a live durational performance in which two performers enact an experiment by Max Factor, Jr. to test the lasting effects of a new red lipstick. In the 1930s Factor hired female workers at his New York manufacturing plant to test the indelibility of a lipstick called Tru-Colors through repetitive mouth-to-mouth kissing. When the workers went on mass strike and walked off the job, Factor created an animatronics “kissing machine” to automate his experiments.
Robotic human labour is emptied of its affective nature, and consequent anthropomorphising machine-automation takes on the ‘soft’ labour of the human kiss. The performance title references the contemporary microsurveillance technologies of Facial Recognition Systems (FRS).
Dressed in custom-made Zentai hooded black suits in front of a black back-drop the performers’ eight-hour labour corresponds to the wage-hour work day, including breaks.
“The lips kiss each other over and over, lipstick smearing into skin. Each time the lips come together, the kiss mark shifts with spears of red spreading further from the mouth. Lipstick is reapplied and the kissing begins again. The enacted repetition motions towards the expression of care this waged labor reroutes: the work of caring is never done; the feminized subjects who often perform this work find themselves doing it over and over. We encountered the intersection of waged work and caring labor, twinned history tearing at what is to come.”
—Clara Lou, “Big Square, Small Circle,” 2017
About the artist:
Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist, poet, and theorist whose work explores the interplay between aesthetic and political valences in the public domain. Exhibitions, performances, and expanded publications include Serpentine Cinema, Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Art Dubai, The New Museum, Pacific Film Archive, Triple Canopy, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Women and Performance, The White Review, Art in America, The New Inquiry, among others. She was previously an artist-in-residence at Wysing Arts Centre, Delfina Foundation, Darat al Funun, and Mansion. She completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Film & Visual Studies at Harvard University and an M.F.A. in Film/Video at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Book publications include a translation of Waly Salomão’s Algaravias: Echo Chamber (nominated for a 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), the poetry volume The Distancing Effect, and the drawing/text artist publication Apparent Horizon 2. Bio is forthcoming from Inventory Press in 2018.
About the performers:
Katie Bishop is currently studying Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Her practice is concerned with images, particularly of women, and their relationship to desire and violence. She appropriates the language of hyper-capitalism to explore the sinister qualities of, for example, beauty sheet masks, and clashes them with other symbols or practices of femininity.
Anna Robson is a Nottingham-based artist, researcher, and curator making work focusing in on the audience and their singular reactions to performative influences and contexts. Recently graduated from the Fine Art course at Nottingham Trent University, she is interested in the boundaries inter-played between art institutions and people that visit them, and the ingrained emotions, memories, and behaviors formed in those relationships.
Event:
Mutual Recognition System (Concerning Max Factor)Dates:
13 Jan 2018, 10am–6pmSupported by:
