Abstract
The theatrical oeuvre of Reza Abdoh has been lauded for its reinvigoration of the avantgarde, its formal and political daring and its astute commentary about the violence of the HIV virus (Fordyce, Carlson, Mufson, Bell). More recently, Abdoh’s work has been taken up as a commentary on neoliberalism—in part because of its politicization of bricolage and pastiche, recalling the more radical possibilities of theorizations of scholars such as Frederic Jameson (Zimmerman). Others have called out the modes by which Abdoh expanded the possibilities of queerness in the early 1990s. Yet no scholar has commented on Abdoh’s engagement of eschatology as a mode of historiography. That is the purpose of this essay. It is under this rubric, rather than an idea of generic postmodern milieu, that I read the multiple and discordant temporalities in Abdoh’s performances. While drawing on theories of the necropolitical (Mbembe) and gore capitalism (Valencia) in relation to conceptions of queer eschatology and capitalist violence, my inquiry emerges from consideration of the structural and theoretical aspects of the art works (“object’s”) themselves. I consider how Father Was a Peculiar Man (1990), performed in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, exemplifies the historiographical possibilities of performance through its embodiment of an eschatological vision of the world in which the gender binary is performatively undone.
Highlights
Abdoh is referring to a cosmological disposition within a monotheistic religion that imagines an end of the world/transformation in which evil is eradicated that is embedded in Zoroastrianism and Western religion—i.e., “the sense of apocalypse or something beyond that in ‘our global’ culture.”[12]. A close consideration of Father Was a Peculiar. Makes it clear that it was Abdoh’s disidentification with Dostoyevsky’s Christian eschatology that allowed him to imagine the end of evil by destroying patriarchy through parricide.[13]
Dostoyevsky resurrected the possibility of human goodness at a moment of great turmoil at the end of The Brothers Karamazov
The externalization of Ivan’s bodily and psychic state takes the form of a meat locker decorated with fake snow in the middle of summer. Within this meat locker we find Ivan naked and hung upside down like a side of meat being beaten by his father; campy Romans and Christians; JFK, his wife, and his lover having a spat; Miss Arizona confessing the violent dynamics of her home to a therapist who wields a saw blade; various scenes of copulation; and Dmitri’s emotional breakdown.[18]
Summary
Taking up the challenge of unsettling historiography within theater and performance practices asks me to consider Reza Abdoh’s Father Was a Peculiar Man with necropolitical theory emerging from the so called “global South” in combination with US based queer theory.
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