Notes on Failure
Notes on Failure (aka Notes on Performance and Activism)[1]
It’s the difference between giving up and not giving up.
– Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die, 2024
For Caliban could only fight his master by cursing him in the language he had learned from him, thus being dependent in his rebellion on his “master’s tools.”
– Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 2014
Dear reader,
It’s May.
This essay is a playful—albeit challenging—experiment. It is a process of complex embodied thoughts. It is a reflection on the intersections of performance, activism, and personal experience, and how failure operates within these spaces—not as an endpoint, but as a site of continuous transformation. It raises more questions than provides answers. And much like unifying the body and mind into one entity that operates interdependently, it merges the failure-success binary into a constant state of becoming within space-time.
There are too many complex themes tied together here, so I offer just a momentary peek into the entanglement of performance, activism, failure, and how they intersect within my life.
In January, I started writing unsent love letters to people, places, things, and concepts. The idea was prompted by a virtual writing course I was taking called Fuck Writing taught by Johanna (yo-haw-nuh) Hedva (head-vuh). If you know me, you already know how deeply rooted my obsession is with Johanna. A few mornings after the March 10th Tilt West Roundtable, I set my ten-minute timer and wrote them for a second time.
“My dearest Johanna—I dreamt about you last night and it was such a sweet dream. I rarely have sweet dreams; they are usually nightmares. I was visiting you in LA because you were going to help look over some papers I wanted to publish into a book. It was the first time (well, I suppose the second time) we’ve met in person. You picked me up from an unknown and unrecognizable coffeeshop. You were driving one of those vans that’s all decked out with accessibility tools. You had the driver seat pushed closer to the passenger seat so that you could only drive with your left arm (I thought it was so you could be closer to me).”[2]
They were constantly on mind in mid-March because I was taking another one of their online courses called Death Writing while reading their newest publication How to Tell When We Will Die. As I read their chapter titled “The Freak,” I thought of my younger-New Orleans-self and the romantic nature of finding freaks to fuck—fantasies that never came to fruition because I was too scared that sex would cause my immediate and spontaneous death.
For context, I was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at age five and have since been diagnosed with a slew of other diseases and disorders. I was taught to embody that the only intimacy that was “safe,” “secure,” or allowed could be enacted by medical professionals. But I never felt safe or comfortable when I was poked, prodded, probed, pricked, and squeezed—i.e., penetrated—in the hospital and clinic. So, I learned to disconnect, separate my mind from my body, disembody. I still have issues with intimacy, love, touch, sex, and most importantly, trust. My inner, irrational gummy bear is constantly afraid that everyone is out to get me, especially when someone I just met tells me “You’re so beautiful” or “I love your body.”
But more on this later.
Performance art was formally presented to me by my mentor eight years ago when I was completing my second master’s degree at the University of Denver. It is an artistic practice that raises questions, disturbs the public, and allows for few precise answers. It is intentionally difficult in that the underlying premise is to avoid the comfortability that other art forms, like painting, might induce within a viewership.[3] Like the protests and violent events taking place at home and across the world, performance art, and especially my performance art, is often characterized as painful, perverse, and provocative. It is activism. It is a tool to both “unseat a complacent public and its view of the value of art” and create embodied connections between myself and others.[4] For me, “the art” happens at the moment when I am interacting or engaging with an audience member—i.e., the brief relationship that forms between me and a viewer during a performance and then disappears (but still exists) when the interaction ends.
As a medium that encourages both personal and collective exploration, performance art allows for play, risk, and experimentation in real-time. I find it liberating because it creates space for failure not as a defeat but to generate new understanding. Performance art, therefore, is a realm where experimentation and failure are essential parts of the process.
The unknown—embracing the chaos and unpredictability of failure—becomes a vital site of transformation and growth. This realization, stemming from both my personal life and my artistic practice, challenges the conventional view of failure as something to be avoided. When we push beyond the boundaries of success and failure, embracing the risk of the unknown, we open the possibility of creating something entirely new.
In April, I presented a nine-hour performance at the Emmanuel Gallery on Denver’s Auraria Campus called Visiting hours under the covers. I wanted to experiment with my fear of bodily intimacy by inviting consenting participants to join me under the blood-stained blankets of a hospital bed. Going into the performance, the initial questions I asked myself included, “How have my early experiences of being ‘touched’ by medical professionals impacted the way I experience bodily intimacy today? Can my bodymind learn/relearn/unlearn how to distinguish between ‘clinical contact’ and physical intimacy that can be comfortable and pleasurable?”[5] My hope was to discover new and unfamiliar relationships, narratives, and movements with each one-on-one interaction.
In my performance work, I often create rules or instructions for the audience as guiding structures for participation. This is where failure plays an important role in my work, because participants almost never interact with me or perceive the performance work the way I intended. It’s as if I always set myself up for failure when I do my performances.
What happens when the rules are ignored or broken? How does experimentation thrive when we embrace the unknown, when we allow the process to be chaotic rather than controlled?
The instructions included on the wall near the hospital bed were direct.
To participate, you are required to follow these instructions:
- Enter the installation at the foot of the hospital bed
- Put on gloves and a mask
- Slowly get into the hospital bed [or sit or stand near the bed][6]
- Visit for about five minutes
- Exit at the head of the hospital bed
“It’s interesting to think about consent here. Perverse performance frequently foists power relations upon the audience member that they may or may not have consented to. When one decides to attend a performance, this is generally understood. One accepts that one does not know what will happen exactly.”[7]
After the third day, I left the hospital bed feeling stiff and perplexed, but excited about the prospects of what I had experienced. with more questions than I had answers. Only one participant I didn’t know personally, out of six individuals, actually got under the covers with me. What was it about the performance that made people scared to get in the bed with me? What were the fears they had? Were they scared of me as a “sick” body? Were they scared that I might harm them since I was a stranger? What does it mean to connect with a stranger? Was it the fear of being in proximity to a “dying” body of someone you don’t know?
Even though not everyone got under the covers with me, critical engagements still occurred. From afar, I was an object. Many visitors mistook me for a mannequin or a “dummy.”
Many college student visitors understood the “care partner” role to mean “doctor or nurse.” Instead of following the instructions, they asked me “How are you feeling today?” or “How long have you been here?”—akin to the 7 a.m. nurse who’s starting their first shift of the week.
I often forget that care is an integral part of intimacy and vice versa. Johanna defines care as an action that combines intention and attention.[8] It’s the moment when you ask the hot femme you’re making out with “Is this okay?” or “Are you okay?” Care is about checking in. Care is not purely for an individual or those closest to that individual. Care is about caring for literally every human because we are human. What would this earth feel like if we were “naturally” inclined to love and care for every being rather than naturally inclined to be fearful of them?
The concept of success in patriarchal capitalism is often tied to completion or achievement. In the medical field, success is married to the linear progress from “sick” to “healthy.” But many of us will never be fully healthy. So why not shift the paradigm to one that accommodates experimentation (which medicine invariably entails, especially for disabled bodies) and ongoing engagement without focus on a particular outcome that may neither be attained nor attainable. As Johanna reflects in How to Tell When We Will Die, activism—much like performance—rarely succeeds in the traditional sense. It is in the repeated failures and the perseverance to continue despite them that new meanings are found. “I like thinking that activism will always fail, because it means that the decision to take action, to act as though what we do matters, even in the face of certain defeat, is its own purpose…It’s about what we can do, right here, right now, for each other.”[9]
This work is a reminder that nothing is wasted, or a failure. Experimentation is all data. It is a practice of emergence. Like adrienne maree brown explains, “Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass, building authentic relationships, listening with all the senses of the body and the mind…It is a system that makes use of everything in the iterative process.”[10]
When Sylvia offers the allegory of Caliban’s inability to break free from Prospero in Shakespear’s The Tempest, she is suggesting that we must find unknown pathways that derive from outside the “master’s tools” embedded within us (i.e., patriarchy, capitalism, colonization, all systems of oppression).
So, the next time you see me under the blankets of a hospital bed, you better come get under the covers with me.
I love you.
Love, MG