An attempt to disentangle the bonds of gender-based oppression and imagine a re-embodied self, unencumbered by patriarchal power and domination.
Disentanglement/Re-embodiment by Los Angeles-based artist Jill Goldman is a response to two years of research into patriarchy—Goldman continues her ongoing exploration of transformative ritual and the gendered body. Disentanglement/Re-embodiment is an ambitious attempt to disentangle the bonds of gender-based oppression and imagine a re-embodied self, unencumbered by patriarchal power and domination. In videos, photographs and performances Goldman interrogates the intangible ways that patriarchy creates fictions of the body and then insists that these fictions are natural, essentializing socially constructed traits as biologically and divinely determined, thereby simultaneously constructing and compelling gendered realities.
Goldman borrows Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome to illustrate how patriarchy proliferates and sustains its power. Borrowed from botany, the term rhizome describes plants that have an interconnected subterranean network of roots that spread horizontally, sending up offshoots in new terrain. Because every point connects to every other point, weeding the visible plant does nothing to eradicate the underground root system, making a rhizome very difficult to destroy. In contrast, a tree has a single origin—a seed that develops roots, a trunk, and branches. If patriarchy functioned as a tree, its proverbial smashing would be no more difficult than chopping that individual tree down. Goldman’s interactive rhizome maps the ways in which patriarchy indiscriminately crosses borders, embedding itself in new territories. Race, class, sexuality, the environment, nationality, mass incarceration, capital and labor are just some of the separate domains that patriarchy infiltrates, creating mutually reinforcing systems of domination and exploitation. A rhizomatic problem requires a rhizomatic solution, a multipronged and intersectional method that works to disrupt and disentangle patriarchy’s tenacious hold in multiple fields.
While it’s impossible to know if we can ever fully experience our bodies outside of the linguistic and patriarchal social institutions that not only regulate them but define them, Disentanglement/Re-embodiment challenges the viewer to take seriously the possibility of a self independent of a system based on power relations. In performances that use ropes and women’s hair, music and dance, Goldman makes visible the invisible structures of patriarchy and attempts to untangle them, extricating female bodies from their insidious and subjugating webs. Goldman, a long-time activist who advocates for the rights of those marginalized by patriarchy is skilled at pragmatic resistance, fighting injustice from a position inside our political and social systems. In her art and Tantric meditation practice, however, she explores a more radical form of resistance, a resistance that is founded on an expansive consciousness that demolishes the oppressive structures the political right is so hellbent on solidifying.
The Sanskrit word Tantra derives from the verbal root tan, meaning to weave, and while Goldman attempts to unravel one fabric, she weaves another one, represented visually in videos and photographs printed on muslin in which the boundaries between the self and the world blur. From its origins in 6th century India, Tantric initiation has always been open to all genders and all social classes. With its revolutionary shapeshifting goddesses and panpsychism Tantra dissolves borders and erases binaries. By embracing this profoundly non-dualist consciousness, Goldman imagines a dematerialized liquid reality, an alchemical transformation that occurs in the world, via the body, revealing the sacred in the profane. Because this state of “oneness” entails a radical solidarity with every human, indeed, with every particle in the universe, the boundaries that separate the terrestrial from the numinous, the self from other, subject from object, collapse, and all hierarchies are razed. Patriarchy is rendered not only absurd but cosmically powerless.
-Asti Hustvedt
DISENTANGLEMENT/RE-EMBODIMENT – PERFORMANCE Mildred’s Lane
October 1,2022
Dancers: Jill Goldman, Veronica Caudillo-Thelia, Louise Hamagami and Roxanne Steinberg
Music by Livia Reiner and Rose Reiner
DISENTANGLEMENT/RE-EMBODIMENT
Performance Photos by Jefferey Jenkins
DISENTANGLEMENT / RE-EMBODIMENT 2 Video
DISENTANGLEMENT / RE-EMBODIMENT 3 Video
Performance 2 Photos
Performance 3 Photos
DISENTANGLEMENT / RE-EMBODIMENT 4
Limbo Festival, July 7, 2023
DISENTANGLEMENT/RE-EMBODIMENT:
TOWARDS RE-EMBODYING EQUALITY
Serpent à Plume, Paris
January 23, 2024
TOWARDS RE-EMBODYING EQUALITY: PERFORMANCE
Dancers: Jill Goldman, Roxanne Steinberg
Music by Livia Reiner
Filmed by Paul Flé
Performance Stills
Rehearsal Stills by Murielle Sauzot Louiseau
“Infinite Becoming”
“Infinite Becoming,” a series of three short films entitled “Dreaming Bees,” “Imagining Spiders,” and “Evoking Birds” strategize new forms of resistance. Among other influences, the films incorporate Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal” as a possible tactic to subvert the mechanisms that turn us into subjects useful for maintaining the existing order. The bees, spiders and birds here are not fixed categories and the women depicted do not actually become bees, spiders and birds, but through their dreaming, imagining, evoking, and becoming they enter a state of flux in which the boundary between human and animal disintegrates and new possible connections, relations and pathways emerge.
Stills of Jill Goldman in “Dreaming Bees”
Stills of Gina Gershon in “Imagining Spiders”
Stills of Roxanne Steinberg in “Evoking Birds”
Towards Re-Embodying Equality: Infinite Becoming & The Collective Nest
Limbo Festival
July 5–7, 2024
Towards Re-embodying Equality: Infinite Becoming & The Collective Nest are the newest iterations of Goldman’s project Disentanglement/Re-embodiment, an evolving, multipart and ambitious attempt to disentangle the bonds of gender-based oppression and imagine a re-embodied self, unencumbered by patriarchal power and domination.
The Collective Nest incorporates actions during which Goldman and dancer choreographer Roxanne Steinberg turn to the communal nesting practices of birds. While at the Limbo Festival, they will gather twigs and branches to create a large collective nest, culminating in a live performance. Through her alliance with non-human animals, the artist engenders a new set of possibilities to subvert patriarchal and neo-liberal conceptions of work, private property, individualism, competition and the nuclear family—all forces that serve to prop up gender-based oppression and capitalist exploitation. The Collective Nest destabilizes those hierarchical structures and points to a new egalitarian ecology of collective care, shared resources and mutual support. —Asti Hustvedt
Towards Re-Embodying Equality: a Community Gathering
Mildred’s Lane
August 24, 2024
“Goldman imagines a dematerialized liquid reality, an alchemical transformation that occurs in the world, via the body, revealing the sacred in the profane and the profane in the sacred. Because this state of “oneness” entails a radical solidarity with every human, indeed, with every particle in the universe, the boundaries that separate the terrestrial from the numinous, the self from the other, human from animal, and subject from object collapse, and all hierarchies are razed. Patriarchy is rendered not only absurd but cosmically powerless.” —Asti Hustvedt
