In Climacter Tanya Ury, wearing a white dressing gown, relates stories about her wounds that having been staunched resulted in scars, from top to toe of her body. Laurel Jay Carpenter dressed in black, acts out these stories by marking her own body with a thin, red, pen-like lipstick. This “reverse” passion of stages of the ladder (climacter) downwards is the instruction in experience of a mother figure to the younger daughter figure, in preparation for the “Change”.

Both Carpenter and Ury have created works that recall alchemical traditions, where blood is transformed into gold: Carpenter has employed the colour red and a suggested bloodline in her performances Red Crest, Red Woman and Maiden, Mother, Crone; Ury has employed gold in the art works Golden Showers and Blue Danaé 1 & 2.

Laurel Jay Carpenter’s photo Cervix taken when she was working as a Gynaecological Teaching Associate1, was also displayed together with Tanya Ury’s Blue Danaé 1, a photographic image of her genitals covered in gold leaf, in the New Life Shop Art Gallery during their performance week.

Tanya Ury submitted to Avant-Garde Dating under the pseudonym “Loreley” (an alter-ego that she adopted in the mid-nineties):
http://www.wooloo.org/Loreley/.
http://www.wooloo.org/laureljay was the coincidentally very similar Wooloo website link of Laurel Jay Carpenter when she submitted to the New Life Shop Art Gallery, Berlin. They were picked to spend a week’s residency together from 150 people (2 other couples also lived and made work in the gallery at different times).

Laurel Jay Carpenter and Tanya Ury have common themes. But in Climacter there is merely an exchange of ideas; only Tanya speaks – Laurel is silent. The performers do not even touch each other. Laurel touches herself with the red, lipstick pen when she draws the line of pain and she inserts this into her vagina to emulate Tanya’s description of the insertion without narcotics of a metal rod into her womb during a medical examination.

lesser is me more or less, a previous work of Ury’s also alludes to generational difference by scar tissue. The two protagonists in the photograph Lesser Ury and Tanya Ury are separated, or joined as the case may be, not only by 89 years, but also the representation of a scar divides the picture.

***

The Art Forum Berlin theme for 2007 (during which the performance week took place) was “About Beauty”.

The video trailer made from Climacter is about Ury’s number tattoo, a different kind of “scar”, to which the tattoo artist added a barcode (both tattoo designs being reminiscent of the concentration camp registration of WW2 in Germany); Tanya describes how poorly the tattooist drew her number tattoo, adding however that:

“It’s not about beauty, in fact the fact that he’s done it so badly is absolutely appropriate.”

Tanya Ury