If It’s Got Naked People, RuPaul Is In

July 26, 2017·26 min·2 clips

RuPaul and Abby watch a man cut Yoko Ono's bra straps off at Carnegie Hall and call it 'a dick move.'

Performance art gets the side-eye right away. The host admits she is not exactly a fan, then makes that discomfort the reason to keep going. Marina Abramovich is the obvious answer. Kanye West, eighth grade talent shows, and fake-deep commentary get brushed off while the episode looks for firmer ground. RuPaul is the first real way in. His life gets treated as performance, which lets the conversation talk about identity and spectacle without sounding trapped in museum language. Then Meat Joy arrives, and the room gets stranger. The work sounds chaotic, physical, and hard to pin down, but the episode keeps asking why that mess rattled people so badly. Patriarchy is the blunt answer. A female artist making work about female bodies lands differently than a man putting a woman on a canvas. The host says the quiet part out loud. If the image could pass under male authorship, then the outrage around Schneemann starts looking less like taste and more like control. Carolee Schneemann calls in from upstate New York. More than fifty years after Meat Joy, she is still making work about war, disaster, suffering, and the need to look. She is skeptical, too. Even as an icon of feminist and performance art, she says plenty of performance work is not very good. That makes her sharper. She remembers 1964 as a time of erotic suppression, ordinary taboos, and almost no room for young women to show or activate their own pleasure. The episode can joke about dirty charades after the credits and still take the body-as-art question seriously.

As heard by us

Abbey Jacobson uses RuPaul and Carolee Schneemann to make performance art feel funny, bodily, and less easy to dismiss.

Performance art arrives here with a wink before it gets its teeth in. Abbey Jacobson starts from the familiar museum-floor bafflement, then uses RuPaul as the friendliest possible way in: someone who treats self-invention not as theory but as daily practice, and who makes a…

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Why you'd press play

You want RuPaul, Carolee Schneemann, and a smarter-than-it-sounds argument about performance art.

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