3.

　　Raging Balls, comprises a performance and a video, and importantly employs the audience as active participants. This culminates in a type of anti-social experiment. The work is created in part as homage to the posthumous artist David Wojnarowicz and his performance diatribe on the mismanaging of the American government’s policies regarding the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. As Ashery writes about the performance, ‘…set amidst the speech are the live interactive limits of audience/performer-instructed exchange and participation, deeming the event an experiment.’[2] Ashery is inspired by the potent handling of anger, loss,[3] illness and pain in Wojnarowicz’s frustrated tirades, but in the process, and many steps removed, discovers that perhaps, nearly 30 years on, the subject of anger and rage is not as readily available to her in such a raw form. However, she is determined to find her contemporary version. As Sylvère Lotringer adds in an interview with Wojnarowicz, ‘Rage is a terrible thing to waste.’[4]

　　Raging Balls presents a deliberation between Ashery and the masculine overtones of Wojnarowicz; principally Ashery’s position – from a female perspective – suggests that the notion of anger is potentially more devastating and suggestive than the act of anger itself. Raging Balls does not pretend to show anger or fictionalise it through a character (unlike Ashery’s other works), but instead reverses the imaginary process by using the face, voice and presence of a male, Chris McCormack[5] - who appears in the video and during the performance – to convey Ashery’s speech. Wojnarowicz was an artist and activist, as well as a writer and performer; his work combined photo-montage, paint and mixed media that often referred to the material sufferings of the poor through science fiction, news and environmental decay. Like Ashery, he combined diverse strands of art and politics using means of expression that often stemmed from associations of conflict, depravation and loss.

　　The speech in Raging Balls, which is delivered by McCormack in monotone epitaphs, readily obliterates its very own inquiry. The inquiry appears to be searching for meaning in a “stop and search” kind of process. The video work, which can be considered as divided into two parts, portrays the image of the actor’s face projected on a large screen. A band of light illuminates the centre of his face – however the framing is slightly off-centre so that the left side of the face is a fraction more in shadow.

　　In the first part of the video, the actor seems to be playing a wrongly accused victim who has been arrested by the police. For Ashery, he is what Giorgio Agamben calls Homo Sacer: a human being that exists outside the law as an exile who is stripped of any human rights. In Raging Balls, the meandering thoughts of the victim are combined with the re-enactment of a ‘stop and search’ scenario. The actor’s utter despair is very strong and his claims to unjust discrimination and loss of human rights appeals to a familiar concern over increased state control. This marks a general shift in current articulations of identity politics from notions of ‘Otherness’ to human rights. Or, to quote Jean Fisher, “What is at stake therefore is not respect for difference as such but respect for life, whatever the differences.”[6]

　　The second part of the video – which is made apparent by a tentative move in the source of light that illuminates the actors face – is a continuation of the angry speech, but this time the subject of anger, combined with the frustration over the inability to feel real anger, is dedicated in a somewhat ‘schizophrenic’ manner to the current state of ‘political art’ or art’s dubious use of politics in a post-capitalist world.

　　Raging Balls can be understood as Ashery’s attempt to deliver a condensed seminar; a necessary protest; an individual in constant rage against the system; or lastly an artistic right to professional frustration. As noted by Giorgio Agamben in The Man Without Content, 1994; ‘Another notion that we encounter more and more frequently in artists’ opinions is that art is something fundamentally dangerous not only for those who produce it but for society as well.’[7] On the one hand, Ashery does not exist in the piece (except for a short while in the performance)[8], on the other hand she is far more present than usual because the piece evidently declares a personal and subjective positioning as a living contemporary artist. Ashery’s deliberate choice of low-tech means, the monochromatic setting, and the linear aesthetic economy of the video, alongside the live performance, recall intentionally canonical works such as those of Bruce Nauman. Raging Balls is underscored by a retro macho belligerence that suits today’s modern poser status. There is little sacred or clear in the tirade, in fact it is the very failure of these ideals that surround the work that act as a type of self-inflicted biographical collapse; or, as noted by Jennifer Doyle’s essay in her reference to Douglas Crimp’s text; ‘the self representation of our demoralisation”.’[9]It is more in the understanding of Ashery’s previous artworks and the socio-political convictions attached to identity politics that Raging Balls marks a transitory position from Ashery’s previous use of alter egos, to her current use of text delivered by the mediation of a ‘speech act’ by a real male protagonist. Ashery has chosen to work with the fe/male body not only to refer to the history of masculinity, femininity, patriarchy, masculine cultural identities and the ensuing historical associations of power and control, but also in deference to the everyday estrangement of conformity attached to these ideals.