Yes, dear readers. It’s time to revisit the mental dumpster fire that is performance art. Specifically, the unliftable talents of Ms Sandrine Schaefer, whose piece Wandering with the Horizon – No. 1, Acclimating to Horizontal Movement was created for the 2015 Foster Prize Exhibition at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art and performed in April of this year. During this six-hour performance, Ms Schaefer “investigates notions of liminality, human scale, and the impact that the external environment has on the body.” As I’m sure will become clear in this, sadly brief, video of edited highlights.

Readers left craving more of Ms Schaefer’s insights can here behold the artist standing inside some tyres, thereby inspiring deep thought on many, many levels. And here we see Ms Schaefer celebrating her weight loss (and her artistic immensity) by attempting to squeeze through a cat flap. Those with a yearning for art of an even higher intellectual gear can marvel at a piece from 2014, in which our fearless transgressor of norms “questions the role memory plays within experiential art mediums, how actions are read on different bodies, and current discource [sic] around documentation, re-performance, and authorship.” By gnawing at a lettuce while sprawling in her underpants. 

Ms Schaefer’s prize-winning artistic innovations have of course thrilled us previously. 

Because I know you hunger for a feminist poetry slam, here’s Anna Binkovitz sharing her inner being:

No, don’t thank me. All part of the service.

MSNBC’s race-hustling bedlamite Melissa Harris-Perry wants to tell you about Star Wars: 

I have a lot [of feelings] about the whole Darth Vader situation. Yeah, like, the part where he was totally a black guy whose name basically was James Earl Jones, who, and we were all, but while he was black, he was terrible and bad and awful and used to cut off white men’s hands, and didn’t, you know, actually claim his son. But as soon as he claims his son and goes over to the good, he takes off his mask and he is white. Yes, I have many, many feelings about that.

She gets quite breathless. 

Let’s call everyone “they”: Gender-neutral language should be the norm, not the exception.

So writes Silpa Kovvali, an exquisitely progressive she-person, in the pages of Salon:

We are forced to… give in and refer to our co-workers, students and friends as “he” or “she.” The result is that our language caps our ability to be progressive in this realm, forces us to immediately characterise people as male or female.

Which is only accurate and expected practically all of the time. And so,

We ought to revert to the gender neutral “they” whenever gender is not explicitly relevant.

You see, Ms Kovvali believes that gendered pronouns and honorifics are an “outdated linguistic tic.” And not a useful, rather concise source of information, a signal of respect, and a way of clarifying who it is we’re talking about.

The effect of elevating gender’s importance is felt by the cis-gendered as well. None of us fit neatly or entirely into a traditional gender binary, with all the expectations of masculinity and femininity that these buckets entail.

And yet despite this claim, and the somewhat random mention of buckets, almost all of us seem quite happy to be referred to as either male or female, as if it were in fact “relevant,” and the demand for gender-neutral pronouns remains, to say the least, a niche concern. I’d even venture to suggest that some of us might feel slighted by the wilful omission of – diminishing of – our respective maleness or femaleness. However, Ms Kovvali feels a need to inform those less enlightened, i.e., the rest of us, that,

The goal is greater inclusion… to be respectful to those we write about, and to be clear to our readers.

By risking affront on a daily basis and introducing a clumsy and needless ambiguity. Because vagueness is the new clarity.

This just in:  

A woman has been charged with attempted murder after stabbing another woman at the biggest art fair in the US, in an attack that was wrongly interpreted by onlookers as performance art.

No. Don’t. Bad dog.

Siyuan Zhao, from New York, was arrested after stabbing the victim’s arms and neck with an X-Acto craft knife during a fight at the Art Basel event in Miami Beach on Friday. The victim, who has not been identified, was taken to Jackson Memorial hospital with non-life-threatening injuries… While she was being patted down, Zhao spontaneously stated: “I had to kill her and two more.” She is also alleged to have said: “I had to watch her bleed!”

Both ladies are believed to have been patrons of the art fair, not rival exhibitors.

Other witnesses later thought the police tape cordoning the area was an art installation.

Via Julia and Chester.