Space, Time, and Excessive Performances of Endurance

Chelsea Coon

To cite this contribution: 
Coon, Chelsea. ‘Space, Time, and Excessive Performances of Endurance’. Currents Journal Issue One (2020), https://currentsjournal.net/Space-Time-and-Excessive-Performances-of-Endurance.

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Course of study:
Doctor of Philosophy, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music (Visual Art), University of Melbourne

Keywords:
Performance; performance art; endurance; space; time; body; excess

Abstract: 
A complex aspect of endurance performance in the visual arts is its elusive nature as significant, unanticipated changes can occur from one moment to the next. I understand and track these changes by identifying the shifting relations of the three core factors of space, time and the body through which the performance occurs, which effectively shapes the performance outcomes. For the purposes of this article, I understand space as the location where the performance occurs, time as the duration of the performance event, and the body to be my body as the performer, and at times this can extend to incorporate the collective body of performer and audience. Each of these contingent factors cannot endure without its intrinsic interrelation to the others, and when one shifts throughout the sustained and precarious actions of an endurance performance all factors can be perceived to evidently shift in response. I structure my endurance performance works in relation to the duration of the event and parameters of the space of the performance itself to ensure that my physical and psychological limits will be tested and likely exceeded within and through the performance. This paper discusses the conceptual frameworks and endurance strategies of my performances all star (2020) and Phases (2014). By exploring my enactments of excess through these endurance performances, I look to discern how the spatial and bodily interrelationships are intensified through the temporal unfolding of the performative structure.   

_{Chelsea Coon, all star, performance for video, three hours (non-stop), video stills, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.}

…the body is “here” as a point from which we begin, and from which the world unfolds, as being both more and less over there… The “here” of bodily dwelling is thus what takes the body outside of itself, as it is affected and shaped by its surroundings...¹ 

Endurance is a form of performance in the visual arts that emphasises the in-flux interconnections of space, time and the body. By performing repetitious acts across an extended duration, spaces that inform the body’s movement unfold and are revealed within the body as it performs. From a phenomenological perspective, philosopher Sara Ahmed explains that ‘…spaces are not exterior to bodies; instead, spaces are like a second skin that unfolds in the folds of the body’ as ‘…the skin that seems to contain the body is also where the atmosphere creates an impression; just think of goose bumps, textures on the skin surface, as body traces of coldness of the air.’² The process of ‘unfolding’ articulated by Ahmed denotes a temporality that becomes manifest over the duration of an endurance performance, which significantly makes evident the inextricably linked relations between the body, time and space. Each of these contingent factors cannot endure without its intrinsic interrelation to the others, and when one shifts throughout the sustained and precarious actions of an endurance performance all factors, as this paper addresses, can be perceived to evidently shift in response.

Historically, endurance performance has been distinguished by physical and psychological duress experienced by the body over the performance duration. I understand endurance performance to align with researcher Kerstin Mey’s reflection on the historical performance contributions of Ron Athey and Franko B. as pushing ‘… physical and emotional limits, the limits of art...’.³ Endurance strategies within performance can take the form of what is known as excessive acts. Performance theorist Dominic Johnson explains the links between extremity and excessiveness in performance as involving,

… acts of physical, emotional or conceptual excess–extremes of too much or not enough–to an extent that harasses the artist, us and the category of art; yet, crucially, in its resistant or elusive character, the performance of extremity also invites the means to dislodge the narrative already established of performance art in a given context.⁴ 

The ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’ that Johnson discusses is crucial to identifying the necessary tensions existing in the framework that also defines the making of endurance performance. These ‘extremes’ reveal an excessive bodily relation to time and space. Furthermore, the capacity of extreme performance to dislodge previous performance paradigms reasserts the significant factors of endurance performance as an in-flux, responsive, and unfolding method of art making that challenges every body who engages with it.

Excessive acts manifest in multiple forms, among which include endured, sustained actions, and their repetitious, exhaustive execution that extends beyond perfunctory, everyday activities. These actions can vary vastly which has informed my understanding of endurance to necessarily be in response to the individual limits of each performers body. While often historic examples of bloody performance works are used (for example bloodletting and cutting) to illustrate excessive acts within endurance performance, I emphasise this is just one of multiple extreme performative strategies that could be employed by a performer. In my experience, an excessive act is one where the body is challenged beyond a threshold of discomfort that ‘takes the body outside of itself’ to be ‘affected and shaped by its surroundings’ that necessarily shifts when bodily discomfort is surpassed by focusing on the temporal duration required to endure a performance to completion. I have challenged the limits of endurance in my practice through breathing restriction with plastic sheets and water submersion (2014, 2015), slow cutting and piercing (2014, 2016), vomiting (2016), through actions such as walking the perimeter of a thirty-six foot circle for thirty-six hours (2017), kneeling on a concrete floor for ten-hours (2016), meticulously repetitive actions (2013-2020), and more.

I structure my endurance performance works in relation to the duration of the event and parameters of the space of the performance itself to ensure that my physical and psychological limits will be tested and likely exceeded within and through the performance. This paper discusses the conceptual frameworks and endurance strategies of my performances all star (2020) and Phases (2014). By exploring my enactments of excess through these endurance performances, I look to discern how the spatial and bodily interrelationships are intensified through the temporal unfolding of the performative structure.  

A complex aspect of endurance performance in the visual arts is its elusive nature as significant, unanticipated changes can occur from one moment to the next. I understand and track these changes by identifying the shifting relations of the three core factors of space, time and the body through which the performance occurs, which effectively shapes the performance outcomes. For the purposes of this article, I understand space as the location where the performance occurs, time as the duration of the performance event, and the body to be my body as the performer, and at times this can extend to incorporate the collective body of performer and audience. Therefore, endurance performance takes form through my body ‘as a point from which we begin’, where I responsively perform in a continuous, shifting relation to the unfixed factors of space and time. As art historian Lara Shalson explains of endurance performance, ‘[…] a broader investigation of what it means to exist in the form of a body that both acts and is acted upon lies at the heart of the performance of endurance.’⁵ Significantly, my thinking around endurance performance has come from years of making and witnessing the works of other performance artists who use a diverse range of strategies to communicate their concepts through their body in space and through time.


Addressing the field and through the process

There exists at least a half century of literature and theory on performance works that employ endurance strategies. A brief list of select artists who have historically and significantly worked with endurance in their performance practices include the bloody works of Ron Athey, Mike Parr, and Franko B.; the political works of Tony Schwensen, Cassils, Mariel Carranza, Mirabelle Jones, Paola Paz Yee, and FK Alexander; the explorations of violence in the works of Karen Finley, Gina Pane, Chris Burden and Vito Acconci; pain within the works of Sheree Rose, Bob Flanagan, Martin O’ Brien, and Helge Meyer; the persona work of Aly Jones; repetition and duration in the works of Marina Abramovic, Marilyn Arsem, Mark Shorter, TJ Bacon, Jessica Borusky, Ivonne Navas Dominguez, and significantly more.

The literature that informs my understanding of endurance performance comes from a wide range of visual and theoretical sources including artists texts, artworks, interdisciplinary theory and more. Sourcing from across fields provides a range of insights into the various ways that the body, time and space can be understood in these disciplinary contexts. The writings that have significantly informed my understanding of endurance enacted through the performance works to be discussed here include: philosopher Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006), and art historian Lara Shalson’s Performing Endurance: Art and Politics Since 1960 (2018). These authors have contributed other ways to think about the body in space through conception of alternative potentials for orienting and unfolding processes. For example, I understand the performative potentials of reorientation in Ahmed’s text as a proposal for the body to reposition and subsequently to have a new relationship to space and time.

Through an examination of the complex unfolding factors of the spatial, temporal and corporeal elements of Phases and all star various understandings of their relations can be observed. These understandings incorporate ways to consider perceptual shifts experienced by the body in space and time when enacting excessive acts. The survival of the excessive performance demands adaptive strategies which could include: slowing down, reorienting one’s body in relation to a space, or utilising an object as a support. Here, I re-emphasise that duration effects the capacity of the body and the adaptations it must make to particular spatial conditions and should be understood for its potential. The duration compounds the duress experienced by the body and necessitates an acute, embodied relation to the performance space, which requires an ongoing adaptation or processes of re-orientation in order to survive the performance framework. This process creates an acute perceptual focus on the unfolding factors of time and space, which is experienced through the body in a performance. This relates to Sara Ahmed’s understanding of spatial orientation,

Perception is a way of facing something. I can perceive an object only insofar as my orientation allows me to see it (it must be near enough to me, which in turn means that I must be near enough to it), and in seeing it, in this way or that, it becomes an “it,” which means I have already taken an orientation toward it.⁶ 

Through my experience of endurance in performance, I understand Ahmed’s observation to describe the ontological apprehension of physical reality, that can be observed by the body as the performance unfolds. These ‘reorientations’ cause perceptual shifts of previous bodily relations and ‘…accumulate like points, to create outlines, or which accumulate like lines, to create new textures on the surface of the skin. Such spaces “impress” on the body, involving the mark of unfamiliar impressions, which in turn reshape the body surface.’⁷ To reiterate, the compositional factors of the space, duration, excessiveness, perceptual shifts and endurance are essential in addressing both the vulnerability and power inherent within these interrelated factors through their bound proximities, which accumulate and create new points of orientation. In every instance when an adaptation is necessitated, regardless of the scale, its result demands a reorientation to the space of the performance. In this reorientation a reactive, survival modality necessarily enters the experience. This survival state comes from the endurance of performing reaching such a state that it has become excessive.

In Lara Shalson’s text, an understanding of endurance performance is a method of making performance that is conscious of the interconnections of the body to time and space is important because it historically describes the use of the body as a material that is loaded with the experience of the space and time in which it is performing.⁸ In my experience realising endurance performance, it is essential to locate the way working with endurance implicates the body in a set of actions that are responsive to shifting factors of the performance space, and time in which the performance action unfolds. What I mean by shifts to space and time is that as the body experiences the duress of the endurance performance framework it must responsively adjust in accordance with the performance space (its walls, temperature, features and objects) to sustain a set of actions for the duration of the performance. On this process Lara Shalson explains,

Endurance is built on a plan, then, but this plan does not fully dictate what the work becomes. The artist designs and then endures an unfolding of events that can never be fixed from the start. This indeterminacy arises from another essential element of endurance: namely, that it is always performed in relation to forces that are beyond the performer’s control.⁹

Specifically, my performance frameworks are conceptualised as structures that push the limits of my body over a particular duration of time which is always responsive to the space where the work is delivered, which means the work maintains a tension in its indeterminacy where it may fail. Necessarily, tension pertaining to failure in the work arises from the exertions that challenge the body throughout the performance. In response, one must make necessary, adaptive and minute adjustments of the body in order to survive the duration. These variations are not pre-empted and are understood as a defining facet of the form the performance may take. Both Ahmed and Shalson make clear in their writing the complexity inherent in being a body in a particular space and time. In considering other ways for the body to exist or endure, attention must be given to the shifting factors of time and space.

_{Chelsea Coon, all star, performance for video, three hours (non-stop), video stills, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.}

all star

all star was a performance that addressed endurance through precise, sustained, repetitious actions. In this 3-hour performance for video, I danced continuously and sang to a loop of the song You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) by Dead or Alive. At a rate of 3 times per song, or approximately every minute, the lyrics ‘Watch out here I come’ occur. To align with this lyric occurrence, I emptied out a vial of glitter into my hands and tossed the glitter over my head. This action was repeated 180 times over the 3-hour performance. Space, time and the enduring body were significant factors to realising this work. Time was mapped by the glitter vials effect on my body, and space was the excessively hot location of the gallery where I danced between two halogen work lights.

Structurally, I was interested in expanding a moment that occurs within the song into an excessive, repetitive sequence of gestures that comprised this endurance performance. Endurance in this performance manifested as a test of the body’s physical and psychological threshold. Author and curator Blair French speaks to the contingency of the concept of endurance to duration and the conditions of the body to space. He offers,  

Endurance as concept and experience may be important to a work, but even in those focusing on physicality and perhaps pain, the complex experience of time and duration produced within the works extends far beyond the limits of a physical capacity to endure. Durational works deal in proposition, uncertainty and the disassembling of the structured rhythms of lived experience.¹⁰

French’s analysis of the contingencies of repetitive acts and duration through the unfolding of a performance addresses endurance as a structural aspect of the space of the performance itself, which contains the disassembled ‘rhythms of lived experience’. Or as I understand it, a performance space provides a frame to disrupt standardised time and thus perceptually ruptures the regular orders of social spaces. Significantly, repetition and rhythm accumulate in an endurance performance and intensively heighten the perceptual experience of the work. The ‘proposition’ to engage in the ‘uncertainty’ through my enduring, performing body is an objective crux of all star.

In all star I understood the structure to be both a physical and a psychological test. Physical endurance was tested through movement, which involved a lot of jumping with very few breaks or pause, so my heartrate stayed accelerated for the duration of the work. I wanted to sweat as profusely as possible, so the sweat would catch the glitter particles I threw around, overtime accumulating in thickness on my skin. I drank blue Gatorade throughout the performance, so I would continuously produce sweat. Further, psychological endurance was tested in this performance because playing You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) on loop for 3-hours non-stop could be considered a form of torture.

I began this work with the acknowledgement that I can’t dance. Quite literally I have no skill or capacity for this particular type of rhythm. I was compelled to see how the body would adapt over time in continuous movement without any skill to fall back on. Furthermore, this demonstration of a lifelong incapacity for dance was showcased within a composition made from a culmination of materials, each of which were weighted symbolically. The materials formed images with visual reference and resonance across multiple, contradicting roles often expected of the body, including: a gold mini-dress, glitter, Gatorade, halogen work lights, and the relentless looping of the song You Spin Me Round (Like a Record). Through the performances extended duration, repetitious actions, and its composition of diverse symbols, I used the performance as a structure to articulate the contradictions inherent in societal and cultural expectations for the body that I have experienced as an American.

I made rules for myself through unmaking rules of previous performances where I often utilised methods of calculated, and at times almost imperceptibly slow movements. In contrast, for all star every time the song was playing (with the exception of fade-out) I had to keep moving, even if it was flicking my wrists or swaying from side to side. I had to synchronise the throwing of the glitter with the lyrics ‘Watch out here I come’ which meant I had to stay focused, alert, and ready for action. I tried to smile as much as possible, which not surprisingly is hard to do through sustained cardiovascular duress. As the performance unfolded, I sang along. Over time the singing along evolved to screaming along, especially when the lyrics ‘I want your love’ occurred. This made me laugh every time.

Laughing was the result of further rule breaking of previous performances, where the tone was often communicated through my intense, sustained silence. Of laughing, Sara Ahmed locates from her experience, ‘Sometimes it is tears or laughter that makes me realize that I have been pulled to another place and another time. Such memories can involve a recognition of how one’s body already feels, coming after the event.’¹¹ The experience of laugher within the performance accumulated as emerging matter within the excessive framework. Laughter was an extension of my body in space, meaning this sound that my body produced filled the room, along with my screaming, singing, and the impact of my feet as gravity weighted my jumping body back to earth. The sheer repetition of the movement and the glitter bursts were meant to achieve an excessive accumulation. The blowback from the glitter bursts collected on my skin, turning my dancing, singing and screaming body into a purple-grey hued corpse. Indeed, as the performance progressed, I began to literally transform and began to look much more dead than alive.

Further, the title all star is a play on the idea of ‘all stars’ including cosmic, celebrity, sport, ranking systems and more. The gold mini-dress reads like the 2020 clubbing version of Marilyn Monroe’s Happy Birthday, Mr. President dress, symbolising contradictions of desire and expectation. Another element of the Gatorade bottles references American contact sports such as football, (for which Gatorade was invented to combat illness linked to rigorous training) where athletic excellence, achieved through physical and psychological sacrifice is necessary for a brief career in the game.¹² Such sacrifice for the game possess metaphorical extensions into numerous professional fields. Further, the Blue Bolt Gatorade colour is still the predominate alien hue of all female body fluids in media advertisements. The Converse ‘ALL STAR’ model shoes speak to being practical, fashionable and sporty. The halogen work lights on both ends of the performance structure call attention back to the fact that the performance artwork, in and of itself, is literal work as is the time in which the performance unfolded. Further, I wanted to address the persistent expectation to be more than, to be excessively exceptional—to be all. In the pursuit to be all, many are driven by the desire to be timeless, glittering, as if they are the song that never stops playing because it implies that they will be remembered.

_{Chelsea Coon, Phases, six hours (non-stop), performed at London Biennale of International Performance Art: Tempting Failure, The Island, Bristol, UK, 2014. Photo: LADA: Live Art Development Agency. Courtesy of the artist.}


Phases 

Phases was performed at London Biennale of International Performance Art: Tempting Failure, at The Island in Bristol, UK for a duration of 6-hours (non-stop). This performance addressed endurance through sustaining both physical and psychological duress as I challenged and surpassed my limits.

I installed a circular loop composed of eighty-grit sandpaper and affixed it to the floor with heavy-duty black electrical tape. The structure measured approximately two meters in diameter. The eighty-grit grade of sandpaper is categorised for the accelerated removal of materials such as hardwoods and metal. Since I had considered the necessity of this structure to take form as an endurance performance over the full six hour duration, this grade of sandpaper was a necessary component in that it provided a variable that my body would need to work with over the duration. The circular track was installed at the entrance to a former prison loading dock and at the backend of my track, there was a cornered intersection covered with two floor-to-ceiling warped mirrors where half my sandpaper circuit was installed. The remainder of the circular track was open, meaning when I walked on the track, I had to maintain my balance without the assistance of pressing into the mirrors for support. There was a low hanging pendant lightbulb hovered just inches above the concrete floor, which provided a haunting illumination of my skin traces, feet, and contours of my face.

I walked repetitively on this circular track where I paced slowly for the duration of the piece. The image was a physiological wearing down of my body seen in the accumulation of traces left on the coarse paper. Phases was produced with the idea that the end always looks like a beginning; everything has to come to an end so that a beginning in another form is possible. What I mean by this is that endings, on a long enough timeline, are informative matter of new beginnings. This concept became more real in the process of the making of this performance through the surpassing of my limits. Further, the recycling of matter from which new forms are created has been observed in life and death processes of stellar bodies. On this conceptual interest of cyclicality to address the body and its place within space, performer and academic TJ Bacon explains,  

… Coon’s practice wrestles with the astronomical universe to create a phenomenological World in which her work encounters the experiential. She uses her practice as a microscope to focus upon the intangible, the ephemeral and the matter that links us.¹³

As the duration of my performance Phases unfolded, I necessarily had to adjust. This was because my feet were raw, stripped, and close to being so worn down that they would just bleed continuously. To maintain the tension and not allowing the skin to break too soon, I began to incorporate the action of pressing into the mirror as the duration progressed. Pressing into the mirror magnified the breaking of my body through the repetitious actions in the framework circuit and time. This action emphasised the tension of the structure, and that every moment as I moved forward, failure of my body to endure became imminent. The performances 6-hour duration resulted in a documented trajectory of my body’s erasure left behind providing a visual trace indicating that my body had endured and sustained, remarkable duress. Significantly, the cyclical trail I walked on the sandpaper circuit felt relentless as the performance progressed. Several times, I felt panic that it would never end as the sustained duress affected my ability to gauge time. The circular trajectory emphasised a feeling of endlessness for me as well as for the audience. This performance utilised endurance to challenge the excessive states and desires inherent of the body as the matter to push my corporeal limitations: to break, to rupture, to open and expel. As Amelia Jones puts it of the strategies of realising performance,

… But this de-manifesting of art, I want to argue, has nonetheless most effectively and consistently taken place through performance and bodily strategies, which have the potential to de-contain (to release explosions of that which cannot be contained):

smells

durational temporalities

blood

boredom

affect

and more. …¹⁴

There was a contract between the structure of the sandpaper circuit, the duration of the performance, and my enduring body which resulted in a significant tension that was essential to sustaining the work. This tension in performance structures is a component which necessarily incorporates responsive, real-time decision making. Without the tension, there would be less urgency to deliver a performance requiring this level of endurance. The tension in Phases relates to my performance experience in realising other works because it begins with the acknowledgement that the structure, and the body under duress could, or rather over, enough time, fail. Addressing the potential for failure is a starting point for my works. The next step is the decision to endure the conditions of a performance framework, and to persist through shifts of space, time and the body. The possibility of failure at any given moment necessarily provokes the desire to persist such tensions in the work, which challenges me to constantly reassess what my limits are and how close to exceeding these limits I get over indeterminate intervals in performances. Through the making, in which the work folds and unfolds overtime, it is necessary to factor in how my performance structure challenges and positions a probable failure of my body, which I significantly identify as a concept core to the work. What would the failure of my body to endure a performance emphasise of its relationship to space and time?

For Phases, the answer to what failure emphasises is an oscillation between power and vulnerability as the body’s limits are challenged and surpassed. The conceptual objective was for the breaking or wearing away of the skin of my feet to occur over 6-hours. Phases demanded that I adapt to the structure by shifting my body weight and the effects of gravity over the performance’s duration in order to sustain the structure. If I was not constantly adjusting, the performance image would not work, meaning it would have ended the performance due to a lack of responsiveness. Not adjusting would result in a more rapid, less controlled acceleration of the body and image simultaneously breaking.

The minimal action of Phases resonated both in the immediate space in which the action occurred, as well as into a psychological space for the audience beyond the initial encounter of the work in documentations of memory, oral retelling, photographic and video files, among others. In the inherent endurance of sustaining bodily erasure, combined with the excessive endurance due to the durational structure of the piece in performing these repetitive acts, I make clear the body to space interrelationship by impressing the space with my body and the subsequent way that the body was oriented by the parameters of the space itself. The impression of my body is evidenced through the documented traces of my skin left on the sandpaper, the marks of my handprints on the mirror that I pushed against for support; the air of the performance space filled with my skin particles, which the audience inevitably breathed into their bodies. The audiences breathing in of my body, further intensifies the folding and unfolding processes highlighted earlier in this article. These processes challenge the way in which physiological and psychological limitations of the body can be exceeded through repetition, duration, and corporeal expelling within excessive performance structures.


Conclusion

By analysing the excessive acts and adaptive strategies employed in my endurance performances all star and Phases I have addressed the capacity of endurance performance as a strategy to exceed perceived limits of the body to make evident the relational response between the shifting factors of space and time. Within a performance, attempts to endure a set of circumstances beyond the capacity to control outcomes extends to exposing the body’s limited time within both the performance space and within life itself. Through physical impressions such as leaning on the mirror and exposing the raw skin on my feet in Phases, literal marks make evident how an endurance performance space affects the skin and contours of the body and in turn how the body has the capacity to affect our orientation to space. Adaptive responses are a necessary facet of endurance, the outcomes of which are evident at the end of a performance. At the end of my performance Phases I was presented with the aftermath of the installation of the sandpaper circle covered with two parallel tracks filled with traces of my skin, spotted with patches of blood evidencing the shift I made throughout the performance to survive the duration outlined in the performance framework. At the end of all star, I was confronted by the purpled corpse-like image I had become as glitter had accumulated on my sweaty skin and the subsequent mess I had made of the space from emptying out and throwing the contents of 180 vials of glitter.

The excessive acts of endurance in my performances all star and Phases sharpens our attentiveness to the intrinsically interconnected factors of space, time and the body as we can perceive their shifting relations unfolding through adaptation, repetition, and reorientations. Endurance performance structures challenge and leave impressions that evidence how space affects and marks the body, and how the body in turn affects and marks space. The parameters of both space and the body are perceivably altered in and beyond the potentials in the complexity of excessive performances of endurance.



Notes:

1. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 8-9.
   
   
2. 2 Ibid.
   
   
3. Kerstin Mey, Art and Obscenity, London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2007. 50.
   
   
4. Johnson, Dominic W. Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s. Manchester University Press, 2019. 7.
   
   
5. Lara Shalson. Performing Endurance: Art and Politics Since 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 18.
   
   
6. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 27.
   
   
7. Ibid. 9.
   
   
8. Lara Shalson. Performing Endurance: Art and Politics Since 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 3, 5, 8, 10, 11.
   
   
9. Ibid. 12.
   
   
10. Blair French. “When Very Little Happens: Durational Performance by Fiona McGregor and Tony Schwensen” in What is Performance Art? Australian Perspectives, ed. Adam Geczy and Mimi Kelly. Sydney: Power Publications, 2018. 260-263.
    
    
11. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology,10.
    
    
12. “Born in the Lab” Heritage. Gatorade: The Sports Fuel Company. http://www.gatorade.com.mx/company/heritage. Accessed 01- June 2020.
    
    
13. TJ Bacon, “Introduction,” No One Thing is the Root of All Anything: Phases and Performance of the Imminent, Los Angeles: Not a Cult., 2018. 6.
    
    
14. Amelia Jones, “Performance: Time, Space and Cultural ‘Value,’” in One Day Sculpture, ed. David Cross and Claire Doherty. Kerber Verlag, 2004. 35.

About the author:
Chelsea Coon (b. United States. Lives in Melbourne.) is a performance artist and writer. Her performances utilise endurance to reconsider limitations of the body through its various orientations to space and time. She has exhibited internationally in festivals, biennales, and galleries in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She received her BFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2012), MFA at Tufts University (2014), and a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Theatre, Performance and Contemporary Live Arts at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Scuola Teatro Dimitri, Switzerland (2015). Recent writings will be included in Rated RX: Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan (Ohio State University Press, 2020); and the phenomenology of bloody performance art! (Routledge, 2021). Coon is a PhD candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.