#thus why we have mostly gay panic over teeth

[ellydrawsstuff]

I want gay panic flashbacks in season 2

[riting]

Dynasty Handbag: Shell of a Woman by Jibz Cameron

Other Animals on Shell of a Woman

“Is this a painting?,” Jackson Pollock once asked the painter Lee Krasner, of a canvas still wet with drips. Krasner and Pollock were married, standing in a studio in Long Island. Her response is never included in the story. But recent research by Dynasty Handbag has illuminated more of this historical moment. We can now see, from beneath a pile of old potatoes and rotting wool jackets and crusty brushes, a Professor Bags lurching forward, screaming, “NO!!!!”

Here, now, stands Professor Bags, limbs akimbo, searing holes in the audience with her stare, her massive brocade trench coat partially eclipsing the PowerPoint projected on a screen behind her. In this LA premiere of Handbag’s latest show, Shell of a Woman, she concerns herself with the 10 Greatest Works of Art ever, according to the Internet. Those in the audience consider her first on that list. PeeWee Herman is here, sitting demurely in the third row, in bifocals. Hannah Gadsby is here, with a handsome fade. The comic illustrator Nicole Georges perches next to Gadsby

, as attentive as a disciple. We would all trade next to anything to watch this lesbian Venus emerge from her scallop shell on loop, the gay world’s most sacred gif.

While Dynasty Handbag’s work doesn’t appear on the Internet’s greatest hits list, here onstage at Dynasty Typewriter (no relation), she crouches atop it, a gargoyle in shoulder pads, lipstick freshly smeared from her kill. It’s fun to watch her woopsy daisy destroy the greats like she’s knocking down a Jenga tower. Irreverent is too golf-clappy a word; Professor Bags is out for blood, even if just to smear an F in front of the word Art with her own tampon. It’s deeply satisfying to fumble along with her Braille for Beginners description of revered works of art – a sort of way-finding around a painting that dispenses with assessment or valuation. Here, a blob, there, a long sandwich or maybe a yellow finger. And here, a large rock with one breast. Thank you, next.

In an alternate dimension, where The Guerrilla Girls never aped around in front of MoMA and La Barbe was just a Parisian secretary, Professor Bags lectures for her undergrads – PeeWee, Hannah and Nicole – with what little is left of art history in the aftermath of broadband patriarchal apocalypse, the ruins reeking of turpentine and strewn with legendary dismembered ears. Bags née Handbag panics, revels and screeches her way through the lowest brows of Art, flashing her teeth at acres of beige male flesh and rote recitations of time-worn accolades, collapsing the soufflé of every Famous Art Man one by one, execution style.

Because she can, she sings, intermittently changing costume on stage, struggling with the projector remote, and draping herself over a stool or lectern to finish a long, howling crescendo. Ending on a seasonal note, Handbag takes the mic from Professor Bags to deliver the world’s most disturbing, slinky, elf-pitched rendition of Santa Baby.

I wish this was the Internet. Would like to feed every Wikipedia page and Bing.com search result through this filter. Want to stay here and watch forever. Only the Bags dynasty can make sense of it all.

Other Animals is Valentine Freeman who writes and overestimates herself from Los Angeles, California.

From E.S.P. TV Presents: Merry Christmas, Mary Boom! Taped live to VHS at Clemente Soto Velez, Flamboyan Theater, NYC, Dec. 15, 2012 by Scott Kiernan and Victoria Keddie.

Amanda Horowitz on Shell of a Woman

Dynasty Handbag is the shell that performer Jibz Cameron constantly slips into, providing discombobulated and hilarious slip-ups for her devoted audience. I’ve seen Dynasty Handbag perform a lot, mostly as a host in her monthly Weirdo Night! variety shows, but also in these smorgasbord theater pieces in which she trolls the formal qualities of comedy, cabaret, and solo-performance art. Dynasty Handbag has absorbed the horror and embarrassment of performance into a method of her own. I love the moments when she stops “performing” and putters out, totally exhausted or mortified by what she is doing. She meanders into anxious self-reflection, descends into wordless baby-talk-babble, and makes herself laugh at the depths of her own character’s absurdity. In these moments, there is an experience of second-hand embarrassment, and I realize just how weird it is to watch someone perform. Entertainment flips inside out, like the banana peel she alludes to at the top of “Shell of a Woman”: it no longer looks like the comedy, song, and dance she was giving us, but instead becomes the excessive, anxious, shedding of an entertainer. This shedding is latent in most performance, and for a reason, it is deeply uncomfortable to know just how desperate our performer/actor is. Dynasty Handbag prods just how far she can go down with the shame-train, teetering between a campy intensification of character and a cringey self-awareness. This is why it’s so hard to accurately describe exactly who/what Dynasty Handbag is; at times she’s abject and revolting, absurdly solipsistic, but her shell-like persona defies internalization of these things. Shame is less a tenant of her character and more a transient force within any performance.

When camp becomes cringey, it creates what my collaborator and I, in our own theater projects, have termed as “cramp.” We began using the term to speak about a particular tone of camp inadvertently performed in viral videos. In cramp, all the inward shivers of vicarious humiliation are brought on by the deep embarrassment of watching someone commit to artifice with total unawareness. Cramp combines camp’s (as noted by Susan Sontag) “glorification of character” with all the shades of othering that is platformed online. Campy performance, with its roots in cabaret, drag, and experimental theater, has long been a way for outsiders to perform their subjectivity to a simpatico audience. But, when these tenants go viral, everyone takes up performance as a way to declaim and defend their otherness. Schools of the unaware perform for each other in vacuums of jingoism, and in the end, no matter what camp you’ve come to represent there’s a cringey moment somewhere for you to watch or to be a part of. 

Throughout “Shell of a Woman,” Dynasty Handbag lectures her creative adjacent audience on the ten best artworks in history. She parodies a bourgeois art historian who, with cramp in hand, infantilizes the male-centric history of art through a performed innocence, making observations such as “Jackson Pollock's painting is a picture of spaghetti and beans,” and pronouncing Picasso as “Pick-A-Sew.” A particularly crampy moment in Dynasty Handbag’s performance occurred during the encore rendition of Santa Baby. She came back on stage in a tight red bodysuit and over-sized furry slippers to sing the Christmas carol as an adult baby. She whines and screams the Crampus number, humiliating and perverting the camp of Christmas cheer. Dynasty Handbag’s cramp also turns up monthly at her Weirdo Night! comedy shows. She’s become a routine nasty pain in the Los Angeles performance-art scene’s core, the lesbian cousin to the belly laugh.

Early on in the show, Dynasty Handbag claimed that “Shell of a Woman” is a lesbian show with nothing inside. It was one of my favorite ongoing jokes. Her continual claiming of the show’s “lesbian content” is entirely uncool. A more fashionable contemporary performer would have traded in the term for queer by now. But Dynasty Handbag claims her lesbian content hard, and with folly. As a shell of a woman she can talk back to herself and be entirely uncool and uncouth, as there is no inside to return to. Thus, she is able to reflect our own cringe worthy fears of being the incorrect thing, or claiming the wrong way to express otherness, which just creates yet another subcategory of alienation and ignominy.

Theater is inherently an embarrassing medium. It can be awfully excruciating to watch live bodies grab for emotions, especially those of campy and melodramatic size. And what’s more, you are stuck there, and the possibility of leaving, while available, would be public, you might trip over your neighbors’ feet, it could be a worst-case-social-situation. So, as a platform for cramp performance, theater seems far more risky and effective than that of the computer or television. In cramp theater, the audience has to confront embarrassment, and they are not cushioned by the safety and distancing of the screen. The inward shiver it produces could be a sort of collective erotics, a place to experience disgrace as a group feeling, rather than one of individual or virtual perjury. In a culture in which shame is used to control one’s body and one’s experiences as good or bad, diving further into the inward shiver could be a good place to start in detangling the anxieties that keep us separated and in fear of each other. 

Amanda Horowitz’s work exists between written language and live address, sculpture and getting dressed, personal soliloquy and satirical declamations from fictional characters.

Shell of a Woman happened at Dynasty Typewriter on December 16, 2018.

Jibz Cameron is a performance/video artist and actor living in Los Angeles. Her multi-media performance work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has spanned 15 years. In addition to her work as Dynasty Handbag she has also been seen acting in films, theater and television. She works as a professor of performance and comedy related subjects as well as lecturing and teaching workshops. Jibz also produces and hosts Weirdo Night!, a monthly comedy and performance event in Los Angeles.

Photos by Charlie Gross.