File Note 143: Dani & Sheilah ReStack

Dani and Sheilah talk about ‘calling people in’ so that they don’t feel so alone, so that they feel buoyed by the bravery of others; they talk about wanting, needing to feel understood, guided, seen. They didn’t say all this to me, or not exactly – these are my words. They called me in for my words. I didn’t know them, but I answered anyway. Sometimes people call and you find a drooling bear at the door. Other times you open the door and find that the caller’s already out in the field, beckoning – Hey, we’ve crossed this river, do you want to see what we’ve found? Yeah, I do.

I’m writing this in clumps because their writing came to me in clumps, and I think of their images as coming in clumps too. A clump isn’t a stack because it’s not vertical. The way I think of a clump, all the parts are touching. And clumps are messy, related to body and earth. Clumps of hair, clumps of blood and mud. A clump has to stick together, otherwise it’s no longer a clump.

When I think about clumps, I think about conception and gestation and abortion – you know, clumps of cells that some call a life. Dani and Sheilah made a trilogy of movies that is about, among other things, what it means to call something into life, what it means to attend to the lives we’re already in, how to respond to the elements we’re made of and in which we find ourselves. Sheilah says the trilogy was supposed to end in a conception; instead, it bears witness to disagreement and disappointment, along with a lot of beauty and water and blood. She kicks that metal pot down the road like a big ‘fuck you’ to a thing that won’t hold. Its counterpoint is rock: rocks don’t leak. Is a rock alive? And how does their camera change how we feel about that.

Dani and Sheilah wonder whether making art helps you to feel more, to go further into your feeling, or whether it staves off feeling, distances you from it. It seems clear that it can do both. It all depends on whose feelings, and what feelings, we’re talking about. Making an image can distance the maker from a feeling in the moment in order to give a feeling to a viewer later, or for the maker to contemplate later. The maker may feel fascinated, but the viewer feels repulsed. The maker may feel high seriousness, but the image gives off camp. Or vice versa. In the case of Dani and Sheilah, there isn’t only one maker (and there’s never only one viewer), so there are a lot of feelings to go around. We know that they agreed on the images they included, but we aren’t always sure they mean them in the same way. That tension is exciting, like a Neapolitan sandwich in which the viewer gets a stripe.

Often they stage something like an argument, whether it’s via avatars on the phone debating whether to have a kid, or in interviews in which they say things like, ‘I disagree’, or ‘I gotta jump in’, or on camera, when they pummel each other to the Kill Bill soundtrack. Sheilah has said the videos were a chance to see who had the better argument, about bringing another kid into a damaged world. But the viewer isn’t tracking arguments. The viewer is feeling. The viewer is feeling the overlapping but distinct orientations toward the world that the artists seem to want very much to convey to each other and to us. It feels like they get so much about each other that the things they don’t get threaten to become chasms. This is not uncommon. One of these orientations might be, ‘Some of us stay busy with the work of ordinary devotion / resilience / triage / sustenance while others luxuriate in despair’; another might be ‘If you don’t feel despair you’re not facing reality.’ The first prioritises amelioration; the second hopes to obviate pain by confronting it. ‘You can’t get around hurting people’, says one of their avatars, a line which, in its context, is part of an argument as to why the speaker doesn’t want to have a child. Freed from its context, however, it offers no obvious prescription for our choices or behavior. It could just as well be followed up by something like, ‘and since that’s an inevitable part of our being in relation, we must accept it and develop robust practices of accountability and repair’. The trilogy plucks both strings to make a chord. 

‘Use artifice to strip artifice of artifice’ is a phrase Eileen Myles taught me (I know now it comes from filmmaker Carl Dreyer). I don’t know if Dani and Sheilah know this phrase but their work knows it. They bevel ‘honesty’ with artifice – going so far as to discuss the term and its relation to art on camera – but they never wink at it. In Future From Inside, they sit up in bed together, entwined, and Dani says, ‘You were bringing up something important: that you’re not going to blame me forever about it’, and Sheilah, distracted by her phone – which is filming them that very moment – responds, ‘I’m just looking at our video.’ They know that anything they have to tell us about honesty and grievance and aggression and forgiveness in a piece of art will already be thick with artifice, so they go headlong into that sluice. 

Dani and Sheilah have said that their trilogy was supposed to be about healing, but it didn’t end up that way. Something different happened. This seems right – in the making, the plan never holds, but rather reveals itself to have been a pretext for opening up to things we could not foresee. Opening up is different from healing. It’s not better or worse. It’s just different. And here we might note that each of the videos features a foundational opening, or penetration. In Strangely Ordinary, This Devotion, it’s the slicing of Dani’s head; in Come Coyote, it’s the insemination; in Future From Inside, it’s the eye-drop ritual. These scenes have the power to evoke (at least in this viewer) some ugly memories, from head stitches to various misadventures in gynecology. But they also evoke many not-so-ugly, even joyful things, like making a baby, having sex, waking up, making art, giving birth, practicing magic. And so we find ourselves in a bumpy symphony of opening and leaking and wounding and inserting and incorporating and stitching and holding – activities revealed by the filmmakers to be a family affair. 

And a bloody one. In addition to a mosaic of head wounds, from the slit in Dani’s head to the bloody bandages around the head of the father in Purple Rain (a film sampled in Strangely Ordinary) to the blood pooling under Dani’s head after Sheilah smashes it against a rock, there’s period blood, vomiting blood, blood swirling in water, and that damn cat with a bloody twig in lieu of an ear. Some of this bloodletting is ‘natural’ (menstruation, illness), some is the result of injury (self-inflicted, ritualised, and/or inflicted by others); some ‘real’, some overtly artificial. Of all the dangers here conjured, however, there is one threat that never makes it onto the screen: that posed by the misogynists and patriarchs and homophobes who stand, as they have long stood, ready to punish, hurt and prohibit the lesbian world-making to which Dani and Sheilah here pay homage and enact. I’m glad these forces get no presence in the work – really, why bother? – but given the moment we’re in, I find it hard to banish them from my mind entirely. Just this morning I heard a well-known white supremacist in Idaho extolling (in what is now approaching a mainstream programme) what he feels sure will follow the overturning of Roe v. Wade: ‘They’re gonna ban sodomy! They’re gonna ban gay marriage! They’re gonna throw gays off roofs! Women lose, God wins. Christ wins. We shall have our theocracy soon.’ 

Which brings us to the inoculation.