Tongue, 1991, Chicago, Club Lower Links (within the Lynn Book Covers event)

Описание: Lynn Book’s “tongue”, her critically received solo vocal performance, was an extended deconstruction of language, meaning and power through a poetics of feminist thought that extends the notion of ‘writing woman’s body’ to speaking it, voicing it and reinventing what ‘voicing bodies’ (her term) could be, including shockingly, boisterously funny. Book developed this 1991-92 work (and it developed her) through a heuristics of procedures that included ‘audio journals’ (her reinvention), free writes, and concentrated writing from theoretical, rhetorical and narrative forms that she feverishly subverted almost at the moment that she opened her mouth. In the words of former Chicago Tribune journalist and writer, Achy Obejas, “Book winds her material around itself like a coil, going back every so often to pick up a piece that at first may have seemed a throwaway… because every little piece fits into every other and resonates.” This video documentation from the first full performance of it occurred as the second ‘set’ within the context of a larger evening called “Lynn Book Covers”, that she produced at Club Lower Links in Chicago, the legendary club near Wrigley Field that was a haven for performance artists, experimental musicians, activists and others challenging boundaries at the height of the Aids epidemic and the culture wars of the early 1990s.