The Brooklyn Rail

Machine Dazzle wears a discarded plastic tarp belted with a pride-themed University of Michigan fanny pack, a large 3D printed vulva on a Mardi Gras-style chain around his neck. He is explaining to our group the contents of his work, Ouroboros, on view this spring and summer in the Irving Stenn, Jr. Family Gallery at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) in Ann Arbor. What the work—a product of Dazzle’s Roman J. Witt Artist Residency at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design¹—contains is…trash. Ouroboros, whose title references the ancient symbol of a snake devouring its own tail, features a tube-shaped scaffolding overflowing with pieces of refuse that Dazzle has collected from Michigan’s Huron River and meticulously cleaned. The installation above us, complete with a soundtrack of hypnotic drips and syllables, is the result of the second and third phases (or acts) of the Ouroboros project, in which Dazzle added subsequent installments of trash to the original sculpture. He doesn’t need the black faux patent leather platform heels he has on to be, easily, the tallest person in the room—but they do place him squarely at eye level with the empty milk jugs, condom wrappers, aluminum cans, and lots and lots of Christmas ornaments the artist has arranged into this colorful, self-consuming garbage snake. These remnants of consumption and convenience, as Dazzle reminds us, have become an integral part of our world, part of ourselves; we are constantly inhaling plastic just by virtue of being alive. The trash-clad artist literalizes his claim, articulated in the exhibition’s introductory wall text, that “We are the garbage. The garbage is us.”

We’ve come to the museum on this mid-June evening to see Dazzle and a cast of performers² transform into embodied garbage. In what those involved are calling “act three” of the Ouroboros project, the performers will wear the exquisite costumes Dazzle has fashioned from discarded items in a twenty-minute activation. Dazzle’s background is in New York’s experimental dance and drag scenes—his chosen name is a remnant of his time as a member of New York’s storied “Dazzle Dancers”—and this evening’s program (with showings at 5pm, 6pm, and 7pm), as we will soon see, might alternately be described as runway show, dance recital, or drag performance. The resourceful creativity of Dazzle’s costumes recalls the “balls” popularized by LGTBQ+ Black and Latinx communities in urban centers in the 1970s and 1980s. For Dazzle, the discarded nature of garbage gives it an inherent resonance with queerness’s oft-attended experiences of rejection and isolation. Throughout the show, participants vogue, sway, and pose to a rhythmic soundscape in unique performances of gender itself. Full-head masks disguise salient gender identifiers such as hair and makeup, forcing viewers to encounter the bodily expression of figures in Big-Gulp skirts and crowns made of 3D printed dildos on their own terms.

In the wake of the performances, these very costumes will be displayed among the installation’s current array of bottles, wrappers, and cans. The empty soup cans invert the iconography of another queer trailblazer, Andy Warhol, who monumentalized objects of commodity fetishism at their most appealing. Warhol’s portraits of Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo box sculptures highlight the attractive packaging that promises swift gratification through consumption. Dazzle, by contrast, displays the evacuated, discarded packaging, stripped often of its label and always of its appeal. A giant phallus on one end of the snake points toward a giant vulva on the other in a delightfully graphic symbol of regeneration. The intermingling of life and waste evokes Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, the dispelled evidence of death, from which we must separate ourselves so that we can live. The ouroboros captures the impossibility in the Anthropocene of extricating ourselves from what we discard, as the packaging we create and throw away becomes the air we breathe, the water we drink, the earth we inhabit: an eternal loop of trash expulsion and consumption.

Yet this packaging, in its very disposability, offers a singular opportunity for reflection. It becomes the trace of a particular moment, a particular now that is over almost as soon as it has begun. This struck me as I considered the exploding watermelons fashioned from disposable Styrofoam medical coolers that the artist added for act two, launched on May 1st. Early May was near the height of the University of Michigan’s encampment, which became a site of discord over the ongoing war in the Middle East. The university removed it just a few weeks before our visit. I didn’t see many children in the audiences the night of the Ouroboros performances, but the few I did notice called to mind the drag story-times that have also become flashpoints in the country’s polarized culture wars. Dazzle has a talent for exposing the current moment, with all of its alluring and conflict-ridden garbage, for our consideration. After all, you can learn a lot by going through people’s trash.

1. Produced by Chrisstina Hamilton, Jim Leija, Andrew Cohen, Matt Casadonte, and Niki Fairchild Azevedo with studio support from Ana Trujillo Garcia. Sound editing by Matthew Girard.
2. Performers include: Thornetta Davis (vocalist), Jackie Blue, Jared Bugbee, Maxi Chanel, Andrew Cohen, Ms Faguette, Emerson Granillo, Rowan Janusiak, Amanda Krugliak, Tree Muller, Jezebel/Jay Orellana, Maddy Rager, Charlie Reynolds, and PonytailDerrick. Movement Director: Clare Croft. Audio in collaboration with Matthew Girard and Gerard Kouwenhoven.