The Only Authentic Expression of Self is Gastrointestinal

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"The Only Authentic Expression of Self is Gastrointestinal" for solo performer, kitchen objects, food, and sine waves
By Eli Namay
video By Daniela Amortegui
c. Dec 2016
for George Risk and Jerry Lewis

“Ultimately, expressivism promotes an ethics of individualism… as well as the concept of metaphysical dualism in that it conceptualizes a separate inner dimension of the mind to which each individual has sole access… What follows is a description of thee historical and cultural roots of the expressivist strand of the “default” model of the self through the accounts of the inward turn of Protestantism and Romanticism, the post-Freudian psychological man, and the concept of authenticity.
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The product of Psychoanalysis as a post-religious ethic, is the psychological man who becomes his own religion --a religion in which taking care of oneself is the ritual and health is the ultimate dogma….
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In The Ethics of Authenticity (1991)... Charles Taylor… claims that an ethic of authenticity was born at the end of the eighteenth century by building on earlier forms of individualism, namely, Descartes’ metaphysical dualism..., John Locke’s political individualism… and Romanticism... The notion of authenticity developed out of a displacement of the moral agent in this idea: rather than being in touch with the “right thing to do,” we are in touch with our “ true selves.” ...(Taylor, 1991).
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The inward turns of the confessional self, Romanticism, and psychological man have in contemporary American consumer society been turned outward as personal values, or sets of values, manifested in the notion of taste. In a post-Romantic and post-psychoanalytic society, the act of expression is no longer reserved for artistic creation; expression can now be achieved through what we decide to buy from among the huge set of possibilities… (Guignon, 2004)”
-- Rami Gabriel, Why I Buy (2013)
[overheard at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in the Body Worlds exhibit]
Young Boy: [crying and yelling]
Mother: It’s ok honey… This is what’s inside you.
Young Boy: [through tears] But I don’t want it to be inside me!


“It is the music of yourself. Yes, you are music too. Everyone is supposed to be playing their part in this vast Arkestra of the Cosmos.”
-- Sun Ra


Coupled with either nihilistic or necessitous preoccupations, Gabriel’s description of our cultural landscape is accurate, and I would argue its problematic nature goes beyond just when it is expressed through consumerism. It is the vast set of images that mediates all social relations, including how individuals relate to themselves. It influences everything from the political to the intimate. These images are designed to release dopamine, coupled with economic desperation we all become addicts: hyper-stimulation -> arousal addiction. It is the phenomena of experiencing and reflecting on our own lives as if they were movies, from Romantic Comedy idealism to Campbellian stories of heroic struggle told with dramatic special effects. We expect our lives to be as thrilling as these stories, we give value to our experiences when they reflect spectacular events.


Alienation from each other and our own bodies is part of this. When we are separated from ourselves and each other a void of insecurity is created that is to be filled with the consumptive activities. Like the little boy in the museum we become frightened when we are confronted with the functions of our bodies and we actively avoid experiencing ourselves. This is quite evident in beauty and hygiene products marketed towards “women.” i.e. the tampon applicator that physically separates a woman from, herself and the douche that implies an inherent in uncleanliness.


In this situation, we find ourselves doing all sorts of absurd things. We play emotional games with our sexual partners, buy sports cars we can’t afford, compulsively document ourselves, join cults, and spend significant amounts of time deconstructing and arranging recordings of our own burps.

An Object that is Not Oriented - Alex Grimes for Eli Namay & Phil Sudderberg

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Eli Namay - double bass
Phil Sudderberg - drum set
Alex Grimes - composition

“I really felt that you were shattering the atmosphere around me, that you were creating a void in order to allow me to progress, in order to offer the expanse for an impossible space to that which within me was potentiality only, to a whole virtual germination that must be sucked into life by the interval which offered itself” Antonin Artaud

an Object that is Not Oriented comes out of a study of ‘gestural spine’, inspired by Merce Cunningham’s discourse on the torso as a central axis of balance in his choreography. The piece is an inquiry into the complex whole-to-parts relationship employed by de-coupled movement and to what extent disconnected movements can develop independently in the same body. It seeks to identify some of the ways in which parameters condition each other within a gesture via their inherent contingencies. It asks if the types of relationships between forces active within the body during a given gesture – in order for it to speak musically – exist along thresholds or strata that delineate a kind of field of structural integrity. To what extent can this ‘field of structural integrity’ of a given gesture be useful for building rules of parametric constraint?

On balance in his choreography, Cunningham writes,

This involves the problem of balance of the body, and the sustaining of one part against another part. If one uses the torso as the center of balance and as the vertical axis at all times, then the question of balance is always related to that central part, the arms and legs balancing each another on either side and in various ways, and moving against each other. If one uses the torso as the moving force itself, allowing the spine to be the motivating force in a visual shift of balance, the problem is to sense how far the shift of balance can go in any direction, and in any time arrangement, and then move instantaneously towards any other direction and in any other time arrangements, without having to break the flow of movement by a catching of the weight, whether by an actual shift of weight, or a break in the time, or other means.