Google the name “Pitriarchy,” and you’ll get an instant question back: “Did you mean patriarchy?”
Would I have rolled my eyes quite as hard at that had I not just spent an evening dancing in public to electronica songs with titles like “Panties in a Wad” and “Nipple Confusion,” immediately after seeing the Barbie movie? Possibly not. That search result is exactly the kind of dark joke the artists who shared those songs might delight in harnessing — the key word being “delight.”
Those artists — interdisciplinary provocateurs Loraine Wible (from France, by way of Cincinnati), Kyle Browne (from Boston), and the anonymous composer known as Pitriarchy (from Planet Pitriarchy; more on that later) — appeared in Tulsa in Pitriarchy Presents, a piece of collaborative performance art that brought equal parts feminist critique and joyful absurdity to a little room in the Pearl District (and to all my future research inquiries, apparently).
During their recent week-long residency at Positive Space, a womxn-focused gallery led by Nicole Finley Alexander, they built a rollicking, incisive body of work that drew from their individual interests in power, cultural mythology, sculptural play, and subversive punk.
I overheard more than one guest saying they’d heard about art like this happening in other cities, but had hardly ever experienced it in Tulsa. True enough: while performance art does have a history here (notably via the late New Genre Festival, which once brought the likes of Emily Johnson, Kristina Wong, and Cloud Eye Control to the city), it’s been a minute since this kind of work was a regular presence, although organizations like OK#1, ArtHouse Tulsa, and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship have kept it in the mix.
This was the first residency hosted by Positive Space, whose goal was to create space for a truly open-ended exploration among the artists, resulting in a one-night-only performance and an ongoing exhibition of artifacts. (Pitriarchy and Wible have created together before, while Browne is a new collaborator.) The result was all the things you’d hope that kind of process would be: exciting, thought-provoking, and new.
The show rests inside the immersive audiovisual world of Planet Pitriarchy, an imaginary futuristic realm where the longer your armpit hair is, the more powerful you become.
“The most glamorous of people begin to get pit hair extensions,” Pitriarchy explains; “the strands blow softly and sensually in the night breeze, on display for all to see.”
The opening night performance never explained itself or asked the audience to soberly weave together all its concepts and images while it was going on. It was fundamentally an in-the-moment experience, with plenty of chances to dance with the artists to deep pulsing beats as mind-bending tongue-in-cheek video projections played on one wall. But I couldn’t help continuing to think about them after it was over.
There was the word cruche, piped out repeatedly from around the space. (It’s the French word for “pitcher” and also for “lemon,” but also, Wible explained, slang for “dumb woman.”) There were the glass pitchers arranged inside a plastic kiddie pool, which Wible tried and hilariously mostly failed to fill with water from a bag inside the giant black-and-white striped column she wore (a riff on the Colonnes de Buren in Paris, inadvertently resonant with Barbie’s first onscreen swimsuit), as she sang an old French folk song about ten women waiting to be chosen for marriage to a prince.
There was Browne hissing in the garb of a Siren, wearing fangs, a green wig, a giant crown of paper shells and two delicate, gleaming sculptures of bivalves (she’s dubbed them “bivulvas”) pinned to her blouse as nipples.
And Pitriarchy herself, barefoot in a pale pink unitard and a flawless doll mask, dancing at a mic as film of spiders, webs, mountain lions, and masses of so many kinds of hair played behind her. And the immensely long cascades of yarn and moss attached to Pitriarchy’s armpits, sweeping the floor like royal garments. And tiny white columns from wedding cake decor, which Wible wore on her fingers and later used as pretend telephones as she paced the space during a song called “Please Enjoy the Music While You Wait.”
Not to mention the immense vagina built from fabric and paper that you saw as you entered the space, complete with a disco ball hanging right at clit level. (Yes, reader, I got in.)
And through it all, dancing. In its rush of sounds and visuals, pressing all these characters and situations right up close to each other (and to us), “Pitriarchy Presents” found a surreal coherence as it unpinned and rewrote expectations, transforming previously stubborn and confining realities of power into a fierce celebration. Dancing on the grave of patriarchy has never felt so liberating or so fun, and the chance to experience more limit-pushing, status-quo-questioning art like this in Tulsa has never been so welcome.
