Skin Shedding and Nostalgia Tripping with Liv Fontaine
‘No help for the not well. No more care bears for the not cared for.’
-Liv Fontaine from A Gloomy Masturbation
I first met Liv Fontaine when she visited a pop-up version of Burning House Books I was hosting in Glasgow a couple of years ago. We talked about our mutual love of the writer Cookie Mueller and performance artist Karen Finley; the uselessness of our arts degrees and whether or not we would be better off pursuing so-called real jobs. Even though it was the first time that we’d met I knew exactly who Liv Fontaine was because her reputation as a talented performance artist precedes her. In her affronting performance work Fontaine viscerally embodies the trope of the screeching and hysterical woman and uses it to challenge engrained patriarchal accusations of female histrionics with her signature working-class wit and fervour. In 2019 after a diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis and subsequent global health pandemic brought her performance work to a standstill, Fontaine turned her hand to drawing. A series of her vortex inducing illustrations from this time have been collected into the book A Gloomy Masturbation, published by Zurich-based CPress earlier this year.
In the self-penned introduction to A Gloomy Masturbation Fontaine refers to the act of drawing as an unwillingness to rest while her live performances were on hiatus. The isolation and ensuing restlessness that accompanies both sickness and a planet in lockdown is present throughout Fontaine’s illustrations. Nostalgic bubble-letter slogans and cartoons crowd the pages creating a cerebral and claustrophobic version of reality, punctured by objects and phrases from the outside world. At the centre of the book’s first drawing, ‘The Performance of Health and Progress 2021’, is a well-trodden welcome mat surrounded by tokens of traditional domesticity: a small tree-lined house, a baby with a pink bow and matching pacifier and a blue Citroen Picasso, the apex of mid-‘90s family cars. After a year of intermittent lockdowns during which the very concept of a future became shapeless and unlikely, Fontaine’s illustrations provide a feeling of optimism through gritted teeth; a manifestation of comfort in uncertain times. Since the pandemic began I have felt for the first time in my life a low grumbling desire for the material trappings of stability and progress such as these. Hours into re-watching Mad Men with my partner on the cancelled Christmas Day of 2020, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to pack the kids we don’t have into a Citroen Picasso we also don’t have and spend the day driving around rope-lighted suburbia visiting relatives to a soundtrack of Michael Bublé. Would it really be so bad? Fontaine derails this train of thought with a handheld mirror containing the bubble-lettered message ‘keep fooling your-self.’ Here she throws up the evergreen millennial quandary: did I choose this life of rejecting normative milestones or were they never available to me to begin with? The older and further away I get from the relative stability of my own childhood, the more I tend towards the latter.
Pop culture nostalgia runs through Fontaine’s drawings in the form of well-loved cartoons and frequent references to the brands and objects that have flooded the mental and physical space of capitalist culture. Little My and Betty Boop haunt the pages with their polar opposite representations of femininity. The menacing and instantly recognisable white gloved hand of Mickey Mouse lifts a mini-skirt with a single finger. There is a page dedicated entirely to a drawing of Kermit the Frog smiling benevolently over a potted Swiss cheese plant—the staple of every millennial rented home, that is so strangely familiar and compelling that I want it framed in my living room. In a drawing entitled ‘Safer in Scotland,’ two columns of Irn Bru cans hold up a pavilion sheltering a baby Highland cow suggesting a cultural significance that goes beyond pure consumption. In ‘Window of Tolerance’ a scantily clad woman has her face buried in 2019’s ‘must-read’ millennial novel, Sally Rooney’s Normal People. On an alienated planet does reading the same book as everybody else constitute community? Does the familiarity of branding lull us into a false sense of self and security, especially during periods of fear and isolation? When chaos reigns, the reliability of bubble gum flavoured fizzy pop that scorches your tongue the same way it has since you were at your mother’s knee can be comforting.
Throughout A Gloomy Masturbation Fontaine depicts herself as a medusa-like creature, a scaly and green mythical monster. Medusa Fontaine moves between two worlds, having shed the clutter of a previous life but still not having amassed the right kind of clutter that is required in order to slither into the next one. In ‘Thinking Correctly Leads to Prosperity (Rusty Old Pipes, Rusty Old Cunt)’ a grey-green Medusa body crowds the page, her face set in a grimacing Grinch-like mask. Writing along her limbs reads ‘BECOME SOMEONE’, ‘BEING REAL’ and between her legs are the words ‘RUSTY OLD CUNT’. In others she appears flanked by floating pink penises or handing a can of Tennent’s to a man with the words ‘ANOTHER NOTCH’ across the back of his shirt. Of her Medusa creature, Fontaine writes: ‘I spent many months visiting the reptiles in the Queen’s Park Hothouse in Glasgow, close to the hospital at which I was being treated. I developed an affinity with skin shedding creatures and viewed them through my own crisis of personality.’
With these multiple Medusas Fontaine begins to process an identity challenged by sickness and the rejection of the normative, capitalist markers of adulthood and success.
The pull between the disparate identities Fontaine wrestles with throughout A Gloomy Masturbation felt depressingly familiar to me. Over the past couple of years, with little else going on to distract me, I’ve been thinking a lot about having children. More than the obvious upheaval in lifestyle this would cause, I worry about the challenges with my own identity I would be made to face. Domesticity looms over the pages of A Gloomy Masturbation like a guillotine about to drop; a constant and steady threat. Sure, there are aspects of the domestic that are alluring, especially the potential of security and comfort in an increasingly volatile world. However, concealed within that comfort there is a cultural sterilization of the lustful and libidinal that falls disproportionately on women. In ‘Working It Out Never Works,’ the book’s final drawing, we see a nude female figure bound by a snake coiled around her middle. She stands above a sinking ship with a pie shaped like a sun setting to her left. Her head is replaced with an iron. In her essay ‘The Laugh of Medusa’, feminist theorist Hélène Cixous agues that men have retold the myth of Medusa, turning her into a monster because of their fear of female desire. Fontaine’s Medusa, with her shedding, slithering and shifting body is trying to carve out a new space for it.