Technology of Enchantment: Les Petites Morts
Laura Ohio
Every day for 10 consecutive days in October 2020, during the height of the Mi’kmaq lobster dispute, Laura Ohio filmed herself eating a lobster. Les Petites Morts subjects the viewer to a simultaneous experience of the 10 videos that resulted, asking them to confront the dubious lines between voyeurism and exhibition, seduction and exploitation, performance and identity, privilege and commentary on privilege.
Like much s3x work and s3x-adjacent work (mukbang, ASMR), the performance of feminine sensuality in Les Petites Morts exposes how straight consumer culture depends upon selfaware queer acts of class drag and feminine drag, where ‘passing’ is a subtle performance. These moments of ‘passing’ are so skillfully embodied by their performers that they do not register as queer in any sense identifiable by an algorithm for discovering “queer content.”
A white woman mocking white wealth and opulence by filming herself eating lobster alone in a stupidly fancy dining room—this is queer (as anything that reveals the artifice of straight culture must be queer), but not in the same way as blue hair or girls kissing. Even the overwhelming repetition on 10 screens defies the algorithm: it is impossible to experience Les Petites Morts on your phone.
But viewing this installation as a radical statement of criticism is insufficient; there is undeniable pleasure on display here as well, as 10 Lauras crack shells and slurp up butter. Les Petites Morts asks where pleasure fits into the enactment of a straight fantasy, and how pleasure shifts uneasily between performer and audience, consumer and consumed.
Laura Ohio is a visual artist working at the intersection of artistic production and ethnography. She uses performance, documentary realism, and cinematic techniques to explore culture, class, and taboo. Her projects communicate the ways in which we as individuals use cliches to self-identify and make sense of our social positioning.
Ohio’s recent work complicates and expands Julia Bryan Wilson’s analysis of art-as-prostitution. Ohio interrogates the business of “selling oneself” in both art and sex work, and examines the radical intimacy common to these practices, in which “artists and prostitutes are compelled to connect with complete strangers: a public. They share themselves with everyone but no one in particular” (Baudelaire).
By documenting sex workers and artists as they shift in and out of character, and recontextualizing this documentation in films and installations that are themselves seductive public performances, Ohio confronts the multifarious ways in which life in late-stage capitalism resists the distinction between real and manufactured interactions, identities, and emotions. In works such as Les Petites Morts and Technology of Enchantment, she demonstrates how art becomes a way to reconcile the “authentic” and the performed.