Decadent aesthetics and the neo-occult revival

There are two main considerations that inform the decadence of Holstein's Notorious: its spectacular presentation of witchcraft as a practice at odds with patriarchal capitalism, and what Holstein ‘does’ with the staging of witchcraft in performance. It is the ‘doing’ of decadence as an embodied and enacted practice that interests me most, which is why this section will be contextualizing Holstein's work in light of other performances that embrace an aesthetics of mess, trash and excess. However, to begin with I will be situating Holstein's engagement with witchcraft in the context of the neo-occult revival, where a comparable interest in the intersections between capitalism and patriarchy has been driving creative and critical explorations of witchcraft and the occult in ways that inform and resonate with the subversive ambitions of Notorious. Where the staging of mess, trash and excess underpins the work's aesthetic qualities, the neo-occult revival helps with explaining why Holstein may have been drawn to witchcraft in the first place.

The neo-occult revival – neatly dubbed (but not coined) ‘occulture’ by Christopher PartridgeFootnote ⁸ – refers to a resurgent interest in occult practices and beliefs in areas ranging from the commercial arena and the wellness industries, to subcultural nightlife, cultural production and activism. Neo-occult activism has been particularly prominent on social media. For instance, feminist covens such as the Yerbamala Collective have used social media as a platform for hexing Donald Trump – the self-confessed target of the ‘single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history’ after being accused of collusion with RussiaFootnote ⁹ – reclaiming Trump's appropriation of gender violence in witty acts of resistance, much to the chagrin of right-wing religious groups who charged Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with belonging to ‘a coven of witches that casts spells on Trump 24 hours a day’.Footnote ¹⁰ Kristen J. Sollée is one of the more prominent commentators associated with neo-occult activism. In Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive (2017), Sollée revisits and celebrates subversive readings of the witch by activist collectives in the 1960s and 1970s, including W.I.T.C.H. (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), as the basis for exploring and experimenting with self-empowerment.Footnote ¹¹ She offers a clarion call for women to queer pejorative framings of the witch by embracing occulture as the basis of intense friendships, liberated sexual practices, and activism (an approach that will be familiar to readers of the neo-pagan activist Miriam Simos, also known as Starhawk). However, Sollée does little to challenge the commercialization of occulture, and accommodates what we might call ‘disenchanted enchantment’, or oc-couture. The commercialization of witch-related cosmetics (e.g. Sephora), clothing (e.g. Hot Topic) and the self-care and wellness industries (e.g. Goop) are indicative of the binding of neo-occultism to lucrative commercialization – often to the annoyance of practising wiccans – in ways that threaten to diminish the subversive qualities of the witch as an enchantress.

There have been numerous neo-occult performances that directly stem from – and honour – occult rituals and performances of the fin de siècle,Footnote ¹² but the most relevant examples for the purposes of this article bear a more haphazard relation to esoteric knowledge and ritualistic practice, favouring the occult's anti-establishment potentialities over and above its orthodoxies. For instance, Ivy Monteiro, who is a Latinx live artist, has been exploring witchcraft in work throughout the 2010s. In one notable example, Tituba.2Point.OH! (2017), Monteiro addresses the mythologization of Tituba as the first person to be accused of practising witchcraft in the 1692–3 Salem witch trials, and draws a parallel between witch hunts and the ostracization of black womxn (Tituba's racial identity remains a topic of some debate, but there is no doubt that she was a slave, with an emerging consensus that she was an indigenous Barbadian). In work such as this, Monteiro seeks to unravel narratives of victimhood by staging enchanting acts of vengeance on a world that perpetuates systemic racism, transphobia and misogyny. Other notable examples include the London-based occult- and witchcraft-themed club night, C O V E N (which gave a home to numerous live artists associated with occult aesthetics and queer goth culture between 2016 and 2018, including FoxGlove, Elegance and Violence, Rodent DeCay and Venus Raven); the annual ‘exhibition-cum-performance-club-night’ Deep Trash, which regularly stages rituals inspired by occult practices;Footnote ¹³ and the ‘carnal theatre’ of FemmeDaemonium, which is a female-led collective of sex workers and allies who have been staging erotic summoning rituals rooted in folklore and mythology since their formation in 2017. These latter examples are also suggestive of the ways in which the neo-occult revival has intersected with the fetish scene in terms of its anti-establishment politics, subversion of straight appearance and behaviour, and resistance to the dominance of monogamous heteronormative relationships. In this, they accord with the binding together of decadence and the occult ‘as defiant strategies against normativity that celebrate darkness, transgression, and “otherness”’, to borrow from the editors of a 2018 issue of the decadence studies journal Volupté on ‘Decadence, Magic(k) and the Occult’.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover, as Per Faxneld sets out in Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2017), they participate in a lineage of aesthetic experimentation and activism that embraces the occult – especially witchcraft – as a ‘subversive tactic of choice’ for undermining the oppression of women.Footnote ¹⁵

Where many of these practitioners deliberately avoid commercial orientation for reasons ranging from safety and solidarity to political integrity, the Detroit-based activist and performance maker Jex Blackmore courts media visibility in staging anti-establishment performances and protests. For instance, Subversive Autonomous Satanic Ritual (2018), parts of which feature in Penny Lane's Netflix documentary Hail Satan? (2019), finds Blackmore imploring her audience to ‘[b]ring down powerful men … [and] execute the President’ as a masked butcher impales pig heads – ‘effigies of rapacious institutional and political autocrats’ – on spikes protruding from the top of an altar.Footnote ¹⁶ These remarks led to her membership of the Satanic Temple, which is a non-violent organization, being revoked,Footnote ¹⁷ but in the broader context of the ritual they also capture the provocative sincerity of a notable branch of neo-occult performance. The work is sincere not because it demonstrates belief in the anti-Christ (Blackmore is a non-theistic satanist), nor is it sincere in calling for the president to be executed; rather, it is sincere in its staging of the occult as a tool to ‘disrupt, distort, destroy, reclaim, resist and rebuild’ a society that perpetuates inequality and gender violence.Footnote ¹⁸

Where performances associated with the neo-occult revival contextualize and illuminate the layered connections that Holstein draws between witchcraft and patriarchal capitalism, this does not go far enough in elucidating her aesthetic choices, especially their decadent qualities. The look and feel of Holstein's work are much more closely aligned with a number of feminist performance makers who make a riotous spectacle of the values, traditions and institutions that produce or perpetuate gendered inequalities. For instance, Lucy McCormick's widely praised performance Triple Threat (2016) finds McCormick and her campy co-performers, Sam Kennedy and Ted Rogers, re-enacting the New Testament via a punk mash-up of power ballads, dance routines and spectacularly messy manipulation of condiments and sex toys. It is deliciously irreverent in its trashing of a belief structure that serves male domination and heteronormativity, but with none of the earnestness that tends to characterize Blackmore's critiques of capitalist patriarchy and religious zealotry. McCormick finds joy in pop-cultural detritus – the songs she sings, the branded clothes that she and her co-performers wear – in ways that find space for fun and subversive silliness in the calling out of religious master narratives that rationalize male rule and heteronormative proprieties.Footnote ¹⁹

One of the most notable examples of an artist working in this vein is Ann Liv Young, who has been presenting work in New York and internationally since 2005. Young comes from a background in dance, although her work challenges representation of the virtuosic. She makes a spectacle of gendered denigration; she frequently orients her work around ridiculously vulnerable and ‘enchanted’ archetypes culled from Disney, myth and legend (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, a mermaid); and, like McCormick, she nearly always incorporates karaoke-style singing. As visual-cultures scholar Anna Watkins Fisher suggests, Young's work resembles a kind of ‘adolescent drag’. ‘Rather than actually being or behaving like adolescent girls’, she writes, ‘these artists appropriate and stage the adolescent as a serviceable figure for articulating a more loosely ordered and multifarious contemporary feminism’.Footnote ²⁰ The lines separating Young's adolescent drag and a mature critique of gendered inequalities and systemic violence are often blurred in an idiosyncratic reformulation of feminist mimesis,Footnote ²¹ but the notion still hits upon a kind of anarchy that inspires and reviles in equal measure.

For example, Young's 2010 work Cinderella, presented in Malmö, Sweden, begins with the artist lying on the floor encompassed by a circle of knives, propping herself upright with her forearms in a pose reminiscent of the exploited soon-to-be princess from the eponymous Disney movie (1950). The performance flits between karaoke-style singalongs and awkward direct address, and culminates in a witchy ritual with Young urinating into a bowl, mixing the urine with soap and using it to wash her face and wig, and attempting to sell her own faeces to audiences in plastic bags sprinkled with glitter. In examples like this, Young makes space to revel in the undoing of gendered stereotypes and their implication in the consumption of popular culture. Equally, though, she unsettles ‘the problem of female identity being inextricably associated with the body’, to borrow from theatre scholar Sarah Gorman, by emphasizing the staginess of even the most visceral acts on her terms.Footnote ²² These acts are another component of Young's ‘adolescent drag’, evoking the recalcitrance of the adolescent in ways that are informed by, and set against, the legitimating authority of patriarchal capitalism.

Interventions such as these are especially pertinent once read in the context of ‘post-feminist’ tendencies in culture, work and government that undermine feminism by accommodating superficial forms of girl power at the cost of actual egalitarianism. Women might have ‘breached the power structure’ in gaining access to work outside the domestic sphere, as Naomi Wolf suggests, but working and consuming as a material girl in a material world has – for several decades now – been systematically used to undermine the project of feminism in a culture in which eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, consumer spending and violent pornography have all grown exponentially.Footnote ²³ Young and McCormick overidentify with this terrain in ways that invite parallels to be drawn with José Esteban Muñoz's notion of ‘disidentification’, which refers to the citing and scrambling of a cultural text in ways that expose its exclusions and prejudices;Footnote ²⁴ however, overidentification places additional emphasis on excessively exaggerating or augmenting a normative cultural logic. Young and McCormick overidentify with just such a logic by spectacularly exaggerating and augmenting – and, ultimately, trashing – images and behaviours associated with post-feminist and highly capitalistic forms of girl power. This, I argue, is what lends their work an appealingly decadent quality.

Decadence and the occult in Lauren Barri Holstein's Notorious

Like Young and McCormick, Holstein's work is often structured around dance routines set to pop songs that pastiche how virtuosic and beautiful bodies appear onstage. She frequently references ‘enchanted’ female types, not least as they appear in Disney, and she usually employs nudity, urination, mess, explicit references to the performance's complicity in commercialism, and the adoption of a persona: ‘the Famous’. Her work is collaborative, and she will appear onstage with two or sometimes several or many other performers whom she orders to carry out various duties (McCormick is a former collaborator). These orders will never be barked; instead, Holstein performs meekness in an adolescent drag that marks a striking contrast with the messy and frequently humorous images she creates onstage: for instance, melting a popsicle clasped in her vagina with a hair dryer in How to Become a Cupcake (2010), or ‘birthing’ a small Bambi figurine from a 1989 McDonald's Happy Meal in Splat! (2013) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Lauren Barri Holstein appearing in ‘adolescent drag’ in Notorious, by Lauren Barri Holstein. Fierce Festival, Birmingham, 2017. Photograph by Manuel Vason. Image courtesy of Lauren Barri Holstein.

In Notorious, models of femininity identified by cultural theorist Angela McRobbie as post-feminist types are both worn and cast off, from adherence to the feminist masquerade derived from fashion and beauty in a lucrative commercial sphere, to the hyper-sexualized phallic girl who must perform at once demurely and in ways that attach emancipation to gendered forms of expression. She overidentifies with these types, stretching them to points of messy excess, and strips bare post-feminism's movement of women into what McRobbie calls ‘a spotlight of visibility, into a luminosity which has the effect of a dramatization of the individual, a kind of spectacularization of feminine subjectivity’.Footnote ²⁵ In this, she extends a form of what Julia Skelly has described elsewhere as ‘radical decadence’, transposing the augmentation of gendered excess in twenty-first-century textiles and craft, which is Skelly's focus, to the stage. Much as the notion of ‘radicalism’ and the essentialism it indexes has fallen out of fashion recently, Skelly's feminist analysis is helpful as an example of scholarship that reclaims decadence from the misogynistic grasp of some of its nineteenth-century interlocutors. As with her analysis of work by artists like Shary Boyle, Mickalene Thomas and Allyson Mitchell, the ‘decadence’ in Holstein's feminism is of a kind that moves away ‘from the moralizing, pathologizing perception of decadence that was popular at the fin de siècle’, instead working with forms of gendered excess that ‘are inherently founded on a rejection, or refusal, of ideal femininity’.Footnote ²⁶

Marketing copy describes Notorious as a ‘witch-bitch ritual’ that looks at the ways ‘social media and consumerism have redefined how we relate to the female body, one's “true self” and public shaming’.Footnote ²⁷ Holstein explains what she means by this in an interview for the Barbican: ‘A witch-bitch ritual is an act of pleasurable repulsion, of intentional delinquency, of unapologetically creating problems. It's being the feminist killjoy in the room, unrepentantly’.Footnote ²⁸ The idea of being ‘the feminist killjoy in the room, unrepentantly’, borrows from Sara Ahmed's introduction of the feminist killjoy as someone who refuses to remain indifferent to structural and day-to-day experiences of misogyny and sexism. Unlike venues known more for their staging of live art and subcultural events, the institutional context of the Barbican enables Holstein to reach a relatively mainstream audience who may not be used to the staging of female bodies that publicly and spectacularly leak and dance to a point of exhaustion. This makes it an ideal venue for tackling the assumed agreeableness of gendered types and discourses, which Ahmed highlights as a commitment of the feminist killjoy.Footnote ²⁹

The performance is episodic, progressing through a series of loosely connected tableaux and routines: from the haunting image of three hanging witches that opens the performance, to the narration of grotesque fairy tales, infantilized pastiches of lesbian fantasies, physically demanding dance routines, and flagellation with the tentacles of an octopus. I will be looking closely at four examples in what remains of this article, each of which bears relevance to the occult, and serves to illustrate how decadence might be embodied or enacted as a ‘subversive tactic of choice’, to recall Faxneld: corpse-like commodities, fetishized corpses, artificial hair, and the birthing and consuming of an eye.

After the hair curtain closes on the three hanging witches at the beginning of Notorious, a close-up live video feed of the Famous is projected onto it, complete with Halloween-style makeup. She muses on what it is like to be ostracized as a witch, with both intonation and language bearing the hallmarks of an adolescent drag: ‘I feel like at night when I sleep outside, I kind of disappear and disintegrate and kind of decompose throughout the night. My body just kind of decays, and I'm covered in these putrid bubbles of, like, festering flesh. And I sink into the soil and rot’. She is describing a perverse mythos surrounding the female body that resonates with Showalter's commentary on decadence and misogyny cited in this article's opening pages: at once hostile and enchanting, condemned to a state of perpetual decay that must as a result be artificially beautified (the word ‘glamour’ is derived from the Scots gramarye, which means ‘spell’ or ‘enchantment’: hence, beautification by magic). However, even after the ‘life’ of the body-as-commodity is ‘eaten up’, there remains a tenacious capacity to produce gestures of defiance – for instance in a somewhat obtuse referencing of the Medusa myth.

Medusa was frequently represented in nineteenth-century art and literature associated with decadence. Jean Delville's picture L'idole de la perversité (The Idol of Perversity) (1891) is among the most striking depictions, which art and literary critic Bram Dijkstra describes as a ‘livid-eyed, snake-encircled, medusa-headed flower of evil’ who ‘could only be expected to mother hordes of degenerative temptresses, treacherous sea creatures, predatory cats, snakelike lamias, harpies, vampires, sphinxes, and countless other terrible, man-eating creatures’.Footnote ³⁰ In the Famous's hands, this ‘flower of evil’ is weaponized in a grotesque recapitulation of the myth's violence (Medusa wielded terrible power, but she was also raped by Poseidon, turned into a monster by jealous Athena, and then brutally murdered by the ‘heroic’ Perseus). Her tentacular snake hair, which became synonymous with the vagina dentata in the European fin de siècle,Footnote ³¹ is resurrected as a dead octopus worn on the Famous's head: a weirdly comedic image that ends up being savaged in a dance to the beat of Nicki Minaj's ‘Starships’ (2012), swinging the octopus in large arcs that repeatedly smack it against the floor to the point of rupture.

Understanding this moment as a site of consumption is crucial to understanding this moment as a site of excess. It is predicated on an excessive waste of life in the service of art, which in its own way echoes the nineteenth-century decadents’ distaste for utility. ‘Life’ is reduced to an expendable resource, and while the wasting of numerous octopuses’ lives over the course of the run of Notorious is questionable, to say the least (despite the fact that they were not killed by Holstein), it can nonetheless tell us something about how capitalism ‘sees’ and understands the value of things, animals and people. The flow of production and consumption may have drawn life from purchase – taking on what cultural critic Tom Holert refers to as ‘the paradoxical animus of a living corpse’Footnote ³² – but movement beyond this point also marks the ‘deadening’ of the product for the vendor. According to this logic, the octopus dies a second death. Not only is it killed once fished; its ‘life’ as a commodity is also harvested at the point of sale unless it is sold on to another, whereupon it might receive a third or fourth death. Because commodities accrue value through circulation, the octopus's deaths as a commodity are more akin to a protracted process of decay as its body is trafficked from the sea to the mouth of a consumer – or, in this case, a stage.

Holstein's destruction of the octopus is a difficult moment in the performance, the ethics of which Holstein is demonstrably cognizant of in a moment that marks a temporary interruption in its destruction. After smashing the octopus on the floor, she kisses it and says ‘I'm sorry … This is not a democratic space’, before she gently, almost tenderly, rips what is left of the creature in two, saying ‘I love you. Thank you for your performance. You are beautiful. Better than on [the audience's] dinner plate’. She then kisses it again several times, and gently casts the two parts of the octopus to either side of the stage, saying, ‘I know, you guys. The whole show is tragic. What can I say?’ The response is typical of Holstein: ‘Let's do that again!’ This time, though, as Minaj's ‘Starships’ is replayed, she is hoisted into the air and pushed from side to side by her co-performers as they whip her with what's left of the octopus in a kind of penance. Drawing attention to the ‘tragedy’ of the octopus's deaths whilst tearing it to pieces is hypocritical, but there is still something to learn from this wanton brutality. Holstein theatricalizes the decadence of capitalist markets, understood here as an attitudinal position that regards living things not on the basis of their own vibrancy, but on the basis of a gradual extraction of value and life. Holstein's witch refuses to accept capitalist exchange as a self-sustaining process of growth and renewal, instead encouraging her audiences to view this process as one of perpetual decay, introducing a typically decadent motif to the work's engagement with capitalism.

Holstein's preoccupation with deadness and decay also plays into the presentation of another material that is abundantly present throughout Notorious: long, artificial grey hair. Holstein has been experimenting with artificial hair in her work for some time, which frequently makes use of artificial-looking wigs, but what emerges most strikingly in Notorious is its sheer excess. It forms a gigantic curtain that traverses the stage, and tumbles from head to foot. It is abundant but lifeless, draining life from those smothered beneath its weight (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Lauren Barri Holstein, Krista Vuori and Brogan Davison collapsed beneath the weight of their wigs in Notorious, by Lauren Barri Holstein. Fierce Festival, Birmingham, 2017. Photograph by Manuel Vason. Image courtesy of Lauren Barri Holstein.

Holstein exposes hair as a fetish, in several senses of the word: as a fetishized commodity, as an object charged with eroticism, and as an object worshipped as a magical entity, which might hold some kind of supernatural power. If the image of woman, as Peggy Phelan observes, ‘displays not the subjectivity of the woman who is seen, but rather the constituent forces of desire of the man who wants to see her’,Footnote ³³ then what the abundance of hair in Notorious stages is a form of necrophilia, lusting after a part of the body that is to all intents and purposes ‘dead’. This ‘deadness’ is not to deny the vibrancy of hair as an autonomous material; rather, it is suggestive of transition into vibrancy of a different kind that bears no essential connection to the ‘life’ of a human, who is encouraged to view it, with notable exceptions (for instance, Kesh in Sikhism), as an expendable extension of the body that is regularly severed in the pursuit of stylized appearance, or as an ‘unfeminine’ growth demanding removal from the neck down.

Artificial hair is usually made to appear as natural and as lifelike as possible, performing vitality in order to draw attention away from its synthetic composition. In Holstein's work, the fetishism of synthetic hair is made to appear as precisely that: a fetish. The labour of production is reified in a spectacular object, a fetishized object – a decadent object – that stands in place of the conditions of its own production, but there is something in this decadence that encourages reflection on the ‘deadness’ of commodities. Manipulation of the synthetic hair to make it look sufficiently lifeless requires a substantial amount of time, work and investment (materials alone cost £3,000),Footnote ³⁴ which draws to light the decadence not just of perfecting artifice, but of refining decay as an art in itself. The wig is also inanimate as a commodity – a far cry, in other words, from the vibrant aliveness of hair as it appears in shampoo adverts, and likewise from traditional models of commodity fetishism that dwell on the transference of life from people to the objects that their fetishized labour is supposed to animate. If one can speak of the ‘animism’ of commodities in Holstein's work, it is akin not to human life per se, but to the reanimated corpse.

Holstein's body also becomes a kind of corpse-like relic in this performance, reanimated by the commodities that surround her. For instance, at the very end of Notorious, Holstein lies prostrate on the floor atop a pile of popping candy. Only moments beforehand she was squatting between the shoulders of her co-performers, suspended in a harness, pissing on the candy. Now, fire-like, the candy crackles into life. This is a striking expression of contempt for a violent history of persecution, but ‘waste’ also animates the environment she inhabits. After a pause long enough to make the ‘burning’ of Holstein's body unmistakable, she asks for the last track of the performance to be played – Britney Spears's ‘Work Bitch’ (2013). The lyrics are well known, but for indulgence's sake:

Holstein's witchy rendering of Spears's ‘Work Bitch’ might make an ironic spectacle of faith in a corrupted and banal beauty myth, but it is still situated within the terrain of post-feminism. Holstein's witch–bitch responds to Spears's importunity by stretching desire for seductive appearance to a point of excess, overidentifying with the expectations of gendered, economistic productivity. She is an extension of Spears's working woman, her superlative, having pushed the laboured dance routines that lead up to this moment just past the edge of exhaustion. She also presents audiences with a deep-set boredom. She is bored of the injunction to ‘work bitch’. She has gone through the motions of each action, step and routine – repeating ‘completed’ sections for no apparent purpose – until productivity itself is exhausted. Such is the flip side that accompanies intensified productivity – ruined within ruins, dazed, worn out – but Holstein's witch is no mere victim. She is not dead yet, more autonomous than automaton, and ready to rise again as the nightmare of her oppressors (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Lauren Barri Holstein rising as the nightmare of her oppressors in Notorious, by Lauren Barri Holstein. Fierce Festival, Birmingham, 2017. Photograph by Manuel Vason. Image courtesy of Lauren Barri Holstein.

The playfully nightmarish qualities of Holstein's witch are reflective of a common criticism levelled against the work of feminist performance makers who embrace trash and ruination: that it is ‘too angry’, or confrontational (a senior male colleague raised just such a point after I delivered a paper on Holstein's Splat! in 2017). There is a long history of critiquing feminist performance along these lines; however, for Sara Ahmed,

Holstein deliberately attempts to ruin what ruins, and her conjoining of a ruinous aesthetic with a ruinous politics offers an important key to understanding the appeal of her work's decadence. At the same time, as theatre scholar Kim Solga puts it, ‘Holstein “does” contemporary populist feminism as a confusing mess, a suite of intractable paradoxes and physically degrading actions, generating for her audiences a fierce parody of “what (neoliberal) women want” that is also a raucous demonstration of how much cheesy, seductive fun the spectacle of that “want” can be’.Footnote ³⁷ There are gendered implications in how Solga and I read this fun, but alongside Holstein's ‘anger’ at the persistence of day-to-day misogyny and structural oppression it is also important to recognize an uncompromising humour, which ultimately pokes fun at me as much as at the culture in which I am embedded.

Holstein's ‘winking’ approach to feminism takes a decadently literal form. In a particularly memorable scene – the last that I want to consider in this article – the giant hair curtains close to facilitate projection directly onto the hair as one of the co-performers, Krista Vuori, positions a camera beneath Holstein's legs. Holstein is naked save for the octopus headdress (soon to be destroyed), some heavy metallic necklaces, and a girdle with a few long tufts of hair that reach down to her ankles, reminiscent of Maud Allan or Mata Hari dancing as Salomé. After a long, awkward silence, the camera picks up something that seems, very slowly, to be protruding from her vagina – something akin to what Georges Bataille describes at the end of his decadent novella Story of the Eye (1928). Whereas in Bataille's text the eye is that of a murdered priest that transfigures into the eye of a lost lover, in Holstein's performance it is a garishly green gelatinous organ that is slowly squeezed out of her vagina only to end up between Holstein's teeth. The camera zooms up close to her mouth as she chews this ‘cannibal delicacy’,Footnote ³⁸ with the masticated eye dripping from her lips or being spat to the floor in gloopy droplets.

It is significant that this eye is birthed. As Federici addresses in Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (2014), acceptable forms of productivity for women in the early modern period were increasingly tied to regenerating the labour force as capitalism started to take root as a mode of socio-economic organization, with ‘heretical’ deviations from normative social and sexual relationships often resulting in persecution as ‘witches’. This is important, as it explains why so many women who were accused of witchcraft were elders, people who chose to live alone, who engaged in non-procreative sex, or who experimented with early forms of birth control.Footnote ³⁹ What piques Federici's interest is the challenge that witches pose to capitalism's instrumentalization of productivity, as well as the pitching of reproduction as a social and moral responsibility, and something of this challenge is what the eye-birthing scene taps into. It makes a mockery of the supposedly ‘disenchanted’ rationalism of capitalism, famously described by Max Weber as the ‘the control [of] everything by means of calculation’,Footnote ⁴⁰ just as it makes a mockery of the instrumentalizing of productive and reproductive capacities.

For Bataille, the eye inspires both attraction and repulsion, eroticism and horror; it is at once a seductive anatomical feature and an ‘object of such anxiety that we will never bite into it’.Footnote ⁴¹ Holstein's engagement with this eye seems to be dealing with Bataille's work on a number of levels. There is an explicit confrontation of an innate fear of an eye's violation reminiscent of its slicing in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un chien andalou (1929). Here, though, the eye is both birthed and consumed, calling to mind the ways in which eyes and eggs are used as ‘substitute objects’ in Bataille's Story of the Eye (much as eyes and the moon are in Un chien andalou).Footnote ⁴² This is an amusing, but nonetheless captivating, vision of excess, recognizing that which is both at home and out of place, both gazed at and gazing. The birthed commodity finds itself cast into the mouth of the witch, who chews it up and in the process destroys it as ‘eye’. She turns decadent expression – as trashy, messy excess and overidentification – against the ‘gaze’ of patriarchal capitalism, as well as its gendered injunctions, and in doing so invites us to engage with decadence not just as a style or aesthetic mode; she invites us to consider decadence as a practice well suited to ruining that which ruins.

The emphasis being placed here on the practice of decadence is important. In this section, I have been dwelling on Holstein's spectacular presentation of the witch as a nemesis of patriarchal capitalism, at once threatened by and threatening to the systemic production of gendered inequalities. The aesthetic that Holstein works with in Notorious takes on a decadent quality, with corpse-like commodities, fetishized corpses, artificial hair and an edible eye all tending toward dissolution, decomposition or exhaustion in the staging of intensely physical or visceral routines, or enervating periods of inertia. Moreover, this decadent quality plays out in the politics at stake in the work, provided decadence is read as a mode of playfully subversive ruination at odds with disenchantment and the instrumentalizing of productive and reproductive capacities. The political sympathies and intentions of Monteiro, Blackmore and other neo-occult performance makers explored in the previous section have just as important a role to play in addressing the decadence of Notorious as McCormick's irreverent trashing of religious conservatism and Young's adolescent drag. Taken together, their performances invite consideration of the aesthetics and politics of decadence in processual terms, approaching decadence not simply as a state, but as a practice. It is a practice that invites us to consider how bodies and behaviours are marked and marginalized as threatening or deviant, be they witches or witchcraft, performance makers or their adolescent drag; however, as the examples explored above illustrate, the staging of decadence and the occult might also be turned against the traditions, institutions, types and societal expectations that shore up and perpetuate patriarchal capitalism and the gendered inequalities it produces, giving us a glimpse of its contingencies and inadequacies by revelling in its embodied and enacted ruination.