Matthew Howland

In this shadow, the dark spot. The blank:

a slight stutter, stitch undone that bends outward
fade, spasm, figure obscured in a patch of darkness
then the soft cry back, malfunction of circuit, a form
comes back into view only to step away

The radio plays static, but a pattern can be seen in the absence of sound.

“How hard it is, when everything encourages us to sleep,

though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes…”1

There is comfort in the fade
in vacant space that fills with echoes,
ah, the slow bliss of the drift,
an edge growing to encompass the horizon altogether.
Fragments form in these gaps
uncovered not through language,

but “gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness…”2

A fourteen-year-old girl sucks the blood from her tampon on her webcam, later uploading the video to her Facebook profile. The girl, named Giovanna Plowman, attains cultural notoriety after the video goes viral within 24 hours of its initial posting. Plowman is given the moniker Tampon Girl.

Rumors of Plowman’s suicide circulate from an article posted on Examiner.com. Though still alive, Plowman is bullied and stalked, reportedly expelled from her high school. She posts a subsequent video on YouTube, titled “giovanna plowman’s confession video.,” that reacts to her Internet castigation.

Plowman can be effectively portrayed as an emblem of 21st-century teenage narcissism: in this common narrative, Plowman’s desire for attention results in an extreme act performed in front of a camera. However, the many reactions to and interpretations of the video prove Plowman’s effectiveness as a cipher. The viewer imbues their expectations and desires onto Plowman as she performs her perception of sexuality, extremity, and popularity for an imagined audience.

As opposed to a teenager seeking momentary attention or validation on webcam, Plowman offers herself up to be publicly demeaned and widely circulated, effectively made into an anti-hero. Her offering is met, matched, consumed.

Plowman’s video fits amidst a wash of contemporary excess-based entertainment that combines the entwined pleasures of consumerism and sex with a lingering, abstract horror. Some of this material can be placed under the misnomer of reality television, though it extends far beyond the category.

Excess is integral to any visualization of the Internet; infinite networks extend in parallel lines. Consumption lurks within competitive eating videos, inside the trade of child pornography and drugs on the dark web, behind vast arrays of consumer products with innumerable specifications, in the tight shot of a reality TV star dripping with wine…

It is inevitable that with excess comes horror:

the transgression of the boundary,
a grand spilling over, ripples
stretch a once flat surface,
“an insupportable range of sound.”3

This is a basic tenet of the ecstatic as theorized by Immanuel Kant: the sublime is held within a moment of inexpressible terror. In the flash, language necessarily falls apart.

The cruelty of Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty is not necessarily physical; instead a shattering transference of energy returns the audience to a state of consciousness. The Theater of Cruelty cuts away at traditional dramatic structures to forcibly return an audience to reality. It points straight towards “that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.”4

Artaud envisioned a text that falls away when one approaches it, an ambiguity with “a collapse of the soul at its center, a kind of erosion [of ideas] that is both essential and fugitive.”5As such, his chosen word of cruelty points towards “a cosmic rigor and implacable necessity; in the gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the darkness,” and further, “that pain apart from whose ineluctable necessity life could not continue.”6

These were not images for Artaud but “attempt[s] to construct an abominable wisdom.”7 The image is that which obfuscates: it covers, makes common, kitsch. It stands in ignorance of the shifting veins. It favors unattainable light.

Giovanna Plowman introduces herself.8She is wearing a low-cut, pale green shirt, brown hair pushed over one shoulder, some eye makeup. She explains that she’s not pulling any tricks, adjusts the webcam which focuses on her cleavage, head soon coming back into view. She prepares to remove the tampon as a striptease: “I’m going to pull it out and show you,” with practiced vocal inflection. Plowman provides an image of flirtation, of early puberty, isolation, understanding the body and face as undesirable.

Pants lowered, she takes several seconds to pull it out. The camera focuses on her changing facial expression. Now Plowman smiles holding the tampon in her left hand, teeth revealed, uncomfortable laughter. “Here it is, ew, so nasty,”: it spins for us across the frame, several distinct shades of red. “This is honestly going to be so nasty”; solely low-cut shirt and held tampon, she introduces a glass of water “to chase it down.” She backs up, face and body in frame, stumbles preemptively disoriented, giddy, drops her phone. She puts on a soundtrack—Azealia Banks’s “212”—and grins directly at the viewer.

Plowman pulls over a stool, sits down, smells the tampon, then cringes; with a grand gesture she moves it away from her body. Her face offers disgust, matched by a small exclamation. She re-composes herself, oscillates between projected confidence and revulsion, lifts the tampon parallel with her mouth and stares at the object. Plowman moves forward close to the webcam: “Okay, if anyone says this is fake, there’s honestly something wrong with you,” the last syllables drawn out in an upwards curve. She sits back and looks visibly upset, lifts the tampon close and far, sip of water, points to herself—“I’m so nervous.”

She raises it close to her mouth with a smile, smells it, broad grimace, sweeps her hair back and stares. A third sniff, she tilts her head back. Mouth open, the tampon drops in. Plowman sucks it, holding the string in her left hand, cheeks moving inward, eyes staring, squinting at the camera. She gags and drops the tampon, grins facing down and picks it up, “oh, that tastes awful,” visibly nauseous, small groan before her gag reflex subsides.

She smells it again and stares at it, appraises the tampon, looks at the blood still on its surface. It goes back in her mouth. Plowman pouts at the camera, looks in the soft distance and gags, but keeps the tampon inside. She continues to suck for ten seconds, her facial expression exhausted, sour. She alternately gags and looks with widened eyes into the camera, her virtual audience.

Plowman removes the tampon and inhales deeply. She whimpers, fans herself, and looks at the object, its color significantly depleted. Azealia Banks continues ambivalently:

ayo ayo, I heard you ridin with the same tall, tall tale
tall tale tellin em you made some
sayin you grindin but you ain’t goin no where (no where)9

Plowman takes a drink of water, winded, the tampon held in her right hand. She gathers her breath and lifts the tampon back in, mouth open, again closing tight around it.

Plowman repeats the pout, looks down, cheeks moving in and out, mouth puckered. It exists and she gags; a broad smile breaks out, accompanied by a deep exhale.

Another re-entrance: Plowman sits in profile while her eyes bug out, a loud burp escapes and she smiles softly. She sucks for several more seconds before the tampon comes out. There are notable patches of white. She sips water, scratches her head; then a last entrance, eyes focused. This time it goes out slowly, centimeter by centimeter through her lips. Plowman sits and stares at the camera, face condensed and nauseous.

She puts down the tampon and vomits just off screen, peeking up once at the webcam in between bursts. The noise is a deep, extended rasp, an emission of accumulated bile and viscera projected from her body. We hear Plowman washing her hands, face still off screen. She sits back and wipes her eyes. She lifts the tampon to the screen—“okay, well here it is, I got most of it out.” The tampon spins once more for the viewer, now a pale shade of pink. She gags then moves close to the camera: “You guys are honestly disgusting. I don’t know why I even did this, ’kay.” She makes a duck face, stares direct, shuts off the webcam.

Horror is necessarily contained to a space. Though it floats, permeates, it is also confined. A fluid quarantine. This gives way to the space of cruelty: stumbled upon, vulnerable; alluring and repellant with the strength of a virus.

The hotel of horror: the no-space. Transitory, off-sterile. Oppressive repetition of form, smell of mildew, claustrophobic although the ceiling is higher than you remember. Time stalls in this room, echoes about, gets stuck in the light brown carpeting.

Gary Indiana: “The hotel is an expanse of pink and white gingerbread next to the sea…Sometimes the hivelike innards of the hotel mutate, changing into parts of the Luisiane in Paris, the Locarno in Rome, the Gramercy Park in New York. The figured carpets shift patterns, rooms shrink and expand, the elevator cages change dimension from scene to scene.”10

It could be kitsch: the horror in the repetition of the manufactured everyday object. Memories imbed in the plastic facade. Walls talk, chatter, gripe in high, wavering tones. The art is laminated but a film of mucus is visible on the sheer surface.

Horror combines with kitsch—and devours it. Horror is implicit in kitsch’s strict boundaries. Yet like cultural context, memory, hagiography, and all potential layers placed around an object, one can ignore its spectral presence. It must be activated for the boundary to be crossed.

Artaud’s cruelty had “always been at home there: but I had to become conscious of it.”11There: the no-space—the mind, the reflection, the theater, the Spanish inn, the hotel.

The sound of Plowman’s vomit. More precisely: the sound made by the ejection of the vomit, her amplified vocal gag. A guttural excess. Blood emitted and gathered, consumed then rejected.

Can anything be learned from the grain of Plowman’s voice?

I’m going to pull it out and show you

Okay, if anyone says this is fake, there is honestly something wrong with you

Oh, that tastes awful

You guys are honestly disgusting. I don’t know why I even did this, ’kay

Words, like Plowman, mutate, shift, signify in their absence, provide a designed nonspecificity. She performs for us. She looks at us and smiles.

Gary Indiana: “If the dream ever played out completely, all the people in my life would show up in one room or another in unimaginable combinations. Even the dead would carry on a second life in the onyx-and-ormolu dusk of the cocktail lounge, regaling each other with posthumous adventures.”12

The viral video, in its most basic form, requires the metaphor of disease. Once posted, it travels extensively. The video is shared and transmitted. It readily multiplies. Quickly it becomes named, defined, reified, and relegated to meme soon after its peak impact. The video remains, although somewhat dormant.

In 2011’s Imagevirus, Gregg Bordowitz explores the propagation of image and language through General Idea’s multimedia Imagevirus project. In 1987, General Idea transposed “AIDS” onto Robert Indiana’s ubiquitous “LOVE” design, disseminating variations of the altered image. Produced in the midst of the AIDS crisis, as described by Bordowitz, General Idea’s project seemed glib compared to a tide of militant educational art and activism. Years later, Bordowitz grew to appreciate Imagevirus destabilization of language.

AIDS, word and virus, is without precise meaning. AIDS blurs through mass proliferation and constant re-definition. The word travels faster than the virus itself, becomes an image of red splotches on the face, arms, hands, chest, or the body of a man on the L train; the death of a brother, a cousin; a news report overheard in an office building, “an appearance, a visitation, a demonic possession,” a mutating cell spilling out over its boundary.13

This none-ness, the repetition of the end, is ground well-traveled in literature and art. Bordowitz proposes Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs as ambassadors—“Word begets image and image is virus.”14 In Burroughs’s Soft Machine, the text continuously “comes to rest on the image of a man strung up by the neck, pants down, cock hard…The action comes to an abrupt orgasmic conclusion only to start again from zero.”15

Like Giovanna: Her action, her consumption, repeats onwards in an endless loop. Her movements unfold in sequential order. She resembles a human form but the repetition denies her a consciousness. Plowman, as exists for the viewer, is Tampon Girl. In this role, she activates her performance and carries out a predetermined act.

The viral video is Plowman’s “hellish site for revelation.”16She moves towards a created notion of fame only to snap back to zero. The cruelty of the circuit: the viewer can conjure this site at will, play it back until numbed. Her revelation is based in negation: revelation of naught, revelation of the void.

Giovanna Plowman introduces herself. She is wearing a low-cut, pale green shirt, brown hair pushed over one shoulder, some eye makeup. “I’m going to pull it out and show you,” practiced vocal inflection.

For a soundtrack, Plowman selects Azealia Banks’s “212” on her smartphone. The song pulses in the background, comments on Plowman’s gestures. In “212,” Banks provides an image of black neoliberalism, wealth deserved, taken, activated, and consumed. She acts out a joy and sexuality—hostile, ecstatic. She repeats: “I’ma ruin you, Cunt. I’ma ruin you, Cunt.”17Banks will take pleasure in fucking you up. She claims what is hers. There is symmetry between Banks’s “I guess that cunt gettin’ eaten” and Plowman’s tampon.18“Okay, well here it is, I got most of it out.”

Validated by Banks, Plowman converts the consumption of the tampon into an act of luxury. She rewards herself with the tampon. She lavishes the tampon, is lavished, was lavished. We, in turn, are lavished by Plowman: she pleasures the viewer.

“212” conjures images of Manhattan: high school parties in Tribeca with that girl from LaGuardia dancing on a glass table; picking a fight with two kids from NYU in a cramped apartment in Hell’s Kitchen; the small one’s father owns a share of The Knicks. Banks dances in anticipation of the first punch, hair pull, Xan downed.

Or when Banks warns “I’ma ruin you, Cunt,” and Plowman, tampon in mouth, burps, cheeks pushed outward, eyes clenched. These lyrics repeat while Plowman bends out of frame and vomits, song and video reaching simultaneous climax. The circuit completes. Banks’s Greek chorus taunts; it encourages and anticipates Plowman’s actions. It ridicules and delights.

“212” video: The close-up on Banks’s lips—smirked, pursed, pissed, lyrics spat, smiling, flirt, paired with bleach-white teeth. She rolls, Mickey Mouse sweater, finger guns, lips smacking, direct eye contact. I’ma ruin you, Cunt. This shit is mine. Mine.

Imagevirus was plastered on subway platforms, installed in galleries, placed in public spaces, passersby confronted by the reconstructed name of an abstract disease. The project relied on chance encounters, the incongruity of navigating daily life surrounded by perverse advertisements for a virus, “a symbol of death” papered on a telephone pole.19

The ecstatic moment of recognizing the self as diseased, an embodied representation of a disease. Bordowitz again: “If you have the sickness, then Imagevirus is an extension of you. You are the word made flesh, a representative of the virus, and your reach extends deep into the atmosphere.”20Furthermore: “When I contracted HIV did it ever occur to me to feel my infection as a form of power? Wresting control of AIDS meant gaining mastery of the language used to describe it.”21

There is a known futility in gaining mastery over an abstraction, claiming a signified “lack” as an essential part of the self. Like the trick of identity. Deleuze offers: “we are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying ‘I’.”22Repeat enough times and the statement becomes solid: “if anyone says this is fake, there’s honestly something wrong with you.” “This shit is mine. Mine.” The radio plays static.

Plowman’s tampon as phallus: The lavishing of the tampon. Plowman cleans the object with her mouth, shows it to the camera, curious and disgusted. She tilts her head back mouth open; it slips in, grapes off a vine.

In their 2014 essay “How Many Licks,” Janani Balasubramanian writes of the innately open possibility in the act of a blowjob. Sucking dick has “an amended symmetry: two heads become faceless by the nature of their encounter. They are differentially faceless, differentially consuming one another—one literally, through the mouth, and the other through the idea of a mouth.”23This “dick” has no set substance: it contains “hands, feet, faces, strapons, fingers, ears, miscellaneous objects.”24It enters and exits with a transfer of energy, waiting to be given meaning.

Plowman understands the visual performance of the blowjob. She knows how she looks on camera. Her facial expressions and clothes practice an image of careless youth. Plowman revels in the imagined rewards of popularity, of luxury. Though her face contorts with the introduction of the tampon, this, too, is a part of the performance. The sexual act must be played out. An inflicted price Plowman must incur for fame.

There is a hole and an object, an additional hole referenced by the object, a different hole created by the object—“a dirty mouth and a cleaned dick, the switch.”25Through the symbolic blowjob, the transference of blood. Plowman is marked. Her blood is tainted.

Artaud’s vision of the Theater of Cruelty drew direct inspiration from an encounter with the Balinese theater. For Artaud, the Balinese theater relied not on traditional narrative structure and language to create a falsified drama, but rather on a “conflict of spiritual states, themselves ossified and transformed into gestures-diagrams.”26Through this enaction, “a new physical language, based upon signs and no longer upon words, is liberated.”27

Artaud characterizes the Balinese theater with an overflow of visual and sonic description: “these angular and abruptly abandoned attitudes, these syncopated modulations formed at the back of the throat, these musical phrases that break off short, these flights of elytra, these rustlings of branches, these sounds of hollow drums, these robot squeakings, these dances of animated manikins…”28And further: “mechanically rolling eyes, pouting lips, and muscular spasms,” “a rippling of joints, the musical angle made by the arm with the forearm, a foot falling, a knee bending, fingers that seem to be coming loose from the hand.”29

These motions exist solely on the stage in a rush of symbols. They fade away when registered, disappear upon entering the realm of language. Artaud refers to this illusory quality as a labyrinth, “a spiritual architecture”30constructed by the totality of their “gestures, attitudes, and sudden cries.”31

In his vision of the Balinese theater, Artaud finds the dissolution of Western logic. His is a sublime encounter with the Other: Artaud experiences a movement towards “pure theater,” a “stupefying realization” found in an “intense liberation of signs.”32Within the labyrinth, he senses an “admirable intellectuality… crackling everywhere in the close and subtle web of gestures, in the infinitely varied modulations of voice…in the equally sonorous interlacing of movements.”33This becomes a synesthetic experience: the senses recombine and splinter.

Artaud’s focus on the performers’ contortions closely relates to his lifelong experience of illness: at four, meningitis left him severely depleted; placed in sanatoriums as a teenager; a stint in the French army resulted in a lifelong reliance on opiates; nine years in “the asylums of Scotteville-les-Rouen, Sainte-Anne, Ville-Evrard, Chezal-Benoit, and Rodez”; death two years after his release in 1948.34Artaud’s existence was of breakdowns, constant movement towards the abyss, a steady experience of disintegration. Inevitably this bestowed on him an intimate understanding of the body’s collapse, both transcendence and the drift.

Bordowitz intones: “Wresting control of AIDS meant gaining mastery of the language used to describe it.”35Artaud’s fixation on cruelty should be viewed through a similar lens, albeit without Bordowitz’s lingering faith in language: “[Artaud’s] work is an inventory of himself.”36Cruelty surrounded Artaud from birth: “it has always been at home there: but I had to become conscious of it.”37The trick is to stare at its outline until a form becomes visible, write at it until patterns emerge, experience and live within its sensations. One moves towards its trace.

Gary Indiana is attuned to failures and indiscretions of the human body, a steady pervasive catastrophe. For Indiana, this state of awareness comes from the AIDS crisis: watching one’s friends’, loved ones’, collaborators’, acquaintances’ bodily faculties slowly fall apart, invaded by a virus without meaning, nutrients stripped away by chemicals, vision turning blue, marks on the hands, arms, face, neck, chest. One becomes attuned to the body’s steady decay, faces malnourished or bloated, the porous skin of television personalities, pops and divots and blemishes and acne scarring.

Or the quotidian horror of cultural consumption: the incomprehensible magnitude of a food-processing plant, an earthquake ripping apart San Francisco and killing seventy two, the escalation of Operation Desert Storm, the capture and ritualized killing of Saddam Hussein, his execution available for repeated viewing. The ecstatic speed of modern existence, the footage of murder becoming meme, spread across ten-thousand neural pathways, a 14-year-old-girl sucking the blood from her tampon on webcam.

Gary Indiana observes among the wreckage. He stews, secretes nasty texts about kitsch objects, gay men snapping in an accelerated landscape laced with meth, nicotine, and cheap vermouth. He claws at presidential campaigns, theme parks, casual sex in a back room of the dive bar on Avenue A with cigarette burns on his arms and they’re playing a minor Roxette hit from thin speakers. Melancholy bottoms who were cute fifteen years ago but still know their angles in the off-blue light.

Giovanna Plowman is stuck in the hotel, eternally confined to the fragment: “figured carpets shift patterns, rooms shrink and expand, the elevator cages change dimension from scene to scene.”38She places herself in front of her webcam, fixes the angle, introduces herself, snaps back to the beginning, holds the webcam, shifts the angle, “okay, I’m Giovanna Plowman.” She repeats herself three times, and the audience finds something new in the grain of her voice, the cut of her shirt.

This sensation is necessarily contained to a space, the confines of a fragment. It is a shiver that comes down the lower back, tension forming throughout the abdomen. A muscle contraction that moves along the hands and forehead like grinding a bare foot against concrete. To maneuver this, one commands it into a sharp edge: stare into blank while the body stands slack.

(They teach the most important part of the self is elasticity of form: one can carve and cut and slim.)

The narrative of disease, the junkie narrative: “For General Idea identity was a form of virus, and in William Burroughs’s universe identity is…protoplasm that travels through all media—liquid, gaseous, solid. His protagonists become what they ingest, fuck, and see…leave each other marked, altered irrevocably.”39

Disease changes the shape of one’s identity. It marks a body socially and physically; the body is revealed as a site of horrific possibility. Skin made liquid, bones brittle, breaks easy, languid. The television shows five alternating images of Mount Sinai Hospital, each accompanied by a different static keyword.

The divine comfort of the narrative: this is my truth, it speaks for me, I learn myself through my truth, I speak myself into being.

And identity as illness—one catches their identity in a sexual encounter, trading off a hypodermic needle in a warehouse by Hudson, seven pills inscribed with different markings washed with rum and soda. It is a constant social exchange: we “leave each marked,” covered by red and onyx.40

The Giovanna Plowman video is dense with negative matter. It sits alongside its cultural context: years of accumulated debris, death threats, relentless trolling, adjacent pornography and Tumblr erotica, op-eds about the emotional impact of Internet use on pre-teens, the experience of navigating the Internet as a 14-year-old girl, a field of discarded viral videos. This goes back into the video’s boundaries, colors the content. It incites a steady invisible chaos.

Plowman is denied revelation. She is relegated to a back catalog of memes. Plowman puts the tampon in her mouth to come into being. She wants to discover her first person, to be noticed for her particular individuality. She wants to become an anti-hero: you know her, love her, hate her. You marvel at her transgression. She keeps it real, she introduces herself, “okay, I’m Giovanna Plowman.”

Plowman marks herself: she miscegenates. Plowman takes stigmatized blood and enters it back into her system. She asks Azealia Banks for approval. Banks taunts apathetic: “sayin’ you grindin’ but you ain’t goin’ no where (no where).”

Plowman fails: the blood is forced back out. She uploads the video to her Facebook, which is soon deleted. The clip resurfaces on LiveLeak, where it currently resides. In April 2013, she makes a confession video. Plowman’s shirt is black and higher cut. She has attached blonde extensions that go down her chest. She sits in the same bathroom as before and chews gum, eye makeup applied. Plowman has practiced this moment, planned out her words, inflections, and appearance. The gum is visible in her mouth and she no longer makes eye contact with the webcam.

I just wanna be broad and say I regret the video more than anything. I would take it all back if I could. Let me start off by saying that most people like attention and being known, but how disgusting is it that I’m known for eating a tampon. You guys act like I haven’t realized that by now, but I have and it’s pretty awful and disgusting.41

Honestly, I lost so many people. I was kicked out of public school, I was in the hospital, I pretty much was out of it for a very long time. Best yet, my family was so disgusted and disappointed with me and the whole situation. At the time, I didn’t care, ‘cuz I was so immature and childish. I just needed something for me to look at to grow up as. But, yeah. I wish I had never done the video, had any thoughts about it, let alone even posted it.42

Plowman’s words don’t speak. They sit and twitch in front of the viewer, clinging to a narrative that flattens the complexity of her actions.

The repeated question: Girl, what’s wrong with you? What makes someone eat their tampon? What images repeated in your brain until the video took shape?

How long did this take, for the rational to break away until the video stared you straight in the eyes; you smiled and introduced yourself.