Dynasty Handbag, Titanic Depression, 2023. Performance view, Pioneer Works, New York. All photos: Walter Wlodarczyk.
AS I WRITE, the search continues for the Titan, the submersible vessel that went missing off the coast of Newfoundland on a high-ticket tourist dive to view the wreck of the RMS Titanic. Operated by deep-sea adventure company OceanGate Expeditions and carrying five passengers—OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush, maritime researcher Paul-Henri Nargeolet, billionaire businessmen Hamish Harding and Shahzada Dawood, and Dawood’s son Suleman—the Titan lost contact with the terrestrial world one hour and forty-five minutes into its journey on June 18; the craft’s oxygen supply is estimated to expire tomorrow morning. In this race against time, the media—like the expansive rescue efforts convened by the US and Canada—remain fully mobilized in their coverage of the story’s every angle, as if to challenge an outcome that seems already foretold. Last week’s shipwreck off the coast of Greece, in which hundreds of refugees and migrants were lost to the Mediterranean (the death count continues to rise), has remained, unsurprisingly, a footnote in many news outlets.
In a grim coincidence, I had, days before the Titan fiasco, completed an essay for Artforum on comedic performer Jibz Cameron’s Titanic Depression, which was staged at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works for two nights in late May, and which coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary rerelease of the 1997 box-office dreadnought by Hollywood auteur James Cameron (no relation). Noting the deluge of recent media attention recently given to the sunken ship—from a blockbuster exhibition that cruised from London all the way to the husk of an Urban Outfitters on Fourteenth Street, to the sold-out off-Broadway musical Titanique (a campy parody of James Cameron’s film from the perspective of “My Heart Will Go On” diva Celine Dion)—and the swell of online conspiracy theories around both the historical tragedy and its iconic Hollywood rendition (was the vessel sunk on purpose to eradicate opposition to the Federal Reserve? Could Jack have fit on that makeshift raft door?), I speculated about “a collective if market-driven desire to excavate some sunken ‘Real’ from the Titanic’s wreckage.” That line carries a vague portent now, in light of recent news. But it glosses past a psychoanalytic insight crucial to Titanic Depression’s lumpen late postmodernism and grimly enacted by the Titan incident (which seems to condense the story of the Titanic—a story of money, hubris, and calamity in the North Atlantic—into a twenty-two-foot titanium container operated by an off-brand PlayStation controller): that the Real can never be retrieved but rather must be traumatically repeated.
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STAGED WITHIN a converted Red Hook warehouse-turned–steamship and copresented by New York Live Arts for the Planet Justice festival, Jibz Cameron’s one-woman burlesque travesty, conceived with artist Sue Slagle (SUE-C) and with visual direction by Mariah Garnett, surfaces the fictions and fantasies at the heart of James’s transatlantic disaster melodrama in the context of today’s impending climate crisis. Jibz’s stage persona Dynasty Handbag set expectations at the top of the show: “Some of you will have a great experience and feel like you’ve been on a journey and you found yourself through a stereotyping of the other and then inhabiting that thing, and then realizing that you need to separate from it in order to find your true self, and some of you won’t at all. Some of you will go down playing the violin and screaming in agony.” But one thing is for certain, she warned: “We’re all gonna die.”
Her most expansive live multimedia work yet, Titanic Depression unfolded both on stage and within an interactive video. Dynasty performed a vaudevillian, disheveled Rose, but also acted out nearly every other character, and voice, in the hour-long performance. Her manifold, embodied characterizations was complimented by a chorus of (her own) talking heads—among other animated figural drawings on screen—which she occasionally manipulated through an onstage foot pedal. While it was never not Dynasty Handbag performing, shuttling between all the characters was a feat: It’s precisely where the abandonment to freewheeling improvisation confronts timed shifts requiring controlled elocution, cued lines, and the onset of musical arrangements that Dynasty’s comedy is at its best. The performer’s virtuosic acts of self-undoing are purposely shabby: They fall apart at the seams, each sequence and scene stitched clumsily together into awkward entanglements. In Titanic Depression, the fictional, historical, social, and biographical were never not each other’s triggers.
Dynasty Handbag, Titanic Depression, 2023. Performance view, Pioneer Works, New York.
As the well-known story goes, Rose’s object of desire is not dastardly robber baronet Cal—in Titanic Depression, a cigar-smoking, one-shoed, roughly drawn dildo named Dick, whose sentences themselves seem to detumesce—but a dashing urchin named Jack, who here took the name of “Hat” and the form of a nonbinary lavender octopus snuck onto the cruise ship in a hat box. Titanic Depression’s narrative broadly resembles that of its namesake film: Rose is a confused and insecure member of the downwardly mobile elite who rebels against her mother’s wishes to secure social standing through a strategic marriage. She protests: “I want to be a climate activist and dancer, heal the world with my stretchy body!” “I want to be an activist and overworked and underpaid!” She cares about social justice, but is also, as one might expect, hooked on the material comforts afforded by her privilege, and only somewhat aware of her altruism’s deep-seated narcissism. She’s particularly vocal about waste, enumerating the sum total of eggs consumed by passengers on the ship and excrement discharged into the ocean in return.
History, like the Titanic, keeps cycling back, though Dynasty Handbag manages to throw an anarchic wrench into its ouroboric regress.
Waste runs deep, so to speak, in Dynasty’s thematic repertoire—from the recent FX short series Garbage Castle (2019), in which she putters around in a trash-filled SRO and battles against her landlord (played by Maria Bamford), back to her 2008 performance as a zany bag lady whose various disposable, now-banned plastic bags bombard her with their needs and expectations (Bags). Dynasty’s preoccupation with refuse—the junk and dregs symptomatic of consumerism, but also symbolic of our psychic excesses and collective neuroses—was precisely what José Esteban Muñoz aligned with the artist’s queer utopian refusal of normativity, conformity, and the failure of political imagination to think itself otherwise. “Dynasty Handbag is the utopian oddball par excellence,” the late performance theorist wrote in Cruising Utopia (2009). Hers is a “mimetic performance of a person, a spoiled subjectivity, who is considered a loser, or rubbish . . . and instead insists on her own value as a countercultural heroine.” In Titanic Depression, refusal and refuse are the driving forces of the screwball narrative: The vessel’s fatal collision is with floating landfill, and it’s a reusable, metal straw—literally the “last straw”—that causes the ship to sink.
Dynasty Handbag, Titanic Depression, 2023. Performance view, Pioneer Works, New York.
What of love, then? What of the class-defying fiction that had so many viewers of the film rapt with hope for Rose and Jack’s submerged relationship. Some might remember Žižek’s persuasive argument, advanced in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) and reiterated elsewhere, that the wreck came, precisely, to prevent what would have been the film’s “true catastrophe,” i.e., Rose and Jack getting off the “ship of dreams” together in New York. Whereas Žižek presumes that their love affair would fizzle after a few weeks of passionate sex, the protracted, devastating collision with the iceberg functions to sustain the “reactionary myth” underpinning James Cameron’s “Hollywood Marxism”: precisely, the myth of a “young rich kid in crisis whose vitality is restored by a brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor.” As Žižek writes in In Defense of Lost Causes: “What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.”
Dynasty sought out that lower-deck exuberance in an underground club crowded with bobbing animals—deep down in the stowage where she can finally break free of her gilded cage and into a liberatory, frenetic dance. As Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack is to Kate Winslet’s Rose, Hat, the silent cephalopod, is Dynasty’s mirror, the ideal surface for the projection of all her affective attachments. He/they/it never said a word but drew her nude eight ways (“like one of your French horns. Whores. Sorry. European sex workers,” she instructed), each sketch more attentive to her unruly bush than the next. In the lead-up to the indelible, steamy car scene, which was relocated from a Renault Coupé de Ville to a dingy camper with Melissa Ethridge’s “Come to My Window” playing as soundtrack, Dynasty brandished a childishly penned “consent form” full of interdictions (no touching, for one) for her soon-to-be-lover to sign. Their climax, such as it was, built up through a crescendo of “oh my God”s—lifted from film clips in which an offscreen, impending danger has been spotted—giving way at last to shots of ice caps melting and glaciers collapsing, water gushing out. But no orgasm: “I lost it. We lost it . . . It’s not you, it’s me . . . Intimacy is a lot . . . I just need to some inhales and outhales.”
Dynasty Handbag, Titanic Depression, 2023. Performance view, Pioneer Works, New York.
Failure can be recuperated, waste recycled. Like Jack’s life-giving sacrifice in the North Atlantic, Hat’s silence guarantees Dynasty Handbag’s self-actualization. In another critical scene, she called up a “ten-second life-changing self-affirmation meditation by a woman with an Australian accent” at her therapist’s behest, but soon the next track comes on: a death acceptance meditation that leads her in a frantic enactment of the five stages of grief. She will reemerge from it having shed her delusional attachment to Hat, and with a newfound tolerance for the idea of escaping the condemned ship (and a death sentence) in Dick’s vaunted “space pod.” As she looks frantically for Dick, heaps of trash begin to amass, filling the stage and the video frame. Aboard the spaceship, which will dock on one of the various “planets” Dick owns (Fitness, Hollywood . . . ), her virtuous, true self, wins out: She returns to save Hat, who escapes without her help as she tries to sort the rising trash into recyclable piles, a task, Dynasty bemoans, that should have been a collective effort and not a “misguided attempt by one person to try to fix things on their own.”
For sure, there were lots of laughs to be had in Titanic Depression (more uneasy ones, perhaps, than in Shell of a Woman, a comedic lecture-performance and takedown of the “10 Greatest Works of Art” according to the internet—all made by men, of course—which had the audience in stitches during its run at Joe’s Pub in 2018). Titanic Depression isn’t just funny; it’s anxiogenic—and indeed a bit depressing—in its dead-on satire of the hand-wringing performances of self-awareness we leftists make in the face of the intersecting, possibly insurmountable doomsday scenarios unfolding before our eyes. (“Comedy,” Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai remind us, “helps us test or figure out what it means to say ‘us.’”) The critique of patriarchy and capitalism in Jibz’s work doesn’t imagine an alternative to these systems or their neoliberal cultural expressions (the cult of “wellness” for example) so much as ironize our subsumption in the grotesque, human-centipede flows of social and financial capital that trouble Titanic Depression’s protagonist and maker alike. “It’s the same shit pile and it’s actually the same shit people,” she declares—a sloppy situation where “conflict of interest” can easily become be a quaint, old-fashioned notion: You can get a Guggenheim (as Cameron did in 2022) and roast the Guggenheims—Benjamin, in particular, a victim of the sinking and a “real nightmare of a person” who made his fortune, as she relayed, between interjected fart sounds, in mining and smelting and nitrate farming in Chile. The gentleman’s quarters on the cruise—a smoking room for “shitty men” like the fur and opium trader John Jacob Astor, who died on the ship, and J. P. Morgan, who owned it—is big enough for some contemporary luminaries, too: Zuckerberg, Musk, et al. Environmentalist futurevore James Cameron even makes a cameo: Coincidently, he shares a first and last name with Jibz’s father, himself the son of a uranium miner and ravenous entrepreneur—George Cameron—whom she never met. History, like the Titanic, keeps cycling back, though Dynasty Handbag manages to throw an anarchic wrench into its ouroboric regress, puncturing—in her self-consciously insecure and ineffectual ways—the overdetermined fatalism of her source material. Humor, especially of the self-deprecating kind, is a leaky lifeboat. But what else could we hope for in the face of the inevitable?
Dynasty Handbag’s Titanic Depression was performed at Pioneer Works on May 20 and May 21.
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