{"id":122691,"date":"2018-03-14T11:00:27","date_gmt":"2018-03-14T15:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=122691"},"modified":"2018-03-16T11:53:37","modified_gmt":"2018-03-16T15:53:37","slug":"slap-the-wave-online-therapy-as-performance-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/03\/14\/slap-the-wave-online-therapy-as-performance-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Slap the Wave: Online Therapy as Performance Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Last month, I made an appointment to get \u201cwrixled.\u201d I knew little about the practice except that it was a new service available only online. Wrixling.com<\/a> describes its product with language that is simultaneously straightforward and frustratingly opaque: it\u2019s an \u201cabstract therapy\u201d that draws upon LARP<\/small> (Live Action Role Playing) and attempts to \u201crescale\u201d the \u201cself.\u201d Wrixling is a \u201cone-on-one online participatory-psychic scrambling\u201d and \u201cword surgery,\u201d which, to me, suggested that the experience would be invasive, entertaining, uncomfortable, and perhaps therapeutic.<\/p>\n

A few days later, at the time of my scheduled appointment, I used Wrixling\u2019s proprietary video chat to log in. It didn\u2019t work: blank screen, spinning pinwheel. A few minutes later, I tried again, this time using Skype (as the site recommended). At twelve thirty-five, I connected with my practitioner, DirB Wentt.<\/p>\n

All six wrixling practitioners use the prefix DirB, an abbreviation for \u201cdirector of behavior\u201d and a self-descriptor that the artist behind the project, Michael Portnoy, has often used in his work. Portnoy sees his primary material as human behavior\u2014his own, his collaborators\u2019, his audience\u2019s\u2014and delights in manipulating it in his performances. His most recent project,\u00a0Progressive Touch\u2014Total Body Language Reprogramming <\/em>(2017), involved a private, two-on-one performance in which Portnoy and his collaborator, Lily McMenamy, sang into the pubic bone of a single, naked white man\u2014the only audience member\u2014for forty-five\u00a0minutes. He did this with twenty men in twenty performances because, he claimed, he wanted to reprogram \u201cthe corrupted source code of the white male.\u201d Portnoy\u2019s work often embraces absurdity as its own form of logic and attempts to solve\u00a0real-world problems\u2014mental health, the distribution of power, the insidiousness of social media\u2014with absurd solutions, blending his own punny humor with his\u00a0frightening intensity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>

Michael Protnoy. Photo: Bogdan Kwiatkowski<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Portnoy spent the early days of his career in New York\u2019s downtown performance and alternative comedy scenes, and he\u2019s since taken on the confrontational aspects of both. In 1998, he famously performed the so-called Soy Bomb intervention. Hired as a dancing extra for Bob Dylan\u2019s live performance at the Grammy Awards, he broke out of his background role and leapt onto the stage, beside Dylan. Shirtless, with SOY BOMB<\/small>\u00a0slathered across his chest, he flailed his limbs aggressively, in a kind of angular vogue dance, until security pulled him offstage. According to Billboard<\/em> magazine, \u201cThe phrase became an iconic part of late-\u201990s pop culture overnight\u2014eventually earning parodies on SNL<\/em> and The Tonight Show With Jay Leno<\/em>\u2014and remains Portnoy\u2019s greatest moment of mainstream exposure.\u201d Portnoy has since mostly inhabited the art world, but Wrixling, by virtue of existing online, reaches beyond museums and galleries and back into the public.<\/p>\n

As a Wrixling practitioner, Portnoy goes by Sen (aka, Senior) DirB PartanakootiG. Other directors include DirB Romorenge, DirB Kalbish, and DirB Danjtorb, who I recognized as Carlos Dengler (a.k.a., Carlos D), the former bassist for Interpol. My practitioner, DirB Wentt (a pseudonym? a role?) is Jon Wan, \u201ca rising star of alt comedy,\u201d according to Portnoy, and an \u201cexpert tidier!\u201d according to Wan\u2019s website. When he appeared on my screen, Wentt looked precisely like he did in the picture I had seen online: bob-cut wig, blood-red lipstick, and dandy-ish attire. Wentt knelt and stared back at me, framed in a kind of bedroom lounge, bathed in red light. The perfection of the cinematically arranged set only exaggerated the unflattering angles and lighting of my own low-res camera.<\/p>\n

The session began, like much online communication, awkwardly. Video chat technology remains cruder than our cultural ambitions, and we learn this anew every time we try to use it.\u00a0 I roamed the house until I found a corner where Wentt didn\u2019t stutter and freeze on every other word. Nevertheless, entire phrases were dropped, obscured, and repeated throughout the session. Disorientation, I realized as the session progressed, was built into the performance. A Wrixling video ad on Portnoy\u2019s Instagram announces, \u201cWhen the world gets confusing, we get confusinginger \u2026 tax pumps!\u201d<\/p>\n

If Portnoy\u2019s material is human behavior, his main tool for sculpting that behavior is language. His work explores the spectrum of linguistic abstraction: improvised and crafted, poetic and comedic, literary smart and infant dumb. Recently, he\u2019s been posting Instagram clips of himself speaking in foreign accents. His rants are run through a captioning app he had designed by linguists at the University of Amsterdam, and the resulting translation is superimposed onto the videos in cartoonish speech bubbles. On March 12, he posted a selfie of himself singing, \u201cI\u2019m a sulochrome collector do you have a swimswuit low room for me?\u201d<\/p>\n

When he was an undergraduate at Vassar, Portnoy described himself as \u201ca full-on Oulipo and [Raymond] Roussel junky.\u201d He studied literature and theater, Mark Leyner and Artaud. He became attracted to what he calls \u201cparasense poetics,\u201d a \u201cparticular almostness of sense, its irresolvable ambiguities and incongruities, its unstable radioactive compounds.\u201d He rejects the term nonsense<\/em>\u00a0for its noncommittal definition and its pejorative connotations.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the goofy, cutesy nonsense with its wacky images, dumb puns, and loping chimeras, it\u2019s this stuff that sullies the whole field [of nonsense literature],\u201d Portnoy tells me. \u201cI\u2019ve sometimes called what I\u2019m after lutosense from the Greek luto<\/em> for \u201cmud,\u201d something that\u2019s constantly slipping between frames of reference, semantic fields, abstractions, theoretical terrains, emotional registers, and tongues, where the \u2018what\u2019 of the sentence is always being challenged, effaced, rewritten.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the goals of Wrixling,\u201d Portnoy continued, \u201cis to learn from language rather than putting our learning into it. To experience with another person the collision of those radioactive compounds in the haze\u2014to mainline those isotopes together, and to have those isotopes reshape the self.\u201d<\/p>\n

Portnoy\u2019s refusal of nonsense is, of course, his obligation as an absurdist, which requires that the artist push against familiarity. In order to create Wrixling, Portnoy drew upon the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson\u2019s \u201cpsychological confusion\u201d technique, which uses a series of contradictory actions and conflicting messages to disarm a patient of their inhibitions. Likewise, Portnoy wants to break down personal boundaries\u2014of intimacy, timidity, identity\u2014by encouraging participants to embrace true bewilderment. In an orderly, comfort-loving society, we tend to reject chaos, but Portnoy argues that it\u00a0is a primal state of mind. It pushes us outside of systematic, logical thinking into more physical, immediate kinds of behavior.<\/p>\n

So, while Portnoy didn\u2019t make my Internet connection terrible, he \u00a0anticipated it\u2014he hoped my fuzzy connection would enhance his service of uncertainty.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

My session began:<\/p>\n

Me: Hello?
\nWentt: [long pause]
\nMe: Hello? Can you hear me?
\nWentt: Yes.
\nMe: Can you see me?
\nWentt: No.
\nMe: Is this good?
\nWentt: Find an area where the light is on your face.
\n[shuffling sounds]
\nMe: How bout here? Better?
\nWentt: Yes, I \u2014
\n[connection break]
\nWentt: Are you alone?
\nMe: Yes.<\/p>\n

Wentt asked me to clap in all four corners of the screen, as if we were configuring my senses with the technology.<\/p>\n

Wentt: Now, when I say bloom<\/em>,\u00a0you say leasing.<\/em>\u00a0Bloom.
\nMe: Leasing.
\nWentt: Bloom.
\nMe: Leasing.<\/p>\n

Once the connection was stable, we began \u201cinfixing modifiers into [my] root-self,\u201d which, like a lot of the Wrixling vocab, gives language a physical presence. We placed petro<\/em>\u00a0(the prefix meaning \u201cstone\u201d) into my own name. For the duration of the session, I was be called R-petro-SS. Wentt asked me to repeat the name several times and then revealed that I had placed this \u201ctalismanic\u201d rock into my \u201cD.E.F.T.,\u201d which, I learned, is an acronym for \u201cDefenses. Expectations. Fantasy. Truth.\u201d I was told to give the stone a name. I chose Charles.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve done enough therapy to be familiar with the basic form of a session:<\/p>\n

1) Therapist explains process
\n2) Therapist asks questions
\n3) Patient responds
\n4) Therapist responds<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve tried hypnotherapy, psychoanalysis, osteopathy, kinesiology, gestalt, acceptance and commitment therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, Reiki, and talk-chiropractic work, sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes out of need. Many of these practitioners have worked with me over the phone or via Skype, and some have even been effective in doing so. (Portnoy told me he was especially put off by\u00a0text-based therapy. He\u2019s tried online therapy services, like BetterHelp,\u00a0with disappointing\u00a0results. \u00a0)<\/p>\n

Many of these psychoanalytic-adjacent traditions share a belief that the deepest well of human experience is the subconscious. I\u2019ve always been enamored by the possibility of an underworld inside us, but I\u2019ve also been suspicious of talk as an effective means of treatment. We spew chitchat all day long\u2014it\u2019s how we navigate the waking, monkey-mind world\u2014so how could those same words help us speak to the unknown parts of our selves?<\/p>\n

Carl Jung has said that images, not words, are the language of the subconscious, but if you do have to use words, then it makes sense to sidestep the ones with which we\u2019re familiar. The poetry of nonsense can be invoked on the level of story, phrase, word, or even syllable. The latter of these is the approach Joyce took in Finnegans Wake<\/em>\u00a0when he depicted dreams by using a vast network of syllabic sounds, simultaneously divorced from and jammed with meaning. Likewise, Portnoy points to the definition of nonsense as\u00a0not a lack of sense (as the name suggests) but an excess of it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

DirB Wentt. Photo by Frankie Galland<\/p><\/div>\n

In creating Wrixling, Portnoy\u2014along with cowriters Dan Fox and Joanna Ruth Evans\u2014culled vocabulary and methodology from his past verbal improvisations. Ultimately, for Portnoy, the single most important requirement of these terms is \u201cgood mouthfeel and fecund\u00a0irresolvability.\u201d According to the Wrixling website, this vocabulary includes phrases like \u201cflirt walling,\u201d \u201ctranscursive drawl,\u201d and \u201cshade neglect.\u201d<\/p>\n

In my session, Wentt spoke a variety of words at me in a kind of verbal Rorschach test\u2014 Klarm, Klornipatrix, Kalakr\u00ednsoron, Feethrish, Fak\u00e1rpsidrew. I responded, as quickly as possible, with the first thoughts that came to my mind: mollusk, drug, island, illness, river. (Many of the words recalled tech companies\u2014Google, Hulu, Kaggle, Etsy, Zynga\u2014who use gibberish brand names to appeal to our infantile desires.)<\/p>\n

Then Wentt asked a series of questions, all of them language focused:<\/p>\n

What words are stuck in my mind?
\nWhat words grate me?
\nWhat question keeps me up at night?
\nWhose name is on the tip of my tongue?
\nWhat words energize me?<\/p>\n

If I couldn\u2019t come to an immediate answer, I was told to sound out the word with my mouth: physicalize it. Then, Wentt \u201cwrixled in\u201d an \u201cagglutinate\u201d through \u201crapid guesting,\u201d which, as far as I could tell, meant that my answers were plugged into a formula and assigned a kind of treatment. What followed was a private, dramatic performance.<\/p>\n

Wentt began role-playing as my wife, supposedly wearing a smock \u00a0to prepare for a party that we were (fictitiously) throwing that night. \u201cThese dinner parties are futile! I haven\u2019t showered in five days!\u201d Wentt bleated like a baby\u00a0goat, then told\u00a0me that we had moved into a small room with lactating breasts on the walls. They were filling the room with milk, he told me, and I was about to drown.<\/p>\n

Wentt switched to the role of my father and began screaming\u2014\u201cRpetross! You\u2019re just a wipedown wishbone protein!\u201d\u2014and demanded that I respond in a complementary vocabulary. \u201cI\u2019m just an undone Twinkie!\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

Then we were, according to Wentt,\u00a0transported to a paradisiacal landscape where I was forced to give a sermon to villagers. Wentt screamed and, while rolling on the ground, described a \u201cmuscled creature, blood dripping from him.\u201d He told me to \u201cstand up! Pull the drain! Slap the wave! Slap the wave!\u201d I mimicked Wentt\u2019s commands, trying to keep up, but was never quite able to follow the motions quickly enough. Wentt began flapping arms, gyrating, and hollering \u201caccept!\u201d into the screen, repeatedly.<\/p>\n

Eventually, the fight about the party (which Barack Obama was attending) was somehow resolved. Wentt relaxed back into a kneeling position and concluded by asking me to say my name a final time: R-petro-SS.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

My Wrixling lasted twenty-five\u00a0minutes, the standard length of a session. It\u2019s\u00a0shorter\u00a0than traditional psychoanalysis (fifty\u00a0minutes) but the same length as a television sitcom\u00a0(not including commericals). For Portnoy, the experience is like \u201cChat Roulette for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets,\u201d an \u201cimmersive telenovela,\u201d a \u201cfever dream you cowrite.\u201d The sessions are just long enough to get a kind of episodic narrative going, something you might consider continuing. In this way, Wrixling recasts therapy as a show. It was something I\u2019d often felt in my own therapy sessions but had never fully articulated to myself.<\/p>\n

For me, the most vulnerable, intimate time I\u2019ve ever had in therapy was through past-life regression (a subpractice of hypnotherapy). For this dubiously named practice, the patient is walked through a kind of trance dream. In it, the patient is a different person from a different era, engaging in a narrative entirely of their own imaginative making. Past-life regression is an exercise in storytelling and can be analyzed in the same way as a novel or a dream.<\/p>\n

To guide patients through this process, hypnotherapists avoid directives and instead rely on the sonic aspects of language\u2014rhythm, pitch, timbre, delivery. Words become vehicles for sound, and the pace of talk acts as a trojan horse that enables the hypnotherapist to enter the mind of the patient, who is asleep, alone, and unprotected. For me, it was as memorable and affecting and useful as any good story.<\/p>\n

Wrixling.com<\/a> clearly states that the practice \u201cis for entertainment purposes only and is not therapy,\u201d a disclosure that\u2019s issued, I\u2019m sure, for the express purpose of legal protection. Portnoy has said, explicitly, that he wants to \u201creengineer the logic, language and movements of human exchange.\u201d He wants to get in our heads, and he\u2019s doing it in plain sight, using the sharpest psychological tools around: talk, humor, poetry, intimacy, confrontation, and of course, the Internet. Personally, I can\u2019t say that Wrixling transformed me, but it certainly did something, <\/em>and I\u2019m willing to admit I don\u2019t yet have the words to describe quite what that is.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ross Simonini is a writer<\/span>\u00a0and artist. His debut novel, <\/em>The Book of Formation, was published last year.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Wrixling.com describes its product with language that is simultaneously straightforward and frustratingly opaque: it\u2019s an \u201cabstract therapy\u201d that draws upon LARP (Live Action Role Playing) and attempts to \u201crescale\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1423,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[33332,4219,33333,33328,33331,33329,33330,33326,33325,12005,17144,33334,33327,16755,33324],"class_list":["post-122691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-act","tag-bob-dylan","tag-cbt","tag-chat-roulette","tag-gestalt","tag-hypotherapy","tag-kinesiology","tag-larp","tag-michael-protnoy","tag-osteopathy","tag-psychoanalysis","tag-reiki","tag-soy-bomb","tag-therapy","tag-wrixling"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSlap the Wave<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" 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