GARGLE — Clara Mary Joy

“Articles of clothing and designer labels are metonymic or make use of synecdoche, a form of substitution. This is the link that connects all three categories of fetishism, that they all deal with the act of disavowal. We assign meaning to objects that connect them to,
or stand in for, other meanings and associations. As Robert Stoller has said,
“A fetish is a story masquerading as an object”.”

Clara Mary Joy

For the opening rendition of Sadie Cole’s performance event GARGLE, curated by Isabella Burley and Climax, I performed a reading of my case study on the history of the production and fetishization of rubber as a material. The piece was inspired by the etymology of Gargle, derived from Gargoyle, drawing a connection between gargoyles and rubber through their shared relationship to functionality and fetish.