Mary Coble, Aversion

Mary Coble performs Aversion tonight at Conner Contemporary. Through video installation and performance, she will stage (and submit to) an electroconvulsive aversion therapy session. In a typical session, positive sexual stimuli (photographs) are coupled with negative stimuli (electrical shocks) in order to shock gay people in hopes of making them straight people. The practice was finally, fully disavowed by the psychiatric establishment as a recognized, endorsed treatment within the last decade. That was long after the end of the psychiatric ex-gay movement, which collapsed in 1973, when the best minds in minds declared that homosexuality is not actually a mental disorder. The religious ex-gay movement, of course, persists today—as does aversion therapy, albeit not in any professional medical setting.

(Writing this brief just now led me to look up American witch trials, and you know what? The last trial was held in Salem in 1878, some 250 years after the first one. I guess that shouldn't come as a surprise.)

Read more about Coble and Aversion in my City Paper piece this week—then see the performance at Conner Contemporary tonight.

New Yorkers can catch her work in the "Global Feminisms" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. And anyone with a modem can see her discuss her work in that show, Binding Ritual, Daily Routine.

UPDATE: At 7:30 p.m. tonight, you can watch the performance via. Note, though, that the piece also includes three videos—not sure how much of that you viewers at home will be privy to.