In earlier stages of her career, Abramovic undertook more dangerous roles. These, at least in some people's minds, perhaps justify much of the reverence she receives now. She frequently worked with the idea of pain, and also with the idea of danger. Her first performance piece, 'Rhythm 10' (1973), was based on a Russian game where rhythmical knife-jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of one hand. The procedure made use of two tape-recorders and twenty knives. Every time she cut herself, she picked up a new knife. When she had cut herself twenty times, she listened to the recording, then tried to replicate the same movements, including her mistakes, thus blending past and present. She has remarked 'Once you enter the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do.' [1]
In another performance, entitled 'Rhythm O' (1974), she challenged the audience to harm her. On a table were placed seventy-two objects. Some were capable of giving pleasure, others of doing harm. Those present were informed that they could use these in any way they chose, while Abramovic herself remained completely passive. Gradually, as if infuriated by her passivity, the audience became more and more aggressive. Abramovic commented later: ' "The experience I learned was that…if you leave decisions to the public, you can be killed." ... "I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly six hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.'[2]
The commitment to danger, and indeed to a search for self-harm, seems to me characteristic of a great deal of contemporary performance and body art. Often body artists carry things to much greater extremes than Abramovic has done.
This is in the broad sense a development of the demand made by the theoreticians of the 19th century Romantic Movement for total originality in the arts, yet carried to a new extreme. Becoming an artist is increasingly regarded, not as the product of a deliberately undertaken course of professional training, but as a quasi-accidental sacred rebirth that leaves the subject in possession of powers that separate him or her from the general body of humankind.
There is a lazy fashion for interpreting contemporary body art as a revival or a contemporary offshoot of the body painting and scarification met with among primitive tribal groups, in earlier times and still to some extent surviving in the present. This seems to me erroneous. Much of it is in fact better understood by looking at the ideas put forward by the Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva (1941) about the idea of abjection in art. In an influential text, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, first published in English in 1982, Kristeva speaks of human reactions to things which have the potential to horrify - an open wound, for example, or a corpse. She sees spectacles of this kind as things that threaten a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss or failure of the barrier between subject and object. In particular, she associates this response with an irruption of reality into lives that are generally organized to defend themselves against this. 'A wound with blood and pus,' he writes, 'or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death-a flat encephalograph, for instance-I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theatre, without make-up or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands…with difficulty. I am at the border of my condition as a living being.' I think it is reasonable to describe this reaction as 'convulsive', in the sense in which Artaud uses this adjective in his text on the Theatre of Cruelty.
Though Artaud was a reader and admirer of the Marquis de Sade, he said that by cruelty he meant not sadism, or the desire to cause pain, but the determination to shatter, by physical means, false constructions of reality. 'The Theatre of Cruelty,' he wrote, 'has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary, but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.'[3]
If we look at body art from this perspective, the comparison with the tribal art of primitive peoples begins to seem increasingly irrelevant. Tribal practices may supply an easy comparison, or even an easy justification, for certain types of contemporary body art, but at a deeper level something extremely different is going on. Tribal peoples do not seek out the 'convulsive' as Artaud describes it. What they look for is a place within a complex collective identity. If they are wrenched from the matrix of the tribe, their own identity is nullified. The idea of convulsion in order to achieve fullness of identity is completely alien to them.
While Kristeva particularly associates the abject with death, it is clear that her theories about it can easily be linked to experiences of seeing wounds, disfigurement or any form of physical anguish. This prompts some interesting thoughts about body art, which has, from the 1960s onwards, so frequently seemed to be concerned with physical damage, harm or, at the very least, with the possibility of harm.
Long before Kristeva's text was published, there were avant-garde artists whose attitudes and practice seem to confirm what she said. In Europe there were, for example, the Vienna Actionists, a tight-knit group who challenged the still conservative preconceptions of mid-20th century Austrian society. The group was active for just over a decade, between 1960 and 1971. During that time most of the core members served short prison sentences on one or another count, for their defiance of the rules of decorum imposed by the public authorities.
Their attitudes are summed up in the Material Action Manifesto issued in 1961 by Otto Mühl (b.1925): 'Material action is painting that has spread beyond the picture surface. The human body, a laid table or a room becomes the picture surface. Time is added to the dimension of the body and space.' Mühl is best known, not for his performances, but for the foundation of the long-lived and for a long while economically successful free-love commune in Friedrichshof, which flourished from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. He seems in many respects less typical of Actionism than his colleagues Hermann Nitsch (b. 1938), Gunter Brus (b. 1938) and Rudolph Schwarzkogler (1940-1969).
Herman Nitsch - Orgonien
Nitsch is chiefly famous for performances using animal entrails and carcasses, with strong religious and (some would say) blasphemous overtones. Nitsch once claimed that he would 'take upon [himself] all that appears negative, unsavory, perverse and obscene...in order to spare you the defilement and shame entailed by the descent into the extreme'. In 1962, for example, he staged a ritual in a Viennese cellar. This featured the crucifixion of the carcass of a lamb, followed by his own mock crucifixion, while an assistant poured blood over him. The blood stained a background sheet, which was then declared to be a relic. As the years have passed Nitsch, paradoxically, has become an establishment figure, and his performances of this type have grown more and more ambitious as his financial resources have increased. They are not however, substantially different. In 1998, he staged a 'Six Day Play' at the Austrian castle that he now owns. For him, the event was a re-enactment of the story of creation. The artist's instructions for Day Three read in part: 'The participants guzzle more and more. The bull and a man tied before it to a cross are attached to a portable frame and carried to the cellars of Essellsstadt by numerous actors accompanied by musicians. All of the participants are drunk. Tavern music, the orchestras all play loud, ecstatic, roaring music in a continual crescendo.'[4]
Gunter Brus, in his early work, went even further with the actions he staged - he defecated and urinated in public, and cut himself with razor blades. Self-mutilation was at the core of his early practice as an artist. A solo exhibition held in 1965 at the Galerie Junge Generation in Vienna was entitled Malerei, Selbstbemalung, Selbstverstümmelung (Ger.: painting, self-painting, self-mutilation). This is exactly what it was about.
The member of the group who now excites most curiosity is the short-lived Rudolph Schwarzkogler. This is chiefly due to the persistent, but false, legend that he died as a result of cutting off his own penis. In fact, he died as a result of a fall from a window, perhaps inspired by his desire to emulate Yves Klein's 'Leap into the Void' (1960). This iconic photograph, documenting Klein's claim to be able to levitate, is in reality a photo-montage. Schwarzkogler's actions seem to have been performed chiefly before a small circle of initiates - he was never as publicity-hungry as his colleagues. The tightly controlled circumstances in which they were made perhaps make the surviving photographs of his self-harming performances/actions more disturbing.
In America, and elsewhere, 'ordeal art' did not fully take hold until the beginning of the 1970s. One of its most famous American exponents is Chris Burden (b.1946, see above). In the early part of his career, Burden staged a number of self-mutilating performances and dangerous ordeals in the name of art. For example, in his 1971 piece 'Shoot', he had an assistant shoot him in the right arm from a distance of five meters. The piece was widely interpreted as a protest against the Vietnam War, or as a questioning of the right to bear arms enshrined in the American constitution, or as both of these things. In 1974, for his piece 'Trans-fixed', he had himself nailed through the palms of his hands, outstretched face up on the back of a Volkswagen beetle. Allusions to the Crucifixion are often referenced in art of this kind, as has already been seen from the performances of Herman Nitsch. In another piece from the early 1970s, Burden took a slightly different direction. In 'Prelude to 220, or 110' he had himself bolted with copper bands to a concrete floor. Nearby were two buckets of water, with live electric lines submerged in them. Had any visitor to the gallery spilled the water, by accident or on purpose, Burden would very likely have been electrocuted.
Burden and Abramovic are two of the best known of performance artists who have deliberately endangered or harmed themselves. Another is Gina Pane (1939-1990) whose performances, less well documented than those of Abramovic, included cutting herself with knives and walking on thorns and broken glass. On one occasion her performance involved climbing a ladder with blades for rungs, barefoot. Perhaps surprisingly, but perhaps not so, Pane has become the subject of some of the ready-made thesis papers offered for purchase on the web, to idle or uncertain students.
A significant younger heir of these self-harming performance artists who made a stir in the 1960s and 1970s is the Californian body artist Ron Athey (b.1961). Athey (see above) was described by Lea Vergine, in her book Body Art and Performance[5] as 'demented and abject', a phrase she seems to intend as a compliment rather than an insult. It duly appears in a passage from her book quoted on Athey's personal web-site. Athey was brought up as a Pentecostal Christian, and his performances often have religious overtones. His first major success, begun in 1992, was a so-called 'torture trilogy' - 'Martyrs & Saints', '4 Scenes in a Harsh Life' and 'Deliverance'. He comments: 'If the inside of your head gets pummeled with enough blunt force trauma to splinter the psyche, you develop ways to punish the body, that fleshy prison which houses the pain.'
'4 Scenes in a Harsh Life' became a cause célèbre when Athey performed it at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1994. In the course of it, he made cuts in a fellow performer's back, covered these with absorbent paper strips, then, using a pulley, hoisted these into the air. Athey is gay and HIV positive, and critics, including the venerable Republican senator Jesse Helms, jumped to the conclusion that he was exposing his audiences to HIV-infected blood. Dr. Mary Richards, a Senior Lecturer at Brunel University, who has previously worked as a performer, speaks of Athey's cross-dressing and emphasis on masochism as integral, closely related parts of his personality as a performer, and regards the surgical needles he has implanted in his scalp as deliberate references to Christ's Crown of Thorns. She also sees him as an artist who induces fear, whether he intends to or not. Tattooed all over and sometimes spectacularly costumed, Athey combines a swaggering, decorative queer aesthetic with abjection. He is the baroque, fully up-to-date version of what the Vienna Actionists attempted to do in the 1960s.
Franko B (b.1960), born in Milan but resident in London since 1979, is another well-established representative of the contemporary body art movement, who has performed internationally - in London (at Tate Modern in 2002), but also in Zagreb, Mexico City, Milan, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Copenhagen, Madrid, Vienna and Brussels (the Palais des Beaux-Arts). He is therefore representative of a now not-infrequent paradox - he is an avant-garde figure who is in good odour with the artistic establishment. He says of himself: 'I'm essentially a painter who also works in performance. I come from a visual art background and not "live art" or theatre, and this is very important to me as it informs the way my work is read. In the last 20 years or so I have developed ways of working to suit my need at that particular time, in terms of strategy and context, by using painting, installation, sculpture, video and sound.' Yet the brief article in Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopaedia, says bluntly that 'his work is based on the bloody and ritualised violation of his own body.'
In fact, much of Franko B's body art seems to consist of creating situations where audience members or participants are confronted with reminders of their own physical frailty and/or psychic insecurity. This, I think, corresponds rather closely to the descriptions offered by academic ethnologists of classic shamanic practice.
It's interesting that Franko B sometimes takes ideas both from and to the fashion world. In his performance 'I Miss You' (2002, see above) he paraded along a catwalk that stretched the length of Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall, naked and bleeding. This seems only one degree further, in terms of audience confrontation, than the fashion shows recently staged by couturiers such as the late Alexander McQueen. McQueen's last menswear show in Milan, held in January 2010, featured fabric with a pattern of human bones. In her eulogy at McQueen's memorial service, the veteran fashion writer Suzy Menkes quoted the designer as having said: 'Anger in my work reflected angst in my personal life. What people see is me coming to terms with what I was in life. It's always about the human psyche. My work is like a biography of my own personality.' There doesn't seem to be much difference here from what Franko B attempts in his performances.
Dawn Perlmutter, in a now notorious essay entitled 'The Sacrificial Aesthetic: Blood Rituals from Art to Murder[6], noted that 'artists are increasingly using blood and violence in art and audiences are attending. This art can be referred to as "postmodern mortification" because it represents a spiritual attempt by artists to dismantle personal and societal boundaries through physical sacrifice as a ritual form of purification. Although it was demonstrated that this fails as religious ritual, it is a ritual process nonetheless. What will define the progress of this genre is not so much the artists as the audience. If audience participation begins to take place, participation being defined as religious interaction and communal transformation, performance art will no longer be positioned in the category of the aesthetic but will be designated by society as a new religious movement.'
It's hard not to feel some force in her contention that the violent, abject, self-harming body- and performance-art that has developed since the 1960s is more like the manifestation of a new religion - a religion let it be said without a settled doctrine or anything approaching a fully elaborated theology - than it is like art as the western tradition has usually defined it. I think I can't be the only person who feels increasingly uneasy about this development.
Notes
[1] Janet Kaplan, "Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic," Art Journal 58:2, 1999.
[3] Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty, in The Theory of the Modern Stage - ed. Eric Bentley, Penguin, London, 1968, p.66.
[4] Shade Rupe, Meat Is Theatre! Scope, November 24 1999.
[5] 2nd revised edition, 2004.
[6] Anthropoetics 5, No.2, Fall 1999/Winter 2000
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