Performing the Wounded Body: Pain, Affect and the Radical Relationality of Meaning

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ In the film, three actors play the artist, one as a boy, one as a young man and in this scene Nigel Terry plays him as an adult.

² See Ilana DeBare, ‘San Francisco Art Institute Halts Exhibition Showing Killing of Animals’, San Francisco Chronical, 30 March 2008, < http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f = /c/a/2008/03/29/BAGNVSRME.DTL> [12/03/2009].

³ The piece is described by this first-person caption and a video clip is available on ‘Media Art Net’, < http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/talking-about-similarity/video/1/> [26/03/2009].

⁴ As Kathy O'Dell has pointed out, Pane was also enacting personal pain to point to the horrors of the politically induced pain caused by the Vietnam war. Pane pushed viewers to recall their own pain particularly in relation to ‘the representation of the injured body on the news’, leaving them in a space in which ‘they could operate critically’. From Kathy O'Dell, Toward a Theory of Performance Art: An Investigation of Its Sites, Ph.D. thesis, The City University of New York, 1992, p.57.

⁵ Wojnarowicz's image of himself with lips sewn shut was included in the movie about AIDs activism, Silence = Death (1990; directed by Rosa von Praunheim); Flanagan and Rose's piece, documented as Video Scaffold, was performed in 1992; Athey's piece, A Nurse's Penance, was performed at Los Angeles's Club Fuck the night David Wojnarowicz died from complications of AIDS (22 July 1992) in homage to the New York artist (Athey actually had his lips laced shut by 10 hypodermic needle tips with black embroidery thread; I thank Athey for sending me this information in an email, 1 April 2009); Franko B.'s lip-sewing performance addressing issues of silencing and censorship took place in several different places, including the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London, in 1995. Flanagan had his lips sewn by Rose in one of their s/m engagements addressing, among other things, his bodily pain as a sufferer of cystic fibrosis; Franko B. and Parr also had someone else sew their lips shut. The most brilliant work on the affective and erotic connotations of the work of Ron Athey, Franko B. and David Wojnarowicz is that of Jennifer Doyle; see her book Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and her essay ‘Queer Wallpaper’, in Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, ed. Amelia Jones (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2006), pp.343-55.

⁶ On the Australian refugee-seekers' action see Joseph Pugliese, ‘Penal Asylum: Refugees, Ethics, Hospitality’, Borderlands e-journal, 1:1 (2002), < http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/pugliese.html> [29/03/2009]. On Mike Parr's Close the Concentration Camps (2002), a durational work in which he empathetically aligns himself with the detainees at the Woomara refugee camp in Australia, I am indebted to the work of Ed Scheer and Christine Stoddard. See Edward Scheer, ‘Australia's Post-Olympic Apocalypse?’, PAJ: Journal of Performance and Art 88, 30:1 (2008), pp.42-56; Christine Stoddard, Becoming Anxious: Bodies, Time and the Performance of Pain, PhD thesis, University of Manchester, forthcoming (2010). I am particularly indebted to Stoddard, whose brilliant analysis of pain in performance has shifted my framework in this paper from its original form (in 2005) to the arguments currently shaping it. See also Michael Young, ‘Mike Parr: Decapitations and Protestations – Cut, Burn, Stitch and Draw’, 2008, Arts Asia Pacific, < http://www.aapmag.com/62features3.htm> [26/03/2009].

⁷ Mary Richards discusses at length acts of lip-sewing by asylum seekers (including very recent protest by Shahin Portofeh in Britain) in relation to those by performance artists; see her ‘Sewing and Sealing: Speaking Silence’, in Art in the Age of Terrorism, eds Graham Coulter-Smith and Maurice Owen (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2005), pp.34-47. Richards notes that Amini was specifically protesting the Home Office's appeal of the decision to grant him refugee status; when the Home Office dropped the appeal, he continued his performative act in order to protest against the treatment of other asylum seekers; see p.37.

⁸ James Thompson, Professor of Drama at University of Manchester, is the director of the ‘In Place of War’ project and I am grateful to him for mentioning this case and the play to me. On Israfil Shiri, see also Debbie Grue, ‘In Memory of Israfil Shiri 1973-2003’, 07/09/2003, The Blanket: A Journal of Protest and Dissent, < http://www.NOTES/Body&BodyArtNotes/IsrafilShiri.html>.

⁹ Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics [1993], trans. Graham Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.48.

¹⁰ Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering, p.115. Boltanski is clearly referring to the Freudian concept of sublimation as a means of displacing the base, libidinal qualities of being human, as articulated in the latter's Civilization and Its Discontents [1929-1930], trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961); Freud writes, the ‘[s]ublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life’ (p.44). See also discussions of Boltanski's aesthetic mode of spectatorship in Scheer (‘Australia's Post-Olympic Apocalypse?’, p.50) and Stoddard (‘Towards a Phenomenology of the Witness to Pain’, in Becoming Anxious, chapter 2).

¹¹ Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering, p.115.

¹² See Christine Stoddard, ‘Towards a Phenomenology of the Witness to Pain’, ms. p.8; and Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

¹³ Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering, p.116.

¹⁴ See for example the glossy coffee-table book, Manuel Vason, Encounters: Performance, Photography, Collaboration, ed. Dominic Johnson (Bristol: Arnolfini, 2007).

¹⁵ Art, Lies, and Videotape explored the complex links between live performance and documentation. The showing of Opie's photographs at the exhibition was controversial – they were originally mounted with captions that did not mention Athey's name, thus reassigning authorship of his performative woundings to Opie and taking the works away from Athey's live practice completely, mitigating the wounding by completely aligning it with the aesthetic. Once contacted, however, Opie immediately agreed that the captions should include information about Athey's practice, and they were then amended. See also the reproductions of six of her Polaroids of Athey in Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman, Catherine Opie: American Photographer (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2008), pp.162-65.

¹⁶ Ron Athey, ‘Becoming Total Image’, in Manuel Vason, Encounters: Performance, Photography, Collaboration, ed. Dominic Johnson (Bristol: Arnolfini, 2007), p.209.

¹⁷ I witnessed the live performance of Incorruptible Flesh in May 2007 at the Custard Factory in Birmingham, sponsored by Chelsea Theatre and the Fierce! Festival; and I viewed Opie's photograph at the Guggenheim retrospective of Opie's work in 2009.

¹⁸ Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering, p.23.

¹⁹ In a related article, I discuss at length the effects of ‘fake’ acts of wounding in relation to this and other works; see Amelia Jones, ‘Rupture’, in A Performance Cosmology: Testimony from the Future, Evidence of the Past, eds Judie Christie, Richard Gough and Daniel Watt (Aberystwyth: Centre for Performance Research and London: Routledge Press, 2006), pp.71-78.

²⁰ Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship, p.2; she is citing the work of Arne Johan Vetlesen from his Perception, Empathy and Judgment: An Inquiry into the Preconditions of Moral Performance (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), and Heinz Kohut's How Does Analysis Cure? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

²¹ Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship, p.2, 34.

²² I was able to view both the excerpt of Judas Cradle, which premiered at the Aksioma Festival, Castle Codelli, Ljubljana, Slovenia; and the full version performed at the Contact Theatre at University of Manchester, 2005 (this latter version traveled to other venues).

²³ See Amelia Jones, ‘Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper's Judas Cradle’, TDR (The Drama Review: The Journal of Performance Studies), 50:1 (Spring 2006), pp.159-69.

²⁴ Hart argues as follows: ‘[the real] produces a confusion between the very boundary that is presumably the only one that remains unassailable – life and death. […] [I]t is their own refusal to allow these acts to signify that has produced the return of the Real in the fantasia of the dominant order's Symbolic. Foreclosed from the Symbolic, they return in the Real – as the real. As “life” that is death – death to the coherency of a Symbolic Order that constitutes itself as whole by producing its own constitutive outside within.’ In Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p.163.

²⁵ For Henri Bergson, in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (Montana: Kessinger Publishing Company, 1910), sympathy binds us to the other through our identification with his or her pain. See also ‘Henri Bergson’ (2003/ rev. 2008), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, < http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/#Bib> [24/08/2008].

²⁶ See Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship on Kohut's work; and Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), especially pp.123-24.

²⁷ Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship, p.2.

²⁸ Rosi Braidotti, ‘In Spite of the Times: The Postsecular Turn in Feminism’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25:6 (Fall 2008), pp.1-24.

²⁹ Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p.131.

³⁰ See also Antonio Damasio's neuroscientific arguments about the necessary illusion of the self as coherent and how this functions on a neurological basis. He notes: our experiences ‘tend to have a consistent perspective, as if there were indeed an owner and knower for most, thought not all contents. I imagine this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the organism, and the slowly evolving elements of autobiographical data’, in Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p.238.

³¹ Cited by Michaela Poeschl, ‘Let's Make it Halloween. Get Out Your Knife, Carve me Like a Pumpkin, and Then Let's Fuck’, unpublished paper, 1997, ms p.25.

³² Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p.13, 16.

³³ See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896; translation from fifth edition of 1908), trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 2002).

³⁴ Gina Pane, cited in Lea Vergine, Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language (Milan: Skira, 2000), p.197.

³⁵ See also Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro's influential article ‘Female Imagery’, where they pose the query, ‘What does it feel like to be a woman? To be formed around a central core and have a secret place which can be entered and which is also a passageway from which life emerges?’; they note the painful aspect of this centered orientation later in the essay: ‘to be a woman is to be an object of contempt, and the vagina, stamp of femaleness, is devalued’. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, ‘Female Imagery’, Womanspace Journal (Summer 1973), p.11, 14. Much of Chicago's own art work around this time was oriented towards reversing this negativity by making vaginal or cunt imagery that referenced the female body in positive ways, but a few of her pieces – such as Red Flag – present the potentially messy, bloody and painful dimensions of female experience.

³⁶ It must be noted here that my interpretation of how pain functions in this work is not ultimately consistent with Boltanski's arguments, which pivot around a conception of the aesthetic which is quite old-fashioned (that is, the idea of the painter, say Caravaggio, as agent translating the pain of an other through sublimation). My argument is polemical and insists on the conflation of the body of the sufferer with that of the agent: in Athey's work, he performs his pain on his body as an aesthetic act.

³⁷ As film theorist Laura Marks puts it, glossing on Bergson, ‘[p]erception takes place not simply in a phenomenological present but in an engagement with individual and cultural memory’ as activated through the body. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp.146-47.

³⁸ Judith Butler, ‘Frames of War’, paper given at University of Manchester, 5 February 2009.

³⁹ This point was made to me in conversation by Jonathan Katz, 22 March 2009.

⁴⁰ Cathy Caruth, ‘An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p.138.

⁴¹ Radical relationality is a concept linking back to Boltanski's concept of suffering eliciting an empathetic intentionality and Cartwright's elaboration of ‘empathetic identification’. It also parallels the arguments of a number of other scholars – including Laura U. Marks (Skin of the Film), Kaja Silverman and Jill Bennett – who, since the 1990s, have attempted to articulate models of affective or empathetic connection to visual cultural works that counter previous, avant-gardist models of spectatorship that devolve around Freudian concepts of distance, fetishization and identification as the metaphoric placement of the self in the position of the pictured other. Silverman thus in 1996 argued for an ‘ethics of the look’: ‘Instead of assimilating what is desireable about the other to the self, and exteriorizing what is despised in the self as the other, the subject whose look I am here describing struggles to see the otherness of the desired self, and the familiarity of the despised other. He or she attempts, that is, to grasp the objectivity of the moi, and to recognize him – or herself precisely within those others to whom he or she would otherwise respond with revulsion and avoidance.’ Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible Word (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), p.170. And, amplifying this dynamic through a model of ‘empathetic vision’, Jill Bennett argues that particular kinds ofartwork can activate ‘sense memory’, which ‘is bound up in a dynamic encounter with a structure of representation, so that it becomes, in Gilles Deleuze's phrase, a question of putting “an outside and an inside into context” […]. [I]t is this notion of the interface – of a point of contact to be negotiated – that is central to understanding the experience of sense memory’. See Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p.31.