Bodies
in Pain: Towards a Masochistic Perception of PerformanceÑThe Work of Ron Athey
and Bob Flanagan [1995]
(Markus
Wessendorf, University of HawaiÔi at Manoa)
The work
of the performance artists Bob Flanagan and Ron Athey, as shown in New York in
late 1994, subverts a perception theory that is still based on detachment and
psychological identification. In Flanagan's exhibition Visiting Hours at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Athey's performance 4
Scenes in a Harsh Life at P.S. 122, both
artists pierce, scar and mutilate themselfs (Flanagan on video, Athey in
performance). Flanagan's and Athey's performances, however, represent a
voluntarily demonstration of power over their own bodies, offering a kind of
self-sacrifice which erases any possibility of a sadistic gaze and therefore
lays a foundation for a masochistic perception of performance.
The increasing level of violence and pain in contemporary performance has
become a highly controversial issue in recent theatrical discourse. The work of
Belgian theatre artist Jan Fabre, for example, has raised questions about the
"intrusion of the real" into the stage event, in particular his use of
untrained animals and the infliction of pain on actors' bodies through electric
shocks. Other contemporary theatre-productions (for example by Reza Abdoh or
Richard Foreman) create painful effects by the use of ear-shattering sound
effects or blinding spotlights directed towards the audience. I want to
demonstrate, how the work of Ron Athey and Bob Flanagan suggests a theoretical
concept of a perception of theatre and performance which would no longer be
based on an aesthetic and detached contemplationÑbut which would be
masochistic, tactile and corporeal, operating on the level of mimesis and
contagion.
The introductory scene of Ron Athey's performance 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life, called "The Holy Woman," begins with a stage
tableau. Athey is standing upstage right in a stiff, erect pose. Wearing a
white gown with protruding fake breasts he resembles a nurse, though without
hair. Two other men are clad in trousers, white shirts and ties and look like
ministrants. Far downstage, in front of them, stands a naked woman, one arm
dangling from a rope, her entire body pierced by numerous hypodermic needles.
Small feathers attached to the needles give them an arrow-like quality. This
female Saint Sebastian doesn't change her position, but shivers visibly
throughout the following sermon that Athey delivers in pentecostal fashion,
until he finally pulls the needles out of her body, covers her in a red robe
and carries her from the stage. In another scene titled "Working Class
Hell," Athey, now dressed in a workman's outfit, wearing surgical gloves
and using a scalpel, cuts patterns into the bare back of an Afro-American
performer. During the procedure, which is based on an African tribal scarring
custom, Athey creates prints by blotting the blood with a series of paper towels.
One by one his two assistants hang these prints on a clothesline that stretches
across the performance space and passes over the audience. Each performance
night, Athey works on a different spot on the other performer's back, allowing
earlier wounds to heal. In the last scene of the performance entitled
"Dagger Wedding," Athey pierces the cheeks of three actresses with
seven-inch hypodermic needles, before theyÑand the other participants of the
showÑstart to perform a wild dance with Christmas balls which are attached to
their bodies by fishing hooks ripped into their skin. At the end of the
performance the stage-floor is sprinkled with blood.
The performance of 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life in Minneapolis in March 1994 led to a public controversy
after one spectator complained to the local health department. He feared that
during the scene with the blood prints the audience had been subjected to the
risk of H.I.V. This was denied by Athey, who claimed that the performer, whose
back he cut, was not H.I.V.-positive. Nevertheless, the fact that the Walker
Art Center had used $ 150 from the National Endowment for the Arts to show
Athey's performance caused an uproar that finally made Congress decide to cut
the N.E.A.'s budget for 1995 by two percent.
Despite the condemnation of the performance by the Christian right and
conservative politicians Athey's questioning of taboos of sex, pain and the
body can no longer be regarded as a marginal and singular phenomenon. If 4
Scenes in a Harsh Life belongs to a
tradition of masochism in performance, which can be traced back to Chris Burden
and Gina Pane more than two decades ago, Athey's performance differs from the
more solitary work of his predecessors by its appeal to an alternative
life-style, one affirming consensual sadomasochism and the endurance of pain as
means of a Foucauldian aesthetic of the self. Since the 1960's there has been a
paradigmatic shift regarding the overall cultural acceptance of sadomasochism.
The Eulenspiegel Society in New York, for example, formed in 1971 as a
masochists' rights group of people with problems of sexual orientation, has
tripled its membership between 1989 and 1994, primarily attracting new members
curious in exploring other sexual dimensions. In the latest edition of the
American Diagnostic and Statistical ManualÑa handbook for mental-healthÑsadomasochistic fantasies or behavior are
no longer categorized as "pathological." In recent years,
sadomasochism has developed into a major trend in fashion and popular culture
(from Gianni Versace's bondage getups to Madonna's video-clips and Garry
Marshall's Hollywood-comedy Exit to Eden).[1] In addition,
piercing and tattooing have become the badge of a large urban sub-culture in
New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Ron Athey's performance work originated out of the context of Modern
Primitivism and the gay community of Los Angeles. In opposition to the
endurance acts of earlier performance artists Athey tries to celebrate the
infliction of pain as a communal event. In terms of ritual, community and
theatricality, his work stands much closer to that of the Living Theatre and
the Performance Group than to the solo acts of most performers working within
the masochist performance tradition. Indeed, Athey originally showed his
performances in clubs, not in established performance spaces. Athey himself
describes his "theatre of pain" as a physical and dynamic altering of
the body; as the attempt "to balance complicated inner-city life" by
a "more organic aesthetic."[2] Mark Russel, the artistic director of P.S. 122, refers to
Athey's 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life as
"a rite of passage, a cleansing trial that is, in the end, life
affirming."[3] Athey's open references to his pentecostal upbringing in
the sermons and his use of Christian symbolism in 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life such as the weaving of a crown of thorns by inserting
needles into his forehead, and the Saint Sebastian tableau also align him with
another cult of pain which Kaja Silverman refers to as Christian Masochism:
In this particular subspecies of moral masochism there
would thus seem to be a strong heterocosmic impulse - the desire to remake the
world in another image altogether, to forge a different cultural order. The
exemplary Christian masochist also seeks to remake him or herself according to
the model of the suffering Christ, the very picture of earthly divestiture and
loss. Insofar as such an identification implies the complete and utter negation
of all phallic values, Christian masochism has radically emasculating
implications, and is in its purest forms intrinsically incompatible with the
pretensions of masculinity.[4]
But even
if Athey uses Christian symbolism in 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life and his preceding production Martyrs & Saints, this symbolism is simply a quotation of, and not a
subscription to the Christian religion. Athey, who was trained as a pentecostal
minister, doesn't perform his acts as motivated by Christian belief, but by his
desire for suffering as a goal in itself. Elaine Scarry has stressed that the
voluntary infliction of pain on one's own body is not necessarily:
an act of denying the body, [...] but a way of so
emphasizing the body that the contents of the world are cancelled and the path
is clear for the entry of an unworldly, contentless force. It is in part this
world-ridding, path-clearing logic that explains the obsessive presence of pain
in the rituals of large, widely shared religions as well as in the imagery of
intensely private visions[...].[5]
While
Christian masochism still considers the experience of pain as a via
negativa to achieve a higher level
of spirituality, Athey's personal obsession is the radical affirmation of pain
as both the medium and the final state of transcendence. In this way, Athey shares
a vision with other artists who try to align performance with masochism. The
Italian performer Romeo Castellucci wants to experience "[p]ain as theatre
and not the reverse. Pain as [an] incredible freedom plan."[6] For Castellucci, the
basic "guilt" of the actor of representing the patriarchal order of
the author-god on stage can only be expiated by a sacrifice; a masochistic
performance-act which destroys "[t]he image of the father in the son," abolishes the masculine gender and
terminates the father's law by a "giving over to the mother" and a
rebirth "from/of the feminine gender."[7] Only the woman can punish "the father in the shape of
the son."[8] While Castellucci appears to take Sacher-Masoch's
association of the submissive role with the male and the dominant role with the
female gender as essential givens, these identifications are in a constant
state of flux in Ron Athey's theatricalization of gay masochism. In 4 Scenes
in a Harsh Life, Athey enacts both roles of son and mother: not only does he
inflict pain on his own body, but in his relation to the other male and female
performers on stage Athey also represents the dominant and healing mother,
particularly when he is dressed up as the "holy woman."
The scene entitled "Working Class Hell" demonstrates, how 4 Scenes
in a Harsh Life subverts any paternal
order. Athey's script refers to the chair on stage, where the scarification
happens, as a "human printing press."
ENTER two FACTORY WORKERS. They de-drag DIVINITY, then
strap him into HUMAN PRINTING PRESS, his back to the audience. SCAR TECHNICIAN
stands above HUMAN PRINTING PRESS on a platform, washes his back, then begins
cutting an African scarification pattern into his back with a scalpel.
TECHNICIAN takes a stack of papers and makes art prints. FACTORY WORKERS are
alternately given the prints to hang on the three drying lines, operated by a
pulley system, leading from the PRINTING PRESS to various points at the back
and side walls.[9]
The scene
of the human printing press resembles the machine in Franz Kafka's short story The
Penal Colony that also uses the human body
literally as printing material. In Kafka's story this machine is used to punish
the delinquents of the colony by writing the verdict upon their bodies with a
harrow, a verdict that has not been revealed to them before the execution and
simply spells out the rule that has been broken. Kafka's machine can be
understood as a metaphor for the underlying process of civilization, which for
Nietzsche consists in the turning of the body into a living memory by a painful
initiation into the law. Nietzsche claims that through the painful marking of
the body the human being is put into a debtor position in relation to society.
Every transgression of the law, therefore, must be paid back by suffering, even
if pain is acknowledged to escape the order of exchange.[10] The law in Kafka's
story is represented by the former commandant, who is also the "soldier,
judge, mechanic, chemist and draughtsman"[11] of the machine of socialization. After the verdict has
been bodily inscribed and the delinquent deciphers the inscription with his
wounds, he is supposed to be finally pierced through by the harrow and cast
into a pit.
The "Working Class Hell"-scene in Athey's performance can be
interpreted as a reverÿsal of the paternal order, condensed in the metaphor of
the machine in Kafka's story. If we follow Gilles Deleuze's characterization of
sadism as institutional and masochism as contractual,[12] we can argue that
the machine of the penal colony embodies the underlying sadism of
institutionalized political systems which inflict pain onto their subjects'
bodies against their will, while the physical suffering in Athey's performance
is based on a mutual agreement between the partners and therefore masochistic.
If the inscription of the verdict in Kafka's story refers to the rule that has
been broken, the scarring patterns Athey cuts into his co-performer's back
don't relate to the institutional regulations of a community. Although these
patterns have been adapted from the context of the sign systems of African
tribal customs, Athey empties the contextual meaning of these signs. Like
tattoos, the patterns are memorials of a painful ordeal undergone and not the
inscription of a social order onto the body. The powerlessness of the
subject-delinquent as described by Kafka is turned into sovereignty in Athey's
performance by the willful acceptance to endure pain, by "changing what
[subjects] do have power over: their
own bodies."[13] In opposition to
Kafka's machine that can only consolidate the turn of the subjected body into a
living memory by finally killing it, the violation of body integrity in Athey's
performance is a life-affirming gesture. The performer reverses his
debtor-position to society by an "anticipation sacrifice,"[14] by his subjection
to the law's penalties in advance and therefore gaining the right to enjoy
pleasures previously forbidden.
In fall 1994 the self-acclaimed "supermasochist" Bob Flanagan[15] came to the New
Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Sheree Rose, Flanagan's partner and
dominatrix, had designed the show which was called Visiting Hours and which had been exhibited one year before in Santa
Monica. Flanagan, who is not only a songwriter and a poet, but has also
extensively performed his acts in clubs, can be visited in a hospital-bed
during the opening hours of the exhibition. Flanagan's autobiographic work
deals with his life-long affliction of cystic fibrosis, a painful sickness usually leading to an early death.
Flanagan has predominantly survived CF so far by a radical affirmation of pain
and his turning the experience into art. In a small hospital room which has
been rebuilt in the middle of the exhibition space and which is equipped with
all the medical tools necessary for Flanagan's treatment, visitors can talk
with him, but also watch him being fed and getting injections. Along with
children's toys with imprinted S/M-insigniae (black leather masks, whips) and
the text of a manifesto that runs along the walls, there is also an
installation of several TV-monitors in the shape of a crucified body. On the
monitors, different videotapes can be seen which recreate a new body consisting
of Flanagan's body-parts, but also those of film and animated characters. The
monitors also display Flanagan's masochistic practices, including his sewing up
his lips and fixing his penis to a wooden plank with a screw.
Like Athey's 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life,
Flanagan's Visiting Hours deals with
issues of sickness, pain and the daily confrontation of death. While Athey's
performance refers partly to the iconography of the gay leather scene,
Flanagan's exhibition deals with his involvement in a heterosexual masochistic
relationship, which follows closely the pattern of Leopold Sacher-Masoch's
famous contract with his mistress Wanda von Dunajev. While Athey's work is a
scripted theatrical event that unrolls within a given frame of time and space,
the program of Flanagan's Visiting Hours
is dictated by the demands of his sickness. Unlike Athey, who both directs and
acts in his performances, Flanagan is surrounded by an environment that has
been created by his dominatrix and life partner, who is otherwise absent from
the scene. While pain in Athey's work is inflicted onto the body by recourse to
ritualistic practices, the ritual of medical treatment in Flanagan's exhibition
is a sterile and desacralized routine. In opposition to Athey, who stresses the
communality of shared suffering, Flanagan's dealing with pain is the
consequence of an idiosyncratic and exclusively personal choice. Despite the
differences between the works of Athey and Flanagan, both performers share
common attitudes that distinguish them from former masochist performers. Both
make use of the Christian iconography of suffering, affirming pain in a joyful
way, and depending on spectators as witnesses to their experience of pain. This
experience, although at the core of their work, nevertheless cannot be shared
with the audience. As Scarry has noted, the experience of physical pain can
only be grasped in negative terms; it does not only destroy language and refuse
any referential content, it also can neither be shared nor properly
communicated, marking the "absolute split between one's sense of one's own
reality and the reality of other persons."[16] As the consequence of the total evanescence of pain, the
artists try to objectify their experience by other means of expression,
Flanagan by a documentation of his illness through photographs, letters and
other autobiographical materials, as Athey by his recourse to theatrical
rituals. In both cases the spectator is excluded from the experience of pain in
which the performers are so evidently absorbed. Flanagan and Athey refuse to
suffer for the pleasure of the spectator, to become a mere object and victim of
a supposedly sadistic gaze. The spectator is confronted with a drastic violent
action, but the super-realism of the event undermines his ability for aesthetic
contemplation. In Athey's and Flanagan's performances, the penetration of the
surface of the human body with a blade or a needle concentrates all the
spectator's attention onto the cutting spot and erases the possibility for a
distanced perception. The identification with the suffering body operates on a
purely mimetic level where the spectator doesn't find him- or herself in a
powerful position to master the stage event psychologically, or, as the
performance artist Rachel Rosenthal has remarked:
In performance art, the audience, from its role as sadist,
subtly becomes the victim. It is forced to endure the artist's plight
empathetically, or examine its own responses of voyeurism and pleasure, or
smugness and superiority. [...] In any case, the performer holds the reins.
[...] The audience also usually 'gives up' before the artist.[17]
Many theoreticians (Freud, Reik, Deleuze, etc.) have stressed the basic
theatricality of masochism. But this theatrical characteristic only refers to
one aspect of the phenomenon. We can distinguish three different levels of
masochism, which I want to call primary, secondary and tertiary masochism, in
modification of Freud's distinction between erotogenic, feminine and moral
masochism. In his essay on The Economic Problem of Masochism,[18] Freud defined three forms of masochism by relating them to
his concepts of the death instinct, female sexuality, and unconscious guilt.
Freud defined masochism overall as the complementary dark side of sadism which
he favored as a life-affirming force. Without going into a detailed analysis of
Freud's concept, I will propose a redefinition of his terms in relation to
performance. This attempt is motivated by two different critical readings of
Freud's theories in regard to masochism. As Gilles Deleuze has shown, the
sadist and the masochist never form a symmetrical couple. The masochist must
persuade someone, who is not by inclination a sadist, into treating him like a
slave, while the sadist takes pleasure in tormenting a victim who does not
enjoy pain him- or herself (this implies that the consensual practices of
so-called sadomasochism are basically masochistic in character). Leo Bersani,
on the other hand, bases his theory on Freud's inability to explain the fact
that we enjoy "pleasure in pain,"[19] that sexuality is not only "characterized by the
simultaneous production of pleasure and unpleasurable tension," but that
also "the pleasurable unpleasurable tension of sexual stimulation seeks
not to be released, but to be increased."[20] Bersani argues that this pleasure of the unpleasurable is
a survival strategy of the psychic apparatus to resist shattering sexual
impulses which would impede the development of ego-structures. Bersani
therefore comes to the conclusion that sexuality is ontologically masochistic.
Primary masochism, in Bersani's sense, can be understood as the experience of
pleasure in pain on the most elementary level, as the binding of those stimuli
that exceed the body's normal range of sensation. Primary masochism can also be
related to perception in general, Deleuzian "suffering of effects"
that other bodies or objects have "on the soft and fluid parts of our own
body."[21] This pre-symbolic level of perception can be said to
operate by mimetic contagion, comparable to the "tactility of a hit
between the eyes." Referring to Walter BenjaminÕs concept of mimesis,
Michael Taussig has characterized visual perception as predominantly tactile:
"tactility is paramount [and] the optical dissolving [...] into touch and
a certain thickness," which implies "both visual replication and material transfer."[22] It is the
substantial connection between the object and the perceiver which is the
primary modus operandi by which the
spectator experiences acts of mutilation, scarring or the piercing of the body
of the performer.
Secondary masochism is characterized by the staging of fantasies that involve
humiliation and submission. Secondary masochism represents the extroverted and
theatrical aspect of masochism and can be regarded as "a kind of
melodramatic version of the constitution of sexuality itself, [...] its making
visible the ontological grounds of the sexual."[23] The masochist
externalizes his most intimate desires by turning them into negotiated
play-scripts, role-playing and masks. Secondary masochism operates on the level
of representation, and aims at the destruction of the ego as a social
construct, which explains the need for an audience. The spectator can share the
pleasurable unpleasure which is specific for this aspect of masochism: the
delay and suspense of a satisfying discharge of libidinal tension. The
pleasurable unpleasure of secondary masochism does not bring about acts of
physical violence, which would exclude the spectator from the event by the very
unshareability of pain.
Tertiary masochism can be defined by what Freud has written about moral
masochism: "The suffering itself is what matters."[24] Here pain is really
inflicted onto the human body. By its willful endurance the performer does not
only aim to achieve an Artaudian "body without organs," a total erasure
of language, consciousness and psychological content, but also the destruction
of the existing world-order as represented by the super-ego, the paternal law,
and the repressive constraints of society. Tertiary masochism is concerned with
the Sublime and resembles the experience of the mystic and the ascetic.
Characterized by introversion and solitariness the only stage of tertiary
masochism is the inside of the performer's body, who does not need an audience
for the completion of his experience. The experience itself cannot be
communicated towards an audience because it negates representation. Only the
intersection of the blade and the surface of the body, and perhaps also the
sounds and cries of the suffering person can be perceived. While tertiary masochism
is intended to destroy the imagination of the performer, the same does not hold
true for the spectator, who cannot identify with the performer by lack of
psychological content. Left with mere indications of an internal scene, the
spectator can only reconstruct the physical situation of the performer in his
own imagination and thus experience his own fears of bodily violation.
These three aspects of masochism, although they cannot be easily separated,
appear in a different constellation in each performance. The attempt, for
example, to express the solitary experience of tertiary masochism within the
representational and theatrical frame of the secondary one, is doomed to fail
from the very beginning. This explains, why Ron Athey's performance, which
celebrates the idea of theatre as a communion by its very focus on the
heterogenous experience of pain, does not only exclude the audience from
the stage event, but highlights the fundamental differences between actors and
spectators, an essential and unbridgeable gap between human beings.
What is finally the position of the spectator in regard to performance work
that is based on a masochistic contract? Freud has suggested that the sexual
excitement is always aroused by the identification with the suffering object.
As we see, the spectator in Athey's and Flanagan's work is clearly not in a
position of mastership or the sadistic gaze. The spectator, however, cannot
identify with a masochist performer either, who evidently undergoes the
infliction of pain onto his body willfully and with affirmation. Kaja Silverman
has claimed that the spectator's attention is focused on the suffering position
because he or she experiences the subjugation of the victim "as a
pleasurable repetition of his/her own history"[25] of
subjectification, which means the painful initiation into the symbolic order.
The spectator of Athey's or Flanagan's work cannot identify with the suffering
position of the performer because the intentional acceptance of this position
subverts the symbolic order. It is the excessive pleasure in pain of the
performer that puts the spectator in a passive position of primary masochism,
flooded with shattering stimuli that he or she is unable to control.
[1]See Melinda Blau. "Ordinary People. S&M Culture
Goes Mainstream." New York,
November 28, 1994, 40f.
[2]Ron Athey. "Blood, Boots and White Weddings." L.A.
Weekly, 8-14.7., 1994, 24.
[3]Quoted in: Ibid.
[4]Kaja Silverman. Male
Subjectivity at the Margins. New York;
London: Routledge, 1992, 199.
[5]Elaine Scarry. The
Body in Pain. New York; Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985, 34.
[6]Romeo Castellucci. "Gewalt als
Selbstauslšschung/Violence as Auto-spoliation." Theaterschrift 3:
Border Violations, 76.
[7]Ibid., 80.
[8]Ibid.
[9]Athey. "Blood, Boots and White Weddings."
[10]See Gilles Deleuze and FŽlix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus.
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983, 190f.
[11]Franz Kafka. "The Penal Colony." Selected
Short Storiesof Franz Kafka. Trans. Willa
and Edwin Muir. New York: The Modern Library, 1993, 101.
[12]See Gilles Deleuze. "Coldness and Cruelty." In Masochism. New York: Zone Books, 1989, 134.
[13]V. Vale & Andrea Juno. "Introduction." Modern
Primitives. San Francisco: Re/Search
Publications, 1989, 4.
[14]Castellucci. "Violence as Auto-spoliation," 78.
[15]See Bob Flanagan:
Supermasochist. San Francisco: Re/Search
Publications, 1993, 3: "In a bizarro, alternative universe kind of way, I
sort of resemble Superman."
[16]Scarry. The Body in Pain, 4.
[17]Rachel Rosenthal. "Performance and the Masochist
Tradition." High Performance,
Winter 1981-2, 24.
[18]Sigmund Freud. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works. Vol. XIX. Trans.
James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1961, 159-170.
[19]Ibid., 161.
[20]Leo Bersani. The Freudian Body. Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, 34.
[21]Gilles. Deleuze. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books, 1990, 146f.
[22]Michael Taussig. The Nervous System. New York; London: Routledge, 1992, 144ff.
[23]Bersani. The Freudian Body, 41.
[24]Freud. "The Economic Problem of Masochism", 165.
[25]Kaja Silverman. "Masochism and Subjectivity." Framework, 1980, no. 12, 5.