The Art of Cruelty Page 10
Now, whatever echo of psychological discomfort we may feel after viewing Family Tyranny clearly pales in comparison to the psychological harm experienced by the actual sufferer of such an assault. We are having uncomfortable and complicated feelings while watching a video, which is to be distinguished from undergoing involuntary psychic and physical damage. And yet McCarthy’s emphasis on psychological haunting is unnerving, insofar as psychological haunting is precisely where the action of both art and trauma occur. “Don’t worry, they’ll remember it,” the Father coos throughout—as if the point of the violation lay less in the momentary discharge of malignant psychosexual energies, and more in the abuser’s capacity to leave a debilitating psychic scar.
After all, “Don’t worry, they’ll remember it” is the direct, negating promise that trauma makes to catharsis. And it is a mantra that may hold true for the viewer as well, as he or she may end up remembering the video with a disconcerting sense of anxiety and unease for some time. Reenactments of sexual trauma that aim for abreaction are one thing; reenactments that explicitly aim to make the trauma contagious and lasting—both to the Son and to us, the viewers—are another. In lieu of purgation or sublimation, Family Tyranny promises that there will be recurrence. There will be legacy. There will be mess.
Given that I, too, felt like “someone who has eaten something poisonous and is desperate to get rid of it” after my first viewing of Family Tyranny, the question remains: why bother? Why inhabit this mess, even if temporarily? (This question was, in fact, once posed by a student in tears after an in-class screening of this piece.) I am not sure I have a good answer. By this point in my life, I would support anyone’s desire not to bother—a stance that can make the pedagogical ethics of presenting such material a bit difficult to negotiate.
What I can say, however, is that I have gotten something different out of Family Tyranny each time I’ve watched it, and that the video has provided me with an exceptionally unpleasant but uncannily productive platform from which to think about representation, trauma, humor, improvisation, and the nastiest aspects of patriarchy and sexual violence. I can also say that I much prefer its poison over the grandiose, mythopoetic renditions of such as explored by, say, Hermann Nitsch’s Orgies-Mysteries Theatre, which happily takes as its “mythical leitmotif ” a roster of phallocentric, patriarchal, and/or literally Oedipal acts of violence (i.e., the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the rending of Dionysos, the blinding of Oedipus, the murder of Orpheus, the murder of Adonis, the castration of Attis, ritual regicide, and something Nitsch calls, likely after Bataille, “the sado-masochistic primal excess”). My preference remains even though—or perhaps precisely because—Nitsch aims to emancipate; McCarthy, to impart claustrophobic dread. For if Rancière is right that an art is emancipated and emancipating when it stops wanting to emancipate us, there may be no mystery to my preference at all.
Nitsch’s work explicitly depends on the idea that there exists such a thing as sacred or sacrificial violence, and that this type of violence can provide a beneficial, cathartic outlet that diminishes rather than augments the proliferation of violence within any given society or group. French anthropologist-philosopher René Girard set forth this theory in Violence and the Sacred (1977), in which Girard argues that sacrificial violence, or scapegoating, acts as a necessary, foundational “safety valve” in human society. The ritual elimination of a chosen, often arbitrary Other serves to appease otherwise diffuse violent urges in individuals, and to unify the group against the chosen scapegoat. (Girard does not spend much time contemplating the victims of such sacrifices, who are often presumed to be either willing, engaged in a deep projective identification with their sacrificers, or simply inconsequential. Historically speaking, however, it bears noting that these chosen Others have most often been non-consenting animals, criminals, poor people, prisoners of war, women, adolescents, people from a different race, nation, or tribe, or anyone else whose agency has been sufficiently compromised or deemed irrelevant.) According to Girard, we repress the scapegoating mechanism at our peril, as “our society’s obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty.”
If and when society, in thrall to this Pollyanna-like “obligatory compassion,” ceases to provide platforms for such natural, restorative, and cathartic sacrificial activity (the reasoning of an artist such as Nitsch goes), then art must step up to provide the altar. If one finds this employment of the scapegoat mechanism—in art or in life—a toxic proposition generally not worth its risks, then McCarthy’s work—which, as he has said, is more about being a clown than a shaman—can act as a bracing and desirable tonic.
Here one could say that I am simply noting the difference between a mystic and an ironist, and that I—typical of my generation—would naturally prefer the ironist. As critic Tom Moody put it in a 1999 review of younger artists Sue de Beer and Laura Parnes’s video Heidi 2 (1999), an “unauthorized sequel” to McCarthy and Kelley’s Heidi (a 1992 video even more notorious than Family Tyranny in regard to its violation of dolls), “This immersion in media and popular culture sets Parnes and de Beer apart from an older generation of performance artists (McCarthy, Schneemann, Nitsch), who seek to heal a split between a ‘repressed, cultural’ self and an ‘authentic, natural’ self through ritualistic acts of transgression (fecal smearing, orgiastic sex, and so on). In de Beer’s and Parnes’ view, no split exists because everything is mediated: the most extreme acts can be found on tape at the corner video store and ‘real’ experience is suspect. Rejecting the superior vantage point of the artist/shaman, the artists use pop culture tropes without apology; expressing the most ‘primal’ events—childbirth, orgasm, incestuous rape—in the idiom of sitcoms, video games, and splatter films.”
Moody has a point. But to me, the most interesting works of art are those that gum up this either-or equation, with its dependence on a whole host of by-now familiar dualisms—repressed/authentic, primal/synthetic, real/mediated—or sidestep it entirely. German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder lived and breathed in this discomfiting, riveting space, somehow managing to conjure literally dozens of cerebral, melodramatic masterpieces from it before his death at the age of thirty-seven. More recently, video and performance artist Kalup Linzy has emerged as one of the wiliest, most compelling navigators of this territory, with his raunchy, lo-fi, weirdly tender renditions of soap operas, such as his All My Churen series (2003, 2005), which chronicles the trials and tribulations of a dysfunctional African-American family, the Braswells, in the rural South, with Linzy playing all the parts with an ecstatic charisma.
Indeed, camp has had a corner on this market for years. One need look no further than drag queen Divine’s infamous shit-eating scene at the end of Pink Flamingos to see how it’s done. As Divine struts and prepares to eat a poodle’s still-warm shit, the voice-over says, “Watch as Divine proves that not only is she the filthiest person in the world, she’s also the filthiest actress in the world!” The layers here are multiple: not only do person and actress meld together in the act of eating dog shit, but also Divine herself is already at least three people—a man born Harris Glenn Milstead, a drag queen named Divine, and an actor/actress playing a character named Divine. Together, “real person,” persona, character, actress, and actor really do eat shit. But they don’t do so to get primal. Divine, containing all her multitudes, is getting filthy, and it is gross, hilarious, and ecstatic to behold.
THE GOLDEN RULE
ARISTOTLE’S THEORY of catharsis has been very useful to artists who believe that humans have a certain measure of bloodlust that must be given controlled discharge, or who insist that their work is not injecting anything foreign into any viewer’s bloodstream—that everything nasty that exists (violent incest, for example, in the case of Family Tyranny; the desire to torture and murder children, in the case of The Pillowman) also already exists in some form in the viewer, and that the depiction of it therefore gives the viewer the chance to confro
nt his or her fears, or desires, in relation to it. (Or, if he or she doesn’t have a sense of it already, then that’s the fault of his or her naiveté, which deserves to be crushed.) As Evenson once put it in an interview, “I disturb nobody—I only give them an occasion for disturbing themselves. . . . [My readers] have externalized their fears in me, but what they really fear is what they see of themselves in the stories.”
I find it an enormous relief, in the face of such arguments, to hear Mike Kelley’s flat assertion: “I make art in order to give other people my problems.” Such a statement lies at the polar end of the spectrum to the (equally refreshing) attitude of someone like John Cage, who spent his life developing an open-ended system of music based on the opposite conviction: “My feelings belong, as it were, to me, and I should not impose them on others.” In service of this conviction, Cage spent his long career aiming to discover forms of “waking people up” that privilege making space around them rather than violating their boundaries.
“I do not disturb your center, nor you mine”: such was Cage’s emancipatory credo. This is obviously not the credo of Family Tyranny, which takes as it subject not only the smearing of sadistic feeling and action down through generations, successively dismantling psychological “centers,” but also the uncanny ability of hyper-simulated representation to smear potent and unpleasant sensations onto viewers, disrupting, even if for a brief spell, theirs.
And yet. Hoping to “give other people your problems” dovetails with Cage’s approach in an important respect. Namely, it agrees with the first part of Cage’s statement—“My feelings belong, as it were, to me”—and makes a simple reversal of the second—“I should not impose them on others.” In all the work of McCarthy and Kelley I’ve seen, no matter how disturbing, I’ve never felt from them the bossy conviction I feel from so many other artists, to admit that my problems are actually their problems—to admit that they are actually Our Problems. Instead, they inhabit their obsessions so thoroughly, with so blessedly little concern for my well-being, as they catapult their feelings, problems, and obsessions into the public sphere, that some space is created.
This space exists when an artist may hope to give other people his or her problems, but also knows that the transmission cannot be surely made, and that the fallout is likely to be unpredictable, disorderly. Rather than stake everything on a projective identification that has been mapped out for the viewer in advance, the artist doesn’t care, and the not-caring makes space. (After all, even if the transmission goes through, all one gets is the experience of new feelings or problems, not a set of solutions.) In that space, even if I’m surrounded by multiple giant screens showing images of hyper-simulated, over-the-top butchery and plunder for over an hour (as was the case during my viewing of McCarthy’s gore-fest, Caribbean Pirates, made with his son, Damon), I can feel a species of freedom.
At this screening, this sensation derived in part from the layout of the exhibition: the screens at the theater—the REDCAT theater in downtown Los Angeles—were hung in a semicircle around both stage and risers, thereby surrounding the viewer with sight and sound. But as the stage itself remained open and empty, many descended to it and watched the film sitting or lying down there. I stayed in the risers, but when I tired of watching the gore on the walls, I’d turn my gaze to the people lolling around on the stage floor. I watched their interest, their discomfort, and their sleepiness; I watched them come and go, sometimes returning, sometimes not. For all the work’s relentless assault, my actual experience of it was memorably spacey.
Space is distinct from alienation. It is fundamentally about volume, rather than about distance. Space also defies the vertical logic of revelation, which insists there is something beneath the surface of our every day—be it ultimate meaning, the face of God, our fundamental nature, a final terror, ecstasy, or judgment, or some combo of the above—that will be revealed when the veil is finally lifted. In lieu of this logic, space offers a horizontal spreading, the possibility of expansion into dimensions no one yet thoroughly understands. Space is also intrinsic to the creation of freedom. As Arendt once put it in a very different context (in 1953’s “Ideology and Terror”), “The one essential prerequisite of all freedom . . . is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space.”
FREEDOM, CONSENT, alienation, boundary, and incursion: the early works of Chris Burden dramatize the play between them by means of some of the simplest yet most notorious episodes in the history of performance art. Most famous of these is Shoot (1971), in which Burden invited a small audience to a gallery in Santa Ana, California, to watch a friend standing about fifteen feet away shoot him in the upper part of his left arm with a .22 rifle. Unlike Haneke’s taunting, “Why are you watching this?” in the middle of a simulated bloodbath he would presumably prefer that we keep watching, Burden constructed a “real” situation available for viewing by a very small, invited public. (Shoot now exists solely by means of oral and art history, lo-fi documentation, and physical relic.)
In 1971—in the middle of the Vietnam War—the principal questions raised by Shoot seemed to be, what kind of person would orchestrate and undergo such a self-inflicted thing in the midst of an outrageously cruel and unjust war, and what kind of audience would allow it to proceed? Almost forty years later, the outrage has dimmed, but questions still abound. Here are some of mine, jotted down after watching Burden’s grainy Super-8 documentation of Shoot: Would I have attended such an event at the time? Why do I still feel morally uncomfortable about watching this now? What are the differences—ethical, sensory, aesthetic—between being present for such a thing and watching a recording of it? What about between watching and listening? What are the differences between beholding—or enacting—self-harm versus other forms of harm? What’s the difference between shooting yourself and asking someone to shoot you? How did the shooter feel? Where is he now? Who took the greater (legal, ethical) risk—Burden or the shooter? What forms or contexts of inflicting harm, on oneself or others, should be allowed (S/M, suicide or assisted suicide, performance art, any other consensual scenario, and so on), and which should be discouraged or prohibited? Who defines harm? On whose behalf? Who has the power, authority, right, duty, and/or audacity, to intervene on behalf of another’s body, especially a body that is doing what it says it wants to do? When and how (if ever) is it anyone’s business to mandate what we do with our bodies in our lifetimes? Does anyone “have” the power, or is it always a means of asserting it, seizing it, inventing it? In what sense, under what conditions, can we say that a body knows what it wants?
The tension is monochromatic but pulsing. Burden’s friend asks him if he’s ready; Burden answers, Yes, go ahead. The pacing, save for the gunshot itself, is glacial. It’s two of the longest minutes I know, with reverb.
An interviewer once asked Burden why he wanted to be shot; Burden responded, “Well, it’s something to experience. How do you know what it feels like to be shot if you don’t experience it?” Fair enough, I’d say—even if the average citizen might think him a complete moron. I’d much rather the artist be thinking about his or her own experience than trying to micromanage mine. As for Burden’s somewhat singular desire to be shot, I think of Cage’s sage remarks: “I think the Golden Rule, which is often thought of as the center, really, of Christianity, is a mistake: ‘Do unto others as you would be done by.’ I think this is a mistaken thought. We should do unto others as they would be done by.” This, to me, has the ring of emancipation to it—which isn’t to say that it resolves any of the above questions about the nature of desire, consent, or intervention. Those questions are ours to contend with, as we struggle to know and name what we want, to hear what others want from us, to imagine and enact fulfillment, and to live with the inevitable missteps, taboos, crossed signals, and impossibilities.
THERE ARE those who think that to ask an audience to stand back and watch someone be shot, no matter what the intent behind t
he event, is in itself a form of cruelty, insofar as it invites people to behave as passive spectators to an act of violence (even if the use of the word may be, once again, complicated by the event’s suspension between gratified self-wounding, assisted self-wounding, and unpredictable wounding by another). But to place this work of Burden’s too quickly under the rubric, or even in the vicinity, of “cruelty” seems wrongheaded. Insofar as some of Burden’s early performance pieces could be deemed masochistic (such as Trans-Fixed, in which a friend crucifies Burden to the front hood of a Volkswagen bug), such a designation may eventually serve as but an occasion to reflect on how distant the operations of masochism and sadism really are—a distance that can make the oft-circulated dyad “sadomasochism” appear as “one of those misbegotten names, a semiological howler,” as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once put it. What’s more, in contrast to other artists whose work seems to embrace the clinical definition of a masochist—“one who derives sexual gratification from pain” (“super masochist” Bob Flanagan comes to mind, for example)—Burden has always seemed aloofly adrift from carnal pleasure, and more devoted to the formal creation of abstract, minimalist, intensely charged spaces.