The Art of Cruelty Read online

  This is literally so in 220, also from 1971. In 220, Burden lined the F Space gallery in Santa Ana, California, with black plastic, set up four wooden ladders, flooded the gallery with twelve inches of water, and climbed up the ladders with three other participants (one ladder per person). After everyone had perched atop their ladders, Burden dropped a 220-volt electrical wire into the water. The four participants then stayed in their perches from about midnight to six o’clock in the morning, at which point sculptor Nancy Rubins, Burden’s wife, shut off the electricity, and the participants climbed down.

  While Shoot evokes a species of horror akin to that of a snuff film, 220 offers a more unusual, more unnameable species of dread. For this reason, I find it vastly more intriguing. The documentation of the piece consists of another grainy Super-8 video, this time depicting four shadowy, mostly immobile shapes perched atop ladders above a murky floor. The figures stare bemusedly at the water, as if waiting for its danger to become manifest. At times, they appear to be asleep, their arms hooked in the rungs. Their stillness and nonchalance make for an utterly chilling contrast with the life-or-death stakes of the situation. It’s like a silent version of Waiting for Godot, performed by slackers, suspended over an actual abyss.

  On the face of it, 220 is a contained experiment, posing serious risks only to the participants. But the primary elements of the piece—water and electricity—bespeak spillage, circulation. Moment by agonizing moment, the situation threatens to become unmanageable, to spread, to transfer its risk to others. Watching the piece now, it seems a miracle that no one was hurt. If the piece had spilled out to injure nonparticipants (such as facilitators of the piece, or people in adjacent studios or buildings; there was no audience), the results would have been tragic, unforgivable. Had it injured Burden and company, the tragedy would have been limned by their utter jackass-ness. Indeed, some of Burden’s pieces seem but a more self-serious precursor to the Jackass industry (i.e., the movies, video games, and spin-off groups derived from MTV’s 2000–2002 hit TV show Jackass, in which the stars perform a series of self-injuring stunts, such as piercing their butt cheeks together, firing a bean bag rifle into their stomachs, snorting wasabi to the point of vomiting, and so on). In Deadman (1972), for example, Burden lay down on a busy street in Los Angeles (La Cienega Boulevard), placed two flares around his body, covered himself with a tarp, and waited to see what would happen next. (What happened: The police arrived on the scene and asked him what he was doing. Burden responded, “Making a piece of sculpture.” They arrested him for creating a false emergency; later, Burden settled the matter in court, still angry with the cops for “wrecking his piece.”)

  Pieces like Deadman, with their wager that one man’s sculpture is another man’s crime, are meant to put Evenson’s distinction between “life” and “art” to the test. But to be more exact, the distinction Evenson makes is between “life” and “literature”: “In life, violence happens to you. In literature, you make the choice to pick up the book and read, and to continue reading.” Insofar as it consists of words printed on a page rather than a body under a tarp that you swerve to avoid hitting on your drive home, literature typically makes such distinctions easier to draw. Not only that, but the written word doesn’t have the animal presence or basic unpredictability of performance, nor the bossiness of a visual image, especially a moving image. Unlike much contemporary media, which aims, asymptotically, for a total takeover of the senses, reading doesn’t make demands on more than one sense at a time. Consequently, while one is reading, one’s agency and physical autonomy remain front and center: The feeling of a page-turner is partly so exciting because you still have to turn the page. You can put down a book and start it up again without missing anything—there’s no imperative to sit through it simply because you paid the price of admission, your date is digging it, and you bought a seven-dollar tub of popcorn.

  This freedom is important. It allows for a dance; it allows you to see yourself dancing in reaction. There’s information there. Your choice to keep going can itself become a cause of puzzlement. Or, if you choose to abandon ship, you can then ponder the classic question, did I fail the work, or did it fail me? When, or what, was the tipping point, and why?

  In my experience, when people talk about disturbing images from art that have stayed with them—images they often wish they hadn’t seen—they are almost always talking about images from movies (and sometimes photographs) rather than images from books. This seems to me a function of the fact that one beholds an image all at once, which leaves the organism more vulnerable to assault, as well as to the fact that an image created by words requires the aid of one’s own mind in its construction—it is not entirely given. As classic literary ghost stories such as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) have made clear, it is precisely this sense of collusion between reader and text that can make the reading experience so guilt-inducing, so uncomfortable, so deeply wicked.

  As much ink as has been spilled on the operations of the visual and verbal, the truth is that both modes remain something of a mystery. As David Levi Strauss has put it (in “Take as Needed,” a 1994 essay that refreshingly takes up the subject of the therapeutic potential of images), “Very little is known at this point about the actual physiological effects of images. What happens to the automatic nervous system, to neurotransmitters and hormones, when a person is moved by an image?” Think, for example, about the fact (noted by Alexander Theroux in The Primary Colors) that “upon merely seeing the color red, the metabolic rate of a human being supposedly increases by 13.4%.” Does this quickening have any relationship to words that conjure red in our minds? What sense, exactly, gets engaged when we read? We typically (though not always) use our eyes to see words, but the images our brain creates in response have little to do with black-and-white type, or with the shimmering appearance of words on a screen (or, for the blind, with the raised letters of Braille). “It’s a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain,” Francis Bacon once observed. The same could surely be said of words.

  AS FAR as Burden’s stance toward his audience goes, it runs the gamut, from invitation to intervention to ambush. The most hilarious and beautiful of the interventions may be TV Ad (1973), which came out of Burden’s long-standing desire to be on television. To fulfill the desire, Burden purchased as long a time slot as he could afford—ten seconds—and submitted a snippet of 16-millimeter footage from Through the Night Softly, a 1973 performance piece in which Burden crawls on his stomach, his hands tied behind his back, through fifty feet of broken glass on Main Street, Los Angeles, wearing only his underwear. (The underwear is a crucial mitigator, though it’s hard to say why—I’ll just admit that I’m grateful, each time I watch, to see the Speedo-like apparatus come into view as Burden slithers toward the camera.) Sandwiched between a psychedelic ad for a compilation record called Good Vibrations and a dopey, unwittingly homoerotic ad for deodorant soap, Burden’s agonized body appears like a skinny worm come up from the underworld. The tag of masochism that may have haunted Through the Night Softly on its own is here obliterated: next to the shiny, happy, sudsy people on TV, Burden’s shredded, dogged worm seems but their inevitable, shadowy counterpart, their tragicomic relief.

  As brilliant as TV Ad is, Burden’s TV Hijack, from the previous year, is stupid. Burden describes TV Hijack as follows: “On January 14 I was asked to do a piece on a local television station by Phyllis Lutjeans. After several proposals were censored by the station or by Phyllis, I agreed to an interview situation. I arrived at the station with my own video crew so that I could have my own tape. While the taping was in progress, I requested that the show be transmitted live. Since the station was not broadcasting at the time, they complied. In the course of the interview, Phyllis asked me to talk about some of the pieces I had thought of doing. I demonstrated a T
.V. Hijack. Holding a knife at her throat, I threatened her life if the station stopped live transmission. I told her that I had planned to make her perform obscene acts.”

  Some have since argued for the piece’s merits by saying things like “T.V. Hijack was ultimately about who is in control over what’s presented through the media” (curator Irene Hofmann), or “Burden’s simulation of televised violence references also the mediation of real bloodshed that was occurring at the time, not only in Vietnam, but also at Kent State (May 4, 1970) and Attica Prison (September 1971)” (academic Sami Siegelbaum). Maybe so, but it’s not enough. For it wasn’t simulated violence for Lutjeans—she had a knife held to her throat by a man speaking threatening obscenities, felt terrified, and feared for her life. Any desire of Burden’s to stage an incisive intervention about media control ends up vastly overshadowed by the unimaginative cruelty of using a woman’s mind and body, without her consent, as disposable backdrops. Burden’s primary achievement here was to marry the spectacle of such cruelty (already a staple of TV and movies) to the actuality of it (already a staple of so many women’s lives). The result is a redundancy that stands as a regrettable low point in Burden’s early career.

  One of Burden’s more recent gestures makes a fitting counterpoint to TV Hijack, perhaps setting it right (or standing in hypocritical relation to it, depending on your point of view). I’m thinking of his controversial resignation from UCLA’s art department in 2004, over the university’s failure to expel a student who performed a frightening staged shooting in a class being taught by guest Ron Athey. (Nancy Rubins resigned as well.) In a 1975 interview, Burden famously defined art as “a free spot in society, where you can do anything.” In his 2004 resignation letter to UCLA, he insisted on a “cardinal difference between an act performed in an art space for an audience that had been warned and one sprung on students in a classroom.” Likely it’s obvious by now that I think the 2004 Burden had it right.

  I think this partly for ethical reasons and partly for aesthetic ones. Consent and warning are not acquiescences to arbitrary, repressive notions of decorum or authority. Rather, they are space-makers, and they allow for the very possibility of voluntary submission or emancipation. The desire to catch an audience unawares and ambush it is a fundamentally terrorizing, Messianic approach to art-making, one that underestimates the capacities and intelligence of most viewers, and overestimates that of most artists. “They always want to hear about; they want an objective conference on ‘The Theater and the Plague,’ and I want to give them the experience itself, the plague itself, so they will be terrified, and awaken,” Artaud reportedly told Anaïs Nin, in explanation of his notorious performance of his essay “The Theater and the Plague” at the Sorbonne in 1933, during which he dispensed with his planned lecture and acted out the delirium and death throes of the plague itself. “They do not realize they are dead,” Artaud insisted.

  I can’t speak to Artaud’s audience that evening, which may well have been full of easily offended, bourgeois putzes. But in my own life, I know I generally feel very alive and emancipated when I choose to walk out of something. After all, you walk out when you realize that whatever it is that you’re watching, for whatever reason, simply isn’t worth it. Walking out reminds you that while submission can at times be a pleasure, a risk worth taking, you don’t have to manufacture consent whenever or wherever it is nominally in demand. (I know countless people—mostly women—who refuse to watch movies with gratuitous rape scenes. And many of these people believe—and I count myself among them—that there is an excellent argument to be made that any rape scene, at this point in cinematic history, is gratuitous. Here, the refusal to manufacture consent to watch bears a strong, albeit metaphorical relationship to the refusal to manufacture consent to tolerate unwanted sexual incursions.) The fact that the exit door isn’t barred, the feel of the fresh air on your face when you open it—all of this serves to remind you of how good it feels to angle the full force of your body and attention toward that which seems to you a good use of your short time on the planet, and to practice aversion toward that which does not. These are freedoms that life does not always grant; God help us if we would prefer an art that further whittled down the choices.

  “The principle of emancipation is the dissociation of cause and effect,” Rancière has said, in his argument for something he calls “aesthetic efficacy”—that is, the paradoxical kind of efficacy that art has to offer, one that “escapes the dilemma of representational mediation and ethical immediacy.” One could hear this argument as yet another stodgy affirmation of art’s need to stand at a distance from instrumentality, for it to retain that “purposeless purposiveness” that Kant famously assigned to it (a distance and purposelessness that many artist-activists have fiercely refused). But I think Rancière is saying more than that. He is saying that no one can do our waking up for us. You can’t rape someone into independence any more than you can deliver democracy at the tip of a gun. Charging others with false consciousness—“They do not realize they are dead”—rarely helps, either. The door has to stay open.

  Of course one does not always know, nor does one’s body always know, when to venture forth, and when to turn away. When to abide, when to refuse; when to accept, when to intervene. For better or worse, some trial and error is required, as is the case for most worthwhile forms of self-knowledge.

  NOBODY SAID NO

  FAST-FORWARD NOW to 2007, to the so-called postfeminist age. An art student is showing a handful of faculty the film that she has been working on, called Do You Have Time to Kill Me Today. The film consists of a series of takes of the student—a knockout, punky blonde from Copenhagen—getting in her car and driving around a block in her sunny Southern California neighborhood. At some point during each take, a rednecky, middle-aged-to-elderly man pops up from the backseat and drags a knife across her neck, pops an obviously fake bag of blood in his fist, then falls back out of sight. The woman pretends not to notice the event and drives on unperturbed, the fake blood dripping down from the fake slash across her neck.

  For the first few takes, the man is entirely quiet. Then, after about seven “kills,” he starts to talk. He says things like, “Die, Bitch,” before dropping out of sight.

  The student tells us that this man is her neighbor, and that he was originally quite reluctant to be a part of her film. He didn’t want the neighbors to see him “killing her” and get the wrong idea. But, she explains, as their work together progressed, he got more and more into it. He would even start coming over to her house on days when she wasn’t planning on filming to say, Why can’t we do the killing today? The talking he started doing during the scene was ad-libbed, she said, and became more frequent and spirited as the killings went on.

  The film was undeniably interesting—it was funny in a complicated way, poised, as it was, between empowerment, horror, and camp, and paced with the slow fascination of a screen test. Yet as she spoke, the faculty became increasingly concerned. The student admitted that it was a bit unnerving to see this man transformed from a reluctant, soft-spoken participant into a “Die, Bitch”–yelling, overeager “killer,” but it didn’t seem to bother or interest her too much. One faculty member asked if his transformation was a part of the piece; she said, No, not really. Another advised her that for her neighbor’s sake, she should probably just work with the footage she already had, and tell him the exercise was over. “He’ll be disappointed,” the student said. (The student, Stine Marie Jacobsen, later went public with the piece, which she now describes as a “social horror project with my American neighbor, Kirk Douglas Sample, whom I train to be a killer.”)

  Was the unintentional wager of her project that every reluctant, soft-spoken neighbor has a “Die, Bitch” script lurking inside him? Maybe so. But even if he does, I wouldn’t necessarily take it as proof that every man carries within him a deep, pent-up misogyny just waiting for the opportunity to express itself in a controlled
or uncontrolled manner. I might be more inclined to chalk it up to the fact that we’ve heard and seen this script so many times that its words are there for us as soon as we dip into it. The words of this particular script are “Die, Bitch.” I could dip into any number of other scripts and start spewing, but I won’t bother. You already know the words.

  EVENTUALLY, THE film student was put on ethical warning, as was a dance student who was choreographing a piece in which several female dancers danced blindfolded while he threw items such as buckets of water and phonebooks at their bodies from the wings. Why not just acknowledge that the piece has an element of cruelty to it, I asked him, and take it from there? “Because it isn’t cruel,” he argued. “The dancers have signed release forms, and they are choosing to be in it.” That makes it legal, I told him—it doesn’t absolve it of cruelty, or at least the evocation of it.

  “Evil is in the eye of the beholder,” Hegel wrote. But is cruelty? Does there exist such a thing as a mirage of cruelty? Or is the apprehension of cruelty one of those things that we should definitively not try to talk ourselves, or each other, out of? The first time I taught an undergraduate seminar titled “The Art of Cruelty,” my students often ended up arguing with each other as to whether they felt a particular piece of art was cruel or not. These conversations—which sometimes slid into an “is too!/is not!” type of debate—always felt off base to me. I knew it was my job to lead us out of this dead-end forest—especially as I had unintentionally led us into it—but how?

  Often I found myself reminding them that the piece at hand wasn’t on trial—that absolving it of cruelty wasn’t giving it a stamp of approval, and, conversely, that finding aspects of it guilty of such didn’t sink it. After all, the implicit reasoning behind such arguments is that art has more value if its creator or its ultimate “message” can be somehow neutralized into the benevolent, or at least be interpreted as critical of the cruel—or if its creator could be satisfactorily proved to be uncontaminated by any sadistic or narcissistic urges. Not only would this standard of judgment disqualify much of the world’s most interesting art, but also, at the end of the day, it is as fundamentally arbitrary as any other standard (“art should serve beauty,” “art should intensify human consciousness,” “art should revolutionize society,” “art should make the everyday strange,” “art should redistribute the sensible,” “art should be an axe for the frozen sea within us,” and so on and so forth).