The Art of Cruelty Read online

  I also tried to get my students to pay attention to the variety of responses they likely had throughout a piece, rather than submit to the feeling that they needed to arrive at some fixed or final verdict. After all, a verdict typically gets made later, simply by virtue of time, as time alone reveals what works, or what aspects of a work, will stick with you, and which will fall away. I would guess that most people attempt to remain open and withhold judgment throughout a movie, book, or play—you know, “give it a chance”—but find their feelings inevitably congealing after the fact. (I saw the Wooster Group’s 2010 production of North Atlantic the other day, for example, and within a matter of twenty-four hours I heard myself go from telling people that it was interesting but flawed to saying that I had completely hated it. Whence the change?)

  For this reason, I find it fascinating—albeit occasionally strenuous—to return to pieces, sometimes years later, that deeply offended me upon first encounter. It is unnerving to realize how much one’s compass or tastes can shift throughout a lifetime, how one’s sense of “okayness” is contingent on a host of factors, including the simple question of whether one is experiencing something for the first or the second time, not to mention the twentieth. A first encounter with a harrowing work that unfolds in time (i.e., literature, film) will always be more harrowing due to the simple fact that one does not know what’s coming. In such a scenario, the organism reads or watches in a state seasoned by dread and self-protective anxiety—a state that, while not without its excitements, is not necessarily the one most commensurate with critical analysis.

  Live performance provides another complicating factor, in that while watching, one can never be sure of exactly what’s going to happen, even if the piece is scripted. To take a Technicolor example, consider the work of choreographer Elizabeth Streb. Over the past several decades, Streb has been developing a form of movement she calls POP action, which showcases impact, velocity, and bodily risk. While watching her company, one might feel (as does Streb, and as do I) that the work is essentially about gravity, athleticism, and the limitations and possibilities of the human body as it moves through space-time, rather than violence, sadomasochism, or cruelty. “I suspect that a lot of the language thrown at my work over the last couple of decades would’ve been different if I were a guy,” Streb said in a 2003 Village Voice article. “Instead of calling it ‘violent’ and ‘sadomasochistic,’ it would’ve been considered ‘athletic’ and ‘rambunctious.’ ”

  But it’s also possible that, during one of Streb’s pieces, you might feel a flash of something else—not that the work is cruel per se (after all, the bodily agonies of POP action pale in comparison to those of ballet or football), but that its showcasing of the hardship endured by its dancers is gimmicky. “You could call it dance-theatre of cruelty, for its chief object seems to be to make the audience wince,” a grumpy reviewer for the UK’s Independent wrote in a 1995 review. “After the initial gasp-response, this spectator tired of such extravagant assaults on the senses.” Personally, I’ve more often felt that Streb’s assaults—if one could even use the word with a straight face—aren’t extravagant enough, at least not tonally speaking: the shiny spandex unitard costuming, the circus aesthetic, the primary-color palette, the reliance on daredevil or superhero motifs, have often struck me as unnecessarily, even relentlessly, limited—strangely at odds with Streb’s questing, expansive, and blessedly original approach to the predicament and possibilities of the human body.

  But then, just when you’re losing faith, something can happen to bring you back on board. Such was my experience upon seeing a preview of Streb’s 2003 homage to flight, Wild Blue Yonder, in which Streb’s dancers repeatedly swan dive from a platform rigged high above a mat, landing each time, facedown, with the company’s signature thud, before popping up and returning to the platform to dive again. (Streb often mikes the surfaces of her performance spaces, so as to maximize the sound of her dancers striking against them.)

  As chance would have it, I saw this piece in October 2003, just three days after one of my dearest friends in the world had been thrown from her bicycle while riding down a hill; upon landing, she cracked two cervical vertebrae, rendering her paralyzed. In light of my friend’s accident, Streb’s piece irritated me. I was not in the mood to watch potentially vertebrae-cracking disasters, however controlled, and I doubted I ever would be again. In the face of the involuntary harm my friend had just suffered, the risks here taken seemed ridiculous. Life has enough suffering in it, I thought. But as the piece went on, swan dive after preposterous, glorious swan dive, my feelings changed. The perverse beauty of it all rose slowly, then triumphantly to the surface—not because there was no price to such flight, but because there could be. It ended up being one of the most moving viewing experiences I’ve had, in that it transported me from protesting our bodily vulnerability to accepting it, then cheering it on, come what may. (I tried to remember this feeling several years later, when I heard that deeAnn Nelson, one of Streb’s dancers, broke her back during a Streb performance on May 20, 2007.)

  In any event, the dance student was right about one thing: the consent of his dancers mattered. (I might here note that Streb’s dancers are typically wildly devoted to the work—not despite but because of the risk and difficulty associated with it.) The Do You Have Time to Kill Me Today student knew that consent mattered too: as a conceptual gesture—perhaps intended as a cheeky reply to the ethical concerns voiced by her faculty—she exhibited her neighbor’s consent form alongside her video in the gallery. But, alas, a framed consent form cannot shake a piece clean of its unruly effects, nor should it. The question of whether it is ever cruel to do unto someone what she would like you to do unto her—or at least what she has authorized having done unto her—remains alive.

  For example, if the participants have consented, but the work still strikes the viewer as cruel, must one then charge the participants with false consciousness? Is this charge its own form of cruelty—the cruelty of condescension, in which the viewer presumes to know more about the subject than he or she knows about himself or herself? And why the condescension—why the presumption that there’s anything wrong with signing up to get mistreated a little, or a lot? Who defines mistreatment, anyway?

  I’ve sometimes found myself wondering such things while watching the seriously drug-addled performers stagger through some of Andy Warhol’s tougher films. (Gerard Malanga’s eventual passing out from being fed amyl nitrate poppers by the “doctor” topping him in 1965’s Vinyl—Warhol’s grim, fascinating adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange—comes to mind.) Warhol’s films unnerve in that they showcase unfeigned activity (people really are fucking, shooting up, slapping each other, and so on) in collision with over-the-top melodrama and artifice; the collision provides the films’ texture, their alienated genius. However high or hysterical the players may be, it seems likely that they would be doing what they are doing anyway, with or without his camera, with or without our gaze. As Wayne Koestenbaum notes, there exists perhaps only one player in all of Warhol’s films—Ari, singer Nico’s toddler son—“whom we may justly pity for his unwitting participation in a purgative ritual of cosmetic, educational psychosis.” I agree. I don’t pity the others, nor have I ever been tempted—as some have been—to charge Warhol with behaving evilly toward his players. To say that Warhol valued voyeurism, prurience, passivity, and performativity over reparative compassion is an understatement. But Warhol didn’t transform his players into self-destructive drug addicts or suicides, nor could he necessarily have altered their fates. As he himself notes in POPism (in an odd echo of Al-Anon), “When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.”

  The problem becomes more complicated when the work at hand presents itself as documentary and features po
pulations whose ability to consent is more contested, such as the incarcerated mentally ill. See, for example, Frederick Wiseman’s 1967 documentary Titicut Follies, which revealed appallingly sadistic treatment of mental patients at Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts. Titicut Follies was banned for a number of years by the State of Massachusetts, on the grounds that the film violated the privacy and dignity of the inmates; it has also been credited with directing national attention to improving conditions for the mentally ill.

  Occupying something of a middle ground between campy performativity and agonizing documentary stand Diane Arbus’s hypnotically creepy portraits of retarded adults, taken at various residences between 1966 and 1971—or, more recently, Jonathan Caouette’s harrowing, narcissistic memoir-film Tarnation (2003), in which Caouette films his mentally ill mother, Renee, hanging the fragments of her psyche out on the line. This exposure becomes most uncomfortable during the scene in Tarnation in which Caouette films Renee dancing with a small pumpkin for an excruciatingly long period of time. Caouette’s refusal to stop filming, or to edit the scene down later, begins to feel more troubling than his mother’s mental illness. Elsewhere in the film, Renee begs her son to put down his camera, by which point one may feel inclined to take her side.

  At such moments, it isn’t the psychological motivation or agency of the participants that comes into focus, but that of the creator. Such is clearly the case with Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, whose more controversial pieces include 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People (2000), in which Sierra gives four prostitutes a shot of heroin for agreeing to have a line tattooed across their backs, and 10 People Paid to Masturbate (2000), in which Sierra offers ten poor Cuban men twenty dollars to videotape themselves masturbating, then give him the footage for exhibition. “A person without money has no dignity,” Sierra explains, in service of the by-now nauseatingly familiar argument that the point of his work is simply to lay this fact bare. “The tattoo is not the problem,” Sierra says of the prostitute/heroin piece. “The problem is the existence of social conditions that allow me to make this work.” True enough, in a sense—but Santiago’s invented equation, in which the radical problems of the world neatly erase the problems posed by his work, is quite obviously a self-serving convenience.

  Even if and when Sierra’s diagnoses are spot-on, the pity he has expressed toward his subjects gives me pause, and evaporates whatever interest in the work I might have otherwise been able to muster. For this pity doesn’t just stand behind the scenes; it also structures the forms of the artwork at hand. As he told the BBC about 10 People Paid to Masturbate, “Nobody said no and for me that was very tough. When I made this piece I would go to bed crying.” It’s one thing to set up situations that aim to alert the world—even if just the art world—to the bad news of radical exploitation, even if one feels the lamentable need to exploit others to make one’s point. It’s quite another to decide in advance on the terms of human dignity (i.e., that a willingness to film oneself jerking off for money signifies that you have none), set up situations which prove (to you) that someone is utterly debased, then weep over the fulfillment of your puritanical prognostication. No wonder there’s not much to think about Sierra’s subjects themselves—such as the ten Iraqi immigrants Sierra found on the streets of London and paid “as little as possible” to be coated beyond recognition with toxic foam in his 2004 piece, Polyurethane Sprayed on the Backs of 10 Workers. Their dignity—which, to my mind, the artist has the power neither to restore nor to annihilate—remains untouched.

  As far as my dance student was concerned, the most I could really hope for (pedagogically speaking) was that he learn a little something about a long tradition of works in which a (typically male, but not always) ringmaster places a body (typically female, but not always) on the line, for any number of reasons, and to any number of effects. I wanted him to know about Santiago Sierra. I wanted him to know about Yves Klein’s Anthropometries performances from the early 1960s, in which a formally dressed Klein directed naked women smeared in blue paint to roll around on sheets of paper laid out on the floor while a string quartet played nearby. I wanted him to know about Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece and Abramovi´c ’s Rhythm 0, as these works deconstruct the tradition of the female body marshaled by the male ringmaster by disappearing the ringmaster, leaving the artists open, sometimes at alarming risk, to whatever might happen next.

  I wanted him to know about the phenomenon art historian Jane Blocker has termed “risk transfer,” in which an artist becomes known as a fearless risk-taker by transferring the risk to those around him or her. (Blocker makes reference to, among others, Richard Serra, whose gigantic steel sculptures once occasioned the death of one of their installers, and Brock Enright, who has made a name for himself by setting up an abduction/torture service for people who sign up for it via his Web site.) As Blocker points out in an important essay titled “Aestheticizing Risk in Wartime: The SLA to Iraq” (2008), the term “risk transfer” (which Blocker borrows from corporate capitalism) also applies to the West’s current method of waging war, in which bodily risk gets transferred to the populations of other, faraway countries; the costs, to future generations. Troubled by the ways in which the valorization of risk—and the prevalence of risk transfer—in recent and contemporary art practice rely on the same logic as that in the political realm, Blocker ends up wondering what “an artistic boycott of risk might look like, and whether our refusal to participate in that game would help productively to change its rules.”

  I also wanted him to know about Mendieta’s minimalist, haunting Body Tracks (1974) in which Mendieta uses her own arms, sweat-shirted and soaked in tempera and blood, to drag her body down a wall, leaving a smeary red V. And about Carolee Schneemann’s ecstatic “action painting,” as in Up To and Including Her Limits (1976), in which Schneemann suspends herself from a rope harness, crayons on hand, and makes marks on paper as she dangles and swings. I wanted him to know about Streb, whose interest in the body happily ignores the oft-plumbed, psychologized poles of resilience and vulnerability, and focuses instead on the human animal as a robust occupier of space-time, in thrall to forces such as rebound, gravity, and centrifugal pressure. I wanted him to know all these things and more, so that he and his work could stand in confident relation to them, rather than in unconscious echo.

  Such is the prototypical teacherly stance. But, of course, many young artists don’t want to know all these things, or at least they don’t want to be flooded by them. And they certainly don’t want to be lectured about them as if receiving a scold or a warning. People need to do their own thing, make their own mistakes, work through their own psychodramas, reinvent the wheel, if they must, on their own time and in their own terms. Fair enough. Perhaps, as Rancière might have it, my impulse to give context, to inform, to “help,” is but part and parcel of what he calls “the logic of the stultifying pedagogue,” which presumes that “what the pupil must learn is what the schoolmaster must teach her.” I don’t really think so, however. Mostly I want to point to third things—unruly, inscrutable, multivalent, un-ownable third things—without knowing exactly what they have to say or teach. For when things are going well with art-making and art-viewing, art doesn’t really say or teach anything. The action is elsewhere.

  THE BRUTALITY OF FACT

  I’VE ALWAYS hoped to put over things as directly and rawly as I possibly can, and perhaps, if a thing comes across directly, people feel that it is horrific,” Bacon once said, in an attempt to explain why some people find his paintings “brutal” rather than manifestations of “the brutality of fact,” which is what he thought he was after, or, when successful, revealing. “Because, if you say something very directly to someone, they’re sometimes offended, although it is a fact. Because people tend to be offended by facts, or what used to be called truth.”

  Bacon is right, in his suggestion that today “facts” are no longer interchangeable with “truth.” Unlike Bacon, howev
er, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. More perturbing is the state of “facts” in a world of “truthiness.” (“Truthiness” is comedian Stephen Colbert’s word meaning “what I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.” As Colbert sees it, truthiness has a selfish quality in addition to a delusional one: “It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true.”) Indeed, it has become an almost comedic phenomenon, that as mainstream news reporting in the United States continues its slide away from fact and into a partisan cesspool of spin, invective, and infotainment, news programs have started to blanket themselves with a “just the facts, ma’am” brand of sloganeering. In 2009, there was Campbell Brown’s “No Bias, No Bull,” FOX’s knowingly duplicitous “Fair and Balanced,” CNN’s juvenile “Just sayin’,” and so on: all bank, however disingenuously, on an offer of “straight talk”—that is, the manufactured sound of a citizen (say, a talk radio host or town hall ranter, rather than an informed journalist) telling it “like it is.”