The Art of Cruelty Page 19
Or, worse—and more likely—von Trier means to present these fictions with tongue so firmly in cheek that if we take them as parables of profundity, the joke may be on us. Von Trier imbues René Girard’s notion of sacrificial violence with an ironic, perhaps even a campy sensibility. But unlike the campiness of, say, Paul McCarthy or John Waters, von Trier keeps his cards close to his chest, as if to preserve his right—and the culture’s—to an entrenched, inevitable chauvinist malevolence. Of course, this approach has gone quite well for him, as it has for related others: David Mamet, Neil LaBute, Philip Roth, John Updike, Woody Allen, and so on. Judging by popularity and acclaim, these men are not “persisting in registering the dimmed signals of a bygone era,” as Sam Tanenhaus says in his 2010 New York Times piece, of Abramovi´c and Finley. Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic.
I suppose, in the end, I remain grateful to Breaking the Waves for one thing: it spoke to a question I’ve had for some time—namely, what purpose could a female Christ serve in the (male) imagination? As writer Eileen Myles has put it, “What would be the point in seeing [a woman] half nude and nailed up? Where’s the contradiction? Could that have driven the culture for 2,000 years? No way.” The cruelty of Breaking the Waves is its revelation, intentional or not, that there could be no sustaining contradiction—that the redundancy of female victimization inflates into a sickening, fundamentally unbelievable martyrdom.
Breaking the Waves has male vulnerability and precariousness at its root, as it is Jan, not Bess, who has been rendered paralyzed and impotent. And yet the film works overtime to shift the burden of vulnerability to Bess’s body, as if to prove how effectively the precariousness of the female body can distract from that of the male body, not to mention that of (heterosexual) masculinity itself. For up until her demise, Bess is uncommonly ambulatory and horny—two conditions that, perhaps on screen even more than in life, rarely go unpunished for the female subject. (See, for example, Michael Haneke’s film The Piano Teacher, based on the novel by Elfriede Jelinek, for a particularly nasty rendition of this narrative.) This arc has for many years subsumed gay and transgendered characters as well, whose humanity was—until quite recently—typically allowed to come into cinematic focus so long as the characters died terrible deaths (as in the otherwise well-intentioned Boys Don’t Cry, Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 film based on the murder of trans-man Brandon Teena, or the many films based on the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, or early AIDS films such as 1993’s Philadelphia, and so on).
What a relief, in the face of such ghastly narratives, to shift one’s attention to an image such as Self-Portrait/Pervert, the iconic 1994 self-portrait by photographer Catherine Opie. In Pervert, Opie is formally seated, facing the camera, her hands crossed in her lap, an ornate tapestry hanging behind her. A glossy black leather S/M hood encases her face; forty-six needles have been ritually inserted up and down her tattooed arms; and the word “Pervert” has been freshly carved, in ornate lettering, into the skin of her chest. Her body squarely presents itself to us as bleeding, resilient, imperial, and desirous.
Unlike Ono’s Cut Piece, Mendieta’s Rape Piece, or Abramovi´c ’s Rhythm 0, Pervert is decidedly uninterested in what others might do to a passive female body. Opie’s self-portrait speaks to the opposite: it broadcasts what Opie’s body likes, what it wants—indeed, what it is: a pervert, stated brightly in flesh and blood. Its solidity, its composure, its reclamatory Pervert announcement, all say, The buck stops here. The meticulousness of the cutting and the needlework signifies intent, resiliency, and training; likewise, the mask indicates a gratified desire for effacement rather than a silencing. Opie bleeds when punctured, as do we all. But her bloodshed here signifies solidarity—a shared kinship with the queer leather community from which much of Opie’s early work emanates, as well as with the work of gay male artists (such as Ron Athey, Opie’s friend, subject, and collaborator), for whom the public shedding of blood—especially HIV-positive blood—during the height of the AIDS epidemic was experienced as an act of catharsis and defiance. Such a stance rejects the burden of abjected precariousness; as a result, the whiff of cruelty is nowhere to be found.
The work of an artist such as William Pope.L—who has adopted the epithet “The Friendliest Black Artist in America©”—takes up related problems, but with a wholly distinct sensibility. In lieu of reclamation or sturdiness, Pope.L repeatedly invents ways to inhabit and conjure precariousness, by means of a decades-long performance practice dedicated to analysis, abjection, and absurdity. As Barbara Pollack put it in a 2002 Village Voice article on Pope.L’s work, “One idea that continually intrigues Pope.L is the use of physical vulnerability to unmask the public face worn by African American men—from the machismo of Puff Daddy to the respectability of Martin Luther King. ‘The preachers in my church were the first men I saw who made use of this,’ [Pope.L] says. ‘Ordinarily, they were dressed dapper—handkerchief in their pocket, shine on their shoes. But when it comes to Sunday, they’re on their knees, crying and making a mess of themselves. And everyone knows that the way you rate the sermon is how much of a mess they made of themselves.’ ”
For Pope.L, this mess also includes the lived reality or ever-present possibility, for many black American males (or BAMs, as Pope.L calls them), of being threatened, poor, powerless, homeless, lynched, humiliated, despaired, addicted, or imprisoned. This, Pope.L explains, is the flip side of the BAM as hypermasculine, righteous, menacing, overendowed. Neither side of this coin contains an untroubled claim to power or presence. As Pope.L sees it, in terms that would please (or perhaps even baffle) French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “The BAM is a phallus looking for its body.”
Pope.L is interested in how this volatile dyad gets foisted upon black men from without, and how it plays out in communities, families, and bodies from within. Speaking of his own patrilineal heritage, he says, “I would be remiss and arrogant to dismiss the shameful aspects and celebrate only the so-called good. It was the two in tango that made these men. If I celebrate poetry and carpentry, I must also celebrate rape and alcohol. If I denigrate domestic violence, I must denigrate the ethos of hard work and Christian character.” This insistence on coexisting contradictions, no matter how disturbing or perplexing, characterizes Pope.L’s thought, speech, and practice. Or forget coexisting contradictions—as he puts it, “There is no such thing as contradiction, only the fire that burns amidst the networks made up of them.”
Some of Pope.L’s best-known pieces propose his body as a site for these volatile networks, this fire. In How Much Is That Nigger in the Window, performed in the summer of 1991 (at Franklin Furnace in New York City), Pope.L stood, as if for sale, behind the gallery window, naked except for a coating of mayonnaise smeared all over his body. Over the course of the performance, the mayonnaise turned from an opaque white to a translucent, putrid oil evoking decay, transmutation. (“For me, mayonnaise is a bogus whiteness,” he says. “It reveals its lack in a very material way. And the more you apply, the more bogus the act becomes. The futility is the magic.”) In Roach Motel Black (1993), Pope.L meandered around New York City with a large roach motel stuck to his head, at one point lying down in the street covered with discs of roach bait—a literalized gambit about the black body as a pestilence requiring extermination. The piece’s motivating force was Pope.L’s question to himself: “What if I explored what whites think about black folks as a sort of truth?”
In one of his most arresting and entrancing performance pieces, My Niagra (1998), Pope.L transformed a gallery space (The Project, in New York City) into a sort of basement dungeon, lit by bare bulbs, punctuated by empty beer cans and other detritus, and lashed himself to a bed frame hanging at a vertical angle in the space. He was naked, save for a bright red ski mask (his glasses eerily poking through), heavy boots, a layer of white flour on his skin, and sheets of bright blue plastic tarp bunched around him. His bare belly was pressed against the bed
frame’s metal wires, his head affixed at an alarming angle, as if his neck might be broken. As Project gallerist Christian Haye remembers the piece, “He had his dick clamped to a pitcher. He would let people in two at a time. There was this really eerie light. It was fantastic. Literally, nobody who saw it forgot it. ”
By most accounts, what was so unforgettable was the uncanniness of Pope.L’s cadaver-like presence, and the unruly, conflicting effects of the materials at hand. For while the piece viscerally evoked the radical, savage violence that racist America has leveled at the black male body—a violence that has included dismemberment, disfiguration, immolation, and mutilation—his tableaux had an absurdist, clownish quality to it, palpable in its use of primary colors (yellow light, blue tarp, red ski mask), and its scrambling of the symbols of victimology (i.e., the ski mask evokes the criminal or the threatening, rather than a crucified innocent; his penis is affixed to the milk pitcher as if being force-fed whiteness, but what could that exactly mean?). As in much of Pope.L’s work, the humor feels both trenchant and inscrutable. “In the case of humor,” he explains, “it is not just about confronting, but also seducing and lubricating as well as confusing (intentionally). I am after the mixed signal.”
One of the simplest, most effective employments of this mixed signal can be found in Pope.L’s Crawl pieces, which he has been performing, using various costumes and locales, for over thirty years. In one of their most well-known manifestations, Pope.L dresses up in a nice suit and, while holding a potted plant in one hand, attempts to crawl on his belly across a part of New York City. He wears the suit, he explains, so as to distinguish himself from other prostrate black men who might not normally garner any attention, so accustomed New Yorkers are to seeing black men in the gutter.
For Pope.L, the Crawl pieces are a means of reinhabiting the underclass from which he came, and whose radical precariousness he experiences as an ever-present possibility (he grew up in poverty in rural Florida; many members of his family are or have been homeless). “People who are forced to give up their verticality are prey to all kinds of dangers,” he explains. “But, let us imagine a person who has a job, possesses the means to remain vertical, but chooses to momentarily give up that verticality? To undergo that threat to his/her bodily/spiritual categories—that person would learn something. I did.” To give others the chance to do the same, Pope.L has from time to time organized “group crawls,” inviting others to “give up their verticality,” if only for a brief period.
As the eccentric pathos of the potted plant might indicate, the Crawl pieces are not meant to provide an object lesson, but rather a peculiar public spectacle around which prejudices, sympathies, uncertainties, and other unpredictable emotions might swirl. In the case of Tompkins Square Crawl (1991), the most salient emotion conjured was anger. The performance—for which Pope.L had engaged a (white) videographer—enraged an African-American pedestrian, who stopped to express incredulity and outrage, eventually demanding that the videographer stop filming or he would break his camera. The pedestrian was upset by the spectacle of a white man filming a black man in such a humiliating posture—an image he took as a personal insult. “I wear a suit like that to work!” he exclaimed.
Precariousness may indeed be a condition—indeed the condition—that unites us all; our primary vulnerability, as Butler has it, is undoubtedly a problem that “one cannot will away without ceasing to be human.” But as Tompkins Square Crawl makes clear (as do Butler’s own inquiries into what counts as a livable life and a grievable death), this condition is not perceived equally, either from within or from without. And it is not perceived equally because it is not distributed or constructed equally.
Part of Pope.L’s genius has been to draw out these differences in the art world as well as on the street. As critic C. Carr has pointed out, Pope.L’s Crawl pieces overtly echo Chris Burden’s Through the Night Softly, but no one takes Burden’s crawling as representative of the internalized masochism, existential precariousness, or economic humiliation of white people, nor were Burden’s performances likely to be interrupted by a white person admonishing him as a traitor or embarrassment to his race. To underscore such differences—and to stake his claim on whatever artistic heritage he sees fit—Pope.L often explicitly engages with the work of white artists (such as Robert Ryman, who is most well known for his monochromatic white paintings), constructing performances that bring into focus what changes when a black man takes up related artistic activities. One example of such détournement might be Pope.L’s 2000 piece, The Hole Inside the Space Inside Yves Klein’s Asshole, which hearkens directly back to Klein’s Anthropometries series. In The Hole inside the Space, which was performed at Concordia University in Montreal, Pope.L—wearing an African mask—smeared his ass in K-Y jelly and acrylic paint, then made “ass prints” on a piece of Kwanzaa paper hanging on the wall.
One of the things I find most intriguing about Pope.L’s investigations into precariousness and “have-not-ness” is his willingness to link them up, at least rhetorically, with the discourse around lack that has (lamentably, and bizarrely) dominated discussion of female subjectivity and sexuality ever since Freud theorized that women suffer from “penis envy,” and Lacan extended the formulation to conclude that women—having neither the penis nor the castration complex that purportedly accompanies it—are doubly stranded, in that they even “lack lack.”
Pope.L repeatedly refers to blackness as lack, but as a “lack worth having”—a notion he has been working out in quizzical, sometimes hermetic writings gathered under the name “Hole Theory.” In 2001, he began a related postering project that involved pasting fliers around Manhattan that read, “This is a painting of Martin Luther King’s penis inside my father’s vagina.” In explanation of this somewhat cryptic provocation, Pope.L says he is trying to “involute” King’s body and men’s bodies in general. “I think one must say in all honesty, ‘Boy, that Martin Luther King Jr. sure had a big vagina.’ This, I think, says something. It gives the legacy of King’s body as a (w)hole worth having. It digs him up from the catacombs of celebration and presence and places him in the lived moment of contraries where we all have to deal.”
I agree: this says something. What on earth it says, I have no idea. I like it, though, because it bothers me, and I’m not sure why. It also makes me laugh, though I’m not sure if I’m laughing at the vagina or with it, whether it’s a misogynistic insult to MLK to suggest he has a big one, a mockery of such, or an irreverent, scrambled act of insurrection, (dis)identification, and reclamation that I can truly get behind. Whatever it is, I agree that it places us in the “lived moment of contraries where we all have to deal.” I’m not sure where this is, but I’m glad to be here.
INFLICTED
TRUTH CANNOT be imparted,” says a character in Brian Evenson’s novel Dark Property. “It must be inflicted.” Inflict: from fligere, to strike. The statement brings to mind a famous quote by Romanian dramatist-of-the-absurd, Eugène Ionesco: “To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a bludgeon blow.”
For his part, Francis Bacon often said he felt the need to “clarify” his paintings by lacerating or nailing down the figures that blob and lurk on his canvases. Almost in exasperation—and, perhaps, to avoid painting more crucifixions—Bacon at times took to pinning his figures down with hypodermic needles. “I’ve used the figures lying on beds with a hypodermic syringe as a form of nailing the image more strongly into reality or appearance,” he explained. On other occasions, Bacon went without needles or nails, and simply hurled a blob of paint from his fist onto the figure to finish it off. “Pity the meat!” cried Gilles Deleuze, in the face of such painting.
If such recourse to inflictions appeared once in a blue moon, it might not seem so strange. But given how often it recurs, especially in twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic rhe
toric, I feel compelled to ask, what kind of knowing is this, that is supposedly accomplished by striking?
On the one hand, one could say that this “bludgeon blow,” this infliction, is but a metaphor meant to indicate that “Eureka!” moment of freshness, of lightning-flash discovery—that moment at which, as Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), would have it, a shift in paradigm occurs, a shift so revolutionary that it obliterates the old paradigm, rendering obsolete an entire mode of seeing, of understanding the world. Kuhn’s theory about the role such paradigm shifts have played in the history of science has proved enormously influential well beyond the bounds of his field, largely because his story about science is also the story of modernity. Rather than valuing the accumulation of received wisdom, modernity values radical change, cleavage from that which has come before. And its name for this process is “progress,” however teleological or nonteleological that progress turns out to be.
Christian traditionalists often cite the Bible as source and guarantor of the reverent preservation of tradition. But as many theologians and historians have observed, Christianity is also a fundamentally modern religion, in that it encourages radical cleavage from family and tradition, if necessary, in order to become a true follower. The New Testament is a hotbed of such incitements. See, for example, Matthew 10:35–37, where Christ says, “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against the mother in law.” Such counsel is no anomaly, but rather a recurring theme throughout the Gospels, as in Luke 14:26: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” In light of such passages, one may find oneself agreeing with Annie Dillard when she asks, in an essay titled “The Book of Luke,” “Why did [adults] spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it. They did not recognize the lively danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a dose of its virulent opposition to their world.”