The Art of Cruelty Page 2
Sometimes, as we shall see, the cruelty stays within the confines of the page or the gallery wall, which makes it slightly easier to talk about or defend. Other times, the cruelty seeps out to the viewer more directly, further troubling the ethical waters. This book diagrams a wide range of such charged instances in recent art and culture, and takes a new look at what is found there. It does not offer what, to my mind, can only be false or moralistic solutions to intractable ethical and aesthetic problems.
Many of this book’s subjects are American, though by no means all—indeed, part of its point is to range widely and idiosyncratically, with no pretension toward the exhaustive. And while it isn’t about American art or politics per se, it’s clear to me now—and will likely be clear to the reader—that its concerns were shaped by the context in which it was initially conceived: the final years of the second administration of George W. Bush, a time in which there was no shortage of cruelties to contemplate. This was also a time in which the notion of “moral complexity” came to be defined—at least by proponents of the so-called war on terror—as a willingness to be “intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to protect what we love,” as one 2008 Wall Street Journal editorial (by conservative commentator Andrew Klavan) urged, without a shred of irony. Such a formulation struck me then, as it does now, as a cruelty of the highest order—one worthy of our analysis, and, I hope, our refusal.
Contrary to the miserable, self-justifying proclamations of Klavan’s editorial, true moral complexity is rarely found in simple reversals. More often it is found by wading into the swamp, getting intimate with discomfort, and developing an appetite for nuance. “Make no mistake: this is not about more intellectual sophistication,” writes Roland Barthes in The Neutral. “What I am looking for . . . is an introduction to living, a guide to life (ethical project): I want to live according to nuance. Now there is a teacher of nuance, literature; try to live according to the nuances that literature teaches me.” Such a project generally gets a bad rap in our culture: nuance is all well and good for the ivory tower, people say, but in the “real” world, what position are you going to take? Whose side are you on? Where will you land at the end of the day, or at the end of days? This book does not shrink from expressing strong opinions, from “taking sides,” when it feels the need to do so. But at the end of the day, its greater aspiration is Barthes’s: to live according to nuance. By definition, there is no master sketch for what such a thing might look like. It can only be an experiment.
THEATERS OF CRUELTY
ANTONIN ARTAUD coined the term “theater of cruelty” in his crackling volume of manifestos from the 1930s, The Theater and Its Double. The Theater and Its Double aimed to annihilate Western theater, and re-create it from the ashes in accordance with Artaud’s principle of cruelty. “Everything that acts is a cruelty,” he wrote. “It is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theater must be rebuilt.”
From the start, Artaud was anxious to differentiate his concept of cruelty from that of simple sadism, violence, or bloodshed. His cruelty, he insisted, meant something quite different: “the appetite for life, a cosmic rigor and implacable necessity, in the gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the darkness, in the sense of that pain apart from whose ineluctable necessity life could not continue.”
Despite his repeated, manic attempts at clarification, however, Artaud still thought his concept was virulently and consistently misunderstood. Indeed, for a madman who lived infamously far beyond the constraints of societal mores, he spent an inordinate amount of time defending his use of the term. “With this mania we all have for depreciating everything, as soon as I have said ‘cruelty,’ everybody will at once take it to mean ‘blood,’ ” he wrote in 1933, in a sort of preemptive strike. “But ‘theater of cruelty’ means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all.” (As if self-cruelty canceled out its other effects: take note—this will recur, and ought to arouse our suspicions.)
It didn’t help Artaud’s case that even as he protested vociferously against the literal interpretation of his cruelty, when the time came to get theatrically specific, his examples of potential subjects were tales of literalized bloodshed: “the story of Bluebeard, reconstructed according to the historical records and with a new idea of eroticism and cruelty”; “a tale by the Marquis de Sade, in which the eroticism will be transposed, allegorically mounted and figured, to create a violent exteriorization of cruelty”; “an extract from the Zohar: The Story of Rabbi Simeon, which has the ever present violence and force of a conflagration,” and so on.
Artaud wanted his cruelty to speak, as it were, for itself. “The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us,” he wrote. “We write only for him.” But the concept doesn’t speak for itself. In fact, the very use of the word “cruelty” in relation to the kind of life force venerated by Artaud can at times seem a regrettable lexical error, perhaps of the Western, or Manichean variety—a distortion akin to the histrionic skewing of shunyata, the Buddhist concept of emptiness, entertainingly accomplished by philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, who spun the notion out of fundamental neutrality and into negativity and nihilism. Artaud was looking to give a name to the “living whirlwind that devours the darkness . . . the pain apart from whose ineluctable necessity life could not continue.” He had already renamed God, shit; he called this whirlwind, cruelty. “And I claim, in doing this, the right to break with the usual sense of language, to crack the armature once and for all, to get the iron collar off its neck.” In short, cruelty meant whatever Artaud wanted it to mean. This makes the term, as passed down through him, somewhat difficult to work with.
But his use of the term, and his unwillingness to give it up, were no semantic accidents. Like Nietzsche before him, Artaud insisted on cruelty because cruelty is associated not only with implacability, but also with evil. And both men considered the riotous reclamation of evil something of a necessary pit stop on the way to dancing with cosmic forces which have no truck with normative, especially religious, conceptions of morality. In other words, embracing cruelty is a step—a sort of hazing, or threshold—on the path to moving beyond cruelty, a space valorized by Artaud (as well as by the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Camille Paglia, and countless others) as a more elemental, more animal, more “natural” realm than that of the civilized world, with the latter’s internalized psychic limits, fretting over ethics, hypocritical moralizing, tedious social contracts and policy debates. “We sail straight over morality and past it, we flatten, we crush perhaps what is left of our own morality by venturing to voyage thither,” Nietzsche wrote, rallying the invisible troops.
Here Nietzsche echoes the great Marquis de Sade, from whose name the word “sadism” derives. In the eighteenth century, Sade inverted Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s more benevolent view of man-in-the-wild, and wickedly venerated the cruelty of Nature as a model for human affairs. As Simone de Beauvoir summarized in her 1955 essay, “Must We Burn Sade?” if Rousseau held that “Nature is good; let us follow her,” and Thomas Hobbes held that “Nature is evil; let us not follow her,” Sade held that “Nature is evil; let us follow her.” “Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted,” Sade wrote in 1795’s Philosophy in the Bedroom. “Therefore [cruelty] is a virtue, not a vice.” Two hundred years hence, Artaud pushed this notion of cruelty as fundamental, uncorrupted energy further still, into the realm of the mystical, the metaphysic: “It is cruelty that cements matter together, cruelty that molds the features of the created world,” he wrote.
It was, of course, of little concern to Sade, or Nietzsche, or Artaud what kind of world, or what amount of suffering, the exaltation of such principles might bring about. Or, rather, they may have cared, but they had, as they say, different priorities—ones more in line with the attitude expressed earlier by Bacon (i
.e., that suffering and difference make great art, not egalitarianism).
SINCE ARTAUD’S death in 1948, there have been many sincere and often laudable attempts to apply his theories to the theater. But any time an audience remains intact enough to shuffle out murmuring how powerful before deciding where to have its pie and Schnapps, Artaud’s dream of “crushing and hypnotizing the spectator,” perhaps to the point of no return, has died. Despite all his work as an actor, director, and playwright, Artaud’s most enduring legacy has not lived on in the theater, but rather in more experiential, physically immersive spheres of expression, such as punk rock, radical performance art, carnivals, butoh, “happenings,” festivals such as Burning Man, and so on. (During his lifetime, Artaud’s major attempt to apply his principles to the stage was 1935’s The Cenci, which was a messy flop; Artaud abandoned the theater shortly thereafter.) Like Dada, which, by definition, cannot produce a masterpiece (though it has, and plenty), Artaud’s theater of cruelty cannot be understood as a means by which one might achieve aesthetic mastery. It aims instead to torch aesthetic mastery itself, and leave a “passionate and convulsive conception of life” in its place.
This call to dismantle or destroy the mediating object—be it the objet d’art, the theater experience, or the book-in-hand—in order to reveal this “convulsive conception of life” is so persistent in avant-garde rhetoric that one sometimes wonders why any of its pushers bothered with art at all. “The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd,” proclaimed André Breton, the so-called Pope of Surrealism, in 1930.
This desire to break down the barriers between life and art—and further, to have this breakdown be marked by violence and rupture—has characterized avant-garde operations at least since the Italian Futurists. The Futurists—whom many consider the first avant-garde—took aim at revolutionizing not only painting, music, sculpture, theater, and architecture, but also fashion, morals, manners, religion, and politics. They aimed to do so in the spirit of “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” published in 1909 by ringleader F. T. Marinetti, which infamously declares that art “can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice,” and promises “to glorify war—the world’s only hygiene,” along with “militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.” As much of a failure or an aborted mission as some say Futurism was (World War I, the war the Futurists agitated tirelessly to bring about, deprived the movement of much of its steam, not to mention many of its leading figures), one must also admit that much of the twentieth century, in both art and politics, unfolded in its image.
By the 1960s, proponents of abolishing the line between art and life were not nearly so fixated on violent rupture—think of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s peace-loving “Bed-In” of 1969, or of the happily mundane art/life scores of Allan Kaprow and Fluxus, or of the advent of intentionally monotonous, endurance-based performance art, epitomized by pieces such as Linda Montano’s and Tehching Hsieh’s Art/Life (1983–84), in which Montano and Hsieh agreed to remain tied together by an eight-foot rope, without touching each other, for a year. Other artists, however—such as the Austrian artists known as the Viennese Actionists—upheld the more violent, aggressive line. “It is the assignment of the artist to destroy art and come closer to reality,” Actionist Otto Muehl declared. With some measure of pathos, Muehl later explained his response to this assignment as follows: “Because I knew no other way than art to get to reality, I intensified my actions to extremely aggressive undertakings.”
Why the desire to “restore us to our senses” or “get to reality” has so often leapt straight to “extremely aggressive undertakings,” epitomized by bloody shock—even when the artist is well aware, as was Artaud, of the flattening effects of such a literalization—remains an open question. (Francis Bacon also judged himself quite harshly whenever he used explicitly violent subject matter, especially that which had the potential to introduce the boredoms of narrative or morality onto the canvas: a bullfight, a Nazi armband, and so on. Nonetheless, Bacon remains known for his splayed meat carcasses, crucifixions, screaming faces, scenes of unexplained but haunting bloodshed, injured heads, and imploding bodies.)
Consider, for example, the work of Actionist Hermann Nitsch, who cites Artaud as a primary influence (“his Theater of Cruelty was very deep in me. . . . I would say he was my brother”). The pinnacle of Nitsch’s career was something called the Six-Day Play, for which Nitsch prepared over decades, and which was finally performed over six days on the castle grounds of Prinzendorf, Austria, in 1997. Nitsch describes but a snippet of the play as follows: “GRAPES, FRUIT and TOMATOES, ANIMAL LUNGS, FLESH and INTESTINES are trampled on in ecstasy. People trample in SLAUGHTERED ANIMAL CARCASSES FILLED WITH INTESTINES, in troughs full of blood and wine. Extreme noise from the orchestras. Slaughtering of the bull, slaughtering of two pigs. Disembowelment.”
Nitsch may be after Dionysian revelry rather than apocalyptic terror, but the presumption that bloodshed, however ritualized, is the ultimate means of giving participants and audience a “feast of the senses,” of “returning them to life,” remains the same. (Whether bloodshed need always signify violence is also something of an open question, as is the definition of violence itself: think, for example, of the varying uses of the word at issue in phenomena such as “symbolic violence,” “divine violence,” “domestic violence,” “the violence of capital,” “abortion as violence,” “violent language,” and so on. Another open question: whether an act of so-called violence must always be characterized or accompanied by cruelty: the killing of animals for food, some instances of suicide, assisted suicide, or mercy killing, ritualized body mortifications, and so on, all offer ready sites for debate.)
It could be argued that there is, quite simply, no substitute for the visceral unease provoked by such bloodshed, either in representation or in reality, or in any smash-up of the two. It’s nearly impossible, for example, to remain physically unaffected by many of the Actionist films from the 1960s, which feature multiple forms of mutilation, beatings, penetrations, and bloodletting. (The same likely goes for the more recent bloodletting work of performance artists such as Ron Athey, Franco B, and others, though their work differs profoundly in both tone and motivation.) Despite the culture’s professed fatigue with transgressive body art, these Actionist films have not lost much of their visceral punch—I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t find them, at least upon first viewing, provoking, exciting, repulsive, or some combination thereof.
But however ecstatic the communion, or however viscerally startling the transgression, this emphasis on bloodshed as a jumpstart into reality can be wearying. Indeed, whenever I read an articulate excoriation of the Viennese Actionists—such as those written by artist Carolee Schneemann or feminist Germaine Greer—the work can seem quickly ridiculous, a witless testament to a ludicrous white-boy repression, Austrian-style, literally trying to whip itself up to Wagnerian proportions. “Soll niemand mein Schwanz steif machen?”—“Is no one going to make my dick hard?”—a flaccid Otto Muehl reportedly yelled during a 1971 performance, a performance at which Muehl’s sacrificial goose was seized (by the British poet Heathcote Williams, urged on by Greer) before it could meet its fate. Goose-less, Muehl ended up shitting on the stage instead.
In any case, whether the call is to create a Dionysian orgy (a la Nitsch), to mobilize a “hygienic violence” to cleanse society of its gangrenous elements (a la the Futurists), or simply an injunction to “free your mind” (a la Oko and Lennon), the anxiety over the relationship between art and life remains quite high; the mandate to break down the barriers between them, acute.
This anxiety and urgency—often posed as a conflict between spectatorship and action, or between the simulated, or mediated, and the real—is literally ancient. Plato famously thought mime
sis (i.e., imitation, but also representation in a much broader sense) drew people away from truth, and therefore had a deleterious effect on the citizenry; it was for this reason that poets were to be banished from his ideal state of the republic. Aristotle had more of a social-control stance, arguing, via his theory of catharsis, that beholding evocative representations with the proper distance (such as going to see tragic theater) could provide a healthful outlet for impulses and ideas that might otherwise be disruptive to the social fabric.
This latter theory arrives in an endlessly debated passage in Aristotle’s Poetics, in which Aristotle defines tragedy as an imitation of an action “with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.” The confusion derives in part from the original Greek, which leaves not only the process itself a bit murky, but also its proper object. Katharsis arrives in English virtually untranslated, as “catharsis,” which derives from katharos—“pure.” But the word has stretched to signify or entail a wide variety of processes, including clarification, enlightenment, purgation, elimination, transubstantiation, sublimation, release, satisfaction, homeopathic cure, or some combination thereof. Second, the phrasing of Aristotle’s original sentence leaves it unclear whether “catharsis” applies to incidents or to emotions—that is, whether the action takes place inside an individual, outside of her, or somewhere in between. Here, for example, are two plausible, but totally distinct, translations of Aristotle’s sentence: “[Tragedy] achieves, through the representation of pitiable and fearful incidents, the catharsis of such pitiable and fearful incidents” (Leon Golden); “By means of pity and fear, [tragedy] contrives to purify the emotions of pity and fear” (J. L. Creed/A. E. Wardman).
In the twentieth century, dramatists Artaud and Bertolt Brecht each staged a savage reckoning with this set of problems. Both accepted Plato’s premise—that there was something inherently nefarious about mimesis—but neither embraced Aristotle’s attempted rescue of it. Brecht wrote explicitly against Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, aiming to replace projective identification and emotional cathexsis—both of which he thought rendered audiences complacent and politically impotent—with strategic forms of alienation that would provoke the audience into dialectical thinking, decision-making, a desire for further knowledge, and action. Artaud—who, unlike Brecht, was no Marxist or seeker of social justice—was more concerned with resurrecting the magic and rawness that he thought spectatorship stamped out of daily life. “If our life lacks brimstone, i.e., a constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in considerations of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their force,” Artaud wrote.