The Art of Cruelty Read online

  ONE OF the most chilling pieces in the WACK show was, to my mind, one of the smallest: a tiny still from the documentation of Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scene (1973), a performance piece in which Mendieta meticulously re-created the aftermath of a rape and murder that took place at the University of Iowa, then invited students over to her apartment to stumble, without warning, upon her “corpse.” Naked, tied up, her underwear around her ankles, her body smeared with blood and dirt and bent over a table, Mendieta peers over her shoulder at the camera like a ghost risen from mud. (Mendieta had previously done an outdoor version of the same, 1972’s Rape Piece, in which she re-created the murder scene in a wooded area near campus, and invited friends to discover her there.)

  I imagine that Mendieta thought her politics here were sound—that she was drawing attention, via horror, to a horror that had been inadequately attended to. But her compulsion to re-enact the scene (not once but twice!) and to terrorize an unwitting audience (not once but twice!) complicates any simple look-at-how-bad-rape-and-murder-is feminist gesture. To my mind, that complication is part of what makes Mendieta’s work so interesting, so formidable, so unsettling. You can’t toss it into the ghetto of feminist protest art and ignore its more aggressive, borderline sadistic motivations and effects. Nor can you easily partition the Rape pieces off from her more shamanistic works involving blood, many of which were made that same year—Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood) (1973), Sweating Blood (1973), Mutilated Body on Landscape (1973), Blood Signs I and II (1974), and so on.

  Blood, for Mendieta, often signified violence, especially sexual violence—as in 1973’s Blood Writing, in which Mendieta dips her hands in a bucket of blood and writes the ominous report, “SHE GOT LOVE,” on a white gallery wall. But just as often, blood meant otherwise, or additionally. (About working with blood, Mendieta—who was deeply interested in ritualistic Santeria practices from her native Cuba—once said, “It’s a very powerful magic thing. I don’t see it as a negative force.”) Mendieta’s audacity—which is echoed throughout the work of artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Abramovi´c , and French performance artist Gina Pane—was to claim this multivalence repeatedly and without apology, regardless of the culture’s capacity to apprehend it.

  The cruelty of pieces such as Rape Scene (or Rhythm 0, or Cut Piece) may start with a certain cruelty to the self, but that cruelty quickly leaks out to the viewer. The artists are not content to stare at the camera and ask, “Why are you still looking?” Instead, they ask, “How will you participate in this?”

  Mendieta’s People Looking at Blood, Moffitt (1973) poses this question in a particularly oblique, disturbing manner. In this piece, Mendieta spilled a large amount of what appeared to be chunky blood over a doorway and sidewalk on an Iowa City street. Then she removed herself from the scene and, from a distance, photographed the reactions of various passersby. (The piece ended when a storekeeper took it upon himself to clean up the mess.) At the WACK show, People Looking at Blood appeared in the form of twenty-four slides placed on a light board. To look at them, you had to bend over the board and use a magnifying lens, adding another layer of voyeurism to a work already laden with it.

  Standing in front of People Looking at Blood and Rape Scene, which appeared side by side at the exhibit, it occurred to me that People Looking at Blood is the crueler, albeit the more abstract, of the two. It intimates to passersby that a grievous and dramatic injury has taken place, but it gives no explanation and, more important, no recourse to action. It may incite horror, concern, compassion, and revulsion—in short, pity and fear—but it doesn’t offer anywhere for these feelings to go. Certainly it does not subject them to any catharsis. Each pedestrian’s only real choice is to walk on by, which looks from the outside—and likely felt, on the inside—like an uncaring abandonment, even if of an indeterminate or imaginary entity. And now, almost forty years later, we peer in at the whole mess, likely with as little idea what to make of it as a pedestrian had stepping over it that day. And somewhere out of sight lurks Mendieta, a voyeur of each passerby’s involuntary voyeurism. Mendieta’s Rape Scene says, Look at what someone did. People Looking at Blood says, Look at this pile of carnage, with no clear story, source, assailant, or victim. Just look at it. Now look at others looking at it. (And I will be looking at you looking.)

  IN A February 28, 2010, piece in the New York Times titled “Violence That Art Didn’t See Coming,” editor Sam Tanenhaus sets forth the argument that art—especially art made by women—utterly failed to predict the kind of violence by a woman that occurred on February 12, 2010, when Professor Amy Bishop opened fire on her colleagues in a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama. Despite coming up with a number of works along the way that would seem to disprove or at least complicate his titular thesis, Tanenhaus argues that “the topic of women and violence—especially as represented by women—remains more or less in a time warp, bound by the themes of sexual or domestic trauma.” He thinks that this fixation on trauma (read: victim art) has blinded women artists to the shifting social landscape that formed the conditions of possibility of Bishop’s shooting spree. (His list of these conditions: girls outdoing boys in the classroom, women making up “the majority of undergraduates at many prestigious colleges,” women outnumbering men in the workforce, and women becoming “in thousands of cases, their family’s principal breadwinner.”)

  Never mind, for the moment, how one measures the effects of these social conditions on Bishop’s murderous actions (the fact that Bishop fatally shot her younger brother twenty-four years earlier, before these trends had come to pass, certainly complicates the issue). Put aside, too, the odd supposition that art’s utility lies in its capacity to forecast the actions of a particular individual on any given day. Tanenhaus’s point is that even though “these conditions have been developing for some years now . . . the most advanced narratives of female violence seem uninterested in them.”

  And what are these “advanced narratives”? Here Tanenhaus singles out the work of artists Abramovi´c and Karen Finley, whose work he deems “stimulating in its way,” but “curiously outmoded.” In a populist gesture that doesn’t quite ring true (few do, these days), Tanenhaus pits high art against low art, using Abramovi´c and Finley as representatives of the “advanced,” or highbrow, wing, which compares negatively to “popular, even pulpish art,” which includes (surprise!) a whole raft of “crowd-pleasing movies” directed primarily by men (Bob Rafelson’s Black Widow, Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, and so on). Somehow these films “got” what the women artists missed, and therefore offer “the most useful glosses on Dr. Bishop.” And what, exactly, did they get? That “women can be just as violent as men.” Equality achieved; conversation closed—but not without pausing to put one more laurel in Tarantino’s cap, while suggesting that the bulk of work made by “advanced” female artists over the past half century or so has been culturally irrelevant.

  The claim that “women can be just as violent as men” not only runs into serious trouble on the statistical level (99 percent of rapes and 90 percent of homicides are committed by men), but also hardly comes as a news flash to the multitudes of artists, writers, critics, and activists—self-identified as feminists or otherwise—who have labored for decades, if not centuries, to explore the complexities of women’s relations to violence, aggression, and structures of psychic, economic, social, and political power. If one really wants to step out of this dead-end dichotomy, which poses a regrettable equality (“women can be just as violent as men”) on the one side, and an equally regrettable difference (“women are essentially victims and men are essentially aggressors”) on the other, one has to develop a sharper ear for dissonance, for artistic instances and tonal nuances that do not derive their charge from making pit stops at well-trod narrative stations.

  ONE OF the strangest and spikiest of such instances that I’ve come across is Jane Bowles’s short story �
�Plain Pleasures,” from 1946. One should go in fear of such a title, for in this quietly brutal, fourteen-page masterpiece, there are few pleasures, and certainly none that are plain (save the pleasure of Bowles’s plain prose, which is immense).

  In “Plain Pleasures,” we are introduced to Mrs. Alva Perry, a widow of eleven years who now lives in a grumpy, structured solitude. One day this solitude gets pierced by a certain John Drake, a delivery man who also lives in her tenement. Mr. Drake offers to help her carry a bag of potatoes up the stairs. Later that night, they end up having a potato bake together in their desolate backyard. Excited by this encounter, the equally lonely and reserved Mr. Drake invites Mrs. Perry out to dinner the following evening, an invitation she warily accepts. In spite of her avowed dedication to only “plain pleasures”—that is, “ones that come without crowds or fancy foods”—Mrs. Perry finds it in her to get gussied up for the date, and she awaits Mr. Drake at the restaurant wearing a newly altered lavender dress and a string of her sister’s beads. Mr. Drake is late, however, and the resentment Mrs. Perry develops while waiting for him proves insurmountable. After he arrives, she gets drunk on sweet wine, lays her beads in her gravy, says some harsh words to him, then wanders off to an empty room above the restaurant/hotel, where she weeps until she passes out.

  The quick souring of their encounter, and the needless dashing of the high (if heretofore repressed) hopes of these two isolated souls, would be cruel enough. But Bowles adds another twist, in the form of the proprietor of the restaurant/hotel. The proprietor quickly ascertains how drunk Mrs. Perry is, and judges that “in her present drunken state it would be easy to sneak a kiss from her and perhaps even more.” He follows Mrs. Perry upstairs when she wanders off, and notices with malevolent glee that the room she has accidentally passed out in is his own. He then lies to Mr. Drake about her whereabouts, assures him that she will be well taken care of, and encourages him to go home.

  When Mrs. Perry awakens the following morning, she is alone but naked, and the reader is put in the discomfiting position of surmising that she has been raped. To complicate matters further, Mrs. Perry wakes up in an inexplicably good mood, although she cannot remember a thing about her evening. The blacked-out lacuna at this story’s navel is one of literature’s most understated slivers of cruelty. But cruelty to whom? Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about Bowles’s stories is that more often than not they leave the reader not knowing how to feel. Should we pity Mrs. Perry? Or should we allow her her good feeling? Who are we to call her good morning mood false consciousness? Bowles here allows herself the freedom to make a queasy satire out of a possible rape—a move that constitutes its own form of disobedience in a world obsessed with the big-deal-ness of female defilement. In such a context, the story’s title, “Plain Pleasures,” starts to seem as wicked as it is multivalent.

  “Everything is nice,” says a chorus of Moslem women in another of Bowles’s razor-edged stories, which bears this ludicrous maxim as its title. For in “Everything Is Nice,” as in Bowles’s world at large, very little—if anything—is “nice.” In fact much of Bowles’s wit stems from putting such truisms in the mouths of her characters in order to reveal them as meaningless, erroneous, or delusional. It isn’t so much that Bowles is out to tell us that the world is a cruel and cold place, and isn’t it a pity. Like many artists of cruelty, she is no philosopher. She is roaming a world of balloons, armed with a pin.

  THIS SLY debunking, accompanied by an unnerving inscrutability, is often a sign that something new is happening. It is the dissonant sound of a new territory being entered, a new story being told. It isn’t feminist in the sense of serving some predetermined aim of empowerment or equality; certainly if there were a litmus test of such, “Plain Pleasures” would fail. But the story’s presentation of a world in which a blackout signifies a sweet triumph, rape is not soul murder, and liberation consists of laying down one’s necklace in gravy and pronouncing, “I am not a mashed-potato masher,” is utterly refreshing. Nothing here is nice, but the story’s cool combination of the flat-footed sublunary and the irremediably distressing produces a quietly ecstatic effect.

  These dissonant chords may be difficult for a writer or artist to chime; they can be even harder for the culture to hear. The impulse to assimilate them by rendering them self-deluding, farcical, or even criminal can be quick and severe. Take, for example, the case of Karen Finley. Certainly some of Karen Finley’s work could be characterized as “victim art” (the phrase coined by Arlene Croce in her infamous non-review of Bill T. Jones’s 1995 dance production Still/Here). But now that twenty years has passed since Jesse Helms and company pilloried Finley as “that chocolate-smeared woman”—and twenty years after Finley became a feminist hero to artists of my generation (and, as often is the case with heroes, someone to push against, differentiate oneself from, sometimes to the point of rejection or mockery)—there is space to hear her monologues with a different ear.

  I challenge anyone to read pieces from Finley’s I’m an Ass Man (1984), such as “Yams Up My Granny’s Ass,” or The Constant State of Desire (1986), such as “The Father in All of Us,” and maintain some rote notion of Finley as a victim artist, or even as a woman speaking a nasty male script solely in order to critique it. Here is the speaker of “The Father in All of Us,” for example, discussing his fetish for women with babies, and describing getting turned on by a lady in a Laundromat: “Oh, gets me going, seeing a woman’s body vibrate against a machine. I just take that mama and push her against the washer—then I take her baby, a bald-headed baby, put Downy fabric softener on baby’s head—strap that baby around my waist til it’s a baby dildo. Then I take that baby, that baby dildo, and fuck its own mama—CAUSE I’M NOTHING BUT A MOTHER-FUCKER!” And here is the speaker of “Yams Up My Granny’s Ass,” explaining that “when things get real bad, real bad dad, I take a can of yams and smear it in my granny’s ass. She’s such a fine granny to humiliate, she’s such a fine granny to torture, because she’s a mute granny. Doesn’t make a sound. Her eyes stick out like blue raisins on a rabbit, some furry little animal. I’m smearing her all over with the candied, sugared yams. And I turn her over on her back so the candied syrup yam juice runs down her back, along her spine.”

  The desires here expressed are too weird, too lyrical, too lengthily formulated, too unsettling, to serve any one nameable, digestible purpose. Such monologues continue to present us with complex, disturbing acts of reclamation, aggression, excoriation, abjection, and identification, the likes of which continue to be rare, even as the culture professes to have absorbed or “moved on” from them. Indeed, in the face of the suggestion that such acts have become “curiously outmoded,” I cannot help but think of the summary Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers (in Epistemology of the Closet) of the preemptive dismissal of inquiry into queer issues: “Stop asking here, stop asking just now; we know in advance the kind of difference that would be made by the invocation of this difference; it makes no difference; it doesn’t mean.” I also think of the college freshman I once had in a poetry workshop who announced, after we read the poem “In Celebration of My Uterus” by Anne Sexton, that he’d rather die than read yet another poem about a woman’s uterus or period. Dear God, I thought, has something radically changed in high school education? Are the youth now inundated with such poems by the time they get to college? Or—more likely, to my mind—was it that a handful of poems on the topic (or, more likely still, this single one) made him feel as though he’d already had enough?

  In short, purporting to know in advance what difference a difference might make—or purporting to be sick and tired of it before it has elaborated itself—is one fast way of being rid of it. Often, to experience the dissonance—especially in art—one has to take the time, and leave open the divine possibility of being taken by surprise. When someone first told me, for example, about a 1992 piece by performance artist Nao Bustamante called Indig/urrito, in which Bustamante invites
white men from the audience to join her on stage, get down on their knees in penance for 500 years of white-male oppression of indigenous peoples, and take an absolving bite of the burrito she is wielding as a strap-on, I think I spouted off some lazy dismissal of the venture, citing a disinterest in collective guilt, identity politics, audience humiliation, and dominatrix chic.

  After watching a fifteen-minute performance of the piece (filmed at Theater Artaud in San Francisco, and available for viewing on the artist’s Web site), I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong. Largely due to Bustamante’s quick-witted humor and benevolently sarcastic persona, the piece transforms political cliché into absurdist theater, opening up space for comedy, unpredictability, titillation, and an unlikely camaraderie. The indictment made by the piece, if there is any, is multivalent: Bustamante begins by poking fun at a (nameless) arts organization that has offered to fund artists of color whose work “addresses the past 500 years of oppression of indigenous peoples,” and introduces this piece as her response. She then invites “any white man who would like to take the burden of the past 500 years of guilt” to report to the stage. After no one ascends, she moves on to invite “anyone with any inner white men,” then “anyone who is hungry,” then “anyone who knows a white man who is hungry,” and so on. The concept of collective guilt—along with that of unswerving identity—receives all the complication it deserves, swiftly and hilariously.

  Eventually a hodgepodge of white men amble up to the stage and get down on their knees behind her, and Bustamante revels in their pitifulness. (About one particularly scrawny, bald, and hunch-shouldered volunteer, she coos, “Aw, I think he’s going to take it for a lot of people, don’t you?”) At the same time, she lauds them as heroes and martyrs, as those willing to bear the guilt and shame that the more cowardly white men out there are unwilling to face. The unpredictability of the performance arrives when she asks each man to state his name into a microphone (fixed at knee height), and make a statement before taking an absolving bite of her burrito.