The Art of Cruelty Read online

  As everyone from Ono to Abramovi´c to Lynn Breedlove (lead singer of the queercore band Tribe 8, who often invited male audience members to come onstage and suck her dick) knows, even men who have volunteered to take part in such ventures can behave volatilely. The feeling of suddenly being in the spotlight with a woman indisputably running the show is, for many, an intolerable reversal (albeit one that many men have a taste for, behind closed doors). For this reason, part of the deep pleasure of Indig/urrito lies in watching Bustamante’s commanding grace, power, and wit as she banters with each man’s self-introduction and apologia, as well as with the occasionally over-theatrical fellating of her burrito by the hammier of them. There’s also plenty of edgy flirtation: after a handsome “Justin” says, “I’m male, I’m white, and I’m sorry,” with more coquettishness than penitence, Bustamante responds, “I’m not sorry, Justin, I’m not sorry at all,” and rolls her eyes in ecstasy at his bite. As the bald gentleman—who introduces himself as “Allan”—takes his bite, Bustamante squeals, “He’s so pitiful!” and holds his head against her rocking pelvis. By the time the last biter, a slim, short-haired figure in a suit, announces into the mic, “I’m a girl, I’m Hispanic, and I’m prepared,” and attempts to unroll a condom against the mess hanging from Bustamante’s harness, all facile premises have disintegrated (as has the burrito).

  Before the biting of Indig/urrito begins, Bustamante asks the members of the audience to yell a congratulatory “Amen” at the moment that each man’s teeth enter her burrito, and to think, at that moment, of any white man they know who needs absolving, so that “we can all just move on.” The audience at Theater Artaud responds to this call with a loud cheer. Obviously, Bustamante and her audience know that “moving on” from 500 years of exploitation and racism isn’t that easy. But neither her call nor the audience’s spontaneous response comes off as a total joke. Indig/urrito provides fifteen minutes of what a different kind of “moving on” might feel like—one not based in denial, abdication, derision, or preemptive dismissal, but in discomfiting role reversals, fraught but consensual confrontations, humor that rides the edge of contempt and anger without collapsing into their force, and a dedication to seeing what happens next, to seeing how individual humans might comport themselves in a politically and sexually charged situation they have been invited to address rather than repress. “Anyone who is offended by this,” Bustamante warns before the ritual begins, “I really encourage you to leave your body.”

  THEY’RE ONLY DOLLS

  IF WE’RE going to listen to what a slew of newspaper editors, social scientists, CEOs, politicians, historians, concerned parents, university presidents, and statisticians have to say about the role that representations of violence may play in “real” life, it seems also right to listen to artists or works of art that explicitly take up the question. A scissor of a play such as Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003), for example, has plenty to say on this account, even if what it has to say may not please a soul.

  The Pillowman takes place in a police interrogation room in an unnamed totalitarian country. Two policemen—Ariel and Tupolski—are interrogating and torturing a writer, Karturian, in an attempt to figure out the relationship between Karturian’s short stories—many of which feature the horrific torture and murder of children—and three recent, “real-life” torture-killings, the details of which closely resemble those in Karturian’s stories. The interrogation reveals a complicated knot of “real” and invented brutalities: we learn that Karturian has a slightly retarded brother, Michal, who spent the first seven years of his life being tortured by their parents in a room next to Karturian’s; that Karturian eventually liberated Michal from the torture, then smothered their parents to death in retribution; that, as an adult, Karturian lived with brother Michal, and read him all of his stories; and that one day, brother Michal took it upon himself to murder three children in the ingeniously gruesome ways imagined by Karturian in his tales.

  Before Karturian learns what his brother has done, he thinks that it is solely his writing that is at issue with the state. He asks his interrogators, “Do you think I’m trying to say, ‘Go out and murder children?’ . . . Are you trying to say I shouldn’t write stories with child-killings in them because in the real world there are child-killings?” To which Ariel responds, “He wants us to think that he thinks that all we’ve got against him is a disagreement with his fucking prose style.” Of course, they have more against him than that, as brother Michal turns out to be in custody next door and has already confessed to the crimes. Later, however, after some confusion arises as to Michal’s culpability, the policemen make it clear that whichever of the two brothers actually killed the children, Karturian’s writing alone would still make him guilty. “You know what? I would torture you to death just for writing a story like that, let alone acting it out,” Ariel says, as he removes an electrode-torture-device from a cabinet and readies it for use.

  The intelligence of The Pillowman (which, I might add, I have no interest in seeing on stage, where the visual dramatization of its cruelties seems to me as needless as it is inevitable) is that it shows, via the injustice of Karturian’s torture and eventual execution, how cruel it is to insist that “life” and “art” have some kind of direct, one-to-one relationship, while at the same time showing how preposterous it is to insist that they have nothing to do with each other. After all, Karturian’s ghastly stories are clearly revisitations and restagings of the trauma of his and his brother’s youth, just as his brother’s acting out of the stories is part and parcel of his own damage. Eventually we even get the “problem childhood” backstory of torturer Ariel, a childhood that Tupolski shorthands as a “ ‘fucked by your dad’ childhood.” The two torturers end up giving voice to two equally reasonable positions vis-à-vis the crimes (including their own) at hand: “I’m just tired of everybody around here using their shitty childhoods to justify their own shitty behaviour,” Tupolski says, whereas Ariel tells Karturian, “I know all this isn’t your fault . . . and I’m sorry for you, I’m really sorry for you,” moments before he pulls the black execution hood over Karturian’s head so that Tupolski can shoot him dead.

  “TO RENDER a violent act in language is not at all the same as committing a violent act,” argues writer Brian Evenson. “The writing itself is not violent, but rather precise. If you’ve ever been involved in real acts of violence, you can see how profound the difference is.” True enough. It would be an utterly egregious, essentially totalitarian mistake to conflate McDonagh’s writing—or Evenson’s, or anyone’s, for that matter—with the commitment of a violent act. (Evenson—once a high priest in the Mormon Church, now a professor at Brown University—has had reason to note the difference: in 1996, a controversy over his first collection of stories, Altmann’s Tongue, cost him his job at Brigham Young University, precipitated the dissolution of his first marriage, and led to his eventual departure from the Mormon Church.)

  Still, I don’t entirely buy Evenson’s sleight of hand, by which representations of violence in literature slide into being simply “precise.” There are, after all, many other forms of precision (are there not?). Is violence simply the sharpest, the fastest, the most immediately or physiologically affecting? As A. O. Scott—who has been writing articles in the New York Times for some time now about the escalating brutality in mainstream cinema—put it in his review of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), “All you have to do is scalp someone—as happens with loving graphicness—to put the audience on edge.”

  Clearly violence is not always a shortcut, nor do I mean to imply that one could or should substitute it with some sort of nonfat equivalent. My point is simply that it isn’t quite right to say that McDonagh’s slow revelation of the fates of the murdered children in The Pillowman—one little boy bleeds to death after having all five toes of one foot chopped off, one little girl dies from eating apples laced with razor blades, and one little girl is lit
erally crucified by her foster parents, then buried alive to see if she will rise again (she doesn’t)—is just “precise.” It is cruel—as is much in Evenson’s work. And part of The Pillowman’s cruelty is that we, like Michal, have now internalized these sickening tales (not to mention another—that of the play The Pillowman itself). The question of what effect they might have on us—on our psyches, our souls, our social landscape, and our deeds—has become our burden to bear.

  “In life,” Evenson says, “violence happens to you. In literature, you make the choice to pick up the book and read, and to continue reading.” He is right—consent is absolutely key. The feeling that we have been violated by a work of art is compounded—and perhaps made tolerable—by the fact that we chose to experience it, come what may. But that doesn’t render the apprehension that a cruelty has taken place entirely invalid. In this sense, the Brigham Young student who wrote the anonymous letter intended to “alert the authorities” to the nature of Evenson’s writing may have been onto something. In reading Altmann’s Tongue, the aggrieved student wrote, “I feel like someone who has eaten something poisonous and is desperate to get rid of it.”

  Now, to whom, exactly, a play like McDonagh’s The Pillowman might be cruel, and what the nature of that cruelty is, I cannot say. If I could say, Simulated cruelty performs no cruelty at all, then there would be no discomfort. I could relax—even if it meant denying my felt experience of many works of art, or—and this is harder—ignoring the full-fledged assault on the barriers between art and life that much twentieth-century art worked so hard to perform. I could draw my line in the sand each time, and rest comfortably on the “art” side—just as those who regularly root on the humiliations of reality TV are accustomed to dissolving whatever guilt or reservations they might otherwise have about the treatment of their fellow humans by resting on the “TV” part of the equation. (At least, that is what I typically do: this woman signed up to be encased in a coffin full of biting rats for an hour; this cruelty therefore does not count as a “real” cruelty; it need make no claim on my conscience.) And certainly some suffering—such as that experienced by the handful of journalists who have been voluntarily waterboarded, for example, so that they might weigh in on whether the procedure is “really” torture—cannot easily be categorized as a cruelty at all.

  Conversely, if I could say, Simulated cruelty does perform a sort of cruelty, and if one is “against” cruelty in all its guises, whatever that might mean, then one should also be “against” cruel simulations, whatever that might mean—then there would also be no discomfort—then I could join the ranks of those working overtime to criminalize and prosecute anime depicting the rape of prepubescents, for example, or just partake in a good old-fashioned book-burning at my local library, tossing everything from Lolita to The Pillowman on the pyre.

  In a 2003 piece in The Believer called “The Bad Mormon,” writer Ben Ehrenreich chronicles how, in response to his accusers at Brigham Young, Evenson wrote a thirteen-page apologia in which he argued that his work was, in fact, “uncompromisingly moral,” insofar as it attempted “ ‘to paint violence in its true colors and to let it reveal for itself how terrible it is.’ ” (See Michael Haneke: “Violence in my films is shown as it really is. . . . That’s why the films are often experienced as painful.”)

  Ehrenreich notes—correctly, I think—that while Evenson’s attackers may have sounded unsophisticated, Evenson’s remarks seemed disingenuous. First, even when art produces the sensation of having presented something “as it really is,” it does so by means of focus and artifice—or, rather, by a complicated procedure one could describe as using artifice to strip artifice of artifice. In other words, it is still and always an act of invention, transformation, and selection. Second, as Ehrenreich notes, “there is far too much humor in [Evenson’s] stories, too much aesthetic delight in the syntax of even the most gruesome episodes, for Evenson to pass himself off as a simple pedant.” Not only are humor and aesthetic delight crucial aspects of Evenson’s genius, but it is foolhardy to take any artist at face value when he or she purports to use violence in only a moral way. To be frank, I don’t believe such a thing is possible—not because of any failure on the part of the artist, but because of the unmanageable natures of violence, sadism, and voyeurism themselves.

  In the well-known opening sequence of David Lynch’s 1986 film, Blue Velvet, the camera zooms in on a severed ear nestled in the grass of a picture-perfect, suburban American lawn, thereby intimating the world of submerged cruelties into which the film’s protagonist, Jeffrey, will soon descend. In contemplating this scene in his book A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America, David Griffith writes, “The severed ear in the vacant lot invites us to enter, with Jeffrey, the underworld. We think we’ll return uncorrupted, even wiser. But violence doesn’t enlighten; it taints. We can’t be both pervert and detective.”

  Griffith is right that violence or cruelty does not enlighten. He may also be right that it taints (though the hygienic paranoia embedded in the word seems unnecessary—better, I think, to stick with our aggrieved student, who feels like she has “eaten something poisonous and is desperate to get rid of it”: the imbibing of cruelty or violence thereby turns from a moral dilemma into a metabolic one). But Griffith is not right that we cannot be both pervert and detective. More often than not, that is exactly what we are. Well-intentioned moralists such as Griffith may wish that it weren’t so. (Perhaps for him, it isn’t.) But if one is to take Jacques Rancière’s principle of emancipation seriously—that “an art is emancipated and emancipating . . . when [it] stops wanting to emancipate us”—then no artist can or should pretend to patrol the borders.

  But perhaps Griffith simply means to return the burden to us. Perhaps he means to say that we—as audience members, spectators, readers, participants, consumers—cannot hope to ferret out injustices, protest certain forms of injury, violence, and violation, while also deriving pleasure or excitation from representations of them (much less from the things themselves: super verboten!). I disagree. It does not help to wish the complexity of our responses away, to punish ourselves for them, to fail to make distinctions between them, or to dream of coming back uncorrupted from them. “It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “That discovery is called the Fall of Man.” Or—if we’d rather leave the lapsarian saga behind (and I would), artist Joseph Beuys gives us the sentiment with an activist twist: “A lifetime is not so long,” he wrote. “You cannot wait for a tool without blood on it.”

  RICHER AND raunchier than The Pillowman—which is, at the end of the day, a pretty conventional “issue play,” albeit with an ingenious Chinese box structure and some rough material—is the work of artist Paul McCarthy, which customarily offers more gratuitous—and more nuanced—opportunities for meditating on our responses to disturbing representations. I’m thinking in particular of the 1987 video Family Tyranny, made with Mike Kelley, which manages, in just eight minutes, using a polystyrene ball, a funnel, and what appears to be a very runny mayonnaise, to produce an unrivalled amount of tension, revulsion, and bewilderment about the functioning of cruelty.

  On an Astroturf stage set, McCarthy’s shirtless, hairy Dad character uses his hand to stuff the mayonnaise-cum-substance down a funnel that has been stuck into the polystyrene ball. The ball has been made to look minimally like a head, by means of a tin hat and an opening where the mouth would be. As the Father repeatedly rams his greased-up fist into the funnel, causing mayonnaise-cum-juice to smear and spill all over, he repeats, with the sing-song lilt of an instructional abuser, “Daddy come home from work today,” and “My daddy did this to me; you can do this to your son, too” and “Do it slowly, let them feel it, do it slowly—let ’em get used to it.” Later in the video, a Son character (played by Kelley) appears, whimpering and futilely attempting escape. But for whatever reason, it isn’t until
another coarse simulation of rape—this time with the Son cowering and screaming under a table, and the Father mercilessly, rhythmically jamming a baseball bat into a red pitcher on the table’s top—that the effect of a nearly unwatchable cruelty is once again achieved.

  How can ramming mayonnaise down an opening in a polystyrene ball, or banging a baseball bat into a pitcher, make a viewer feel so profoundly, almost unmanageably, ill at ease? As Arthur Danto once said in response to Family Tyranny, “ ‘They’re only dolls’ helps about as much as ‘It’s only art.’ ” Or, as critic Bruce Hainley put it in a 2001 piece in Frieze, “McCarthy has reiterated that ‘there’s a big difference between ketchup and blood.’ Of course, there’s just as big a difference between a dummy, mannequin or doll, and a human being. But how and why does one invoke the other and can the referential impact be throttled? In a media-saturated society can anything be or remain only what it is?” This latter isn’t a question that can be easily answered—which is likely why Hainley sagely doesn’t try. Things do and do not remain “only what they are”: that is the slippery space from which work like McCarthy’s derives so much of its power.

  “What you have to do is emotionally get this to him,” the Father in Family Tyranny insists, offering another clue as to the short video’s potency. To get it to him, or to us, emotionally (rather than physically, or “actually”), simulation and artifice are key. One obvious layer of simulation involves McCarthy’s celebrated use of easily recognizable food substances (chocolate, catsup, mayonnaise, and so on) in lieu of actual body fluids (a tack which, as many have noted, differentiates his work from that of the Actionists, whose work McCarthy’s both references and transforms). Another is that McCarthy does not cast the audience as voyeurs on a discrete scene unfolding in the privacy of a home. Rather, the Father character is already re-performing these operations on his Son—parodically, pedagogically—for the viewer’s benefit, on a stage set, at one point even counseling, “Try this at home!” On the one hand, this transparent attitude toward fakery makes the work bearable to watch (and, in my case—only after repeated viewings—a species of funny). On the other, the obvious artifice also makes the piece more insidious, as it liberates the abuse from the burden of believable representation, and places a crystallized version of its effects on display.