- text by Bojana Kunst
- First published in: Frakcija [N.6/7] - January 1998 (Zagreb, Croatia)
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The fact that at the end of the 20th century there is no form or material left unchallenged by the contemporary art reads already as a cliché. Just as it became a platitude to say about contemporary art that, with its interventions into representation procedures, it is tearing apart the firmly fixed structures, invading, indeed, even the human body as the last field that still gives some illusion of untouchability, or rather, of touchability under certain rules. Following that clear (at least, at a first glance) evolutive line of artistic self-questioning and reflecting on one's own structure, we are coming to the most radical strategies, one of which is certainly the performance, or its even more radical form, "body art", which with some of its forerunners already in the 70's and 80's (Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic) and the contemporary artists of the 90's (Ron Athey, Laurence Steger, Annie Sprinkle, Orlan, Franko B, etc.) obsessively explores penetration of the real, the wound, the incision and the hole, in short, with the use of harsh procedures it re-examines the body itself and its representation, thus continuing with the tradition of radical presentation of the body on stage and exposure of all its epidermal, secretory, fleshly and sexual analogies. So, we could talk about a contemporary phenomenon which deals with the body and the problems of bodily identity in a most radical way, which speaks about the body most directly by using it as a material, as an explicit tool of expression, even when by doing that it clearly makes the incision into its corporeality as such. In a way, Annie Sprinkle, Ron Athey, Laurence Steger and others, continue with their work the bodily performance of the 70's, when by violent modernistic re-examination of form and means they challenge even the body itself, the strategies of its presentation, representation and shaping, the very structure of stage presentation dictated by the body and the identities produced by the worn out representation models. The strategies are becoming radical in order to achieve transposition and destruction, so that we could perceive that what is hidden behind the outer shell of the body, that what is secretly inscribed into it, determining its form, as well as in order to finally confront the identity, which, so to speak, is always penetrating the artistic form through the back door and with its realistic invasions remains for ever problematical. On one side, we can notice a concrete use of the body as a material, both, visual and expressive material within the space, which in contact with new technologies (video, computer, etc.) achieves new formal dimensions and new modes of existence, to which the phenomena like space and time, internal and external, are no longer quite as important as they used to be. The most significant contemporary phenomenon in that direction is certainly Australian artist Stelarc, who is using the body as pure material, thus reflecting the status of the body in contact with new technologies. On the other side, in the 70's the body was opening primarily as the reading material or the text of political discourses that were inscribed into it, as an attempt in the first place of female artists of feminist orientation, to expose it and liberate it from the clichés of sexuality, of male/female body differentiation, of body as product, etc. Some of the connections between the performance of the 90's and the beginnings of the aggressive re-examination of representational strategies appear as clear and correctly placed; the representatives of body art are challenging in the first place the body itself, thus continuing the problematization of its dis-play, an accelerated process that began in the 70's. But in spite of that, the question and dilemma still remain: is it really possible to perceive performers like Athey, Sprinkle, Steger, Orlan, etc. and to discover the meaning they are trying to mediate in the light of self-examination of artistic forms, that is, are they still the part of modernistic tradition of de-struction of structure and consequently, of the very structure of the body. It seems, namely, that somehow we cannot place them into that tradition of artistic self-examination, their structure is a lot more "traditional" (in fact, the reflection of structure itself appears to be unnecessary), their reflection is not directed at the artistic event as such, their thought is not occupied with the presentation structure. Instead, they are flirting with classical forms and triviality, leaving an open door for kitsch and bad taste, and provoking because of that (in a period of a general conservative impetus or at least, its foreboding) even more strongly the intriguing reactions. So, in that case, where could we place the performance art of the 90's, or more precisely, how could we explain its radical strategies?
Certainly, the matter here is no longer the reflection on artistic form itself. On the contrary, the performances of the 90's are mostly using classical forms, without penetrating into their structure, that is, without exposing the structure with its fractures, invasions or presentation seams. The performances of the 90's are no longer seen/interpreted as structural networks of which we cannot say very much, that is, they are no longer perceived as self-reflections of one's own form. When we watch the performances of Jerome Bell, Ron Athey, Annie Sprinkle or Laurence Steger, we can see that they are characterized by an almost classical dramaturgy, which is perversely arraying them into a classical theatrical performance, using clichés and classical patterns of storytelling and presentation, as well as some of the most established and most obdurate forms of theatrical representation. Consequently, the focus of interest in the performances of the 90's are is not directed at the form of representation, in fact, to a great extent the artists are using those models which they have at their disposal. Annie Sprinkle is using simple didactic models in her performance "Post Porn Modernism" (1990) - in my opinion her best stage creation - and is plainly demonstrating all forms of sex in "Hard-core from the Heart - My Film Diary of 25 Years as a Metamorphosexual", the performance seen at the last Eurokaz, wherein in a didactic monologue she bares the hierarchic scale of progress from all possible sexual positions and relationships to the spiritual love, sprinkling in a few additional words about freedom, all-encompassing universal love and similar matters. Jerome Bell, Laurence Steger and Ron Athey are using theatrical forms, from such which are closer to physical expression and mime (Jerome Bell) to the allusions to the cabaret, the ritual (Steger, Athey). So, there are no problems with reading or structure, all those works are highly communicative on the form level and attentive of the audience as an important factor in the process of achieving the so called catharsis. So, we could say that here we have an almost classical relationship, which is, exactly because of that, even more provocative and penetrates even more effectively some questions about the art itself. Remember the censuring experienced by the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in connection with his photographs, when the critical judgement of Mapplethorpe as the master of classical form was used as the strongest argument against the intended censoring of his Cincinnati exhibition in 1990. We could hardly say that in these manifestations we are confronted with political and ideological strategies of the body, the strategies which would somehow expose the associated body (female body, homosexual body) and which would try to read the discourses beyond it, what was one of the fundamental characteristic of the performance eruption in the 70's. The analogy on this level does exist, the body presented to us is most frequently some marginal body (a body of a prostitute, of a homosexual or transvestite, a body subjected to domination and subjugation), already problematical as such, if we put it into a certain representative model. We could say that it is in itself a political body, because by persisting in showing us its marginal position, it makes certain statements and takes stand in relation to some traumatic areas of its existence. In spite of the use of the real body, which is constantly widening the circle from which it comes, the political statement is not that chief statement that we are following on these bodies, because in these performances there is no strong desire for destruction of representation, or the mode of presentation, there are no allusions to reading of the hidden meaning, no allusions regarding pertaining to certain groups or courses of ideas. These performances are not examining the perspective (viewer's perspective), they do not transpose that perspective onto the hidden areas, although it may seem so at the first glance. Consequently, the invasion of the real actually hurts (it also hurts us, who are watching it), but it does not offer any signs for political reading, moreover, each of the invasions of the real is placed into a clear stereotype, into a ready-made presentational network, which reveals nothing of a kind, nothing hidden, nothing politically problematical, nothing ideologically discoursive.
Quite the opposite, these creations seem to disclose no other associations but the association to one's own person. The body, with all its fluids and orifices (which are the two most traumatic lines of self-exposure: one reaches into the fluid elusiveness and ephemerality of the body, the other offers the opportunity for a curious glance into its interior) is primarily a private body, it is first of all "my body", that is, the performer's body, the body of that person on the stage. This is the body inside of which an ex-hibition of identities is going on, in other words, the body that determines the identity of the performer, that has performer's Self inscribed into it.
So, we are watching an explicit body and the person inhabiting that body; most performances of the 90's do not contain any distance towards performer's own body, any distance toward performer's own person, quite the opposite, they are proudly (even egotistically, assaulting our stomachs) showing it, exposing it and extending it, talking about the values of the identity exhibited on stage, which are somehow all circled around simplified New Age phrases about love, freedom and liberation of spirit. So, the viewer is constantly receiving a combination or mixture of the real and the fictional; on one side, his eyes are easily penetrating the real body, his stomach is, more or less sensitively, reacting to Athey's performance of administration of enema, his piercing of various parts of his body and similar, while on the other hand, exactly this identity of the performer is producing fictional elements, which are not in the least unnatural or reflected, but strictly stereotyped, both in their form (monologue, didactic moralizing) and content (which is, in addition to already mentioned New Age values, dealing with religion, sin, absolution and similar). What is this, then, what we are watching? The egotistical self-exhibition which fascinates because of its invasion of the real - where we cannot avoid being shocked one way (agreeing) or another (disagreeing) - or the self-exhibition of the identity which penetrates the very essence of the contemporary problems of identity and the body in general?
Both, Ron Athey and Orlan are performers who can, without any doubts, convince us of the second half of this rhetoric question. That in that case it is impossible to incise the body just like that and that penetration of the body can be read also as reflection of a hunt for identity and the body. Or: how these two things can still today stand together, without making it appear altogether overly problematic? "My body", showing itself with secretions and orifices, represents also a desperate reflection of a demand for establishing of the identity, for establishing of one's own body, which would allow us the possibility to install ourselves into it, such as we are, and the identity of the body, which would allow us to shape it after our own image. Exactly because of that, it is possible to find in these performances the above mentioned relationships (more conflicting than not), a direct combination of fictive (classical forms) and real (strictly earnest) where body appears both, as the object and the subject; where the difference between presentation and appearance is constantly being destructed, it is also possible to perceive the constant transition between the real and the fictive subject. Consequently, the body art performances are the performances of an exhibited identity, which through radical interventions constantly escapes the reality (slashing of the skin, injecting of enema into the bowels, sexual intercourse on stage) in an attempt to finally catch its body there, and - at the same time - they are exhibitions of the body that in desperate search for its identity is crawling more and more into fiction, into a fictive image, into a cliché.
Somatic visibility is that essential strategy, within which "my body" , my identity, could finally be found; it is an open wound, mirroring "my Self". The question is whether this encounter of the body and the identity is ever successful. Therefore we can also view those performances as a paradoxical answer to the universal loss of the body in the modern times, we can read them as an awareness of the body as the last sanctuary, where for quite some time already there is no place for subjectivity. The body is becoming less and less the space for individuality, for difference, we are progressing, more and more, toward that state of things when all of us will have the same body, eat the same food, enjoy the same pleasures (using the proper protection, of course) and as there are no longer any secrets about the body in our everyday life, the secretiveness on stage would be simply phony. Consequently, we can view these performances as a desire to recolonize the body with subjectivity, to refill it, to achieve its individual characterization, as a desire for freedom of specific stigmatization. Nowadays, when it has become normal to do things without the body (virtual technology, etc.), when it has become almost impossible to differentiate between the body and its image, when bodies are becoming more and more the epidermal sacks, those artists are telling us that the body is still traumatically here, that our fundamental conflict with the body is still unresolved and that it can still fatally mark our personal tragedy, pleasure, illness or destiny.