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Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury As Art And Entertainment
By Philippa Snow (Repeater Books, 2022)
A short, sharp stiletto of a book that gets to the point of how our inner pains become public across the highs and lows of (un)popular culture.
There is a (jagged) line connecting the extreme hinterlands of 1970s performance art to the millennial masculinity crisis of TV show Jackass emerging in the very late 1990s – their chief passion and their trial are rigors and rituals of violence – to become the slackers’ requiem. Philippa Snow is keen to explore the grey area of performance and perpetration, philosophically speaking doing and being done-to. Her book bridges the intellectual chasm between academic foresight and translatable experiences of outrageous pain Snow picks out this choice shard of a quote from academic Jason Concepcion: “A stunt is simply a very bad idea…executed with total commitment”.
Snow argues that a large part of our expectations of pain are formed by the inner tensions of masculine identity that requires star of the show Jonny Knoxville (nee Clapp) to conceal his inner sensitivity and self-awareness he shows us the clown face that we want to see. Where he is expected to stress-test his body towards being brutalised and to remain unbroken, not simply to be exposed as a woman might, Knoxville et al often lean into latent eroticism of getting naked, simply as part of the stunts. Knoxville’s capacity for hurt, and acknowledging the schadenfreude and personal resonances for the viewer, is perhaps why he has such enthusiastic capacity for the wealth of exhibitionism as expression in his performances; artifice rubbing up against the very real. Where the female body is seen as more vulnerable and therefore more readily open to pain, aside from the fact that women routinely endure greater bodily suffering through childbirth, beautifying regimes and threat of sexual assault, via implied submission, we hold male bodies to a higher standard are more moved and disappointed when they fail to live up to this. Snow points out that it is sexualised female bodies that we hate to see damaged, disfigured or wounded; their objectification collapsing in the eye of the beholder – “don’t ruin the merchandise”. For Snow this rejection of bodily expectation becomes: “an exorcism of the feminine itself”.
On Jackass we didn’t just see the broken doll bodies fallen where they lay, we hear, like a voice in our ear, the flesh slapped on concrete, the pseudo post-orgasmic groans, winces, and cries sharpened into exclamation points of each incident, a neurotransmission shot through the body like a microphone. In the book we read that the vocalization of pain is either loud and comes from a more basic pre-language centre, or abstractly silent; its own form of muted discomfort within the audience, who expect or even need a reaction to react-to, to make the experience seem real. I really enjoyed Snow’s description of Marina Abramovich’s long staged pauses, she sharpens the agony of the infinite moment, the pain of not-knowing stretched across– to wait (and bleed). The once-personal and art partner of Abramovic, Ulay, argued for the solemnity of “inactivity, inaction, fasting and silence” advancing the idea of Wordsworth’s working definition of poetry as “an emotion recollected in a moment of tranquility” where the stillness itself is the non-concrete creation, there is no art-as-product.
Elsewhere the god-is-dead (silent) listening of performance artist Chris Burden (perhaps best known for being nailed to the body of a Volkswagen Beetle) when he hides in a high-school locker on a university campus, or behind a shroud, both there and not (eat your heart out Sylvia Plath). In this section I could help but think of the great masochist ‘dog-philosopher’ Diogenes, masturbating in the marketplace to show his contempt for human society, living in a wine tub surrounded by doggy pals, sharing their street manners. He elsewhere ‘performed’ like the Christian ‘stylite’ ascetics; fasting in a tower and preaching his ideas of misanthropic recrimination.
Snow unearths the rugged mutual ground of the grotesque and the sublime where one person’s stupid stunt is another’s act of spiritual expiation, somehow becoming more alive through pain the nearer we edge ourselves towards death. Making a show of one’s suffering is not pure voyeurism, it can be attainment of a heightened state; a mutual shock that leaps over the mimetic barrier between victim and spectator, united in the moment, enjoying shared exploitation “birthing sudden glory” like the sweaty sheen of Catholic Guilt. For ‘people’ like Marina Abramovic art became the living thing, not normal life, the body was merely a conduit for fractured aesthetic acts.
A particular example is the relatively underground S&M artist and cystic fibrosis sufferer Bob Flanagan who always performed within one eye upon death. It is interesting to note that Snow sees his affirmative acts of sexual provocation as potentially fulfilling, evidenced by the fact that Flanagan died aged 43 when many people with CF do not expect to live beyond their twenties. His end is particularly poignant where he made dying an artform in itself moving from his ‘Fuck Journal’ of 1988 to the last words of the ‘Pain Journal’ two sides of same coin that saw Flanagan record what it was to fade away as pain finally overcame pleasure.
There is a really interesting look at Harmony Korine’s ‘lost’ film of trying to start fights with strangers – Fight Harm – which I would love to have seen contrasted with the uber-male parody of the Nietzschean ideal ‘Fight Club’. Both the novel and the film aimed to offer fictional commentary on a generation of men “raised by women”. As a nine Inch Nails fan I would also have liked to learn more about Flanagan’s role in the band’s early music videos such as “Happiness In Slavery”, (contrasted with live stage performances from the Jim Rose Circus), included in the extended snuff film, Broken Movie. But perhaps outright murder is beyond the remit. Where Camille Paglia offered yet another tossed-off line that female sexuality is power, period, it makes one wonder what then is nasty, painful, gory sex performed upon the submissive male, a mere display of force or an overturning of the paradigm, an impossible flipside?
Snow gracefully articulates and soon short-circuits the natural division between high and low culture, revealing that when it comes to pain, its motion runs full circle. The ecstasy of agony is as profound and sublime as it is ridiculous and offensive; just see Snow’s list of saints strung-out on starvation and demystifying their own beauty to spite the body as just another way of getting nearer to death and closer to God, alongside Jackass’s continued use of internal fluids as abject body horror au dela-du lettre. Snow has written a penetrating and poignant look at the extremes of body and soul, accident made art. A revised/expanded edition or even a sequel to Which As You Know Means Violence would be most welcome. Snow’s book is insightful, measured and far-reaching – this is going to hurt – and you’ll love her for it.
~
Words by Adam Steiner: Adam is a lifeguard, journalist and author. His next book is Silhouettes And Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) forthcoming in 2023.
In 2020 his first music book was published: Into The Never, a deep dive into the Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral album, was published by Rowman and Littlefield, his first novel, Politics Of The Asylum about a cleaner in a collapsing hospital was published in 2018.
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