Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment

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Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment

Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment

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Another illustrative example comes from Abramović’s infamous Rhythm 0. Standing silently in the middle of a room, she invited the audience to do whatever they please to her motionless body. The artists also placed bottles of wine, glasses, scissors, a loaded gun, and other paraphernalia on a nearby table. In one version of the performance, a fight broke out between audience members as a man attempted to manipulate Abramović’s finger into pulling the trigger while the gun was pointed at her head. A group then set themselves the task of protecting her. PS: Oh, wow, Jesus Christ. You are absolutely right about the arc, but I’d never noticed that before. Your saying this actually helps to provide another answer to your earlier question about the role of the critic, which is sometimes to interpret art on behalf of the artist (if you’ll allow me to refer to the book as ‘art’ for a moment). Johnny,” Thompson had reportedly informed him, “we were just sitting here talking about you, and then we started talking about my needs, and what I need is a 40,000-candlepower illumination grenade. Big, bright bastards, that’s what I need. See if you can get them for me. I might be coming to Baton Rouge to interview [imprisoned former Louisiana governor] Edwin Edwards, and if I do I will call you, because I will be looking to have some fun, which as you know usually means violence.” Snow’s monograph is interested in how and why representations of self-injury and cruelty are productive parodies of a whole, self-contained, and fulfilled body. She particularly attends to trans representations of self-injury and cruelty, likening Arsenault’s performance of the feminine to queer artist Cajsa von Zeipel. ‘Her adoption of, and subsequent dismantling of, hyper-feminine attributes might be interpreted as a generous act of martyrdom for trans and cis women alike,’ Snow writes, ‘the former often unfairly yoked to a conventional image of femininity as a matter of life and death as well as of conformity, desirability, and professional advancement’. Snow’s monograph is not a theoretical account of biopolitics and violence in contexts of US empire — you can turn elsewhere for that — but more of an attempt to understand why individuals utilise self-violence to rebel against those contexts. For the most part, Snow focusses less on gruelling instances of self-injury but instead the comedic, pathetic, or humiliating. She elucidates how comedy, to quote Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, is ‘always a pleasure-spectacle of form’s self-violation’.

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. Crucial to all Snow’s artists is the use of pain as a conduit to authenticity, as a way to access the real. What feels striking is how staged and less-than-real these pursuits sometimes appear. Indeed, something that Snow only discusses towards the end of the book is what happens when things go wrong (she explores the tragic death of Pedro Ruiz at length). The ways in which the lure of pain, in its proclivity for accident, offers an epistemological break from what is knowable.Holly Connolly: What I love about your work as a critic is that you’re able to find meaning and value in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, so that your criticism often adds a new depth or dimension to the work itself. What do you think the role of the critic is?

A bad idea, executed with full commitment, can be transmuted into a good or even great idea if it is suitably interesting, unexpected, dazzling, or entertaining. It can also be transmuted into art — an act of conceptual significance, meant to elucidate some facet of society or culture that is in itself a bad idea, whether that facet is war, sex, love, patriarchal violence, or a yen for self-destruction. Whether the practitioner believes his or her bad idea to be conceptually significant rather than simply an amusing, violent goof is one way for an audience to determine whether they are watching art or entertainment. Through her measured prose, Snow explains what she finds valuable across all these varied bodies of work. Korine’s personality, for instance, was characterized by a comic combination of self-destruction and self-effacement. In an interview on Letterman in 1998 the director, visibly intoxicated, tells the show’s host that he plans to shoot a sequel to Titanic set on a “rowboat.” The book is concerned with the question of why would someone injure their body in the name of art or entertainment, and why would anyone be interested this spectacle. Snow takes a more exploratory approach that gives the reader ample context and space to consider the question of commentary. It is in offering rich contextualisation where her writing is most engaging. Repetition, as Lacan preaches, is what defines the difference between human and animal understandings of signification. For the human animal repetition of the same signifier—e.g. War is war, or Brexit means Brexit— brings additional meaning, the former word does not mean the same, does not have the same sense, as the latter. For the non-human animal repetition is of no import (we are told). Good-boy means good-boy the first and the last time. For human animals meanings can be emptied out or complexified by repetition. Following this thought, one can appreciate that Korine, in Fight Harm, getting punched in the face might be tragicomedy in one instance, but by repetition it folds into comedic farce. Something entirely different. and performance artist is another. Performance artists are always so goddamn self-important, intellectualizing everything they do. I don’t intellectualize anything I do. I’m kind of uncomfortable with that term [“performance artist”] because it comes across as highbrow, elitist, pompous and not entertaining. We’re just trying to make you laugh. We’re like the Three Stooges, except we’re doing it for real.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.”– Adam Steiner, Louder Than War As she notes, some of the underlying themes of the franchise – masculinity, violence, guns, risk, self-harm and suburban ennui – have strong links to 1970s performance art. In Burden’s Shoot (1971), for instance, the artist arranged to be filmed while getting shot in the shoulder. Burden would later claim in a 2007 New Yorker interview with Schjedahl that the extremes he went to in Shoot and other self-injurious performances were motivated by ‘want[ing] to be taken seriously as an artist’, thereby offering an intriguing take on the contemporary metric for artistic achievement.

This gripping, brainy, fascinating and often hilarious book took me on the wildest of rides through art and the body, literature, pop culture, sensation, gender, class, mortality, theory – what else even is there? The sense that Philippa Snow had an absolute blast writing this is palpable and contagious; reading Which As You Know Means Violence left me with a giddy gratitude for this strange human life.”– Michelle Tea In Which as You Know Means Violence, writer and art critic Philippa Snow analyses the subject of pain, injury and sadomasochism in performance, from the more rarefied context of contemporary art to the more lowbrow realm of pranksters, stuntmen and stuntwomen, and uncategorisable, danger-loving YouTube freaks. In a world where violence - of the market, of climate change, of capitalism - is part of our everyday lives, Which as You Know Means Violence focuses on those who enact violence on themselves, for art or entertainment, and analyses the role that violence plays in twenty-first century culture. The best book I’ve read on art and pain since Maggie Nelson’s Art of Cruelty, and a worthy successor to that work.”– Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online By focusing on a larger corpus of artists, with a more concerted effort to focus on self-injurious and endurance-based body art from queer, and POC communities, Snow’s exploration of gendered embodiment might have put pressure on the idea that female subjectivity is some sort of internal truth emerging from the body. Works like Chris Burden’s Shoot, which is often considered as an exemplary work of 1970s body art, are habitually thought about in terms of “mania”, “oblivion”, “agony”, “ecstasy”, “physical discomfort” and “inner turmoil”. Much of Snow’s criticism is focused on the excessive aftereffects of this genre, but I would argue that what undergirds so much of painful and self-injurious body art is the precarious balance between excess and mania on the one hand, and control and restraint on the other.Korine’s sense of humour,” Snow tells us, “sprang from an innate sense of being contradictory […] both hard and soft.” In an unfinished film, Fight Harm (1999), he recorded himself starting altercations with strangers; he was often left bloody and beaten in the process. Subjecting himself to the strength of others seems, Snow suggests, to serve as a means of exposing Korine’s narcissism and his vulnerability. PS: Oh God, it is so, so important to me! I need people to understand that when I am, for instance, writing about Logan Paul’s YouTube in the context of Andre Breton’s definition of surrealism or whatever, I am absolutely making fun of myself as much as I am making a point. I think it’s possible to do both things simultaneously: to apply serious analysis to an unserious thing and in doing so make a salient point, and also to recognise the inherent preposterousness of applying that kind of seriousness to some of the dumbest things on earth. The idea that I take myself too seriously might be one of the worst things a person could take away from my writing, to be honest; I find it hard to connect with writers who don’t have at least a little touch of humour – not zaniness, not silliness, but some deadpan sense of the absurd – in their work.



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