A man who shoots himself and later crucifies himself on a Volkswagen, there is someone you can see masturbating in a public place, but only by invitation and mirrors, a woman invites people to come up on the stage where she is sitting so they can cut all of her clothes off, someone yells and rolls around on glass in front of an audience, until he is bleeding, an accountant decides that he hates his life and replaces it with rituals including being hung from his nipples, instead of playing guitar a musician incites violence and spits on his audience, instead of playing guitar a musician incites violence and exposes his genitals, a bulimic arranges hundreds of very thin models into elaborate tableau, a man who is abused and isolated from his family has elaborate plastic surgery to eliminate who he is, a woman who comes from a safe and middle class life in the suburbs has elaborate plastic surgery to make herself resemble works of great art, a woman stuffs yams up her anus and then at a later date rolls around the stage in chocolate, a man is diagnosed with cystic fibrosis and turns into a self identified supermasochist, making the pain work for him, five videos show a clown being beaten his screams amplified through the small room, three men spend years arranging orgies that include music they composed, sexual activity, ritual bloodletting and other madness, a man spends two days wrapped in a felt blanket next to a coyote, a man bleeds himself over the course of a year until he has 8 pints, which he makes into a bust of his head, a man gets onto MTV by being run over a car, driving down large hills in a shopping cart and mutilating his genitals, a man makes a film that gets wide distribution and raves from the New York Times with a scene of reliving an elephant's sexual tension, this same man made snow sculptures of fornicating women and put them on her parents lawn, a film maker gets handsome men and women to eat what looks like shit on screen, a man cans his own
shit, a man makes photographs of blood, milk and urine, a woman makes a print of her pulling out a bloody tampon, a man convinces 7 others to eat horse rectums in public, a musician eats the heads off bats and there are others. Who are they: Chris Burden was the man who crucified and shot himself in the mid 70s, Vito Acconci masturbated at the blue chip Illena Sonnabend 1969, Yoko Ono got people to strip her with scissors the mid 60s, Iggy Pop self injured on stage in Detroit ca 1969, Fakir Musafar stopped being an accountant in the late 50s, The punk audience madness is of course the Sex Pistols, but it was took over by all sorts of other punk from the 70s onward, Jim Morrison exposed his penis in Miami in 1972, Vanessa Beecroft starves her models for the last 10 years or so, Michael Jackson is plastic surgery victim one who started in the late 70s, Orlan is victim two who started in the early 80s, and to that list we can include Jocelyn Wildenstein who became famous for looking like a cat ca 1992 and is only getting worse and genderless diva/club superstar Amanda Lepore appeared at the same time as Karen Finley who was the yam loving chocoholic(ie mid 80s, to early 90s), Bob Flanagan is the su
permasochist and dates his feelings to childhood with the needles and the bloodletting, Bruce Nauman hates clowns and proved so in 1987, the orgies are hosted by Otto Muhl, Hermann Nitsch and Gunter Bru and have taken place every 5 years since 1965 in a field outside of Vienna where they have become a kind of pilgrimage, Mark Quinn bleed himself from 1990 to 1991, The Jackass crew, debuting on MTV to record ratings, and having a number one film, occurred in 2001 to the present day, Tom Green masturbates Elephants and the New York Times critic was AO Scott, Pasolini made the pretty terrorists eat shit in Salo made in 1975, Seranno made body fluids glam in the 80s, the bloody tampoon is Judy Chicago in 1972, the horse rectums are Joe Rogan in Fear Factor, last season, and Ozzy bit the bats sometime in the coke addled 80s.
What do these have in common, what do these lists mean, are I taking this out of context? If we take the earliest limit as the late 60s and the latest as last year, what happened in the last 40 years that made this kind of often permanent, often shocking spectacle common? What happened in those years were the most drastic changes in the way society were run since the enlightenment. Identities were being formed, politics were being structured around them, the ease of transatlantic communication including flight meant ideas, and complaints, structures, and revolution were being broadcast in every corner. Feminism, gay rights, isolation, anarachy all came into one place. What was taboo was being talked about, what was considered shameful was spoken out loud for the first time? But that ended, The revolutions in 1968 gave birth to Kent State, Stonewall caused police crack downs, women’s lib made the life of wife and mother so imposing that there was agitation to get more, and then when the
more came, their was collapse to what it mean. As well a larger social change mean that personal change was imminent, and with that social change came a kind of hedonism. The world was new, and with this New World they could change it, and that change must come with all sorts of pleasure.
This explains in many ways the essential masochism of the art from the late 60s and early 70s and with that masochism and obsession with the person. There was a belief that pain was a way to the inner soul, that releasing pain was healthy. Look at The Leathermans Handbook, with it discussing BDSM as a way towards personal fulfillment, or EST, where over heated rooms and verbal abuse was supposed to bring inner peace, or the rise or new religious movements or cults that came with this
This may explain some of this, obviously The Cut Piece was not only about rape, but what happened when women were made the custody of men, and this was about discussed as menstruation, which makes the Judy Chicago piece so shocking; punk and rock and roll were catharsis, the masturbating Barden becomes Barren the new messiah, who crucifies himself on the new mechanics and ties the hedonism to the new hard spiritualism, the spiritualism also ties into Beuys, who was trying to create a new America, making the Coyote the trickster God that was lost to Puritanism, the other extreme end of this, of course are the Actionists, their blood orgies, part pagan, part ancient Israel and large chunks of pre Vatican Two Catholicism, that dark, fucked up and deeply sexy mystery that was replaced with a touchy feely and necessary revisionism. That was the 60s and 70s though, and if it can be explained by liberation tendencies moving into something larger and weirder, this spirit may have ended in the 80s, the time of conservative politics, covert wars, increased facist tendencies, famine, AIDS, Cancer and all that other good times, but the art has not really changed. Flanagan became famous in the 80s, with his performances centering around his BDSM, Finley recorded an album about her rape, and wrote about it extensively, and called her pro fucking radical sex, chocolate and yams performances a feminist excessive in pleasure. Both of them was taboo shattering, both of them were so hermetic that it became very difficult to watch. Orlan and later Beecroft took this personal obsession with body, and turned it dangerous-physically destroying their bodies, through starvation and surgery.
The theory around these people is all the same, discussions of the body, of control and pressure to maintain the perfect figure. The hygiene of the surgical chamber, becomes the hygiene of the toilet. Burning fat can mean fire or medical incineration, and no one realize how the creation of identity can mean the obliteration of self. I am Woman Hear Me Roar, can mean I am nothing but women.
Which makes the case of Lepore, Wildenstein and Jackson so interesting in this case, they are the exceptions, unable to be shielded by Theory, unable to connect to a nexus of art history and identity politics, they are mocked or made into freaks. Lepore appears to not care, her strange and artificial body showing up at clubs with almost no clothing, she is naked but instead of this nakedness being honest or raw, it is another kind of disguise. She is the posthuman freak show, and she makes money selling it-sometime an actress, sometimes a whore, sometimes a work of art, sometimes geisha, so new that language has caught up.
If Orlan is theory approved and Amanda Lepore is enough of a freak to make a living then Wildenstein and Jackson are the exceptions that prove the rule. Michael Jackson, in the words of a common aphorism has made enough money to make a beautiful black boy an odd looking white women. Works by Chicago, Ono and even Orlan are essentialist, they maintain the gender standards, they are about being women and not only about being Women, but recognizing that they have a core identity, a personae that cannot be cut away, even through surgery. What Jackson wants is to be made nil. He no longer wants to be MJ, because of the emotional pain; he wants to be nothing, a ghost, and a cipher. He is not making himself white; he is making himself blank. His nose falling off, and a recent Popbitch story that discussed him being transparent, obsessions of wigs, all suggests that he cannot kill himself but he can eliminate himself. Like Lepore is neither man nor women, Jackson will eventually be
nothing.
Which brings us to the socialite Wildenstein. She also does not want to be Human; she wants to be a jungle cat, a lion. Dozens of facial reconstruction’s have slowly made her look past human, not exactly like a cat, but more like a freak to be pitied, she wants to move away from something else, be totally artificial, and in such a way that suggests like makes like magic. If Jackson works hard enough, he can be nothing, and if Lepore works hard enough it is genderless, but Wildenstein will never be a cat. None of these have the politics that Serrano, Numan and Quinn does, and all of these so far are politics or personhood, they are not meant to be entertainments, like Fear Factor, Tom Green, Jackass, Punk or Osbourne. If we deal with the politics first it will be easier, feminist, queer and body art in the early 60s and 70s was hermetic, about personhood and not about community, and in many ways the series of video works that Nauman did in the mid 80s, and the large Cibrochromes that Serrano did about the same time were comments on that, much like Quinn's work commented on the self consciousness of the yBas, which he was part of.
The clowns yelling obscenities in a black room is uncomfortable to watch, difficult and unusual to process, and confusing all around. What I maintain is that it is a sort of inside joke, a way to discuss the extreme masochism of his predecessors and contemporaries. To look at the work, with its inherent absurdity, it becomes a way to tell us, all those other guys, who talk about their pain, who do violent acts on the stage and in galleries, they are clowns, all you have is a bunch of clowns beating each other up, and you know that beating each other up is really sublimated fucking anyway.
Serrano, of course, takes himself more seriously, but there are indications that he also doesn’t take himself too seriously. There is the painting Blood and Milk, painted a year before Clown Torture was made, it is slick and sexy, a post minimalist comment on nothing in particular, the colors resonant but not deep until one realizes what the medium is. By aesthicizing the art of the body, by refusing to make it ugly, he like Nauman makes it more complicated. It is no longer about personal therapeutics or victim hood, but something larger. It is about what we find beautiful, and therefore human.
This is also what happens with Quinn. It is all of the blood in his body, frozen into some kind of death head. Literally, this is all of Quinn, he has, the great Romantic that he is, bleed for you, put all of his effort into the work, made biography destiny. The movement that he has been lumped into, Young British Artists, is one that sold dirty beds and sharks in tanks, and the criticism has been one of spectacle and show, the solemnness of this piece, and the darkness of it betray the expectations of movements. The Autobiography becomes tragic in a very frightening way.
If Nauman, Serrano and Quinn are about fine art as a criticism of itself, or if not a criticism then a reconstruction, then what happens when MTV gets hold of the same tropes, is their a similarity between these three and Johnny Knoxville and Tom Green-or between any of the fine artists. Do the themes of spectacle, the use of violence, the rituals, grotesqueries, and the isolation of audience make this a kind of democratization of performance art? Tom Greens opus, Freddy Got Fingered, is no more obscene then Finley, no less obsessed with body fluids then Serrano, it confuses person and personae like Lepore, it is as masochist as Bourdin, like Nauman it tries to destroy a genre by impure mockery, It isolates the audience, in fact it is a pretty good art film, a bit like an absurdist Salo, a fact noted by AO Scott in his review for the New York Times, who discussed Green as having a “demented but unmistakable integrity.” also noting “Like it or not, he's an artist.” Jackass has a similar kind of concentration, with one skit, where he bathes in blood and tapes meat to himself, something that could have come from the lower east side in the mid 70s, only with much more pretension, and like Bob Flanagans, Steve O- a cast member does lovely tricks with his cock and some nails, sort of a phallic crucifixion. Even the most commercial of these enterprises, Fear Factor, has a certain spirit about it, though this is the most obvious of the gross out shows, every thing is done with a seriousness that imbues it with a high ritualism; although it is commercial, so is Nitsch, who sells his work to Major Museums and his music via Nonesuch, the label connected to Warner Brothers.
What is interesting is the difference between these three examples and the High Art discussed earlier, even though we can draw connections between them. Green was discovered via a cable access show, a place where eccentricity is if not rewarded, given a safe third place to move into. Knoxville made videos that were passed underground before slipping into the hands of an MTV aesthetic. These were not the only men doing this sort of mad acts, it was common with skate punks, who absorbed certain tastes from the original scenes in London and New York, however those were quick burn outs, dying or moving into something larger and more nebulous.
The punk as anarchist life style, that developed its own tastes and styles, came from people who were feeling a similar anger and oppression, they had no theory, and theory could not sustain them. Look at the places where they grew up-Salt Lake, which grow ever larger and more oppressive the more religion got its claws in, Orange County with its republicans and arms factories, Olympia, a dead factory town that nothing really to recommend it, Edmonton with its oil refines, the list can go on and on, and does world wide.
The fear of the body, of authority, of death, of change, of war, or fascism, of republicans and Tories, of control, moved through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, becoming more and more pronounced, and the belief that the only way to change it was direct action moved into a personal awareness, communities developed and the more media savvy got the attention. Tom Green got on MTV, cause kids watched MTV, Iggy Pop destroyed himself in Detroit cause that’s where he was from, Accoci wanked at Sonnabend because he wanted to be a real artist, the same reason the NEA five sued the government and Quinn’s head was destroyed when Saachi moved apartments.
All of that said, the emotions that gave birth to performance/body/conceptual art 30 years, and the punk ethic which constantly renews itself, and the televised spectacle designed to shock, are similar. However years of hype have loosened any larger effects, what the new TV does is combine the cult of the new that marks the 20th century, the fuck you punk aesthetics, the class warfare of metal, and the value of television. Whole generations of people have inadvertently followed Gore Vidal’s maxim of never giving up the chance of having sex or being on television, and with a universe that rewards constant exposure, this need has become almost a right, With 80 channels, there needs to be some content, and those who sell to youth are willing to give it up to those who are good at pushing themselves that it is all attention getting, the fifteen minutes of fame turning from an ironic and dry quip to a constitutional right, and the best way of getting attention has always been Freudian, i.e. shit and sex.
The impulse that connects all of these artists is complex, but theory is one way of legitimizing an already existent anger, desperation and nihilism. Why Torte of the Clowns makes it onto PBS and why Green and Knoxville are on is not that Numan is better, but a question of demographics, he skews older. Why Green is interesting is that he brings the ugliness of the above aesthetic and makes it look fun, since MTV is all about fun, they are a good mix.
After World War One, we had violent art movements, but Dada/Surrealism/expressionism believed it could change the world. World War Two gave us the belief that our pain was legitimate, that all of the expressionist angst was a way to move through the pain of violence and death. In many ways, this personal obsession and belief in angst, birthed by Greenberg, gave birth to the solipsism of what has been discussed her, even pop and camp did not really work as a way to change anything. What we have now is a refusal to believe our aesthetics affect anything. The romantic obsession of making artists, to paraphrase Shelly, the legislators of the world has been a failure. Even the Auden rejoinder, that arts survive “In the valley of its making where executives/ Would never want to tamper” is no longer true, it has been proven that the market absorbs all, makes use of what it can and avoids everything else.
What is left, then is working in the shadows of office towers, picking bottles and rags, trying to make something interesting, or moving into the executive suite. There can be no change from the outside, and from the inside everything is too comfortable.