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

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Snow’s most convincing attempt to defend the uniqueness of Abramović’s approach comes in her discussion of the performance piece Relation in Space (1977). In it, the artist and her former collaborator and ex-partner, Ulay, repeatedly crash into each other, naked. Snow argues that the simplicity of the performance reveals the gendered imbalances of power between the couple. Though both artists fling themselves with full force at one another, it is the female body that comes off worse. This is exactly the consequence which, according to Snow, Abramovć intended to reveal. Snow writes with such kinetic, sensory power here, alongside her characteristic, roving intelligence, that I felt I’d (somewhat queasily) witnessed, as well as read, this gripping exploration of pain and performance. Which As You Know Means Violence is as smart, fearless and funny as its many sensitively drawn subjects. Brilliant.”– Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road

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.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’. Svelte and smart analysis… Snow has a witty and sleek style, approaching the subjects of life, art and performance pushed to their extremes with sensitivity and care. This is a book about pain and hurt that, somehow, is both provocative and immensely pleasurable to read.”– Anna Cafolla, The Face The glaring difference is that the Bumfights creators did not make a statement concerning the obvious inequalities the sordid production exploited. Although the matter of commentary, the ontological status of being ‘a commentary’, does not need to be formally declared or claimed (there is a greater message beyond the text), it does need to be apparent either by virtue of context or presentation or some diegetic symbolism, allusion, signifier or reference. If one struggles to find evidence of some effort towards commentary, at least some minimal aesthetic gesture or reference in the glyphs of language, beyond metaphorical equivalence, well, it probably is not commentary but rather declared as commentary by third party retrospective analysis. This isn’t to say a historiographical revision isn’t appropriate or erudite or urgent, but it is a difference between declaring something was and still is and is now seen as. This isn’t crystalline in Snow’s text, and it doesn’t have to be.

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). Snow’s ability to move from niche performance art to the messianic iconography of millennial Americana is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Indeed, through unlikely commonalities, Snow draws together performance artists such as Chris Burden, Nina Arsenault and Bob Flanagan with Buster Keaton and Johnny Knoxville.Snow’s ability to move from niche performance art to the messianic iconography of millennial Americana is one of the book’s greatest strengths.”– Bryony White , Elephant Magazine. 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?

An effort at perfectible practice or pace, more than pain, lies at the centre of most of the performances. Abramović and Chris Burden don’t mutilate themselves as a result of self-hatred but to consider the human body and its limits. Snow gives us terms for the ‘the grace and violence’ of Korine and Keaton. (It’s worth quoting Snow’s entire description of Keaton in full: ‘He repudiates the sin of boringness by being unpredictable, the chaos of him rippling across what was previously lifeless as if something very heavy — as heavy as love, or God, or the iron door of a bank vault — had been tossed into a lake.’) Korine, Keaton, Abramović, Knoxville: they do anything to condemn ‘the sin of boringness’. In both of these performances, Arsenault did not express any signs of pain, though audiences can clearly discern her injuries. Relatedly, when discussing other now-canonical feminist performances, such as Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974) and Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), Snow notes how these artists seemingly only have to let down their boundaries to be exposed to the latent violence of misogyny. The state of vulnerability experienced by Abramović, Arsenault and Ono stands in stark contrast to Burden’s and Knoxville’s active pursuit of violent encounters with the world. Reading Snow’s book, it’s apparent that critical and popular interpretations of performances featuring self-directed violence depend to a greater degree upon the identity of the performer. In particular, Snow reflects on the relationship between gender and violence. In chapter two, ‘This Performance Art Is for the Birds’, she considers work by Nina Arsenault, a trans artist who often reconfigures her own image within durational performances that involve acts of self-harm, such as whipping herself while riding a stationary bike ( 40 Days and 40 Nights: Working Towards a Spiritual Experience , 2012) or burning herself with cigarettes ( Lillex , 2013). Snow is adept at historicising her cases in the context of their communities. Her final chapter on disability is crucial to the monograph. Any discussion of ‘freak power’, or freakery, that fails to attend to the disabled body in the wake of Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s landmark Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body is missing something. Discussing writer and artist Bob Flanagan, who lived with cystic fibrosis for decades, Snow reminds us that what we call the performance of self-injury, or body in crisis, passes as daily life for a good number of individuals. Flanagan’s ‘refusal to entirely condemn cystic fibrosis and its effect on his quality of life, choosing instead to see it as. . . “empowering” is not just defiant’, Snow writes, ‘but punk, turning affliction into enlightening material’. Valuations like ‘quality of life’ are suddenly thrown into question: how can one begin to criticise or define self-injury, if some bodies inhabit perpetually precarious states anyway? 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. Snow’s career in cultural criticism perhaps most consistently attends to what Hunter S. Thompson called ‘freak power’. That might not be obvious from her by-lines on the Gossip Girl and Sex and the City reboots. But it doesn’t take long to realise that an analysis of the smoothest, most normative cultural object is just another way into a consideration of the ‘freakish’. In holding up a looking glass to the most seemingly glossy surface, Snow implicitly asks: Why? And why not otherwise? Why is SATC’s Samantha not weirder? (As Snow asked in her LA Review of Books review of And Just Like That in January.) Why are things, generally, not weirder? Which As You Know Means Violence takes up the question in the context of works that do dare to be weird. 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.