Tag: performative masochism
CHRIS BURDEN
Relic from “Back to You”
1974
Stainless steel bowl and push pins
Case: 10 x 10 x 10 inches
25.4 x 25.4 x 25.4 cm
Back to You
112 Green St., New York
January 16, 1974
Dressed only in pants, I was lying on a table inside a freight elevator with the door closed. Next to me on the table was a small dish of 5/8" steel push pins. Liza Bear requested a volunteer from the audience, and he was escorted to the elevator. As the door opened, a camera framing me form the waist up was turned on, and the audience viewed this scene on several monitored placed near the elevator. As the elevator went to the basement and returned, Liza told the audience that a sign in the elevator instructed the volunteer to “Please push pins into my body.” The volunteer stuck 4 pins into my stomach and 1 pin into my foot during the elevator trip. When the elevator returned to the floor, the door opened, the volunteer stepped out, and the camera was turned off. The elevator returned to the basement.
Chris Burden, Velvet Water, 7 May 1974
“Burden relentlessly dunked his head in a filled-up sink, trying to inhale the oxygen-rich water. We sat stupefied, paralyzed, until he seemed to pass out, and the monitor went dark, and that was it.” – Jerry Saltz, 2013.
Gina Pane, Action: Discours mou et mat, 1975, Courtesy of Frac Lorraine – Metz, © ADAGP Paris, © VEGAP, Leon, 2015-16
“In order to enter the performance space, visitors first had to sidestep a motorcycle, that blocked the entrance. In the room several objects had been placed as the scenery of the forthcoming performance: a safety helmet, boxing gloves, knuckledusters, a gold painted golf ball and razor blade, red and white roses plus a naked woman whose back had been decorated with blue stars.The first scene lasted 15 minutes. Pane entered the performance space, dressed in white pants, a white blouse and high heels of the same colour. She wore sunglasses and had drawn blue stars on her left arm and hand. On the floor had been placed two mirrors, with sheets of glass on top. On the right mirror (from Pane’s point of view) stars had been drawn and the word ‘aliénation’ had been written on the glass. The left mirror was blank, but on the sheet of glass on top the portrait of a person wearing shades had been drawn. The sunglasses reflected a mill and a field of tulips. Pane kneeled down behind the mirrors and played two cymbals of cardboard, with cotton wool on the insides. After this silent concert several slides were projected. During the second scene of five minutes Pane smashed the sheets of glass with her fists.The next ten minutes Pane sat down on a stool, playing tennis with a ball that hung from the ceiling. She hit the ball with a racket and stopped it with her forehead.During the fourth scene Pane crawled to the shattered sheets of glass to hit them once again, meanwhile gasping into a microphone.For scene five, that also took ten minutes, Pane cut a vertical incision in her upper and under lip with a razor blade.During the final scene, Pane laid down next to the naked woman and looked at the ceiling through binoculars. Meanwhile music by Brahms was played in slow-motion and some slides were shown.”
–De Appel
Gina Pane, Azione Sentimentale, Galleria Diagramma, Milan (1973).
Chris Burden, Velvet Water, 1974
In this performance the artist repeatedly inhaled water and broadcast his self-torture to a remote audience.
Gina Pane, Nourriture-actualités télévisées-feu (1971; repr. Pluchart 1971).
Pane force-fed herself and spat back up 600 grammes of raw ground meat, watched the nightly news on television as she stared past a nearly blinding light bulb, and extinguished flames with her bare hands and feet. After the performance, she said, people reported a heightened sensitivity. “Everyone there remarked: ‘It’s strange, we never felt or heard the news before. There’s actually a war going on in Vietnam, unemployment everywhere.’” (Stephano 1973, p. 22)[4]
Simona Giordano, Understanding Eating Disorders
Stelarc: Event for Lateral Suspension, 1978
Musafa: Dances Sacred and Profane, 1982
Gina Pane, “Action Psyche” (1974): Along with the poetic descriptions accompanying them, these photographs on glossy white cardstock paper document a performance in which the artist applied make-up while cutting parts of her body and face with a razor as she sat in front of a mirror. “Throughout the grizzly display, her impassive stare increased her detachment. Excruciating, both to herself and for her audience to watch, Pane’s art addressed the anaesthetization of a society numbed by the violence in everyday life. During the 1970s, Pane was the star of Body Art, a phenomenon that used the body itself as its primary material. ‘One has to understand “My body in Action” not as the skin of a painting enclosing its interior but as a WRAPPING/UNFOLDING bringing back depth to the edge of things,’ said Pane. In her extreme acts of self-mutilation, Pane equated masquerade with masochism, questioning the relationship between vulnerability and violence. Like other feminist art, her work also explored the sexual stereotypes of female passivity and male aggression.“ (The 20th Century Artbook, London: Phaidon Press, 1999. p. 357)
Little Bristling Soul 