Why do artists go to macabre lengths to perform?

Terry Notary performs as an ape in Ruben Östlund’s ‘The Square’

Performance art is as old as time itself, with the first reported instances of musical performance in human societies taking place as far back as the late geological period, while archaeologists have documented the origins of dance forms to at least 3300 BC. The Bhimbetka cave paintings in central India are perhaps the oldest recorded expressions of human performance, but it would not be off the mark to assume that humans began performing much before that, considering performance art — unlike other art forms — could not leave direct traces of its existence up until very recently.

The reason I briefly venture into the history of human performance is because of a recent Swedish film I saw called The Square, which was nominated for an Oscar in the Foreign Film category this year. It eventually lost to the Chilean film, A Fantastic Woman, but never mind the Oscar — The Square is a delicious and surreal cocktail of Ballardian proportions. It chronicles the weirdly comic events in the life of a contemporary art museum curator, Christian (Claes Bang), after his mobile phone is stolen one day. Christian’s attempts at getting back at the thief is interwoven with snippets about his museum, the X-Royal (formerly the Swedish Royal Palace), planning the opening of a new exhibition — the eponymous Square suggested by the title.

A satirical introspection by director Ruben Östlund on the state of contemporary art, the limits of performance, and how an installation or performance space alters our perspective of the meaning of art, The Square is a richly crafted tale told with a sense of humor — but one particular scene stood out for me —also the reason that I felt compelled to write about it here. Terry Notary, an actor who has finely studied the movements of animals for roles in movies such as Avatar and Planets of the Apes, becomes an ape during a fundraising event for the museum. It is an exquisitely and deeply unsettling extract about performance art transcending normality in an effort to elicit a reaction from its audience.

Brilliant as this scene is, it set me thinking on why a performance artist would choose to do something like this. Is it simply provocation? Attention? Probably. After all, almost all art wants to draw attention unto itself, and there could be little doubt that such an inflammatory performance would get people talking, and thereby bring attention to the themes of an artist’s work, but there is more to it. Over time, and with the incorporation of performance art as an academic discipline, artists have sought to deviate from the aims of early performance art — which was ritualistic in nature, or was intended to provide entertainment, education, or both. It has gone from the merely physical to the symbolic, with modern artists grappling with the relationship between an audience and the body — exploring how this relationship is forever in flux, with varying degree of agency available to both the artist and the performer. This is not to say that early performance art did not give agency to its viewers, but over the last century, there has been a conscious effort on part of performance artists to do so.

For example, in the above mentioned scene, which was actually choreographed up to its last detail in the film, the artist gives the audience an unparalleled sense of agency. The audience could choose to sit there and remain passive, or they could confront the ape, in which case it would tell us something about the audience, more than it would tell us about the performance itself. Throughout the 20th century, performance artists have sought to do this in more drastic ways — with roots in the anarchic Dadaist movement — letting the viewer become part of the performance itself.

This has led to some troubling results, as The Square’s director Ruben Östlund explained to the New York Times. The “monkey scene,” he said, is based on the performance piece by real-life Russian artist Oleg Kulik, who, about twenty years ago, shocked the Swedish art fraternity by biting the leg of the daughter of a renowned museum curator for which he got into trouble with the police. He was playing a dog, or had become one, which was even more explicit during his performance at SoHo in Manhattan. Here, he refused to be seen as Oleg Kulik the artist, and remained a dog throughout his stay in the United States, from the time he passed through customs at Kennedy Airport, up until the moment when he boarded a flight back to Europe. Replete with a dog coat, collar, leash and muzzle, Kulik intended his “conscious falling out of the human horizon” to bring attention to what he called “artificial barriers” created by contemporary culture. Kulik believed the overly refined cultural language of the art world had left no room for the expression of simple emotions, and by limiting himself to the vocabulary of a dog, he hoped to transcend this superfluous construct and communicate at a more visceral level.

Other artists have gone to similar lengths, albeit for different reasons. Serbian artist Marina Abramović, whose work often deals with issues around femininity and human relationships, exposed the darker side of her audience members with her Rhythm performances. During her first performance of this series in native Belgrade back in 1974, Abramović put her life on the line by placing 72 objects — including a knife and a loaded gun — at a table in front of her, and invited the audience to do with her as they pleased with the tools. While it started as a timid experiment, it quickly spiraled into a stark portrayal of human depravity with audience members tearing off her clothes and knifing her, with one member even threatening to kill her with the gun.

“I had a pistol with bullets in it, my dear. I was ready to die,” she recalled in 2014. “How lucky I am.”

Indeed. In the same year after her first performance, during Rhythm 5, she almost died after throwing herself into the middle of a burning communist red star, before audience members rescued and rushed her to the hospital. When she brought her performance to the United States, she was berated as “some Yugoslavian-born provocateur” by Fox News, which failed to make heads or tails of her performance. But, the “grandmother of performance art,” as the now 71-year-old artist is lovingly called by her fans, has remained completely unaffected by such ridicule, safe in the knowledge that her work has singularly pushed the envelope by underlying an almost shamanic commitment to performance art.

Marina Abramović during a performance in 1983. (Photo by Luciano/Flickr)

Abramović is not even the only performance artist whose work involves self-harm and masochism. London-based performance artist and HIV activist Ron Athey is known for causing himself extreme pain in an effort to draw attention to themes pervading his work — masculinity, sexual desire, and trauma. Most of his performances are too brutal for the layman, but Self Obliteration is perhaps also his most esoteric performance. During the performance, the HIV-positive Athey sat naked in a glass box with a wig on his head which contained needles underneath. As he brushed the wig in front of his audience, blood spurted from his scalp and onto the glass walls. It was so extreme that Athey became the poster boy for the American right-wing in the 1990s, which used him to attack avant-garde art — considered too distasteful and immoral for god-fearing Americans. But in the most ironic fashion, subsequent performances by Athey continued to spread the discourse around HIV — much in the manner that was originally intended — with artist AA Ronson hailing Athey for being the Christ of AIDS.

“There’s a real spiritual fire to Ron Athey’s performances that we cannot turn away from. The performance is a ritual, and the blood — his HIV-positive blood — is the Eucharist that turns this event into communion — the audience is transformed.”

This insistence on the audience being “transformed” is central to the works of these artists. Shock and provocation may fulfill the gluttonous appetite that the public always seems to have for the macabre, but that is not the driving force for these artists. What motivates them most is their belief in the idea that for their art to become complete, the audience must partake in the performance. Abramović, Kulik and Athey are all either interested in engaging the audience to make art, or provide them with more than a cathartic experience that transcends morality and traditional perspectives of art only being a means to provide pleasure and entertainment. It is a bullet tearing into the conservative notion of “art for art’s sake,” instead making the performance of art a communal event — open for everyone to partake in and transform.

But it also has a political function. These performances, because of their very nature of being anti-tradition, inherently reject the straitjacketing of art as representative of status quo and its paradigms. All these artists come from the fringes of mainstream society — some of them evading very traumatic childhoods — to create spaces more viable to alternative discourses. By puncturing the notion of safe art, these performance artists are all at once able to help their audiences enter spaces where even the most radical ideas are carefully considered and not frowned upon. In some cases, the politics of performance is subtle — and in other cases loud and in-your-face — but they are almost never sterile in their political underpinnings.

A recent and forceful example of the political function of performance art has been evident in the works of young Russian dissent artist Pyotr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the icy cobbles of Moscow’s Red Square in 2013 to protest “the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of modern Russian society.” The risque performance was purely political — unlike the other performances mentioned here — because it did not take place in a gallery space and was not advertised beforehand. Here, the audience — the police officers who removed the nail and took Pavlensky to the hospital, only to later charge him with “hooliganism motivated by hatred of a particular social, ethnic or religious group” — were not even expecting a performance but became unwitting partakers in the performance. Pavlensky protested against the authority by engaging its agents in his discourse and on his own terms.

The Russian dissent artist had previously coiled himself naked in a barbed wire and even sewn his lips shut, and here Pavlensky sought to invoke the legacy of the space — the Red Square —transforming his performance, the audience and the space, all without art museums, curators or the need for performance spaces.

“Whenever I do a performance like this, I never leave the place. It’s important for me that I stay there. The authorities are in a dead-end situation and don’t know what to do. They can’t ask the person to leave a square, because he’s nailed to the square.

Pyotr Pavlensky during another one of his trademark protest performances in Moscow two years after the scrotum act. (Photo by Missoksana/Wikipedia Commons)

It is little wonder that when Pavlensky was finally close to getting arrested for his Red Square performance, he chose to place faith in his art instead of trying to evade the authorities, something other Russian dissenters have to do to escape incarceration.

“I think that would have discredited everything I’d done before, if at the first sign of danger I’d gone into hiding,” he said. Pavlensky’s commitment to his art enabled him to survive the consequence of his actions.

“I decided to take a position of strength, because there is nothing to be afraid of. You can be afraid if you feel you are guilty of something and I don’t. Anything the authorities do against me means discrediting themselves. The more they do with me, the worse they make it for themselves.”

This is the other common thread to the works of the artists mentioned here. All of them know the consequences of their performances may lead to tragic results, but that never stops them from performing their art. If anything, it continues to be the light that guides them. For example, in Pavlensky’s instance, if the Russian authorities did not pursue the artist with charges, his act would have then been deemed a failure.

Of course, a tactics to simply provoke could misguide artists and there have been plenty of instances throughout the last hundred years where performance artists have been deemed to go too far. So where do we draw the line for artists — imaginary as it may be? It becomes all the more contentious in today’s day and age, when the need for attention is so exaggerated that some artists are bound to employ mere provocation to get themselves noticed. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this — but such is the nature of art. After all, performance art — like other art forms — is subjective too, and what might appear to be a work of genius to one may be reviled by the other, and there is no clear path to determining what truly constitutes art.

Having said that, there is a profundity to timelessness of true art. It always — always — stands the test of time. Even with the relentless churning out of performance pieces in these frenetic times, art that truly invigorates or gives its audience insights hitherto unseen will bloom and show itself resplendently in the midst of mediocrity. Provocation will work for a day or two, and may even get the artist the attention he/she craves, but it will fail in having any sort of tangible impact on its audience members — a priority for these performance artists. All the artists mentioned here have — in some or the other way — not only been able to push the envelope as far as performance art is concerned, but they have also successfully amplified the need for such works.

When a piece of performance art will seek to only provoke, failing to muster any true “transformation” in its audience, it will — necessarily under its own weight — wither and die. And that would never be the fate awaiting true art.