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

Product Information

No one gets celebrity better than writer, critic and i-D contributor Philippa Snow. Her first book [is] a thrilling work of cultural criticism about the peculiar place aestheticised violence occupies in contemporary art and culture.” – iD Magazine 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.

Thus, Johnny Knoxville ended up adopting another popular American pastime, newer than the nation’s lust for violence and a little older than its history of stunt performers: he began to see a therapist. “‘I don’t want to fix the part of me that does stunts,’” he recalls saying. “‘Just to get that out in the open… That’s what I don’t want to fix.’” In that interview with Marchese, he is coy about what drives a man to throw himself into a children’s ball-pit full of snakes, or deliberately crash a motorcycle, or split his head open “like a melon” on the concrete floor of a department store, save for saying that some of his impetus to destroy himself is almost certain to emanate from a dark, “unhealthy place”. The reader, left to fill in the blanks, invariably imagines some formative, terrible event that shook these strange desires loose — a childhood injury, an accident bloody enough to scar the mind. David Lynch, the dark suburban yin to Waters’ camp suburban yang, has said that as a child he saw a naked woman staggering down the road at night outside his house, “in a dazed state, crying”. “I have never forgotten that moment,” he told Roger Ebert in an interview in 1986. He has not allowed us to forget it, either — in Blue Velvet, Dorothy, a nightclub singer and rape victim, is seen stumbling past the verdant, manicured lawns of her younger lover’s neighbourhood stark-naked, evidently in distress. If not all artists make such deliberate connections in their work, re-enacting and restaging these determinative, generative moments as if all art were true crime, it cannot be denied that many of them enjoy gesturing elliptically at their own histories. Thompson’s self-destructive habits informed his trademark gonzo journalism. (Photo: Creative Commons) 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.Review of Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment by Philippa Snow (Repeater Books, 2022)

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). 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 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’. HC: In the book, you quote the artist Nina Arsenault: ‘Everybody’s lives are mythic, everybody’s lives are big. It’s a lie of TV, capitalism, propaganda, that our lives are casual … ’ I think this also, in a way, describes your approach – that you assume there’s intelligence and meaning in most things and set out to find it. 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.Cannot express how much I enjoyed reading this. Apologies to all the friends that have met up with me over these weeks and have had to listen to my gushing stream of praise for this book, its ideas and all the artists mentioned within its covers. 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. I wish I could write like Philippa Snow. Every essay she writes does exactly what she’s trying to get it to do; every text she writes about is transformed, new; and it’s funny, it’s all so funny and sad and right. For goodness’ sake, buy this book.”– Phillip Maciak,LA Review of Books

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? 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.

Become a Member

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 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. 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. 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. Snow’s case studies all involve a level of self-consciousness and will to survival. They are ‘pleasure-spectacles’, by which I mean they necessarily involve the violation of form, by which I also mean the body. This book is less about Isabelle Huppert’s Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher, for instance, leaning over the tub to cut her genitals — although Snow did write on Michael Haneke’s film for Artforum — but more about Keaton’s death-defying stunts. It’s self-injury with an attention toward survival, or the performance of survival. It’s what Snow calls the ‘deathlessness’ of director Harmony Korine’s ‘commitment to the joke’. Yes, there is a risk of death there, but that itself might be deathlessness. If survived, it renders you eternal and awesome. (As when we see Keaton survive his famous stunt in Steamboat Bill, Jr.) These case studies, despite their violent nature, are distinctly unsuicidal.