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

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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

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. In a world where violence - of the market, of climate change, of capitalism - is part of our everyday lives, Which as You Know Means Violence focuses on those who enact violence on themselves, for art or entertainment, and analyses the role that violence plays in twenty-first century culture.

As she notes, some of the underlying themes of the franchise – masculinity, violence, guns, risk, self-harm and suburban ennui – have strong links to 1970s performance art. In Burden’s Shoot (1971), for instance, the artist arranged to be filmed while getting shot in the shoulder. Burden would later claim in a 2007 New Yorker interview with Schjedahl that the extremes he went to in Shoot and other self-injurious performances were motivated by ‘want[ing] to be taken seriously as an artist’, thereby offering an intriguing take on the contemporary metric for artistic achievement.

There is a really interesting look at Harmony Korine’s ‘lost’ film of trying to start fights with strangers – Fight Harm – which I would love to have seen contrasted with the uber-male parody of the Nietzschean ideal ‘Fight Club’. Both the novel and the film aimed to offer fictional commentary on a generation of men “raised by women”. As a nine Inch Nails fan I would also have liked to learn more about Flanagan’s role in the band’s early music videos such as “Happiness In Slavery”, (contrasted with live stage performances from the Jim Rose Circus), included in the extended snuff film, Broken Movie. But perhaps outright murder is beyond the remit. Where Camille Paglia offered yet another tossed-off line that female sexuality is power, period, it makes one wonder what then is nasty, painful, gory sex performed upon the submissive male, a mere display of force or an overturning of the paradigm, an impossible flipside? 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?

In Which As You Know Means Violence, Snow figures most of the theoretical work of the book through the lens of physical wounding. But what happens when these forms of self-injury intersect with other, perhaps less obvious, forms of self-harm, like exhaustion, hunger, confinement and endurance? With a focus on the spectacularisation of self-injury, there is a critical tendency to only read this sort of performance or body art as extreme or excessive, or through the lens of annihilation or aberration. Review of Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment by Philippa Snow (Repeater Books, 2022) 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

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. This gripping, brainy, fascinating and often hilarious book took me on the wildest of rides through art and the body, literature, pop culture, sensation, gender, class, mortality, theory – what else even is there? The sense that Philippa Snow had an absolute blast writing this is palpable and contagious; reading Which As You Know Means Violence left me with a giddy gratitude for this strange human life.”– Michelle Tea Snow is evidently more than aware of the liberties she takes, broadly it is the ambitions and posed ‘stretches’ and ‘spirited interpretations’ that are the most engaging turns in the text. These passages not only provoke thought and add a certain lingering sheen of question to the art and entertainment she explores, but also, resonate further with a little more digging. Snow admits the line ‘this is for the birds’ is not present in the current edit of the clip now available on YouTube. Ultra-rigour is not what is on offer here, rather it is the energetic interpretations. When watching the scene, her comments around a ‘different kind of queering’ unfurl into ever more significance and relevance (as the digression to Agamben above is no doubt a register of). When watching ‘The Human Barbecue’ one cannot help but notice that Knoxville is so heavily clad in fire protection he cannot move, he must be dressed like a gilded cage princess, or a bizarre Kardashian fashion stunt. He can barely walk unaided and must be walked over to the fire pit, and, madly, also be helped up, lifted and pulled away by others. He is like a doll, except he can speak with an unsure voice, his eyes darting nervously, and, of course, he can feel and fear pain. Indeed, it is these rather ambitious flights (as Snow declares them to be) in Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment that are so rewarding and resonate.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.

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.

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In a point that could have been further elaborated (and is underexplored in the history of performance and body art in general), this artistic tendency towards pain and self-injury also reveals the privileged contours of whiteness. Snow reflects that “most practitioners of this kind of art tend to be white. This is perhaps because Caucasian people do not have the same historical relationship with pain as other racial groups”. 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. Snow has somehow created an enjoyable—indelible- book-length meditation on pain. Most notable is its critical analysis of hurt in the culture industry at large.”– Stephanie La Cava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You. 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)