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

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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. 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”.

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.Though the works in Which as You Know Means Violence produce entertaining or spectacular forms of injury, scarification, blood, and pain, much of this kind of art is also about carefully controlling the execution of a plan, or about training and restraining the body in judiciously managed ways. Perhaps the rub, then, is that while it is a very human impulse to desire death-defying mastery over the self, what these works tend to always reveal is that despite our best efforts, we are complexly vulnerable to a world, and others, that we cannot always control. By focusing on a larger corpus of artists, with a more concerted effort to focus on self-injurious and endurance-based body art from queer, and POC communities, Snow’s exploration of gendered embodiment might have put pressure on the idea that female subjectivity is some sort of internal truth emerging from the body. 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.

I also have to add that, because I wrote this manuscript in the period after contracting Covid when I was really quite seriously ill, I will be the first to admit that there is a formlessness to it because it emerged at a time when I was sort of a stranger to myself, physically and psychologically, and when I was experiencing quite severe brain fog intermittently. Reading it now, it often feels to me as if somebody else wrote it, but I have to say that the illness in some way loosened or destructured my thinking, so that a lot of the decisions I made were based on instinct rather than any preconceived ideas about what the finished book might look like. 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?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.

A searing meditation on violence, pain and the nature of art under patriarchal, racialised capitalism. Snow’s essential empathy is at its most apparent; for all the withering one-liners & theoretical zeal that propel her writing, this is at base a book about pain, death & creativity, the basic fabric of life… This is the most nakedly, vividly human book I’ve read in some time.”— For artists such as Burden, Marina Abramović, or even Knoxville, Snow suggests that “it takes youth” to conduct death-defying acts like getting shot in the arm or carving a pentagram into one’s stomach (as Abramović did in Lips of Thomas). Like my friend Sammy, Snow suggests that artists prone to self-injury are “motivated by a kind of restlessness”, that they exalt an almost puerile thanatological drive, that “they do not so much announce themselves as carve their identities, bloodily and publicly into their skin, the way a teenager might carve his or her crush’s name into a school desk or a tree-trunk”. 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

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Evidently, if Thompson felt any revulsion for the neophyte stunt actor, he renounced it over time; the sins of the father, when it came to bad behaviour, far outweighed those of the son. The two men shared a proclivity for some things — large quantities of alcohol, illegal and dangerous fireworks, lurid tiki shirts, and a very specific style of aviator shades that looked on Knoxville like a white-trash pastiche made by Gucci, and on Thompson like the glasses of a pervert — and a disdain for some others — personal safety, formal dress codes, what might loosely be referred to as The Man — and they were altogether two peas in a pod, in Thompson’s mind, when it came to possessing something called “freak power”. Knoxville repeated that message from his answerphone to an interested journalist in 2005, putting on “a scratchy Dr. Thompson voice”. That he appeared to remember the words verbatim was evidence of his awe, a lasting sense that he had somehow been inducted into greatness. “Johnny,” Thompson had reportedly informed him, “we were just sitting here talking about you, and then we started talking about my needs, and what I need is a 40,000-candlepower illumination grenade. Big, bright bastards, that’s what I need. See if you can get them for me. I might be coming to Baton Rouge to interview [imprisoned former Louisiana governor] Edwin Edwards, and if I do I will call you, because I will be looking to have some fun, which as you know usually means violence.” 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

PS: Oh God, it is so, so important to me! I need people to understand that when I am, for instance, writing about Logan Paul’s YouTube in the context of Andre Breton’s definition of surrealism or whatever, I am absolutely making fun of myself as much as I am making a point. I think it’s possible to do both things simultaneously: to apply serious analysis to an unserious thing and in doing so make a salient point, and also to recognise the inherent preposterousness of applying that kind of seriousness to some of the dumbest things on earth. The idea that I take myself too seriously might be one of the worst things a person could take away from my writing, to be honest; I find it hard to connect with writers who don’t have at least a little touch of humour – not zaniness, not silliness, but some deadpan sense of the absurd – in their work. 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’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. 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 Johnny,” Thompson had reportedly informed him, “we were just sitting here talking about you, and then we started talking about my needs, and what I need is a 40,000-candlepower illumination grenade. Big, bright bastards, that’s what I need. See if you can get them for me. I might be coming to Baton Rouge to interview [imprisoned former Louisiana governor] Edwin Edwards, and if I do I will call you, because I will be looking to have some fun, which as you know usually means violence.” 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.