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Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts

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Taking Apart the Body

Rina Arya
Published online: 13 Jun 2014.

To cite this article: Rina Arya (2014) Taking Apart the Body, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 19:1, 5-14,
DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2014.908079

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 Taking Apart the Body
Abjection and body art
RINA ARYA
The concept of abjection, as theorized by Julia
Kristeva, came into prominence in the visual
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arts in the late twentieth century, particularly in
the 1980s and 1990s, with [t]he postmodernist
return to the body (Ross 2003:281), where the
body was not necessarily featured as a whole,
integrated entity but as something evoked by
corporeal fragments and physical residues
(Hopkins 2000:225). The body was also
subject to a number of processes that involved
dislocation, evisceration and other ways of
breaking up its unity and revealing its relentless
materialism and uncontrollability.
This special issue On Abjection testifies to
the increasing importance of the concept of
abjection in the study of performance practice
(taken inclusively), and this article takes us
back to one of the earlier manifestations of
abjection in performance practice, namely, in
body art. By subjecting their bodies to a range
of often extreme experiences, artists pushed
the boundaries of representation and expressed
corporeal and psychological states that
transgressed the boundaries of social propriety.
Abjection became a tool of social critique in
which marginalized groups could articulate
their concerns as a way of empowering their
minority status. In turn, viewers experienced
sights, and participated in actions, that
challenged their assumptions about art and
opened a new realm of experience.
BODY ART AND ABJECTION
Body artists of the 1960s and 1970s used their
bodies as the medium of expression, where the
artists body was disclosed as a valid art material
in its own right, as the content of the work,
PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 191 : pp.5-14
http: //dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2014.908079
but also as canvas, brush, frame and platform
(Warr, in Warr and Jones 2000:11).1 Increasingly
1
Body art is often used
interchangeably with
in the 1980s and 1990s, body artists started to Performance Art,
mediate the body and the bodily through the although, technically, as a
branch or category of
use video installation works and other
Performance Art, body art
technologies, but in the beginnings of body art, concentrates on the
the body itself was very much the tool of artists body as material or
the use of the body in
experimentation for artists to explore other ways to make
philosophical and socio-political notions about human sculptural forms
in space (see, for instance,
identity, gender, sexuality and community, and Goldberg 1999:153).
by which they could question social strictures Performance art itself
started much earlier than
imposed on art and society. the 1960s with the
With the presence of the actual as opposed Dadaists and the arrival of
the European war exiles in
to the represented body, we have a new the United States in the
understanding of the body that is in keeping 1940s.
with the twentieth-century impulse to
undo the body to show what lies behind the
external surface. Artists such as Chaim Soutine
and Francis Bacon had already attempted
to articulate a sense of the condition of
embodiment, which is the phenomenological
state of the lived body that is defined by the
situation of both being and having a body.
Bryan Turner defines what is distinct about
embodiment as follows: [t]he concept of the
body suggests a reified object of analysis,
whereas embodiment more adequately
captures the notions of making and doing the
work of bodies of becoming a body in social
space (Turner 1996:xiii). Bodies were presented
not as static entities that could be preserved
by representation but instead as prone to
breakdown, fragmentation and dissolution,
thus exploring questions of identity, sexuality
and death. In its fragmented state, lacking
its customary wholeness and unity, the body
tested our own sense of stability. This [was]
not the healthy normal body, intact and
ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online 5
2014 TAYLOR & FRANCIS
 functioning, but the body as damaged and
sundered; it accordingly prompt[ed] the shudder
we feel when the body is otherwise falling to
pieces (McGinn 2011:16).
Body artists explored embodiment by
interrogating the boundaries between opposing
states: the subject and the object, the human
and the machine, male and female, life and
death, health and disease, and natural and
artificial, and in doing so they gave rise to an
experience of the abject. They did this by
employing abject materials (such as bodily
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fluids, excrement, dirt, dead animals and
putrefying food substances) to confuse the
boundaries between different states and to
impart a sense of the vulnerability of the subject
experiencing corporeal turmoil. Many artists
employed bodily functions like urinating and
defecation to protest and shock.2 What needs to
2
Examples include Andy
Warhols oxidations be emphasized is that what was abject was the
paintings in the 1970s and actual act of expulsion, where the excreta
Hermann Nitsch in his
OMT works in the 1960s. signalled the vulnerability of the body
boundaries. Being of the body, in its outsider
state, the waste was unable to be objectified
and lingered on the threshold between self
and not-self. As Kristeva observed, [f]ecal
matter signifies what never ceases to separate
from a body in a state of permanent loss in
order to become autonomous, distinct from the
mixtures, alterations, and decay that run
through it (Kristeva 1982:108). Colin McGinn
comments on this in-between status by saying
that bodily waste is at its most appalling when
in the very act of leaving the bodys interior
as with the dangling turd, the running nose,
and spurting blood. The closer to breathing
life the material is the worse it seems
(McGinn 2011:103).
Another strategy of undoing the body
involved the use of extreme actions, often of
a sado-masochistic kind, which were employed
to push the body and mind beyond the pain
barrier in order to explore human endurance
and the boundaries of the self. Artists put their
bodies in potentially dangerous situations
by embracing the abject. Piercing, cutting,
ingesting and expelling were commonly used
methods, in the 1960s and 70s, of rupturing
6 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 191 : ON ABJECTION
personal and social homogeneity and of
distorting the normal parameters of bodily
expression and sensation, which often left
the artist in a state of stupor or ecstasy at
which point they were able to escape beyond
their culturally determined body to a state of
abjection and anarchy. Pain became a symbol
of the rupture of social homogeneity and of
rethinking identity and social mores.
IDENTITY POLITICS
Gina Panes Nourriture / Actualits tlvises /
Feu [Food / News Television / Fire] (1971)
conveys some of the different pressures that
body artists inflicted on themselves. In this work
Pane subjected her body to a series of brutal
activities, including consuming half a pound of
rotten mince while watching television in an
intentionally uncomfortable position. She then
put out fires that were burning on sand with her
bare feet until the pain forced her to stop. In
these actions she is polluting her body, opening
it up to infection (by eating uncooked meat and
blistering her feet) and is violating norms about
the sanctity of the body by deliberately putting
her body into a state of risk. Another example
of extreme action is by Chris Burden. In Shoot
(1971) Burden asked an assistant to shoot him
in his left arm without seriously injuring him.
This, however, was not the outcome, and flesh
was torn from his arm. A year later in Deadman
(1972) he carried out a death-defying act in
which he lay in a canvas bag in the middle
of a busy Los Angeles boulevard. This work
was halted by the police who arrested him for
endangering his own and others lives and thus
put a stop to his actions.
One of the main questions that need to be
addressed, with reference to these and other
examples, involves possible explanations for
such extreme behaviour. Why do these artists
subject themselves and often others to danger
and violence? One possible explanation is that
the work should be viewed as a provocation
that involved social critiques about a host of
different things, including cultural traumas
and consumerist society. The artists were
 politically motivated and wanted to make
visible the plight of disenfranchised groups in
society, thus promoting their identity politics.
This was often against US political conservatism
that condemns any art that addresses issues of
multiculturalism, the reproductive rights of
women and the pathologizing of gay men and
lesbians (Ben-Levi et al. 1993:8). Body art was
a new mode of expression that enabled artists
to reinvent aesthetics and to challenge the
sanctity of museum spaces. Artists were able to
move away from the exhausted representational
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space of the canvas and to discover their bodies
through the economy of sensation. The turn
to the body-as-canvas signaled a new and
exciting aesthetic. The sado-masochistic urge
to cut, open and rupture their bodies and
to act in unregulated ways enabled them to
explore new spaces and sensations in order to
articulate their identity and issues in their own
critical terms instead of being spoken for by
others. Abjection provided a powerful means
of transgression and reinvention (Connelly
2003:10) for artists who had been denied
autonomy to speak for themselves and who
have been construed in terms of the other.
In the process of recovery, these artists
often turned to the very site of repulsion and
stigmatization that they embodied their
gender, sexuality, race, disability as a way of
destabilizing Western notions of otherness.
In mapping out new spaces of articulation,
they were able to turn to their bodies to
reconfigure subjectivity and meaning. In
Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler discusses
how the construction of subjects operates
through exclusionary means, in which there
are normative positions of sexuality and abject
inverted versions of this. In order for control
to be maintained, the excluded need to remain
on the outside of the signifying boundary.
Important work in resignification needs to be
done for homosexuality to gain legitimacy,
viability and affiliation (Butler 1993:passim).
Butlers insights about social abjection can be
applied to other variables of identity that have
been (or continue to be) pathologized, such as
ethnicity and race. Building on this, Iris Young
argues that the repudiation of bodies for their
sex, sexuality and/or colour is an expulsion
followed by a repulsion that founds and
consolidates culturally hegemonic identities
along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation
(Salih 2003:108).
Artists used their bodies as the site of
contestation where their excluded position(s)
became the mechanism for action. Some used
their art to critique American society in general
with its emphasis on consumer culture. In
mapping out new spaces of articulation, they
were able to turn to their bodies to reconfigure
subjectivity and meaning. In the terrain of
feminism, for example, the shift in
interpretation of the gendered body took the
following form. Within a patriarchal system,
th[e] space of the feminine [was] defined as
terrifying, monstrous mad, unconscious,
improper, unclean, non-sensical, oriental,
profane (Jardine 1985:723, in Jones 1993:33),
and women artists in the past were forced to
deny the presence of sexual/gendered imagery
in their work if they wanted to be taken
seriously (Jones 1993:35). But now they were
able to use precisely these aspects in order to
reframe their positions. Many women used their
mark of defilement menstrual blood as
a symbol of empowerment and feminism. And
so we have a transformation of meaning;
menstrual blood was marginalized in religious 3
This use of their body as
the platform and locus of
ritual traditions because of its alleged polluting self-expression was met
properties, which meant that women were made with reservation in some
quarters. Lisa Tickner
to undergo specific rites of purity, but in the
comments on the
context of avant-garde practices, the vagina and tendency of women artists
associated menses become foregrounded, and in the 1970s to take the
body as their starting
blood becomes a symbol of power.3 One of the point, arguing for the
ultimate expressions of female autonomy is importance of making a
distinction between the
Shigeko Kubotas Vagina Painting (1965), for overpowering position of
which the artist attached a paintbrush to her living in and looking at
a female body, which are
crotch and indecorously squatted over the qualitatively different
canvas in a parody of Pollocks painterly experiences (Tickner
1987:263, 266). Vaginal
gesture. In her performance she [activates] the iconography may be used
vagina as a source of inscription and language, politically, but there is a
danger that it can be
[thus] inverting the Western cultural viewed as a debasing
designation of female genitalia as a site of lack gesture that enforces
biological determinism by
(lack of the phallus) and the place where reducing women to their
language breaks down (Warr and Jones 2000:24, bodies.
A RYA : TA K I N G A PA RT T H E B O DY 7

4
Womanhouse was an
installation and
performance space created
by Chicago, Miriam
Schapiro and their
students of the Feminist
Art Programme at the
California Institute of the
Arts in Los Angeles.
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5
Lcriture fminine expression of criture fminine.5
[womens writing] is a
concept that was coined by
French feminist Hlne
Cixous in 1975 and was
used in feminist literary
practice to promote a
liberating practice that
emphasized womens
experiences and the drives
of the libido.
6
What is interesting about
contamination is that it is
not solely brought about
by the other but also by
the self-as-other. In other
words, there are aspects
that belong to ourselves
that may cause
contamination and
disruption to both body
and mind, as in the case of
a tumour.
8 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 191 : ON ABJECTION
63). In Menstruation Bathroom from the
installation Womanhouse (1972), 4 Judy Chicago,
who only a year before had waved the Red Flag
of female solidarity, now presented viewers with
another uncensored portrayal. In her
installation we see a white, clean and
deodorized bathroom that is covered with gauze
veil and that contains boxes of feminine hygiene
products stacked on a shelf. The neat and
sanitized presentation of the paraphernalia
cannot mask the bloodied sanitary towels that
overflow from the waste bin and the saturated
tampons that lie on the floor. The overpowering
sight and stench of the blood, red against white,
cannot be covered up and conveys a threshold
where nature confronts culture (Jardine away from the audience, Pane began to
1985:89, in Jones 1993:34) thereby disturbing
identity, system and order. Carolee
Schneemanns Interior Scroll (1975) is another
bold instantiation of womanhood, this time
moving beyond menstrual blood to focus on
vulvic spaces. Standing before an audience
Schneemann discarded a book in her hands
before unraveling a scroll from her vagina and
reading it. This represented the ultimate
on some faces that were frozen with shock.
ABJECT VIEWING
The undoing of the body through transgressive
means also had consequences for viewers. It
meant the exposure of sights that were normally
hidden from public view, especially bodily
fluids. Social convention dictates that we are
generally privy only to the external and outer
body of other people in our dealings with them.
This public aspect of the body concerns what is
on the outside, while what lies inside the
envelope of skin is veiled from the public gaze.
In fact, it is not wide of the mark to say that we
are encouraged to think of body-image as
consisting only of the external. When we do
conceive of the body in terms of the inner and
the outer, the insides of the body are not meant
to be shared with others. The distrust of the
body we harbour also applies to rituals of care;
we mop up after our leaky insides but prefer not
to dwell on them. Body art puts the alien,
diseased, mutilated and dying body on show.
Taboo subjects were explored in explicit ways
that disturbed the equanimity of viewers. The
level of discomfort is increased precisely
because these activities are taking place in
public spaces within the presence of others that
makes the possibility of flight or cover difficult.
Moreover, the nature of the work and what it
asks of us means that the boundaries of viewing
are annihilated and that we are taken into the
space of the artist and ultimately to abjection,
where we fear contamination of the boundary6
and our subjectivity is put into crisis.
Consider Gina Panes Lait Chaud [Hot Milk]
(1972). Dressed entirely in white and facing
alternate the actions of cutting herself with
a razor blade and bouncing a tennis ball against
a wall. She started by cutting her back before
moving the blade to the face, which resulted in
mounting tension and pleas to stop by viewers,
No, no, not the face, no! (Pane, in Warr and
Jones 2000:121). After cutting her face, she
picked up a video camera and starts filming the
audience lingering on the passive expressions
This process conveys the intimacy between
artist and viewer in performance art; we are
implicated in the performance in various ways
through audience participation or, in this case,
where we have the gaze turned on ourselves.
The boundary then separating the audience
from the artist is not safeguarded and instead
the audience is tested to see how far they can
be pushed. By reversing the direction of the
camera, Pane was subjecting viewers to acts of
violation and was making us culpable in the
actions. In this example we are made to watch
a sequence of gruesome acts that increase
in their level of violence. We are compelled
to witness both the operation of abjection
to which the artist subjects the body and the
abject condition of the artist brought about by
their actions.
Watching Pane cutting her face induces
a sense of abjection anything from anxiety
to the physical feeling of needing to vomit.
Her actions are now more shocking than her
 self-harming other parts of her body because
of the social and cultural status of a face, which
is a signifier of individuality. In the West it is
also a part of the body that is always exposed,
so cutting it open adds to the vulnerability
of the action. The viewers reactions and
reflections become the subject of the work,
and the duration of the performance traces
the movement of the abject: at the beginning
we are faced with an ordinary body which
becomes abject (which abjects itself) in the
performance and the viewers bear testimony
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to that transition. By ensuring a physical
separation between herself and the audience,
Pane is playing a cruel trick; she is reinforcing
her autonomy, which gives her the right to cut
herself up, but, by then turning the camera on
us, she is making us culpable in her actions.
Other artists also used recording equipment
such as video cameras as a way of including
the audience in the performance. Throughout
the performance we get a shift of focal point:
subject becomes object and, in the above
example, we go from victim to torturer as the
camera moves onto us as we collude in Panes
self-mutilation. The demand that artists place
on the viewers here brings us to the question
of the roles undertaken by the audience in
performance practice. The dynamic of viewing
is problematized: we cannot talk about discrete
subjects or objects but about degrees of activity
and passivity. At one end of the scale, viewers
are passive and do not intervene in anyway.
However, the attention bestowed is not of the
same degree of passivity in the way that we
might casually watch a television programme or
the view outside a window. The intense actions
that occur cause the viewer to maintain a stance
of attentive viewing, which may or may not spur
on action. Some performances demand more
of the viewer, where they become involved in
a verbal exchange or dialogue with the artist
who acts as interlocutor (Goldberg 1999:153)
which influences the series of actions that
occur. The following example, Rhythm O
(1974) by Marina Abramovi shows how the
artist relinquishes control during the act of
the performance.
Rhythm O articulates an instantiation of the
abject, whereby the artist becomes abject
during the course of events and so does the
audience by virtue of allowing such desecration
to take place. In the work audience participation
is invited and in some ways could be seen to be
obligatory. This is conveyed in the written
instruction issued, which reads There are
seventy-two objects on the table that can be
used on me as desired I am the object (Warr
and Jones 2000:125) and by the matching
silence of the artist. The audience is forced to
become the makers, the instigators of action
who determine the course of events.7 7
Artists working in the
field of Conceptualism and
Abramovi stands by a table and passively Performance Art often
offers herself to viewers. The objects varied used language
performatively and
from those that could be used as weapons
instructively instead of
including a gun, a bullet, a saw and knives merely in a descriptive
to others that were seemingly innocuous, sense. The influence of the
linguistic philosopher J. L.
such as lipstick, bread and newspaper, but Austins notion of speech
which could nonetheless be used to objectify acts is apparent here.
the body further. William Miller points out
that the set of self-violating actions is smaller
than that of actions that would disgust and
offend if done by another (Miller 1997:51).
So the impact of allowing others to violate
her while she remained passive in the face of
this adds to the impact of the actions.
The performance lasted for six hours, and by
the end all her clothes had been sliced off her
body with razor blades. She had been cut,
painted, cleaned, decorated, crowned with
thorns and had had the loaded gun pressed
against her head (Warr and Jones 2000:125).
At the outset Abramovi transformed herself
from being the agent and author of her
performance into completely submitting to the
participants. Furthermore by renouncing her
subjectivity, Abramovi had turned herself into
a thing, and the array of objects available invited
the participants to explore her as a plaything.
The artist is relegated to object-status and
becomes other to herself. Without group
participation the objectives cannot be achieved
and the performance does not occur. While the
individuals in the audience were not obliged to
participate, there was an expectation for them
to take part. Those who chose not to participate
A RYA : TA K I N G A PA RT T H E B O DY 9
 directly were involved in witnessing the actions
that occurred and thereby contributing to the
mob mentality that increased during the
performance. At the beginning of the
performance, the audience mentality was
individualistic, but, as actions were carried out,
the tension experienced by individuals increased
and sentiments became collectively experienced
by the group, thus causing a blurring of
boundaries between the individual and the
group. This explains the scattering of the
audience at the end of Abramovis
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performance; for example, when she got up and
walked towards the audience to signal the end of
the performance, they just walked off. The
emotional buildup of violence caused by the
brutality of the actions, especially the fight that
broke out between someone who levelled the
gun to her head and his interceptor who took
the gun away, generated an atmosphere of great
uneasiness in the audience who, fearing a riot,
exited at the end of the performance. In another
work Incision (1978) she was attacked by
a performer, who was planted in the audience.
Abramovi was aware that she was going to be
subject to a karate kick but was not sure when
this would occur. The audiences ignorance
about the course of events was unsettling and
provoked questions about the function of
viewing. Exercizes like this are as much about
human psychology as artistic action in that they
test the urges and limits of human behaviour
(prompting the question, How far will you go?)
and echo psychological studies of the 1970s,
8
The psychologist Stanley such as the Milgram experiment.8
Milgram devised an
experiment that explored
In live performances interaction between the
the relationship between artist and the audience is more intimate and
the orders of authority and
immediate, and what we are seeing is a blurring
ones own morality.
between art and life. The staging of performance
works is arguably less hierarchical than theatre
viewing, where the audience is confined to
designated seating areas that are apart from the
central stage. Here the artist can dictate the
position of the audience and impose some
separation, if desired. In Warm Milk Pane turns
9
Hal Foster stated that
[i]n trauma discourse the camera squarely on her audience, thus
the subject is evacuated interrupting our personal space and right to
and elevated at once
(Foster 1996a:168). privacy. But it is not unusual to have the
10 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 191 : ON ABJECTION
audience encircling the artist, which limits their
privacy and adds to the intensity of the actions.
The abjection that often results from the
actions of the artist in which the participants
may be involved causes a sense of recoil in the
viewer, especially as leaking and wounded
bodies are brought into social visibility. At the
beginning of the performance, the artist is
usually clothed, unscathed, not in pain and
invulnerable, but the actions carried out break
down barriers and render the artist abject. The
process of making abject in a literal sense takes
us beyond social conventionality and tests the
limits of acceptability, often prompting ethical
responses in the viewers. In the early years of
body art, there was an element of
unpredictability in that the audience was often
unaware of what might occur in the duration of
the performance, and in extreme cases the body
was poised between safety and danger, life and
death. Greater familiarity with the art form has,
without eliminating spontaneity, increased
awareness of the expectations of what might
happen, or at least the types of action that may
be seen. In the case of certain artists, such as
Franko B, bloodletting is a typical occurrence,
and fans of his work anticipate this as part of his
routine. The need to see and experience the
wounding of the body in different outlets
addresses a deeper need in the audience about
the stakes of art. This is addressed by Hal Foster
in his statement about contemporary art
effecting a general shift in conceptions of the
real: from the real understood as an effect of
representation to the real understood as an event
of trauma (Foster 1996b:106). Performance art
from the 1960s onwards redefined the
boundaries of the aesthetic so that
representation becomes real, which is meant in
a Lacanian sense of moving beyond the
symbolic into the realm of trauma. What
happens to the body during the course of
actions in the performance is traumatic
(involving the loss and recuperation of self)
because it is wounding, and this in turn
becomes traumatic for the viewer who is
accustomed to seeing a different type of
aesthetic representation.9
 It needs to be qualified that not all the
performances are live, and there are many cases
in which artists have opted to use
representational (and not actual) violence or
injury. In these instances the graphic realism of
the actions meant that they appeared authentic
to the viewers or audience who responded as if
the actions were real and felt horrified by the
scenes that unfolded in front of them. There are
some other cases, such as the performances and
video work of Paul McCarthy, where the set-up
is artificial, theatrical and even comical. In
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childlike fashion McCarthy invents a world,
staging it with props, and then proceeds to
violate it in a host of transgressions. Fantasy
characters in grotesque attire, such as Father
Christmas, are the perpetrators of horrific acts
of violence and simulated body parts the
penis-as-hotdog are mutilated and fluids such
as ketchup (blood) are splashed across walls.
These obviously exaggerated actions do not
always involve real bodies, but they are still able
to incite feelings of utter horror as well as irony.
In fact the hyperreality of fantasy characters
heightens the viewers expectations of
a Disneyesque paradise and makes the
encounter with degradation even starker. The
question is whether their unreality lessens the
feelings of abjection, and I would argue that the
visceral display of grotesque actions and
substances is potent enough to create
a tumultuous state of abjection in the viewer.
This unreality creates parallels with cinema.
People watch horror films that are about
monsters that do not exist in the outside world,
and yet the suspension of disbelief, which is the
ideal aesthetic sensibility, means that it not
only is entirely reasonable but is expected that
viewers should be scared and threatened by the
unreal characters that inhabit the screen.10 By
applying the same reasoning in this context, the
creations of McCarthy and other artists are
capable of eliciting horror from viewers that is
sustained in the viewing of the artwork. Away
from the source of the horror, we are able to
reflect on the fictional nature of the monster,
but this distancing is less achievable when in
a fearful state while watching.
In many of the above examples, the given
conventional viewing positions of the subject
object are thwarted. The ambiguous boundaries
between artist and viewer allow the viewer
greater autonomy in the determination of
meaning or interpretation, and conversely
the artist does not have authorial authority.
The meaning of the work is constructed
in the interaction that occurs between the
two parties. The dethroning of the artist or
author was the topic of discussion in Roland
Barthess essay The death of the author (1967),
which overturned the uncritical belief in the
intentionality of the author in favour of the
role of the interpreter. David Hopkins discusses
how Barthes followed a trend in French
Structuralist thought, along with thinkers
such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and
Julia Kristeva, to destabilize bourgeois liberal
belief in an essential unchanging human
nature (Hopkins 2000:82). Kristevas notion
of abjection conveyed the instability of the
conception of the self or subject, which is
under the perpetual threat of invasion by the
object and hence unable to maintain the self.
The inherent instability of the subject means
that it is always in process (Kristeva 1984:22).
One is neither subject nor object but hovers
in between. What is so troubling about the
examples of performance or body art cited is
exactly this inability to maintain the boundaries
of the self. We are undone by the violent actions
that we witness and cannot dispassionately
view the process of abjection that the artist
undergoes because it affects our sense of self,
and ultimately we become abject through
contamination by what we have seen and
experienced and need to go through a process of
catharsis or collapse of meaning before meaning
and identity can be reconfigured. 10
This is not applicable in
the case of bad horror
Whether politics was a motivating force of films, which are
action or not, performances (on stage or in the unconvincing and
uncompelling.
public domain) forced people to think about
human psychology violence, fear, danger
and a host of other emotions. For the ancient
Greeks the cathartic benefits offered by tragic
drama were thought to be socially beneficial.
Rosie Goldberg states that the ritualized pain
A RYA : TA K I N G A PA RT T H E B O DY 11
 experienced in performances had a purifying
effect on an anaestheticized society and
awakened their perception and sensation
(Goldberg 1999:165). People would emerge from
the performance feeling uplifted and purged,
which would make them more productive and
wholesome. But one could argue that catharsis
was only achieved in the cases of ritualized
violence, whereas real violence, in the sense
of the actual infliction of violence, as present
in Burdens Shoot, for example, takes us over
a threshold and becomes unequivocally horror-
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inducing. This claim can be used to frame the
performances of the 1960s group the Viennese
Actionists, who were influenced by pagan and
early-Christian rites and staged spectacles
that involved ritualized sacrifice and torture
in order to attain abreaction and catharsis. In
religious traditions ritual was used to safeguard
the sacred from everyday life. The Actionists,
in particular Hermann Nitsch, reversed this
principle to unleash the force of the sacred,
where the artist was elevated to the role of
shaman. In Orgien Mysterien Theater [Orgies
Mysteries Theatre] (OMT) he staged a number
of performances that involved mock-violence
carrying out sacrificial rites using dead animals
and humans. Doused in blood and eviscerated,
the mimetic violence was reminiscent of the
Dionysian rites of the Bacchanal.
THE PERVASIVENESS OF ABJECTION
A S A S T RAT E G Y O F R E A L I S M
The abject has become a central aspect of
art from the twentieth century onwards and
it continues to occupy contemporary artists
because of its ongoing relevance to questions of
identity. When thinking about the motivations
of the artists to violate their bodies, several
possibilities are opened up. The sceptic may
argue for the sensationalist interpretation,
thus reducing the work to nothing more than
gratuitous provocation. The rationale offered
earlier was that the artists, being motivated by
critique whether of the prevailing aesthetic
ideologies, social conservatism or politics
were drawn to look under the veneer of
12 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 191 : ON ABJECTION
representation to depict the underside of reality
and to animate the senses of the viewer to bring
about an intensity of emotion.
In thinking about abject viewing, we can speak
of different orders of viewing. The experiential
aspects of actual viewing made various moral
demands on the viewer to watch someone
self-harming, to witness the invitation to harm
the artist undertaken by a fellow viewer and
participant and to suspend social conventions
of propriety and normalcy. The presentation
of such practices as entertainment in the stage
shows of Franko B and live screenings of the
multimedia artist Orlan (who carried out bodily
modification) convey the disturbing voyeuristic
sensibilities of people. A comparison may be
made between viewing a horror film and these
performances, in which the former is carried
out in an artificial and safe environment where
the actors are not physically harmed, while
the latter invites an element of the unknown
because in many cases the performances are
not scripted and the artist often halts the
performance only when the pain becomes
unbearable. This then raises the question of
what the enduring nature of performance art
tells us about society and our psyches. Does it
show the depraved nature of humanity? In other
arenas of life the abject is kept in abeyance, but
it becomes the purpose of art to unveil what is
normally hidden from us the unrepresentable.
To conclude, I want to examine Mona
Hatoums Corps tranger (1994), which was
shown at the Rites of Passage exhibition (Tate
1995) and consolidates all the main
characteristics of art that is classified as abject
for the following reasons: it transgresses the
boundaries of the body, it confronts us with the
formless mass of viscera from which we are
unable to escape, and it turns the known body
of one into a scientific experiment thus
depersonalizing the individual. The viewer is
invited to watch a moving image of the inside of
Hatoums body. We enter a small cylindrical
room that contains a viewing screen on the
floor. Using endoscopic and colonoscopic
technology, which penetrates different orifices
of her body, we delve into the world beneath
 the flesh and explore the layers of Hatoums
body, tunnel upon tunnel. [T]he interminable
forested landscape of the surface gives way to
glowing subterranean tunnels lined with
pulsating animate tissue, moist and glistening
(Morris 1995:102). This is abject horror. The
video is replete with sound and we can hear her
breathing and her heartbeat, features that
enhance the spectacle. We are taken out of our
comfort zones and are shown the body at work.
Being so accustomed to viewing a body from the
outside without guidance, we are unable to
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identify or even understand the sights we are
seeing, which render it (to translate the title of
the work) a foreign body.11 While inside the
body organic parts fluids, organs have a
physiological function, but once outside the
body, they become stark reminders of our
mortality. Even though in this case the organs
are still inside the body, the fact that we are
seeing the inside as outer is deeply
destabilizing. The idea of the foreign body also
plays with our fears about the boundaries of the
body and about how, through our rituals of
washing and monitoring, we want to discard
anything that is foreign or harmful to the body.
Continuing with the analogy, maybe it is the
viewer who should be called a foreign body as
we penetrate the depths of her flesh.
Corps tranger presents a new perspective on
abjection. Rather than presenting a dialogue
between inner and outer, which is a common
strategy in the visual arts, where the ruptured
boundaries between the skin and what is
contained within the body create a sense of
revulsion that makes the viewer want to turn
away from the sights that it beholds, here we
the enter the body through the orifices. We
have seen that the body artists persisted in
enhancing feelings of disgust by continuing
to violate their bodies for instance,
Hatoums work takes us to a different level by
transgressing the taboo of the sanctity of the
inside of the body. The surgeon represents the
exception to the rule, because of having access
in order to investigate the maladies of the body.
But these sights should not be for either the
artists privilege or the viewers gaze. Hatoum
has turned the secret compartment of her
body into a piece of theatre and is sardonically
reflecting centuries of the objectification of the
female body. On a sensory level the sights that
we see confuse our perceptual understanding
and spatial mapping of the body. The
contours and cavities inside the body mar our
understanding of what is inner and outer, and,
as we go deeper into Hatoums body, the viscera
become more indistinguishable and we lose
any sense of the external. Facing the screen,
head down, enveloped by the acoustics and the
relative darkness, we experience disorientation,
the pulsating mass simultaneously constitutes 11
Hatoum may also be
and undoes us, touching us in the fabric of referring to her own
our being. political displacement as a
refugee in Britain during
the Lebanese Civil War.
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