Contact with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s - Review

Kathy O'Dell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 142 pp., 34 b/w illus. $ 18.95 paper.

Significantly, Amelia Jones's Body Art/Performing the Subject begins with an epigraph from Antonin Artaud's The Theater and Its Double: "We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site . . . [in which a] direct communication will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it" (1). The emphasis is Jones's, and it underscores what is, for her, the single most powerful effect of performance art (or, in her phrase, body art): the interaction of spectator and spectacle, reception and production, to the point of the dissolution of any meaningful distinction between them. She calls this merging of roles the site of intersubjectivity, a site in which "the subject means always in relationship to others and the locus of identity is always elsewhere" (14). And she traces of the rise of the art world's interest in such a notion (correctly, I think), back to the popularity, in the early sixties, of Irving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, first translated into English in 1962. Vito Acconci, a key figure for Jones, was indisputably influenced by both texts. For Jones, Acconci's work demonstrates that art maker and art interpreter are, in Merleau-Ponty's phrase, "collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity" (41).

Kathy O'Dell shares with Jones this enthusiasm for the spectator's inevitable involvement in the spectacle of performance. In her preface to Contact with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s, she recalls a guest lecture by Chris Burden in the art historian Kristine Stiles's seminar on performance art at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979: "I kept looking back and forth between the slides of his performances and the actual person standing before me. Burden was calmly talking about crawling across broken glass or having nails pounded through his hands, but his short descriptions did not match the overwhelming power of what I was seeing. At the time, I was confused and a little anxious. Now, I think that what Burden was saying - precisely by not saying it - was . . . [that] we, as viewers, are an active part of the artist's work" (xii). Fascinated by the "wide strain" of early 1970s performance art dedicated to "bodily violence," which she calls "masochistic performance," O'Dell's interest is more narrowly focused than is Jones's. She considers almost exclusively the seventies work of Burden, Acconci, Gina Pane, and Ulay/Marina Abramovic - and stresses that its theoretical drift is psychoanalytical rather than phenomenological. What Jones calls intersubjectivity, O'Dell describes in terms of a tacit contract between artist and audience.

Burden's Shoot offers a clear example of O'Dell's theory. In front of a small audience at a Santa Aria, California, gallery in 1971. Burden asked a friend who was a trained sharpshooter to fire at his left arm from a distance of fifteen feet, with the intention of grazing him, though a more serious wound resulted. For O'Dell, the key to understanding the event is the tacit contract between those present: "audience members chose not to stop the shooting, just as the sharpshooter himself chose not to turn down Burden's request" (2). This contract is, O'Dell argues, masochistic, just as in the nineteenth-century erotic writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who gave masochism its name, the women who committed violence against his body to arouse him sexually did so under signed contract. O'Dell admits that none of the performances she describes are intended to arouse either spectator or performer sexually, but in her reading they metaphorically reenact the presexual triggers of psychic development - the oral, mirror, and, finally, Oedipal stages, the last of which "culminates in the rigidification of symbolic systems . . . the positioning of the individual within another institutional construct - the world of law" (10) - which is to say, the world of the contract.

During the oral stage, reflexive actions involving touch develop. O'Dell cites psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu's description of "being a piece of skin that touches at the same time as being a piece of skin that is touched" (15). Thus, when Acconci bites himself in Trademarks (1970) - a photograph of which serves as a sort of emblem for O'Dell's book - he reenacts the fundamental process of the oral stage: "the repeated biting simulates attachment and separation from the body of the maternal figure" (18). When we look at a photograph of Burden after Shoot, "staring glassy-eyed into the camera as two hands pull a tourniquet around his arm just above a blood-stained bandage" (15), we experience the same attachment (or identification) and separation. In fact, for O'Dell, before the photograph, we reenact the next stage of development, the mirror stage, as well; we recognize the self as other, or, in Lacanian terms, that the self "speaks in the Other." What is articulated in this space is "the unconscious" (36).