Driving Nails Through Testicles And Masturbating Under Floorboards: What’s So Good About Performance Art?

Last week in Moscow, the performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky walked into Red Square, took all his clothes off, sat down, then drove a nail through his scrotum. He was attached to the cold cobblestones for over an hour until the authorities arrived. Pavlensky described it as “a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society.”

Before maiming his testicles, Pavlensky was best known for wrapping himself in barbed wire outside a government building, and for sewing his lips together as an act of protest against the imprisonment of the members of Pussy Riot. Similarly, Pavlensky’s Red Square ‘stunt’ was a message about the powerlessness of life under Putin; a message reinforced by the fact that the video is being blocked on a number of Russian social media sites.

He has now been charged with ideologically motivated ‘hooliganism’, the same ambiguously worded section of the Russian criminal code used to imprison Pussy Riot. Pavlensky faces a similar jail term, too.

A few days after this happened, I had dinner with my family. Because I was taking advantage of the free-flowing red wine, I decided that a discussion about mutilated genitalia was appropriate conversation. I proceeded to regale my mother and stepfather with all the examples of artistically-motivated bloodied limbs and endured pain I could think of. My mother grimaced, her limbs performing that involuntary shake you do when you hit your tailbone or pinch a nerve; the kind of sensation best expressed through the arches of the feet.

It was a response I hadn’t entirely anticipated. You very rarely get to see such visceral reactions in people caused by anything anymore, particularly not art. We’ve become very French in our apathy. And that’s what I find endlessly interesting about what Pavlensky did, and what a lot of performance artists do. They shock us out of our complacency. They throw in our faces all the confronting things lurking in the haunted house of our minds.

It’s Art! (Just Not The Art You Learned About In High School)

“That’s not art,” my mother said, after she’d finished the full-body cringe. Those three words are a fairly common reaction whenever anybody — particularly a performance artist — does something ‘shocking’. Performance art is one of the least controlled and more transient forms of art. And, like street art, it tends to provoke a strange frustration in people, because it diverges from our traditional notions of art as something that’s eternal, something that belongs to a museum or a gallery.

Performance art had its genesis in the happenings and cultural changes of the 1960s and ‘70s. It was a confusing, orphaned art form for many years until recently, when it began to be recognised as a serious historical movement, bestowed with legitimacy by MOMA in 2010 when they held a retrospective of the work of Marina Abramovic — arguably the grande dame of performance art.

It can be extremely difficult to define what performance art is, because the performance can be almost entirely be dictated by the artist. It can occur with or without a live audience, can be viewed by video link, or can simply be performed and documented. Performance art doesn’t have to occur in a gallery – it can happen anywhere and last for any length of time. But it is always the performance itself that constitutes the piece of art.

‘Shock’, obscenity and confrontation were elements of performance art from the very beginning. In 1964, Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece was performed for the first time in Japan, before going on to be staged in New York and London. While Ono sat still and silent, members of the audience were invited to cut away at her clothing with scissors, leaving her sitting near naked, her dress in tatters. In 1971, Chris Burden arranged to have a friend shoot his arm with a rifle at close range, and to be crucified to the roof of a Volkswagen. In the same year, Vito Acconci performed Seedbed. The audience wandered the empty gallery while Acconci, out of sight beneath the floorboards, masturbated and narrated the sexual fantasies he was having, amplified on speakers so that the audience could hear. His murmuring ranged from the more abstract: “I’m turned to myself, turned onto myself,” to the more explicit: “you’re pushing your cunt down on my mouth.” In another New York gallery, Joseph Beuys spent three days living with a coyote.

In these pieces, and in many of the performance art works that continue to shock us today, including Pavlensky’s, the audience is asked to witness extreme and often life-threatening events, involving self-harm, or which violate deeply ingrained taboos.

But the lightening rod of confronting, extreme performance art is Abramovic herself. In her art, pain is a constant. She has lost consciousness in the middle of a burning star, brushed her hair until her scalp bled, screamed until she lost her voice. She and her long-time collaborator and partner Ulay traded slaps, kissed until they fainted, hurled themselves at walls and at each other. In Lips of Thomas, first performed in 1975, she ate honey from a jar, she drank a bottle of wine, then she cut a five point star in her stomach with a razor blade, lay down on a cross made of ice blocks and remained there for half an hour while she bled and froze. And in one of her most ominous pieces, Rhythm 0, she allowed the audience to do whatever they pleased to her. Over six hours the crowd went from playful to bestial, cutting into her clothes and skin, stabbing a knife between her naked legs and holding a loaded gun to her chest.

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On Shock, And How It’s Different To Scandal

In October this year, the Turner-prize winning artist Grayson Perry declared that art has lost its ability to shock. He had a point. The furore over Tropic of Cancer and Portnoy’s Complaint in the 1950s seemed quaint once millions of middle-aged housewives took to reading Fifty Shades of Grey on public transportation. Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs look not nearly as obscene as a lot of contemporary advertising. Gangsta rap is mainstream, to say nothing of Elvis’ pelvis.

It’s the ”real” element of performance art that sets it apart from a lot, if not most, of contemporary pop culture. Performance art doesn’t truck with the idea that art should be a thing you can spend a small fortune on, so that you can hang it in your dining room or in the foyer of your tastefully decorated investment bank. And performance art rejects illusion. In a play, the knife has a retractable blade and the blood is tomato sauce, but in performance art the knife is always real, and so is the blood. It raises the stakes for the artist and the audience, and it’s this quality that frequently causes the shock.

Shock can, I grant you, seem indistinguishable from scandal. It’s for this reason that when I tried to explain this article to my housemate last night, he compared Pavlensky to Miley Cyrus’ twerking routine at the VMA’s. With Miley, the uproar is not so much a side effect of the performance itself, but its perceived intent: a cynical ploy started by a self-promoting ‘so-called’ artist, and spread by the easily-outraged scolds of commercial TV and talkback radio.

There are, of course, examples of this in performance art. In 2008, Yale University student Aliza Shvarts caused a scandal (not a shock) by proposing inducing abortions as part of her senior year art project. She was reported to have inseminated herself as much as possible over a nine-month period, and induced abortions with drugs. The exhibition was to feature sound recordings of the abortions, and preserved collections of blood from the process. It soon became clear that the induced miscarriages in all likelihood never took place, but her intention — to offend a whole lot of people — worked a treat. Ultimately the controversy entirely took over the creation, and the piece was only ever spoken about, never performed or documented. It was a scandal caused by talking about doing something, without following through on it, but it raised her profile enough to get into a doctorate program at NYU and to be invited onto MTV to give a theoretical reading of the work of Kanye West. From the outside, it looked very cynical.

Shock is different. It’s a visceral reaction – the involuntary arching of your feet or the queasiness in your stomach of the sympathetic pang in your limbs. It’s frequently uncomfortable, and confronting, but a lot of performance art sees it as a duty to reflect the world back at itself, in all it’s discomfort. And though we might be more jaded, not blinking twice at dirty books and gyrating teenagers in music videos, it is still possible to shock us by making us look upon something that we don’t want to see. Performance art pieces still shock us. Last month, Clayton Pettet, a nineteen-year-old art student at Central Saint Martin’s in London, announced that on January 25th 2014 he will be losing his virginity to another boy in a Hackney gallery, to an audience of 100 people. Pettet isn’t the first to perform sex acts for art — Chinese artist Cheng Li was hauled off to a re-education facility in 2011, after doing something similar with a woman at Beijing’s Contemporary Art Exhibition Hall. In a much more extreme instance last year, the Japanese artist Mao Sugiyama had his penis and testicles surgically removed. He then proceeded to divvy up the shaft of the penis, scrotal skin and testicles, then cooked, garnished and served them with mushrooms and parsley to five diners at a banquet in Tokyo. (If you’re wondering why he wasn’t prosecuted for feeding people human flesh, it turns out there’s no law against cannibalism in Japan).

The visceral shocks caused by pieces like these shake us out of things we take for granted. It goes straight to our nervous system. In The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), Maggie Nelson questions the kind of art which sets out only to shock, summed up for her by Austrian director Michael Haneke’s stated desire to “rape the viewer into independence.” She argues that art still needs to say the kinds of things that culture can’t allow itself to hear, but there has to be something beyond the initial ‘eurgh’ factor, another emotion, an intimacy and a sense of the ‘real’ which comes afterwards.

Why Performance Art is Worth Embracing, Not Head-Shaking And Pearl-Clutching

Shocking performance art — testicles nailed to the cobblestones, self-induced miscarriages, jerking off under floorboards and carving stars into flesh – assaults the sensibilities of the audience. It creates a confrontation between the artist and the world. It’s nearly impossible to remain physically unaffected by real-life scenes of bloodletting, mutilation, violence and sex. However hard and fast our emotional outer-shells are, it’s hard to find somebody who, upon first viewing any of the videos or photographs of the performances I’ve mentioned in this piece, doesn’t feel excited, repulsed, provoked, or some combination of all three. We feel something.

The increased attention being given to performance art as a legitimate art form coincides with a time when our experiences are more and more mediated and devoid of emotion, or constructed for our consumption beforehand. It’s not good for us personally, but it’s also not good for us politically. In the most extreme situations, those of us dissociated from sensation can administer pain abstractly, like soldiers shooting unarmed Iraqi adults and children as if they’re in a video game. The shock of art which is viscerally affective, extreme enough to cause our shoulders to shudder and our feet to arch, forces us to feel the things which are so easy to lose in the mediation of everyday life.

While I don’t believe any art form needs to be justified, the shock factor of performance art explains why it’s so interesting, and it’s why we are increasingly paying more attention it. It makes us feel something, even if it’s just, ‘ewww, gross, please stop driving a nail through your testicles.’

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Madeleine Watts writes article, stories, essays, and notes to herself on the back of her hand. She has contributed to The Lifted Brow, Griffith REVIEW, Concrete Playground, FasterLouder and Broadsheet. She lives in Sydney.

Feature image by Petr Pavlensky.