The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson

Nihilism-
http://www.ws5.com/nihilism/

Some notes on; the Art of Cruelty

Marqueis De Sade

Bacon- suffering and difference make great art not egalitarianism

Artaud- the Burning man festival/performance art

Artaud’s theatre of cruelty aims to torch aesthetic mastery itself, and leave a “passionate and convulsive conception of life” in its place. Desire to break down the barriers between life and art.

The founding and manifesto of Futurism, published in 1909 by ringleader F.T. Marinetti, infamously declares that art “can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice”.

Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh’s Art/Life (1983-84)- they both agreed to be tied together by and eight foot rope, without touching each other, for a year.

Actionist Otto Muehl: “It is the assignment of the artist to destroy art and come closer to reality”.

(whether bloodshed need always signify violence is also something of an open question, as is the definition of violence itself: for example, the varying uses of the word at issue in phenomena such as “symbolic violence,” “divine violence,” “domestic violence,” “the violence of capital,” “abortion as violence,” “violent language,” and so on)

…another open question: whether an act of violence must always be characterised or accompanied by cruelty: the killing of animals for food, some instances of suicide, assisted suicide, or mercy killing, ritualised body mortifications and so on- all sites for debate.

No substitute for the visceral unease provoked by bloodshed- either in representation or reality (or in any smash-up of the two). Actionist films of the 1960’s and performance artists such as Ron Athey, Franco B.

However, emphasis on bloodshed as a jumpstart into reality can be wearing. Anxiety over the relationship between art and life remains high; the mandate to break down the barriers between them, acute. Plato famously thought that mimesis (imitation) drew people away from the truth. Aristotle argued that beholding evocative representations with the proper distance could provide a healthy outlet for impulses and ideas that might otherwise be disruptive to the social fabric. For example a play- tragedy- arousing pity and fear- working as a catharsis of these emotions.

Kaprow- “un-arting”

Artaud strives to collapse the distance between looking and acting entirely, leaving the spectator subsumed, possessed, dissolved. Brechtian technique of directly addressing the audience.

Allfredo Jaar

Capacities of particular works to expand, invent, explode or adumbrate what we mean when we say ‘reality’. Ranciere’s “redistribution of the sensible”- bounty of representational and perceptual possibilities- changing, quite literally, what we are able to sense.

Artaud desired a theatre that would “break through language to touch life”.

2000 book of documentary photography ‘Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America’. Our ability to revel in the spectacle of public executions and gruesome torture.

Stephen King’s “The Running Man”- prophetic. Show after show that draws on some combination of surveillance; self-surveillance; “interactivity” with the home audience; techniques associated with torture, interrogation; and rituals of humiliation, sadism and masochism. French TV programme- The Game of Death (electrical shocks). The Hub- “See it, Film it, Change it”- however, seems to be an exceptionally poor means by which to contemplate the horrors of human trafficking, child prostitution, landmines and so on.

Susan Sontag- “Regarding the Pain of Others”

Errol Morris- Is it possible for a photograph to change the world? For better or for worse? Shock-parody

Treating spectatorship as a problem or the problem- for example, Obama’s decision to hold back further photographs that depict the abuse, rape and torture of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners in American custody as it would only “further inflame anti-American opinion and put our troops in greater danger”. The image has the power to cause injury, but it is not the image that has caused the damage- it is the act. Sontag argues there is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. Maggie Nelson; “Nobody can think and hit at the same time”.  

Trecartin’s 2007 “I-Be Area”

Trecartin’s; “contemporary life is mind-scrambling, fragmented and distracted, so my art must be mind-scrambling, fragmented and distracted too.”

Aesthetic-of-amnesia. Richard Foreman (Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theatre)- “The image of the Marlboro man riding his horse and smoking his cigarette has struck with me for many years…all it means is that the image seduced me…it didn’t widen my sensibilities, compassion or intuition. Whereas an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. It offers images and ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do.