Can art still shock in the age of the extreme selfie?

Marina Abramović had a gun put to her head. Joseph Beuys shared a gallery with a coyote. But with the social media full of shocking images, is it worth today’s artists putting their lives at risk? In 1974, standing expressionless beside a table in a gallery in Naples, Marina Abramović began her performance piece, Rhythm […]

Marina Abramović had a gun put to her head. Joseph Beuys shared a gallery with a coyote. But with the social media full of shocking images, is it worth today’s artists putting their lives at risk?
In 1974, standing expressionless beside a table in a gallery in Naples, Marina Abramović began her performance piece, Rhythm 0. There was a page of instructions for the audience: “There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired … I am the object. During this period, I take full responsibility. Duration: 6 hours (8pm-2am).”
Among the objects were a loaf of bread, perfume, a rose, grapes, scissors, nails, a bullet and a gun. At the beginning of the event, she said years later, “Nothing really happened.” Someone kissed her, someone gave her the rose – but then the “public became more and more wild … They cut my neck and drink my blood. They carry me around, put me on the table, open my legs and put the knife in between.” They sliced off her cloths and pierced her body with thorns. One man loaded the gun, pointed it at her head and wrapped her fingers around it to try to make her squeeze the trigger.
According to Abramović, whose work features in the Turner Contemporary’s new show Risk, the gallerist intervened, throwing out the would-be provocateur of the artist’s suicide and tossing the gun out of the window. “The experience I learned was that if you leave decisions to the public, you can be killed.”
That same year, Joseph Beuys performed his work, I Like America and America Likes Me, in which, on his first trip to the US, he was picked up at the airport by an ambulance, wrapped in felt and delivered to a gallery, where he shared the space for eight-hour stretches with a wild coyote. After three days, the ambulance took him back to the airport.
In 1975, Chris Burden performed the last of his “danger pieces.” In Doomed, he lay on the floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The secret of the performance was that he would remain there until someone interacted with him. After 45 hours, a museum guard brought him a glass of water, so Burden got up and left. The piece was over.
These events seemed, at the time, to look to the future, to break free of artistic constrictions. They seemed to be embracing chance and danger to create something novel – and reveal something true. As Nietzsche had instructed a century earlier: “Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!”
Modern times begin with the measurement of risk. In the 18th century, French philosophers and mathematicians were engaged in a grand project to establish scales by which everything could be measured, from devising a standard system of weights to measuring internal movements of emotion. In his 1777 Essay on Moral Arithmetic, mathematician Georges-Louis Buffon established as his basic unit of hope and fear (“there is no difference between them, other than from positive to negative”) the probability of a 56-year-old man dying in the next 24 hours. So, for example, as your chances of winning the lottery are lower than that of a middle-aged man dying before tomorrow, you would be foolish to buy a lottery ticket. This is how acting in the world was now to be appraised: every possible action has its risk-to-reward assessment. Death is part of the measurement, and therefore built into the system. And this is the world we live in now, looking at future decisions through gamblers’ eyes.
Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (as with its less extreme precursor, Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, in which the artist sat motionless with a pair of scissors for the audience to shear away pieces of her clothes) seems to use the performer’s passivity for a ritual that exposes the basest desires of the audience, revealing the mind of the mob. Except it was not the gallerist but members of the crowd who defended Abramović from the gun: the audience at Rhythm 0 split into factions, including one that protected the artist.
Contrary to what the artists say and the mid-20th century seems to demonstrate, the crowd is not always homogenous or evil. One of the stars of the Risk show is Eva Hesse. Her sculptures were made of unstable plastics and rubber, and had their own decay and degradation built into them. In her final interview, before she died of cancer in 1970 at the age of 34, Hesse praised Andy Warhol: “He is the most artist that you could be. His art and his person are so equivalent. He and his works are the same.”
And this is what that 1970s performance art is aiming for: the “authentic” moment, whether it’s submitting to the horrors of the crowd and therefore convicting it of war crimes, or communing with a coyote. The most reliable site of this risk-inflected event is the artist’s own body, because that is the most the artist can be sure of.
But what’s the poor performance artist to do today? How can performance artists possibly compete in a world where a selfie-taking Canadian can make thousands of dollars after being inadvertently kicked in the head by a Peruvian train driver and posting an 11-second video of the event on his YouTube channel?
We’re not living on Vesuvius, but smartphones and social media are documenting trips to its slopes. Just look east. In his 2011 piece Art Whore, Chinese artist Cheng Li had sex with a female partner in front of an invited audience at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Beijing. He was arrested and sentenced to a year of “re-education” at a labour camp. Which goes to show that there’s no need to be nostalgic for that 70s moment when the serious and the silly could combine to produce the possibility of meaning – or at least the possibility of consequence.
theguardian.com