by Mark Dery
Ironically, the Australian artist’s reputation rests on the twenty-five unequivocally low-tech “suspensions” he executed between 1976 and 1988. Reminiscent of the Native American sun dance, these events involved raising the naked artist skyward by cables attached to stainless steel hooks embedded in his skin. Unforgettable evocations of prenatal weightlessness, the primal urge to fly, and space age fantasies of floating in zero gravity, the suspensions were testaments to gravity’s victory over the earthbound body.
For each event, Stelarc was skewered at multiple points so that the weight on his hooks was uniformly distributed. In Sitting/Swaying Event for Rock Suspension (1980), he floated, cross-legged, in a Tokyo gallery, counterbalanced by a gently swaying ring of rocks. In Seaside Suspension: Event for Wind and Waves (1981), he swung precariously over the ocean, buffeted by gusts of wind and spattered by crashing waves. In Street Suspension (1984), he swooped, via cable and pulleys, from the fourth floor of one building to another in New York’s East Village. And in City Suspension (1985), he hung from a crane two hundred feet above Copenhagen’s Royal Theater, describing lazy circles under the watchful gaze of the building’s stone sphinxes.
Reflecting on the experience of hovering over Copenhagen, the breeze shivering his cables, he confided:
I really suffer from a fear of heights. . . . I kept my eyes closed for the first 10, 15 minutes. . . . 200 feet up, all you could hear was [the] whooshing sound of the wind, the creaking of the skin gently turning and swaying in the wind.10
In each event, the pain was excruciating during liftoff and touchdown; in most cases, it took about a week for the wounds to heal and Stelarc to recuperate. Other body artists have pushed the threshold of pain even further: Chris Burden, the avant-garde’s answer to “Evel” Knievel, set himself on fire, tried to breathe water, was crucified atop a Volkswagen Beetle, and, for his 1971 piece Shoot, arranged for a friend to shoot him at close range with a rifle, blowing a chunk of flesh out of his arm. “[A] guy pulls a trigger, and in a fraction of a second, I’d made a sculpture,” marveled Burden.11
Body art, a performance art subgenre that emerged in the late sixties and flourished in the seventies, sprang from conceptual art, which rejected the commodified art object for an immaterial-and therefore theoretically unsalable-art of ideas. Body art was conceived of as intangible, transitory sculpture, fashioned by the artist from his or her own body and physical actions. Early body artists, most of whom were male, exhibited a curious detachment from the flesh that was their clay, a tendency that recalled the mechanical impersonality of minimalist painting, with its uniformly applied colors and hard-edged, rectilinear compositions. Shunning expressionistic or autobiographical impulses, they created works that resembled endurance tests (for the audience as well as the performer) or scientific experiments: Terry Fox’s Push Piece (1970) consisted of the artist shoving, with all his might, against a brick wall until he was overcome by exhaustion; Bruce Nauman’s Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1968) is self-explanatory.
At the same time, body art constituted a backlash against the minimalist mandate that art be reduced to utter neutrality through the use of uniform “color fields” and flat, geometric shapes. This opposing tendency impelled the genre toward the ever more spectacular aesthetic exemplified by Chris Burden.
The feminist bodyworks of the seventies were as fervently political and unreservedly personal as earlier, male-dominated body art had been either coolly formal or histrionically gory. They evidenced a growing recognition of the body as war zone, a conviction asserted in the feminist axiom “THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL.” The art critic Thomas McEvilley writes, “Much women’s [performance art] relates to what in feminist literary criticism is called ‘writing the body’ As against the male assertion of abstract painting or modernist literature as essentially otherworldly endeavors aimed at immaterial realities . . . women artists restored focus to the reality of the body and with it to social and personal realities.”12
Recasting her body “as a source of varying emotive power,” Carolee Schneemann parried conventional images of woman as the weaker vessel in works that excavated prepatriarchal ages or cultures for archetypes of female empowerment.13 Performances such as Eye Body (1963), a neo-shamanic ritual in which the recumbent artist, daubed with paint and writhing with snakes, personated a statue of a Cretan goddess, prefigured the passionate interest among feminist body artists in the Great Goddess, the Earth Mother, and other pre-Christian deities. In New Age feminist narratives, the image of a procreative nature goddess is often counterpoised with the stereotype of an angry god of war whose shock troops are Culture and Technology. “[I]t’s no accident that the most technological, militaristic Western ‘culture’ was destroying all these ancient goddess sites,” Schnee-mann observed, of America’s bombing of Iraq during the Gulf War.14
A brief digression on body art is essential to any discussion of an artist whose signature works involve piercing his body with hooks and hoisting it high to dangle like a side of beef from a meat rack. There are obvious comparisons to be made between the aesthetic of extremes implicit in Burden’s gonzo body art and the gut-clenching spectacle of Stelarc’s suspensions, painful even to behold; between the minimalist objectification of the flesh in male body artists’ flatly reportorial documentation of their activities and Stelarc’s almost clinical disengagement from his physical self (in his essays and interviews, it is always “the body,” never “my body”).
Furthermore, the juxtaposition of characteristic body art by New Age or ecotopian feminists with Stelarc’s work is highly instructive. The former harks back to ancient matriarchies and prehistoric goddess worship for a vision of the feminine unmediated by the male gaze, while the latter looks to a future just beyond the rim of possibility, made possible by technology. The former is heavily invested in a mystical ecopolitics symbolized by a loamy, generative Earth, while the latter dramatizes a theory of escape velocity in which the body falls away like a rocket stage as Homo sapiens accelerates into “pan-planetary” posthuman evolution.
Stelarc recoils from “the reemergence of the mystical” in the guise of a return to “cultural rituals that have long outlived their purposes.” Although his early suspensions, executed with ropes and harnesses, emerged from yogic practices and his subsequent use of hooks paralleled a study of Hindu religious rites of piercing, he is at some pains to divest his work of the ritualistic associations of much body art:
I’ve never meditated before an event. I’ve never had any sort of out-of-body experience. I’ve never felt a sense of being a shaman, or [of being in] an S&M situation. To me those notions are largely irrelevant. . . . Previous awareness techniques were important in our development but I don’t think they’re significant anymore as human strategies.15
For Stelarc, the writing is literally on the wall. In his 1982 performance Handswriting, the artist laboriously coordinated pens held in both hands with the marker-wielding Third Hand to scrawl a single word on paper taped to a gallery wall: EVOLUTION.
Stelarc embodies McLuhan’s declaration that with the advent of cyberculture “man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull and his nerves outside his skin; new technology breeds new man.”16 As noted in chapter 3, McLuhan’s technodeterministic reading of history rests on the assumption that
All media are extensions of some human faculty-psychic or physical. The wheel. . . is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye . . . clothing, an extension of the skin.17
According to McLuhan, all such extensive or “autoamputative” strategies are the overstimulated nervous system’s response to cultural catalysts such as “the acceleration of pace and increase of load,” themselves technological in origin.18 Further, he argues, each autoamputation results in a numbing of that part of the nervous system associated with the now technologized and therefore traumatically amplified function.
To McLuhan, the metaphoric extrusion of the central nervou
s system (“that electric network that coordinates the various media of our senses”) in the form of global telecommunications networks and other cybernetic technologies represents a survival mechanism, triggered by “the successive mechanizations of the various physical organs since the invention of printing [that] have made too violent and superstimulated a social experience for the nervous system to endure.”19
Adopting McLuhan’s premise that the vertiginous whirl of the information age has outpaced and overtaxed the nervous system, Stelarc argues that humanity is superannuated, its biological hardware unadapted to the infosphere. In his essay “Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary Strategies,” he declares,
It is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1,400-cc. brain is an adequate biological form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity and quality of information it has accumulated. . . . The most significant planetary pressure is no longer the gravitational pull but rather the information thrust. Gravity has molded the evolved body in shape and structure and contained it on the planet. Information propels the body beyond itself and its biosphere. Information fashions the form and function of the postevolutionary body.20
Like McLuhan, who couched his fundamental insight in the catchy maxim “THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE,” Stelarc has condensed his theories into a single, mediagenic aphorism: “THE BODY IS OBSOLETE.” If the suspensions were object lessons in the physical and psychological limits of the terrestrial body, Stelarc’s cybernetic events are dress rehearsals for posthuman evolution. High-tech prostheses and medical technologies for monitoring and mapping the body hold forth the promise, Stelarc maintains, of self-directed evolution-the result not of incremental mutation over generations but of somatic change brought about through technology. “Patched-up people,” he writes, “are evolutionary experiments.”21 According to Stelarc, miniaturized, biocompatible technologies will one day make each individual a species unto him or herself.
EVOLUTION ENDS WHEN TECHNOLOGY INVADES THE BODY. Once technology provides each person with the potential to progress individually in its [sic] development, the cohesive-ness of the species is no longer important.22
The artist’s philosophy of transcendence through technology is hitched to a space-age teleology: for Stelarc, our Manifest Destiny lies in the stars. If it is to attain “planetary escape velocity,” he reasons, the body must first be objectified:
It is no longer meaningful to see the body as a site for the psyche or the social but rather as a structure to be monitored and modified. The body not as a subject but as an object-NOT AS AN OBJECT OF DESIRE BUT AS AN OBJECT FOR DESIGNING.23
Reconceived as an “it” rather than an “I,” the body may be subjected to ballistic streamlining, “amplified and accelerated” into a “postevolutionary projectile.” Humans embarked on an extraterrestrial odyssey would find the body’s “complexity, softness, and wetness . . . hard to sustain,” predicts Stelarc.24 The body must be hollowed, hardened, and dehydrated, its inessential innards scooped out so that it may be “a better host for technology,” its skin peeled off and replaced by a synthetic dermis capable of converting light into chemical nutrients and absorbing all oxygen necessary to sustain life through its pores.25 An internal early warning system would monitor what few organs remain, and “microminiaturized robots,” or nanomachines, would “colonize the surface and internal tracts to augment the bacterial populations-to probe, monitor and protect the body.”26
Eviscerated and stuffed with modular components that can be easily replaced; armored and endowed with pile-driver brawn by a robotic exoskeleton; fitted with an array of antennae to amplify its sight and hearing; and implanted with a brain chip or genetically engineered to expand its cortical capacity to supercomputer proportions, Stelarc’s posthu-man being would inhabit a “pan-planetary physiology that is durable, flexible and capable of functioning in varying atmospheric conditions, gravitational pressures and electromagnetic fields.”27 Such creatures might resemble one of Sterling’s “Lobsters”–Borglike posthumans sealed in “skintight life-support systems, flanged here and there with engines and input-output jacks” whose
greatest pleasure was to . . . open their amplified senses to the depths of space, watching stars past the limits of ultraviolet and infrared . . . or just sitting and soaking in watts of solar energy through their skins while they listened with wired ears to the warbling of Van Allen belts and the musical tick of pulsars.28
Entities such as these might choose to become “reengineered extraterrestrial explorers,” the artist speculates.29 But in the scenario sketched in most of Stelarc’s published essays and public lectures, the mutant, transmigrant remains of the human race come to rest in virtual reality, in a “high-fidelity illusion of tele-existence” wherein their “performance parameters [would be] limited neither by . . . mere physiology nor the local space [they occupy].”30 In a 1993 lecture at the Manhattan artspace the Kitchen, he argued
If the . . . sensory feedback loops between the robot and the human operator are of a high enough quantity and quality, then there’s a collapse of the psychological distance between the operator and the robot; in other words, if the robot does what the human commands and the human perceives what the robot perceives, the human-machine system [effectively] collapses into one operational unit.31
Immobilized in cybernetic networks and immortalized by means of replacement parts, Stelarc’s posthuman teleoperators would reach across solar systems to sift alien sands through robotic fingers-fingers sophisticated enough to reproduce reality with a fidelity indistinguishable from embodied experience. A postevolutionary strategy that began with bodies redesigned not to accommodate airflow but rather the torque of McLuhan’s “electric vortex” ends in a hyperreality that has become “a medium of action rather than information.”32
Meanwhile, back in the present, Dr. Richard Restak raises doubts about the nuts-and-bolts feasibility of the cyborg upgrades proposed by Stelarc. A neuropsychiatrist, professor of neurology at George Washington University, and the author of the New York Times best-seller The Brain, Restak takes issue with Stelarc’s postevolutionary scenario on medical as well as psychological grounds.
“It’s essentially science fiction,” he contends, “a kind of a postmodernist view of what the future person is going to be. In postmodern philosophy you can say, ‘Why take anything for granted? Let’s question the most basic elements-our very biology, for instance.’ Of course, at the outer limits of this ideology, you come up against biology, which is where Stelarc’s weakness lies.
“For example, I don’t know how you would decide what innards are inessential because such things as the immune system are housed in some fairly unprepossessing organs, such as the thymus. You might be able to replace the liver and the kidneys but you’d have to keep some type of immune system. At the same time, the immune system is going to wreak havoc on any foreign object you put into the body. That’s going to be your biggest problem: What would keep the body from rejecting these implants while it’s in the process of this transmogrification? The immune system would have be suppressed but then of course you’re open to viruses and bacteria. Furthermore, once you peel off the skin, before anything else can be put over it, your infection possibilities are just astronomical. There’s no way that I could imagine that you could get from a human being to something like this, not only because of the technical hurdles but more specifically because of the biological ones.
“Moreover, who would want to live like this, out there among the stars? I’ve written on brain and body prostheses and they’ve done some wonderful things, but I look upon Stelarc’s fantasies as pathological; they’re in the general genre of world destruction fantasies–extreme, narcissistic fantasies of complete isolation. This creature’s out there by itself, it doesn’t need anybody because its brain has been amplified with a chip or genetically engineered, which I think implies an involutional process whereby it’s just occupied with its own
internal processing.
“Fantasies such as this represent a distorted Cartesianism. We’re so locked into the Cartesian idea that we’re a mind and the body is an it and we treat it as an it (the analogy is usually to a machine), whereas in fact we are embodied. I think there’s a lot of self-hate in this objectification of the body, a lot of estrangement.”
Stelarc’s essay “Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Post-evolutionary Strategies” ends with the assurance that, in tele-existence, “[t]he body’s form is enhanced and its functions are extended. . . . electronic space restructures the body’s architecture and multiplies its operational possibilities.”33 But beneath this tantalizing vision of the body apotheosized (albeit in a fashion that accommodates the contrary notion of human potential unbounded by physicality) lies an almost sadomasochistic subtext: The body, “traumatized” by its objectification, is “distraught and disconnected” from its functions by technological mediation and has no recourse but “interface and symbiosis.” Here is McLuhan’s traumatic autoamputation come back to haunt us, attended by his “Narcissus Narcosis,” the body’s self-protective mechanism against the shock of being flayed alive. “We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed,” argues McLuhan, “or we will die.”34 Stelarc likewise insists that “[t]he body plugged into the machine network needs to be pacified. In fact, to . . . truly achieve a hybrid symbiosis the body will need to be increasingly anesthetized.”35
As well, it must be skinned and gutted, “eliminating many of its malfunctioning organs and systems, minimizing toxin build-up in its chemistry.”36 The polymorphous, almost synesthetic physicality that Carolee Schneemann celebrated as “meat joy” is counterweighted here by a vision of the flesh as dead meat. Awash in toxic waste and always on the brink of collapse, Stelarc’s body bears little resemblance to Schneemann’s “source of varying emotive power.” It is indistinguishable from Foucault’s ideal subject of power, the analyzable, manipulable “docile body,” available to be “subjected, used, transformed and improved.”37