What is “deepest” for Bacon is sensation, not psychology. And the peeling away of psychology from sensation occasions a certain sort of pain—the pain of extinguishing the story behind the suffering, and of contending directly with the sensation of suffering itself. This process might be likened to the Buddhist instruction to focus first and foremost on the wound made by an arrow that has pierced your heart, rather than on the direction or bow from which it came. Focusing on the latter is sometimes termed frivolousness, insofar as it distracts from the pain, instead of leading you further into it. “It is obvious that, when you are really squashing frivolousness, you should feel pain, because there is a certain attraction toward the occupation of being frivolous,” Chögyam Trungpa writes. “By squashing it you are completely taking away the occupation. You begin to feel that you have nothing to hold onto anymore, which is rather frightening as well as painful.” What on God’s earth, after this squashing, does one do next? “Then you must not live on your heroism, on having achieved something, but just dance with the continuing process of energy that has been liberated by this destruction.”
Plath, too, knew how to do this dance. She too liked to keep moving. “And you, great Stasis— / What is so great in that!” she writes in “Years.” “What I love is / The piston in motion— / My soul dies before it. / And the hooves of horses, their merciless churn.” Plath also loved the feeling of going from zero to ninety, as in her famous fire arc of a poem, “Ariel,” which begins with “Stasis in darkness,” and ends with her hurtling like “the arrow, the dew that flies / Suicidal, at one with the drive / Into the red // Eye, the cauldron of morning.”
Many have wondered whether this inexorable drive—Plath’s infamous “blood jet”—had to have an element of cruelty to it—a cruelty that, in Plath’s case, eventually took the form of self-murder. Many have asked why she couldn’t have loved the piston without having her soul “die before it,” why the churn of the hooves had to be “merciless,” why the arrow or the dew or the drive had to be “suicidal,” why the jet had to be made of blood. Often I think people ask these questions because they are afraid that there is no drive that, when pushed to its outer limits, does not invite or at least graze its extinction. This seems to me a reasonable fear.
Bacon was one of those who insisted that humans will always suffer, no matter how just their circumstances, and that to argue otherwise is to deny a fundamental aspect of the human condition. He was right, of course, which is why any commitment to social justice that cannot acknowledge the existence of basic pain—that is, suffering that will exist for the human subject no matter how equitable or nourishing its circumstances—will end up haunted by bewilderment and disillusionment. (This is the narrator’s main point in Gaitskill’s “Agonized Face.”) But to obliterate, happily and eagerly, the distinctions between avoidable pain and basic pain is another story. It speaks of a different taste—that of wanting to amplify basic pain, valorize it, court it, exalt it. (Case in point: art historian John Richardson recalls that, after homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain, Bacon—who was gay—once wished that they would “bring back hanging for buggery,” a wish that makes clear how much pleasure Bacon derived from risk, taboo, and the threat of punishment.)
Of course, in art as in life, pain doesn’t typically arrive wrapped up in neat boxes, some labeled “pain from preventable injustice,” others, “pain from basic suffering.” Think of the pain of being poor, of being raped, of being enslaved, of being gay-bashed, of being forced into exile, of losing everything in a natural disaster, of suffering from an illness such as HIV or cancer (or any illness, especially if one does not have access to health care to treat it): such experiences swirl all kinds of human-made and primordial sufferings together. But that doesn’t mean one can’t become a student of the swirl and learn how to make useful distinctions in its midst. (Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, known to twelve-steppers everywhere, comes to mind here, as does Buddhism’s attention to discerning the differences between three categories of pain: “all-pervading pain,” “the pain of alternation,” and “the pain of pain.”) The increased ability to make such distinctions is one means of wising up to our various styles of imprisonment, should one wish to lessen their grip.
It can be exciting and worthwhile when art assists in this wising up. For some—such as Brecht—it is art’s duty. Perhaps that is one of the main differences between ethically scrupulous endeavors and so-called art of cruelty: the former is beholden to this sense of duty, while the latter can be more concerned with communicating the felt sensations—on all sides—of injustice or trauma, come what may. You might even see some art of cruelty as a division of trauma itself, in that one of trauma’s most troubling cruelties lies in its tendency to replicate itself—Freud’s “compulsion to repeat” writ reckless and large. “Beauty brings copies of itself into being,” Scarry writes in On Beauty. Alas, the same must be said of trauma, as trauma can notoriously suffuse its sufferers with the desperate (if unconscious) desire to make others feel as bad as they have felt. The consequent wheel of suffering—often appropriately termed a “cycle of violence”—accounts for much of what is despicable in this world. It is also, for better or worse, the drive behind some of its art.
You want people to know how bad something feels, either for you, personally, or for a larger community—a family, a people, a race, a class, a gender, and so on. The urge might be strong enough that you want the mean satisfaction of producing, in another, bona fide pain. Some end up trying to bludgeon their audience into understanding. Think, for example, of Fernando Meirelles’s 2002 film City of God, a fictionalized portrait of life in the ultra-violent, ultra-poor, ultra-corrupt Brazilian slum, or favela, known ironically as Cidade de Deus. City of God marries this bludgeoning impulse with the more noble desire to bring the bad news of radical poverty and its attendant miseries to both the elites of Brazil and the MTV generation worldwide. Its popularity depended on this union, and on the in-your-face, hyperkinetic, relentlessly violent aesthetic that it used to deliver it—an aesthetic designed to exhilarate as much as brutalize its audience. “Tarantino with a social conscience,” several reviewers called it. You do indeed walk out of the film palpably terrorized—I felt jumpy and queasy for hours, and struggled to differentiate this sick feeling from that produced by other Tarantino-like experiences by telling myself that perhaps Meirelles was trying to inject into audiences who would otherwise have no conception of what it feels like to live in a place like Cidade de Deus but a drop of the knowledge—a drop that might stay with someone beyond the 130 minutes the movie takes to blow its wad. This possibility seemed potentially worth the film’s many attendant risks: desensitization, glamorization, exploitation, misrepresentation, and so on.
Nonetheless, I almost walked out of the film during the scene in which a gangster is terrorizing a toddler at gunpoint, forcing him to choose whether he wants his hand or foot blown off. (At long last, the little boy chooses his foot, which the gangster promptly shoots off.) The cruelty of this scene felt like too much to bear, in part because the child at hand appeared too young to discern the difference between being terrorized at gunpoint for a film and simply being terrorized, and thus I had the bad feeling in my gut that I was watching a cruelty that was only partially simulated. This feeling was complicated by the fact that most of the actors in the film were residents of the favelas themselves, so if one tried to rid oneself of the bad feeling by telling oneself that this boy’s life was probably chock full of similar terrors, and therefore the desire to protect him from this simulated one was as naive as it was useless, the argument brought about but a new breed of bad feeling. But really none of this mattered to me at the moment I felt the need to bolt. What mattered was the door clanging shut inside me, the door that clangs shut whenever I feel absolutely certain that neither I nor the world will be a better place if I ingest a particular cruelty. (Then, of course, I ingested it anyway, as per the implacable impera
tive of the cinema, especially the cinema of cruelty. Bam.)
WHAT KIND of circle is it, that aims to represent all sides of a horrible act? Does drawing such a circle provide the most ethically thorough and fearless approach to a heinous deed, or is “true” ethical clarity achieved only when one privileges the experience of the victim? Does focusing on the POV of a perpetrator re-perform a cruelty, under the guise of a far-reaching empathy? How to cultivate the difference between an all-inclusive compassion, with freely given forgiveness at its base, and idiot compassion, which fails to assign or take responsibility or to protect us adequately from those who have done or would do us harm?
Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord—a project made in response to the systematic rape and murder of women during the war in former Yugoslavia, and made manifest by Holzer in various forms between 1993 and 1995—addresses itself to this question with controversy and variety. The basis of Lustmord—which is a German word meaning “sexmurder,” or rape-and-murder—is three written texts, each of which tells the story of the Lustmord of a Bosnian woman from a different perspective: that of the woman being raped and murdered, that of the rapist/murderer, and that of a witness to the act. In 1993, Holzer presented this work as an insert in the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Munich’s principal newspaper. (The November 19 cover of the magazine was taken over by Holzer’s words: “DA, WO FRAUEN STERBEN, BIN ICH HELLWACH”—“I am awake in the place where women die”; more text followed inside.)
The controversy arose not only due to the disturbing nature of Holzer’s text, but also due to the accompanying announcement that the words had been printed in an ink made partially of women’s blood, which stirred up a very literal anxiety over their unsanitary nature. Lustmord has since appeared in a variety of different forms and settings. There was a 1994 installation at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, in which Holzer presented the text in three distinct formats: as LED texts spinning around a dark, leather-lined module into which the viewer must step in order to read the words; as inscriptions on metal bands tied around human bones, all taken from female skeletons and lined up on a wooden display table; and in a series of photographs of the words printed on human skin, in ink that resembled blood, or branding. Pieces of Lustmord have also been projected, via laser, onto Leipzig’s Monument to the Battle of Nations (1996); they have also appeared in various forms at museums and galleries in Germany, Norway, and Switzerland.
Holzer says she conceived of Lustmord as “a memorial to protest violence perpetrated against women.” She has also said that, after reading the three texts, she “hopes the viewer will come down on the right side.” But, as one can imagine, the most disturbing aspect of Lustmord is its unholy trinity of perspectives, and its use of the same poeticized language in each. I personally find the brief text of Lustmord some of the most upsetting, confusing, and indelible material quoted in this book. To take but a few examples: from the perpetrator, “I WANT TO FUCK HER WHERE SHE HAS TOO MUCH HAIR.” “HER SWALLOW REFLEX IS GONE.” “THE COLOR OF HER WHERE SHE IS INSIDE OUT IS ENOUGH TO MAKE ME KILL HER.” From the victim, “I AM AWAKE IN THE PLACE WHERE WOMEN DIE.” “I HAVE THE BLOOD JELLY.” “I TRY TO EXCITE MYSELF SO I STAY CRAZY.” And from the observer, “SHE SMILES AT ME BECAUSE SHE IMAGINES I CAN HELP HER.” “SHE IS NARROW AND FLAT IN THE BLUE SACK AND I STAND WHEN THEY LIFT HER.”
This is audacious, sickening, and troubling business, which has rubbed many the wrong way. Holland Cotter of the New York Times called the moral position of Holzer’s work “so calculatedly opaque as to come across as sensationalist”; Laura Cottingham of Flash Art called Lustmord a “pseudo-poetic text” that “de-brutalizes, romanticizes, and eternalizes rape—a naturalization made complete by the installation’s complete lack of historical specificity”—a judgment related to the distaste I felt for Bacon after seeing his collages of Algerian body parts. Nonetheless, despite what Brecht might have hoped, the “Always historicize!” imperative that has held sway in academia for some time now is not an easy import into the field of art-making, nor should it necessarily be.
Personally I don’t feel capable of testifying to Lustmord’s work in the world as a political intervention (as was intended by its appearance in Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin), nor do I feel particularly interested in charting the aesthetic differences between its appearance in spinning LED versus engraved on a bench, and so on. My interest in Lustmord remains tethered to its bare text, for the simple reason that I almost cannot read it. The prospect of deeply internalizing its 500 words frightens me more than the psychic effects of a hundred copies of Altmann’s Tongue or 120 Days of Sodom combined.
This response may be in part a reaction to something politically rotten about the work. After all, Lustmord could easily be accused of “vicarious possession,” artist Adrian Piper’s term for the “inappropriate level of imaginative involvement” that characterizes the attempt to speak for others, especially others who have been deprived of the right to speak for themselves. But I also suspect it due to other things, some of which I’m not even sure I want to touch. One has to do with coming into visceral, intimate contact with one’s deepest fears for no obviously salutary reason, while simultaneously recognizing that countless others—such as the girls and women who were detained and tortured in the rape camps that operated throughout the Bosnian war—lived those fears, often dying in the process. Another has to do with the fact that, despite what we may want or need to believe, the perpetrators of such crimes are human beings, with human consciousness and human hearts, and further, that their experience is equally available for poetic rendering. Another has to do with the fear—or the conviction—that certain consciousnesses or hearts or events should not be rendered poetically (or “pseudo-poetically,” whatever that may mean), a la Adorno’s 1949 proclamation (later revised) that writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. Yet another has to do with the worry that if and when one attempts such a rendering, the inhabitation of the perpetrator’s consciousness will inevitably annihilate (or re-annihilate, as the case may be) the voice of the victim (who is, after all, much easier to deal with once she has been silenced). “I HOOK MY CHIN OVER HER SHOULDER. NOW THAT SHE IS STILL I CAN CONCENTRATE.”
Cottingham takes the latter route, arguing that “even as [Holzer] claims to be presenting three perspectives on rape, she presents only one: that of the perpetrator.” But why is this so? Or rather, must it be? Is it because the victim in Lustmord is, like most victims, too frightening to identify with? After all, the victim’s script has few to no lines of heroic defiance, save “YOU CONFUSE ME WITH SOMETHING THAT IS IN YOU. I WILL NOT PREDICT HOW YOU WANT TO USE ME.” But this one attempt at differentiation is definitively overwhelmed by testimony of ruinous invasion: “YOUR AWFUL LANGUAGE IS IN THE AIR BY MY HEAD.” “HAIR IS STUCK INSIDE ME.” “WITH YOU INSIDE ME COMES THE KNOWLEDGE OF MY DEATH.” And while the observer’s account begins with fearless tenderness (“I WANT TO LIE DOWN BESIDE HER. I HAVE NOT SINCE I WAS A CHILD. I WILL BE COVERED BY WHAT HAS COME FROM HER”), it soon gives way to an overwhelming sense of repulsion and horror: “SHE ASKS ME TO SLEEP IN THE HOUSE BUT I WILL NOT WITH HER NEW BODY AND ITS NOISE.” “I WANT TO BRUSH HER HAIR BUT THE SMELL OF HER MAKES ME CROSS THE ROOM.” “SHE FELL ON THE FLOOR IN MY ROOM. SHE TRIED TO BE CLEAN WHEN SHE DIED BUT SHE WAS NOT. I SEE HER TRAIL.”
I don’t profess to know why Holzer focuses so much of Lustmord on the abjection of the victim’s body, but it seems clear from her deployment of SZ Magazin that she at least meant to disallow the abject from remaining abjected. She meant literally to force the bloodshed of women, however sickening, into people’s living rooms. (The fact that the day’s paper would likely go out with the trash, almost in reenactment of people’s incapacity to know what to do with news of horrific events occurring around the world, may have unintentionally complicated the gesture.) Whatever one makes of the stunt, it is too bad that the editor of SZ, Tibor Kalman, couched the piece, in his explanatory essay, i
n the prototypically masculinist, violent, and aggrandizing terms of the avant-garde: “Jenny Holzer’s art is an act of terrorism. . . . Jenny puts the gun to your head: think about it! . . . are we the assailants or the victims? Are we the strong or the weak? Are we the man or the woman?” Assailant/victim, strong/weak, man/woman, hero/victim: Kalman’s rush of binaries—along with his suggestion that good thinking comes from having a gun held to your head—almost flatten Holzer’s text beyond repair. But, alas, years later, it still pulses here beside me, in all its bewildering, spare, perhaps unforgivable horror.
“SYLVIA PLATH could not distinguish between herself and the facts of say, Auschwitz or Hiroshima,” a critic once diagnosed. “She was victim, killer, and the place of horror, all at once.” This critic did not mean this as a compliment. I, on the other hand, see this blurring as one of Plath’s most salient poetic achievements. The intense, first-person drive of Plath’s poems gives the sense that their speakers are hurling blame like thunderbolts from the heavens, so it may come as a surprise to realize that the Plath poems that seem, on the surface, to cast the most blame, when attended to closely, often offer but blame-blurs, which stand out like wonky smears amid her obsessive technical precision.
The main subject of Plath’s controversial poem “The Rabbit Catcher,” for example, is neither the sadistic trapper nor the victimized animal, but rather the “place of force— / The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair, / Tearing off my voice, and the sea/ Blinding me with its lights.” Likewise, when she writes in “The Jailer,” “How did I get here? / Indeterminate criminal, / I die with variety— / Hung, starved, burned, hooked,” the speaker may be the criminal, but she could just as easily be addressing her jailer as such: it is, as the poem says, indeterminate. And even if the jailer were definitively to blame, Plath’s use of the passive voice for the hanging, starving, burning, and hooking still smears out any neat assignment of agency. “How did I get here?” Plath’s speaker wonders in “Getting There”; “Who has dismembered us?” she asks in “Event.” These are not questions that Plath answers.
The Art of Cruelty Page 24