ARISTOTLE UNIVERSITY OF THESSALONIKI

The Painful Body

A Trajectory of Pain through Female Performance Art

Maria Tzouni February 2015

A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. The Painful Body: A Trajectory of Pain through Female Performance Art

By

Maria Tzouni

Has been approved

February 2015

Approved:

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Accepted:

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Department Chairperson

For my brother, Themis, my inspirational power

Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………….. i

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………….. iv

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………... 1

Chapter One – Performing Pain through Gina Pane’s Bleeding Blades……………………. 17

Chapter Two – Embodying Pain through Marina Abramović’s Engraved Body…………... 33

Chapter Three – Transforming the Body through Orlan’s Surgical Performances…………. 55

Chapter Four – Mediatizing Pain through Lady Gaga’s Fashionable Performances……….. 82

Chapter Five – Vomiting Pain through Millie Brown’s Colorful Rainbows……………… 104

Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………… 118

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………….. 121

Biographical Note ………………………………………………………………………… 133

Abstract

Drawn by the fact that performativity and theatricality are found in almost all aspects of everyday life, it is significant to note that no matter how extraordinary, socially accepted or rejected, far-fetched or even exaggerate a piece of performance is, we have to admit that we become witnesses of events of complete theatricality more or less qualified for their artistic value. The performers that I have chosen to focus on in the present thesis re/present their pieces of art by working on their bodies or merely using their bodies as a malleable raw material so as to respond creatively on the sociopolitical challenges of their time. They use their bodies in order to show its limitless potential and provoke their audiences from the perspective that the body is a boundless canvas to process on and express their pieces of art.

When the body is disposed of manipulation, when it is cut and penetrated by needles and when it is presented in a rather unnatural way but presented as the norm, then, the audience loses the comfort and the security of being distant from what the spectacle creates.

Subsequently, the focus is withdrawn from the stage or screen to avert the gaze from horror.

But, the gaze might also be lured by the spectacle as it seeks a way to voyeur the precedent mystified body. Hence, the spectators’ bodies sense the vibrations of the artists’ painful bodies through their act of gazing.

When the female body is presented through performance art then it leads its appearance to extreme cases of representation. The female body appears in front of an actual or mediatized audience so as to shock and provoke the spectators’ reactions. The spectators are awakened from their former passivity as mere observers of the theatrical performances to a more active participation in them. The female body, presented in a rather “grotesque” and raw way manages to be spectated as such as it is most of the times concealed, mystified,

“sexualized,” or completely eroticized. The female performers that I tend to occupy with in my research come from different cultural backgrounds ranging from the 1960s experimental

theatrical performances to today’s representational mediatized popular culture. Gina Pane, the

French artist of Italian descent deals with body-cutting when she is inserting blades in her own body. Furthermore, Marina Abramović, the Serbian artist places her body in the center of attention and she tries to objectify the image of the “passive-performer, active spectator” with the intention to reverse balance and subsequently activate the spectators or even stimulate their most vicious and animalistic instincts. Orlan, the French artist, stresses the limits of the female body through surgical cosmetic surgeries as she tries to redefine the notion of female beauty through constant transformations and hybridizations of the self. The next two artists are examples of the next new generation of performer artists. Lady Gaga, the

American artist of Italian origin, is both a singer and a performer who knows how to shock her audience with her weird costumes, the haute-couture outfits that even reach monstrosity and sometimes face transformations with prosthetic horns on her forefront that she claimed as actual parts of her physicality. After her collaboration with Marina Abramovic and her influences by Orlan, she has created her own stylistic extreme performativity using media representations. Last but not least, Millie Brown, known as the “vomit artist,” causes almost controlled vomiting to her herself which she subsequently places on white canvases because she intends to create her “colorful” artistic outcomes as parts of an inverted expressivity. The specific artists present and treat the female body in a different, yet provocative way with the need to stress the limits that society and especially the American society along with mass media place on it. To conclude, the inner psychological need to test the body-limits and stress the physical boundaries through painful procedures, beautifying techniques, the incessant quest for youth and newness, and fashion are what the American society demands from the female body. The body perception and representation ideology is presented from a differentiated angle through those artists’ experimentation and recreation. Even if they presented their pieces of performance art in more or less successful ways yet, they manage to

challenge audience reception and vision of the body. However, the audiences’ perceptions and reactions seem to vary according to their social backgrounds and will to embrace, reject or even ignore them as forms of performance art.

Acknowledgements

The decision to attend the graduate program in American Literature and Culture was more than willingness to further my studies on the specific domain; it was a dream that evolved in a love affair. The announcement that I was a part of the program brought me back to Thessaloniki without realizing that it would be an unprecedented experience that would transform me to the one I forgot I was. The demanding schedule, the inspirational professors, and the colleagues; now eternal friends and companions, transformed this 2-year program into a life-changing journey. So, this is my chance to express my sincere gratitude for everything I was generously offered and managed to gain.

First and foremost, this journey wouldn’t have been the same without the contribution of my friends’ support; both old and new. My friend Anastasia was one of the first people I met in Thessaloniki in my undergraduate years and ever since she has been a true and loving friend. She kindly disposed her home to accommodate my first year of postgraduate studies.

Paulos, was always there for me to support and believe in my aspirations and share his valuable ideas about politics, society, and business. My new M.A colleagues, and friends; the

“Termites gang: Demetra, Constantine, Penny, Katerina, Fjoralba, Eve,” and Eleni each and every one separately. They are precious to me. They taught me so much and shared even more. Demetra, my “tairi” and “pc mentor” for transforming me into a pc freak and for being the best partner I could ever imagine. The MESEA Conference in Germany and the Summer

School in York University in Toronto, Canada wouldn’t have the same vividness and importance without you. I had the time of my life thanks to you all.

Furthermore, I owe my indescribable gratitude to Dr. Savas Patsalidis who supervised my M.A thesis and whose “Avant-Gardism” completely altered my perception about art, performance art, and theater. He was always there to cordially welcome my craziest

thoughts and positively consult me in my innumerate questions. Dr. Zoe Detsi, whose political “ideologies” enriched my perception about American ideology and helped me express my critical thinking more overtly. The parental figure of our department; the president of our school, Dr. Yiorgos Kalogeras, whose office was always open and welcoming for us to merely greet him or “bombard” him with our news, thoughts, and fears.

He made the MESEA Conference a familiar atmosphere for me. Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou, whose course on postmodernism liberated my creativity and writing style and made the

Summer School at York University a reality. Dr. Domna Pastourmatzi, a professor that is really significant to me as her “Feminisms” brought to the forefront the feminist that lies in me. Dr. Smatie Yemenetzi-Malathouni, who so kindly supported my grotesque “Poe” nature.

Dr. Yiouli Theodosiadou, who brought the American South “sweetly” in our sessions. Dr.

Emily Bakola, for sharing her cinematic angles. I feel blessed that I was taught by professors who are, on top of everything, charismatic human beings.

Also, I would like to express my gratitude to my students who let me make my dream come true and were always willing to change their schedules, work hard, and sustain early and late Saturday and Sunday classes. Last but not least, an immense gratefulness goes to my family who are my stepping stones to my most extravagant beliefs and desires. For making me the person I want to be and letting me liberated with the ultimate grace of personal choice on whatever I deem. That is; my dad, Vaggelis, who woke at four o’clock in the morning on a regular basis so that I can catch the Volos-Thessaloniki bus on time. My mum, Nikoleta, who believes I am the most intelligent and talented person in the world. My brother, Themis, because I always had someone to look up to and admire. Thank you for being there for me.

You are my guardian angels.

Tzouni 1

Introduction

In recent years the contribution of performance art to the academic and artistic field of performance studies has progressively flourished. Performance studies and, more specifically, performance art has gained attention from a wide number of theoreticians, performer artists, scholars, and audiences. In many people‟s minds, performance art is either an extension of

“traditional” theater and theatrical studies or the means created to contradict and challenge the structure of the “traditional theater.” As James Loxley notes, “[p]erformance studies is to some degree an extension of theater studies, a recognition that the genres of performance worthy of academic attention are neither limited to what we usually call drama nor constrained within the space of the stage” (139). The question of what performance art is along with the division between traditional theater and performance art has raised contradicting responses among theoreticians. Even though performance art shares some common characteristics with traditional theater, it has managed to create a new form of artistic expression. Performance art is liberating. It forces the mind and the body away from conventionalities of the past and from their own limiting restrictions. The body is now more prevalent than ever before and it has become more centralized as performance art has created a symbolic space for the body‟s free expression and overt presentation in front of an audience.

In many instances, traditional theater is identified as an enclosed space where actors, dancers, and performers act upon a conventional procedure that is generally reproduced a number of times, has accurate stages along with a pre-determined duration, and demands a kind of passivity on behalf of the spectators. Performance art, in some cases though, can actually share all these characteristics and in others differentiates from them. For this reason, Tzouni 2 performance art is a form of “post dramatic theater”1 as it does not focus on drama per se but on “performance” aesthetics in which the text is either absent or limited and the reaction from the spectators plays the leading role. I would like to borrow Jessica Hagendorn‟s phrase about performance art that says, “performance is […] a theater without borders” and I would add that it is a theater without spatial limits and physical preconditions while being unique in the sense that performance art can be performed by anyone in any place available (14). Yet, the venues hosting pieces of performance art can range according to context, sociopolitical perspectives, financial possibilities, and artistic perspective that the performer artists attribute to their pieces accordingly. Subsequently, pieces of performance art can be performed either openly for the public or in more secluded places, with or without the presence of an audience, either with limited “stage” directions or no directions at all. The initiation of performance art has redefined its relation to the former means of representation, stage formation, scenography, music, and audience presence. Moreover, the tools that are used for the pieces of performance art acquire a more ritualistic and symbolic appearance than a facilitative occurrence on stage. What is more, spontaneity and abstractness are two elements that characterize performance art as being its pedestal force. Performance art is inclusive and yet, not restricted to terms and rules.

Taking a closer look at the history of performance art, one notices the multidisciplinary nature of the genre as it addresses a wide range of performers and spectators who have been able to express themselves overtly against the various sociopolitical events of their respective eras. Moreover, Geraldine Harris notes that, “as a relatively new genre it did not carry the burden of a historical discourse delimiting what form it should take, where it should occur, what materials it should employ, what its subject matter should be and, most importantly, who was authorized to do it in the first place” (39). To this extent, performance

1 The notion was originally coined by the German theater researcher Hans- Thies Lehmann in his book Postdramatic Theatre written in 1999. Tzouni 3 art is the genre that can address social events and welcome new artists to respond to this initiative.

From the influx of Dada and Alfred Jarry‟s Experimental Theater of the 1920s, to the interdisciplinary Happenings2 of the 1960s, with Allan Kaprow‟s many Happenings, Body

Art, to the video installations, the Fluxus network, music videos, and the live “postdramatic” performances, the element of openness in front of the audiences has been of fundamental importance. Moreover, the performers could now act according to their artistically liberated nature. Performance art “is a theater that remains open, drawing on many sources: vaudeville, stand-up comedy, rap music, confessions …Low-brow to some, maybe too lofty for some others - performance is definitely a riskier and demanding experience that involves the audience in a more direct way than traditional theater” (Hagendorn 15). Performance art is the artistic means of representation that has evolved and challenged traditional thought regarding the theatrical forms of the past. Unconventionality, experimentation, parody and differentiation are some of the elements that have originally contribute to the uniqueness of the genre.

However, the profile of performance art has been altered during the second half of the twentieth century and especially during the 1960s and 1970s, when American society was affected by the sociopolitical phenomena taking place both in the country and around the globe. First and foremost, J.F. Kennedy‟s assassination created a general sense of vulnerability in American society while scenarios of possible political conspiracy affected the social stability of the nation as well with the U.S. being in an incessant political debate with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The ceaseless demonstration of dominance and technological achievements between the two parties, with one trying to surpass the other in any facet of growth and development, generated concern and restlessness among the

2 Coined by Allan Kaprow Tzouni 4 civilians. The space program, for instance, was among the most prevalent issues of foreign policy and demonstration of power between the two superpowers. What is more, America‟s controversial role in the Vietnam War sparked the polarization of public opinion between either supporting the presence of the U.S. forces in the war or peacefully demonstrating against it. In this milieu, American society started expressing increased concern for environmental issues such as air and water pollution and preservation of natural habitat. All this provoked a tendency to artistically react for or against the social phenomena. So, artists and performers actively expressed their opinions using multiple means of representation.

Subsequently, for the specific period of time the contribution of art was immense with the formation of many artistic movements and currents that expressed uneasiness with the sociopolitical phenomena. During the „60s, the appearance of the hippie movement, sexual liberation, human sexuality, the Second Wave of Feminism and the women‟s rights, the experimentation with psychoactive drugs, multiple interpretations of the American Dream, and the American Gay and Lesbian movement all acted as inspirational topics for artists.

Hence, performance artists were mobilized to express their beliefs through their pieces and react to any perceived social injustice. In the 1970s, performance art differentiated itself from the traditional theatrical dramatization and it was from then on classified under the more expanded idea of art. Using this term, pieces of performance art could be sold and thus be commoditized. As Philip Auslander notes, “[o]ne of the major concerns of performance in the late ‟60s and early ‟70s (the era of body art and conceptual performance) was to serve as an alternative to the work of art as commodity; many current performance artists happily embrace the commodified world of mass entertainment” (119). From another perspective though, as Shelly Esaak alternatively observes,

Performance Art also meant that it was art that could not be bought, sold or traded as

a commodity. Actually, the latter sentence is of major importance. Performance artists Tzouni 5

saw (and see) the movement as a means of taking their art directly to a public forum,

thus completely eliminating the need for galleries, agents, brokers, tax accountants

and any other aspect of capitalism. It's a sort of social commentary on the purity of

art, you see.

The two aforementioned opinions approach performance art from a tout a fait distinctive angle on how performance art should either be considered a commodity or not. Yet, they are exemplary, as of how public opinion is divided between diversified comments on whether performance art is or is not a commoditized form of art. Performance art as a medium of expression more or less encourages this debate as it is inclusive rather than exclusive on this basis. From another perspective, though, there is the opinion that “[t]he present relationship between art performance and mass culture is one of mutual support – each „feeds‟ the other”

(Auslander 120). So, by taking this perspective into consideration, artistry is unavoidably shared with a wider audience and artists are unintentionally considered to be systemic and consequently commoditized because of the invasion of the media technology. However, there are cases where commodification functions as a taboo issue even if the final outcome was nothing less than a commodity.

The interrelationship between commodification and documentation is often misinterpreted and hence the performer artists frequently dispute whether to choose “for or against” the documentation of their pieces. Documentation implies reproduction and thus reproduction reaches mass representation. Hence, documentation may function as a recorder of performance art for future generations. However, many performing artists feel that documentation understates the importance of their artistic outcome. The question posed to the artistic circles is whether to resist documentation or not. But as Jon Erickson notes, “from the moment that the artist recognizes that his or her survival or fame depends upon documentation, much memorable contemporary art has been made with the view to adequate Tzouni 6 documentation, if not playing to documentation primarily” (99). Embarrassment of documentation in the 1960s is a fact since the artists, although they wanted to acquire social status, they denied that recordings would be accessible to the audiences. Because performance art revolves around audiences and their vivid participation in the pieces performed, documentation constitutes the incentive tool toward the present participation of the aforetime passive audience. As Marina Abramović recalls,

The performance is one way of transforming work, in certain stages, psychologically,

and going to another type of reality. Really, performance is to do with change and

transformation. And some of those witnessing this could go with this. But the public

always, until now, have had this role of being voyeurs, of not actually participating.

They are always at a distance. But it is a time, now, especially at the end of the

century, for the public to take a completely active part. (qtd. in Huxley and Witts 17)

So, by documentation the public “re-attends” the acted pieces and senses the vibrations from the documentations even though it is not actually present. Documentation acts as an archive for future or distant spectators to unite with those of the artists. Without recording and documentation, the vivid representation of actual performances would have been lost. Hence, both researchers and spectators would have to trace, retrieve and restore past narrations, instead of sharing their own personal view on the actual event from indisputable data drawn from the aforementioned recordings. The realization of this thesis wouldn‟t have been the same without these documented pieces.

Apart from the fact that the appearance of performance art challenges the traditional structure of theater, commodification and documentation also stresses the importance of the centralization of the human body. The body now seeks transformation and deeper re- invention of the self. As Kathy Davis notes, that “[b]odies no longer represent how we fit into the social order, but are the means for self-expression, for becoming who we most like to be. Tzouni 7

In an era where the individual has become responsible for his or her own fate, the body is just one more feature in a person‟s „identity project‟” (2). The body, and more specifically the female body, is represented in powerful ways in an attempt to instruct and influence public opinion through extreme acts imposed on it. The female body is used as the vital tool for female representative power as it “[has become] the primary site for the operation of modern forms of power – power which [is] not top-down and repressive, but rather, subtle, elusive and productive” (Davis 3).

What is more, nakedness, nudity, beauty, violation, fashion, physical transformation, implants, prosthetics and cosmetic surgery render the body a malleable material that finds expression through performance art. “[T]he naked body in performance, in particular, or the body marked or pierced, can enact a corporeal, psychic reality that is often concealed in the everyday. It can thus show the everyday what is usually hidden, but is nonetheless always there” (Loxley 150). The pierced and curved body is challenged by its humanity which is further questioned due to mechanization, industrialization, and “mediatization.” The human body is an outcome of the medical and technological inventions that the postmodern era constructs. As Janelle S. Taylor notes, “[t]he body, […], is not a thing as an –ing. That is, not simply the inert objects on which mind and culture perform their meaning making bodies take shape and take place through practices of all sorts: feeding, legislating, training, cutting, explaining, beating, loving, diagnosing, buying, selling, dressing, and healing, among others”

(745). The era is characterized by the fluidity of the constantly “under-construction body image,” and hence, the body should re-approach its own substance in order to fight against this transformative enforcement. In this part, performance art takes the initiative and plays the most characteristic role in the representation of the body. So, performance art offers a r- definition and re-vision of the human body, particularly the female body as a means to disrupt previous convention of it. Tzouni 8

Adding to commodification, the ambivalence towards documentation, the locus that the body occupies, and consumer‟s culture also contributed to a new perspective of the female body. In American society, which craves for youth and newness, the female body is the focus of attention. Women are now victims of commercialization and their bodies are transform into manipulated puppets. The purchase of goods related to fashion, cosmetology, and the general mentality: “I shop therefore I exist,” is a response to the fear of ageing and to the maintenance of eternal youth. Hence, the “Barbie syndrome” has come about and the appearance of identical women with common physical characteristics confirms the ideology of beauty that demands young, luring, thin, and eager women to serve the male gaze.

According to Virginia MacKenny, “[m]en‟s traditional location as voyeur (subject- the one who looks at the other) and women‟s as narcissist (object - the one who looks at herself in the context of being looked at by the „subject‟) however, is not necessarily fixed but interdependent and shifting” as it has to fall out from the cliché binary of either being in the position of the one or that of the other (18). But the Barbie doll models gave a plastic identity to the body which, along with plastic cosmetic surgery and fashion, transformed the female body into a thousand identities and cut it into multiple pieces. In the American culture, ageing is a taboo that scars the female psyche and leads women to proceed with painful beautifying practices in response to the desire for eternal youth. So as Erica Reicher and Kathryn S. Koo note,

[i]n their pursuit of this ideal, women have subjected themselves to extreme regiments

of diet, exercise, and other forms of physical self-improvement, efforts that all too

often becoming all consuming to the detriment of more socially relevant projects.

Thus, the ideal gendered body does not merely remain in the realm of the symbolic;

its power lies in its ability to directly influence behavior within the social domain.

(301) Tzouni 9

Fashion, as a social aspect adds to the constant demands for the transformation of the female appearance. Women have to fit into anorexic clothes sizes and vary their body weight accordingly.

The female body is victimized when the “mirror-reflection” does not match the

“model-figure” of the female imagination. Women do not understand their images any more.

Most of the time they see someone else; either their grotesque figure that tantalizes their thought or the marketable woman represented on the glossy magazine covers. Women appear reluctant to learn from history and learn how to love and respect their bodies. For this reason, they rush to their surgeon‟s office to demand the perfect nose, eyes, lips, hips, and all the

“desirable” new body parts. Yet, they are reluctant to face the possibility of a monstrous outcome for the sake of beauty. Hopefully, female performer artists have deciphered the root cause of the problem and have challenged the limits of the physicality of the female body.

Through performance art, female performing artists inform and instruct other women about these unjust representations of a supposedly modernized but yet, male-centered and phallocentric era. Those female performers, though, have to act radically against these representations. They use the female body as a “performance tool” to narrate the violent and painful stories that the body has endured throughout the centuries. In some cases though, the performers‟ initiatives have been successful while in others the intention though hopeful has proved to be misleading from their original purpose.

It was after the emergence of the Second Wave of Feminism in the early 1960s, which radically affected the American social and cultural status of the country, that female performativity and artistic expressivity has found performance art as way to voice their opinions. It enabled female performers to express through their own productions and projects.

Inspired by the body aesthetics in female performance art, many contemporary artists are contemplative of the body representations. By viewing different types of art pieces, one can Tzouni 10 realize that performance art functions as a linear thread which interconnects and embraces pieces that are phenomenally very distinct but are based on a common ideology. The 1960s and the 2010s may present differences on the means of representations, the tools, the sociopolitical phenomena and the artistic perception on the theater and performance art, but the latter is definitely inspired by the former. Performance art offers a continuity of the representation of the female body which is yet questioned and even disrupted by many performer artists. In order to prove that the body is a primary material that is employed by performance art to facilitate its cultural-political commentary and critique, I have decided to present a type of trajectory on painful pieces performed by female performer artists. When performance art is combined with the representation of the painful body as projected by fashion and cosmetic industries, and media prerequisites, which torture the female body and harmfully influence the female psyche, then the outcome can be revealing. I do not imply that performance art is a panacea for the biased load that the body has acquired through the decades. However, this powerful and influential medium operates against the marginalization of the female body.

Since women‟s social position is often conveyed as “looked-at-ness” of the male voyeuristic gaze, female performers successfully attempt to reverse the angle by deliberately using their bodies as counter-examples of carnality. Women mainly acquire the role of the model, the puppet, the doll or the ventriloquist‟s dummy rather than the role of the doer. In this milieu, I will focus my research on Gina Pane, Marina Abramović, Orlan, Lady Gaga, and Millie Brown who challenge the stereotypical female representation. The aforementioned female performing artists decide what their bodies will look like and under which conditions they will be presented. The five artists who are included in my research touch upon the issues of female “look-at-de-ness” but only through their active contribution through performance art. Having different social, historical, political, and cultural backgrounds, they manage to Tzouni 11 challenge the American perception of performance art because “[p]erformance art is one of the prime „stages‟ to re-imagine gender identity as it allows a rescripting of conventions and a

„playing out‟ of such rescripting” (MacKenny 17). Performance art connects those artists who phenomenally appear as totally distinct. Pane, Abramović, Orlan, Gaga, and Brown use their bodies and the idea of the body as their raw material to further construct their pieces. One‟s piece intermingles with the others‟ even if they are chronologically, geographically, stylistically, and aesthetically separate and distinct.

The focal point of my thesis is to consider the resourceful contribution of the aforementioned female artists, who has pushed their bodies to extremes even putting their lives in grave danger, as a trajectory of female performativity which serves as an alternative instructive tool for both their spectators and researchers. The deliberate choice of the specific performing artists, their pieces, documentations, circulation around media, and audience‟s actual or symbolic participation, create a collective space for performance art. When pain is inflicted on the “performative” body then, the spectators become recipients of multidimensional painful representations. The repelling spectacle renders the gaze of the painful body penetrable. Instances of the aforementioned multifaceted painful pieces are the bleeding and cutting of the human flesh in Pane‟s constats and Orlan‟s surgical performances, the pain from the whip in Abramović‟s Rhythms, the representation of anti- feminist acts, the bulimic/ anorexic social demands in Lady Gaga‟s performances, and the willing coercion of the act of vomiting in Brown‟s videos. These women use their own bodies to actively respond to their former speechlessness.

In Chapter One, I focus on Gina Pane, the performer artist who is known as one of the proto-feminists and pioneers of painful body pieces of performance art. Pane clearly depicts the distinction of the traditional actor and the performing artist; that is when the former merely represents and the latter experientially incarnates a piece. In this chapter, my intention Tzouni 12 is to show how Pane reverses the gaze and the participation of the audience in relation to her extreme pieces. The presence of spectators is thus challenged in contrast to their former passivity. Even if the artist appears initially fearful to expose her bleeding body to the audience and seclude her pieces within her studio, she later realizes that the participation and the “liveness” of the spectators are essential to her pieces. Furthermore, Pane stresses documentation of her acts as a central element for the capture of her unique and solely enacted pieces. Pane believed that objective documentation is a “performativity tool” for the preservation of her pieces so that future spectators would be able to have access to them despite the era and the time.

Another reason why Pane intended to activate the former passive audiences is a critical comment towards the passivity that people experience in their actual lives. Pane desired to motivate and give “voice” to her spectators both through their active participation in performance art and in their actual lives. The artist sensed that the spectators were reluctant to act in their lives. When the socio-political events of the 1960s took place in America, people could not understand the pain that other people sustained in different parts of the globe. So, Pane bled her own body as a reaction against social silence and passivity.

Subsequently, she chose to bleed the pain that other people suffered due to wars and injustices to awaken those who comfortably watched them embody pain through media reproductions. So, Pane fractured her own limiting skin to let her flesh re-unite with the world and acquire the consciousness that other people lacked.

In Chapter Two, Marina Abramović‟s pieces of performance art represent the suffering body which incorporates a multilayered representation of the pains that a person incurs. Abramović tests her own limits on the extremes that the body can sustain; through consciousness and unconsciousness, suffocation and ample air fusion, exhibitionism of her naked body, and intentional passivity as a waif to her audiences‟ will power. Hence, the artist Tzouni 13 embraces and welcomes a strong and vivid relation with her audiences since most of her pieces are publicly performed craving her spectators‟ contribution and active participation.

She reinforces her reciprocal relationship with the audience in order to cause them to reflect on the multiple pains of the human body.

Among the reasons why Abramović incorporates pain is her attempt to relive it through her personal painful experiences. For this reason, Abramović relives the painful relationship with her mother which has stigmatized her life as the scars that she carves on her own body during her pieces. Furthermore, she comments on Communism as a political power that supposedly supports the social human rights but which Abramović experiences as the most totalitarian and authoritarian system that restricts both her personal and artistic options.

Additionally, she expresses her own relationship with beauty and the stereotypical portrayal of the artists when applying beautifying products and techniques either in their daily routine or in their pieces of performance art.

Abramović aims to also share her personal experiences with the audience through the documentation of her pieces; as Pane has previously attempted. For Abramović, documentation functions as a tool of exhibitionism of her pieces in an attempt to share her art with the masses but who ends up being accused of commercialization and commodification of her pieces. In this case, the act of documentation is a powerful means that has made her famous and which still manifests her powerful presence and technique among other artists.

The intentional preservation of her documented/recorded pieces has enriched performance art.

Orlan‟s performance projects take totally distinct notions as this artist has managed to raise controversial comments due to her surgical cosmetic surgeries and the incessant transformations of her identity. Orlan is very commonly regarded as the “monstrous beauty” of performance art. In Chapter Three, I will focus on the Orlan phenomenon also performing Tzouni 14 online in front of her audiences. Orlan‟s connection with the audiences is attained through their live distanced participation but with the power and the ability to automatically comment on and question the artist on the feelings generated during her performances. Her beliefs about cosmetology, beauty stereotypes, transformations, feminism, and performance art are conveyed through her pieces. Orlan does not hesitate to lively engage her audience throughout the operations.

Orlan is a postmodern hybrid who experiences constant transformations of the body and proceeds with a sculpting of a self-construction against the stereotypical representations of fashion and body image. In order to successfully succeed in that, she presents her opened body to the audience and demystifies its construction. She pierces her body and fractures her skin according to her own will. She hence comments on the passivity that the female body has undergone through cosmetic surgery and reacts, as Pane and Abramović have done, to the silencing of the spectators. She is a sculptor of her own body and constructs multiple faces that she intends to embrace or comment against. However, as a pioneer media performer,

Orlan creates a commodity of her body image and even commercializes her body disposals as a means of personal commentary on the social impact that media imposes on the female psyche. Her intentions, though, are often misinterpreted by the general public and I believe that the merchandizing of her body parts diminishes the original and unique outcome that her performance art offers.

In Chapter Four, commoditization, commercialization, and media culture relate to performance art through Lady Gaga‟s pieces. First and foremost, Gaga represents the new millennium as she is a performer at her most productive state. Taking a closer look at Lady

Gaga‟s performance appearance, I can clearly decipher an artist who has no hesitations in performing to extremes. What is more, Gaga is a multidimensional artist who combines musical, vocal, acting, and marketing skills. Her aim is to perform the “spectacle” but from Tzouni 15 an experiential point of perception while she stresses her personal experience foremost. Gaga employs her expressivity and emotionality to welcome “otherness” in her pieces. She creates a welcoming spatiotemporal milieu for her spectators even when she exposes her body to grotesque transformations. Her spectators experience dilemmas when exposed to painful representations of her body and lyrics which are charged with connotations against the most radical social issues of the era; such as bullying, money, fame, human rights of the LGBT community, eating disorders, homophobia, and victimization. Apart from her representational power, Gaga uses the power of speech in order to liberate her audiences from suppressing their personal beliefs. She is not accidentally called as the “Mother Monster” of her little monsters; her fans, who have formulated a whole cyber-community to worship their mother.

Gaga tries to disillusion her spectators by what the media and entertainment industry create in the mentality of the viewers. However, Gaga is over-reacting and from a personal perspective her beliefs contradict her personal acts. The fact that she documents and merchandizes her personal life more than anyone within the American popular culture and by exposing her glamorous “fashionable” life to her spectators is totally ironic. Her artistry should have been limited mainly to the public sphere rather than that of her personal enactments. So, even if Gaga‟s artistic power is indisputable and limitless, she knows how to commercialize her pieces of performance art and create a brand name around her.

In Chapter Five, Millie Brown concludes a rather short but welcoming trajectory of female artists who exercise painful procedures on their bodies and of those who expose their bodies to pain and extremities. Brown‟s pieces of performance art create a peculiar relationship with the audience as the audience is both welcomed and excluded from the pieces. Brown‟s artistic expression is linked to the act of vomiting. Brown manages to transform this obnoxious act into a colorful manifestation of the female body. The artist, also, employs documentation of her acts while in some cases she creates more linear outcomes Tzouni 16 with specific scenarios that all end up with looking at the artist vomiting on white canvases, on other collaborate performers, or even on her own body. Brown mainly focuses on social aspects that torture the female identity such as eating disorders, and the embracement of fashion. Brown uses documentation from a more artistic angle as her videos serve both as the testimony of her acts and her intention to use the body as the raw material against which multiple manipulations can occur.

On the other hand, Brown‟s intentions are not clearly documented for the spectators to

“read.” They glamorize the act of vomit rather than instruct against bulimia and anorexia, both of which torture the female body. Nevertheless; the artist provokes a type of artistic ennui since her acts centralize vomit without having more to show to the volatile spectators. I surely hope that she along with Gaga will actually represent the future of performance art and find the artistic stability it takes to clearly confront the injustices that are still imposed on the female body.

Tzouni 17

Chapter One

Performing Pain through Gina Pane’s Bleeding Blades

Throughout the twentieth century, performance art has been the genre that has exposed the female body to extreme “performance” conditions in public places and which has been welcomed in conventional places such as museums and galleries that had previously excluded it. As a result, the female body has acquired the principal role in many performance acts. The depiction of the body in a multiplicity of representations, its physical abuse, its projection through media, and mainly, its reciprocal relation to the skin, has created a new tendency known as Body Art. Foremost in this transition was Gina Pane (1939-1990), the

French artist of Italian origins, who managed to set herself free from the strict boundaries of more traditional styles such as theatrical reproductions and performance art that audiences had previously become accustomed to, she made her own statement by using her body potentials as an offering to both performance art and the audience. She used her body as an

“art object” and simultaneously as a subject so as to provoke the audience‟s reactions with regard to suffering and pain. Along with Yoko Ono, Abramović, and Orlan, performers who also related their painful pieces to their documentation by photographic lenses, media exposure, literary texts, and immediate communication with their audiences, Pane was also in favor of recording her pieces as well. As Jennifer Blessing accurately notes in this light,

“[Pane] performed for an audience and for a camera, because neither one alone would satisfy her goals. Perhaps she also insisted on the obvious presence of the photographer in the name of „authenticity;‟ […] for the sake of honesty” as a testimony of her extremes acts (23).

She preferred to call her performances acts because they related to theatrical acts and attempted to dissolve the artist‟s and the audience‟s passivity. The artist was present and represented, but she was not an important incarnation in this role. “Her persona is that of a Tzouni 18 generic „actor‟ - a person committing acts - rather than a specific personality” (Blessing 14).

In this way, she was mainly opting for an artistic outcome rather than a role. This explains the reason why the artist used, in most cases, recordings such as videotaping and photographing while having live audience attending the performance; her acts were supposed to be performed only once. Pane constructed her pieces on the basis of the ephemerality of performance art that can be retained only through documentation.

The choice of the place, the relativity of time and the reaction of the audience (present or absent), played an immense role in Pane‟s performances, because she considered them to be key-factors in the re-creation of her performances which was what she was opting for. The issue of recording, though, generated suspicion and tantalized argumentative discussions relating to the “liveness”3 of performativity, as Philip Auslander puts it. He further comments that,

It is clear, then, that such archetypal works of body and endurance art as […] Pane‟s

were not autonomous performances whose documentation supplements and provides

access to an originary event. Rather, the events were staged to be documented at least

as much as to be seen by an audience; as Pane observes, sometimes the process of

documentation even interfered with the initial audience‟s ability to perceive the

performance. (31)

In her acts, Pane used her body as a means to comment on the sociopolitical agenda of the current era. As Carolyn Black notes, “Pane‟s work was affected greatly by the political activities in Paris and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, when student protests occurred in response to the war in Vietnam and the American nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll” (12).

Despite the political connotation following her acts, media and audience reception mainly focused on the superficiality of them; that is corporeal pain that she inflicted on her body

3 The term is mentioned in Auslander’s book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Tzouni 19 because it generated tumultuous reactions. Pane, though, mainly wanted to comment on the fact that sometimes issues seem to be perceived as skin deep because the audience and media were neither trained nor willing to decipher the hidden meanings behind her acts. Pane became widely known for her pieces/acts Escalade non Anesthesiéé (Unanesthetized

Escalation), The Conditioning, The Sentimental Action, as well as for her, Action Notation, which were all related to body suffering and its reciprocal relation to the public gaze.

In 1971, Pane performed the Unanesthetized Escalation in her Parisian studio with her intentional seclusion away from a live attendance of spectators. As always, being concerned with the recording of her acts, she collaborated with photographer Françoise

Masson, who contributed to the present documentation as a consignment to performance art.

As Frédérique Baumgartner notes, “[f]or Pane, photo-documentation was integral part of the work, by no means secondary to the performance itself” (249). She continues by mentioning that Pane paid attention to all the parts of her acts and she believed they were integrally linked, as the artist noted that “a performance included three parts of equal importance: the groundwork, consisting of preparatory drawings, photographs, and texts; the actual performance; and the selection of photographs taken during the performance which constituted the constat” (249). The perspective of how the act was really staged is from one point saved due to its photo-documentation, the constat; “a French word that can be translated as statements, reports, or proofs” (Blessing 16). The isolation of the artist in her studio deprived the grand public from attending her performances and actually becoming part of her acts as she would later do in her Action Notation. However, even if the presence of the photographs establishes a kind of objectivity, Pane felt that her pieces were open to the subjective perspective of the photographer. Because Pane was highly concerned about the outcome of her acts she was not satisfied with the potential subjective interpretation of her performance. The public was considered to be “unnecessary” to the specific performance, and Tzouni 20

she strove to control the results and the conclusions that would be drawn on behalf of the audience and future generations of spectators.

In Unanesthetized Escalation, Pane actually both acted and recorded her act. The specific performance consisted of the artist climbing, barefoot and bare-handed, up a ladder- like structure with rungs studded with sharp metallic shards and of the photographer who was there to vividly capture and record the bloody climb (249). The artist had to sustain the

physical pain and finalized her act almost

exhausted by the constant loss of blood that

was flowing during her struggle to ascend

the wooden climax. Her performance

functioned as an additional comment on the

sociopolitical condition of the era in an

Fig. 1. Unanesthetized Escalation, 1971 Performance attempt to clearly express her arguments Pane’s Parisian studio about the depiction of human suffering.

Pane‟s act should be seen as a multilayered artistic experience; that is why performance art necessitates the need to trigger both attention and thought through limitless dimensions and paths. Pane used the spiritual, physical and political boundaries that her body offered to pain so as to comment on the sociopolitical aspects of the era. Pane narrated her act as such,

After fixing the metal “object-ladder,” studded with sharp metallic shards, to a wall of

my studio, I climbed barefoot and bare-handed, up and across its full length.

Escalating-assaulting a position with a ladder – strategy, which consists of climbing

the “steps.”

American escalation in Vietnam.

Artist – artists too escalate/ ascend.

Pain – physical pain in one or several parts of the body. Tzouni 21

Internal pain, deep, suffering, moral pain. (qtd. in Baumgartner 251)

The artist clearly depicted the experience of suffering of someone else; the victims of the war and the spectators who could not actively respond to what was broadcast. The performance presented an internal and personal situation where the artist experienced and externalized the feelings that had been created in her, not only in relation to the Vietnam War but also in relation to her bloody climb per se. Through her personal act, Pane revealed the more globalized energy and tension that performance art attributed to the public sphere. Pane used the person to narrate the general suffering. As Mary Richards vividly observes that,

“[d]esigned to draw attention to and remember the escalation of violence in Vietnam, the performance makes physically manifest the mental anguish and struggle Pane felt to be the experience of the Vietnamese, who were still at war with the Unites States” (112). Pane chose not to remain silent and passive to what the sociopolitical agenda offered. Her initial purpose was first to shock the audience and then, draw her own conclusions on controversial political events as the materialization of the golden age that J. F.

Kennedy promised and never occurred due to the Vietnam

War. Pane incorporated the pain of others and, further, transmitted the message to her spectators. So, she made her audience reflect on their reaction of what media was emitting during the Vietnam War. The news media during the Vietnam War were either trying to perceive the gravity of the situation by merely commenting on the events or even worsen it by remaining senseless towards the

“spectacle.” By her acts, the artist clearly commented on the Fig. 2. Unanesthetized Escalation, 1971 Performance Pane’s Parisian Studio fact that humans perceive inflicted pain differently and even indifferently when they were distanced from it. According to scientific belief, “[t]he Tzouni 22 experience of pain appears to be a high level mental affair, not a simple reflex action”

(Science News 423). Subsequently, by having the blades inserted in her bare hands and feet and being exposed to the direct contact of the knives, Pane found a way to re-unite with the world. The artist achieved the depiction of physical pain with the complete consciousness and synesthesia of the situation. Her performance signified the need to awaken the public and make them act for or against their external reality. Her need to unite with the world was a way to provoke reaction against the passivity that people exhibited when news did not directly affect them and their interests.

As far as the artist is concerned, she was the one who both incorporated pain and the one who created it. The artist was responsible for the self, the recreation of the act, and the details, along with the representation that would later be shown to the spectators of her constats. For some, creation and suffering of this type of deliberate pain is masochistic behavior or sometimes characteristic of a turbulent personality. The incessant bleeding that a person causes to one‟s self for artistic reasons is not a eupeptic situation that many people can completely understand. It was at some point believed that Pane was selling her own suffering for personal fulfillment or attention from the media and the audience. It was as if she was intentionally crying out for attention and exposure. But, this is not the case. The

Unanesthetized Escalation was not like fireworks to merely generate reaction from public opinion but rather a more symbolic act, to be communicated to the public. It was open, though, to those spectators who desired to decode the symbolism that lay beneath it. In this case, Pane was prone to recording to facilitate the opinion of viewers and spectators in the future. She intended to make her audience realize the reasons why she provoked pain to her own body. Pane tried to inhibit her audience from their own literal suffering, but she desired to provoke their direct reactions out of their indirect exposure to pain through her struggle and bleeding. Tzouni 23

Suffering for both the artist and the audience falls through some common disciplines even though they are so differently perceived. Both the artist and the audience could feel the pain, as the former incorporates it while the latter is exposed to it. However, the artist deliberately chose to be isolated from the audience for fear of both her and their reactions as the artist was stepping on unstable artistic grounds previous acted by other performers and the audiences were not used to such kinds of spectacles. Her intention was to remain focused on her act but rather have a direct reaction from the audience as Abramović did by incorporating it in her performances. The two artists tended to use physical pain, as they both exposed their bodies to extremes but they differed from each other as far as the attendance of spectators was concerned. Pane experienced the physicality of pain in a ritualistic perspective as she acted on a disclosed environment so as to further manage to unite with the world. Pane, though, had the luxury to choose and make her audience originally shocked and further skeptical in the sense that “[h]er close-up, real pain was willingly been brought into the gallery space so that suffering is witnessed in the flesh by spectators” (Richards 112). As

Richards further accurately notes, “[w]e may choose to transfer our concern to the many thousands of people who suffered in Vietnam, but perhaps instead, the spectacle of Pane‟s repetitious ascending and descending, and the proximity of this suffering body will all but obliterate a desire to act beyond the walls of the gallery” (112). Pane managed to agitate her spectators‟ reactions from a distanced perspective. But even if the artist intended to create a new type of performance, the audience should not have been excluded from the act but actively contributed to it, as they will later do with her constats. The presence of the audience would have been valuable from Pane‟s first acts since when something is recorded; it intentionally and unintentionally becomes subjective because of the perspective of the person who records the act. Hence, the audience cannot fully sense the experience if it is through someone else‟s perception. However, in performance art, the loss of originality and newness Tzouni 24 risks becoming obsolete and commonplace. For this reason, Pane chose to incorporate her live audiences in her later performances. Still, the audience was aware of what they were about to confront. In those terms, Pane and her audience intentionally chose to suffer.

In her next act, The Conditioning, first action of Self-Portrait(s) (1973), Pane understood that real-time performativity and the appearance of the audience contribute constructively to the effectiveness of performance art. The audience should have been an indispensable part of her performativity. Hence, she moved to a more expressive and dialectic relationship with her audience and performed The Conditioning under Abramović‟s direction.4

As Branko Miliskovic notes, Pane described in one of her interviews in London The

Conditioning as such:

The first action was called “The Conditioning.” There was a type of iron bed with a

few crossbars and below fifteen 25-cm-long candles. The candles were lit and I laid

down on this bed, my body only five cm from the flames. Needless to say, the pain

started right away and was very difficult to dominate. The public understood my

suffering from the way I wrang my hands much more than from my face, so it was

actually a very primitive mode of communication. But I feel successful in making the

public understand right off that my body is my artistic material. When, half an hour

later, I was able to get up, I caressed my body very gently. There was no violence; my

body hurt but I could feel my touch.5 (14)

In her description, Pane clearly indicated the physical constraints that according to her act would both affect her body and the reactions of her audience present at her performance. That statement, also, reminds us of Orlan‟s live performances allowing her spectators to follow all

4 Abramovid is the creator of the complete performance Seven Easy Pieces, which would later be re-performed in terms of Abramovid’s own re-enactment acts at the Museum of Modern Art, MoMa in New York in 2005. 5 Gina Pane in an interview with Effie Stephano, "Performance of Concern," Art and Artists (London) no. 85 (April 1973), p. 24. Tzouni 25 phases of her body transformations. Even though, she was simultaneously accepting and rejecting the appearance and influence of pain, or at least, she was diminishing the protagonist role of pain in her acts, Orlan completely rejected the appearance of pain even though her body and facial expressions revealed the opposite. In Pane‟s case, the artist used her body as a medium of performativity. Her message was communicated to her audience through a totally different perspective from the one that accompanied her Anesthetized

Escalation. First of all, the artist was not the actual creator of the act, since Abramović was the one who got inspired and then staged the act. The artist used her body as a sculpture,

subject to her creator‟s desire. The spectators did not clearly

decipher the facial expressions on her face, as provoked by

her actual physical pain. This created the allusion of

passivity and distancing. The artist is positioned as the

sculpture which is there to be seen and even harassed in

many instances but it cannot reveal its own beliefs on

Fig. 3. The Conditioning, first action of becoming an artistic outcome. By appearing as raw material Self-Portrait(s), 1973 Performance Galerie Stadler, Paris in the artist‟s hands, Pane subsequently acquired the shape and notion of another artistic identity that had nothing to do with beauty construction. The female body, which is still considered one of the most creative and inspiring “objects” for artistic recreation, generated Pane‟s need to re-define its condition in art and the world. The female body is the one that can incorporate pain through its phenomenal fragility but still has the strength to sustain it.

First and foremost, we should take into consideration the fact that Abramović intended to create an atmosphere of passivity that seemingly touches upon the issue of necrophilia and female manipulative corporeality. The fact that Pane was placed on a metal bed resembles a funeral scene. The body is placed in its coffin still warm and rosy. Even if Tzouni 26 the person has passed away, it is still raving between life and death as if it is giving its final performance. Furthermore, the appearance of the candles is also an element that accompanies the deceased person in its final moments. What struck the audience and the critics most in

Pane‟s piece of performance art was the fact the Abramović chose to place the candles beneath the metal bed so as to note that the female body should not remain passive despite being abused. The pain of burning candles on the body intends to awaken it. Through remembering the pain that was often applied to the female body, the female performing artists intended to educate and inform the female audience about its remaining awake no matter the situation. As a result, pain in The Conditioning prevailed, even if the performer tended to diminish its appearance. Pain existed but could not restrain the female body from its active participation in the performance and generally to its existence and communication dialectics with the society. Death is there to remind the performer and her audience that it will prevail in the end. So, the experiences that the body enacts on a daily basis are not supposed to acquire deadly characteristics. The body should remain active and alive. It should communicate with the rest of the world and not conceal the traits that pain has indelibly marked on them as a resourceful reminder of its painful situation.

In The Conditioning, Pane enacted a transformation. She had forgotten about the corporeality of her female body and united with the metal bed in a symbolic way. She identified with the consolidative objectification of the bed and forgot about the pain that the flaming candles triggered. She could feel the pain but she was obliged not to succumb to it throughout her piece in order to symbolically perform the restriction of pain in actual life.

Pane used her own body to comment on the manipulation and harassment that the form of passivity she was enacting had nothing to do with her actual activity in life. She had to sustain pain by experiencing it, so as to further proceed with its decoding and transformation of her identity. Unfortunately, the female body has been objectified by multiple sentimental Tzouni 27 and physical manipulations. Pain was not a sentiment that could easily be incorporated by human beings. The human body should not be subject to pain and that is why it produces chemicals such endorphin so as to reduce physical pain. The body is not capable of remembering pain, but the mind is there to bring multiple memories of its existence. In The

Conditioning, Pane exposed her body to the memory of pain, on behalf of all the suffering people and especially those who, even though they did not choose so, had to suffer multiple pains. She tried to remember the pain that other people had forgotten. She implied that people should try to leave the pain they have suffered behind even though they sometimes tried to conceal it or pretend they have not suffered by it. By trying to ameliorate the perspective of the painful experience, people intend to diminish the experience.

Her next act, The Sentimental Action (Galleria Diagramma in Milan, 1973), is one of the most representative acts in Body Art and performativity of the proto-feminist performances. The performance took place in front of an audience, the front row of which was completely female. The female audience tended to share Pane‟s experience. As Susan

Noyes Platt notes, “[w]e associate cutting ourselves with razors in suicide or attempted suicide, particularly for women for some reason.” She enforces her opinion by noting that, “extreme sexual violence, domestic violence, or anguished isolation have all driven women to attempt suicide, and this form of suicide is always enacted alone

[…]. It is not a topic that it is found in other performance Fig. 4. Sentimental Action, 1973 Galleria Diagramma, Milan art at this time” (Platt). In the specific act, Pane tests the limits of the skin as a means of carrying the body and as a symbolic “garment” on which violence is prevalently expressed. It is the skin that restricts the inner identity of being united with the rest of the cosmos and testifies to the violence exercised on it. Pane intentionally Tzouni 28 chose this piece in order to comment on the female nature and against female violence and inactivity. Where women are concerned, the succession of life and death scenario is a subject that is often negotiated in pieces of performance art against violence “performed” on the female body.

The Sentimental Action, revealed in its most profound form what Jennie Klein argues that “[p]erformance has been the medium of choice for artists who wish to stage social interventions. It is a courageous medium, as those who deploy it always put their own bodies on the line” (81). In the specific constat, Pane used her own body once again as the medium for comment on the female condition. According to Francoise Neau, Pane noted that, “I have understood that it was exactly it, my body, the fundamental element of my concept” (qtd. in

Neau).6 Pane performed the act twice, once with a red bouquet of roses and the second with a white one. She originally moved back-and-forth with the one of the bouquet of roses and then inserted their thorns into her arms along with the insertion of razors. She progressively passed from standing to the fetal position. Subsequently, the white roses turned to red, as the flowing blood came out of her fragmented skin. The cuts in her body resembled those of the petals and stems. Then, she applied the same procedure with the red roses in order to show that the red color has stigmatized purity on the misconceived female identity. The red color that always shocks and magnetizes the gaze is related to the painful procedure of looking and suffering by simply gazing at things.

Pane intended to relate The Sentimental Action with the relationship of the child to its mother and wanted to comment on the fragility of the body. As Julia Emberley accurately notes, “[t]he skin of truth and reconciliation represents a historical moment in which to think through the surface of things, to consider what penetrates beneath the porous surface of colonization” (2). She further notes that “„skin remembers something that has not happened

6 Gina Pane: “J’ai compris que c’etait preciment lui, mon corps, l’element fondamental de mon concept” (the translation on English is attributed to the writer). Tzouni 29 yet‟” (2). Pane chose to cut her skin in order to transmit the message to her audience that the skin is once again a surface marker. For the performer, the body was boundless and limitless, though the skin had a somehow limited existence. Through her performativity, Pane narrated that the gaze of the blood actually shocks the audience because it contains a kind of energy that the human mind cannot sustain. As Enid Schildkrout notes, practices “including tattooing, branding, and piercing, may be highly symbolic, but they are not metaphorical […]

They inevitably involve subjects who experience pain, pass through various kinds of ritual death and rebirth, and redefine the relationship between self and society through the skin”

(320). Its existence both signifies the beginning and the end of life. It is reassuring when it circulates through the human veins as it signifies the continuation of life and the reassurance of the human existence. But when it breaks the skin‟s boundaries and appears in front of the viewers‟ and peoples‟ eyes, it then, causes discomfort and nausea. Even through her constats, and the simple narrations of her acts, the audience is not even nowadays ready to accept and reconcile with the idea that an artist is acting violently upon the self to make her comment on social issues.

In her Action Notation, Pane once again reversed the angle of her performativity.

After her shift of performativity from the isolated Anesthetized Climb to the more extroverted

Sentimental Action, Pane used her body as a memory collage. In her Action Notation, the performer gathered the photographic sequences of her physical performances and created a new perspective for her previously attempted pieces. “Pane used reproductive technology in her actions for two central reasons. The first was to create documents of the performances, to preserve them for posterity,” while the second reason was “to foreground for the audience its ontological status as witness to the event taking place before it” (Blessing 15-16). This photographic sequencing is the method that Orlan would later use in her own pieces of performance art in an attempt to capture the vividness of the moment for future spectators to Tzouni 30 be able to see and reflect upon them. In Pane‟s collages, her performativity angle initiated her tension to re-unite with the world. The artist seemed to have passed through several sentimental stages till she finally could create the outcome she desired. Pane‟s stages of performativity actually depicted a notion of artistic maturity. The stage of performing in front of an audience is related to that period of life when the person can relate to the world and hence welcome and sustain criticism and reactions. The person is then ready to be more skeptical and willing to listen to the comments. It was, hence, Pane‟s attempt to move beyond the egocentricity of the juvenile isolated identity, which she enacted in her former secluded performances, and move to the globalized rejuvenated self that was then ready to unite with the world by later welcoming the audience in them.

In her Action Notation, Pane transferred her physical painful performances to her photographic installations. She did not abandon her Body Art and the physical performativity, but she intended to let her spectators and audience draw their own conclusion from her acts.

However, the vivid “liveness” of her previous physical performativity had nothing to do with the motionless photographic shot. Yet, as the old saying goes “a picture is worth a thousand words,”7 so the audience can benefit from the photographic collages of her performances. As

Pane “performed [the live performances] only once because she believed them to be catharsis

– producing events; she wanted them to have a visceral impact on her audience” but also to record them for future enactment (Blessing 16). Fortunately, though, the specific type of documentation left a stockpile for future spectators. Without it, research would have been limited to the point of subjective narrations and oral descriptions but by always lacking the rather objective point of their documentation that Pane was struggling for.

In Action Notation, Pane ceased to be at the center of the attention. Spectators were placed at the center of the galleries that the constats were “decorating” the walls and hence

7 The proverb is attributed to Frederick R. Barnard published in Printer’s Ink, 1921 to comment on the effectiveness of graphics in advertisement. Tzouni 31 they would express their sentiments of awe, discomfort, disgust, lust or curiosity on the original performance. It is as if Pane intended to create a reversed performativity with the audience drawing from the photographs, and creating in this way a new type of performance based on the reactions of the audience. The audience in Action Notation prevails. Even if she is now absent, she made her appearance strong and conspicuous. She managed to create an ongoing performance within the limits of a gallery but with the limitless number of thousands of visitors who still react to her constats.

The audience in Pane‟s case designates the performance. It is essential to note that spectators apart from the racial, gender, educational and age background that they come from create their own personal, unique and most notably subjective performance pieces of art through her constats. The individual‟s contribution is now centralized among the groups of visitors in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, where the installations are presented.

The audience hence formulates interesting instances of performance acts by their reactions as they function as different performing groups who perform in front of the pieces. Some more experienced spectators express their knowledge and offer their artistic background from previous experiences that they had been exposed to. They are, thus, able to compare and contrast the data they have collected and reimburse reflection and yet, even them, were not often ready to attend Pane‟s “bloody” performances and collages. Some might turn their gaze queasily while others might feel moved by the painful outcomes of Pane‟s pieces. Among the reactions in Pane‟s live pieces was the one of a “French art critic [who] found herself unable to attend Pane‟s performances because the sado-masochistic imagery was too disturbing” but she “had no problem participating in Michel Journiac‟s Messe pour un corps (Mass for a

Body 1969)8 in which the artist distributed for the audience‟s consumption sausages prepared with his own blood” (Blessing 25). The striking part, though, in Pane‟s Action Notation, is

8 Referred to Catherine Millet’s L’art Contemporain en France, Paris: Flammarion in 1987. Tzouni 32 that the audience did not have much experience from former performances since Pane was among the first artists who attempted acts on Body Art. Pane offered them the chance to refresh their memory and relate her acts to more traditional performances of the past. As for those spectators who had not previously been exposed to anything similar, they, also, had a lot to offer. From the beginning those spectators did not have the experience to view and react to performances that intentionally expose the human body to painful procedures so they tended to react more spontaneously. They contributed to the purpose of the performances with more unintended sentiments and with the freshness of a look that had not yet been exposed to similar stimuli. Subsequently, the audience created a chorus of unexpected choreographies as they provided their own, personal narrations of the performance.

Pane‟s proto-feminist performances on Body Art, inspired many performers to either construct or direct their own performances by using symbolisms similar to Pane‟s. For instance, Abramović chose to create complete narrations of performances in her Seven Easy

Pieces (1973) and Thomas Lips (1975) in which she also exposed her body to extremes and painful “sanguinary” pieces. Lady Gaga will also be inspired by representation of performing on blood even though she will not physically incorporate it. While Millie Brown, uses colored soy milk in order to construct her colorful vomit canvases as Gina Pane had previously used in her performance Le Lait Chaud (Hot Milk) in 1972 “when she drank milk and spat it out, irritating her system until she actually spat out a mixture of milk and blood – like the two liquids in the body …” (Abramović 14). So, pain creates linearity between these pieces from female performers and a kind of intercommunication through the passage of time. Painful aesthetics creates a dialectic relationship among the performers who reciprocally respond to the other performers‟ pieces with their own in a symbolic trajectory through time. Performance art, finally, becomes the imaginary and symbolic space where extremities find an expedient “locus” to be expressed publicly upon. Tzouni 33

Chapter Two

Embodying Pain through Marina Abramović’s Engraved Body

Abramović is widely known as a pioneer of performance art that focused on visual art representation and pieces on Body Art. The artist initiated her career as a performing artist during the 1960s and was among those who, as Michael Rush puts it, “enacted extreme gestures to awaken art from its painterly sleep” (4). Many female performers used their bodies as a canvas on which they could present new aspects of female performance art.

Abramović has extensively used the rhetoric of body representation with the intention of persuading her spectators that art enables the body to be used extensively without limit. It is this writer‟s opinion that Abramović is a performer of commanding presence whose acting provides both challenging and critical views of social and political issues around the world.

Abramović and performance art are inextricably linked. She manages to transform her body into an artist‟s “canvas” where inconceivable things can happen and opinion is expressed overtly. Hence, Abramović depicts the repercussions of acts and facts that occur in her contemporary world by submitting her body to the conscious choice of painful procedures.

As Maureen Cheryn Turim notes, “Abramović‟s works explore the body in pain and the body as a source of pleasure – the body tested, and the limit approached” (108). Even from her early pieces, she did not hesitate to expose herself to and express herself through Body Art and its limitless potentials. In her interview with Janet A. Kaplan, “Deeper and Deeper:

Interview with Marina Abramović,” the artist notes that: “if art comes just from art, it loses its power and becomes decorative. I never create art to be decorative. I don‟t like this idea of aesthetic beauty – a beautiful frame, nice colors that go well with the carpet. To me art has to be disturbing” (16). Tzouni 34

In her pieces of performance art, Rhythm 10, Rhythm 2, Rhythm 4, Rhythm 5, Rhythm

0, The Lips of Thomas, and Art Must Be Beautiful; Artist Must Be Beautiful, Abramović does not hesitate to put her life in danger and construct painful performance narrations so that her audiences can experience an incessant and timeless exposition. She chooses to abuse her body in order to disturb the thoughts and reflections of her spectators. The procedure that she follows in her performance art reveals new territory of thought concerning her performance acts. Since her performances include the infliction of pain on the body, they frequently relate to fetishism and masochism. However, Abramović‟s performances “place before an audience the accomplishment of pain as something staged for interpretation and appreciation” rather than the intent to stress or focus on fetishism and masochism (Turim 102). We can clearly perceive that in her pieces the representation of the female body is interdependent on nudity, minimalism, exhibitionism and rituals but in no case can we connect it to pornography in terms of voyeurism and sexual promiscuity. Abramović‟s body intentionally lacks the sensuality of a pornographic model as the artist chose to expose her nude body without creating the idea of an alluring figure. Abramović focuses on the relationship she weaves with her spectators and the unconventionality of the interpretation through her artistic acts.

Furthermore, she is also highly concerned, as Pane used to be, for the true representation of her pieces.

In The Sound Pieces, Abramović tends to focus on the recording of her performance pieces as she has been persuaded that the outcome of her pieces must be concise and exact for the viewers who were not present at the actual performances. She makes an attempt to record her pieces as if they were actually presented for the sake of the “proper” narration of her performances. The choice to record her acts might not be original per se. However, the way that Abramović enacts and records her pieces makes them unique because she focuses on the painful expressions and sounds that are uttered when the viewers are exposed to them. In her Tzouni 35 interview to Chris Thomson and Katarina Weslien “Pure Raw: Performance, Pedagogy, and

(Re)presentation,” Abramovic notes that “[d]ocumentation is extremely important. […] I have every single piece documented and I honor every video, because I have a very early, very strong feeling for the historical moment” (45). To Abramović, the audience is one of the most significant factors for the resolution of a piece. For this reason, she desires to create a chronicle both of and for her spectators. Abramović is rather an inclusive than exclusive artist as far as her spectators are concerned. Furthermore, the artist is more determined and decisive about the denouement of her piece. She does not eagerly desire to shock the audience and discourage them from attending her performances; she is there to embrace them and make them reflect upon her performances.

Another factor to note about Abramović‟s pieces of performance art is that of transformation. Many female performer artists encounter transformations in their art as far as appearance, body, mentality, fashion and even identities are concerned. Abramović tends to transform the social identities of her audience as well as her own as a part of her pieces on a first layer and in their real lives on a second. She meretriciously and primly constructs her afflictive pieces to create new dimensions of thought and viewing. She intends to assist her spectators in exposure to multiple and perplexing visual stimulus thus resulting in more skepticism and consciousness of the spectacles delivered and the ideology that underlies them.

In the sequence of her performance pieces entitled Rhythms, as well as in most of her other performances, Abramović has attempted to create a painful atmosphere for the body rendering the audience co-responsible for her acts. In Rhythm 10 (1973) which was performed in the Museo d‟Art Contemporanea at Villa Borghese in Rome, the artist constructed a sixty-minute piece of performance art. Abramović knelt on a white canvas on the floor where in the first part of her piece, a recorder captured the sounds. There was a line Tzouni 36 in front of her which oriented her position with the one that she had previously placed the ten different-shaped knives that she was about to use. The artist took a meticulous look at the knives and their position. She, then, started stabbing the space between her fingers with a different knife which she chose to replace only when she accidentally cut her own flesh with it. Proceeding, she grabbed another knife and continued with the same process. When she had used all of her knives, she stopped the recorder and played it once again. She began again by using a second recorder and applying the same process with the specific sequence of knives that she had used in the first one. As the artist describes in her interview to Klaus

Biesenbach9,

Rhythm 10 wasn‟t just about playing with knives in between my fingers. There were

two tape recorders. One recorded the sound of the first performance, and every time I

cut myself, I changed the knife and rewound the entire tape. Then I would play it, and

while listening to the first sound I would concentrate and repeat the action by cutting

myself exactly at the same time. I only missed twice. And then I had a second tape

recorder with the doubled sound. So the idea was to find out if I could put together

past and present, including the mistakes. (13)

Rhythm 10 is a complex and multilayered piece. Abramović used knives and body cuts to express her relationship with her mother through physical violence (Stiles 64). She needed to communicate these issues along with the reactions of her audience. According to

Kristine Stiles, by converting such violence scenes into a musical metaphor Abramović reminded herself of the fact that her mother “forced [her] to play the piano even [though]

[she] didn‟t have any ear for music” (64). The strict upbringing that she had received from her mother throughout her childhood and mother-daughter contradicting characters empowered Abramović to use performance art to comment on the physical and psychological

9 The interview is a part of the book Marina Abramovid: Kristine Stiles, Klaus Biesenbach, Chrissie Iles. Tzouni 37 implications that violence imposes on people‟s lives. She uses her painful psychological scars to generate physical scars that enable her to remember. Stiles notes that, “Abramović punished the fingers that struck the notes without joy or talent for what she perceived to be their clumsy failure. This aesthetics of pain visualized a somatic memory of emotional suffering disengaged from the source of its wound” (64).

Rhythm 10 reveals that emotional pain is equally hard to succumb. The psyche

acquires its own memories and it is capable of

bringing them to the forefront when it remembers.

The somatic pain might alleviate and heal overtime

but the scars will always be conspicuous reminders of

the painful past. The psychological pain that people

Fig. 5. Rhythm 10, 1973 Performance Museo d'Art Contemporanea Villa Borghese, Rome succumb to is also expressed in duality. Some people tend to forget as a form of defense against the verbal or somatic pain while some will remember it because they want to become accustomed to the suffering. However, Abramović uses the infliction of pain to armor the female body and memory. The psychic and the body marks harden the female body against its being fragile and mistreated. The supposedly unintentional suffocating love that many mothers claim to pass on to their daughters might cause immense damage to their psyche. The cleanliness both of appearance and character, the sentimental and physical purity, the excellence and seeking of the perfection that many mothers demand from their daughters might deeply hurt them more than blades inserted in their bodies.

When I came across Rhythm 10 from a reproduction, I was both moved and shocked on how sound and image created a space of agony and fear. The most striking part of her performance is Abramović‟s gasps and suspirations when she experiences the knives cutting her own flesh. The artist is in actual physical pain but she does not desert her performing Tzouni 38 position. She remains on “stage,” despite how painful that is, which creates the illusion to the viewers of them suffering along with the artist. The artist is meticulously trying to keep her painful vociferations from extreme exclamations of pain. However, the feeling she creates in her viewers is even more powerful since it is as if she is trying to keep it for herself and not being able to refrain from it actually occurring. The sentiment of certainty that the artist has that she is definitely going to get stabbed once again and the incessant tapping of the knives create an atmosphere of agony and suspense. The monotonous tone of the knives hitting the ground is intermingled with the exhalation of a sigh. It is both painful and relieving when pain instantly vanishes in preparation for the following one to proceed.

The appearance of the audiovisual factor gives an eternity to the performance that drawings can never do equitably in my point of view. This fact ultimately relates to the paper sheet that is placed beneath her. Even if Abramović originally rejected the idea of keeping the objects of her performances since she denied “fetishization,” she does so with the creation of a new bloody canvas from the remnants of her painful experience as a reminder of it. It is as if when observing Jackson Pollock‟s paintings we were not aware that they were made from ink, we would believe that they consisted of bloody remnants. When observing both

Abramović‟s performance outcome and Pollock‟s paintings, we are shocked by the fact that both blood and ink can bring painful memories to the mind. Orlan will also use the remnants of her surgical performances as parts of her performances, while Millie Brown will later be inspired by the outcome of her body products to produce colorful imprints of her “vomit art.”

In 1974, Abramović proceeded with her next two pieces of performance art, Rhythm 2 of a six-hour duration which were performed in Galerija Survemene Umjetnost in and

Rhythm 4 performed in Galleria Diagramma in Milan. The following year she proceeded with

Rhythm 5 performed in the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade. As Peggy Phelan notes,

“[d]eciding that her art was quite literally more important than her mind, she created Tzouni 39 performances in which her conscious presence was both a provocative anchoring point and strangely irrelevant, if not quite completely expendable” (572). The performer tested in these two pieces the limits of her consciousness by risking her own life. She did not seem to care about her being conscious or not as she was keen on enduring any obstacle or limitation that her body imposed on her mind. As Abramović has mentioned, “I could not accept that a performance would have to stop because you lost consciousness. I wanted to extend the possibility, and that‟s why I made these two pieces, Rhythm 2 and Rhythm 4 (1974), in which the performance continues even if the performer is unconscious. I didn‟t accept the body‟s limits” (Biesenbach 14). Fear that her condition might be gravely affected by the extremities that she imposed on herself and the pain that was inflicted on her body is not the case here.

To Abramović, art is beyond everything and this is a quality she seems to reckon as valid.

Her artistic identity is linked to the realization of impartibility of the acts.

In Rhythm 2, Abramović divided her performance into two parts. In the first part, she took drugs that are prescribed for catatonia; that is when the human body is immobilized in a single position as the muscles of the body do not cooperate with the mind. The body can remain still for hours without reacting to the stimulus from the environment. As Abramović‟s body reacted aggressively to the drug with the performer being totally aware of her situation but without the ability to move her body according to her own voluntary will. The drug gradually took complete control of her body but the mind was there and lucid despite its inability to initiate a physical reaction. In the second half of the performance, and almost ten minutes after having recovered from the effects of the first drug, Abramović received medicine for depression and aggressive behavior that lead her to total immobility. In this specific state, Abramović was physically present but not conscious of the specific part of the performance. Abramović used her body as an experiment; not only to test the limits of the body but also the limits of her audience. She exposed herself to the horrific experience in Tzouni 40 order to enable herself to comment on the human state when it is subject to medication or other people‟s will, as well as the tolerance or the intolerability that the viewers have towards a “spectacle” of such an act.

In Rhythm 4, Abramović tests her relationship to consciousness as body reacts to extreme and painful conditions once again. Abramović narrates:

I slowly approach the air blower, taking air in as much as possible. Just above the

opening of the blower I lose consciousness because of the extreme pressure. But this

does not interrupt my performance. After falling over sideways the blower continues

to change and move my face. The videocamera is only focused on my face without

showing the blower. The public looking at the monitor have the impression of me

being underwater. (Biesenbach 24)

After having been exposed to an extreme condition as such and having placed her body in an incontrollable condition, the performer continues on with her piece for some minutes. For this reason, the performer believes that she has performed a successful piece since nothing actually deterred the resolution of her performance. However, the specific piece has nothing in common with what we might call “a painful performance,” however, it shares two characteristics that are related to physical pain; brain and mental suffocation. Abramović once again oscillates between life and death as she is challenging the functionality of the most important body organ: her brain. The symbolism that surrounds “brain suffocation” reflects a will to

comment on mental passivity. She relates brain Fig. 6. Rhythm 4, 1974 Performance Galleria Diagramma, Milan capacity to intentional mental default. When the female mental capability is under dispute, the female is accustomed to being silenced and restricted from taking a stance. But that does not happen in Abramović‟s presented state Tzouni 41 because it exemplifies the limitless mental state which can only be silenced when taken to extremes. The performer is also caustic towards those performers who use their bodies as mere exhibits. Even if she is accused of exhibitionism and ostentation, and while there are in fact some cases of her raving towards those directions, Abramović still uses her body against these principles. She acts and reacts against the sociopolitical facts of the era and embraces both the emotional and the physical pain that is inflicted on other people.

In 1974, Abramović continued her performance pieces of the sequence with Rhythm 5 in Belgrade. Rhythm 5 is considered one of the most risky and hazardous pieces that she has ever performed. The performance lasted one and a half hours. In the specific piece she did not only try to test the limits of her consciousness to its extremes but she actually lost her senses unintentionally. The specific incident rendered her position unsupportable since the performer always wanted to be in control Fig. 7. Rhythm 5, 1975 Performance Student Cultural Centre, Belgrade of both her state of mind and her performance intentionally or unintentionally. In Rhythm 5, she constructed the five-pointed star, the political emblem of Yugoslav Communism, which is made of wooden remnants that she had saved and soaked in 100 liters of petrol. She, then, cut her hair, nails and toenails which she placed at the edge of every part of the star. Subsequently, she lit the star up and lay down in its center without realizing that the flames would consume the air around her. During the performance, Abramović consequently lost consciousness. She was only saved by a doctor who was present as a spectator and realized that the artist was not moving when the flames were seriously approaching her. The performer has no memory from the incident.

Abramović risked her life in Rhythm 5 more than at any other time in her career but she accomplished her original target; to comment on liberty of speech and expression when Tzouni 42 political ideology dictates that art should either be prohibited or censored. Performance art should give you the liberating autonomy to act according to your artistic belief even if you do not find supporters to your demarche. Art is a liberating process and the body can be used in its greatness to reveal that principle. Abramović does not intend to create a holy image around her persona. She seeks the transformation of the psyche and of the rhetoric of ideology that accompanies performance art. As a person who was raised in a politically charged environment, Abramović‟s intention is to comment on the fear for change and insertion of new types of performance art through time. According to Johannes Birringer, by setting her life in danger and after suffering from the realm of her performance pieces, she managed to “[reveal] how the self-torturing and heroically individualized enactments of body art, particularly under the political conditions in the East which sometimes forced the artists to perform in privacy or within a closed circle friends, changed in the 1980s” and then into

“the experience of real bodies in the social realm of the hypermediated twenty-first century”

(69). She was unwilling to artistically hide out of fear for political deprivation on her performance pieces. However, she proceeded to perform according to what she perceived as performance art. Abramović does not want to orient performance within enclosed walls where limited individuals can be exposed to it. Abramović intends to connect with her audience and unite with them under the common faith of performance art from personal preferences or objections. She uses Body Art and especially her bleeding and suffocating body to approach the audience. Even if she is misconceived and misunderstood by many, she does not give up. Her ultimate goal is to communicate a message of liberty in arts and thoughts. However, her message is not always prevalent with her spectators. Her point is to show, deconstruct, reconstruct, educate and expose her own personal body narrations by violating the seeming beauty of a spotless and alabaster body in terms of politics, beauty, and society. Body Art is there to question, to doubt, and to dispute, or else there is no point in its Tzouni 43 existence. Combined with performance art, Body Art shares the expressive means so that can be overtly presented to a wider audience.

Abramović considered pain to be an imporart element in a variety of her performances, but in Rhythm 0 in Galleria Studio Morra in Naples in 1974, she managed to stress her personal limits of pain and sufferance even further, while experimenting with the limits of her spectators once again. Rhythm 0 is the most profound of Abramović‟s pieces that brings the audience into the spotlight of attention of her Body Art. In Rhythm 0, Abramovic placed seventy two objects on a table and “invited visitors to use them on her as desired” as

she herself claimed (Abramović). Among objects,

she had placed grapes, a whip, honey, a rose, a

feather, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet

as she categorized the objects in “objects of

pleasure” and “objects of pain” (Abramović). In her

interview with Kaplan, Abramović notes: “I use all Fig. 8. Rhythm 0, 1974 Performance Galleria Studio Morra, Naples kinds of materials as I need them, but the subject is always the same. It‟s always about the body and about performing. […] There are objects for human use, which the public can use, and objects not for human use, for spirit use” (8). The categorization, though, of the objects into the two categories is expressed as sarcasm and irony on behalf of the performer since pain and pleasure are two notions that can reciprocally affect one another if they change positions. Pain is regularly categorized with negative and violent connotations but in some cases pain intermingles with pleasure. For instance, in some tribes such as the Aztecs and the Maya pain was used for spiritual and physical purification or as a means of re-birth. The reason why Abramović is blamed for incorporating elements of masochism in Rhythm 0 is exactly the fact that she made her body the “topos” and the

“tropos” that is the place and the means through which the spectators can express their Tzouni 44 instincts and concealed desires. Abramović is objectifying her body to the uncontrolled intention of her audiences. Her passive figure standing in the museum as a sculpture renders

Rhythm 0 unique in the sense that the performer chooses to use her body as an exhibit. The performer critically comments on the passivity of performing acts. The passive performer is exposed to her spectators while the spectators are finally allowed to contradict and question the formerly traditional attitude towards exhibits that are not allowed to be touched.

According to Kristen Renzi, “[h]ere, the unscripted nature of her performance turned mortally hazardous when her explicit staging of the body not as a passive self but rather an object of artwork threatened her body as a lived subject”

(124). Abramović had to remain passive and suffer all the verbal insults, the pain from the whip, the humiliation of other people touching her body in every part they wanted to, and the torture of waiting till her six-hour performance would come to an end. Fig. 9. Rhythm 0, 1974 Performance Galleria studio Morra, Naples But as Martin Jay states, “(after three [hours], apparently, a fight broke out among the torturers, who had done a frighteningly thorough job of hurting and humiliating her, and the ordeal ended)” (62). Abramović reverses the angle; that is the performer is passive when the spectators are active and free to act accordingly.

Abramović empowers her spectators to act. In one of her interviews she confesses that initially she thought that the spectators would originally treat her with playfulness but “later on [they] became more aggressive. Real horror!” she exclaimed (Abramović). The performer narrated: “[The audience] would cut my clothes; they would cut me with a knife close to the neck, place me on the table and with the knife between my legs on the wood” (Abramović).

The audience seemed to show signs of aggression and violence as if they wanted to test the Tzouni 45 performer‟s limits on her body. In Rhythm 0 Abramović ceased sculpting her own body and became the object that others would vandalize with their acts.

One might ask why she has made such a decision even for the fear of her own life.

The performance ended in a dramatic tone and the suffering performer left the audience in awe and her identity on reflection. The performance created an ambiguity between the performer and the audience since it was differently perceived. “This willingness to risk the self for art also, however, created an irreconcilable tension, since the material of Abramović‟s art was, in fact, her self – her body” (Renzi 131). After the detonation of the bullet, the performance ended and the performer started to “move about on her own, a transformation from object to subject that frightened the audience, who „literally ran out of space,‟ […] because „they could not stand [her] as a person, after all they had done to [her]” (Stiles 60).

The object was then subjected once again. But it was not the sculpture that the audience was confronting; it was the artist herself. It was inexplicably difficult to confront the one you had previously harassed. The audience was as much at a loss and in confusion as the artist herself.

Abramović recalls finishing the performance by walking naked through the crowd with blood and tears in her eyes, and ending it by looking at her face in the mirror of her house having a quantity of grey hair appearing. Pain is perceived from multiple perspectives as it is a subjective issue. Abramović had to deal with the infliction of pain from someone else and even worse by many who weren‟t aware of their intentions and psychological background. In Rhythm 0, Abramović was now subject to her spectators. She could not handle her own fate as in Rhythm 5. In Rhythm 0, she knew that the outcome of her performance piece would be unexpected. She was aware that she might suffer and that she might not be in control of the situation. As far as the audience was concerned they must have been confronted with feelings that they never expected were hidden in their subconscious.

Performance art is an experience since “[it] remains a compelling art because it contains the Tzouni 46 possibility of both the actor and the spectator becoming transformed during the event‟s unfolding” (Phelan 575). Causing pain to someone else may be interpreted in a multilayered way. From one perspective it might be the inner pain that a person carries within him or her and is subsequently expressed by causing pain to someone else as a counter reaction to his/her own suffering. “Rhythm 0 represents the ghost of a zero sum game in which one can only gain if another suffers an equal loss” (Stiles 60). From another point of view, inflicting pain to another person; that is Abramović who is a performer artist and especially with her own blessings, explains the sadomasochistic tendencies that lie hidden within us. When pain is caused to someone else, it might lead to actual pleasure of both the one that causes it and others who might be mere viewers. Hence, they are fantasizing being in an equivalent position of a torturer experiencing something they might not do and would be reluctant to suffer themselves. Pain is also depicted as pleasure or it is totally ignored by people who incorporate it. As Valerie Gray Hardcastle notes, “[i]n parts of India, for example, men chosen to represent the gods have steel hooks inserted under the muscles of their back. They then swing above the crowds, suspended on these hooks by ropes, blessing children and crops. They exhibit no pain” (396). In many tribes and religions,10 pain is an indicative factor of purification, rejuvenation, and treatment since the person is reborn through the process of pain. In its more simplistic analysis, the suffering body appreciates its former sane condition more when it has previously become subject to painful conditions so as to be ready to further encounter it in life.

Abramović‟s performance The Lips of Thomas was performed and re-performed in

Galerie Krinzinger in Innsburg in 1975 and in Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New

York in 2005. It is originally a seven-hour piece in which the suffering female body

10 Instances of such practices are the Sepik Scarification, the Naghol Land Diving, the Okipa Ceremony, the Satere-Mowe Bullet Ant’s Sting, the Matausa Blood Initiation, and the Xhosa and Sabiny Male and female circumcisions respectively. Information is extract from http://listverse.com/2010/07/17/10-incredibly-painful- rites-of-initiation/. Tzouni 47 maintains the leading role. In The Lips of Thomas, Abramović startles the audience with the repetition of the same procedure that includes her naked female body and the use of several symbolic objects such as a liter of red wine, a liter of honey, and a clock which are placed on a table, a block of ice forming a cross, a pair of worn out military shoes, a military hat and seven razors. Abramović sets the scene by mentioning:

I slowly eat 1 kilo of honey with a silver spoon. I slowly drink 1 litre of red wine out

of a crystal glass. I break the glass with my right hand. I cut a five pointed-star on my

stomach with a razor blade. I violently whip myself until I no longer feel any pain. I

lay down on a cross made of ice blocks. The heat of a suspended heater pointed at my

stomach causes the cut star to bleed. The rest of my body begins to freeze. I remain on

the ice cross for 30 minutes until the public interrupts the piece by removing the ice

blocks from underneath me. (Stiles 54)

The 2005 repeat performance deviates from the original one in the fact that Abramovic did not let herself lose control of her performance. She was present and conscious during the whole performance as she chose not to remain still for extended periods of time. However, she proceeded with the pattern of drinking wine, eating honey, carving the several angles of star, lying on the ice blocks, whipping herself and then standing in front of her audience with a flying bloody flag on her right hand and a Slavic song being heard from the recorder.

Abramović wore her father‟s hat as a symbolic reference to the communist political background and the social stimuli that she was exposed to during her childhood within her family environment.

The Lips of Thomas seems as an assortment of her previous pieces. The performer passes through several stages of experiencing physical pain. The Lips of Thomas is a multilayered piece of performance art since the female body succumbs to many types of suffering. “By collaging obsessive eating and self-flagellation with self-mutilation, „Thomas Tzouni 48

Lips‟ sets up a comparison of acts. Abramović‟s female body gives particular inflection to the

food obsessions and sadomasochistic aspects of these works” (Turim 101). Abramović resorts

to a variety of symbols and acts in her performance pieces that are related to pain and torture.

One explanation “lies in shamanistic ritual and

transcendence of the body as derived from

religious practices, particularly eastern religions”

(101). This is the reason why she uses the five-

Fig. 10. The Lips of Thomas, 1975 Performance pointed star as the one used in Eastern and Gallerie Krinzinger, Innsburg Western Orthodox Christianity, the cross, the

consumption of wine and the use of the whip. All these elements exemplify the reason why

many types of cultures and religious practices place the body of the worshiper in various

tortured conditions. Purification of body/spirit is the reason or excuse given for such

practices. Another reason is based on psychoanalytic theory that implies that “[s]ubjects who

are acting out unconscious desires that they cannot express otherwise perform such rituals”

(102). A third explanation leads us to the erotic element found in beauty practices and

fashion. Abramović uses the symbols to show that the female body is an object rather than a

subject in the ways of religion, society, and politics. In terms of religion, the female body is

believed to be contaminated and mystifying apart from its sacredness. From a Christian-Eden

point of explanation, the female body is the one that condemned the person to its mortal end

condition, death. When Eve deceived Adam into following her will the human body was

doomed to mortality. Abramović sets new rules and challenges the religious thought on the

female body rendering it active through art.

From a social perspective, the female has been constantly subjected to changes in

order to respond to the ideals that have been imposed on it through each and every era. The

social standard of the curved body of the Renaissance was transformed into the skinny body Tzouni 49 standard of the 1970s through the 1990s and it is now apparent in fashion once again. The female body is transformed and re-shaped and very often rejected by the social needs and trends. The change of hair color, body piercing, eating habits and the interchanging of nudity and clothing still torture the female persona. The Lady Gaga Chapter will later, also, address the phenomenon of the extravagant costumes, the changes of fashion trends in every personal Fig. 11. The Lips of Thomas, 2005 Performance Solomon. R. Guggenheim and social appearance, as well as her video and live Museum, New York performances. However, in Abramovic‟s case “pain […] is clearly eroticized, presented in its discrete penetrations on a nude body” (102). Abramović‟s body is presented in a postmodern way which does not create the sexual fear of the typical feminine sexuality. Abramović created the type of fear in the spectators that linked to pain and “not for pleasure – at least not in the direct form of a pronounced sexual gratification” since “[h]ere the ritual is rather that of a performance psychoanalytic space of enduring, representing, and witnessing” (105).

Abramović is a powerful creator of pieces of performance art because apart from her performing them, she is also their master. Despite her low profile in her social life, she manages to provoke through her pieces rather than commoditizing her personal life with extremities. Abramović has concentrated on her art and it will be only later that she will be socially exposed and photographed with “stars” of the American and global stage.

In her performance Art Must Be Beautiful; Artist Must Be Beautiful, which was performed in Charlottenburg Art Festival in Coperhagen in1975, Abramović again focuses on the physicality of pain so conspicuously. The piece is based upon the repetition of the phrase

“art must be beautiful; artist must be beautiful” with the naked performer standing in front of the camera which is functioning as her mirror holding a brush and a comb. She is originally combing her hair smoothly and gently but as time proceeds, the movements become Tzouni 50 progressively more aggressive. The artist seems to be in pain as she “really hurt [herself], showing a very disturbing image that is the opposite of beauty” (Kaplan 14). The performer through her act turns against the ideology of beauty as many women tend to violate her body and even worse manipulate their own will in order to fit into the male ideal and perception of beauty. As Valie Export comments, “[w]omen‟s adaptation to the masculine ideal of beauty, even if it is so deeply internalized that women experience it as their own, is already soaked with the blood of self-abandonment and identity loss” (79). Orlan will later comment on the matter of transforming the body into something else; or even more accurately into someone else. The two women focus on the body and its relation to fashion industry and beauty prerequisites that torture many people, especially women who phenomenally sadly do not have the characteristics that the era demands. Lady Gaga, as will be shown in the next chapter, will more precisely comment on fashion and the transformation of her identity since she has also used fashion to embrace a new identity that would fit to beauty myths and ideals.

Orlan and Lady Gaga followed Abramović‟s example on the painful procedures that the body must succumb to that the world of fashion demands from women. However, they even changed their identities and names as while pursuing the exaggerated and senseless acquisition of cosmetics and fashionable garments that each era places on the spotlight.

On Art Must Be Beautiful; Artist Must Be Beautiful, Abramović shows that she feels awkward with beauty and fashion issues. She indicates signs of guilt and uneasiness. The choice of her nakedness is not accidental. The performer relates nakedness to the inner shame that women feel for their naked bodies. The puritan ideology that is imposed on females renders the female body as both sacred and dirty at the same time. For this specific reason,

American society was originally reluctant to understand Abramović‟s intentions and performance focus. Abramović was considered to be oscillating between pornography and masochism since she exposed her naked body to the devouring eyes of her spectators. But to Tzouni 51

Abramović her body is not a mere bearer of the self. The body is a tool by which she delves into the female psyche and explores its surreptitious intentions. For that reason, she once again exposes her naked self and manipulates her hair. As hair is considered the ultimate sign of femininity and womanhood in many societies, she also criticizes the relation women have with their mirrors and their hair. Abramović uses her relationship with her spectators and the camera as her mirrors. The public though would project and reflect their perceptions and

fears of their own deteriorating and fragile

appearances by utilizing Abramović as their

reflection in the mirror. The symbolic use of the

mirrored identity is charged with multiple

meanings since “[i]t is ambivalent, a symbol of

Fig. 12. Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be broken dreams and utopias, of broken identity, Beautiful, 1975 Performance Charlottenburg Art Festival, Copenhagen but also of hope, the retrieval of fragments of a tortured soul, the summons to independence” (Export 86). Abramović‟s statement on the specific piece of performance lies in the fact that art gives birth to and further recreates and reconstructs beauty just as the beauty ideals have been diversified and manipulated through time. The symbols, in this case, used in her piece exhilarate and instruct the spectators. With the symbolism of the mirror, for instance, she adds in one of her quotes to Gunter Berghaus that “[t]he deeper you go into yourself as an artist, the more universal your work becomes” in the sense that “[e]very moment, every symbol you use as a performer, is actually the tool to a universal language” (178). Abramović uses the universal language of art to communicate with her spectators on beauty ideals though the specific piece.

In Art Must Be Beautiful; Artist Must Be Beautiful, Abramović is highly concerned with the outcome of the video recording of her performance. In her attempt to record the relationship between pain, fashion and beauty she re-performed the piece as Pane had done in Tzouni 52 the past, since the cameraman did not capture the piece as she had originally imagined. She noted:

I was so furious that the documentation was so stupid and the camera was going up

and down. I didn‟t like it. Straight after the performance I made one more time the

entire performance just for the documentation, to have it right. Now when you see this

piece, it is right, and you can get the sense of it. And if you have been there or not

been there, it is still much better than seeing one slide. (Thomson & Weslien 45)

Abramović reflects her need to maintain and reassure the existence of her pieces. She disregards pain because she desires to capture the performance as she believes it will offer her spectators a chance for transformation and reflection.

Abramović used performance art to instruct and to be instructed; to alter and to be altered; finally, to transform and to be transformed into a new entity that seeks resurrection through the pain that she inflicts on her body. When Body Art is centralized in such pieces of performance art, it is based on the impermanence and ephemerality that those pieces present.

Since Body Art is constantly outdated and more and more commoditized, the performers, subsequently, seek newness and constant change. As Mark A. Pegrun notes, “[t]he principle of ephemerality is in fact to be found everywhere in the art of recent decades, for example in the Performance Art […] of Joseph Beuys […]; the Performance/ Body Art orientation of

Gilbert and George who act as living sculptures; […] to the Pont Neuf in Paris (1985) and

Reichstag in Berlin (1995), all of which processes, as he writes of the fabric on a proposal of the last of these projects, „the special beauty of impermanence‟” (220-1). Abramović managed to transfer the violence of her performativity into the rooms of galleries and museums and relocate the human body to the center of our attention. She mentioned that when you bake your bread in a bakery, you are just a baker, whereas when you “bake” your bread within the walls of MoMa, then you create art (Abramović). Abramović‟s art is Tzouni 53 limitless despite her now being accused for commoditization of her acts. At least, Abramović uses her image as a performer per se and does not succumb to the allure of commercialization and “fetishization” of the tools used in her pieces.

Abramović seems to change her state of mind towards fashion. She used to incriminate fashion and appear bare footed, naked and without make-up in her pieces since she did not intend to perform femininity. She did not want to stress gender. In one of her interviews called “Embracing Fashion,” she explains how she was made to feel during the

1970s and how she feels now. In the aforementioned interview she notes that “in the 70‟s, when the artists have red lipstick and nail polish and any kind of relation to fashion, it was disgusting. Like being a really bad artist who had to prove yourself because you couldn‟t do it with your work. So, it was a big NO NO NO!11” (Abramović). Abramović, later, appeared in Vogue and the V Magazine and as Louisa McGillicuddy notes, “[s]ince then she's gravitated from the avant-garde into somewhat of a celebrity darling, collaborating with Jay-

Z, teaching the "Abramovic method" to Lady Gaga, even working on a biopic of James

Franco” (McGillicuddy). The artist used to feel guilty about her appearance and tried to suppress femininity in order not to diminish her artistry. However, the artist is now showing her actual self liberated and exempt from the self imposed restrictions of the 1970s. Hence, she can now enjoy herself and embrace fashion since she has nothing to prove as an artist but does need to boost her confidence as a sixty-year old woman (Abramović). To my point of view, fashion does not limit or categorize the artists‟ quality along with the artistic outcome they produces. Viewing fashion only as a fetishized vehicle to promote pieces and artifacts is totally different from embracing fashion in a personalized way both in the pieces and the personal expression of the self and the body. Fashion should add to the free expression of the presented body rather than suppress and restrict it.

11 Capitalization is attributed to my perception in order to show Abramovid’s aggravating tone during the interview. Tzouni 54

The artists are free to invent and transform into new personalities and to transform into millions of others within the walls of galleries and museums. However, as Mary

Richards notes, there are objections on what kind of transformation they actually experience as “[t]here is no promise of re-birth but the „terrible beauty‟ of the performance is nonetheless a hopeful action rather than one of nihilistic despair” (111). Performance granted the artists with a playfulness that set them free from conventionalities of theatrical means like the stage, the theater, the audience and the script as they would create and express their performativity in the most extravagant and extraordinary places. In performance art there are no restrictions.

The performers are free to convey their own messages to spectators who will receive their own impressions as well as those of the artist.

Tzouni 55

Chapter Three

Transforming the Body through Orlan’s Surgical Performances

When performance art is combined with the latest technological advancements, the body is reclaimed as a state-of-the-art tool and hence its meaning and use are re-defined in the world. Because the body is now a medium of artistic expression, it loses its substantiality and physical location in the sense that it acquires an omnipresent screened reality; appearing and reappearing as often as possible; be it cut, opened, carved, suffering, or bleeding.

However, as Savas Patsalidis puts it, the body has to have the feeling that it belongs somewhere (295). This is where performance art provides both direction and location for which the body can actually be re-conditioned and given a new position. Through the flourishing relationship between performance art and medical innovation the human being has become interactive with and even intrusive in the construction and representation of the body.

The natural limits of the human body reminds human beings of their inevitable mortality and that one can either fight against the idea of death or merely surrender to it passively. Since “the more we, [as human beings] remember our body, the sicker we are,” we are doomed to suffer pain and the advent of death (296). Because the sick body reminds us of our mortality, this automatically creates the need for a “superbody” that will function against all odds and in every circumstance. This “superbody,” though, is not enough when beauty considerations come to the forefront. This functionally ideal body does not seem to serve beauty and its prerequisites. Hence, many women who are keen on acquiring an ageless, unspotted and unblemished body turn to cosmetic plastic surgery as a possible solution. In many instances, the outcome may prove to be destructive for females because the body is homogenized and standardized as the products in the marker. Women are mesmerized by Tzouni 56 promises that cosmetic plastic surgery will offer them all the features they desire. Cosmetic plastic surgery propaganda filled with western male-dominated social taboos conditions and influences women into believing this is the magic cure-all they seek. Ageing, one of the worst foes in society‟s desire for physical beauty, is one of the greatest fears of females.

Unfortunately, in order to meet the new trend of being “forever young” the woman‟s natural body has to be sacrificed through alteration. It is cut and spliced, stretched and tucked in the hope that time will somehow pass by allowing beauty to remain untouched by nature‟s hand.

The medical domain and the body are interrelated in the sense that one makes a promise to the other. Medicine creates the illusion that the body will not age if it is subjected to specific medical practices and, therefore, will not die (298). Moreover, doctors have to confront the defects of the body and find new ways to connect the body to itself and to the world using new technological and medical trends such as implants, prosthetics, delicate surgical practices, and diets. Society creates the need for perfection and the female body will have to assimilate and adjust to the new phenomena that its era demands. However, women subconsciously absorb and adjust to these assimilations and unfortunately, in many cases act against their own free will. The female body is transformed due to cosmetic plastic surgery interventions and modifications as in the case with weight gain or loss, incessant formulations of hair sculptures, insertion of implants in various parts of their bodies, breast augmentation or reduction and fashionable garment selections all fulfilling the demands and conventions of the time.

Female performers have used their bodies in the leading roles of their performance art pieces in order to critically comment on the phenomenon of how fashion and society affect female perception and need. Many have managed to make this comment more or less successfully. However, we do have to admit that they all successfully respond to the social injustice that bombards the female body with new needs and ideals. In some instances Tzouni 57 though, the means of presentation has been highly glamorized, commercialized and commoditized thus losing this original aim to.

One of the most controversial female figures of performance art is the French artist,

Orlan. She is widely known as Saint-Orlan and she insists on her name being written in capital letters; that is the name ORLAN,12 which it was changed in 1971. Orlan chose to completely alter her identity in the 1970s and she later transformed her physical characteristics through surgical procedures in the 1990s. Her phenomenal contribution to performance art accumulates to what Auslander states as “Orlan is becoming a sort of living palimpsest demonstrating the complicity of aesthetics, fashion, and patriarchy with the representational practices that define and enforce cultural standards of female beauty (e.g., painting, sculpture, surgery)” (131). Orlan takes distinct steps and uses her own means to relate the three notions of pain, beauty and performance. Orlan is a phenomenon of plastic surgery and cosmetology as she uses the surgical table and her body as the premium means of communication with the public for her performances. As Martin Jay puts it, Orlan “showed plastic surgeons cutting into and rearranging her face to conform to traditional Western ideas of feminine pulchritude,” and she hence re-appears as a pastiche figure of her self (62). The public might have found it difficult to understand the intention of her performing means and her performance pieces might be considered queer or even grotesque. But the phenomenon of basing art on anatomy and surgical experiences is not an innovative procedure that Orlan introduced. It was her, though, who managed to shock the public and bring into contact these notions with a wider audience. From Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) to “Anatomy Theatres” taking place at the beginning of the twentieth century, audiences could not always realize the functionality of using medicine in the service of arts, especially visual arts. However, Da

12 Her original name is Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte and it was converted to Orlan at the age of seven and recently renamed as ORLAN as she desires to be called and after her personal will, but I will follow the small- letter choice throughout my thesis. Tzouni 58

Vinci‟s art, that could not be based on the beliefs and scriptures of the wise men of his era but was a preferred experimentation in order to solve his quandary, was a distinct situation. As

E.H. Gombrich notes, Da Vinci explored the secrets of the human body by dissecting more than thirty corpses in order to acquire accuracy in his drawings (294). In this case, the “body” becomes the object of scientific experimentation. According to Jane Macnaughton, the

Anatomy Act originally excluded the public from the “anatomy theatres,” but empowered medical students to experiment with the use of the body as a malleable material rather than just a deceased body (73). Fortunately, after late the 1980s, “[p]ublic dissections are once again being held „in the flesh‟ and in the glare of television cameras” as an innovative procedure of the representation of the dissected body (73). Even within the medical circles,

[t]he images […] show groups of medical students gathered around cadavers at various stages of dissection. Many of these images were intended to be humorous” (73). The intention, of course, of the specific acts was not to show disregard or disrespect towards the dead bodies but to create a sense of familiarity with what was considered so distant a practice in the previous eras. The exposure of operating procedures indicates that “the body is active; patients are responsible and involved in their own well-being; and medicine is engaged in health maintenance through co-operation with patients rather than in eliminating disease through the imposition of treatments” (77). Apart from the dissection of the body and the revelation of the secretly concealed world of the human body, a ritualistic notion was given to the procedure. As Eugene Thacker puts it, “[i]n the anatomy theater there is a complex, ritualistic morphology which takes place, from the acquisition of the corpse for dissection, to the completed demonstration in the anatomy theater, or to a completed anatomical text” as the corpses were used for the revelations of the truths of the body and the world (324).

Additionally, the deceased body was considered to have magical powers still present or even have ghosts haunting its manipulators if it was not well preserved and taken care of. In Tzouni 59 ancient Greece, when the battles were finished, time was given in order for warriors to collect the bodies of their fellow soldiers and mourn for them. Many artists and performers were later inspired by the “Anatomy Theatres” and the medical themes and they inserted medicine in their pieces of performance and in fine arts.

Moving towards the twenty first century, performances that dealt with “blood sacrifices” as Carey Lovelace puts it, were becoming more and more popular with artists such as Hermann Nitsch who used to slaughter lambs above the naked body of women or Rudolph

Swartzkogler who appeared to maim himself (15). Other instances included Gina Pane, previously mentioned, or Carolee Schneemann, the artist who removed the script of the performance from her vagina during her performance Interior Scroll (15). Furthermore,

Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou), who had an ear implanted in his arm and a third arm incorporated into his body, is another example of how medicine, robotics and performance art can cooperate. It is important to note that Stelarc legally changed his name in 1972 similarly to

Orlan.

In Orlan‟s case, the student movement, sexual liberation and the unconventional spirit of the 1960s inspired the artist to comment on the stereotypical taboos and the divine beliefs through her pieces of performance art (Patsalidis 301). Her whole life was based on transformations. In 1971, she changed her name and after a personal incident that led her to hospitalization, she considered the female body transformation and identity to be in a constant flux. Those were the initiatives that inspired her to take up her project and prove that performance art has healing potentials. The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan was the project in which Orlan would focus on cosmetic plastic surgery, the limitless potentials of the post human body, feminism, and the grotesqueness, beauty and monstrosity interrelation. Orlan subjected her body to multiple cosmetic surgeries in order to create self-construction which would make its critical comments on beauty and the social, racial, gender and religious Tzouni 60 stereotypes that surround it. As Alynda Faber notes, it was a “practice of self-directed violence [that] creates a spectacle that violates the viewer and establishes her body as „a site of public debate‟” (85). Interestingly, some of the challenges that one faces when writing about Orlan are the ambiguities that she generates and the queries that arise as a result of her acts. Orlan is an artist who is loved as a pop diva and hated as a miasma of the fine arts.

The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan should be viewed as her attempt to be someone else through the multiple pictures that she had been exposed to from the history of art and mythology. As Jill O‟Bryan notes, the initial idea of the specific project was to construct, “a composite image, via morphing computer soft-ware, of her own face, combined with that of

Leonardo's Mona Lisa, an anonymous School of Fontainebleau sculpture of Diana, Gustave

Moreau's Europa, Botticelli's Venus, and Francois Pascal Simon Gérard's Psyche” (50). As the artist explained,

I constructed my self-portrait by mixing representations of goddesses from Greek

mythology: chosen not for the canons of beauty they are supposed to represent, but

for their histories … These representations of feminine personages have served as an

inspiration to me and are there deep beneath my work in a symbolic manner. In this

way, their images can resurface in works that I produce, with regard to their histories.

(qtd. in O‟Bryan 52)

In her attempt to justify her “choices,” she states that The Mona Lisa is not considered the representative of beauty since there is a man hidden beneath her image, as La Gioconda is related to Da Vinci‟s identity problems (Orlan; O‟Bryan 50). She, also, wanted to copy

Diana‟s nose because she was the goddess of hunting and expressed her aggression towards men (50). Europa‟s mouth was appropriated as she “looked away to another continent, permitting herself to be carried away into an unknown future” while she chose to appropriate the chin of Venus who was the representative of fertility, recreation and beauty (50). She Tzouni 61 finally wanted to apply the eyes from Psyche as a woman searching for love and possessing

“spiritual beauty” (52). Orlan lives with the aim of constructing herself through them

(Patsalidis 302). She is not in search of an identity framed and limited by gender and number.

Orlan is inspired by many social and historical personalities; actual or fictitious, alive or dead. As Danielle Knafo notes, “[a]lthough she likens her surgery to woman-to-woman transexuality, Orlan has stated that she is a manwoman or a womanman („Je suis une homme et un femme‟)” (152). She intends to create a transsexual body that is converted from a female to a female and who is actually aspiring to acquire the specific characteristics as a part of her pieces of performance art. The complexity of her project was assisted by medical practice and it perplexed her audience even more.

Orlan‟s project about her reincarnation included her going through a procedure of nine surgical performances in which she applied subtitles such as: Body Art, This is my Body,

This is my Bodywear, and I Gave my Body to Art. The first plastic cosmetic surgery was held in 1990 on her fortieth birthday. A Black male striptease dancer performed along with Orlan while the surgical gowns used were designed by the famous fashion designer Paco Rabanne

(Lovelace 14). “Her first four surgeries involved liposuction: reduction and reshaping of her ankles, knees, hips, buttocks, waist, and neck,” with the artist being under local anesthetic. This allowed

her to communicate with her audience and respond Fig. 13. Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, 1990-1993 Performance to their questions when that was needed (Faber

85). Her first performances/surgeries were applied by the male doctors, Dr. Cherif Kamel

Zahar and Dr. Bernard Cornette de Saint-Cyr but she did not get the result she was striving for. Orlan believed that her first operations were of minor importance because “there was no new face yet: problems with the first operation had necessitated another, so she fielded Tzouni 62 audience questions, her speech slowed by stitches” (Lovelace 15). As she notes on her personal website, she considers her fourth surgery successful but of trivial importance

(Orlan). It was not till Omnipresence, her seventh plastic surgery, which she considers as the

most important, as it “was broadcast live to 15 art galleries in

several different countries, and viewers could ask Orlan questions

during the operation” (Faber 85). Orlan had now placed her

bleeding body at the center of attention and it was then that her

goal for immense popularity and recognition would actually be

realized. This performance was of immense significance as it had

a more feminist approach. “Her transformation into the Mona

Fig. 14. Omnipresence, 1993 Lisa was undertaken in November 1993 by a feminist aesthetic Performance, New York surgeon, Dr. Marjorie Cramer, in New York City” as Sander L.

Gilman mentions (160). Orlan, also, stressed her need to communicate with her spectators during the whole procedure as she wanted to unite with them in a dialectic relationship. In this piece, Orlan added silicone implants in her forehead as it was portrayed on the famous painting. Those implants are often called the unicorn horn implants and inspired many artists later on. One of the most profound examples of later inspiration is the one of popular culture diva, Lady Gaga, who placed unicorn horns on her forehead, cheekbones and shoulders for the sake of her album “Born this Way.” This act had actually sparked Orlan‟s rage against the singer who had not asked for the rights or even given the credit to the French artist.

However, apart from the spectacular world of media and performance art, one might critically question the participation of surgeons in Orlan‟s performances. They had to proceed with surgeries that had nothing to do with the conventional ones they were accustomed to.

According to Charles Hall,“[m]edics who are forced into a narrower and more impersonal specializations have reacted with growing enthusiasm for the chance to collaborate not only Tzouni 63 in experimental surgery but in experimental art as well” (1308). There was much reaction and ambivalence toward the fact that the surgeons were participating in Orlan‟s surgical performances. In many cases, social restrictions and public opinion towards performance art which embraced the violation of the body created constraints, limitations, and fear. Additionally, many social groups were not ready to experience such performances. The difference in Fig. 15. “Born this Way,” album cover in which Lady Gaga appears with the mentality between the European and the American unicorn horns continents was immense. “Things have been very different in the United States; there, after all, surgeons are accustomed to fulfilling the requirements of their customers rather than determining the needs of their patients” (1308). This comment indicates that in the United

States doctors were more prepared and willing to put their own power aside if an innovation appeared to the proscenium. Thus, the Europeans seemed more artistically and practically offended while the Americans appeared more open-minded since they faced these operations as means of advertisement. However, the surgeons lost their original power to construct

“their surgical dolls” according to how they perceived beauty because they were now guided by the artist‟s “digital draft” that she had pre-constructed in perfect detail. Orlan had placed

“[p]osters of the painting from which she has chosen a body part […] on display to guide the surgeon‟s hands” (Knafo 147). Even if she did not have the lancet in her own hands, as

Abramovic did, we can at least admit that Orlan had everything pre-designed according to her will. Orlan, as Abramović in her Rhythm 0, tried to alter the standard representation of the

“passive exhibit-active spectator.” She intended to co-relate the two worlds in her pieces of performance art in the sense that she tried to reverse the role of the passive patient on the surgical table and the active surgeon. The surgeon is, now, deprived of duties and acts upon them merely to serve her patient and the performance. Tzouni 64

Orlan managed to transform her surgeries into colorful spectacles where costumes of famous designers such as Miyake, Lan Vu and Frank Sordrier were utilized. Fashion was a prerequisite in Orlan‟s pieces since it symbolized the sacrifice of personal style at the altar of commodification. Orlan would kiss the surgeons passionately and sensually before undertaking her first operations; she kept symbols such as crosses and fiendish tridents while she decorated the room with her own posters from her previous performances such as the

Artist’s Kiss (1977). Videos and screens were placed in strategic positions throughout her performances because Orlan wanted to assure the actual representation of her surgical performances and the “visual-testimony” of her implication with beauty and pain. Orlan turned into a media performer who constructed her pieces based on the interaction with the online audience. The camera zoomed in and out according to where the performer wanted the tension and focus to be placed. An important element in her performances was the fact that she would read passages from theoreticians and philosophers during her operations and she appeared smiling and glittering. She actually gave the impression that she was lying on her bed not on the surgical table. Orlan was a symbol of glamor and intellect while performing.

As Lorrie Blair and Maya Shalmon note, “[o]ne key text read by Orlan during her performance was from Lacanian psycho-analyst Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni‟s book (1983),

La Robe (The Dress)” (16). In which Orlan writes:

Skin is deceiving... in life, one only has one's skin ... there is a bad exchange in human

relations because one never is what one has. ... I have the skin of an angel, but I am a

jackal ... the skin of a crocodile, but I am a puppy, the skin of a black person, but I am

white, the skin of a woman, but I am a man; I never have the skin of what I am. There

is no exception to the rule because I am never what I have. (qtd. in O‟Bryan 52)

Taking Lemoine-Luccioni‟s words into consideration, the original aim and final purpose of the artist was to move from reading these kinds of passages and commenting on the events to Tzouni 65 acting. Orlan proceeded to the aesthetic surgeries with an intention of indicating that the person is rarely satisfied with the mortal body. People end up in painful situations just to obtain an appearance according to the stereotypical images published and distributed through media. As the skin envelops the body, people and especially women are compliment on, judged on and even categorized by it. The body is framed by its skin. When the skin is cut and violated, women need to find its continuity because the bleeding body and its wounds remind them of the fear of their inevitable mortality. They remember what they have suffered from their skin and that hurts them even more. Not only do women suffer from their bleeding body but from the bleeding memory as well. As Hall further notes “[t]he violence of the pressure on a woman to conform is satirized in the bloody mutilation of her body as she attempts to squeeze it into a conventional template of the perfect body” (1308). Orlan uses her body and embraces pain as part of an aggravating procedure. She does not seem to be afraid of the consequences even if she pretends to do so. Orlan‟s aesthetic procedures are like watching the Theatre of the Absurd or “Artaud‟s theatre of cruelty,” because pain is the main issue that the spectator is called to deal with while observing the smiling artist (Carnal Art).

Orlan is found between the binary of beauty and pain and as the saying goes, you have to sustain pain in order to be beautiful.

Orlan denied being objectified when in the arms of her doctors-sculptors. The philosopher Serge Francois wonders “Who is the artist? Is it the surgeon working on Orlan‟s face or is it Orlan who lets the surgeon work on her? The answer is clear: the surgeon is a technician, Orlan is the artist. She sets the rules” (qtd. in Orlan - Carnal Art). She wanted to be a work of art that future generations will be able to see, admire or reject. That is why her whole attempt is attributed the term “Carnal Art.” Orlan shows her discomfort or slight pain when the first needle is injected into her body and she states “„[t]he initial injection hurts.

After that the painful part is lying on an operating table for 6 hours‟” (qtd. in O‟Bryan 50). Tzouni 66

When watching the needles entering her skin, we suffer as well. When we see her ear cut, or her lip line curved with the scalpel and her blood springing up, we feel disgusted or horrified and our sight automatically recoils from the screen. But to Orlan, that is a simple matter of her own ornamented hand to take away the excess blood running and even leave her imprint on a cloth while being operated. The little tubes that are used for liposuction create the illusion that they run through her body to consecrate and sanctify her into becoming someone else; that is Saint Orlan. The artist is trying to be caustic about the social beliefs that seem to tantalize female thinking and mentality.

Her attitude towards her aesthetic surgeries is a comment which is opposite to that of society. During Orlan‟s “performances,” “you stand in the middle of a taboo and watch it being broken, you can chart your reactions to the process” because the sentiment of being in the middle of an indescribable horrific act is fused to the spectators (Lovelace 14). Even if “to watch the procedure of Orlan‟s skin being opened up and flesh removed feels like witnessing an obscene act” and become part of a grotesque (18). The public‟s amazement is additionally aggravated when realizing that she intentionally chose to have local anesthesia so as to be fully aware of what the doctors were opting to perform on her body. Despite the absurdity that pain provokes though, I would also like to note that flowing blood is alluring as well. I felt like raving between nausea, curiosity and admiration after watching the reproduction videos from Orlan‟s official website.13 I was amazed by how a performer made such a hazardous decision. The sight of the blood, the needles and the scalpel, cutting the flesh of a woman who can actually see what is going on leaves the spectators speechless. The feelings were aggravating and perplexing at every viewing. I personally felt amazed by my not actually knowing what to feel. As a sight per se, it is admittedly shocking and disturbing.

This how Orlan wants us to feel. She neither undertakes all those operations to simply

13 http://www.orlan.eu/ Tzouni 67 indicate her narcissistic tendency nor as a means of pure insanity. She is not even an artist who is willing to express her inner sadomasochist need of expression but it is out of love, vanity and recognition that she performs extremities. These three important elements are key- factors to success since the performer actually knows how to “grotesquely” expose herself to her audiences. As with Abramović, Orlan also believes that art must be disturbing. Her motto is “Art is a dirty job but someone has to do it” (Orlan). In her Carnal Art, she actually rejects the idea of pain even if her performance videos are for spectators who can deal with it. People have reacted in multiple ways; from “gasping, closing their eyes, recoiling at the images of her punctured and opened body,” to statements as such: “I was certain I could not have sustained the intense pressure I felt in my gut as I looked at images of her surgery” (Faber

89). There were also testimonials from people abandoned their seats while others waited to replace them (Phelan 186). As Robert Ayers notes, “[h]er audience, […], has been sympathetic, sycophantic, adoring, with young women in particular responding to her like some pop music role model” (174). Orlan loves to have her fame spread despite the positive and negative comments she inspires.

Additionally, another fact in her videos that shocked me was the look on her face. The performer was smiling throughout the most extensive parts of her pieces. Hence, an emphasis is placed on her after-surgical pictures in which the artist is smiling and glamorous in order to convince us that she was in fact entertaining herself during the procedure. I strongly believe that her smile highlighted her effort to conceal the pain it takes to be transformed into what society demands. Pain and beauty can collaborate when the one is superimposed onto the other. In spite of the fact that her blood has stained the sheets, the surgeon‟s hands, and her face, she rejects the idea of pain. She actually notes, “[t]he celebrated giving birth with pain is completely ridiculous in our day and age, when we have epidurals and a whole pharmacopoeia which allows us not to have to suffer if we don‟t want to” (qtd. in Ayers 183). Tzouni 68

To the audience, her statements on her “painless operations” become even more annoying than her pieces because they feel powerless or lunatics of actually incorporating in their lives.

Indeed, they often result in believing that the performer is either charismatic or a troubled entity. More or less, Orlan manages to capture the attention of the audience and makes herself a performance celebrity, which commercializes her and the products of her pieces.

Orlan, according to her physician, is a totally sane person who felt the pain and in many instances instead of terminating the operations she sustained the entire struggle because pain was one of the elements that the artist had to overcome in order to accomplish the ultimate goal of her artistic recreation. We also have to note that Orlan is not a psychologically or mentally ill person but a sentimentally ill entity. As in Abramović‟s case,

Orlan had a poor relationship with her mother and sister. Orlan could only aspire for her mother‟s attention when she was sick as her sister would always do. Orlan notes, “[i]t was necessary for me to tell her, „I‟m sick,‟ for her to become interested in me. My sister always followed her example. She was sick and is still always sick. When I call her, the only thing she talks about is her illness” (qtd. in Knafo 151). The cuts on her flesh represent the cuts in her psyche. Orlan places herself on the surgical table because she intends to comment on her mother‟s lack of attention toward her. “She takes a healthy body and turns it into a sick body, one that requires medical attention and one that alters the way she perceives herself and we perceive her” (152). Art is the ultimate meaning of her life and no matter how she felt during the procedure she responds to one of her mediatized interlocutors this way: “I feel hot, extremely hot and dizzy but I will continue” as she wanted to complete her project (Orlan).

Orlan intends to steel herself against any psychological traumas but she seems desperate to draw the attention of her spectators, something, as a child, she couldn‟t do with her mother.

She feels secure in rejecting any pain since she has people who would react for or against her performances. The artist rejects her DNA to become someone else. She tries to replace her Tzouni 69 genetically inherited features in order to acquire the ones she desires and to become an art- child (Knafo 152). Orlan is one among the other selves. For this reason, performance art is intensely ingrained in her life as a welcoming means of expression which can embrace her artistry no matter the identity she has or the one she desires to obtain.

Her intentions though are misinterpreted as she is often considered an “under construction” monstrous beauty. When the spectator views the surgeon drawing Orlan‟s face in order to pinpoint the parts of her body and face to be changed, the realization that she will actually proceed with the act seems unlikely. The idea that the human being is capable of ignoring and determined to forget its original body and proceeds to embrace a new identity, creates the fear of losing the past and confronting the unknown. Orlan manages to change her aesthetic transformation to transformations of the “self,” creating the illusion of obtaining multiple identities to fit the societal façade. Orlan is about to construct a beautiful monster of

Western culture and hence creates both anxiety and anticipation in her spectators. The viewers are not comfortable with what she has to offer and they are aware that they might not be able to take it all the way. Orlan manages to be perceived in millions ways with her identities. One‟s voice representing those of many might ask:

Is she the ultimate cultural foil- not merely monster beauty but a beautiful monster-

who crashes through the edifice of Western culture to remind us that we got it all

wrong to begin with because we subverted, appropriated, and marginalized the

woman as being, a self, a living inside, both sacred and precious? (Knafo 147)

Is Orlan an extravagant performer who embraces cosmetic plastic surgery and fashion in the name of performance art? Can we simply categorize her under the title of a performer whose intention is to shock and absorb our awe? In my opinion, if this were the case, it wouldn‟t be

Orlan we were talking about. She can acquire the most absurd and unworldly features she desires in the name of art. Orlan is capable of doing everything it takes for her art. Orlan is a Tzouni 70 postmodern hybrid who is willing to adjust to transformations of the self so as to comment on the incessant changes of her era. The performer who offers her body to art and thus becomes a subject of interest and an object of research. As the human identity confronts its own crisis and is in search of its place in the world, Orlan tries to “re-position” the natural human identity by questioning the human body. Hence, the plastic performer transcends the limits of the human body by surpassing its own physical limits. Then, the spectators may come across monstrous spectacles as her painful operations change the body into unconventional beauty aesthetics. Interestingly, when beauty and aesthetic standards are questioned they, then, become “grotesque” and lead to a social crisis that must be dealt with; an “otherness.” Sadly, the “other” becomes a monster that generates social fear and ambivalence. Orlan is critically commenting on monstrosity by becoming a monster of beauty. Orlan‟s relation to this monstrosity is one of ritualistic passion and gratitude which she then shares with her spectators. As Tatiana Rapatzikou notes:

Orlan, the performer artist, transgresses the boundaries between human and monster,

forcing her spectators to come to terms with the deep-seated human anxiety of self-

definition: an anxiety relating to man‟s confrontation with his double, with a part of

himself, which can prove to be a traumatic experience. (484-5)

The spectators confront Orlan‟s surgical table and are left perplexed and puzzled. The spectacle is not an oasis for their eyes and for that reason Orlan is certain that her audience will have to be courageous to remain seated throughout her ordeal.

Exploration of the self is not just a figure of speech. Orlan unveils her body and violates her skin to construct a grotesque figure. Unambiguously, “[d]welling in the realm of the „grotesque‟ is not unfamiliar to Orlan, who has spent her career challenging gender stereotypes, defaming religions, and generally being „wrong‟” (Lovelace 18). The performer delves into the “grotesque” in order to challenge stereotypical ideologies of the past and Tzouni 71 instruct her spectators while at the same time forcing them to question the “fixed” ideas that limit them. In this ambivalent attempt, Orlan functions on two levels. On one level, a half- naked body female body is presented on the surgical table. The exposition of the female body acquires a rather “voyeuristic” element. However, in Orlan‟s case, her sensual female body rejects the idea of representing sexiness in order to transform into someone else. In the beginning, the spectators confront her semi-nude body which is half covered by haute- couture costumes while half of it remains uncovered so as to delineate her body parts in fragments. Her intention to wear haute-couture costumes and intentionally choose to show the body parts that will be operated on creates a fragmented image of femininity.

Eroticization of her body might appear in the pre-surgical state thus; “[f]or a woman to display her sexuality, yet not erotically, is „grotesque‟” (Lovelace 18). Orlan intentionally dissects her image in body tissues and garment pieces that she uses for further exhibitionism and narcissism. Image and media are manipulative tools in Orlan‟s hands and she will later use them in her other two performances, Self-Hybridizations (1994) and The Harlequin’s

Coat (2008).

On the second level, the artist‟s skin is what brings her spectators face to face with their bodies. Orlan represents her body as a multilayered entity; both powerful and grotesque.

She believes in the ongoing construction of the body as it happens with the new technologies, in biology, microsurgery and genetic engineering. She shocks in the fact that the body is considered a default machine that needs to be ameliorated and repositioned in society. That is the reason why she actually embraces cosmetic plastic surgery and fashion as the body acquires new potentials. As she states in her Carnal Art:

I can observe my own body cut open without any suffering! … I can see myself all

the way down to my viscera, a new mirror stage. I can see to the heart of my lover and

its splendid design has got nothing to do with the soppy symbols usually drawn. Tzouni 72

“Darling, I love your spleen, I love your liver, I adore your pancreas and the line of

your femur excites me.” (Orlan)

The artist, here, tries to break the boundaries that beauty creates with the expression and appearance of the female body. Orlan re-invents the body in this interior level. She rejects

“beauty” as presented through western ideals and she herself creates and beautifies the self from the inside out. Rarely have we seen instances of how the interior of the female body is considered beautiful nowadays. However, as Gunther von Hagens enforces Orlan‟s idea by stating that in the sixteenth century “the sculptures and paintings of Renaissance had elevated the beauty of the human body to an aesthetic ideal, and natural beauty stood at the understanding of art, [so] artists also discovered the beauty of the body‟s interior” (12). For this reason, Orlan desires to approach the body through interior beauty and infinite modification. Orlan‟s mentality accumulates to that “our attitudes towards the body, […], are outmoded; [as] we can fly to the moon, […], but we still inhabit the same old-fashioned shell, and have the same old-fashioned attitudes toward it” (Lovelace 24-25).

Orlan never ceases to look for newness and change. However, her tendency towards cosmetic plastic surgery makes her spectators and viewers skeptical and suspicious. As she declares in her site, “I‟m not against it [referring to cosmetic surgery], that‟s a technique of our time. Yet I‟m against its attempts to standardize people” (Orlan). How is it possible for a claimed feminist, that is “neo-feminist, post-feminist and alter-feminist,” to embrace and be subjected to cosmetic plastic surgery and relate it to performance art and art history? (Orlan)

Orlan wants to get to know beauty of the inside body as the way we tend to seek for the inside beauty of the self. Her aim is to attack the physical extremities that are socially demanded by employing “[t]he extremity of her medium [which] ridicules the desire, promoted through cosmetic surgery, to manipulate and possibly disfigure the human physicality from the satisfaction of human narcissism” (Rapatzikou 484). Tzouni 73

In her attempt to capture the painful surgical procedures that she has deliberately imposed on her body, Orlan both videotapes her surgical performances and photo-shoots them. Contrary to Pane and Abramović who only resorted to the power of photography and few video recordings, Orlan made extensive use of the online communication means with her spectators which made her performance narration more subjective and unbiased. Fortunately, online video recording is a powerful means of representation but, unfortunately, the nature of the specific performance has no place for repetition and rehearsals; a surgery can be solely and individually performed. Unlike, the two other female performance artists, Orlan had to pre-arrange and pre-plan everything in great detail since she was putting her life in danger.

We have to co-examine the fact that she did not consider her surgical performances successful till the seventh one, Omnipresence. She was unsatisfied till eventually acquiring the image she was seemingly opting for. Orlan knows how to manipulate her image and skin in order to represent a performance that falls beyond conventionalities and limitations.

The operating and media techniques she resorts to are not put at the service of a

restoration of beauty: they have become tools for the denunciation of the power of the

image. The contrast between the theatrical and the electronically-generated Orlan and

the Orlan on the operating table leaves the audience with a feeling of emptiness: with

the realization of the depthlessness and the savage playfulness of surfaces.

(Rapatzikou 486)

But Orlan is a performance artist who knows how to create, promote, and maintain her reputation. Orlan is the manager of a performing persona. Her purpose is to comment on the superficiality of the image that women mostly recognize on the glassy surfaces of their mirrors. They unintentionally deal with the identification with magazine models and pop star divas that mass media tend to promote on a daily basis. Media, hence, formulate public opinion as far as “idols” and beauty models are concerned. Tzouni 74

By her post-surgical pictures and her Triptych Operation Opera (1993), Orlan shocks with the images she composes and exposes her spectators to. Orlan recorded her image during her recovery stage. She created the post-surgical self-portraits that she would capture daily till the final day of her recovery state when the outcome would be prepared and the process of healing would be terminated. She, then, exposed her images to show the outcome of her performance. The final outcome is a grotesque representation of a female person who

Fig. 16. Appeal vs. Appeal. Photographic triptych of Operation Opera no6, 1993 35 x 107 x 2 in., two Cibachrome prints, black wood frames, black and white photograph is raving between the image of a cartoon and the minstrel shows. The creation of a ready- made digitized image was far more illusory than Orlan would expect. Since “[h]er identity is then one who has exacerbated a state of flux (with surgery) in a live (and therefore already continually changing) human body, to create a portrait of physical evolution which may reflect a constantly fluctuating interior image” (O‟Bryan 55).

The Triptychs are the photographic installations of Orlan‟s surgical performances in which her aesthetic interventions are also prevalent. In each composition, the performer is represented in a triptych as the title suggests. In the middle enlarged picture, the artist is more sensually portrayed while the side ones represent painful scenes from her project with the title

Reincarnations of Saint Orlan where Orlan was presented alongside the symbol of the

Christian cross. The spectators are given the impression that they look through a window or straight at multiple screens. Entitled Appeal vs. Appeal triptych of Opera Operation no6, Tzouni 75

Orlan ironically triggers her spectators‟ gaze because the images are rather repelling and grotesque. Her face is fragmented like parts of a mirror as the artist deliberately chose the most eye-catchy images that would definitely trigger her spectators‟ curiosity and imagination. The red color is preponderant as it signifies the appearance of blood. The surgical instruments that were actually used through her operations are magnified showing either cutting or inserted into her bleeding body.

In most of these images the spectators came across the grotesque and the absurd in museums or galleries. With the intention of meeting and observing beauty, the spectators were placed in the uncomfortable position of witnessing how beauty and beauty myths were constructed. Orlan exaggerated the focus of the images she selected but she portrayed an altered version of beautification of the self. She focused on the surgical means in order to indicate that beauty is not always a given by nature and that its construction takes pains and efforts. Her Triptychs do not create the immediate painful reactions that the online performances used to provoke in the past. However, the video images are interchangeable and instant while those represented in the several venues that host them are static and motionless. Hence, the painful practices are converted into afflictive representations. Even if the physical pain isn‟t immediate when presented to the spectators it still creates a distanced discomfort. The museum is often used as a sanctuary where performances and exhibitions might be normalized and standardized only because they are shown in them. Eric Mullis accurately notes that “the art industry and its temple – the museum – are called into question by performances that purposefully escape the fetishization that often accompanies original and unreproducible works of art such as paintings, sculptures, and buildings” (86).

Furthermore as these pieces of performance art “are violent and disgusting in nature [they] make the psychological phenomenon of aesthetic distance impossible” for the spectators to easily follow (86). Due to these principles, Orlan managed to find her place in the galleries Tzouni 76 and the museums all over the world and continued to provoke her spectators‟ gaze on how the social demands might torture the female nature; always using her own personal but ambivalent style.

The performer proceeded with the next series of pieces that were installations of

Orlan‟s portraits, called Self-Hybridizations closely relating to The Harlequin’s Coat. The series of Orlan‟s installations was a composition of pictures representing her head as a figure of beauty from different civilizations. Orlan expresses herself at a new level; the one of digital technology in combination with the esthetics of painting. The body is decapitated while she only uses the head to comment on how western society misconceives beauty when it surpasses its own boundaries and limitations. Orlan is a media persona of the performing art. Hence, she uses technology to approach the depiction of beauty through her digital representations. The spectators‟ gaze is either attracted or repelled by the sight of a disfigured head that resembles a dehumanized entity and the realization that it is Orlan‟s head which is actually portrayed in this weird composition. The extravagant performer is not actually deforming and sculpting her own flesh through cosmetic surgery as she did in her

Omnipresence and her Reincarnation of Saint Orlan. Her focus is to slaughter the image through digital technology. The hand of the surgeon is replaced by the fingers on the keyboard. Technology empowers Orlan to construct a million faces without undertaking the risk of an operation. She can manipulate her image and guide it through the digits of the computer to many faces. In her Self-Hybridizations Orlan is the puppeteer of her artistic outcomes and she takes full responsibility of her acts. She is now the sculptor of her image.

Her Self-Hybridizations emerged from the need to construct an innumerate amount of possible post human combinations by using human facial characteristics in “grotesque” and unexpected combinations. This innovative technique, though, was not something totally new in arts. In the sixteenth century, the Italian Mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526 or Tzouni 77

1527 – 1593), who was very well known for his heads, drew the Four Seasons. His composition consisted of portraits of distinguished people of his era but as compositional

representations of fruit, vegetables, flowers, books and fish.

Arcimboldo was related to the esthetics of High Renaissance and

the Baroque that are apparent in Orlan‟s pieces. Yet, Orlan‟s

innovative spirit reinvents this artistic realm through media and

photographic installations. By reconstructing her body into the

identities that she wanted to acquire after her plastic cosmetic

Fig. 17. Disfiguration- surgeries, Orlan brings her spectators to the realization of the Refiguration, Precolumbian Self-Hybridization No.2, 150 x painful procedures that they impose on their bodies. In Orlan‟s 100 cm, cibachrome, 1998 case, the technologically limitless post-human body is dominated by the fear of the limited human nature. What I mean is that even if Orlan rejects the limiting human body she actually uses it as such due to her own fears and insecurities. The opened body can be subjected to all sorts of disfigurements. However, the wounds and the bruises from the operations on the body make the human being remember its corporeal mortal nature. Even if the human body is daring and malleable enough to take the steps towards innovation and “modernity,” it cannot forget pain that Orlan unequivocally rejects. Thus, she continues sculpting her images by focusing on the technological means that her era provides her with and enables her to use.

Orlan also focused on beauty standards from a multiethnic perspective. Among others, Orlan selected Native Americans and African Americans whose beauty ideals were misconceived and totally mistreated by the westernized American society. The two civilizations were maltreated, slaughtered and enslaved as they were not considered human beings by the western civilizations. The West rejected “otherness” as it took advantage of

Native American / African American land and human rights, and they concocted reasons to label and classify them as “sub-humans.” For these multiple absurd and irrational reasons, Tzouni 78

Orlan has chosen to explore beauty in relation to “otherness.” I find her ideas successfully depicted in Jean Baudrillard‟s note that, “the Other is no longer an object of passion but an object of production…we can only remember that seduction lies in not reconciling with the Other and in salvaging the strangeness of the

Other” (qtd in Ayers). The artist performs beauty limitations in an attempt to restore the female human entity regardless of color, Fig. 18. American Indian Self- Hybridization #1: painting portrait of No-no-mum-ya, race, and age. In her interview to Ayers, Orlan states: 2006 digital photography, 60 x 49 in. After the surgical operations, which focused on the real, I‟ve working on the virtual,

and the idea of undertaking a world tour of standards of beauty in other cultures,

civilizations and epochs. Here I‟ve started with the pre-Columbian civilizations,

which have a relationship with the body which is particularly disturbing for us, which

completely challenges us and which is very intense – whether that be of their human

sacrifices, or because of things which I‟m very interested in, like the god who‟s

always presented in sculpture by the figure of the priest who is wearing the skin of his

victims, which had been prepared in a specific way, for about 20 days. This is the idea

of entering the skin of the other. These civilizations have standards of beauty which

are completely different to ours. (177)

The performer does not actively perform pain and rage against the stereotypes that western societies impose on people as “beauty standards.” Thus, she expresses her dissatisfaction by opposing those beliefs with her installations. Beauty is an obstacle and a tool for the expression of femaleness and womanhood. It is a crutch that many civilizations use as a means of expressing and justifying the “purity of their race.” Orlan constructs a collage of ethnic facial representations on a western face aimed at agitating the comfort that the western beauty standards create for western and westernized civilizations. Tzouni 79

Taking otherness as a vehicle for her critical commentary towards beauty, Orlan visits the operational table in 2008 with The Harlequin’s Coat.14 The artist, although she has undergone many operations, she seems ready to be subjected to a further cosmetic surgical operation. “The Harlequin‟s Coat is an „in progress‟ installation incorporating a video Fig. 19. Harlequin's Coat Performance, 2008 projection of cells from different origins and a bioreactor – specifically designed for this project, where my skin cells are co-cultured with cells from a foetus of African origin, Swann cells, marsupial cells and bovine cells” (Orlan).15

Orlan‟s voice is heard signaling the nature of her performance as she reads an extract from

Michael Serres‟ text, Laicite. The text refers to the appearance of the harlequin, the trickster hero of the commedia de ll‟arte whose costume is a symbol of polyphony and multiculturalism as it is constructed by cloths of different colors, shapes and materials. As

Orlan notes “[i]t is a philosophical tale that takes the Harlequin‟s as a metaphor of multiculturalism and also of the acceptance of the other within oneself, with religion or not, with beliefs or not and it seems to me extremely important to take up this text and to declare it of our times and for me it is like a manifesto” (Orlan). She originally used this text in her

Operation Opera in which she actually wore a hat and skirt with the colors of the Harlequin‟s coat. The purpose of choosing this outfit was to remind her spectators that the Harlequin‟s coat is a composition of multiple garments, colors and materials that are combined together to clearly symbolize how multiculturalism functions nowadays. Society seems unprepared to accept globalism and multiculturalism as the patriarchal dominative ideologies still rule among people. Unfortunately, the uncertainty that otherness generates, as it is not created

14 It was produced and realized by Orlan and SymbioticA Art and Science Laboratory at the University of Western Australia in 2007 and exhibited in Perth and Liverpool. (http://www.orlan.eu/works/videos-dorlan-2/) 15From “Art and Science in the Post-Biological Age: the international video documentation in archives” (http://www.videodoc.ncca-kaliningrad.ru/participants/vi-semi-living/orlan/) Tzouni 80 within the boundaries of commonplace beliefs about gender, race and color, render the societies skeptical and contemplative. Orlan uses Harlequin‟s costume to reconcile the fear of the other. She brings in a common piece of cloth the multiple colors that are given to ethnicities as a flag of unity and collaboration. Orlan distinguishes uniqueness and originality that every nation and more precisely every person has. She uses the exemplification of color multiplicity to signify that societies should not only demonstrate tolerance and forbearance towards difference but actual acceptance. Assimilation is a western chimera that should be replaced by distinction of the self within the larger scale of the community.

Orlan is a composite artist who desires to be inclusive rather than exclusive in her pieces of performance art. She empowers her art through the aforementioned procedure. The ambivalent artist is aware of the comments raised around her name and the mythologies that are born as to her character as a performer artist. Orlan oscillates between avant-garde and mainstream tendencies of art. Even if she considered herself as an avant-garde performance artist, she, indeed, commoditized her art by selling the remnants of her body parts after the surgical cosmetic operations. Orlan never ceases to provoke her audiences with her installations along and her acts. But what are the original reasons for doing so? From one point of view, “[w]hile she is clearly opposed to the commercialization of art and the commodification of feminine beauty standards, she nonetheless sells reliquaries of her body tissues, in effect, selling her flesh” (Faber 90). The aforementioned statement though seems one-sided if one considers Orlan‟s intention to also comment on the commercialization of the female body through pictures, pageants and fashion shows, with Orlan, for instance, presented fleshless in one of her latest performances. She accepted the influx of the human image that continues to adjust to the changes that time imposes on it instantly. She believes that the body will eventually reconcile with the changes but the mind is there to recreate falsified needs. Owing to Orlan‟s “performativity” which has managed to demystify the body Tzouni 81 through Body Art and performance art, more and more female performance artists have stated their expressivity by painfully stressing the limits of their own bodies. Despite the ambiguity of her performances and the objections she raises, we have to admit that at least she knows how to re-invent herself and draw her audience‟s attention.

Tzouni 82

Chapter Four

Mediatizing Pain through Lady Gaga’s Fashionable Performances

The 21st century started with a new way of approaching performance art through the advent of social media such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Tweeter, to name just a few. These means reposition female performativity in the sense that the female performing artists have become more extroverted in their communication with their audience.

Subsequently, the audience is able to watch the performers through social media wherever and whenever they desire. Music videos of live performances can be viewed for as many times as a viewer desires and have become the new form of mediatized performance art.

Ambivalent female performer artist, Lady Gaga, who shocked with her appearance when first introduced to media culture managed to acquire recognition and use it in promoting her pieces and videos. Her music videos and live performances have references to “Warholian” aesthetics and constitute the fusion of many styles and currents. Hence, her performativity and personal style is a mishmash of many artistic ideologies and means of expression.

Gaga represents a new era of performance art where art blends with pop music and pop culture. The artist is often questioned about her existential position as an artist of performance art. Her pieces of performance art and the reasons why she should have a position among the female performing artists, who manage to perform in galleries and museums, is also controversial. Gaga is both commercial and avant-garde hence her performance art passes onto another level16 of female body representation. Gaga manages to leave her own mark in an era when ready-made personae pop up to make a sole and occasional performance only to see their “shooting stardom” fade into anonymity and

16 I wouldn’t intend to say “next,” since postmodernism and media culture have exemplified that the twenty- first century is characterized by many “next” levels and we should approach each one differently. Tzouni 83 oblivion. Gaga, on the other hand, has become an influential artist ranked among the world‟s most influential people according to Time Magazine in 2010.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanota is a representative of the new American Dream in the media and showbiz world. She is the first child of a middle-class family born in New

York City who sees her dream come true. Gaga‟s persona is that of a self-invented creature who waves between paranoia and glamorous sanity. According to Johnny Morgan, Gaga believes of herself that she is not a persona but herself in her origami glory. The basic idea is that she is a performance artist who composes music, sings songs, and designs the clothes for her performances as well as orchestrates the whole spectrum of her performance. Gaga tells

Morgan that she dresses for the look she chooses and if someone tries to take that away from her she would totally make a fuss about of it (qtd. in Morgan 80). Gaga seems to influence many and to outrage even more. The uncomfortable feelings and the unsettling position that she creates for her viewers establish her among her contemporary performing artists.

From personal experience, I must admit that my attendance in her live performance,

The ArtPop Ball Tour in Athens in 2014, triggered my writing even more as she assembled and combined all the characteristics of an “avant-garde/pop” artist. To this extent, Gaga uses her body and her voice as her means of “painful expression” through pop culture. She combines elements from music, fashion, Performance Arts, pop culture and audience reception to construct an alternative artist that we have not seen in the past. Her strive to create newness, but not of a Madonian kind, makes her seem a popular culture phenomenon in extremes and exaggerations. Consequently, the representation of pain is acquired from a differentiated alternative perception.

In her attempt to become famous and be heard by the general public, Gaga does whatever it takes to distinguish herself from the crowd of female performing artists. Gaga Tzouni 84 submits to the demands of the era for change. During her collaboration with Rob Fusari,17 she was renamed from Stephanie to Lady Gaga. A rumor suggests that while she was recording her first songs, the issue of her renaming was really prevalent as her actual name did not fit with the show business industry image. The inspiration for the new name came from Queen‟s song “Radio Gaga” (1984) that the artist was really fond of due to the charismatic potentials of Queen‟s lead singer, Freddy Mercury. The aesthetics of the specific music video with the white background and the monster-like audience dressed in white is also, prevalent in her future videos. In her interview at Jean-Paul Gautier‟s studio, the fashion designer asks her how she wants to be called and she simply replies “Gaga.” Lady refers to the glamorous comme-il-faut manners that she acquired during her school years in the Convent of the Sacred

Heart, one of the oldest independent girl‟s schools in Manhattan, New York while Gaga derives from the glamorous-kitsch fashion that was very widespread during the 1980‟s, when

Gaga was born (Gagapedia). The name “Gaga” also captures the feel of irrationality and folly that she tends to present. As a female performing artist, she is a persona who combines haute- couture garments with DIY extravagant almost monstrous constructions that expose her hyper-sexualized body in any case. In addition, rumors of her transgendered nature sparked comments about her gender and her excessively expressed sexuality. Gaga‟s intentional passive reaction to the aforementioned comments sparked speculation about her gender and actually enforced her public recognition. Lady Gaga was the female persona who served the voracious curiosity of media and spectators alike.

Gaga‟s career set off with “Just Dance” (2008) where the artist urges her audience to follow her into the folly of a crazy dance as the song and her name suggest. The specific music video shows the singer in a party-like environment where people have been exhausted from incessant drinking while she, in her „80s suit, rejuvenates the atmosphere. Morgan adds

17 Rob Fusari is a Grammy-winner producer and songwriter. Tzouni 85 that the shooting of the specific video was a rather entertaining experience for the artist as she noted that Melina Matsoukas, the producer, intended to do something that is akin to performance art which would be really pop, even if the video was extremely commercial; but without losing its authenticity (66). Despite the fact that her acting skills were always mixed with her pop singing capacities, the artist was always in favor of combining the two versions of art. As Paul Lester notes, Lady Gaga referred to the foresaid fact by saying that: “instead of trying to be theatre or trying to be pop I decided to do something that married the two worlds and something that I really loved” (qtd. in Lester 21). In her attempt to combine her two natures, that is her dramatic theatrics and her pop-art vocals she was rejected by many auditions in her attempt to enter show business. For this reason, Lady Gaga decided to merge those two powers and create her own version of “performance pop art.” She added that when

“[she] started thinking of the theatrics of performance, […] [t]hat‟s when [she] really discovered [herself]” (qtd. in Lester 34).

Through Pane‟s, Abramović‟s, and Orlan‟s pieces of performance art the artists painfully “manipulated” their bodies to comment on the socio-political agenda of their respective periods of time. This was related to war politics, political ideologies, and the new emerging feminism through media. Additionally, all of them had to struggle against the suppressive or indifferent relationships they had with their mothers. Lady Gaga, though, fights against her own “monsters” such as fame, fashion, media, money, eating disorders, and the human rights of the LGBT community. However, these “monsters” represent the social agenda of her era. Kathryn Leedom elucidates that,

Lady Gaga presents to her audience the illusory nature of reality, while

simultaneously enacting narratives of a historical feminism, of commodity culture as

religion, and of the self-destructiveness of fame which she represents through an all-

encompassing performance consisting of music, fashion, and a figurative mirroring or Tzouni 86

projection of consumer culture which is referred to here as “reflective performance;”

all of this is done in order elicit in the fans both a sense of striking individuality and a

realization of their place in the large, like-minded community the allure of this

independence attracts. (Leedom)

Her videos, her live performances and her collaborations with performing artists clearly indicate that the artist uses her power of media to acknowledge and reward “otherness” and difference among people and especially among her spectators. She incessantly refers to her schooldays when she was a victim of bullying due to her appearance and her style choices.

Gaga exhibits her body in an unconventional fashionable way in order to support the idea of difference and free will. “Gaga uses fashion as an aspect of her general performance in order to convey narratives which she doesn‟t have to literally state” (Leedom). She is the anti- paradigm of pure femininity since she is extremely sensual and sexually presented; she exposes her nakedness without inhibition and shame, and uses all the stereotypical appearances of “femaleness” in a critical way.

Her live performance for the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009 indicates a unique interest in terms of what lady Gaga usually presents. The fact that she presents her famous song “Paparazzi” with a short introduction of the song “Poker Face,” clearly, depicts the message she desires to share about fame and the multiple faces that media people present in their daily lives and live performances. Gaga later refers to the monster of fame that devours her life. In the specific performance, Gaga appears in a white lace-embroidered bodysuit and a single shoulder-padded frou-frou. Her legs “hyper-sexualize” her image as she chooses to wear over-the-knee high-heeled matching boots while her stockings cover half of her thighs, which as is an oddly worn ensemble. However, the selections of monstrous garments and the peculiarity of the way they are worn by the artist tend to be more natural as the audience is now more receptive to her outstanding garments. Tzouni 87

The settings for this performance are idyllically presented and fairy-like. The curtain raises and the camera zooms in on Gaga, lying on the floor, dressed in a semi-fox/ semi-cat style mask ornamented with pearls and feathers and a lace-cape. The artist assisted by her dancers gets up and starts dancing. Gaga appears as in a theatrical stage even if it is a pop culture event that is both live and broadcasted. As Auslander successfully notes about TV,

“[a]s a camera-bound medium, television might well have striven to be cinematic; but instead it strove to be theatrical” (12). I would add to that comment that videos and live performances, also, acquire a notion of theatricality and dramatization. Viewers are unified with the audience in their reactions even if they have the alternative of pausing the performance whenever they wish. Furthermore, “[t]he multiple-camera set-up enables the television image to recreate the perceptual continuity of the theatre. Switching from camera to camera allows the [video] director to replicate the effect of the theater spectator‟s wandering eye” (19). In this video-performance, the eye is focused on her fit dancing body while curiosity is stimulated when the camera zooms on her semi-dyed pinkish hair which totally creates question marks as it ruins the fairytale image that the whole composition synthesizes. Her hair color creates a “proeconomia” as in Homer‟s Iliad for what is about to follow and, hence, gives a hint to the spectators. This video performance includes tragic elements similar to those in the ancient Greek tragedies. There is the plot, the music, the leading character, the chorus, and the stage. These elements facilitate the resolution of the drama and will lead to the eventual “catharsis.”

The masked appearance of the performing artist appears as in Greek tragedy “that all the actors wore masks, so that facial expression could have been no part of the acting;” as

L.H.G. Greenwood notes (32). Masks are frequently selected as a means of expression for the artist. Exaggerated masks, hats, and head constructs create the image of an artist who is not concealed but who is rather trying to intensify her spectators‟ fantasy. In Greek tragedy “the Tzouni 88 same actor would take as many as four or five parts successively in a single play: we see that tragedy was a highly formal and stylized affair that did not even attempt to reproduce as exactly as possible the events represented, or to create in the audience any sort of illusion”

(32-3). Gaga‟s pieces of performance are criticized for an illusionary reality that she created for her audience but “Gaga obliterates the line between reality and illusion by suggesting that our reality is illusion, and vice versa” (Leedom). In this case, though, Lady Gaga, as in Greek tragedy, “offered symbolism rather than illusions; its actors presented, rather than fully impersonated the characters of the story” (Greenwood 33). Gaga knows how to create and represent millions of images by wearing one or multiple masks, or by simply using her statue in the cover of her album Artpop. She is the woman with the million faces and numerous identities.

On stage, Gaga‟s expressions and emotions are overtly expressed as if incarnating a role. In this piece, Gaga combines the angelic/demonic dichotomy that the female nature is charged with. When she reaches her white piano, she seems to be gradually possessed by

demons as her face is altered to that of a vampire‟s almost

monstrous persona. She, then, leaves her piano while “blood”

runs through her semi-nude body spoiling the angelically divine

atmosphere that she had previously created. As Jean Baudrillard

notes, “[t]his hopeless strip-tease is that of reality itself, which

literally „out-strips‟ itself [se «dérobe»], offering to the

Fig. 20. MTV Video Music Awards, credulous eyes of voyeurs the appearance of nudity. But 2009 Performance actually, this nudity envelops it in a second skin, which no longer has even the erotic charm of dress [la robe]” (Baudrillard). The audience and the spectators are accustomed to her extravagant pieces but they still show amazement at this transformation. The scenery becomes gothic as her body is collected by the chorus that represents vultures that will Tzouni 89 devour her body as their best prey. As in Greek tragedy, “[b]efore the spectators‟ eyes hardly anything happens of a purely physical kind. Scenes of violence are in general forbidden.

Battles, or murders, or suicides that are often part of the story occur off-stage, and are merely reported” (32). Gaga, though, could not compromise with the traditional forms of representation without making her own comment. For this reason, she uses irony. She does not clearly portray the bloodshed by the devouring vultures that appear on stage but she concludes her performance hanging by a rope. Irony lies in the fact that she holds the rope with one hand while the other hand is positioned in a ballerina-like position. Her face and body are covered with “blood” and her bloody eyes are congealed looking in her audience‟s direction; but reveal a lost vague look.

Gaga‟s intention is to comment on the fact that media alters and imposes ideologies of body exposure and show-off, body practices and appearances, money consumption, and glamour to generate jealousy and fear to the audiences. Gaga does not mean to frighten her spectators. What she does, though, is shock and alert them through the “liveness” of her painful pieces of performance art. What we see in the world of spectacle might seem surreal and hyperbolic but, in her pieces, spectators are aware that they will momentarily experience the illusion that the spectacle creates. Her irony lies on the fact that the world of fame can devour the body and the soul of the individual. “The image of Lady Gaga bleeding and hanging on stage in her white lace could be read as the result of consuming fame, but it also could represent the sacrifice of the virgin, or „angel‟ stereotype” (Leedom). Live performance is so powerful that it can actually be thought of as reality. “Live performance, thus, has become the means by which mediatized representations are naturalized, according to a simple logic that appeals to our nostalgia for what we assumed was the immediate: if the mediatized image can be recreated in a live setting, it must have been „real‟ to begin with” (Auslander

43). In these terms, many spectators confuse the message between the real and the surreal. Tzouni 90

This fact is prevalent with the audiences‟ reaction in the first instance and with the viewers‟ perception in the second. Until the moment we understand that this bloodshed is another trick of her artifices, we are convinced that the artist might be suffering. But, then, she continues to dance and we are restored to our “comfort zones” of viewing another Gaga show. Gaga‟s

“bloodshed” is ultimately connected with the spectacle. Pain, in Gaga‟s show, is performed instead of created as in Pane‟s, Abramović‟s, and Orlan‟s pieces.

In her song “Donatella,” which is dedicated to her friend Donatella Versace, Gaga is supposed to be narrating the story of the world of fashion. Gaga‟s perception, acquired over the years, of this famous designer and her relation to fashion industry, reveals that even nowadays when more and more women are emancipated and are struggling for equality, the stereotypes are well embedded within their psyche. Symbolism and criticism are inextricably linked in “Donatella” but it seems that the monster of fame has forced Gaga to succumb to the lustful world of commoditized fashion.

American culture is bombarded with incessant falsehoods that destroy rather than reinforce the female position in society. What Una Stannard stated in the 1970s, that “[e]very day, in every way, the billion-dollar beauty business tells women they are monsters in disguise,” is even now more apparent in the lyrics of this song (192). She also adds that “[i]n

[American] culture women are told they are the fair sex, but at the same time their „beauty‟ needs lifting, shaping, dyeing, painting, curling, padding. Women are really being told that

„the beauty‟ is a beast” (192). Gaga‟s intention to fight against stereotypes is regrettably misinterpreted in this song. Her narration on what the costly garments and the accessories of the Versace collection add to beauty image and status perplexes the audience in terms of the false stereotypes that are promoted by the fashion industry that they might perceive as the norm. The attempt to exorcise anorexia, bulimia, skinniness, lust, body exposure and senescence as parts of the ideology of perfection is problematic as they are all presented as Tzouni 91

“creatures of artifice” which Gaga stresses and overemphasizes in her social outings, interviews and pieces of performance art (Stannard 194).

In “Donatella,” Gaga‟s lyrics “Walk down the runway but don‟t puke, it‟s okay/ You just had a salad for today, Boulangerie18” are very provocative as the critical comment towards the social demands on the female body are prevalent. Thus, the lyrics create the mentality that only women who are ill-mannered, “bitches,” blonde, upper class and prosperous can manage to sustain the fashion industry and be considered successful even though they are misconceived by public opinion. In the song, she suggests that “Cuz she walks so bad/ like it feels so good/ Listen to her radiate her magic/ Even though she knows she‟s misunderstood/ Voodoo Voodoo/ Check it out/ take it in/ who‟s that bitch?/ She‟s so thin/ She‟s rich/ And so blonde/ She‟s so fab/ It‟s beyond.” Additionally, this word choice creates a question mark to the fact that Lady Gaga, who is against violence, bullying, and body transformations, recommends that her female fans acquire a “bitchy” attitude and

“Versace looks,” as Gaga does in order to be considered successful and manage to survive in the devouring world of media and fashion.

In her live show, The Monster Ball Tour at Madison Square Garden, 2011, Gaga‟s body is exposed as a malleable material curved as a living sculpture. Gaga‟s continuous transformations resemble an extravagant fashion gallery exhibition where the most impossible and outstanding costumes appear on a performer‟s body. Her body gathers the characteristics of a Barbie doll that is given to the manipulative hands of little girls to play with. Despite her being given to someone else, Gaga becomes the Barbie doll she desires.

Donatella Versace mentioned in one of her interviews to Pret-a-Reporter that “No one tells

Gaga how to dress. Not even me” (ptd. in Ginsberg). Gaga transforms according to the song and the concept she wants to present to her audience and, hence, she creates a piece of

18 Bakery Tzouni 92 performance art that resembles a gothic deserted territory where the monster fights against the monster that lies within. As Pavlina Radia wonders

When Lady Gaga prances on the stage in her Burnaku-inspired19 masks, machine-gun

breasts, and over-the-top Bauhaus fashion, bemoaning the bad romance she has with

the paparazzi, or suggesting that she might be becoming Judas any minute, or simply

protesting, oh no, this is not a performance, she was “born this way,” her

transformative aesthetic demands that we ask: is this divine madness – to paraphrase

Plato, an attempt to shake off all custom and convention by reinscribing the very same

customs and conventions with a vengeance? (197)

Gaga chooses to present to the DVD viewers the whole procedure of her preparation and on- the-spot transformations but most importantly engages her spectators in the creation of the spectacle. The DVD viewers acquire a voyeuristic attitude since Gaga is exposed at every step she makes and they feel that they are peeping into her sacred backstage while the spectators of the live spectacle wait for the performer to re-appear in the most extravagant transformations. While performing “Monster,” she is presented in a fairy coat that is made of animal skin and she wears matching sunglasses from which strings of hair create the illusion of a veil that covers her face. The audience subsequently engages in the extravagant atmosphere that the artist generates. In the music bridge between “Monster” and her next song “Teeth,” Gaga is once again lacerated by her dancers who are also dressed as rapacious birds as in her performance for the MTV Awards. The contrivance in this piece is found in the

“depths of her backstage” where Gaga is shown to the DVD viewers to be painting her body with red paint as if she has been actually attacked. The live audience misses that part but they are astounded when the performer re-appears covered in red paint and jumping onto the stage once again. Gaga presents a new kind of perception compared to the live show for the MTV

19 Burnaku is a form Japanese puppet theater which was found in Osaka in 1684. Tzouni 93

Awards as she seems to have acquired the vampire identity that the vultures had. She is rejuvenated by the attack and urges her audience to live along with her by showing their teeth to her as the song suggests. Gaga, then, stains the rest of the dancers that have remained pure with her “blood” and continues to dance as if possessed.

In her two videos, “Born this Way” and “Applause,” Lady Gaga uses a common rhetoric as far as body exposure is concerned. The dialectics between the two videos places the artist in front of mediatized stages in which she responds to nudity in the one and to total dressing up of the body in the other. “Born this Way” manages to get the audience to concentrate much of their attention on the bumps protruding from Gaga‟s forehead, cheekbones, and shoulders. In one of her interviews to Melissa Whitworth for the Harper‟s

Bazaar, Gaga mentions that “they‟re not prosthetics. They‟re my bones…They‟ve always been inside of me, but I have been waiting for the right time to reveal to the universe who I truly am. They come out when I‟m inspired” (qtd. in Whitworth). In fact in the introduction of the video “Born this Way,” Gaga mentions her own Manifesto; the manifesto of Mother

Monster20 that

A birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place […]

And thus began the beginning of the new race […]

A race which bears no prejudice

No judgment […]

[and] [a]s the eternal mother hovered in the multiverse

Another more terrifying birth took place

The birth of evil […] [and the mother monster wondered]

"How can I protect something so perfect without evil?" (gagapedia)

20 The Manifesto of Mother Monster is a speech by Lady Gaga during the music video for "Born This Way.” During the reading in the music video, the backtrack played is from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film, Vertigo. The song itself is composed by Bernard Herrmann. The Manifesto was reused during The Born This Way Ball Tour, where a giant animatronic recreation of Lady Gaga's face in a diamond shaped prism spoke it as an interlude between the performances of "Bloody Mary" and "Bad Romance" (Gagapedia). Tzouni 94

In this respect Gaga indirectly notes that prejudice and judgment will be placed upon everybody who expresses difference. Gaga offers her body to her fans as a territory of acceptance of difference and she narrates her own story against misconceptions. Gaga combines the “evil” with the “good” as two sides of the same coin. In her music video, the bumps shock the viewers who have not been exposed to such a spectacle. Despite the originality that some people place on Gaga‟s choices, Orlan expresses her dissatisfaction and indignation towards the “originality” that Gaga reaped from Orlan‟s original idea in her pieces; Orlan‟s sculptures Bumpload (1989) and the Woman with Head (1996) as well as the whole stylistic universe that Gaga used in her video. Orlan‟s attorney Philippe Dutilleul-

Francoeur mentioned in his interview to Céline Piettre that “Not only did Lady Gaga reproduce works by the artist, but she also drew inspiration from her concepts. Orlan‟s entire universe of hybridizations was copied in the “Born This Way” album, such as giving birth to oneself, which is seen in Orlan‟s photography series „Orlan accouche d‟elle-m‟aime‟ (1964-

66)” (qtd. in Piettre). Gaga‟s perception in this piece of performance art is directed towards the psychological pain that the body succumbs to when it has to be stressed against specific social limitations. Gaga claims to have given birth to a self that is not accepted by social standards. She takes Orlan‟s idea of idealizing and exorcising body alterations and suffering, and she is also presented as the creator of the idea of self-birth which Orlan had already put into practice in her Reincarnation of Saint Orlan.

Gaga wears haute-couture garments when she is presented giving birth to the creatures of evil and good. Just as Orlan placed her body to the curious eyes of her spectators,

Gaga positions her body as if she is actually delivering the concept that she is actually having a glamorous birth. She acts out the sufferings of birth enabling the spectators to feed their hunger for the peculiar spectacle but which in no case seems to be real or at least realistically presented. The bumps that are protruding from her body parts create the illusion of an alien Tzouni 95 creature which has multiple faces and who can alter its head according to its will.

Subsequently, the heads that are placed in a row, exemplify the cult of spectacle and social media which are in constant demand for changes and renewal in order for the artists to maintain their freshness and the interest of the public. Unfortunately, Gaga‟s project left her artistically barren as she did not have anything new to present to her audiences. The fact that she has used cosmetic implants and fake tattoos in order to indicate an issue of body suffering has not been successful on the whole. She tries to support her video choice by commenting that:

It's a performance-art piece. I have never, ever encouraged my fans or anyone to harm

themselves, nor do I romanticise masochism. Body modification is part of the

overarching analysis of Born This Way. In the video, we use Rico, who is tattooed

head to toe [including a skull on his face]. He was born that way. Although he wasn't

born with tattoos, it was his ultimate destiny to become the man he is today. (qtd. in

Whitworth)

Her comment indicates the deficiency of originality apart from her final success in shocking the general public. The bumps approach stylistic perfection as they form the protruded cheekbones that many women demand from their doctors. Gaga does not undergo physical pain. The outcome that she presents to her spectators is a monster-glam persona that is unwilling to show her marks and the pain she suffers is not even as skin deep.

“Do What You Want” (2013) is a controversial video as far as its authenticity is concerned but in which the representation of pain is very conspicuous in the way how Gaga hurts her female spectators and how she deals with the “monster” of pain during the operation of her hip. In this video Gaga appears as R. Kelly‟s patient, who is presented lying on the surgical table letting her “doctor” do what he wants with her body. Gaga waits for her male doctor who claims to be the best in his profession to completely treat her hip so, she disposes Tzouni 96 herself to his free will. When the doctor supposedly tries to feel her hip in order to observe the gravity of her condition and the effect of the medicine, Gaga expresses her pain in a rather sexualized tone. She is, then, placed passively on the bed as numbness from the medicine starts to “kick in.” The doctor and the lustful dancers are presented dancing and harassing the performer‟s numb body; an act meant to express the passivity of the female body. The surgical table reminds me of Orlan once again, though Orlan‟s deliberate choice to undergo her physical transformations by female doctors while being awake during the procedure functions as a comment against the passivity of the female surgical body. However; in Gaga‟s music video Fig. 21. “Do What You Want,” 2013 Unreleased Music Video ft. R. Kelly Gaga is presented as a waif to the doctor‟s will. She is ridiculed and raped by the stereotypically presented nurses who are wearing high heeled shoes, red stockings and short robes which give the appearance of being taken from a distasteful strip show. The perpetuation of the stereotypes is aggravated if we consider the sensual nurse caressing Gaga‟s body in front of the lascivious and devouring eyes of the male doctor who seems to be the puppeteer of the act. The comment towards passivity of female representation when the patient is passively given over to the doctor‟s will is broadcasted to the spectators from the male perspective once again.

In “Do What You Want,” sexual allegations deplore the female nature in gender biased passivity. Hopefully,“[m]ost music fans and especially music critics would love nothing more than to forget that R. Kelly is an alleged sexual predator whose predilection for underage girls caused untold amounts of misery for his targets and their families,” as Amanda

Marcotte accurately notes. Why did Gaga choose to attack women in such a way when she is the one who advocates against each form of physical and psychological abuse? Why does

Gaga make this unforgivable backlash in terms of using a predator in her pieces of Tzouni 97 performance art? If we take into consideration the fact that the video was actually shelved, one could say that her intentions were hopefully taken into further account and she reconsidered. How does that explain the live piece of performance art where R. Kelly is presented as the supreme phallocentric example of representation, and even representing the president of the Unites States? Gaga manages to hurt spectators by the specific pieces and even worse to assist in the perpetuation of the fame of a person who is alleged to be abusing young girls.

The specific piece takes on further dimensions when Terry Richardson appears. At her simultaneous representation in the newspaper background with the offending comments concerning her persona, Richardson shoots the performer from his own photographic angle.

Gaga originally wears an haute couture dress as if it is made of newspaper while she is then presented semi-nude masturbating as if she is sexually stimulated by the media comments and the fame she obtains through it. Ironically, Gaga reverses the angle and she uses the power of media to express her gratitude. Gaga offensively treats the media as the media people have treated her; luckily to her own good. The paper that dresses her body is the one which her body is actually written on and about. Her nude body is portrayed in raw sexual positions enveloped with pieces of paper that were previously parts of her gown. She depicts her rage against media and expresses her gratitude that their comments about her as a “body” rather than a person and a performer enabled her to construct the career she enjoys.

At the same time, her being shot by Richardson, the photographer, who shot her personal moments and who functions as a symbol of the hunting she suffered as the result of media misinterpretations, is an unsuccessful choice as well. Richardson‟s selection to embody the photographer played an immense role in the non- release of the video. As

Michael Nelson explains, “ANYWAY, […] Page 6 posted a story about the video in question, saying that the clip was scrapped due to the growing controversy surrounding Tzouni 98

Richardson, as well as the ever-present controversy surrounding R. Kelly” (Nelson). The controversy was raised even more when Gaga and Richardson‟s collaboration was a fact since “Gaga spent 10 months with Richardson between 2010 and 2011 while he documented her life for an eventual photo book, so presumably she knew the guy‟s deal” (Nelson).

Despite Gaga and her record company‟s choice to keep the specific music video from being released, it leaked onto the Internet. This collaboration clearly depicts Richardson‟s intention to use Gaga‟s body as a metaphor of female passivity and the video would, then, promote stereotypical female representation to an offensive extent. The symbolism of Richardson‟s camera flash functions as a real bullet as it both hurts and can cause real death and fear to those people who are exposed or represented through media. Hopefully, the video is officially banned even if we have to remain skeptical about who leaked it and for what reasons.

Gaga‟s collaboration with Abramovic in The Abramović Method Practiced by Lady

Gaga (2013) is a piece of performance art that has nothing to do with the extravagant pieces that Gaga used to present to her audience in the past. In this piece, the artist manages to shock the spectators since she exposes her body to complete nudity. The artist has mentioned that in the past she used to be unable to deal with her eating disorders and drug use. The monster that absorbed her body did not only have to do with her relationship with the media but also with her own personal “monsters” that she was struggling to defeat. Even if on stage, Gaga is presented as a female performer who is capable of anything; in her real life she has expressed the need to heal from pain she had previously incorporated. As Gaga notes in one of

Abramović‟s question about limits and boundaries, she says that “we are our most terrifying monster” and she admires Abramović because of the fact that she is not afraid of herself and that she trusts herself limitlessly (Lady Gaga). For this reason, Gaga trusts Abramović who has managed to heal her own fears and pains through artistic procedures because as Tzouni 99

Abramović notes, Gaga “doesn‟t believe in doctors and therapists, so she reached out to an artist to help her” (qtd. in Hoen).

In The Abramović Method practiced by Lady Gaga, Gaga is presented in various positions that are stylistically showing off Abramović‟s thinking on performance art and

Body Art. Gaga is originally shown lying on the floor while making an incessant sound with her vocal cords. Given that the artist mainly focuses on her vocal capacities and relies on them to construct her own career, Gaga actually incorporates physical pain while performing the piece. She exposes her vocal cords to a sound that can only make her vocal cords hoarse and useless, at least temporarily. It is not accidental that the sound is incessantly heard till the end of the piece. Gaga hurts her vocal cords in order to feel how it is to experience the loss of something so precious. She uses her voice against her voice; that is she uses her most powerful tool to hurt it with its own means. Self-destruction is on the spotlight as the

Abramović method would suggest. As Abramović hurt her body in the past, Gaga hurts her vocal cords at present.

In The Abramović Method practiced by Lady Gaga, the absence of live audience is an element that triggers one‟s attention since both artists are usually very welcoming toward appearing in front of a live audience. The audience is missing and thus, is not able to sense the vibrations of the experience. The sterilized milieu and the absent audience create an eerie silence to the setting. But why didn‟t Gaga choose to incorporate the audience in the performance? Why does an artist who exposes herself in the media choose to stay away from Fig. 22. The Abramović Method practiced by Lady Gaga, 2013 Performance New York it? The sterility of the setting, the passivity of the artist and the nudity of the performer express her inner need to exclude herself from the audience that worships her; this is another means of pain. This is the kind of pain that the artist Tzouni 100 incorporates when media turn their gaze towards someone else and at the same time the lights might dim. Due to this inner desire to live through the pain that might appear in the future,

Gaga sees herself in a simplistic way where glamor and extravagance do not have a place.

She simply wears a white and a gray uniform that both resemble the ones that inmates wear when they are secluded. Gaga is detached from her mediatized self and in seclusion with the suffering that the contact with the real self can bring to people. The realization of the self can cause unexpected pain that people cannot always realize and control. It is like her going back to where she started in order to remember the pains that she confronted in the record industry in order to become who she now is as she mentions in one of her interviews to Ellen

DeGeneres (mentioned in The Ellen DeGeneres Show).

Gaga pushes the limit of performance art and the painful representations of the body into further dimensions with her collaboration with Millie Brown in their piece which is entitled SWINE for the Festival SXSW Bold Stage Doritos (2014) in Texas. This piece of performance art raised much ambivalence and contradictions as its signified messages on eating disorders, the painful body and the repercussion that it created with the viewers and the artists themselves. The collaboration with Millie Brown is presented as a random event on

Gaga‟s part since she mentioned that the idea of the specific piece was generated when she learned that Millie Brown would be in Texas at the same period as she would.

SWINE depicts the ugliness that people carry within their souls and bodies and that it is most times expressed in ugly or even offensive language towards other people. This phenomenon represents the inadequacy in taming animosity and monstrosity that overwhelm the human mind. Performance art is receptive to innovations and extravagance but the audience‟s reactions vary according to their morals and the cultural background. In American society where bulimia and gluttony are culturally prevalent, the issue takes repulsive Tzouni 101 dimensions since the audience is made to face reality as they both spread like a plague in their cultural and social perceptions.

In SWINE, Gaga introduces the piece in a way that resembles every live performance that her spectators are accustomed to seeing. She is on her drums singing, “I know you want me/ you‟re just a pig inside the human body/ […] you‟re so disgusting/ you‟re just a pig inside the human body,” while Brown is standing next to her like a super model; skinny and glamorous, drinking a green substance from a plastic bottle.

Gaga wears a cooking apron which signifies that she is waiting for Brown‟s vomit. As Leo Benedictus notes for The Guardian “[Brown] goes about the Fig. 23. SWINE, 2014 Performance for the Festival SXSW Bold Stage Doritos, Texas retching process with a kind of demure determination that is hard to watch, and even after all these years she doesn‟t seem very good at it” (Benedictus). The green substance is fused all over Gaga‟s body even if Brown seems perfectly intact and perversely uncontaminated. Gaga sweats and acts as if being possessed but Brown follows the steps Gaga makes without any other means of expression apart from her vomit as “[t]hose two middle fingers rummage around her throat for ages to until they find the twitch, and often release only a dribble”

(Benedictus). What Gaga verbally expresses by referring to disgust, is what Brown expresses by discarding her green vomit. Then, the two artists escalate a pig-like bull ride during which

Gaga and Brown are bound together in a crazy ride. Brown is gradually drinking a black substance and vomits once again on Gaga, who seems rather more ecstatic than disgusted.

Gaga seems possessed and stimulated in contrast to Brown who appears insensitive and is only forwarding the piece.

The audience of Gaga‟s performances comes across a very painful procedure because apart from what they see and experience in the specific moments they also undergo a very Tzouni 102 complex procedure that they are not capable of analyzing at the time of the piece. They are so enthusiastic and ecstatic from the outcome of the piece that they are incapable of reacting rationally and neutrally. The fact that Gaga chose Brown is not accidental even as she claims so in her interviews. The reasons of this attempt are difficult to decipher since the performer often informs her fans about her own eating disorders that she had been trying to overcome for years. In one of her interviews for the Harper‟s Bazaar, she notes that she no longer suffers from eating disorders and that she doesn‟t let anyone take advantage of her anymore

(Harper‟s Bazaar May 2014). Her collaboration with Brown provokes nausea and suffering in people who had previously suffered from bulimia, anorexia and disorders. As the performer

Demi Lovato notes in one of her tweets, “Bulimia isn‟t cool, […] Young people who are struggling to figure out their identities are seriously influenced by the things they see their idols do” (qtd. in Benedictus). The weird fact in the specific performance is that the world of media and the spectators are divided into two distinct groups that either support or exorcise the piece even if the “vomit artist” herself has never suffered from eating disorders as she has mentioned. Apart from what the spectators are accustomed to watching or not, the outcome of the specific piece presents the ugliness of human nature which is expressed in the most shocking and disgusting way as far as human nature is concerned. The stylistic and aesthetic perspective that it creates is of questionable quality. The two performers fashion ambivalence for the sake of the demanding audience which is willing and volatile to be exposed to the newness of the performer artists. Unfortunately, Gaga and Brown only manage to shock rather than add to the experience of pain that the female body succumbs to due to social and cultural demands. The answers of the two artists in this case provoke confusion and void since they do not manage to make their own voice clearly heard on the purpose of the specific piece. Maybe, the answer is simpler than we think after all; commodity art and public engendering for their own recognition. However; we should not pigeonhole the fact that Tzouni 103

Brown gained public recognition after the SWINE as the performance artist who vomited on

Gaga.

All in all, Gaga‟s multidimensional pieces of performance art combine the painful female body practices that are represented through the indisputable power of the media. Her pieces centralize audience reception through the depiction of the female body as a painful spectacle. Being considered the artist who is interested in challenging public opinion by the extremities of her fashionable appearances, she urges her audiences to be exposed and react to them according to their free will. For this reason, her stigma in performance art lies in the playfulness and the dialectics that she has established with her audiences who have been immensely influenced by her “avant-garde” extremes.

Tzouni 104

Chapter Five

Vomiting Millie Brown’s Painful Colorful Rainbows

The performance artist Millie Brown (1986) was originally initiated into the circles of performance art with her attendance of the artist collective called !WOWOW!/ The Children of !WOWOW! which occurred in Peckam, London in 2014. The pieces were performed in a large Victorian co-op which had been transformed into a collective art space. The specific event encouraged the performer artist to further discover body limits and stress the physical boundaries of the self. Since then, the artist has created a series of narrative stories exploring the limits that she imposes on her own body. Through the artist‟s incorporation of painful vomiting experiences, Brown expresses, revisits, and rehabilitates the body which then comes into an immediate relationship with the reactions of her spectators. Vomiting is inextricably linked to a series of physical and mental ailments; nausea, emetophilia,21 bulimia, anorexia nervosa, and eating disorders, all of which many women have suffered from and are subsequently brought to the proscenium through Brown‟s performance art. The infliction of pain on the body through vomiting is a state that is differently perceived by the person enacting it and the person viewing it. Elaine Scarry notes about pain that, “in order to express pain one must both objectify its felt-characteristics and hold steadily visible the referent for those characteristics” (17). In Brown‟s case, the visibility of her pretentious and ambivalent painful situation of her vomiting acts oscillates between sanity and insanity, health and sickness, lust and disgust. Nevertheless, she unobtrusively proceeds with the realization of

21Emetophilia is deriving sexual pleasure from vomit. There are different instances, several of which are those of hearing someone vomit, seeing someone vomit, being vomited on, vomiting on someone else and vomiting alone according to the Urban Dictionary. Or, A sexual fetish in which an individual is aroused by vomiting, or by seeing others vomit which Origin is Based on the Ancient Greek ἐμέω (emeo, “I vomit”) + φιλέω (phileo, “I love”) for YourDictionary.

Tzouni 105 her pieces despite the hazards and the accusations that her acts entail. The idea of vomiting on canvases, other artists, surfaces and even on herself creates ambivalence for the intention of her acts among the spectators and the general public.

Brown became widely known as the artist who vomited on Lady Gaga in the video

Exorcist Interlude or Puke on Gaga (2010) and for the live piece of performance art SWINE for the Festival SXSW Bold Stage Doritos (2014) in Texas. Even though Brown had tried to publicize her own pieces in the past, the collaboration with Gaga granted her wider audience

recognition. Brown collaborates with Gaga who has

intensely expressed her satisfaction with the new

“[a]norexic culture: a culture of disgust, of expulsion, of

anthropoemia, of rejection. Characteristic of a period of

obesity, saturation, overabundance” according to Jean Fig. 24. Exorcist Interlude or Puke on Gaga, 2010 Performance Baudrillard‟s enforcing comment (Baudrillard 39). Hence, the body has been stigmatized by the social pretensions that are constantly changing and negatively contribute to its malleability. When the body is subjected and simultaneously objectified, as Gaga‟s body in this piece, it then becomes a living sculpture that the other artist, Brown, uses to express her vomiting artistry. As previously noted in Abramović‟s

Rhythm 0, the living body is immobilized hence transformed into a sculpture. The female body acquires the notion of passivity and mutability and becomes a “living objectification.”

The performer is thus deprived of her ability to react to the extremes even if she was the one who had originally consented to the outcome of the act. Gaga‟s appearance in this piece as the object of “abuse” gives a notion of commodification to the piece as she is the ultimate pop-diva. Brown tries to expose her “avant-gardism” by vomiting glittering turquoise vomit on Gaga‟s haute couture white garment. The outcome is extravagant rather than disgusting as the act of vomiting becomes a fashionable trend as presented by Brown. Gaga‟s contribution Tzouni 106 to the piece commodifies Brown‟s art due to Gaga‟s wide recognition by the public. For this reason, the gaze is placed on Gaga who succumbs to being vomited on in Brown‟s act. It is as if Brown reaps Gaga‟s reputation and fame for her own good.

In Exorcist Interlude or Puke on Gaga, the two artists expose their art by a double- bound combination of body relationship and communication. It is no accident that they are dressed in black and white as they incorporate the angelic and devilish nature of the claimed female psyche; a stereotypical representation that they choose to ridicule. The way they playfully perform so as to represent the female body is unsuccessful, though. The body as an art medium does not free itself from conventionalities and stereotypical representations but, in fact, succumbs to them. The two artists attempt to use the same weapons against the war on the body but the combination does not work as it should. Gaga stands still as the passive mannequin dressed by MathhewWilliams22 that is left at the hands of a male artist who appears unexpectedly. She is occupied having her feet bound as in Japanese and Chinese culture and in ballet performances in which, as C. Fred Blake notes, “[f]oot binding was a prelude to, even a preparation for, the sexual maturation of [the female] body” (684). She simultaneously has her body sprayed on according to the male artist‟s will and then Brown‟s vomit is fused on Gaga‟s body which is used as a sculpture exposed in public places. The physical boundaries that Brown stresses and breaks are oriented towards the artist‟s passive body. Lady Gaga is then shown chewing on a bleeding heart as Nick Knight‟s (her director), initiative “to help Gaga confront her fears about her father's open heart surgery” (gagapedia).

Media in the specific piece represents the public spaces as the Gaga-sculpture remains passive and the abusers cause her further destruction. When she is shown devouring the heart, her passivity is turned into a grotesque drama which is once again related to the parental relationships that the artists still are still trying to come to terms with.

22 This part was inspired by "The Bridgegroom Stripped Bare", a performance in the Transformers series by Nick Knight in 2002 (gagapedia). Tzouni 107

In SWINE, the aforementioned case is defiantly perceived and presented as the artists experience vomit art in front of a live audience who is staring at them ecstatically and being simultaneously disgusted by the spectacle. As Deborah Caslav Covin notes, “[i]n [Kristeva‟s] view, human and animal wastes such as feces, urine, vomit, tears, and saliva are repulsive because they test the notion of the self/other split upon which subjectivity depends” (17).

Gaga‟s body is not passive in the live piece as presented in Exorcist Interlude because she is actually provoking Brown to vomit on her in order to show the disgust she feels both from her experience of being observed as a media persona and to the personal abuse she has recently admitted when questioned by the radio DJ Howard Stern.23 By receiving excretes of another female performer, Gaga reverses the angle of disgust she has for her male abuser. For

Brown, though, it is an opportunity to present her work to the general public. The artist does not further explain the gain of this collaboration but refers to it as an incidental opportunity.

The boundaries of the female body are pushed further in Brown‟s piece Martina

Spetlova SS11(2012) in which the artist embraces fashion in a rather grotesque way, as she vomits rainbows of colored milk on her own dress designed by the homonymous designer.

The specific piece is there only to provoke the female artists‟ and spectators‟ attitude towards fashion and its close relationship to the female mind and body. Joanne Finkelstein is accurate about fashion when she states that

[f]ashion is swathed in anomalies. On the one hand it is often regarded as a

distraction, a form of playfulness and humour; on the other, it is understood to

generate the economic potential to rehabilitate failing businesses and restore

commercial respect. Fashion can be used to indicate social change and progress, for

example, by its weakening of the prescriptions around gender-appropriate dress. […]

23 The recording is available in “Mirror” magazine in http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/howard- stern-questions-lady-gaga-4735299 Tzouni 108

The anomalies embodied in fashion make it an important adjunct to commentaries on

the cultural formations which effect and shape modern life. (154)

In this specific piece, Brown stands opposite the cinematic lenses as a sculpture placed in the center for its spectators‟ attention. The body meets its extremes as it is placed in front of a single camera that shoots her attempts at vomiting multiple colors on her formerly white dress which is meant to spoil the angelic representation of the artist. There is great difficulty in deciphering whether the artist is an artist or a model and this situation perplexes the audience even more. The artist supposedly comments on bulimia related to fashion idols but she actually supports them by her physical appearance and the selection of the specific fashion milieu to express her own perspective on the matter. This piece is inspired by the designer‟s fashion collection that has previously used respective appellation for her advertising campaign of her garments. As fashion has reinforced the physicality of the female body in an objectified and passive way, Brown is represented as a passive figure which is suffocating in the fashionable garment and now repaints it with her own vomit as she struggles to maintain a silhouette that actually fits in it.

The fashion attitude that Brown idealizes does not support her artistic outcome in any case as the meaning she intends to create lacks clarity. For instance, Brown puts on her

multicolored and heavy make-up and has her hair

done in a Victorian bun. Her garment is neat and

clean while the background is totally sterilized and

mist is produced in some of the shots to add mystery

Fig. 25. Martina Spetlova SS11, 2012 to the piece. Brown‟s colored nails search for the Performance “appropriate” spot in her throat which will generate the artist‟s disgust and to start the vomiting. The artist‟s body twitches every time her stomach disorder reacts while her eyes gradually become reddish and teary. This all indicates Tzouni 109 that she has undergone a procedure that is against human nature and it exposes the physicality of the human body in danger. Brown generates colorful “stomach” stimulations and she thus exacerbates her own body limits. In her attempt to justify her painful act, she tries to present her artistic outcome as a natural behavior of the body which is, in fact, opposite to the healthy predispositions of the human body. Brown enacts “the characteristic hysteria of our times: that of the production and reproduction of the real. The other production, that of values and commodities” (Baudrillard). Brown chooses to perform with vomiting to challenge the natural condition of the self as presented though media. She uses this “sick” human condition against the perpetuated images on the incessant transformations of the female body and the

“struggle” for their naturalization. However, the image she endeavors to show to the public contrasts the morbid and diseased image that her own body really narrates in this piece. In addition, her skeleton body and the slim silhouette both support the adverse meaning for the condition she tries to generate. The model figure which vomits on surfaces to fight against eating disorders might generate a sarcastic comment but it also generates fear for the subsequent perpetuation of the fashion industry anorexic ideology.

Overall, this piece is revealing in the sense that it touches upon the dialectics between fashion and the female body. Brown is almost chocking herself on her own vomit as she produces the disgust she feels about the perpetuation of the images that are imposed on the female mentality about the faulty beauty archetypes. As Brown notes, “[b]y creating art from the very depths my own physical being I am able to challenge people‟s perception of beauty, expressing raw elements of human nature and in turn challenging myself both physically and mentally” (qtd. in London). Her comment though creates ambivalence in the way she actually

“challenges the perception of beauty” in the sense that her vomit actually represents her

“disgust” which is a contradiction against eating disorders. However, the selection of Tzouni 110 glamorous fashionable attires along with the aforementioned model-like figure functions oppose to what she originally had in mind.

Unfortunately, Brown, only, reveals that she is incorporating her disgust towards bulimia and faulty representations but she cannot actively support it. Brown underlines that,

“It‟s very much about timing, I find the whole process fascinating and the long meditative fast can be very inspiring” (qtd. in London). Brown seems unaware of how to represent the ideology that is lying beneath the act of vomiting in this part. Unless, if we bear in mind that the whole blend of garment choice, anorexic figure and extreme vomiting is a generalized attitude that she has incorporated both in the public and the private sphere by making performance art her focal point of reference. What she achieves is to merely glamorize the idea of vomit art with an initiative more to provoke through her piece rather than to instruct her spectators. On behalf of the spectators, the situation is perplexing as objections are not only raised on the stylistic outcome of the piece but the admission of the piece as an artistic construction for the sake of performance art and Body Art specifically. The question on what art is and whether vomiting can be considered art comes to the forefront. Furthermore, spectatorship is challenged in the sense that the viewers are exposed to a physical condition that awakes the memory of their possibly sick bodies and regenerates the absurdity of viewing their bodies in a glittery condition as presented by Brown. Hence their physical boundaries are stressed to extremes as they cannot react to their sickness which strives to exorcise memory. This piece functions in a redemptive way as the artist managed to touch upon the delicate phenomenon of eating disorders. In any case, though, its admission of whether being art or not relies on the perception of each individual. The individual perception of every human being is differentiated as far as aesthetics, physical boundaries and constraints, environmental effects and personal beliefs are placed under consideration. Tzouni 111

In her piece LiveStudio (2011), Brown correlates her vomit expressivity to the

“Pollockian” artistic complexity on white canvases. The artist clearly depicts her intentional need to capture the moment as she addresses her audience through a videotaped version of her act. Whereas what she opts for Fig. 26. LiveStudio, 2011 Performance is the perpetuation of her outcome through the combination of a polymerization of acts and artistic forms such as Body Art, Performance Art, Drawing, and Visual Arts. The need to express oneself in a multiplicity of means is her actual need to fight for the preservation of her artistic moments as far as her relation to her audience is concerned. The feminist approach that she attaches, though, to her pieces of performance art contradicts the intention to create canvases that are inspired by Jackson Pollock, who, it is claimed, was a womanizer.

Stephen Hicks enforces this perception by noting that, “Ms. Brown‟s vomiting is a nod to J.

Pollock, noted womanizer. But it could be an edgy, coded reference to bulimia, which is a plague among women victimized by society‟s unrealistic beauty standards. Brown‟s work indicates feminist mileage not yet traveled” (Hicks). Hence, the artistic outcome that she presents on the canvases and her clothes is inspired by forms of art such as the Pollock‟s that apparently contradict the initial intention of her acts. The possibility of her expressing her disgust towards artists whose philander opinion towards women are overtly expressed, negates her intention to caustically comment against it. My question, though, as in

Abramovic‟s example, is, “Why do women persist in getting inspired from art forms that are charged and biased against female identity?”

In LiveStudio, the setting of the piece implements the performing intentions of the artist and enables her to stylistically create the impression of a sterilized milieu that encloses a “sacred” act that the artist wishes to insulate from the public gaze even if she is willing to Tzouni 112 further share the spectacle with the general public. The isolation from the spectators‟ live participation in her acts sparks ambivalence in the sense that the artist, who is a twenty-first century performer, excludes viewers as if she is actually afraid to confront the actual and real- time reactions that would be triggered by her piece. Brown performs in a white studio where the white canvas has the leading role. Next to it is, her chair and the artist who is shown in a black uniform that covers her entire body along with high heeled ankle boots. Her face seems extremely alluring as she has put on heavy make up and her hair is held in a bun to complete the stylistic perfection of her piece. The participation of two sopranos24 that are performing their own pieces behind the white panel, which Brown chose to separate from her performing act, creates an atmosphere of the absurd as they are dressed fully in white costumes and sing pieces previously performed in renowned operas.25 The spectators view eight glasses of colored substance that the artist is about to vomit on the white canvas after a repetitive, almost mechanical and robotic procedure. Brown sits in a white chair that contradicts her black vestments. She then retrieves a colorful glass among the many, sits once again and consumes the substance. When she feels ready, she positions and re-positions her body in front of the white canvas and vomits on it as if it is a natural situation. The perpetuation of the act is both risky and hazardous for Brown who pretends to be unaffected but her body and especially her eyes reveal that the artist has undergone a grave situation that might have put her health in danger. The two sopranos continue singing as they seem unimpaired by viewing vomit and appear insensitive to Brown‟s disgusting procedure while Brown continues to vomit as if the sopranos were singing via a recording machine.

On the other side of the spectrum, the spectators are placed off their comfort zone as they view a procedure that reminds them of their destructible and perishable body. Thus, the

24 Patricia Hammond and Zita Syme. 25 The sopranos’ perform Manuel Falla’s “Siete Canciones Populares Espagnoles,” “The Flower Duet” from Léo Delibes’ opera Lakmé, “Pie Jesu;” the motet derived from the final couplet of the “Dies irae,” and Goerge Frideric Handel’s “Dixit Dominus.” Tzouni 113 infliction of pain on the body transgresses the physical limits and renders the body malleable to the intentions of the artist. Brown admits that “[f]ilming can be exhausting, it can be an entire day of vomiting which leaves you with migraines but generally I feel good after performing, it‟s like a cleanse for your body and mind” (qtd. in London). In no case, though, does she concede the adverse effects that vomit has on her body, the perpetual migraines and possible severe damage to her esophagus. She supports her acts with supposed healing and therapeutic processes that the indigenous peoples of the Amazon attributed to vomiting.

Brown desires the spectators‟ active participation to a ritualistic process but she is unaware of the diverse result that it may impose on them. Yet, the spectators have the alternative to pause on the procedure while watching the video. Contrariwise, the discomfort that the action generates triggers the human curiosity towards cruelty and violence that the spectators themselves are intimidated to express.

As a spectacle, LiveStudio is a repulsive and abhorrent procedure but it functions liberatingly because it frees the human mind from artistic boredom. After being exposed to one of Brown‟s pieces the spectator feels as if she or he has seen it all. There isn‟t anything for the spectators to wait for and confront as they have related Brown‟s pieces to performing

“vomit art.” The piece is an endless procedure that even if it originally captures the view of the spectators, it, then, ceases to provoke interest or enthusiasm. The spectators are longing for a revelation but they are only left with an abstract piece of modern art that is hopefully interesting per se while it annuls the piece of performance art as a stylistic outcome and a piece of art. The colorful canvases that are produced by Brown‟s multiple pieces of performance art are subsequently made available for purchase which is also an element that contradicts the nature of avant-gardism and performance art. As aforementioned in Orlan‟s case, commodification is related to purchasing her body parts while in Brown‟s example it is linked to the excretion of her own body fluids. The two artists commercialize their body parts Tzouni 114 and excretions that, to my perspective, invalidates the artistic power that performance art entails.

In her next video Main Entry: Power (2011), Brown does not differentiate her piece a

lot but at least she constructs linearity which is not only

related to the repetition of her vomit acts. In Main Entry:

Power, Brown collaborates with the performer Danny Fox who

plays an active role in the piece contrary to the sopranos‟

passivity in LiveStudio. The setting of the pieces does not have

any extreme alterations or innovations since the minimalistic

tendency of the artist is prevalent in most of her pieces; in a

rather vulgar way in most cases. The artist is not only dressed Fig. 27. Main Entry: Power, 2011 Performance in the usual way but exposes her semi-nude body as well in parts of the piece. The choice of leather-stripped masks, one with a pointed muzzle and the other as an old pilot helmet, a coned bra, a silver corset, and gloves generate a sterilized environment in which paranoia reigns. The performer escalates some steps and she vomits on a glassy surface that lies on another subordinate performer‟s back. Brown, then, gathers a proportion of the vomit and preserves it in a bronze insect implying that it is the juicy substance that insects excrete when smashed and squashed. She, consequently, sets fire to the substance and blue smoke fills the rooms and automatically returns to its content. Brown is then found lying on the floor as a seat for Fox to use as a stepping stone for his own participation. He is gradually raised from Brown‟s convenient bottom and uses her vomit as his paint to start writing a sign on the white canvases surrounding them. In the end, Fox finishes his creative writing and Brown leaves the spot in an animalistic movement silenced by the muzzle mask.

Tzouni 115

Despite the profound similarities with most of her pieces, at least Main Entry: Power

is stylistically and symbolically more generous for the spectators. The use of symbols

ritualizes the piece as when her vomit is set on smoke as an attempt to annihilate its existence

as a purifying act. She uses the curio bug as a vehicle of this transformation as the symbol of

rebirth and regeneration as believed in ancient Egypt. Brown indicates in these ways that

performance has been rejuvenated through her vomit and has created a new territory for

performer artists to express themselves; freed from gender biases and partitions. Brown also

wears a corset while exposing her breasts as a symbol of liberation against the restrictions

placed upon the female body over the years. As April Fallon observes, “[t]he corset

encouraged the idea that the female body was structurally unsound and needed to be

supported by artificial contraptions at strategic points” (102). The corset implied that as the

female body was to be supported by artificial structures in order to achieve perfection, the

women had to be restricted from social roles and supported by the appearance of a man in

their lives. For the aforementioned reason, Brown uses the corset as her prop against social

conventions that restrict female expression. The overt demonstration of her breast protruding

the corset brings to mind the Minoan statues of the female figures that were synonymous with

female power, fertility, and female domination in the Minoan Crete.

In the last piece of the artist that I am going to focus on; #02 (2007-8), Brown

manages to communicate her “vomit art” more clearly

than in any other piece. Being placed in the ballerina

position of the music treasure box, she engages in a vomit

dance that smears the formerly idyllically fairytale scene

Fig. 28. #02, 2007-8 Performance of every little girl‟s dream. She is originally dressed in white while wearing an eerie mask that renders her appearance sterilized. However, she is, of

course, once again shown drinking a liquid substance and gradually vomiting on her tutu- Tzouni 116 dress and on the setting while huge emetic black substances overwhelm the setting. The piece is shortly completed with Brown‟s appearance in a black setting as if she has vomited it and then she continues to dance as if performing isolated from the rest of the world and the gaze of the public.

Brown‟s #02 is a relatively short piece of performance art that is also isolated from the active and live participation of an audience. Brown‟s unmentionable fear to confront the audience creates ambiguity about her performance art because she later chooses to collaborate with Gaga and express her “vomit art” overtly and in front of their spectators‟ eyes. Brown is afraid to confront her audience while she feels secured only when looked at by the cinematic camera. The choice of the ballerina concept which is related to her “vomit acts” depicts the artist‟s need to comment on the stereotypes once again but in a more successful way than in her aforementioned pieces. The symbol of the ballerina creates this ambivalent image of the childish fragility of ballet dance between the perception we have as viewers and the effort that ballerinas have to shed to master their technique. As Anna Aalten notes, “[t]here is a strange paradox in the fact that as a viewer I experience an immense pleasure watching […] ballet performance[s] – a pleasure that does not seem to be in accordance with my awareness of the dreading images of femininity on stage and the unhealthy practices behind it” (41). The outcome of the fragile movements accompanies the ballerinas. Their porcelain faces, and the slim aerial figures have undergone years of hard training while food limitations restrained their appetite and sometimes even caused bulimic and anorexic syndromes in the girls who lacked the demanded grace and physical structure.

Yet, “[n]obody expects ballet dancers to have „natural‟ bodies,” and for that reason they suffer from many health problems in order to fit to the absurd and unnatural demands of body construction (Aalten 48). From the use of the pointed shoes, to lack of menstruation and the delayed physical growth, dancers must sustain a sort of a prolonged adolescence. By a Tzouni 117 profound likeness to an ex-ballerina, Brown comments on the eating disorders and the syndromes imposed on the female psychology through her own vomit. Her vomit in this piece symbolizes the disgust the artist might be feeling for the restriction of food and the limitations that are imposed so that girls acquire the characteristics that the social fake idols create. Brown harms her own body in order to shock for her own media exposure; yet, she does not manage to be persuasive against the bulimic, anorexic, sick, and the ossified bodies presented in pop culture. The physical appearance and eating habits she takes into her actual life and for performing reasons, reveal that she is also struggling to maintain her position as a westernized symbol of beauty.

In her attempt to create newness, Brown manages to perpetuate the image of the

“vomit artist” that is now becoming outdated and inartistic since she perpetuates the basis of her pieces that is her vomit which seems to have caused tiredness to the spectators. Brown proves that she is an artist with potential but she should set free from the conventionalities that she is imposing on her own self and her pieces. It is only until recently that she broadened her artistic horizons to the experience of new forms of performance art. Hopefully, the #Wiltingpoint26 approaches “disorders” through the restriction of food consumption where the artist stresses her personal limits to a not so distanced approach from her spectators as she is placed within the shop window of a gallery. Brown has at least approached live enactment of her pieces. Let us hope for a more diversified perspective of her pieces in the future as she is an artist with the potential of pushing to further terrains of expression and experimentation.

26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGKHEvRS2Bc Tzouni 118

Conclusion

What this thesis has attempted to prove is that the female body is a limitless malleable commodity that is frequently employed in performance art to represent social conditions through painful representations of that body. In this milieu, performing artists dare to comment on sociopolitical events of their respective eras through their painful pieces of body art. Through these pieces, they contributed to American cultural ideology which even altered

American performativity in terms of expressivity, documentation, and extremities. For this reason, both the pieces and the artists selected in my thesis come from different artistic currents, sociopolitical influences, and ethnic backgrounds. This is in order to attempt to maintain multidimensionality and polyphony, always contributing to the American reality.

These five female performing artists, on whom this project focuses, Pane, Abramović, Orlan,

Gaga and Brown, are examples of women who represent a trajectory of generations who articulate their voice on human pain and subsequently, on universal pain, through their performance pieces.

My attempt has been to demonstrate the connection and relationship of these pieces and of the specific female performers. For this reason, my attention centers on the female body, the painful procedures that are imposed on it and the audience participation during these pieces. The differences in spectator participation signals the individual perspective and personal belief that each performing artist intends to narrate and perform through their pieces.

This phenomenon is attributed to the original fear that the artists incorporated and way in which the spectators might have reacted. Another factor that facilitated their pieces has to do with the incorporation of illustrative tools; from recorders and cameras to fashionable garments and symbolic ornaments, into their performance. Drawn from the desire to make their pieces either more appealing or “grotesque” for their spectators, they use these tools in Tzouni 119 order to illuminate their pieces and enforce the credibility of their acts. Each one of them creates a “painful spectacle” that incorporate items such as guns, whips, razors, corsets, haute couture nightgowns, extravagant costumes, feathers, canvases, high heeled shoes, and surgical instruments. All of which were used to guide the audience gaze towards the artists‟ bodies and to add to the experimental nature that performance art offered them.

For the aforementioned reasons, I have intentionally focused on specific female performers because I hold them as representative examples that illustrate my point and clearly prove and exemplify how pain is represented through female performance art. The reason why I have chosen these specific female performers has to do with the fact that first of all their pieces challenge my thinking, feelings, and then, my curiosity to further explore thae way pain becomes part of their performance art. While extensively observing videos of their pieces, their constats, photographs, live music videos, interviews of the artists on YouTube, and even participating in a Gaga show, I have experienced equivalent sentiments similar to those recorded by the spectators of the aforementioned pieces were experienced.

Of course, the agenda of performance art is promoted when gender and race are equated with the representation of pain and the way the audience perceives it. Pane,

Abramović, Orlan, Gaga, and Brown are examples of female performance artists that might have previously been unrelated or at least restrictedly referential to one another.

Subsequently, the contribution and the probable collaboration of male, Chicano/a, African

American, Native American, Asian American performer artists is vital to the perpetuation of a vivid form of art that has a lot to offer since there is still much to be done. To name just a few; Stelarc, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, David Hammons, Vito Acconci, Chris

Burden, Clifford Owens, Carrie Mae Weems, Sandra Sterle, Regina José Galindo, Franko B,

Milo Moiré, Marta Minujin, Sherman Fleming and Lyle Ashton have enriched performance art with their experimental power. The contribution of those and of many other performering Tzouni 120 artists functions as an initiative to intrigue, inspire, and demand further research on “painful” performance art.

This artistic circle of female performers who perform using the painful body is expanding as more and more performers, who engage in body acts in order to reimburse the sociopolitical phenomena of their corresponding eras, make their appearance. Being a receptive field, performance art, is open to recreational and awareness –raising ideas which crave innovation so as to generate spectators‟ more active participation. Performance as approached in the present thesis breaks free from past conventionalities and embraces audiences that previously felt distanced from the theatrical venues and practices. Hence, performance art pieces which tend to provoke strong feelings and active audience participation are equivocally enriched by its reciprocal relationship with these elements that are generated by the spectators. Performance art is the means of embracing pain representing the healthy body‟s suffering as a most natural act; so, this “grotesque” relationship attempts to stress the artist‟s body to its limits and dissolves the audience‟s resistance to the unforeseen.

Tzouni 121

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Performances

Abramović, Marina. Rhythm 5. Student Cultural Centre, Belgrade. 1974. Performance.

---. Rhythm 2. Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. 1974. Performance.

---. Rhythm 4. Galleria Diagramma, Milan. 1974. Performance.

---. Rhythm 0. Studio Morra, Naples. 1974. Performance.

---. Rhythms 10; 2; 5; 4; 0. Museum of Contemporary Art, Bergarde, toured to Galerie

krinzinger, Innsbruck, Austria; Galleria Diagramma, Milan; Studio Morra, Naples

(solo). 1975. Performances.

---. Thomas Lips. Gallerie Krizinger, Innsbruck. 1975. Performance.

---. Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful. Art Festival, Copenhagen. 1975.

Performance.

---. Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina

Sofia, Madrid (solo). 2005. Performance.

---. Seven Easy Pieces. Solomon R. Guggenhem Museum, New York. 2005. Performance.

Picasso Baby. By Shawn “Jay Z” Carter. Dir. Mark Romanek. Perf. Marina Abramović. Pace

Gallery, New York. 2013. Performance. Tzouni 129

Pane, Gina perf. Unanesthetized Climb. Phot. Françoise Masson. Pane‟s studio, Paris. 1971.

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---. Sentimental Action. Galerie Digramma, Milan. 1973. Performance.

---. Action Notation. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 1970s- onward. Photography

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---. Omnipresence. Dir. ORLAN. Perf. ORLAN. Omnipresence. Vimeo, 1993. Web. 2 June

2013. Performance.

---. Operation Opera. Dir. ORLAN. Perf. ORLAN. Omnipresence. Vimeo, 1991. Web. 2

June 2013. Performance.

---. First Surgical Performance. Dir. ORLAN. Perf. ORLAN. First Surgical Performance.

Vimeo, 1990. Web. 2 June 2013. Performace.

---. Harlequin's Coat. Dir. ORLAN and Symbiotica. Perf. ORLAN. Harlequin's Coat.

Vimeo, 2008. Web. 2 June 2013. Performance.

---. The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan. Perf. ORLAN. 1990-1993. Performance.

---. Self-Hybridizations 1994-2014. Michael Rein Gallery, Paris. ORLAN OFFICIAL

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---. Triptych Operation Opera. 1993. Michael Rein Gallery, Paris. ORLAN OFFICIAL

WEBSITE. Web. 2 July 2013.

Brown, Millie. Films for SHOWstudio #02 // Jez Tozer // Millie Brown Official. May 11,

2012 Web. 26 December 2014. Performance.

---. Martina Spetlova SS11 // Millie Brown Official. May 11, 2012. Prod. Piotr Onak. Dress.

Martina Spetlova. Perf. Millie Brown. Web. 26 December 2014. Performance. Tzouni 130

---. Puke on Gaga SHOWstudio // Millie Brown Official Lady Gaga // Exorcist Interlude //

Monsterball 2011. Prod. Nick Knight & Ruth Hogben Perf. Millie Brown. 23

February 2013. Web. 26 December 2014. Performance.

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Performance.

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Performance.

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Performance.

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Aug. 2014. Performance.

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2013. Web. 10 Aug. 1014. Performance.

---. Born This Way. Streamline/Interscope/KonLive, 2011. CD.

---. “Born This Way.” Prod. Vincent Herbert. Dir. Nick Knight. VEVO 2011. Music Video.

---. “Applause.” Prod. Gabe Hill. Dir. Inez van Lamsweerde and Vindoodh Matadin. VEVO

2013. Music Video.

---. “Lady Gaga ft R Kelly Do What You Want Live AMA 1013 HD.” YouTube 2013. Web. 10

Oct. 2014. Performance.

---. “Do What You Want.” Dir. Terry Richardson. YouTube 2013. Web. 10 Oct. 2014.

Unreleased Music Video.

---. “Just Dance.” Dir. Melina Matsoukas. YouTube 2008. Web. 19 Aug. 2014. Music Video

---. “Donatella.” Writer. Lady Gaga. Prod. Zedd. 2012. Song.

The Monster Ball Tour at Madison Square Garden. Streamline/ Interscope/ KonLive

Records. Prod. Vincent Herbert. USA: 2011. DVD Tzouni 131

Videos

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Art Marina Abramović Rhythm 0. YouTube. Web. 15 May 2014.

Marina Abramović: Art must be Beautiful; Artist must be Beautiful, 1975. YouTube. Web.

15 May 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1smoNE6Stc

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OTTO, la minute d'Art Contemporain - Gina Pane. YouTube. Web. 27 December 2014.

GINA PANE YouTube. Web. 27 December 2014.

Metamorphosis. 8 April 2012. YouTube. Web. 2 June 2013.

Orlan - Carnal Art (2001). Dir. Stephan Oriach. Perf. ORLAN. YouTube, 2001. Web. 2 June

2013. Documentary.

Millie Brown - Vomiting Rainbows. 31 Mar 2014. YouTube. Web. 26 December 2014.

Lady Gaga. “Gaga by Gautier Documentary Full HD 720.” By The Jean Paul Gautier House.

Dak Tirak Productions. Pr. Aureliere Combelles. 18 April 2013. YouTube. Web. 10

September 2014.

---. “Lady Gaga – Inside the Outside.” Dir. David Russo. Prod. Jon Doran. MTV 5 July 2013.

YouTube. Web. 10 Oct. 2014. Tzouni 132

“Atelier Versace Spring/ Summer 2014 ft Lady Gaga/ EXCLUSIVE/ Paris Couture Fashion

Week / Fashion TV.” Paris Couture Fashion Week, Paris. 2014. YouTube. Web. 10

Aug. 2014.

---. “Lady Gaga – Interview for MSN Canada.” MSN Entertainment 19 Nov. 2013. YouTube.

Web.10 Sept. 2014.

---. “Lady Gaga on the Record with fuse.” Fuse 2009. YouTube. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.

---.“Lady Gaga Gets Vomited On At SXSW!” YouTube. Web. 2 Jan. 2014.

Tzouni 133

Biographical Note

I completed my BA degree in English Language and Literature and my MA degree in

American Literature and Culture in the School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of the

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. My MA thesis focused on female performers‟ pieces of performance art that stress the physical limits to extremities and painful practices.

My fields of interest include Performance Art, Gender Studies, Feminism, and Ethnic

Studies. In May 2014, I co-presented my work for the MESEA Conference (“Spiritual

Boundaries and Ritual Revival; or The Search for Native American Ethnic Identity through

Rituals and Traditions in Smoke Signals”) in Saarbrucken, Germany. In July 2014, my poems

“Young like Peter Pan,” “The De-voiced Body,” and “The Fragmented Mirror” were published in the Anthology In Praise of Beauty (Vol.1) and were translated in the Romanian language. I presented my work in the poetry festival “Poetry Nights” in Curtea de Arges,

Romania. During the same period, I received a Summer School scholarship for York

University in Toronto, Canada. As part of the Summer School program I received the title of the “Honorary Ambassador for the Greek Canadian History Project (GCHP).” In November

2014, I presented my paper (“Sculpting the Body: Re-defining the Body through its Relation to Beauty and Pain in Marina Abramović‟s and Orlan‟s Performance Art”) for the War on the

Human Conference in Athens, Greece. In December 2014, I co-presented my work

(“Multiculturalism in Toronto”) for the Symposium on Greek Diaspora: Greek and Canadian

Perspectives. I currently reside in Volos and work as an English language teacher, while a

PhD is a prioritized aspiration for the immediate future.