HOLD IT AGAINST ME Difculty and Emotion in Contemporary Art

jennifer doyle HOLD IT AGAINST ME difculty and emotion in contemporary art Duke University Press Durham and London 2013 © 2013 Duke University Press Library of Congress Cataloging- All rights reserved in-Publication Data Printed in the United States of Doyle, Jennifer. Hold it against me : difculty and emotion America on acid- free paper ∞ in contemporary art / Jennifer Doyle. Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan p. cm. Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro Includes bibliographical references by Copperline Book Services, Inc. and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5302-7 (cloth : alk. paper) Frontispiece: Linda Mary Montano, isbn 978-0-8223-5313-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) Mitchell’s Death, 1978. Video (black and 1. Emotions in art. 2. Art, Modern— white, sound). Edited by David Wagner. 21st century—Psychological aspects. From the archive and courtesy of Linda 3. Art, Modern—21st century—Themes, Mary Montano. motives. 4. Art criticism. I. Title. nx650.e46d698 2013 publication of this 709.05’1—dc23 2012044742 book has been aided by a grant from the millard meiss publication fund of the college art association. is wrested from the body. Within the institutional framework given us by Eakins, the “proper” point of identifcation for this work is not the body under the knife, nor is it the woman who can’t look. It is not even the sur- geon and his colleagues. This painting places us with the spectators in the dark, nearly invisible, who are learning from this spectacle. They mirror our position en masse. And when we look at the painting through their eyes, we participate in the violation it depicts. Surveying those students, I wonder what they feel, or indeed if they feel anything. Their disinterest (be it the disinterest of clinical attention or the sleepy disafection of the bored student) contrasts profoundly with the ma- ternal fgure of investment, a woman so overcome with sympathetic pain that her body appears to withdraw from the whole scene, as a refex. The Gross Clinic imagines thinking and feeling as incommensurate; the two are cleaved from each other. Emotion appears on this canvas as a feminine spirit un- leashed by a surgical wound. Touchy Subject: Ron Athey, Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle (2006) The Gross Clinic is a helpful counterpoint for thinking about the difculty of Ron Athey’s work. Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle was performed at Artist’s Space in New York on 1 May 2006 (fgs. 9 – 10; plate 1). In the juxtaposition of The Gross Clinic and this solo performance, we see a shared interest in the social vulnerability of the body, but their dynamics couldn’t be more diferent. In his work, Athey lies on his back on a metal table made from scafolding. (It looks like an elevated lawn chair.) His body rests against the fat metal rods of his platform for six hours. Built into the table is a pivoting rod, onto which Athey attached a baseball bat, upon which he has impaled himself. He is naked and covered in bronzing lotion and Vaseline. Hooks pierce multiple points in his face and are attached to leather strings to pull his skin back, turning his face into a painful (but also comic) mask. His scrotum is flled with fuid — turning his genitals into a watery, pink, feminine mass.46 In her writing on the artist, Amelia Jones observes that Athey explores in his performances an “ethics of embodiment” that begins with the “dehabituation of the body,” loosening the male body in particular from the codes of the patriarchal norm to insist on its permeability, its pliability, its fragility. Mary Richards similarly describes Athey as an antiphallic artist who re- presents his body as penetrable, leaking, and vulnerable.47 And, truly, in this performance Athey is greased up, engorged, and violated. three case studies 49 figure 9. Ron Athey, Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle. Artist’s Space, New York City. 2006. Photo by Julia Portwood Hipp. Courtesy of Ron Athey. On entering the space, spectators are told by a gallery attendant that they are welcome to put on gloves and touch Athey, using Vaseline as a lubricant. In the center of the white gallery is the artist on his table, lit from underneath by lights covered with red gels. Clusters of disco balls hang from the ceiling above him, sending sparkles of light across the brightly lit gallery. This is the only thing that he has to look at. In fact the hooks pull his skin back so that his eyes are forced open — he can only stare up at the ceiling, without blink- ing. I was present for the duration of the event, administering teardrops to Athey’s eyes, attending to him as a supervisory presence. For this performance, the audience largely stood at a distance from Athey, leaning against the gallery walls, watching the occasional person put on gloves and approach his body. In spite of the fact that the gender balance of the audience was just about equal, most of the people who accepted the invitation to touch the artist were women. In fact, from my own observations I would say that nearly all of the women who attended the show put on the gloves, whereas only a fraction of the men accepted this invitation. The real show in this performance is not Athey’s body but the spectac- ularization of our communal relationship to it. For Francesca Alfano Mi- glietti, Athey’s performances explore “the complicated, subtle, disconcert- 50 chapter two figure 10. Ron Athey, Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle. Artist’s Space, New York City. 2006. Photo by Julia Portwood Hipp. Courtesy of Ron Athey. ing, learned, warm behavior with which we become visible to the eyes of another.”48 This is true of Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle, but that circuit is not formed between the performer and his audience, and it is not a happy scene in which one is recognized and made whole in a meaningful exchange of glances. Athey may be visible to his audience, but in this work that audience is not visible to him. His connection with the audience is short- circuited by the fact that he can’t see them; approaching the table you realize that it is relatively high, and with his face tied to the bed’s frame, his vision is limited to the space directly above and in front of him. This foregrounds the spectacular nature of the relationship of the toucher to the touched, not as a site of communication but as an image produced for others. Athey’s state of being (penetrated and prone) is fully visible, but his feelings (I imagine hallucinogenic discomfort and pain, meditative boredom) are removed from his audience. (Without an exchange of looks, our sense of how he is holding up is only an empathic guess.) On this point there is a harmony between the position of Athey’s body in this work and that of the patient in Eakins’s painting. In both instances, we are given startling access to the body. The body is presented aggressively to the viewer, and yet our access to it is strictly regulated. In both, sexualized violence and corporeality are associated with a three case studies 51 defacing; both works dramatically refuse to provide the face as a visual focal point for the viewer.49 Both works address a latent social violence toward the body, furthermore, and link that violent defacing of the body with sex.50 Eakins’s painting aligns mastery over the body with violence to it, exil- ing feeling to the painting’s margins; pain is displaced from the unconscious body that can’t feel to the hysterical woman who can’t not feel. The violence of that painting is ongoing. The mise- en- scène of Athey’s performance is a violent and homophobic universe in which the damage has already been done. The suspension of his body between a disco ball and a baseball bat suggest the relays of fear and desire that link gay and straight, queer and pho- bic masculinity. But Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle doesn’t represent gay bashing. A violent gesture is summoned and transformed by this tableau vivant, conjured and recast as erotic, sadomasochistic fantasy. We enter the room and are confronted by a body accommodating itself to an impossible situation. Approaching Athey’s pinned- down, immobilized, bloated, impaled, naked body, we expect something dramatic. But the encounter is strangely anticlimactic: the touch produces no intelligence, no epistemic shif. This is no magical encounter — or, it wasn’t for me. Over the duration of the performance, our relationship to Athey’s spectacle settled, as we reconciled ourselves to his state and began to participate in a collec- tive maintenance of his body. Although at frst glance his work appears to promise some kind of intimacy with that body, as Jane Blocker writes, we are ofen thrown back instead onto “the body’s capacity for producing a sense of ‘never knowing.’ ”51 At least, never knowing in the sense meant by Eakins’s painting. For there is a world of feeling in Athey’s action and in our relationship to it, but keeping company with that will not give us a sense of mastery over the event. This is the opposite of The Gross Clinic’s narrative, in which the body is the occasion for the production of knowledge — or, more nearly, reading The Gross Clinic through Dissociative Sparkle, the surgical theater is crowded with instruments and handlers who manage the “never knowingness” of the body with a sadistic theatricalization of the production of knowledge. The feeling of the body under the knife is buried; it erupts somewhere else as an element at complete odds with the social structure that is the painting’s ostensible subject.

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