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Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970S / Kathyo'dell P

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Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970S / Kathyo'dell P CONTRACT WITH THE SKIN This page intentionally left blank CONTRACT WITH THE SKIN KATHY O'DELL MASOCHISM PERFORMANCE ART AND THE 1970s University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Copyright 1998 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmit- ted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O'Dell,Kathy. Contract with the skin: masochism, performance art, and the 1970s / KathyO'Dell p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2886-6 (he: alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8166-2887-4 (pbk. alk. paper) 1. Performance art. 2. Masochism in art. I. Title. NX456.5.P38034 1998 700'.9'045—dc21 97-45530 CIP The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 For John Mernit This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix PREFACE xi 1 HE GOT SHOT 1 2 HIS MOUTH/HER SKIN 17 3 MY MIRROR 31 4 THEIR BEDS 45 5 HOME AGAIN 59 6 CONCLUSION 75 NOTES 85 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 111 INDEX 123 This page intentionally left blank ILLUSTRATIONS 1-2. Chris Burden. Shoot. 1971. 3. Gina Pane. Nourriture, actualites televisees, feu. 1971. 4. Vito Acconci. Trademarks. 1970. 5-6. Chris Burden. Velvet Water. 1974. 7-12. Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Ulay/Marina Abramovic. Talking about Similarity. 1976. 13-14. Gina Pane. Discours mou et mat. 1975. 15. Vito Acconci. See Through. 1969. 16-20. Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Ulay/Marina Abramovic. Balance Proof. 1977. 21. Gina Pane. "The Conditioning." Autoportrait(s). 1973. 22. Chris Burden. Deadman. 1972. 23-24. Vito Acconci. Reception Room. 1973. 25-26. Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Ulay/Marina Abramovic. Communist Body/ Capitalist Body. 1979. 27. Chris Burden. Oh, Dracula. 1974. 28. Chris Burden. Doomed. 1975. 29. Chris Burden. Bed Piece. 1972. 30. Chris Burden. White Light/White Heat. 1975. 31. Chris Burden. Oracle. 1975. 32. Catherine Opie. Self-Portrait. 1993. 33-34. Robby Garfinkel. Case 61. 1997. This page intentionally left blank BREATHLESS and excited, I am racing toward an old brick warehouse with my trophy: a heavy-duty, thirty-foot, orange exten- sion cord hanging in multiple loops over my shoulder. Careening around the cor- ner, through the double doors and down a ramp, banging into everything and everyone I pass, I arrive just in time to PREFACE plug in the cord and allow the perfor- mance to begin. This is the image that comes to mind when I ponder my intro- duction to performance art. It was 1977, and I was the program coordinator at 80 Langton Street, a defunct coffin factory in San Francisco that had been converted into a nonprofit art space. Our mission was to present work that commercial galleries and museums would not touch at the time—such as performance art. My main task, besides helping the board of directors review artists' proposals and search for funds, was simply getting the show on the road. This meant making lots of runs to the airport, finding the cheapest palatable wine for receptions, and scrounging up those last-minute items the artists always seemed to need. "The neighbor must have another thirty- foot extension cord we could borrow." I'm not sure I could have provided a definition of performance art while I was at 80 Langton Street, or that I wanted to. During those heady days of the alterna- tive art space movement, all I knew was that what I was experiencing was impor- tant and alive. Later, when I did decide to seek out definitions, I had the good fortune of en- rolling in Kristine Stiles's seminar on the history of performance art at the Univer- xi xii KATHY O'DELL sity of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1979. What I did not know at the time was that Stiles's course was one of the first on performance within the discipline of art his- tory (RoseLee Goldberg had taught a similar course at the School of Visual Arts in New York the year before). Since then, many other scholars and critics have started to teach and study performance art. All of us owe a great deal to the work of Kristine Stiles and RoseLee Goldberg. In her classic book Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present, published in 1979, Goldberg showed that visual artists had been engaging in "performance art," as it came to be called in the early 1970s, since the beginning of the twentieth century. But Gold- berg's book was the first comprehensive book to survey this topic. It was a gutsy move. Every general art historical survey of this sort is criticized mercilessly for who is in- cluded, who is not included, and which issues are addressed. Goldberg willingly faced such criticisms because she was—and is—devoted to the topic. Her rapture, her on- going work on performance art, and her spirit of inclusiveness toward all of us who have joined her in this field have made Goldberg a model and an inspiration. She is, in- deed, "la grande dame" of performance art history. But Kristine Stiles had an even more direct effect on the course of my own work. While she was teaching the Berkeley seminar, she was also entrenched in research for her doctoral dissertation, a one-thousand-page manuscript titled "The Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS): The Radical Cultural Project of Event-Structured Live Art," which will no doubt remain the definitive analysis of that landmark event. Stiles's com- mitment to grappling with the topic of destruction in art inspired me to take on a sim- ilarly controversial topic—masochism in art. The turning point in my interest came, I believe, the day Stiles introduced to the seminar a visiting lecturer: Chris Burden. As he spoke, I kept looking back and forth between the slides of his performances and the ac- tual person standing before me. Burden was calmly talking about crawling across bro- ken glass or having nails pounded through his hands, but his short descriptions did not match the overwhelming power of what I was seeing. At the time, I was confused and a little anxious. Now, I think that what Burden was saying—precisely by not saying it—was what Stiles had been saying in her lectures: we, as viewers, are an active part of the artist's work. By now, this view is commonly accepted. But it is important for me to recall the strange sensation of a time when it was not. And performance art has been instrumen- tal in making that case. As I looked at Burden's slides that day and listened to him speak, I knew I wanted to dig deeper, to try to understand and explain this work. Why, I asked myself, would artists push their bodies to such extreme physical and psycholog- ical limits? Intuitively, I knew that women's rights, gay rights, civil rights, and the Viet- nam War were all part of the reason. But I also sensed that the masochistic bond be- tween performers and audiences was a key to the situation. In the end, it was the PREFACE xiii intensely political connections among these various levels that proved most enigmatic and deserving of nuanced investigation. This book is the culmination of my inquiry. I thank Stiles for serving as my mentor in this intellectual pursuit. I treasure our years of friendship, conversations over coffee, critical readings, and mutual support. Such close and energizing relationships, in which thoughts flow freely and rapidly, are invaluable, but they sometimes make the proper attribution of ideas difficult. Therefore, let me apologize in advance to all my colleagues, friends, and students for any oversights that you may discover as you read this book; these are the inadvertent consequences of intellectual camaraderie. Many individuals have written on perfor- mance in the last few decades and have prompted my own thoughts. Among the most notable are Maurice Berger, Kelly Dennis, Saundra Goldman, Chrissie lies, Amelia Jones, Liz Kotz, Peggy Phelan, and Rebecca Schneider. In related areas of scholarship, Martha Buskirk, Rosalyn Deutsche, David Joselit, Therese Lichtenstein, Micki McGee, Leslie Prosterman, Ann Reynolds, and Mary Anne Staniszewski have also been consis- tent sources of insight and support. I also thank Hal Foster, Amelia Jones, Rosalind Krauss, Rose-Carol Washton Long, Linda Nochlin, Ann Reynolds, and Kristine Stiles for very specific feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. Moreover, the extraordinary editorial talents of Brian Wallis have gone the furthest in helping to enrich and refine my text. I am indebted to his assistance. Special thanks go to Biodun Iginla, my first editor at the University of Minnesota Press, for his enthusiasm for this project, and to my subsequent editor, William Mur- phy, and his associate, Robin A. Moir. The following individuals at the press were also enormously helpful in preparing the book for publication, and I deeply appreciate their skillful attentiveness: Daniel Leary, production coordinator; Amy Unger, produc- tion manager; Laura Westlund, managing editor; and Tammy Zambo, copyeditor. I am also grateful to David Yager, chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, for consistently supporting my scholarly efforts, and to Jo Ann E.
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