Burn The Radical Disappearance of Kathy Change Joseph Shahadi On 22 October 1996 at around 11:15 am, the performance artist and peace activist Kathy Change walked on to the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, stood in front of one of its large outdoor sculptures, called Peace Symbol, doused herself with gasoline and set herself on fire, as students moving between classes and just inside of buildings watched, horrified. “I want to make a statement about life and death,” read the note Philadelphia police found near her body (Matza and Gibbons 1996). Change further explained her final act in writings she placed at the scene and in packets she left for friends and the media that morning. In one of these let- ters, her “Final Statement,”1 she wrote, I want to protest the present government and economic system and the cynicism and pas- sivity of the people in general. I want to protest this entirely shameful state of affairs as 1. Kathy Change’s writings, suicide notes, and manifestos, unless otherwise indicated, are reproduced here courtesy of the Friends of Change, a group formed by her friends to commemorate her life and disseminate her message. Although she left multiple documents, all of which could be considered “suicide notes,” the Friends of Change have referred to this document, found near her body, as her “Final Statement” so I am employing that description here (and throughout my essay) based on their designation. TDR: The Drama Review 55:2 (T210) Summer 2011. ©2011 52 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00070 by guest on 25 September 2021 emphatically as possible. But primarily, I want to get publicity in order to draw attention to my proposal for immediate social transformation. To do this I plan to end my own life. The attention of the media is only caught by acts of violence. My moral principles pre- vent me from doing harm to anyone else or their property, so I must perform this act of violence against myself... (Change 1996a) Such an act, designed to blur the lines between performance and protest, brings the ques- tions raised by public acts of self-inflicted, mortal violence into sharp relief: Can suicide ever be considered using the same theoretical frames as performance? Could such an act be judged in terms of its aesthetic strategies? Is violence against the self ever a performance of moral, ethi- cal, and political ideals?2 And finally, what instantiated social, cultural, and moral hierarchies are threatened by a conception of performance broad enough to include acts of violence? Performance has challenged the distinctions between art and crime at its experimental edges since the early 20th century when the Surrealists theorized the performative quality of violence in the wake of World War I. Anthony Kubiak writes: According to Andre Breton [...] “the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” This “simple” Surrealist act is meant to awaken spectators to their own “debasement” and to the “exhilarating danger — and beauty — of performance menacing art.” (1987:79) The impulse toward social disruption through the performance of violence, theoretical in the cultural and political revolution aspired to by the Surrealists, was made material by performance artists at mid 20th century. The use of “real,” not represented, violence in performance art was not directed toward the crowd, like the Surrealist bullet, but was rather more often turned inward toward the artist: “A similar desire [to that expressed by the Surrealists] finds its most graphic expression today in the work of those body-artists who use real, and often excessive vio- lence as a means of representation in their performances” (Kubiak 1987:79). Self-destructive, or what Kathy O’Dell calls “masochistic” performance art encompasses a wide range of counterintuitive practices such as piercing, penetrations, suspensions, cutting, self-starvation, and the application of fire, among other methods (1998:1). Kubiak concludes, “Unlike the theatre that evokes terror, these terrorizing works desire for disappearance to show itself — and by the same token, to reappear [...] threatening to destroy the performer’s body, and producing a visible sign of terror in the body” (1987:79). 2. The use of public suicide as a method to agitate for and enact political change is an ancient tactic of resistance that reemerged in the mid-twentieth century. Self-immolation is used to stage the horrors of war by destroying the body violently and publicly in the name of peace. Beginning in the Vietnam era and up to and including the first and second Gulf Wars, self-immolation has been revived for this purpose and these actions were inspired by the ancient example. One notable recent example is Mark David “Malachi” Ritscher, a Chicago musician and activist who immolated himself next to the public artwork “Flame of the Millennium” overlooking Chicago’s Kennedy Expressway to protest the Iraq War on 3 November 2006. Figure 1. (facing page) “The Dance of Change.” Kathy Change displays her new dance outfit, mask, and flags, embellished with inspirational words, in 1992 at West Philadelphia’s annual Clark Park Music and Arts Festival. (Photo by Diane Nemea Laessig) Joseph Shahadi is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU and a 2004 winner of the Performance Studies Award. He will defend his dissertation “Radical Disappearance(s): Embodying Absence to Perform Presence” in 2011. A Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary performance Kathy Change artist, his work has been exhibited in New York, regionally, and internationally. As a scholar and artist he is interested in the relationship between language and the body, transgression, and systems of power. See his work at www.josephshahadi.com. [email protected]. 53 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00070 by guest on 25 September 2021 Change (born Kathleen Chang) staged her suicide publicly, on the exact spot where she had performed countless times in an effort to engage the University of Pennsylvania students in the progressive causes she championed. She planned the act and rehearsed it, after a fash- ion: Philadelphia police inspectors deduced from her personal effects that she had been exper- imenting with different accelerants on various cuts of meat — eventually deciding on gasoline because alcohol did not burn hot or quickly enough (Matza and Gibbons 1996). Further, before immolating herself, Change delivered packages of her writings, including a seven-page dialogue explaining why she was choosing to end her life, to six Penn students and two local residents with whom she had previously discussed her beliefs, in addition to Penn’s campus newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian and other news organizations (Hammer 1996). Several students said Change left the packages for them at their residences at approximately 9:00 am on 22 October (Hammer 1996). Although no one retrieved the packages before she killed herself a few hours later, their contents reveal the extent of her planning and give a context to her suicide. It was Change’s determination to use her death as a vehicle to carry her message to the students she performed for, and beyond them, to the press and public, and it is the meticulous planning and sensational execution of her suicide that lends itself to an analysis of her actions as performance. Kathy Change’s self-immolation was designed to shift the emphasis from her dancing phys- ical body, which she destroyed, to her political message, an act of transfer through which she simultaneously embodied her own absence. Peggy Phelan argues in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance that the ontology of live performance cannot be reproduced so it “plunges into vis- ibility — in a maniacally charged present — and disappears into memory, into the realm of invis- ibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control” (1993:148). Embedded in this argument is the singular, immediate, and nonrepeatable nature of performance. In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas Diana Taylor suggests a parallel configuration of performance — as embodied action that facilitates learning and conveys knowledge through cultural and political agency. For Taylor, this movement between bodies is what gives performance the capacity to travel across space/time, as cultural memory and vir- tual identity, a gesture that relates traditional oral, gestural, and aural practices to postmod- ern virtual environments, whose performative potential disrupts simplistic understandings of “presence” and “absence.” She writes, “the repertoire [her term for the ‘system of transfer’ that transmits performance between bodies] requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being part of the transmission” (2003:20). But I am arguing that absences can also participate in the production and reproduction of knowl- edge across space/time, repeating themselves within and against representations as modes of resistance and elements of being. I propose a conception of performance that is situated between the paradigms suggested by Phelan and Taylor, one whose ontology persists by and through disappearing. Following Taylor’s work on embodied practice, I am suggesting that Change’s body may be thought of as a generative and performatic3 scene of her (dis)appearance, even when, espe- 3. Taylor suggests the term “performatic” to denote the adjectival form of the nondiscursive realm of perfor- mance and formalize its distinction from “performative,” a term that has come to primarily represent its linguis- tic dimension. Taylor writes, “[In J.L. Austin’s formulation] performative points to language that acts, in [Judith] Butler[’s] it goes in the opposite direction, subsuming subjectivity and cultural agency into normative discur- sive practice.