“Johnny,” Thompson had reportedly informed him, “we were just sitting here talking about you, and then we started talking about my needs, and what I need is a 40,000-candlepower illumination grenade. Big, bright bastards, that’s what I need. See if you can get them for me. I might be coming to Baton Rouge to interview [imprisoned former Louisiana governor] Edwin Edwards, and if I do I will call you, because I will be looking to have some fun, which as you know usually means violence.”
I was so intrigued when I read that the title for Which as You Know Means Violence came from the above exchange between Hunter S. Thompson and Johnny Knoxville of Jackass fame that, despite not having a firm appreciation (or, really, understanding) of performance art as a whole, I was delighted to have been approved for an ARC and flew through this in a couple of hours. Writer and art critic Philippa Snow analyses the use of pain and self-harm in performance art — covering artists from Buster Keaton and Marina Abramović to Johnny Knoxville and modern YouTube stars — and her knowledge and enthusiasm went a long way towards growing my appreciation for the performance of violence as an artform. This was entirely satisfying as a general interest read, seems like it would be valuable for those with prior knowledge in the field, and I am enlarged for having read it. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Because common sense dictates that hurting oneself is an idiotic act rather than one that can be radical, meaningful or creatively fulfilling, and because the players themselves were quick to distance themselves from performance artists on the grounds that categorising oneself as such was unforgivably pretentious, I had only been vaguely aware of the show when it first began to air, seeing it as a stupid joke for boys. Later, with the benefit of an arts education, I found it harder and harder to tell the difference between what Johnny Knoxville et al. did and what, for instance, Chris Burden had done in 1971 when he enlisted an anonymous friend to shoot him in the arm as what he called a commentary on “a sort of American tradition of getting shot.” Wasn’t Jackass, in its way, a kind of commentary on the directionless, uninsured and broke American slacker’s own tradition of, metaphorically speaking, getting kicked extremely forcefully in the balls?
I must confess: I have never seen an episode of Jackass, thinking of it, as Snow initially did, as a “bro-ish showcase of self-injury beloved by male lunkheads”. As an initial set-up, it seemed like a hard sell for Snow to convince me that fratboy stunts involving the abuse of rectums and penises could be considered “art”. But Snow quotes critic Uncas Blythe as writing in 2015, “The Jackass Decade, which began with the national wound of 9/ 11 and ended a hair early with the fiery crash of Ryan Dunn on June 20th, 2011, was a shamanic displacement of war trauma onto what looked to the untrained rationalist eye like idiot clowns, but who in fact were voodoo medics for the whole of American culture.” If Knoxville can elicit that kind of response, and attract the attention of Hunter S. Thompson, he must be culturally significant; but is he an artist? That — through an exploration of the history of self-harm as performance art by self-declared artists — is the question that Snow sets out to answer, and she satisfied me that the answer to the question must be “yes”.
A bad idea, executed with full commitment, can be transmuted into a good or even great idea if it is suitably interesting, unexpected, dazzling, or entertaining. It can also be transmuted into art — an act of conceptual significance, meant to elucidate some facet of society or culture that is in itself a bad idea, whether that facet is war, sex, love, patriarchal violence, or a yen for self-destruction. Whether the practitioner believes his or her bad idea to be conceptually significant rather than simply an amusing, violent goof is one way for an audience to determine whether they are watching art or entertainment.
I was recently introduced to the performance artist Bob Flanagan (whose The Pain Journal was excerpted by Eileen Myles in Pathetic Literature) and I was moved by his use of self-harm and S&M eroticism to make commentary on living with chronic disease (I didn’t need to look up the film to be provoked by the mental image of him pounding a nail through his own penis while singing If I Had a Hammer). Snow devotes a good chunk of space to Flanagan’s work and its meaning, and ultimately, if one accepts his self-violence as art, one must also make that determination about Knoxville and the Jackass crew, too.
This is something the performance artist, the comedian, and the stuntman have in common: an ability to conjure, often using very little means other than courage and inventiveness, an immediate reaction from the viewer, whether that reaction happens to be laughter, relief, schadenfreude, horror, terror, psychic agony or spiritual ecstasy. It is shocking to consider how close Abramović came to being shot in Rhythm Zero, just as it is shocking to read about injuries sustained by famous men who trash themselves for entertainment. In both cases, we could broadly commend this as a commitment to the bit.
Ultimately, reading Which as You Know Means Violence is like attending an art lecture, and I leave the experience with greater knowledge and appreciation for the topic. What more could one ask?
