Violence in the Arts: Performing & Witnessing

r '! Sibila Petlevski Violence in the Arts: Performing 6 Witnessing Introductory Notes Perhaps the easie'st way to approach the vast sUbject of violence in the arts would be to choose from an open-ended list of examples in which aggression and suffering comprise the subject-matter and then to comment on the selected titles in historical perspective. Another possibility would be to undertake a cross-media comparative analysis focused on well-known topics of violence such as the Passion of Christ or the Holocaust. One could examine the concept of pain in the performing arts, with special emphasis on endurance theatre; explore art intervention within the borders of conceptual art; gain new insight into paradigmatic examples of artistic expressions of war; or study famous examples of fascination with 'great' leaders such as Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, or Napoleon, in literature and music. One could also explore the link between artistic thematicization of violence and issues of gender socialization, social stereotyping and ritual violence; search for traces of racial, religious and class discrimination in literature; or study how the narrative structure of war propaganda in different media has changed over time. There would hardly be any novelty in elaborating upon the evergrowing amount of aggressive messages incorporated in video-clips, trailers, lV-ads and other commercials. Many cultural critics have already commented on the ideology of the visible in documentary films, detected invisible hegemonic master-narratives in the content of television, film, literature, popular songs and the daily news, and analyzed 215 KeyWords: • body in pain • conceptual art • Dada • emic • empathy • etic • imagination • intervention art • in-yer-face • performance • performing arts • violence INTERPRETATIONS Violence & ART Violence in Arts: Performing & Witnessing the cultural import of cover-images in news magazines and other mass media artefacts. The broad subject of violence in art presents the scholar of today with a whole range of theoretical possibilities in the treatment of the chosen topic. The change of major aesthetical concepts in the period of modernism, post-modern aesthetic egalitarianism with its levelling of traditionally high and traditionally low genres, new treatment of identity issues, cultural relativism, and other symptoms of post-modernity have all brought about new narrative strategies, causing dramatic change in all aesthetical concepts, offering new perspectives on old ideas such as the concept of empathy. Although we intend to tackle some of the aforementioned aspects of the topic, the main aim of this text is to analyze some recent works on the crossroads of art intervention and performance, and to highlight the difference between ideas-based conceptual subversion on the one hand, and body-based transgression in performances that involve physical endurance on the other. A body in pain no longer concerns itself with ideas. Fully concentrated upon itself and the pain it endures, the body itself constitutes the stage on which the performance takes place. In a conceptual interaction with previously existing, aesthetically approved and canonized artwork, the concept involved in interventionist work takes precedence over aesthetic and all other concerns. One topic of special interest is that of identity-based, corporeal thematicization of violence in performance. This paper explores violence in relational spaces determined by gender, sex and body, in the context of a theatrical event. The subject of violence in theatre could be explored in connection to the specific relational spaces based on identity that have implications in the performing domain with special reference to urban, institutional, colonial, postcolonial, national and transnational spaces of identity constructed under the influence of popular culture; marginal and liminal spaces and 'Iiminoid' experiences, including the related terms of periphery, border, the Other and the Different. The Death of Sarpedon The obverse side of the Euphronios krater, a bowl used for mixing water and wine, depicts the death of Sarpedon, one of the heroes of the Trojan War. Sarpedon was hit, according to Homer in Book 16 of The Iliad, by Patroclos' spear where the midriff clasps the beating heart. Fatally injured, he lay moaning for a long time, clutching at the bloody dust. The agony of the dying hero is observed by Zeus, an invisible, all-seeing god who happens to be his father. Blood gushes from the slain body. Euphronios shows two winged figures, Hypnos and Thanatos, representations of Sleep and Death, in the process of lifting the INTEIlPRETATlDNS Violence & ART 216 SibiJa Petlevski body from the battlefield to transfer it to Lycia for proper burial. Two calm and impassionateonlookers, Laodamas and Hippolochos (two previously killed heroes), witness the scene from an unearthly perspective. Zeus remains out of the picture, although he watched Sarpedon's agony and even wanted to save his son's life in spite of the fact that Sarpedon was fated to die at the hands of Patroclus. During the fight between Sarpedon and Patroclus, Zeus sent a shower of bloody raindrops over the Trojan's heads expressing his grief at the inevitable death of his son who was about to die. Hera talked Zeus out of the idea of sparing his son's life. Her argument was that Sarpedon was not the only half-god fighting in the Trojan War. Zeus was supposed to show solidarity with other gods whose sons died in the course of action, and 0[1 this occasion he acted according to the moral law, preferring common benefit to selfish emotional impulses. Scholars are not agreed as to Aeschylus being the author of Carians or Europa, a play featuring Sarpedon's death at Troy and the return of his body to his home for burial (see Radt 1985; Keen 1996), but at least there is a brief reference to Sarpedon's grave in the fifth act of The Suppliants by Aeschylus. The Danaides of the chorus constitute the collective protagonist in the impending abduction. They have fled a forced marriage to their Egyptian cousins and found refuge in the city of Argos. The protection they requested from King Pelasgus was granted to them only after a vote by the Argives at the moment of greatest suspense, when it already seemed as if the Herald and his helpers would force them to continue their voyage to Egypt and suffer the consequences of the. unwanted marriage. In the passage quoted, a herald of the Egyptians tries to force the maidens to board the ship and continue their voyage to Egypt. He threatens them physically, while they put a curse on him invoking his death in a sea storm (Aeschylus, trans. Morshead 1881): 'Herald of Aegyptus: Shrines, shrines, forsooth!-the ship, the ship, the ship be shrine. Aboard, perforce and will-ye nil/-ye, go! Or e'er from hands of mine ye suffer torments worse and blow on blow. Chorus: Alack, God grant those hands may strive in vain with the salt-streaming wave, when 'gainst the wide-blown blasts thy bark shall strain to round Sarpedon's cape, the sandbank's treach'rous grave.' 217. INTERPRETATIONS Violence & ART Sibila Petfevski When the Chorus of Danaides speak of Sarpedon's grave, they are mentioning a geographical metaphor of death in far-off lands, but this metaphor also brings to mind the famous passage from The Iliad: the scene of Sarpedon's death and the ship-related imagery used in the description of his collapsing body: 'And he fell as falls an oak, or a silver poplar, or a slim pine tree, that on the hills the shipwrights fell with whetted axes, to be timber for ship-building; even so before the horses and chariot he lay at length, moaning aloud, and clutching at the bloody dust. ' (Homer, trans!. Lang, 2005, Book 16: 108). When Voltaire in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764) speaks about the 'concatenation of events' he starts his argumentation with an example from Classical Antiquity: 'Events are linked to each other by an invincible fatality: it is Destiny which, in Homer, is above even Jupiter. This master ofgods and men roundly declares that he cannot stop his son Sarpedon dying at his appointed time. Sarpedon was born at the moment when he had to be born, and could not be born at another moment; he could not die otherwise than before Troy; he could not be buried elsewhere than in Lycia; had at the appointed time to produce vegetables which had to be changed into the substance of a few Lycians; his heirs had to establish a new order in his states; this new order had to exert an influence over the neighbouring kingdoms; from it resulted a new arrangement of war and peace with the neighbours of the neighbours of Lycia: thus, step by step, the destiny of the whole world has been dependent on Sarpedon's death, which depended on Helen being camed off; and this carrying off was necessarily linked to Hecuba's mamage, which by tracing back to other events was linked to the origin of things. ' (Voltaire 2001) Voltaire added aslightly ironic twist to the subject of concatenation by mentioning the origin of things at the end of the paragraph. The dramaturgy of the world is not all that simple. Present events, he argues, are not the children of all past events: they have their direct lines as well as a thousand little collateral lines that do not serve them at all. Having chosen the motif of Sarpedon's death as the opening metaphor in this paper that treats of the link between art and violence from a predominantly dramaturgical perspective, we have opted for two major lines of interpretation: one concentrates on the change in the concept of empathy in the modern mind; the other traces changes in the treatment of the human body as a mediator of suffering. Yet what connects these two approaches is the underlying thesis that violence INTERPRETATIONS Violence & ART 218 Violence in Arts: Performing & Witnessing in the arts, regardless of the media, could not be treated otherwise but as an event-based, proto-dramaturgical concept. An event is usually defined as a significant change in state. 'M1at could be treated as significant depends on the perspective. Love is certainly an event in the context of a romantic poem and the death of a hero is an event in the context of a tragedy, but love and death are not perceived as events in a chronicle that comprises an open-ended list of the names of married couples and of deceased people. Events are directly related to specific changes of conditions. Correlation between events can be causal, temporal, spatial, or combined. The cause and effect model and the special model in the treatment of violence usually has a strong link to the system of social values. We _could also analyse historical and culturally typical patterns of behaviour that include violence and see how any interpretation of these patterns (defining 'normal' versus 'abnormal', 'acceptable' versus ·unacceptal);. Ie'; 'native' versus 'foreign', etc.) is dependent upon the perspective and the level at which the structure of a cultural event communicates with the structure of an event in artistic performance. The concepts of etic (coined from phonetics) and emic (coined from phonemics) are of great value for such research (Pike 1954). Emic units are usually desCribed as those relating to features or items analyzed with respect to their role as structural units in a system, as in behavioural sciences or linguistics. The term emic, having crossed the border from the fields of linguistics and anthropology; has found its way elsewhere: emic (Ducrot and Todorov 1979: 36) interprets events according to their particular cultural function, while etic characterizes events only by spatio-temporal criteria. Hymes (1970: 281-282) discusses in an ear1y work why the most commonly applied meaning of emic, as 'native point of view' or insider's point of view, is inadequate and misleading; namely, that natives are normally neither conscious of their emic system nor able to formulate it for the investigator (Headland 1990). The theoretical basis for our research on violence in performance would not be applicable to the subject without Victor Turner's pivotal study of cultural performances: 'With the post-modem dislodgement of spatialized thinking and ideal models of cognitive and social structures from their position of exegetical pre-eminence, there is occurring a major move towards the study of processes, not 8S exemplifying compliance with or deviation from nonnative models both etic and emic, but as perfonnances. Perfonnances are never amorphous or open-ended, they have diachronic structure, a beginning, a sequence of overfapping but isolable phases and an end. But their structure is not that of an abstract system; it is generated out of the dialectical oppositions of processes and of levels of process. In the modem consciousness, INTEIlPilET All OMS 219 Violence & ART Sibila Petlevski cognition, idea, rationality, were paramount. In the post-modem .turn, cognition is not dethroned but rather takes its place on an (Turner 1986) equal footing with volition and affect.' VVhen Turner uses the tenn Homo performans, a performing animal, he defines man as a self-performing animal whose performances are reflexive to the extent that he is capable of revealing himself to himself. This reflexivity is two-fold: singular and plural. The actor gets to know himself better through acting and enactment (singular reflexivity), or one set of human beings may come to know themselves better through observing, participating, or observing and participating in the performances generated and presented by the group to which they belong one way or another (plural reflexivity). Turner defines plural reflexivity on the assumption that 'though, for most purposes, we humans may divide ourselves between Us and Them, or Ego and Alter, We and They share substance, and Ego and Alter mirror each other pretty well - Alter alters Ego not too much but tells Ego what both are!' (Turner 1986) The link between performance in the performing arts and cultural performance opens space for discussion of socio-cultural influences on psychopathology with a cluster of 'culture-bound' syndromes. Emic symptom complexes are not only described but also acted out as linked to typical stress areas in a particular culture, a particular social group, or a culture-change situation. Interventionist Theatre programmes use drama to challenge criminal behaviour and build self-awareness by reestablishing a balance between the singular and plural reflexivity of a self-performing individual. Some interventionist theatre models try to get to grips with violence-associated emie-symptom complexes such as acculturative stress through existence in a culture-alien milieu, race and gender-based fear of persecution, or fear of not being able to make a pleasing impression on others. Maybe the best-known, dramaturgically important, socially effective and programmatically well-grounded concept of interventionist theatre is Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal 1971). Already Boal's concept of Newspaper Theatre -with its system of twelve techniques of scene-building based on thematerial taken from daily newspapers-was leading towards the much, more elaborate model of performativity developed in the techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed. The principal aim of Boal's type of theatrical Interventionism is to show a situation of oppression that the Protagonist does not know how to fight against by putting up a scene or making a play out of the raw material of life. The spect-actors are invited to replace this Protagonist and to act out-on stage and not from the audience-real problems: to turn them into ideas and resolve the 'plot' by developing an adequate 'dramaturgy'. The most prominent INTERPILETATIONS Violence & ART 220 Violence in Arts: Performing &Witnessing example of such a form of theatrical activism is Forum-Theatre viewed by its inventor as a collective rehearsal for reality. The Theatre of the Oppressed is defined as an antithesis of Discipline and Freedom in the . Game of Dialogue with explicit didactic purpose. Boal is reacting to social violence by giving the audience the means of production rather than the finished artistic product for observation. Killing Warhol Systematic questioning of the valiqity of aesthetic jUdgements based on 'old' concepts of beauty, harmony, purity, goodness, decency, compassion, and the sublime, has turned some of the practices of modernist art violently against the Canon of the past. The conceptual _art of the sixties, especially 'action art', founded some of its concepts on rejecting object­based art practices. The ontological status of the work of art has been changed dramatically; what is perceived as art is no longer an object, but rather an event. The body is used as a podium for staging transgression­as in Degradation of a Female Body, Degradation of a Venus (1963) by Otto MOhl and Hermann Nitsch. The concept of Orgien Mysterien Theater by Hermann Nitsch, involving the staging of crucifixions and animal slaughter, connected performance to violent ritualistic practices. In 'corporeal' actions, time is added to the dimension of the body and space (Muehl 1963, Versumpfung eines weiblichen K(jrpers Aktion, Nr.2). The Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS), held in London in 1966, launched a series of events bringing together artists and scientists. Speaking on the topic of destruction in art in Covent Garden in London that September, representatives of the counter­cultural underground took part in the process of the canonization of the new aesthetics of transgression­perhaps for the first time and without realising it. In the announcements for the opening night of the performance entitled kaBoom!, 'staged' in the highly institutionalized" framework of the Detroit Museum of New Art in 2002, the museum aUdience were invited to exercise personal intervention in the concept of the new art by destroying the museum's exhibits. ･ｾｮＮｩ､ｕａ enthusiasm overwhelmed the exhibit. Visitors­who turned intoactrve agents ofvandalisrndestroyed not only objects of arts but also pedestals and wall shelves; fires were started in isolated galleries; a wrecking ball for one display was removed from ·Its chain and used instead like a bowling ball; someone took out an installation as well as the comer of the wall. The paroxysm of intellectual 'enjoyment' in vandalism, masked in the new concept of destruction­based creation, reached its peak on the following morning. One could read in the press releases how the director of ( the museum Jef Bourgeau, wading through the carnage of the exhibits, 221 INTERPRETATIONS Violence & ART Violence in Am: Performing & Witnessing said 'on a surprisingly bright note' that the event was a wild success 'in a twisted way': 'Bourgeau pauses to gingerly pick up some bumed photographs of Marcel Duchamp cross-dressed as Rose Selavy. He drops them where he found them. They are unsalvageable, a few charred remnants dripping with the urine that was used to douse their flames. (Available at: http://votww.detroitmona.com.) You have to give them credit for being creative. The challenge now, he adds excitedly, is to pick up the pieces and somehow tum all of this back into art. ' The director of MONA did not show much feeling for the famous Dada photograph entitled Marcel Duchamp cross-dressed as Rose Selavy (Ray 1921). It was not only the artefact, the photograph of Man Ray dripping with urine, it was, by the power of metonymy, Marcel Duchamp himself lying on the floor of the Museum. Duchamp's programmatic idea 'Dada is nothing'literally comes to truth. The director of the museum, a disinterested onlooker, is caught by the media in the Homeric moment when he, like Zeus watching the death of Sarpedon, first plays with the idea of saving the exhibit, then just lets the museum staff pick up the pieces. . Tony Shafrazi's spray-painting over Picasso's Guemica in 1974, or the recent hammer-assault on Duchamp's Fountain (one of eight porcelain urinals created by the artist to replace the original lost in 1964), are representative examples of criminal art interventionism. Pinon celli claimed that by damaging Duchamps ready-made. he had created a new 'original'. Shafrazi has latterly become a successful New York art in its own way-are symptomatic of narcissdealer. Both ｨ｣｡ｾ･ｳ istic character disorder, exemplifying a wish to win attention by committing a violent act, and an expression of conceptual egotism, showing the interventionist's wish to get credit for being creative. The conceptual link between Duchamp's ready-made, based on depriving the object of its common, daily functionality, and Warhol's pop -art objects, made out of commercial designs, is obvious. Warhol 'rePlicated' a stack of Brillo shipping cartons, making it out of wood rather than cardboard. Opting for solid material typical of traditional art-objects, Warhol had put to irony the aesthetic idea of permanence'guaranteed by the choice of perennial subjects, the tenability of the material the artwo'rk is made of and the complete trust in the skills of metier. When Valerie Solana attempted to murder Warhol, her violent act was an implementation of a thesis from her militant feminist SCUM Mamlesto. In 1967, the same year in which she published SCUM Manifesto, Solana shot and wounded Andy Warhol. That was her intervention against a living pop-art icon and 'Great Art' as representative of male art: INTERPRETATIONS Violence & ART 222 Sibila Pe#evski 'The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, of love, friendship, affection or tenderness. He is a completely isolated unit, incapable of rapport with anyone. The male, having a very limited range of feelings and, consequently, very limited perceptions, insights and judgments, needs the 'artist' to guide him, to tell him what life is all about. But the male 'artist', being totally sexual, unable to relate to anything beyond his own physical sensations, having nothing to express beyond the insight that for the male life is meaningless and absurd, cannot be an artist. How can he who is not capable of life tell us what life is all about? A 'male artist' is a contradiction in terms (. ..) Being totally sexual, incapable of cerebral or aesthetic respon_ ses, totally materialistic and greedy, the male, besides inflicting on the worfd 'Great Art', has decorated his unlandscaped cities with ugly buildings (both inside and out), ugly decors, billboards, highways, cars, garbage trucks and, most notably, his own putrid self. (. ..) The male likes death ­ it excites him sexually and, already dead inside, he wants to die. (...) SCUM will destroy all useless and harmful objects ­ cars, store windows, 'Great Art', etc. Both destruction and killing will be selective and discriminate.' (Solana 1967) Solana describes the killing of men as an 'act of mercy', euthanasia for human beings 'incapable of empathizing or identifying with others'. In her anti­utopian world populated with dominant women and some obedient men, the male survivors exist 'fulfilling themselves as spectators' and 'vicarious livers'. They live only through the feelings and actions of women. Their experience is second-hand, derivative, surrogate and finally, empathetic. 'It will be electronically possible for him to tune in to any specific female he wants to and follow in detail her every movement. The females will kindly, obligingly consent to this, as it won't hurt them in the slightest and it is a marvellously kind and humane way to treat their unfortunate, handicapped fellow beings.' (Solana 1967) Solana's episode with Warhol has already served as film-script material and excerpts from her manifesto have been anthologized. If nothing else, empathetic voyeurism is certainly an interesting concept of the Society for Cutting up Men (S.C.U.M.). 'Bitter Arrows' of Empathy Using expressions that represent things as being in a state of activity can make listeners 'see things'. In Book III, Chapter 11 of Rhetoric, Aristotle shows how things have the effect of being active because they 223 INTE RPRET All ONS Violence & ART Sibila Petlevski are made animate. The 'bitter arrow' that is 'flying on eagerly' then 'panting to feed on the flesh of the heroes' is an example taken from Homer's Iliad. Shameless behaviour and fury are forms of activity. 'The poet has attached these ideas to the things by means of proportional metaphors: as the stone is to Sisyphus, so is the shameless man to his victim.' (Rhetoric 1412a). Activity attached to the object is often violent. However, the Homeric universe does not recognize what later westem aesthetics would call empathic understanding. Vividness achieved on the rhetorical level makes listeners of Homer imagine scenes of violence as real. They 'see things', but they do not witness them. That is why, unlike the audience of a tragedy, Homer's listeners do not experience what they have 'seen' with personal involvement. There is no catharsis without mimesis. Robert Vischer's idea of empathy in Das optische FormgefOhl (1872) explores the dynamics of formal relations in a work of art with the thesis that dynamics inherent to the work of art suggest muscular and emotional attitudes in a viewing subject. The subject experiences his own feelings as qualities of the object. Aesthetic pleasure is thus defined as an objectified self-enjoyment produced by the active fusion of subject and object. An involuntary act of transference (Einfuhlung, a concept described by Friedrich Vischer), is the process of adding vital content to the object observed. Two relatively recent books have changed the course of intellectual discourse on violence in art: The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry (1985), and Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Starting form Virginia Woolfs unjustly forgotten and marginalized reflections on war in Three Guineas from 1938, Sontag ponders Woolfs concept of the 'difficulty of communication' and her proposition to see whether when we look at the same photographs of mutilated bodies we feel the same things. Sontag comments: 'Condemning war as such did not seem so futile or irrelevant in the wake of the paper fantasies of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which fifteen leading nations, including the United States, France, Great Britain, Gennany, Italy, and Japan, solemnly renounced war as an instrument of national policy; even Freud and Einstein were drawn into the debate with a public exchange ofletters in 1932 titled 'Why War?' Woolf's Three Guineas, appearing toward the close of nearly two decades of plangent denunciations of war, offered the originality (Which made this the least well received of all her books) of focusing on what was regarded as too obvious or inapposite to be mentioned, much less brooded over: that war is a man's gamethat the killing machine has a gender, and it is male. Nevertheless, INTERPRUATIDNS Violence & ART 224 Violence in Arts: Performing & Witnessing the temerity of Woolf's version of 'Why War?' does not make her revulsion against war any less conventional in its rhetoric; in its summations, rich in repeated phrases. And photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus. 1 (Sontag 2004, 5­6) For Sontag, 'a cityscape is not made of flesh', but 'sheared off buildings are almost as eloquent as bodies in the street'. Pictures say: 'this is what it's like', 'war dismembers', but we frequently fail to hold this reality in mind. Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy, says Sontag. (Sontag, 8) When Aristotle speaks about the power of 'seeing things' being connected to the capability of making and understanding metaphors, he is choosing some of his rhetorical examples from battle-scenes in The Iliad containing detailed description of war carnage. Both culturally and stylistically (at least we claim so from the distance of centuries) epic text did not provoke empathic reactions. Something in the nature of the Homeric universe disconnected the power of imagination from the power to feel it. There must be something in the nature of our media-dominated universe-maybe it is the speed with which we can change TV channels to see pictures of bloodshed at different locations?-that leads to a lack of empathy. What is left out of the picture, the atrocities that are chosen not to be shown, might be the new starting point for critical imagination. Elaine Scarry starts from the belief that pain experienced by others is essentially un-shareable because its existence destroys the language necessary for it to be conveyed. She then proceeds to a subtle analysis of the language that uses the reality of the body in pain to secure the truth of a cultural/political position. The body in pain is viewed in historical perspective. Scarry points to the reality-producing quality of pain in Judeo-Christian scriptures and in the relationships of humans with inanimate objects. She identifies five groups of people who create a 'language of pain', artists among them. The ability to force pain into speech, to 'deobjectify the work of pain by forcing it into avenues of objectification', 'to enable pain to enter into a realm of shared discourse', is the principal quality of the artistic 'language of pain' (Scarry 1985, 6) Superficial Engagement The dictionary-definition of the phrase 'in-your-face' comprises qualities such as blatantly aggressive, provocative, confrontational, impossible to ignore or avoid. Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Antony Neilson are the best-known representatives of the new British drama that INTERPRET AllONS 225 Violence & ART Sibila Pe#evski conquered other European stages in the early nineties. A1eks Sierz, the author of In­ Yer­Face Theatre: British Drama Today (Faber, 2001) and The Theatre of Martin Crimp (Methuen, 2006), defines the genre on his in­yer­face theatre website: 'How can you tell if a play is in­yer­face? Well, it really isn't difficult: the language is filthy, there's nudity, people have sex in front of you, violence breaks out, one character humiliates another, taboos are broken, unmentionable subjects are broached, conventional dramatic structures are subverted. At its best, this kind of theatre is so powerful, so visceral, that it forces you to react ­ either you want to get on stage and stop what's happening or you decide it's the best thing you've ever seen and you long to come back the next night. As indeed you should.' (Sierz, www.in­yer­face­theatre.com) There is a tint of avant­gardism in a type of theatrical provocation that confronts onlookers with taboos in their own psychological and cultural 'operating .systems' in order to free their language and help them break habits of passive observing. Some of the plays written and staged in the dramaturgical model of in­yer­face theatre based their success on exploring the theatrical potential of violence and have already had a major impact on new playwriting, simultaneously creating a new type of audience. Thomas Hirschhorn, an artist who mixed together photographs of mangled corpses from Iraq, scenes of political violence around the world with mannequins riddled with nails, enlarged newspaper headlines and reproductions of abstract drawings by the Swiss visionary artist Emma Kunz, exhibited at New York's Gladstone Gallery in New York very recently, in November 2006. One of the critics called his exploration of the subject of vi01ence and death a 'walk-in manifesto', others were simply revolted by the chaotic bricolage of revolting details that somehow failed to provoke empathy. The aim of the artist is that of aestheticizing violence through the interplay of war and art. Although Hirschhorn's project, significantly entitled Superficial Engagemen.f, brings to mind photographs of individuals in the morgue by Andres Serrano, it lacks the purity of concept and solemn atmosphere around Serrano's objects of death-art. The artist is shouting in vain: Let's take the images of destroyed bodies seriously! The mannequins shot through with nails are not references to martyrdom and suicide bombings, as one of the journalists Sarah Douglas wanted to suggest while interviewing Hirschhorn for Artinfo (Available at: http://www.artinfo.com): 'The mannequins, 'says the artist 'when I made them - wanted to be the poor, contemporary,· amoral, non-religious version of somebody or something who endures in place of another, a kind of fetish, INTERPREtATIONS Violence & ART 226 Violence in Arts: Performing & Witnessing which is in African culture an object charged with a supernatural power, either favourable or evil. ' Maybe our failure is one of imagination, as Sontag would say, or maybe our failure is one of superficial engagement and the lack of empathy caused by fixation with empty cultural fetishes. References • Aeschylus. 1881.The Suppliants. Trans. Edmund Doidge Anderson Morshead. London: C.Kegan Paul. • Babbage, Frances. 2004. Augusto Boal. London: Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Books Ltd. • Boal, Augusto. 1985. Theatre of the Oppressed. New Yorl<: Theatre Communications Group. • Duchamp, Marcel. 1917. 1964 replica. Fountain. • Ducrot, Oswald, and Tzvetan Todorov. 1979. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press • Hymes, Dell. 1970 Linguistic Method in Ethnography: Its Development in the United States. Method and Theory in Linguistics. Ed. Paul L. Garvin, The Hague: Mouton. • Headland, Thomas N. 1990. Introduction: Defining Emics and Etics and Harris and Pike. Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate. Eds. By ThomasN. Headland, Kenneth L. Pike and Marvin Harris. London: SAGE Publications. • Homer. Iliad. 1898 (2000) The Project Gutenberg E-text ofThe Iliad of Homer. Trans. Samuel Butler. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org. • Keen, Anthony. 2005. Lycians in the 'Cares' of Aeschylus. Lost Dramas of Classical Athens: Greek Tragic Fragments. Ed. by Fiona McHardy, James Robson, David Harvey. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. . • MOhl. Otto. 1963. Versumpfung eines weiblichen KOrpers Aktion, Nr.2 • MOhl, Otto & Nizsch, Hermann. 1963. Degradation of a Female Body. • Ray, Man. 1921. Marcel Duchamp cross­dressed as Rose Selavy. 227 INTERPRETATIONS Violence & ART