Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment

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For artists such as Burden, Marina Abramović, or even Knoxville, Snow suggests that “it takes youth” to conduct death-defying acts like getting shot in the arm or carving a pentagram into one’s stomach (as Abramović did in Lips of Thomas). Like my friend Sammy, Snow suggests that artists prone to self-injury are “motivated by a kind of restlessness”, that they exalt an almost puerile thanatological drive, that “they do not so much announce themselves as carve their identities, bloodily and publicly into their skin, the way a teenager might carve his or her crush’s name into a school desk or a tree-trunk”. 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.” Numerous studies examine empathy in terms of observation of physical pain and immediate pre-conscious responses, such as heart rate, dilation, cortisol, adrenalin, FMRI. This is not cognitive empathy, but an immediate pre-conscious autonomic response. It is not ruminated over, not a moral question, it is something one cannot help. Very much like laughter. Laughter is not language, humans without language (often as a result of damage to the part of the brain largely responsible for language) can still laugh. Empathic winces for the fallen and laughter operate in a space siloed from conscious thought and language. This is curious—and Snow does reference the nature of laughter briefly with some lurches to archaic references like Hobbes—but not as curious as one of the comments Snow provides from Korine regarding the uncompleted film Fight Harm. “I really wanted to make a perfect comedy, and I thought that pure violence, and the repetition of violence, would [achieve that]. I thought it would just build. I thought the repetition of the violence would just negate it, and it would just build and build into something humorous.” 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.”

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. It is a true pleasure to become immersed in writing that is capable of connecting so many dots with such dexterity and grace.”– Natasha Stagg, author of Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019.Which As You Know Means Violence is a surprisingly moving, life-affirming book, in part because it’s about life, art, performance, being pushed to its limits. Here, we discuss the current landscape for criticism, subconscious creativity, and the value of humour.”– Holly Connolly, AnOther Magazine. PS: Oh, wow, Jesus Christ. You are absolutely right about the arc, but I’d never noticed that before. Your saying this actually helps to provide another answer to your earlier question about the role of the critic, which is sometimes to interpret art on behalf of the artist (if you’ll allow me to refer to the book as ‘art’ for a moment). In Which as You Know Means Violence, writer and art critic Philippa Snow analyses the subject of pain, injury and sadomasochism in performance, from the more rarefied context of contemporary art to the more lowbrow realm of pranksters, stuntmen and stuntwomen, and uncategorisable, danger-loving YouTube freaks. In a world where violence - of the market, of climate change, of capitalism - is part of our everyday lives, Which as You Know Means Violence focuses on those who enact violence on themselves, for art or entertainment, and analyses the role that violence plays in twenty-first century culture. Words by Adam Steiner: Adam is a lifeguard, journalist and author. His next book is Silhouettes And Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) forthcoming in 2023. In 2020 his first music book was published: Into The Never, a deep dive into the Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral album, was published by Rowman and Littlefield, his first novel, Politics Of The Asylum about a cleaner in a collapsing hospital was published in 2018.

Cis white women who make this kind of work, Marina Abramović or Gina Pane, for example, do so to exorcise “ the feminine itself, a self-lacerating admission of the same terrible feeling of inherent victimhood”. That is, these artists make a spectacle of female suffering through pain. In a point that could have been further elaborated (and is underexplored in the history of performance and body art in general), this artistic tendency towards pain and self-injury also reveals the privileged contours of whiteness. Snow reflects that “most practitioners of this kind of art tend to be white. This is perhaps because Caucasian people do not have the same historical relationship with pain as other racial groups”. I also have to add that, because I wrote this manuscript in the period after contracting Covid when I was really quite seriously ill, I will be the first to admit that there is a formlessness to it because it emerged at a time when I was sort of a stranger to myself, physically and psychologically, and when I was experiencing quite severe brain fog intermittently. Reading it now, it often feels to me as if somebody else wrote it, but I have to say that the illness in some way loosened or destructured my thinking, so that a lot of the decisions I made were based on instinct rather than any preconceived ideas about what the finished book might look like. Hunter S. Thompson at his home in Aspen, Colorado, 1997. Courtesy: Wikicommons; photograph: Helen Davis Review of Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment by Philippa Snow (Repeater Books, 2022)Snow’s case studies all involve a level of self-consciousness and will to survival. They are ‘pleasure-spectacles’, by which I mean they necessarily involve the violation of form, by which I also mean the body. This book is less about Isabelle Huppert’s Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher, for instance, leaning over the tub to cut her genitals — although Snow did write on Michael Haneke’s film for Artforum — but more about Keaton’s death-defying stunts. It’s self-injury with an attention toward survival, or the performance of survival. It’s what Snow calls the ‘deathlessness’ of director Harmony Korine’s ‘commitment to the joke’. Yes, there is a risk of death there, but that itself might be deathlessness. If survived, it renders you eternal and awesome. (As when we see Keaton survive his famous stunt in Steamboat Bill, Jr.) These case studies, despite their violent nature, are distinctly unsuicidal. In Which as You Know Means Violence, writer and art critic Philippa Snow analyses the subject of pain, injury and sadomasochism in performance, from the more rarefied context of contemporary art to the more lowbrow realm of pranksters, stuntmen and stuntwomen, and uncategorisable, danger-loving YouTube freaks. An effort at perfectible practice or pace, more than pain, lies at the centre of most of the performances. Abramović and Chris Burden don’t mutilate themselves as a result of self-hatred but to consider the human body and its limits. Snow gives us terms for the ‘the grace and violence’ of Korine and Keaton. (It’s worth quoting Snow’s entire description of Keaton in full: ‘He repudiates the sin of boringness by being unpredictable, the chaos of him rippling across what was previously lifeless as if something very heavy — as heavy as love, or God, or the iron door of a bank vault — had been tossed into a lake.’) Korine, Keaton, Abramović, Knoxville: they do anything to condemn ‘the sin of boringness’. A brilliant, bracing and often funny debut, Philippa Snow’sWhich As You Know Means Violencecasts a compassionate but rigorous critical lens on self harm as art and art as accident. The smartest book I’ve read all year, and one I will return to for years to come.”– Allie Rowbottom, author o f Jell-O Girls and Aesthetica.

Another illustrative example comes from Abramović’s infamous Rhythm 0. Standing silently in the middle of a room, she invited the audience to do whatever they please to her motionless body. The artists also placed bottles of wine, glasses, scissors, a loaded gun, and other paraphernalia on a nearby table. In one version of the performance, a fight broke out between audience members as a man attempted to manipulate Abramović’s finger into pulling the trigger while the gun was pointed at her head. A group then set themselves the task of protecting her. Which as You Know Means Violence, from Philippa Snow, is at once an interesting assessment while also being a bit frustrating. Thus, Johnny Knoxville ended up adopting another popular American pastime, newer than the nation’s lust for violence and a little older than its history of stunt performers: he began to see a therapist. “‘I don’t want to fix the part of me that does stunts,’” he recalls saying. “‘Just to get that out in the open… That’s what I don’t want to fix.’” In that interview with Marchese, he is coy about what drives a man to throw himself into a children’s ball-pit full of snakes, or deliberately crash a motorcycle, or split his head open “like a melon” on the concrete floor of a department store, save for saying that some of his impetus to destroy himself is almost certain to emanate from a dark, “unhealthy place”. The reader, left to fill in the blanks, invariably imagines some formative, terrible event that shook these strange desires loose — a childhood injury, an accident bloody enough to scar the mind. David Lynch, the dark suburban yin to Waters’ camp suburban yang, has said that as a child he saw a naked woman staggering down the road at night outside his house, “in a dazed state, crying”. “I have never forgotten that moment,” he told Roger Ebert in an interview in 1986. He has not allowed us to forget it, either — in Blue Velvet, Dorothy, a nightclub singer and rape victim, is seen stumbling past the verdant, manicured lawns of her younger lover’s neighbourhood stark-naked, evidently in distress. If not all artists make such deliberate connections in their work, re-enacting and restaging these determinative, generative moments as if all art were true crime, it cannot be denied that many of them enjoy gesturing elliptically at their own histories. Thompson’s self-destructive habits informed his trademark gonzo journalism. (Photo: Creative Commons)

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Cannot express how much I enjoyed reading this. Apologies to all the friends that have met up with me over these weeks and have had to listen to my gushing stream of praise for this book, its ideas and all the artists mentioned within its covers.

Those who choose to make a hobby, a career or an art practice out of injury are wired differently - subject to unusual motivations, and quite often powered by an ardent death-drive. By focusing on a larger corpus of artists, with a more concerted effort to focus on self-injurious and endurance-based body art from queer, and POC communities, Snow’s exploration of gendered embodiment might have put pressure on the idea that female subjectivity is some sort of internal truth emerging from the body. Snow writes with such kinetic, sensory power here, alongside her characteristic, roving intelligence, that I felt I’d (somewhat queasily) witnessed, as well as read, this gripping exploration of pain and performance. Which As You Know Means Violence is as smart, fearless and funny as its many sensitively drawn subjects. Brilliant.”– Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road Through her measured prose, Snow explains what she finds valuable across all these varied bodies of work. Korine’s personality, for instance, was characterized by a comic combination of self-destruction and self-effacement. In an interview on Letterman in 1998 the director, visibly intoxicated, tells the show’s host that he plans to shoot a sequel to Titanic set on a “rowboat.” The book is concerned with the question of why would someone injure their body in the name of art or entertainment, and why would anyone be interested this spectacle. Though this is her first published book, as both a critic and essayist Snow is prolific, with bylines in Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Frieze, Vogue and many more. Her writing has a singular quality: one of the pleasures of reading her is that certain fixations – Lindsay Lohan, the films of David Lynch , the bind of heterosexuality – repeat, so that her work has a particular Snow sensibility.No one gets celebrity better than writer, critic and i-D contributor Philippa Snow. Her first book [is] a thrilling work of cultural criticism about the peculiar place aestheticised violence occupies in contemporary art and culture.” – iD Magazine PS: Oh God, it is so, so important to me! I need people to understand that when I am, for instance, writing about Logan Paul’s YouTube in the context of Andre Breton’s definition of surrealism or whatever, I am absolutely making fun of myself as much as I am making a point. I think it’s possible to do both things simultaneously: to apply serious analysis to an unserious thing and in doing so make a salient point, and also to recognise the inherent preposterousness of applying that kind of seriousness to some of the dumbest things on earth. The idea that I take myself too seriously might be one of the worst things a person could take away from my writing, to be honest; I find it hard to connect with writers who don’t have at least a little touch of humour – not zaniness, not silliness, but some deadpan sense of the absurd – in their work. A searing meditation on violence, pain and the nature of art under patriarchal, racialised capitalism. Snow’s essential empathy is at its most apparent; for all the withering one-liners & theoretical zeal that propel her writing, this is at base a book about pain, death & creativity, the basic fabric of life… This is the most nakedly, vividly human book I’ve read in some time.”—