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

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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. Svelte and smart analysis… Snow has a witty and sleek style, approaching the subjects of life, art and performance pushed to their extremes with sensitivity and care. This is a book about pain and hurt that, somehow, is both provocative and immensely pleasurable to read.”– Anna Cafolla, The Face 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. 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.

As she notes, some of the underlying themes of the franchise – masculinity, violence, guns, risk, self-harm and suburban ennui – have strong links to 1970s performance art. In Burden’s Shoot (1971), for instance, the artist arranged to be filmed while getting shot in the shoulder. Burden would later claim in a 2007 New Yorker interview with Schjedahl that the extremes he went to in Shoot and other self-injurious performances were motivated by ‘want[ing] to be taken seriously as an artist’, thereby offering an intriguing take on the contemporary metric for artistic achievement. and performance artist is another. Performance artists are always so goddamn self-important, intellectualizing everything they do. I don’t intellectualize anything I do. I’m kind of uncomfortable with that term [“performance artist”] because it comes across as highbrow, elitist, pompous and not entertaining. We’re just trying to make you laugh. We’re like the Three Stooges, except we’re doing it for real. The second chapter of As You Know contains a long discussion of Marina Abramović and gender. “Is it possible to earn one’s own seat at the big boy’s table, as a woman, not by laughing at your degradation, but adopting all that gung-ho, big-boy violence for oneself?” Snow asks. The question here is whether there is something distinct about being a woman artist interested in violence which Abramović’s work gives us an insight into. Zupančič’s chapter ‘Repetition’ in The Odd One In: On Comedy opens with the famous line of Marx from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ Lines later, she writes that repetition is ‘among the most prominent comic techniques.’ But not just comedy: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’. Snow’s monograph is interested in how and why representations of self-injury and cruelty are productive parodies of a whole, self-contained, and fulfilled body. She particularly attends to trans representations of self-injury and cruelty, likening Arsenault’s performance of the feminine to queer artist Cajsa von Zeipel. ‘Her adoption of, and subsequent dismantling of, hyper-feminine attributes might be interpreted as a generous act of martyrdom for trans and cis women alike,’ Snow writes, ‘the former often unfairly yoked to a conventional image of femininity as a matter of life and death as well as of conformity, desirability, and professional advancement’. Snow’s monograph is not a theoretical account of biopolitics and violence in contexts of US empire — you can turn elsewhere for that — but more of an attempt to understand why individuals utilise self-violence to rebel against those contexts. For the most part, Snow focusses less on gruelling instances of self-injury but instead the comedic, pathetic, or humiliating. She elucidates how comedy, to quote Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, is ‘always a pleasure-spectacle of form’s self-violation’. Snow’s ability to move from niche performance art to the messianic iconography of millennial Americana is one of the book’s greatest strengths.”– Bryony White , Elephant Magazine. This gripping, brainy, fascinating and often hilarious book took me on the wildest of rides through art and the body, literature, pop culture, sensation, gender, class, mortality, theory – what else even is there? The sense that Philippa Snow had an absolute blast writing this is palpable and contagious; reading Which As You Know Means Violence left me with a giddy gratitude for this strange human life.”– Michelle Tea Works like Chris Burden’s Shoot, which is often considered as an exemplary work of 1970s body art, are habitually thought about in terms of “mania”, “oblivion”, “agony”, “ecstasy”, “physical discomfort” and “inner turmoil”. Much of Snow’s criticism is focused on the excessive aftereffects of this genre, but I would argue that what undergirds so much of painful and self-injurious body art is the precarious balance between excess and mania on the one hand, and control and restraint on the other.

Though the works in Which as You Know Means Violence produce entertaining or spectacular forms of injury, scarification, blood, and pain, much of this kind of art is also about carefully controlling the execution of a plan, or about training and restraining the body in judiciously managed ways. Perhaps the rub, then, is that while it is a very human impulse to desire death-defying mastery over the self, what these works tend to always reveal is that despite our best efforts, we are complexly vulnerable to a world, and others, that we cannot always control.Holly Connolly: What I love about your work as a critic is that you’re able to find meaning and value in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, so that your criticism often adds a new depth or dimension to the work itself. What do you think the role of the critic is? 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 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. 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

Snow takes a more exploratory approach that gives the reader ample context and space to consider the question of commentary. It is in offering rich contextualisation where her writing is most engaging. 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. Review of Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment by Philippa Snow (Repeater Books, 2022) 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.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. There is a really interesting look at Harmony Korine’s ‘lost’ film of trying to start fights with strangers – Fight Harm – which I would love to have seen contrasted with the uber-male parody of the Nietzschean ideal ‘Fight Club’. Both the novel and the film aimed to offer fictional commentary on a generation of men “raised by women”. As a nine Inch Nails fan I would also have liked to learn more about Flanagan’s role in the band’s early music videos such as “Happiness In Slavery”, (contrasted with live stage performances from the Jim Rose Circus), included in the extended snuff film, Broken Movie. But perhaps outright murder is beyond the remit. Where Camille Paglia offered yet another tossed-off line that female sexuality is power, period, it makes one wonder what then is nasty, painful, gory sex performed upon the submissive male, a mere display of force or an overturning of the paradigm, an impossible flipside? Snow has somehow created an enjoyable—indelible- book-length meditation on pain. Most notable is its critical analysis of hurt in the culture industry at large.”– Stephanie La Cava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You. In both of these performances, Arsenault did not express any signs of pain, though audiences can clearly discern her injuries. Relatedly, when discussing other now-canonical feminist performances, such as Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974) and Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), Snow notes how these artists seemingly only have to let down their boundaries to be exposed to the latent violence of misogyny. The state of vulnerability experienced by Abramović, Arsenault and Ono stands in stark contrast to Burden’s and Knoxville’s active pursuit of violent encounters with the world. In Which As You Know Means Violence, Snow figures most of the theoretical work of the book through the lens of physical wounding. But what happens when these forms of self-injury intersect with other, perhaps less obvious, forms of self-harm, like exhaustion, hunger, confinement and endurance? With a focus on the spectacularisation of self-injury, there is a critical tendency to only read this sort of performance or body art as extreme or excessive, or through the lens of annihilation or aberration.