This dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside gives rise to a fourth aspect of the felt experience of physical pain, an almost obscene conflation of private and public. It brings with it all the solitude of absolute privacy with none of its safety, all the self-exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibility for camaraderie or shared experience. Artistic objectifications of pain often concentrate on this combination of isolation and exposure. (Scarry 1985: 53)
As noted throughout, the exposure and, more particularly, self-exposure of psychological and bodily trauma has become the central feature of our ‘post-documentary’ culture. Television talk shows, observational documentary, life-style programming and reality TV all facilitate the exhibition and consumption of personal pain and suffering (as well as joy and individual success). Generally speaking, this showcasing of personal trauma is a gendered one; with many of the established and newer formats dismissed as feminised media culture; with few, if any, intellectual pretensions. This is partly the case because the domain of emotional suffering, at least, has been conventionally designated a ‘feminine’ one, with women especially licensed to speak about bodily or psychological insecurity, vulnerability or damage. When ‘masculine’ damage or trauma is at stake, its presentation and articulation in media culture takes on quite different forms and meanings. Bearing in mind this context, this chapter examines an example of the new hybrid of reality TV and performance piece: the David Blaine event entitled ‘Above the Below’. It does so in order to explore the meanings, symbolics and ethics of the current specularisation of bodily trauma in social and media space; revealing the multiple ways in which an ethics of the self and of becoming is articulated in a popular form. Ultimately, the aim is to make more complex our understanding of ‘the apparently oxymoronic “popularity” of trauma’ as cultural text (Radstone 2001:189).
In early September 2003 illusionist David Blaine was sealed within a plexi-glass box and suspended above Tower Bridge in the centre of London with the intention of starving himself for 44 days. His exploit was clearly a media spectacle and was designed to generate ‘event television’.
1 As noted in
chapter 1 event television is ‘high concept’, aiming at reaching a critical mass of viewers through extensive visibility and multimedia choice. As such, it is often stripped across a television channel everyday for a number of weeks and is supported by multi-platform media such as interactive TV or the Internet. The commercial aim is to attract huge audiences and become part of the popular discourse of everyday life. Like soap opera serials, the action is contextualised and amplified by hyperbolic media commentary including talk show interviews, tabloid newspaper coverage and the circulation of participants’ images as celebrities, a process which prompts conversation among audiences about the characters and their behaviour. But unlike soaps, the talk generated is not contingent, rather it is an essential part of the event’s success. The promotion of talk produces the anticipation, elaborate ongoing evaluations and retrospective judgements upon which the commercial success of the venture depends (Couldry 2002: 272, see also Scannell 2002).
‘Above the Below’, devised by Blaine, fits this pattern of a commercial media enterprise whose success is predicated on the audience’s interaction with events and their reportage. It was broadcast by Channel 4 and Sky 1, who presented it as a variation on reality TV. Special shows were devoted to it on 19 and 20 October 2003, the latter being the day when the illusionist exited from his self-imposed imprisonment. The event was streamed live on Channel 4 broadband 24/7 and filmed by Blaine’s collaborator, the avant-garde filmmaker Harmony Korine, for a future documentary also entitled Above the Below. It was promoted as the pinnacle of Blaine’s major productions since 1999 which had so far included interment under the streets – ‘Buried Alive’ (1999), encasement in a block of ice – ‘Frozen in Time’ (2000) and ‘Vertigo’ (2002), in which he stood atop a 100-foot pole, without any means of support or a safety net, for 36 hours. Many of Blaine’s other acts have involved physical endurance or illusions that challenge physical taboos such as eating snakes or slicing off his own ear. Indeed Korine recalls his first, rather bizarre, introduction to Blaine in a pizza restaurant: ‘he got into one of the ovens and turned the heat on. He stayed in there for hours’ (Rose 2003).
British critics of ‘Above the Below’ tended to locate Blaine’s exploits within the context of extreme forms of reality TV in which overt suffering or potential suffering formed a central feature of its appeal. Certainly, one of the reasons for situating the event in London was because reality formats have found great success with British audiences. Popular challenge game shows had already demonstrated that audiences have an appetite for watching physical suffering or psychological shocks. Also prominent during the Blaine period was the Channel 4 broadcast on Sunday 3 October 2003 of
Derren Brown Plays Russian Roulette Live. The title is self-explanatory. With only a few seconds time delay, viewers watched illusionist Brown hold a Smith and Wesson snub-nosed revolver, randomly loaded with a single bullet by a member of the public who had been screened by a psychologist, to his head and pull the trigger. He pulled the trigger on three empty chambers before turning the gun away from his head and shooting the bullet. It seemed to audiences that Brown visibly shook when he reached the third chamber and was uncertain whether or not it was empty. Although this was eventually revealed to be an illusion, commentators had already included the show in the category of voyeuristic, extreme and unacceptable reality programming (Hattersley 2003).
2 The differences here, and they are important ones, is that ‘Above the Below’ was not revealed to be a deception, and it also numbered amongst its viewing constituencies those that came along to watch the event live on the ground over a sustained period of time. This seemed to be a genuine although highly planned ‘happening’ and it was an event evidentially in social space as well as media space.
‘Above the Below’ then was a live event and Blaine’s exploits were multiply-mediated. As will be explained later on in more detail, Blaine’s agenda was explicated and his suffering mediated through extensive commentary. The plexi-glass box both separated him from audiences and contained/framed him, as did the documentary footage, live television filming and web-streaming. These multimedia platforms reinforced the sense of immediacy that is so characteristic of the televisual experience. As already noted, John Ellis describes how television, above all entertainment technologies, has epitomised the process of ‘witness’ through its aesthetic promise of liveness and intimacy. In particular, the abundance of audio and visual information signifies the live event, helping to intensify the experience of witness: ‘witness is underwritten by the presence of the entirely unremarkable within the image, and of the “atmosphere” of sound’ (2000: 12). The spectacle and noise of the shifting, heaving crowds around Tower Bridge offered precisely this congruence of the contingent, unremarkable and ordinary together with the remarkable scene of Blaine’s suspension above them. So too, the images of ordinary people beneath the box seem to condone the event as acceptable, if exceptional, entertainment. Finally, these senses of ‘witnessing’ are further accentuated when the event is of a traumatic or disturbing nature.
For those watching at home audio-visual technology clearly offers a different experience from that of being present at the pro-filmic event; offering a ‘modality’ of experience in which the viewer feels both powerful and disempowered, involved and helpless. There is a real contrast here between the ordinary and the domestic and the extraordinary and geographically distant. This contradictory positioning, argues Ellis, obliges a certain powerless complicity with the unfolding of events whether we agree with them or not – for even if we do not approve of the event we cannot undo or disavow our knowledge of it (2000:11). Having said this, not only our knowledge, but our understanding of such events is also inevitably formed by their framing and contextualisation and, for the live event above all, commentary is needed to direct and orientate viewers. As will be seen in more detail, despite the extended reporting and press releases of ‘Above the Below’, Blaine and his supporters refused any simple explanations of the enterprise. Indeed their interviews and expositions only helped to perpetuate the confusion of distinctions between truth and illusion, art and entertainment, introspection and exhibitionism that came to characterise not only the event but the public’s reaction to it.
Body time/television time
The presentation of ‘Above the Below’ as a countdown of 44 days also signalled the production’s generic relationship to reality programming and, more particularly, to the peculiar (and contradictory) intimacy of this very public enterprise. As Misha Kavka and Amy West suggest, ordinary clock time is expunged by reality genres which operate within their own temporal logic. Instead of linear time featuring years and dates within a historical context they segment the time into days, hours and minutes as experienced by the programmes’ participants; offering countdowns to dénouements such as house or lifestyle transformations, the achievement of personal challenges, feats of endurance or release from various forms of incarceration. In these ways reality entertainment collapses the time of production into the time of transmission, producing a ‘single order that mobilises a community of viewers’ and affords them the optimum sense of immediacy and intimacy or at least, that is the intention (Kavka & West 2004:141). The live streaming of ‘Above the Below’ reinforced this collapse so that theoretically the ‘liveness’ and ‘immediacy’ of being able to view Blaine at all times (including the prolonged ‘dead time’ in which he does little or nothing) involved audiences in the enterprise. It established continuity between the external time of viewers and time as experienced by Blaine himself and which is marked upon his body through starvation.
Time in reality TV frequently begins on ‘day one’ and is measured by rituals of sleeping, eating, set activities and the graphics of the screen clock. This is the case with Blaine where the clock was set from the day of his incarceration and much of the debate was about how much ‘time’ he had and whether he could last out its duration. In Korine’s film, a female spectator is overheard repeatedly asking in an awed and incredulous voice, ‘
how long has he got left to go?’
3 On another occasion, Blaine is filmed discussing with his production manager the feasibility of his surviving for 44 days. His manager warns him that even if he survives he could go ‘past the point of no return’ into organ failure and asks what would be the point of surviving publicly 44 days only to die on the sixtieth when everyone else has gone home. Blaine himself compared the challenge with the protest carried out by the Irish hunger-striker Bobby Sands, who died in 1981 on the sixty-sixth day of his protest.
In interview with Korine he offered a variety of explanations for the enterprise, stating at one point that ‘I’m doing it for myself.’ But later he added, ‘I love making people watch suffering ‘cause I had to watch it my whole life … I saw everybody that I know, my mother, my real dad, drop dead in front of my face.’
4 He goes on to recall his mother’s unfailing stoicism in the face of a long terminal illness. Blaine’s project designer commented, ‘David doesn’t recognise limitations – he wants to go right to the edge and wants to do it in public to show how real it is’ (Asthana 2003). Blaine seemed to be challenging not only himself but also ‘time’ and specifically time’s erosion of corporeal strength, vitality and agency with these references to the political body (protestor) and the sick body (patient). As the days unfolded the public and media commentators became increasingly convinced that ‘Above the Below’ was not going to be a feat of illusion after all but a feat of ‘real’ endurance and a battle against the clock. The authenticity of the enterprise as both reality TV and endurance feat is marked out through the temporal logic of the project (44 days not 43 or 45) and by locating the body and its experience as the object of time passing.
As Blaine undertook his fast over Tower Bridge, sustained allegedly only by water unadulterated by supplements, the spectacle of his suffering attracted bizarre behaviour from the general public. Suspended near the Tower of London, his exhibition of suffering and public responses to it recalled the pre-modern spectacle of public punishment and humiliation which was to be replaced by far more insidious and occluded disciplinary mechanisms of bio-power and surveillance (Foucault 1975). In this case, however, the event was in fact a bizarre marriage of the pre-modern and the post-modern with Blaine’s suffering transformed into multimedia spectacle. Police voiced concerns about scenes of public disorder including an attempt to sever Blaine’s water supply, the appearance of air guns and the firing of paint balls and other projectiles at the box. Others taunted him by beating drums to prevent him from sleeping or by cooking food nearby so that the smell would torment him. Overall, while Blaine certainly had his fans, the early days at least attracted extensive criticism from the public with some website commentators observing that only his death would make interesting viewing and even then they would probably miss it as the media would not dare to show it.
Despite the ‘expert’ and documentary evidence, as well as the evidence of their own eyes, audiences were, at times, both unsympathetic and sceptical to the degree that Blaine’s US public relations advisors were alleged to have wanted to pull him out. They were concerned about the ‘near medieval barrage of abuse’ which he initially attracted and which was potentially dangerous (Palmer 2003). British commentators observed that the event said more about the British public than it did about Blaine: ‘Like the crowds outside the
Big Brother house, conspicuously for or against the evictee, what we seem most at pains to do in all this is to have the self-contained individual made part of our crowd, to have him say something about us.’
5The analogy with
Big Brother was an apt one as the success of the series was predicated on the participants winning a kind of public popularity contest.
Big Brother contestants had to prove their skills in negotiating the social setting of the house and its inmates and, it soon emerged that anyone too smart or too media savvy, would be regarded with suspicion. In
Big Brother it was the girl or boy ‘next door’ that tended to come out victorious after a series of evictions in which housemates often re-entered public life only to discover that they had been the subject of vitriolic media abuse while inside.
6 Blaine had none of the advantages of ‘ordinariness’ which so endeared reality contestants to the British public and, far less well known as a celebrity in Britain than in the US where he was already a star, neither did he have the public’s more distanced admiration. Blaine himself commented, ‘I expect most people not to understand, and be angered by it.’
7 It seemed he had set himself a near impossible task in that he attempted to be spectacle and reality, entertainer and ascetic and an elevated celebrity with popular appeal. He had to literally ‘stage manage’ the contradiction, in Korine’s words, of ‘public isolation’.
8The body in pain
Public scepticism about the degree of suffering underwent by Blaine was rooted partly in the impossibility of sharing an understanding of pain as it is experienced by the individual subject. As Elaine Scarry has argued in
The Body in Pain, corporeal suffering necessarily involves a split or division between one’s own sense of reality as a suffering subject and the reality of others who can only learn of one’s pain at one remove. This splitting is essentially dangerous as, unless a feat of the imagination or creation spans this divide, others not only fail to empathise, they can in fact feel permitted to inflict pain themselves (1985: 4–12). This was graphically illustrated in the scene in
Above the Below in which Blaine invites a member of the public to repeatedly punch him in the stomach. The well-muscled pugilist makes three convincing attempts to floor his challenger, prompted by an amused and jeering crowd. In the example of ‘Above the Below’ the crowd and its capacity for empathy are twice removed, through the ‘splitting’ described by Scarry and through spectacular display which, by definition almost, precludes dialogue.
9Media coverage made it very clear that Blaine’s body and its decline was central to the narrative of the event. The Channel 4 website declared in the manner of a show-ground huckster ‘THE FEAT: read the complete low down on why and how David Blaine is enduring 44 days of isolation, the dangers he faces and what will happen to his body.’ Newspapers summarised ‘what could go wrong’; noting ‘after three weeks, hallucinations or dementia set in. After four weeks, bones begin to weaken and muscle tissue shows signs of damage … a person could face severe brain damage, damage or failure of internal organs. Death is possible at any time…’ (Austin 2003). In his second week Blaine was quoted as saying, ‘I have entered starvation mode, low energy … really low energy and a freak taste in my mouth … I believe this is starvation. I read it could happen after two weeks. I didn’t believe it’ (in Asthana 2003). It was in subsequent days that public opinion, on the ground at least, seemed to become more favourable and crowds became less negative in their attentions towards the man in the box. The longer Blaine remained in the box, the more he starved, the more approval he seemed to attract and crowds of up to 10,000 visitors in a day increasingly overwhelmed the sceptics.
Huge crowds gathered on the day of his release. Blaine, stripped to the waist, was weighed as he exited from the box and was shown to have lost four stones in weight. As he emerged screen captions made his suffering explicit; listing symptoms including dizziness, impaired vision, thinning of the organ walls, arrhythmia, muscle spasms, blood toxicity, loss of skin pigmentation and so on. He appeared to be frail, ill and close to emotional breakdown. He only managed to say a few words to the crowd, punctuated by sobs: ‘This has been one of the most important experiences of my life … I’ve learned more in that little box than I have in years … I’ve learned how strong we all are as human beings.’ With a backdrop of screaming crowds the scene became a parody of the moment when the star emerges from the movie theatre to greet his/her fans or evictees leave the Big Brother house. But instead of being guided by minders into a luxury car Blaine was pushed towards the waiting ambulance. The cameras following him as he was carried into the vehicle produced footage reminiscent of ‘emergency services’ reality TV as paramedics connected him up to drips and monitors and gave him an ECG. In this sense the depiction of this experience was part of a wider ‘post-documentary’ aesthetic; the ‘continuing “colloquial turn” in the culture and a shift towards greater engagement with everyday terms of living and the varieties of ordinary “private” experience, both pleasant and traumatic’ (Corner 2004:291).
The continual monitoring and final weighing of Blaine’s body marked it as the site of transformation and self-management; a spectacular rendition of the ‘before and after’ imagery used by advertising for charities and slimming clubs alike. His performance suggested a kind of ‘technics of the self’ in which individuals can through self-monitoring form and transform their bodies and, consequently, their souls, thoughts and conduct. As Baldwin
et al. (2004:186–7) suggest, the consumption of food and drink is a truly ‘generic practice’ which is understood as a necessity shared by all. But in developed nations, at least, ‘accepted present-day standards of eating – what we eat, how quickly food is consumed, when we eat – involve a considerable degree of self-control’ and this too is commonly understood. The tremendous success of the weight-reduction diet as commodity, lifestyle and regime forms the discursive backdrop to Blaine’s stunt and its attendant fascination. The same period witnessed an overwhelming interest in, for example, the ‘Atkins diet’; an interest which went far beyond its efficacy, entering into the morbid arena of detailed discussions of biological processes (fat breakdown, ketosis, constipation, urine analysis and so forth). The ‘problem’ of weight control was never far from public fascination with the stunt. In interview with Libby Brooks (2003) after the event Blaine comments:
If I’d had food in front of me I couldn’t have done it. I can’t even control myself on an aeroplane. I need to eat, eat even though I don’t want that food … I’m a binge eater, which is the worst thing you can do for your heart and your metabolism.
Brooks adds, ‘for a moment one wonders whether the whole stunt was just the elaborate execution of an eating disorder’. The climate of the 1990s onwards has been one in which body management, in all its manifestations, has become a central preoccupation. Jason Jacobs suggests that the period represented ‘an unprecedented intensification of the medicalisation of everyday life: regular health scares, the theorisation of the “risk society”, the promotion of “healthy living” … as a moral as much as a medical imperative’ (2003: 12) and all contributed to a popular engagement with medical fictions and their strange association of morbidity and glamour.
10These concerns are also articulated in reality ‘emergency services’ TV and in documentaries and lifestyle programming that attended to diet, plastic surgery and makeovers; these last arguably aiding self-disciplinarity in support of society’s normalising mechanisms (see Goodwin 1993; Hawkins 2001; Palmer 2004: 177–80; Wheatley 2001). In this sense, critics were wrong to associate ‘Above the Below’ solely with the grossest exploitation reality programming, for the event also tapped into the prevailing ‘ethical turn’ in reality formats towards self-disciplinarity and the making and re-making of the subject. As Gay Hawkins explains, new programme formats have been promoting ‘ethics’, not in the sense of moral imperatives, but in the sense of ‘becoming’ and the technics of the self that this involves. This ethical turn (and the Foucaultian and Deleuzean theories that explicate them so effectively) involve not only ‘bodies, actions and sensibilities’ but also an ‘ethics of existence’ revealed in the ‘practical and everyday terrain of making oneself a subject’ (2001:414). Blaine’s exit from the box, then, while evidential of his re-fashioning of the body through starvation was also, in keeping with this broader cultural turn, an expression of a supposed psychical transformation.
As Blaine tried to express the depth of his experience crowds cheered in the festive manner common to many forms of public celebration or entertainment. Despite the ‘emotional high’ of the moment of his exit from the box he was unable to fully reveal his corporeal trauma or to ‘show’ his physical and psychic pain or the transformation these had effected. This would require some form of demonstration of the erosion of corporeal distinctions between inside and outside, mind and body. In reality lifestyle programming visible transformations are obviously the most legible: the tidy house, the newly slim or fit or fashionable body. Or, in talk shows and other ‘confessional’ forms, when subjects are in pain, this has to be expressed verbally and hyperbolically in order to connect with audiences. Blaine had no adequate language to express his experience, no wounds to show to his audience, no grotesque body as a signifier of damage;
11 a situation in complete contrast to several of his most dramatic magic tricks, which had worked exactly in this mode of overt wounding where he pretends to injure himself.
The problem with ‘pain’ is that it is essentially a private matter. Pain inhabits the body, which is ‘the most contracted of spaces, the small circle of living matter’ (Scarry 1985: 22) and that pain ‘unmakes’ the subject, reducing and objectifying him/her in the eyes of others; only the successful expression of pain can help span this divide.
12 From this perspective Blaine was disadvantaged from the outset in that the undoubted pain of gradual starvation has, from a distance, few external signs and his enclosure made communication nearly impossible. In any case, as Scarry observes, the expression of pain is itself always mediated, operating through proxies (those who speak on behalf of the subject such as doctors or PR advisors), analogies (‘my pain feels like…’), legal document or art work (1985: 6–10). Within Scarry’s terms, for Blaine to ‘successfully’ communicate and gain the ‘correct’ form of engagement with his audience he would need to transform spectacle into art, private pain into public expression.
Hunger artist
The convening of the public around scenes of violence … has come to make up wound culture: the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and open persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma and the wound. (Seltzer 1998:1)
As noted in
chapter 1 the exhibitionism and concomitant voyeuristic distancing and objectification of the subject in pain has been identified as partly the inspiration for the new forms of observational programming now known as reality TV. A number of critics have pointed to reality TV’s roots in psycho-social experiments such as the notorious Stanley Milgram (1961–62) and Stanford Prison Experiments (1971). The Stanford Experiment introduced volunteers into the hierarchical, anonymous world of the penal system where they adopted the roles of prisoner or guard for the duration. Isolated from the world, the experiment soon spun out of control as the prisoners rebelled and the regime became more hard-line. One ‘inmate’s’ textbook symptoms of a nervous breakdown were even dismissed by the experiment’s director Philip Zimbardo as fakery; a misconception made as he himself became overly immersed in his character of ‘Prison Superintendent’. Critics of reality TV’s exploitation of its participants note wryly: ‘Zimbardo … is sometimes spoken of as being a frustrated artist, and reality TV creatives can be equally viewed as industry versions of today’s conceptual artists, creating templates for installation-worlds’; worlds which may be regarded as ethically problematic (Cohen & Brenton 2003: 91). ‘Above the Below’ is one such problematic environment. Whether understood as experiment, art installation or reality vehicle its attraction still depends upon its exhibition of preventable starvation. The debatable question then is whether the ‘intentions’ motivating the event, even if they could be fully apprehended, can ever be said to mitigate its exploitation of the subject.
The artistic imperative of ‘Above the Below’ was signalled in a number of ways. Korine’s involvement in the film of the event already marked the enterprise as avant-garde project as well as populist crowd pleaser. So too did the overt references to writers and artists including Franz Kafka and Chris Burden. Blaine’s reference to Kafka’s short story ‘A Hunger Artist’ (1924), in particular, signalled the peculiar conjunction of populist performer, artist and misunderstood religious ascetic that Blaine’s feat seemed to invoke. This story tells of a successful side-show star whose feat is to fast for forty days, sipping only water, for the entertainment of a paying audience. He sits in a cage, watched constantly to ensure that he does not cheat but, in fact, he is honourable and would do no such thing. This surveillance and the crowd’s liberty to feel his wasted limbs overcome any scepticism. Eventually, however, as more spectacular circus acts render him redundant he starves to death, neglected in his cage. The allusion to Kafka and his work signals the ascetic, almost messianic, connotations of Blaine’s act as well as the acknowledgement that the public may not ‘understand’ or appreciate it. Blaine’s silence, his obvious contemplation (he claimed that he would leave his body and go ‘astral zipping’) and his overwhelming abstinence necessarily distance him from the crowd.
In contradiction to the idea of the body as a residence that can be vacated or a gross object that can be overcome Scarry claims that the suffering of the ascetic is precisely not about denying but about emphasising the body to the exclusion of the world and its concerns (1985: 34). Moreover, within a secular society in which the media frequently depicts deprivation as being ‘elsewhere’ and usually caused by economics, war or natural disaster, overt religiosity or introspection is often regarded with suspicion. As such, self-inflicted starvation, which is of course qualitatively different from disease, would be viewed by the sceptical as a peculiarly masochistic, even narcissistic activity. For if the body is a means or instrument of agency that permits engagement with the world then the refusal of engagement may be regarded as challenge; a challenge taken up by the audiences who aimed to gain Blaine’s attention and ‘make’ him react to them.
Those visiting the site certainly commented on the carnivalesque atmosphere beneath the elevated form; a side-show mood involving adults and children, tourists and locals, hamburger vendors and committed fans. Together they constituted an unruly ‘grotesque’ body as outlined by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World (1968). Bakhtin describes how this body is embodied through the consumption of food and drink and how, in doing so, the body becomes worldly:
The distinctive character of this body is its open, unfinished nature, its interaction with the world. These traits are most fully and concretely revealed in the act of eating … Here man tastes the world, introduces it into his body, makes it part of himself. (Bakhtin 1968:281)
In contrast to their ‘below’, Blaine’s suspension ‘above’ signalled the occupation of a different cultural sphere; or at the very least a different iconographic register – that of the classical body as figured in the form of the classical statue. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White note: ‘the classical statue is the radiant centre of a transcendental individualism, “put on a pedestal”, raised above the viewer and the commonality and anticipating passive admiration from below. We
gaze up at the figure and wonder’ (1986: 21). Unlike the multiple, teeming, mobile and ‘split’ body of the crowd, this classical body is figured as distant, isolated, sealed and contained. Several of Blaine’s earlier exploits placed him in equally elevated positions, most notably ‘Vertigo’ (cited above) in which he stood atop a tall column for a day and a half precisely resembling a statue. Korine’s
Above the Below also shows Blaine standing on one of the London Eye’s glass pods high above the Thames river; the shot is strongly reminiscent of the statue of Christ overlooking Rio de Janeiro. Not only Blaine’s suspension but also his incarceration in the transparent box affirms this positioning as contained. It is also reinforced by careful and discrete administration of his bodily functions through both intense medical supervision and catheters. In order for Blaine to remain dignified and ‘above’, his bodily functions, their operation and even his physical deterioration require constant management. In a sense then, this is pain without the markers or indignity of pain, bodily trauma with its offensiveness heavily masked, suffering of an elevated kind.
Additional meanings are lent to this figuration of suffering as either Christic, self-indulgent or introspective through references to the work of performance artists such as Chris Burden, whose public and sometimes spectacular acts of self-harm have been read as implicitly (sometimes explicitly) political and worldly.
13 His most notorious works explored the psychological experience of danger and pain and involved shocking abuses of his own body. In ‘Shoot’ (1971) Burden was filmed at a gallery reception while a friend shot him in the arm and in his overtly Christic piece entitled ‘Trans-fixed’ (1974) he allowed himself to be nailed by his palms to the roof of a car. ‘Five day locker piece’ (1971) is the clearest antecedent of ‘Above the Below’. In this work Burden was incarcerated in a locker measuring two feet high, two feet wide and three feet deep for five days. He had ceased eating several days earlier. The locker above him contained five gallons of water and the locker below contained an empty five-gallon bottle. These works occurred during the Vietnam War and have been read within this context. Kathy O’Dell (1998), for example, has argued that ‘masochistic’ performance artists such as Burden foregrounded significant ruptures in the social contract. They also explored the coupling of isolation and exposure signalled by Scarry in the opening quotation. The artist’s encasement in locker, cage or plexi-glass box is a metaphor for the isolating experience of suffering even when it is made visible and on display. It highlights the potentially dangerous distance or chasm between those in pain and others and the political implications of the inevitable lack of empathy entailed by such distanciation.
Some commentators have chosen to understand Blaine’s work (or its reception) in political as well as personal terms. ‘Vertigo’, for example, was read by admirers such as the late paraplegic actor Christopher Reeve as an assertion of the power of mind over body whereas others regarded it as a living tribute to those killed or damaged by the events of 11 September 2001. One fan commented that Blaine’s presence was a declaration that ‘we’re still here – especially after what we went through’.
14 In the case of ‘Above the Below’ there was the suggestion that self-imposed suffering (and by a US citizen) was inappropriate and ‘crass’ in the light of the British public’s opposition to the ‘war against terror’ launched against Iraq. Speculation also addressed Blaine’s Jewish ancestry and whether his interest in the events of the Holocaust had influenced his work. When asked whether the suffering of the concentration camp inmates was connected with his exploits he only commented enigmatically, ‘I think it was really difficult for them because they never knew whether they were going to get murdered or not. The only similarity I can come up with is hunger’ (in Sigesmund 2003).
Performing gender/trauma
As in other ritual dramas, the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactiment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualised form of their legitimation. (Butler 1990: 140)
Having noted this conflation of meanings and roles arising from the public performance of personal suffering as spectacle (Christic, artistic, ascetic, political) there is one additional layering that merits consideration: the gendering of Blaine’s body within this field of vision and within these contexts. Visual representations are especially important to the cultural process of differentiation between the genders and the surface and interiors of bodies are frequently looked to as evidence of biological sexual difference. Blaine’s elevated body in ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Above the Below’ is essentially articulated as a ‘masculine’ performance of the classical body with all its associations with high culture, heroic and transcendental individualism. As Stallybrass and White (1986: 23–5) imply, and Mary Russo (1994) demonstrates at length, the opposition between classical and grotesque body can be a gendered one; with the sealed and elevated body as masculine and the grounded, open, split and grotesque body as feminine. Within culture, and indeed within art history, the classical statue has been understood as possessing the attributes of rational, intellectual authority. Anthea Callen has shown, for example, how the well-known Greek classical statue the ‘Apollo Belvedere’, was taken as an ideal of masculine authority and one used as the model inspiration for painted and sculpted portraits authorising the power of politicians, leaders and gentry (2002:606–13). Images of the grotesque, then, are precisely those which are abjected from the bodily canons of classical aesthetics and the grotesque as a bodily category emerges as a ‘deviation from the norm’ with the female body (already a deviation from the norm) rendered doubly grotesque (Russo 1994: 8–12).
If Russo’s grotesque female body is made doubly grotesque, Blaine’s body is multiply-masculinised through its biological designation as ‘male’, through the positioning and policing of his body and its corporeal signs and through its masochistic display. It has already been noted how the outflow of Blaine’s bodily functions were hidden and/or discretely removed. It was possible to watch his deterioration without witnessing the offensiveness of starvation or overhearing expressions of pain. And, again, in the example of Chris Burden’s locker performance, the seclusion of enclosure meant that his bodily functions and his suffering also went unseen. From this perspective, and in Blaine’s case in particular, these were performances of ‘containment’ in more than one sense of the word and signifiers of the masculine (almost macho) performance of suffering. The communication (such as it is) of Blaine’s suffering is always delivered in a deadpan way, revealing very little in terms of any emotional or physical hurt. Aside from the moment of his exit Blaine always spoke of his impending suffering and risk-taking with dry humour or blunt pragmatism. When asked about his fear of falling from the column in ‘Vertigo’ he responded with the simple observation that the potential for instant death was enough to keep him standing. Again, Burden’s dry and laconic presentations of his pieces enact a refusal to be regarded as physically weak or vulnerable. Blaine’s stoicism, therefore, is one of the contradictions of his act as ‘Above the Below’ has to present a creditable picture of suffering while containing its signs and expressions. Ultimately, this stoicism has to be maintained as it is also a necessary accoutrement of masculinity; one whose importance has by no means diminished within the media culture of the twenty-first century.
Amelia Jones, in her illuminating analysis of gender and performance art (as defined by her as ‘body art’), explores the complexities of the relationship between the artistic performance of suffering and shifting formations of gender and sexuality. Her analysis points to the tenacious survival of normative codes of masculine power and artistic sovereignty even as these were being challenged, superseded or ironised in the art world. Jones argues, for example, that performance work of the 1970s both ironised the heroic aspects of artistic predecessors (such as Jackson Pollock and his action painting) but also frequently maintained many of their legitimising elements (1998: 104). Importantly, she suggests that the prevalence of masochistic strategies, specifically in male performance, was rooted in the inability of the male artist to un-latch himself fully from the ineluctably gendered artistic myth of self-coherence and self-assertion (1998: 128–9). Reflecting on the work of Kathy O’Dell, already cited above, who argues that masochistic scenarios can be read as resistance or challenge to the modern social contract, Jones chooses to insist on the gendered and sexualised meanings of these scenarios and the masculine grounds of masochism itself. She notes:
Such a wilful subjection of the masculine body to the violence of the other might seem in a direct and simple way to unhinge male subjectivity’s normative link to the active wielding of power. And yet … this ‘perversion’ of masculinity can also function as a means of ensuring the coherence and power of the masculine subject. (1998:130)
In this context, Jones points to the mythologisation of the male artist martyr and romantic individual and his assertion of coherent self-hood through the overt display of his endurance and ‘survivability’.
Like the hero of sequel action films, the masochistic performance artist continually sets himself new challenges that attest to his indestructibility, variations on a theme of the durability of the male body. The repetitious structure of these scenes is made more explicit when we consider other projects orchestrated by Blaine or by his most recent collaborator Korine. We have already noted the scene in
Above in Below in which a young man continually punches Blaine. This seems to be a more controlled version of Korine’s project ‘Fight’ (undated, with Blaine as camera operator) in which Korine deliberately picked fights on the streets of New York in order to get himself assaulted by different ethnic groups. In
Above in Below the pugilist and his friends are black. The assertion of the self through the presentation and visual record of the impervious body as both ‘masculine’ and ‘white’ is almost too obvious here but nonetheless needs to be mentioned. These scenes can also be read in the light of David Fincher’s controversial film
Fight Club (1999) as ceremonies of masculine self-assertion and redemption through aggression and a rejection of feminised culture. With a nod towards Judith Butler as quoted above, therefore, spectacles of masculine suffering such as those of Burden, Korine and Blaine may be regarded as theatrical and hyperbolic repetitions of the more banal and everyday performance of gender; re-enactments that continue to legitimise and ritualise masculine power and ensure its display.
To conclude, it makes sense to understand the fascination, confusion and intermittent hostility surrounding ‘Above the Below’ as responses partly rooted in Blaine’s performance of bodily trauma and masculinity together within the current moment of media culture. Put simply, Blaine’s act does not seem to properly fit established models of performance and display. It may invoke spectacular performances of masculinity with antecedents in popular entertainment but not in any consistent ways. It may reference them through its codification of martyr, artist, survivor and so on, but far from explicitly. It may present itself as a reality programming ‘event’ but it ultimately fails to position itself clearly within this frame of reference. As already noted, the exposure and, more particularly, self-exposure of bodily and psychological trauma has become the central feature of our ‘post-documentary’ culture and the foundation of ‘tabloid’ and reality TV. But popular television’s exhibition, revelation and consumption of personal pain and suffering has been consistently, although not wholly, marked (and frequently condemned) as ‘feminine’. The emotional arena of talk shows, the domestic or leisure space of observational documentary, the sexualised space of reality TV more broadly, all permit the public articulation of the personal within the formerly masculinised space of the public sphere. While ‘Above the Below’ adopts the structuration of reality formats (webstreaming, liveness, temporal collapse and so forth) it did not adopt their discourse of emotional exhibitionism or easy-going sociality. As such it occupied a far more ambivalent space within media culture and arguably failed to provide the necessary illusion of uniting subject and viewer that reality programming requires.