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

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HC: In the book, you quote the artist Nina Arsenault: ‘Everybody’s lives are mythic, everybody’s lives are big. It’s a lie of TV, capitalism, propaganda, that our lives are casual … ’ I think this also, in a way, describes your approach – that you assume there’s intelligence and meaning in most things and set out to find it. 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. Reading Snow’s book, it’s apparent that critical and popular interpretations of performances featuring self-directed violence depend to a greater degree upon the identity of the performer. In particular, Snow reflects on the relationship between gender and violence. In chapter two, ‘This Performance Art Is for the Birds’, she considers work by Nina Arsenault, a trans artist who often reconfigures her own image within durational performances that involve acts of self-harm, such as whipping herself while riding a stationary bike ( 40 Days and 40 Nights: Working Towards a Spiritual Experience , 2012) or burning herself with cigarettes ( Lillex , 2013). 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.” 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. 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

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. 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 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 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’.

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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. The glaring difference is that the Bumfights creators did not make a statement concerning the obvious inequalities the sordid production exploited. Although the matter of commentary, the ontological status of being ‘a commentary’, does not need to be formally declared or claimed (there is a greater message beyond the text), it does need to be apparent either by virtue of context or presentation or some diegetic symbolism, allusion, signifier or reference. If one struggles to find evidence of some effort towards commentary, at least some minimal aesthetic gesture or reference in the glyphs of language, beyond metaphorical equivalence, well, it probably is not commentary but rather declared as commentary by third party retrospective analysis. This isn’t to say a historiographical revision isn’t appropriate or erudite or urgent, but it is a difference between declaring something was and still is and is now seen as. This isn’t crystalline in Snow’s text, and it doesn’t have to be. 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. 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 As far as the argument about self-harm, real, staged, and even fictional, is concerned there is not a lot new here. But it is presented as a more coherent whole than in many other publications. This helps the reader to make a better evaluation of the premise(s) and more important decide where they believe the line is between art and, well, whatever you want to call the other side of the line. As far as the basic argument, I don't think there is really that much debate about the validity but about the degree.

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? 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. A blending of art and pop cultural criticism about people who injure themselves for our entertainment or enlightenment. 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.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.”—