Specular Suffering: (Staging) the Bleeding Body
(Editor's note: This essay is part of the ongoing PAJ series, "Art, Spirituality, and Religion," in which artists and critics explore artworks and art practices shaped by religious imagery, liturgical forms, and theological concepts.)
Gaze with the blessed Apostle St. Thomas, not merely on the print of the nails in Christ's hands; be not satisfied with putting your fingers in the holes made by the nails in his hands; neither let it be sufficient to put your hand into the wound in his side; but enter entirely by the door in his side and go straight up to the very heart of Jesus.
Brother Leo, The Little Flowers of St. Francis
I use blood as more than a physiological exercise . . . my concern is to make the unbearable bearable, to provoke viewers to reconsider their own understanding of beauty and suffering.
Franko B, Live: Art and Performance
The symbolism of religious stigmata is at the core of the staging of the bleeding body in contemporary performance art. While the performance context of the last fifteen years is worlds apart from the religious devotional practices of late medieval believers, artists such as Franko B and Bálint Szombathy encourage spectators to imaginatively engage with the materiality of their bleeding bodies in order to elicit an intense connection with, or awareness of, the "sorrows" they suffer. In this respect their choice to present themselves as marked and bloodied draws upon the most iconic image of Western civilization—the crucifixion. In late-capitalist, post-industrial Western society, words are inadequate, imprecise, and potentially deceptive. Images too, in their excessive presence, have lost their punctum. Instead, these artists embody communication, transforming the incommunicable "word" of their own concerns into bleeding flesh. Whether consciously or not, these artists' bodies resonate the iconography of religious suffering, and provide an intense, spiritual site of connection for today's largely secular audiences of performance art.
The provocative staging of the bleeding body as corporeal reality—at a time when the medico-scientific management of bodies and tele-filmic distancing of real bodies [End Page 108] works to contain or mask the bloody reality of our interiors—may be understood as a contemporary exploration of the role of the sacrificial body, both as an extension of the limits of representation and as a signaling of desire for the intense and personal connection conventionally associated with the contemplation of religious images of suffering. Although the performance actions of artists Franko B and Szombathy do not necessarily make conscious or deliberate reference to crucifixion imagery, the choice to use bleeding wounds in performance draws upon the tradition of the traumatized body of Christ "on show" that is central to the devotional experience and spiritual testimony of Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism. The bleeding body in contemporary Western performance references two thousand years of citation of the crucifixion and its reception. Alluded to, perhaps obliquely, is both the moment of the crucifixion itself, and its repetition through a history of stigmatism and bleeding icons.
The fact that these performances are produced live for immediate audiences who share the same space lifts the spectators' experience beyond the quotidian visual diet constructed by mediatized bodies in pain visible on television, the Internet, and in newspapers. The value of this live performance and its immediacy lies in an energy and connection born of this intimate sharing; the artists' openness and generosity is reciprocated by the audience's energies. These performances, through their real violence, generate a social critique that is at root deeply ethical. The bloody wounds, while often eliciting feelings of disgust and anxiety, also generate compassion and empathy; as Emma Safe suggests in her 2002 Guardian review of Franko B's Aktion 398: "I wasn't sure which of us was more vulnerable . . . I was struck dumb . . . Others responded differently: some were too scared to approach him at all, some wanted to touch the wound, shake...
