On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century

Before and After Science

• • • Before and After Science The body mounted a platform. Eighteen fish hooks pierced the back of his naked frame. He positioned himself face down below a pulley with eighteen rings. Calmly he instructed two assistants to connect the hooks and pulley with the cord. Thirty or so spectators around the platform were tiptoe-silent. The body suddenly gasped with pain. "No worse than usual," he winced. "I just keep forgetting how bad it is." He began instructing his assistants about removing the platform from below so he'd be left hanging by the hooks, his skin stretching and causing him excruciating pain. He was prepared for that. As he'd written about an earlier piece, "Stretched skin is a manifestation of the gravitational pull.... It is proof of the body's unnatural position in space." Once the pulley carried him out the window, he would be demonstrating this to everyone out on East 11th Street between Avenues Band C. He would be amplifying the obsolescence of the body out there, the need for it to "burst from its biological, cultural and planetary containment " in the post-evolutionary age. With more than twenty other "suspension events" behind him, this would be the most public one he'd ever tried. 50 one more precaution had to be taken: his assistants would lock the building against the possibility of police intervention. We were asked to leave, and I was the first one out. Hadn't wanted a close-up of that horror show of stretched skin-I mean "the gravitationallandscape "-anyway. 5telarc (born 5telios Arcadiou) would not have understood that. The body doesn't respond emotionally to his own self-mutilation. Why should others? He thinks people misunderstand him. They obsess Before and After Science 11 about the hooks. They ask if he's a masochist. They think he has some spiritual goal. They are all wrong. "1 am not interested in human states or attitudes or perversions. 1am concerned with cosmic, superhuman, extraterrestrial manifestation." Stelarc lectured on evolution three days before "Street Suspension." He told 40 of us sitting in the sawdust of a raw loft lit with three bare bulbs that we are on the threshold of space. But we're biologically illequipped . It's time to consciously design a pan-planetary physiology. Stelarc thinks the artist can become an evolutionary guide. To illustrate this, he demonstrated his "third hand," a prosthetic device on his right arm. He opened and closed its "fist" by contracting his rectus abdominus muscles. Electrodes on his skin connected these muscles to the mechanism. Some day, he added, it would be nice to have them surgically implanted. He showed slides of other work, fierce projects described quickly and modestly, most of them done in Australia where he grew up or Japan where he now lives. (He is Greek.) The first slide-the inside of his stomach-had been made by swallowing a gastro TV camera, during a "visual/acoustic" probe of his own organs. Other early work: lying on pointed stakes, lying still for ten days while a huge steel plate hovered over him. Many slides of "stretched skin" suspensions: the body suspended horizontally through a six-story elevator shaft by the insertion of eighteen hooks into the skin. It reassures me to see that "the body," as he calls himself when discussing the work, stands apparently undamaged in front of the room. He describes a piece for body and ten telephone poles, all suspended from a gallery ceiling and then spun over twelve tons of rock on the floor. Just two weeks before this lecture, the body'd been suspended in a condemned building in Los Angeles and swung like a pendulum. A tree suspension near Canberra had attracted 350-400 spectators. Stelarc told us he had asked them to leave after fifteen minutes so he could experience the "symbiotic relationship of the body and the tree" without being distracted. "They drove away in their cars. It must have been beautiful to drive off leaving the body there." Someone in the audience asked if he was "motivated by pain." Stelarc laughed. He'd read in an essay about his work that all performance art is masochistic but he didn't agree. He said women did not 12 IN EXTREMIS give birth in order to experience pain, and he did not make art in order to experience pain. "Everything beautiful occurs when the body...