Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness by Karen Gonzalez Rice (review)

In her 2005 volume of letters, Linda Montano suggests that we should look not just at the aesthetics and technology of performance art, but also at the psychological reasons artists create the work that they do. Karen Gonzalez Rice answers this call in Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness by bringing together religious studies, psychology, art history, and ethnography to analyze works by Montano, as well as Ron Athey and John Duncan. While other performance art scholars, such as Kathy O’Dell (1998) and Meiling Cheng (2002) have labeled works in the same lineage as “masochistic” or “extreme,” respectively, Gonzalez Rice introduces instead the terms “disciplined hardship” and “enactments of survival” to emphasize the subjecthood of these artists. Her focus is on how these individuals use art processes to intervene in or manage the way power operates on their bodies and minds. By examining specifically how trauma and religion inform their work, she hopes to “recuperate religion as a crucial area of contemporary art historical concern” (10) and destigmatize trauma as the “foundational human experience” that it is (4). In this way, Gonzalez Rice positions endurance art as a logical personal response to suffering that also offers opportunities for communal acts of ethical witnessing.

The self-professed daughter of a research psychologist, Gonzalez Rice explains that she also wishes to move away from the Freudian analysis Kathy O’Dell presented in Contract with the Skin (1998) towards privileging psychological and psychiatric views that are more rooted in lived experiences of trauma (12). Each chapter is therefore a “spiritual biography” of a particular artist that focuses on one or more works that Gonzalez Rice analyzes as representative of a specific post-trauma response: Montano—dissociation; Athey—Non-Suicidal Self Injury (NSSI); and John Duncan—cyclical victimization.

The links Gonzalez Rice draws between religion, spirit, trauma, and artmaking are organized around her claim that all three artists offer us the opportunity for prophetic witnessing in the tradition begun by 18th-century American religious reformers. Here, witnessing consists of an encounter or observation, and a testifying to or protest against injustice that demands an ethical response. Gonzalez Rice offers us several examples of American radical movements that were led or supported by faith-based activism, ranging from abolition to the New Sanctuary movement, to the work of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. She then draws a parallel with endurance artists, explaining that they are testifying “to real conditions of life and raising moral consciousness by also demanding an ethical response” (7). This idea is a repetition—with a religious studies variation—on a theme presented before by scholars such as Amelia Jones, Jennifer Doyle, Antonio Viejo, and others: that endurance art demands ethical reflection by forcing viewers to contend with how to look, our ability to look, and how we may be complicit in causing the artists’ suffering. What Gonzalez Rice adds to the existing scholarship is a detailed study of how religion and trauma shape the why and how of these artists’ acts.

Gonzalez Rice draws a connection between Athey and Montano by highlighting how both artists felt betrayed or disappointed by their families and their families’ religions (Catholicism for Montano and Pentacostalism for Athey), and how they both continue to use tools and images from these practices in order to consciously seek healing. For example, Gonzalez Rice points out that Athey’s Torture Trilogy (1992–1997) begins with the question “what is healing?” and is a conscious “homage to and reconsideration of the Pentecostal healing revival movement of 1960s and 1970s Southern California” (60). She also cites cultural psychiatrist Armando Favazza to explain how NSSI can be seen as a form of self-care, and a strategy for the integration and healing of trauma (72). In the case of Montano, Gonzalez Rice narrates an evolution from: using religion as a way to escape from the trauma of sexual abuse; to using...