Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper's Judas Cradle

Jones, Amelia.
TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 50, Number 1 (T 189), Spring 2006, pp. 159-169 (Article)
Published by The MIT Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tdr/summary/v050/50.1jones.html

Access Provided by Central European University at 04/29/12 1:43PM GMT

Critical Acts
Holy Body
Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snappers Judas Cradle
Amelia Jones
Perhaps a politics without veriable identities and acts (even those that are stigmatized and shameful) may be incoherent (although I am not completely convinced of this), but what of an ethics without veriable identities and acts? Such an ethics would not be a complete denial of identities and acts (how would such a denial ever be possible?), but would be an interruption in the discursive protocols that make identities and acts veriable. This, then, would be an ethics without sexual content, what I am calling an erotic ethics: without a positive, epistemological ground, and therefore without a struggle for recognition (even a shameful recognition). John Paul Ricco (2002:16) In brief: there are two kinds of radical queering put into play by Ron Athey and Juliana Snappers 20042005 performance Judas Cradle. JC, as I will refer to it, in fact, is a work that pushes forward the very notion of queer, enabling (even violently insisting on) new ways of thinking about bodies that acknowledge rather than disavow their hol-iness.1 First: JC produces a dehabituated body that sloughs off the shackles of the naturalizing ges-

1. Ron Athey and Julianna Snapper, Judas Cradle, 200405. (Photo by Manuel Vason)

tures and patterns through which our bodies are encouraged to perform in normative ways, every day, on and on. Second, JC amboyantly confuses

1. Conceived and performed by Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper, with sound design by Amanda Piaseki and costume design by Susan Mattheson. Judas Cradle originally was commissioned by Fierce! Festival with support from Arts Council England. My trip to Ljubljana to see the piece in its rst guise was generously supported by the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at University of Manchester. I am indebted to Jennifer Doyle and Robert Summers for engaging me in provocative discussions about Judas Cradle, as well as to Athey and Snapper for their input and generosity.

Amelia Jones is Professor and Pilkington Chair in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She has organized exhibitions with accompanying catalogues, including Sexual Politics: Judy Chicagos Dinner Party in Feminist Art History (UCLA Armand Hammer Museum and University of California Press, 1996). She coedited Performing the Body/Performing the Text with Andrew Stephenson (Routledge, 1999) and edited Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (Routledge, 2003). She is the author of Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Body Art/Performing the Subject (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (MIT, 2004), and Self-Image (Routledge, 2006). Her edited anthology Contemporary Art (a handbook and intellectual survey) includes 25 original essays by a range of scholars and artists (Blackwell Press, forthcoming). Critical Acts 159

Annunciation
The annunciation is the beginning of Jesus in His human nature. Through His mother He is a member of the human race. New Advent/Catholic Encyclopedia (2005) JC was a body full of holes and a holy body: human, penetrable, scarred, bloody (if theres any doubt about it, see the gorey realism of Mel Gibsons horric The Passion [2004], which elaborates the making and suffering of his holes ad nauseum). I am a body of holes. Dripping, mucousy, bloody. I wait outside in the freezing Slovenian air. It is 2 a.m. outside Kodeljevo Castle in Luna Park in Ljubljana, and Peter Mlakar, founding member of the political art movement Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK)politician, artist, and philosopher in true Eastern European styleorates something empassioned in Slovenian out the castle window. People, a chic international crowd of arty types but much more motley than the standard biennale or London/New York gallery crowd, mill around, clustering under heat lamps.2 I am a body permeatedevery pore open to the night chill. Ears cocked. Mouth closed against the cold. Finally, the doors to the castles old chapel open: It is, of course, desanctied (and about to be profaned), its poor 19th-century imitations of baroque religious murals and sculpture (the latter covered, provocatively, in twisted sheets), glowing forlornly in the articial light brought to bear on this musty space of former ecstasies. I think of Berninis extravagant baroque sculpture St. Teresa (c. 1650) and Jacques Lacans horny over-the-top exposition of her obvious orgasm, body convulsed in a truly transcendent pleasure of the esh.3 The audience is packed in like proverbial sardines and the body heat makes the space warm, then hot and almost steamy like a bathhouse. I take a fabulous spot up on the edge of a platform built into the side of the chapel, waiting for the live bodies about to emerge.

2. Carlo Crivelli (c. 1435/401495), The Annunciation with St Emidius, 1486. National Gallery London. (Courtesy of The Art Archive/National Gallery London/ Eileen Tweedy)

the heteronormative structures of conventional Euro-American narrative (whether novelistic, operatic, theatrical, cinematic, televisual, or otherwisestill in the main retained today) by appropriating the very stories and enunciative gestures that gel these structures and then performing them with bodies that are male and female but decidedly not masculine and feminine in the conventional sense. JC offers what John Paul Ricco, in the quotation above, describes as an erotic ethics. Unmooring the sexed body from its alignment with categories such as male and heterosexual, JC nonetheless maintains an ethics of embodiment, pulling us continually into its multisensual texture to reclaim us as bodies with holes: permeable to the potential violence and pleasures that surround and inhabit us.

2. Judas Cradle, in its rst version, was performed in Ljubljana 17 December 2004 at the night-long Visions of Excess performance extravaganza organized by Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis. 3. Lacan writes, notoriously, You only have to go and look at Berninis statue [of St. Theresa] in Rome to understand immediately that shes coming, there is no doubt about it (1983:147).

160

Critical Acts

armor. Strong legs shoot out from solid barrellike torso. He wears a leather loincloth with jeweled codpiece, yellow leather leg-piece and corset. He is bald. His body, a vital throbbing rod of manly power brought to feminine excess. The opera begins on one altarwith her soaring atonal voice and his rasping off-key responses, a falsetto gone terribly wrong (continually snagging in his throat and chest, as if caught like a moth under the jagged glass edge of a lamp its own into). He moves to a second altar across the room, which is topped by an ominously sharp three-foot-high wooden pyramidominous because it is clearly a judas cradle, waiting to penetrate the body of one or more of the performers.5 Snapper moves through the crowd, regally forcing her body along to part the waves of starstruck performance art groupies, up to the altar where I am standing. Her voice pierces with the clarity of a trained opera singer, yet she deliberately forces it beyond its limits. It keens and scrapes against my tendernesses at every opening of my body. Snapper calls forth and pushes to excess what Catherine Clments observes of the female opera singer: You cry, you laugh, you trill, you call out so far your voice cannot help but fail you [...]. You are faced with the spectacle awaiting, in that black hole full of eyes shining with joy. Just like in the circus, you will have to leap without a net and destroy yourself. (Clment 1989:11) Snapper sings the voice as limit. The voice as that which escapes the body to enunciate the self is rendered unbearably raw, a ayed shred of human need, desire, pain. Every pore of my skin opens, a venus ytrap lusting for light and noise. Sucking at the spectacle as if to drain it of its opulence and leave it, accid and tired, at my feet. But I am, in the instance, powerless after all. Only a receiver. Absorbing.

3. Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (15981680), The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa of Avila, 164552. Marble. Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. (Courtesy of The Art Archive/Joseph Martin)

I am a giant ear/eye: one big orice, porous and desiring. Doors open to my all-too-easily aroused emotions. A tympanum waiting to vibrate, a retina waiting to receive the piercing rays of light. They entertwo gorgeously grotesque bodies, both excessively sexed yet violently ambivalent in gender. One, Juliana Snapper: a fabulously beautiful red-lipped woman, zaftig esh, garbed in what looks to be the 17th-century dress (bosom pressed up and out) of a down-and-out courtesan yearning for better days. Her bizarre afro-like white wig is decidedly askewshes a temporally displaced Nana, her voluptuous esh waiting to drip away from her body from excessive use and sin.4 Two, Ron Athey: an almost naked body, covered in tattoos that, oddly, seem to afrm the vulnerability of his skin rather than acting as

4. This is a reference to Emile Zolas character Nana, in the book by the same name from 1880. Nana is a highly successful courtesan for a brief period of her youth in Paris before her luscious body literally begins to rot from within, a symbol of the depravity of Second Empire Paris. 5. A judas cradle is a torture device invented in the European middle ages used to extract confessions; it consists of a pyramid onto which the victim is lowered such that it penetrates her or his nether regions.

Critical Acts

161

While the woman utters through a weird hysterical version of some bad, miscast 1970s BBC drama (with wispy ahs and huffs), the man impales himself slowly on the pyramid. The searing agony of wood penetrating anus prostrates me (guratively). He grimaces. I grimace. I hold my orices tight. I am, inadvertently, determined to close myself after all. I am his pain, his fracture. He lifts himself off, moves ceremoniously through the crowd like a post-crucixion Christ having risen from the dead (of pain). They both rejoin at the central altar in a climax of cacophonous, operatic union. (Clment notes of the operatic narrative: The man and woman are tiny actors in a history where nature and culture seek, thwart, and marry one anotherpart and tear one another apart (1989:20). (For Snapper and Athey the tearing is all.) They come through their screeching, rasping, chortling voices: Sound as sex. My ear has been pierced and I am pregnant with sound and image.

Theyve developed into fully elaborated male and female partners in an operatic drama that has narrative air. Throughout, their bodies crisscross the carefully designed yet spare seta ladder, a pyramid on a scaffold, a tall platform around which a curtain of jewels hangs down, a plush chaise lounge (turned torture device), a low wooden plank stage center, behind all of which is a large screen scrolling with abstracted images and texts from various operatic scores, including some of the words sung by the two protagonists. The piece is far more elaborately worked out than the rst performance; it is now a perverted semblance of an operatic tale of a love turned into a violent battle of wills. An s/m drama (with Snapper playing a dominatrix who yearns to torture herself as well as Athey) set into movements, each of which shamelessly appropriates from various famous operas. From the program, these are: I. The Riddle (Monteverdian duet, singing Puccinis Turandot [ca. 192025]); II. The Witness (from a Jean Genet text, Prisoner of Love [1983]); III. Purse (an inquisitor makes demands); IV. Sextette (Maeterlinck libretto, Daddy coaxing Yniold to sit on his lap); V. Flat Thing (soliloquy on dissociation and love note to private Lyndie England 6); VI. Auto De Fe (Atheys glossolalia; Snapper following) ( Judas Cradle 2005a). I am a good student of complex narratives, though not a patient theatre attendant (hence my tendency in the past to prefer singular body art works rather than narrative performance art [see Jones 1998]). The details of this elaborate choreography go right by me, as I know next to nothing about opera. Still, I absorb through the distance required by the setting (that black space in between proscenium and me, drenched with the cold breeze of unrequited desire) an explosion of uncontainable, shrieking embodiment. There is, really, no containing it. I become porous as the thing unrolls. The performers bodies are choreographed to approach, collide, engage (often through melodramatically feigned or partial violence), and miss each other over and over again. Their costumes are far more elaborate in this version: Snapper sports an enormous Wagnerian headdressshe is a Valkyrie of sorts with a aming red cape and huge, bombastic wings of victory on her head;

Deep Throat
The body that sings and the body that calls itself [queer] are not as sealed as we think. Wayne Kostenbaum (1993:156) My holes are properly closed off. I am a trained advocate of theatre and performance. I sit in a theatre chair with my friend and students waiting for the performance to begin, more or less on time. The temperature of the room is appropriately modulated. My body is contained and obedient. I swallow without realizing. Anticipating what is to come. The space of this performance of Judas Cradle (Contact Theatre, Manchester; 17 May 2005) is black in that way of contemporary theatres, which knowingly foreground the artice of the events they host while artfully concealing their own: The theatre pretends it isnt there. Clean, almost antiseptic, this is a far cry from the melodramatic religious bellicosity of the Slovenian castle, lled with the baroque noise and movement of two bodies ailing through a story of passion expressed and denied.

6. Lyndie England is the American woman soldier who was photographed humiliating Iraqi soldiers held in bondage during the Iraq war at Abu Ghraib prison.

162

Critical Acts

Athey is, as always, dual: a delicate ower covered with the traces of pictures inscribing the tenderness of his esh; and a howling mist, a metallic breastplate over his tattooed chest and chaps down below that amboyantly display his ass. Their skin gleams white under the careful, theatrical lighting. In the early movements, a metronome stutters an attempt to regiment their body movements and singing. (They are continually working against or at odds with this kind of habituation metaphorised by the harsh regularity of this musical tool to regulate time.) It is the monotony of this mechanism of control that makes the perversion of its rhythm all the more evident. Their bodies continually burst forth out of such connes: At one point Athey attaches a chicken-wire breastplate to his chest and smears lard on/in it, then smashes his body down onto the low platform, sliding back and forth along the grease. A body skating on the thin ice of fat. My nostrils are assaulted with the smell of fat and sweat. My throat constricts. Groans, trills, howls barge their way into my formerly obedient ears. I cant, I cant refuse the incursion. I am permeable again. Deep... Throat... Close it on up. Make me clean again. I write in order to purge the chaos.
4. Ron Athey, Solar Anus, 19982000. (Photo by Catherine Opie; courtesy of Ron Athey)

Cunt Voice/Hole Body

Every body is a civil war. Wayne Koestenbaum (1993:146) Ron Atheys asshole has its own place in the history of contemporary performance art. In the 19982000 Solar Anus, he pulls a string of pearls from the puckered orice, decorated with an elaborate and appealingly symmetrical black sunburst tattoo.7 His body is both shown to be holy (inspired by a divine something, its potential transcendence forever yanked back to the immanence of holes and esh) and enacted as a pictureperformed to remain in history as a stunning photograph, which documents and freezes itbut of what? Saying queer body or queer subject is not enough. Elaborating on, luxuriating in, my experience of JC will I hope bring a new under-

standing of what and how a queer body might be thought (to be). And will suggest a way of thinking an erotic ethics. JC is an extremely complex and intelligent meditation on the limits (or not) of the holy body. Watching it, I became a body of holes. Rendering it through description and critical dialogue here, I want to recall this process by which I found myself repeatedly and on different sensory registers punctured or even cracked open, and to articulate how this fracture becomes or inspires (for me) an ethical way of thinking. In the 1993 book The Queens Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, Wayne Koestenbaum has written a truly inspirational theory and history of the queer body in relation to opera. My rapturous analysis has been inspired by his deep queer opening of his body to the thrill of the diva. The only changes I insist on making

7. See Lea Vergines eloquent description of the performance (2000:289290).

Critical Acts

163

in his formulations are due to a crucial shift since the early 1990s from gay to queer in conceptualizing a body that is not what it seems8here, what I am describing as the holy/holey body that both creates and receives JC. While Koestenbaum deploys the notion of queer on occasion, he also reverts continually to the gay body and gay experience by way of exploring his own particular passion for the operatic. The gay male body (inherently white, Euro-American, and middleclass) in most of its 1990s formulations) is a body I identify with through pain and pleasure, but not a body I consider queer. It is too tied to body structures and the acts that a xation on anatomical sex tends to imply. The holy body offered (no, violently enacted and forced on us) by Athey and Snapper is a queer body, not (remotely) a gay body. It is in this way that this queer body speaks to me, for my body is not gay either (and Koestenbaums numerous asides to his gay male readership often leave me cold). Koestenbaum, still, writes queer much of the time in spite of his own strategic essentialism. He notes, for example, the visual (and conceptual) analogy between cunt and glottisthe moist lipped opening of which is amboyantly vaginal (1993:160). Let me propound my own theory expanding from Koestenbaum (who leaves the labial behind very quickly), grounded by my own strategically essential anatomical experience, by a hole and what Luce Irigaray has called the two lips of womens sexuality.9 If the glottis vibrates to make noise (to make music) this is an erotic movement. The glottis is the cuntand also (more obviously) the tip of the fellating throat. The glottis, then, is the g-spot crossing over (messing up) the binary terms of European modern thought about the sexual subject. The glottis produces a queer subject, neither m/f, s/o, hetero/

5. Tee Corinne, No. 40, Yantras of Womenlove, 1982. (Courtesy of Tee Corinne)

homo, but sliding (on grease) across these now unmoored points of identicationthought previously to be so obvious and naturalized as such but known (felt) now, in an age of publicly violated bodies at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere around the world to be completely obscure and even obscene. (Remember, among other perversions, Athey and Snapper enact the transgressions of the grossly in-pleasurethe subject who fails to follow the rules, lost in an erotics of holes. Lyndie England as part of their s/m revision of traditional opera).

8. As John Paul Ricco puts it: queer is an interruption in the discursive protocols that make identities and acts veriable (2002:16). See also Judith Butlers denition: My understanding of queer is a term that desires that you dont have to present an identity card before entering a meeting. Heterosexuals can join the queer movement. Bisexuals can join the queer movement. Queer is not being lesbian. Queer is not being gay. It is an argument against lesbian specicity: that if I am a lesbian I have to desire in a certain way. Or if I am a gay I have to desire in a certain way. Queer is an argument against certain normativity, what a proper lesbian or gay identity is. (Butler 2001) 9. See Irigarays lesbo-erotic essay When Our Lips Speak Together (1977). References to strategic essentialism here point to the crucial work of Gayatri Spivak, who argues for the usefulness of a situation specic strategic essentialism in a conversation with Ellen Rooney (Spivak 1993:1-23) and renes this argument (with the term situation specic) in her contribution to the Forum for Special Issue on Feminism and Activist Art (Aagerstoun forthcoming).

164

Critical Acts

The glottis (like the hymen) is an opening to a passage (the throat/vaginal canal) marking the transition from the outside of the body to the inside. As Jacques Derrida notes: Hymen [...] is rst of all a sign of fusion, the consummation of a marriage, the identication of two beings, the confusion between two. Between the two there is no longer difference but identity. Within this fusion, there is no longer any distance between desire [...] and the fulllment of presence [...]. The hymen takes place in the inter-, in the spacing between desire and fulllment, between perpetration and its recollection. (Derrida [1972] 1981:209, 212) The glottis/hymen (throat/vagina) is that eshy passage that, on the one hand, indicates a site of potential penetration and, on the other, is no place at all, a hole dened only by moist aps of esh, a hole that indicates there is no strict division between one and the other, only the potential for their frictional encounter. Snappers throat is Atheys anus (and perhaps the obverse of his throat, propelling the sounds of a trained voice meant to speak in tongues rather than to sing).10 Both open to the world. Both spew invectives and love. As Snapper herself describes the piece, Atheys voice spins around my taut string, greasing it up, dening its space and pulling light in [...] our trilling, nuzzling, beating phonography is a struggle between one body disciplined, and one body stretching to capacity ( Judas Cradle 2005b). Shes coming, over here; her voluptuous body (ripe and hefty like a huge strawberry, dripping with juice) capped by that ludicrous Wagnerian hat; her simultaneously shrill and velvety voice sucks me toward her. Her palpitating chest (echoed by the rubbery movement of Atheys diaphram) is like the uttering of a mother birds breast, pulling me in and in and in. He, on the

other hand, greasy and inscribed, speaks in tongues, his body shivering to the beat of his unworldly voice, emanating (anti-operatically) from his intestines, it would seem. He ails. She rails. He sings in glottal moans. She sings a body electric.11 As Koestenbaum notes, the throat is the site of reciprocal identication for the opera queen lasciviously and joyously listening to and watching opera: The opera queens throat is inactive and silent while he listens; the singers throat is queen. But the act of intense, grounded listening blows to pieces the myth that we can know precisely where an emotion or an experience begins (1993:156). My emotion begins (and ends) with theirs.

DehabituatedQueerBody
A singing identity, like any identity, is an articial system, part choice, part circumstance. Identities coalesce around catastrophes, later forgotten; the process of forgetting builds the new self s groundwork. The diva cant separate self from vocation, her body is her art. When she discovers her diva incipience, shes discovering the nature of her body, and she coins that body, that inseparability of election and damnation, in a scene of trauma or embarrassment. Wayne Koestenbaum (1993:87) If the singing bodyespecially the operatic bodyis trained, disciplined, whipped into shape and made to sing in a highly articial and controlled way so as to sound simultaneously (and paradoxically) ecstatic and natural, the body of JC is an egregiously dehabituated body. In a presentation at a conference I co-organized called Theorizing Queer Visualities in the spring of 2005, Snapper and Athey led conference participants through a voice-body workshop: Snapper rst teaching (very briey) operatic methods of controlling the torso and diaphragm and throat, then instructing ways of deliberately perverting what she termed this professional habituation.12

10. Athey was raised as a fundamentalist Pentecostalist and was as a child apparently famous for his ability to speak in tongues. See his website Biography (2005a). 11. Snappers broken yet euphoric voice/body revises the spectacular, fake body of operas prima donna, a hysteric with beautiful indifference who gets back up, smiling, scarcely affected after the violent tears and suffering of the nale (Clment 1989:180). 12. Co-organized with Laura Doan at the University of Manchester, cosponsored by Queer Up North, and generously funded by Arts Council England and the British Academy, as well as the University of Manchester.

Critical Acts

165

Atheys too-tight corset, which he had to remove halfway through because he couldnt breathe, provided one means of dehabituation. Snapper taught other ways of restricting or distorting parts of the body that, in classical opera singing, are disciplined into openness. So, there we stoodso glad to move after hours of more or less passive listeningstretching, yawing our bodies right and left, breathing, humming, and then (with Atheys supervision) producing the howling sounds of Pentecostalist glossalalia. Speaking in tongues, we made our bodies otherwiseproducing an erotic ethics between immanence (embodiment) and transcendence (disavowal of the esh). Scholarly bodies became religious bodies yearning for an always failed transcendenceproperly behaved bodies revealed their status as tortured from within. Did these bodies then recall the recently publicized bodies of tortured Iraqis in the images from Abu Ghraib prison that showed the limits of American civilization when revealed to the world in 2004 (as the press materials for the performance claimed)? Certainly the potential was there. If anything, the act of dehabituating our proper bodies recalled a general sense of socially bonded suffering (and not just at the strain of having sat through a rather marvelous but long series of presentations). We laughed and howled, joined together through sound, motion, and sweat. We felt the deadness that had previously tied our scholarly bodies into their places lift like the heavy mist rising over a rank pond. The deadness became evident as a mode of habituation: The scholar denies his body, pretending to transcend it through pure thought. Cogito ergo sum.13 In JC itself, Snapper dehabituates her operatrained body by hanging upside down on a rack. Her diaphragm pushing downward into her lungs, her voice becomes strangled. She suffers a kind of martyrdom to her body, dripping downward like the ayed esh of Marsyas. Gulping and howling like a strangled dog, she articulates a human pain

6. Julianna Snapper on the rack, Judas Cradle, 2004 05. (Photo by Manuel Vason)

that is at once both universal (in that everyone can and probably has felt it) and of the utmost social and political and embodied specicity (each experience of it is unique and unextrapolable). Estranged from its training, her body is made deliberately wrong and calls forth my inexorable sense of absolute wrongness (something I experience multifold a million times a day in the aches and pains of a stress-wracked body that dehabituates itself, over and over again, from the vicissitudes of everyday life). My wrongness evoked, my mind turns to other bodies wrongedNew Orleans, Abu Ghraib, and beyond.14 The singing body/the receiving bodyI see and hear with my holes. My holes hurt.15

13. This of course is Ren Descartess formulation, I think therefore I am, which exemplies the split of mind and body at the core of postEnlightenment European philosophy ([1637] 1968). 14. In August of 2005 a massive hurricane swept through New Orleans and the Bush administrations failure to take action resulted in the deaths of thousands of poor black people, who could not escape the rising waters when the levees broke after the storm. 15. Which links back to what Koestenbaum recognizes as the female, indeed lesbian aspect of the divathe holes (mouth, cunt, anus, ears) that might be understood as metaphors for this queerness (1993:98101).

166

Critical Acts

Sebastian, son of a wealthy Roman family who was martyred for helping persecuted Christians. Saint Sebastian is also the subject of many Christian European paintings and was gorgeously and painfully reenacted by Athey himself in 1997. As Kaja Silverman interprets the work of theorist Theodor Reik, Christian masochism perverts the natural division between masculine and feminine behaviors: In Christian masochism the subject functions both as the victim and as the victimizer, dispensing with the need for an external object [...]. [T]he suffering, discomfort, humiliation, and disgrace are being shown and so to speak put on display. (Silverman 1992:196)17 In JC, Snappers body is dehabituated from the hyperdiscipline of the operatic bodyperhaps one of the most extreme arts (along with ballet) of the regimentation of the female body to attain an ideal. Ultimately, Atheys body in JC is a body dehabituated through the overt (masochistic) enactment of pain, all over its surface and in and out of its orices. Both make their bodies, which are supposed to be coherent and closed, into bodies with holesholes that spew words and sweat, holes that pricks us where we hurt as they open to us. The body of the man, the body of the womanconventionally theatre, opera, lm, television and other European art forms orchestrate them to come together in the end, whether in love or death. Here, however, the overall effect is of a tormented duet that mocks the very structures of the hetero: The tormented duet is between a man and a woman who completely queer the idea of heterosexual matrix both by their holiness and by their bizarre refusal to mesh in a conventional way as two sides of a proper couple. They collide and stroke each other, mewl and screech; they are in pain, they are funny; they will never meet or unite as one. In JC, the highest of high culture (opera) is turned inside out. The habituated body of the heterosexual matrix (exaggeratedly performed in opera) is violently wrenched from its place

7. Ron Athey impaling himself, Judas Cradle, 2004 05. (Photo by Manuel Vason)

Erotic, Ethical Bodies

If the inside of your head gets pummeled with enough emotional blunt force trauma to splinter the psyche, you develop ways to punish the body, that eshy prison which houses the pain. Ron Athey (2005b) Christian masochism, intimately linked to Christian martyrdom, has a long history, involving bodies pierced and hung to dry, only to be dismembered and (by Catholics) venerated in the form of body parts. In the most hyperbolic case that of Christ himselfthe body is submitted to s/m tortures involving a crown of thorns, long exhausted walks carrying heavy cross, and a crucixion (again, Gibsons The Passion narrates with relish the obscene sadomasochism of this scenario; thousands of paintings from Christian Europe essentially do the same). Another famed, and often depicted, male masochist (according to Freud, all clinical masochists are male and invariably transfer themselves into the part of a woman [Freud (1919) 1963:126]16) is Saint

16. On masochism as a perversion experienced by the male subject, one characterized by a passive attitude toward the sexual life, or a narcissistic and feminized relation toward sexual pleasure, see Freuds rst examination of masochism, the section Sadism and Masochism in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality ([1905] 1962:2326). 17. Silverman is quoting Reik in the second part of the quote; Reik (1941:72).

Critical Acts

167

voice [overtrained and overstrained] to break down, a tendency that makes queer people feel at home (1993:126). If Snapper and Athey refuse the instinctive acts of mimicry through which we generally conform ourselves to codes of gendered and sexual behavior, then where am I in watching/listening to/smelling/feeling JC? The struggle to dehabituate the body strikes me at my core. Or rather, it exposes the hole there. The same hole that (certainly) encouraged Lyndie England to join in the torturing and humiliation of bodies made momentarily subordinate to her own or, if I could be so bold, George W. Bush to act as if poor black people (drowning or dying of dehydration in New Orleans after one of the worst hurricanes and oods in U.S. history) do not exist. It is no surprise in fact that Bush seeks to divert the failures of his administration by deferring to a higher (transcendent) power to breach the hole inside himself (that void that constitutes what would otherwise be an ego tempered by ethics) by invoking national prayer, as if his failure could be ameliorated (the hole plugged) by an indomitable higher power. Ask the tortured bodies of Abu Ghraib and the dead black people in New Orleans about the hole, the rupture that keeps us from coherencethey have been forced to live it every day. Exposing the hole(s) in the body is exposing the hole(s) in the self is pointing to the ultimate source of human aggression on both personal and political (global) levels. By dehabituating the body and by narrating the impossibility of the hetero-body and the hetero-matrix, Athey and Snappers JC open us to these holes. Acknowledging them in all of their hymenal (glottal) uncertainty, wetness, and permeability is in itself the most important beginning of a politics of action in the 21st century. Or so my hurting holy body (echoing back to Snappers throat and Atheys anus and forward to the body of an old black woman, dead in a wheelchair of dehydration from the holocaustal wet of a hurricane) tells me. This is an erotic ethics.

8. Ron Athey as Saint Sebastian, 2000. (Photo by Catherine Opie; courtesy of Ron Athey)

through the deliberate perversions of sadomasochismthe dual poles of which themselves are parodied and overturned as Athey and Snapper continually change roles. If Athey is the Christian masochist (man-cum-woman), Snapper is the delighted courtesan-dominatrixa Mary Magdalene who, instead of offering solace like a proper woman by her mans side, twists the arrows penetrating the male bodys torso and gets off on the slow ooze of blood. When Snapper herself is tortured (hung upside down by her ankles), she struggles mightily to escape and thus distorts her voice even more. Her writhing body testies to a refusal to accede to passivityto the disciplined body of the diva (the woman). She enacts what Koestenbaum calls the vocal crisis built into operathe tendency of the divas
References Aagerstoun, Mary Jo, ed.

forthcoming Forum for Special Issue on Feminism and Activist Art. National Womens Studies Association Journal.

168

Critical Acts

Athey, Ron 2005a 2005b Butler, Judith 2001 The Desire for Philosophy. Lola Press 2. <http://www.lolapress.org/elec2/artenglish/butl_e.htm> (9 September 2005). Opera, or the Undoing of Women. Translated by Betsy Wing. London: Virago Press. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Biography. <www.ronathey.com> (9 September). <www.ronathey.com> (9 September).

Clment, Catherine 1989 1972 Derrida, Jacques Descartes, Ren 1968 [1637] Discourse 4. In Discourse on Method and the Meditations, translated by F. E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund 1962 [1905] Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books. 1963 [1919] A Child is Being Beaten, in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. Translated by Alix and James Strachey, 2326. New York: Macmillan. Irigaray, Luce 1985 [1977] When Our Lips Speak Together. In This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jones, Amelia 1998 Judas Cradle 2005a 2005b 1993 1983 Performance yer handed out at event. Western Project. <http://www.western-project.com/exh/2005/JudasCradlePR.html> (September). The Queens Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Vintage Books. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Edited by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, translated by Jacqueline Rose. New York: Norton. The Annunciation. New Advent/Catholic Encyclopedia <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01541c .htm> (8 September). Masochism in Modern Man. Translated by Margaret H. Beigel and Gertrud M. Kurth. New York: Farrar, Straus and Company. The Logic of the Lure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London: Routledge. Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language. Milan: Skira. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Koestenbaum, Wayne Lacan, Jacques

New Advent/Catholic Encyclopedia 2005

Reik, Theodor 1941

Ricco, John Paul 2002 1992 1993 Vergine, Lea 2000 Silverman, Kaja Spivak, Gayatri

The Drama Review 50:1, Spring 2006 Copyright 2006 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Critical Acts

169