If I open my body so that you can see your blood in it, it is for the love of

you. () This is why I am so keen on YOUR presence during my actions.

Gina Pane

The Postmodern Subject, Feminist Multiplicity, and Masochist Performance Art

An artists blood drips from her thorn-covered arm and self-slit palm onto a bouquet of
white roses. Another artist is shot point-blank in the arm, as he himself directed his friend to do.
More blood drips from the five-pointed star sliced into one artists belly, as she both freezes her
backside and heats the raw wound. In the realm of performance art, the prevalence of
masochistic acts is striking, yet they frequently disturb even those viewers who have become
desensitized to most taboo-breaking actions taken by performance artists. Such disturbance is
often accompanied by a disbelieving questioning; why would these artists physically hurt
themselves, and why in the name of art? The role of these performances can be understood by
examining the lenses through which they are often understood. Performance art is prevalent in
feminist oeuvres, and, even in the work of those who disavow a feminist framework to their art,
performance particularly when involving masochism tends to be interpreted in terms of
gender, regardless of the artists gender. If masochistic performance lends itself to these
interpretations, it is because it somehow calls up questions or anxieties about gender. Indeed, I
argue here that performance art precipitates a postmodern disruption of Modernisms coherent
selfhood by always questioning the subject/object opposition, thus participating in the feminist
project of destabilizing the unitary, male subject as the embodiment of power.
In his 1983 article, The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism, Craig
Owens describes the structures of Modernist thought, as well as their subversion through the
advent of postmodernist thought. Describing the former, he explains that The representational

systems of the West... posit the subject of representation as absolutely centered, unitary,
masculine (Owens 336). This structure allows only one type of subject to be comprehensible, by
nature of its insistence on singularity on the possibility and desirability of an ultimate and
superior existence. Because Modernist discourse is based also on a Cartesian split between the
subject and the object (Jones 157), this singularity also precludes the possibility of being both
(subject and object) simultaneously, reserving subjecthood for the masculine and objecthood for
the Other, the repressed feminine. By being denied selfhood/agency within patriarchy, the nonmale is made (Lacanian) Other, understanding herself primarily as object/other, while the male is
made to deny his objecthood and to claim his selfhood/agency as absolute and natural. The
unitary (un-split) self is privileged within the patriarchal order. While the denial of the split
nature of the self is always illusory, it is at least attainable in fantasy for the male, who can
conceive of himself as subject and only subject (ODell 122). The non-male, however, cannot
attempt to deny her selfhood to maintain an un-split-self-as-object, since to see herself as object
she must be able to see, that is, to be a subject, and so her understanding of herself as object
immediately forces a revised understanding of herself as subject-object (Jones 122). Thus, the
structure of Modernist thought imposes incomprehensibility on the (feminine) subject-object and
represses it, holding aloft the unitary (male) subject, whose objecthood has also been repressed.
In a disruption of this, postmodern work attempts to upset the reassuring stability of that
mastering position (Owens 336). It breaks down the very possibility of singularity, reasserting
the inherent simultaneity of subjecthood and objecthood by revealing these aspects of the self as
unconsolidated and multiple, but not dialectically split.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the subjective objecthood is Marina Abramovis
notorious work, Rhythm 0. This was
performed at Studio Morra, Naples, in 1974. Here she assumed a passive role. She
placed seventy-two itemsas varied as blue paint, perfume, a feather, chains, a
gun, a bullet, a whip, needles, nails, flute, alcohol, flowers, and wireon a table
along with a sign instructing the audience to use the items any way they wanted.
Initially during the six-hour performance, members of the audience were passive
and calm, but they became more aggressive as the night wore on. During the
performance she was alternately caressed, written on, chained, blindfolded, had
her shirt torn off, and was threatened with the gun, all the while remaining
passive... At the end of the six hours, Abramovi, who had been detached and
unresponsive during the entire performance, once again engaged and approached
the audience, which quickly dispersed once the power had shifted. (Heartney
107-8).

It should be noted that the sign instructing the audience to use the objects on [her] as desired
next bore the phrase, I am the object. Abramovi blatantly places herself in the position of
object to be acted upon. While the structure of the performance is of her own design, she
seemingly surrenders her agency during the 6-hour period. Not only does she allow the audience
to use her body as an object, but she also refuses to personally engage with them, even through
eye contact; she denies any appearance of subjecthood. The subversive effect of this work thus
becomes elucidated by its very end. When Abramovi once again engage[s] and approache[s]
the audience, they flee. What was so horrifying about this point of the performance so as to
elicit this reaction? Certainly, some of the audience members may have feared repercussions for
their own actions or for not stopping the violent actions of others. This complicity, however,
could have been recognized, criticized, or reported by anyone present at any point during the
performance. What about Abramovis reawakening marked that moment as entirely more
worrisome for those present? I contend that it was the reintroduction of subjectivity into what

had been viewed entirely as an object. The impossibility within Modernist thought of such a
subjective objecthood, of the experience of being an object, created a fear for audience members
that went far deeper than that of being caught or punished. By asking the audience to act upon a
body as purely an object for hours, then having that object reveal its undeniable subjectivity,
Abramovi destabilized for her audience the very coherence of a unitary self, causing terror and
the impulse to run away.
Body artworks, like Rhythm 0, help in the postmodern and feminist project of
deconstructing the subject-object split in the conception of the self. As I interpret them, feminist
body art works produce the female artist as both body and mind, subverting the Cartesian
separation of cogito and corpus that sustains the masculinist myth of male transcendence (Jones
157). Jones, as well as Kathy ODell in her book, Contact With The Skin: Masochism,
Performance Art, and the 1970s, both describe the work of performance artists in relation to this
recognition of the body as subject-object. ODell draws on Lacanian theory to elucidate the
impact of such work on the viewers own conception of the self:
The viewer is reminded of the delicate balancing act that takes place during the
early moments of the mirror stage, juxtaposing the notions that ones body is both
a subject and an object, an entity that simultaneously sees and hears, is seen and is
heard. It is precisely this kind of indeterminate thinking, retrievable through
reminiscences of the mirror stage and the concept of the split self, that can break
up rigid perceptions of the body. (ODell 19)

In Rhythm 0, Abramovis display of objecthood and subsequent assertion of subjecthood, of

having experienced objecthood as a subject, recalls Lacans mirror stage the self being split,
understood as both object and subject while simultaneously subverting that split, recognizing

the subjecthood and objecthood as ultimately part of the same moment of being, a moment of
both personal experience and fleshy materiality.
There is, within the passivity of the non-males prescribed role as object, an implied and
necessary contingency on others (Jones 122).1 To disrupt the structure that reifies the fantasy
of mans pure subjecthood that is, to reveal his inherent and coexisting objecthood is then
also to (re)introduce contingency into the subject. An exhibition of this contingency exists within
performance art. Chris Burdens artistic career has been rife with masochistic performance, both
audacious and subtle, but his most infamous remains Shoot:
Performed in 1971 during the height of the Vietnam War, the piece could not be
simpler or more radical: Burden called a group of friends into a gallery to watch
an assistant shoot him with a .22 rifle. The bullet went into my arm and went out
the other side, recalls Burden, who essentially treated his body as a sculptural
material to be reshaped by the bullets passage. It was really disgusting, and
there was a smoking hole in my arm. The extreme act defined Burdens career
but to some seemed inexplicable, if not entirely deranged. The artist counters that
the piece, in fact, was carefully rehearsed to minimize the chance of more serious
injury. Cheating death was never the intent, he insists. I was trying to think about
a big fear, says Burden. Rather than turn from it, I was trying to face it, to eke
something out of it, to doodle it out. (West)

Through Shoot, Burden is revealed as contingent in two ways. First, his artistic creation is
dependent on others, both to perform and to view the act, and so the artist as such is contingent
on their cooperation and participation. Second, his bodily existence is exposed as contingent on
physical circumstances, and on others to ensure (or deny) his safety. This and other works of
Burden are often criticized as reiterat[ing] normative codes of masculine artist-astranscendent (Jones 132), based on their presentation of a male subject who controls violence
and bodies, both as director of that violence, even when enacted against himself, and in terms of
1 As

one without agency one who cannot act the relations an object has with the surrounding world cannot be
assumed to be of the objects own making; they are, instead, quite contingent.

withstanding that violence in a way that displays strength and impenetrability. I would counter
that the sense of control and heroic triumph that emerges from these pieces is vastly
overwhelmed by the horrific confrontation of Burdens fleshy reality, which forces
deconstruction of the self through revealing not only Burdens subjective objecthood, but the
viewers as well. Thus, despite the frequent reception of Burdens work as reiterating masculine
norms, it effectively operates toward the dissolution of the Modernist subject by the introduction
of contingency into artistic subjecthood, as well as objecthood into subjecthood more generally.
In that way, his work is feminist in its impact.
The importance of this contingency, as well as what Amelia Jones refers to as
intersubjectivity, can best be understood through first exploring the concept of multiplicity, as
presented by Luce Irigaray in her essay, This Sex Which Is Not One. Responding to and
drawing on the work of Lacan and other psychoanalysts, Irigaray attempts to establish a new
paradigm of thought, in which the singularity of power structures described in Freudian
psychoanalysis is replaced by an entirely new mode of thought. Irigaray describes the existing
masculine economy as one in which woman cannot be represented, nor can she understand
through its language her own pleasure, For woman is traditionally a use-value for man, an
exchange value among men; in other words, a commodity... How can this object of transaction
claim a right to pleasure without removing her/itself from established commerce? (Irigaray
31-32). She describes the few powers that women are given within this system as the powers of
slaves, which, she says, are not negligible powers, moreover. For where pleasure is concerned,
the master is not necessarily well served. Thus to reverse the relation, especially in the economy
of sexuality, does not seem a desirable objective (Irigaray 32). If the existing power structure

cannot allow woman to know and experience her own pleasure, to be fully satisfied, even if
entirely inverted, then an entirely new system, a new mode of thought and of existence, must be
established. In an attempt to begin to construct this new paradigm, Irigaray explores female
sexuality, looking to its rhythms and structures as a model. What she finds is plurality, and an
incompatibility with singularity or staticity. She finds her pleasure to be far more diversified,
more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imaginedin an
imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness (Irigaray 28). This leads Irigaray to
consider the possibility of sacrificing no one of her pleasures to another, of identifying herself
with none of them in particular, of never being simply one. A sort of expanding universe to which
no limits could be fixed and which would not be incoherence nonetheless (Irigaray 31). This
conception of pleasure and of power as plural, irreducible, and always multiplying, establishes a
new frame of reference from which to understand not only sex and sexuality, but also the very
structures of society and the possibilities of their alternatives: meaning, power, success, value
all of these change radically through the lens of Irigarays new paradigm of multiplicity.
This form of thought came to be embodied in the work of artists who insist[ed] on the
intersubjective, highly invested, and processural (rather than static or finite)... (Jones 103).
Performance works break down the coherence of the centered, unitary, and masculine Modern
subject through a multiplicity that recalls Irigarays. Not only do they reveal the impossibility of
pure, autonomous subjecthood (and hence of a unitary subject), but they decenter the subject,
multiplying subjectivities through the multiplication and complication of the source(s) of
meaning. Amelia Jones elucidates in her book, Body Art: Performing the Subject, how the

methods of body artists2 in particular work to subvert Modernist conceptions of artistic meaning
as static and, importantly, as originating from the author. By opening the embodied artist/subject
to the other, body art also opens the embodied other (as interpretive self) to the artist; each
projects onto the othereach taking its place there as subject while simultaneously authorizing
the other as subject (Jones 106). In body art, the meaning is created in the interactions and
relation of the artist and audience. It is endlessly interpretable by those who have some
relationship to the piece, whether during the performance or afterward (through its
documentation). Body artist Gina Panes performance Sentimental Action, enacted November 9,
1973, explores the intersubjective nature of meaning through the reception of its restriction of the
audience to females. An exposition of Panes work at the Muse des Beaux-Arts de Nantes
describes the piece thus:
Performed at the Diagramma Gallery in Milan in 1973, Azione sentimentale is
Gina Panes most well renowned performance. In front of an exclusively female
audience, the artist enacted the same sequence twice, with a bouquet first of red
roses, then of white. Passing gradually from standing upright to the fetal position,
she first enacts a swaying motion with the bouquet, before driving rose thorns into
her arm and making an incision with a razor blade in the palm of her hand. Her
arm thus transforms into a rose, the wounds evoking the petals and her forearm
representing the flower stem.3 (Muse des Beaux-Arts de Nantes 3)

Interpretations of this work have focused not merely on the physical acts and harm that Pane
enacts, but on how their meaning can possibly be interpreted given the composition of the

Jones uses the term body art specifically and intentionally, as she feels it places a necessary emphasis on the
body as present in and central to the work. I, however, use her term and performance art interchangeably.
3

My translation from the French: Accomplie la Galerie Diagramma Milan en 1973, Azione sentimentale est
laction la plus clbre de Gina Pane. Devant un public exclusivement fminin, lartiste rpte deux fois la mme
squence, avec pour accessoire un bouquet de roses rouges, puis de roses blanches. Passant progressivement de la
station debout la position ftale, elle excute dabord un mouvement de va-et-vient avec le bouquet, avant de
senfoncer les pines dune rose dans le bras et de pratiquer une incision avec une lame de rasoir dans la paume de
sa main. Son bras se transforme alors en rose, la blessure voquant les ptales et lavant-bras reprsentant la tige de
la fleur.

audience. The fact that the demographics of the audience are seen as central to this works
meaning, simply because the demographics are perceived as unusually different from those of
the larger society, reveals in the end that the audience is relevant to the construction of meaning
in any and all performances. The artist is thus removed from the seat of ultimate power in the
creation of meaning, which is revealed as not only contingent, but dependent on and created by
multiple subjects.
Through this decentering of authority, work like Panes Sentimental Action
has the potential to eroticize the interpretive relation to radical ends by insisting
on the intersubjectivity of all artistic production and reception. By surfacing the
effects of the body as an integral component (a material enactment) of the self, the
body artist strategically unveils the dynamic through which the artistic body is
occluded (to ensure its phallic privilege) in conventional art history and criticism.
By exaggeratedly performing the sexual, gender, ethnic, or other particularities of
this body/self, the feminist or otherwise nonnormative body artist even more
aggressively explodes the myths of disinterestedness and universality that
authorize these conventional modes of evaluation. (Jones 5)

Jones notion of intersubjectivities falls within the discourses of postmodernism and feminist
multiplicity, and it reveals in them the method by which artistic practice can embody or subvert
these theories. The presentation of the body/self in body art marks not the immediacy, unity, and
presence of this body/self but its radical interdependence with the other (Jones 107). Early
(pre-1970s) performance art was revolutionary in its positing of the body as involved in art the
body, which, as it was understood at the time, could only be subject, and, as non-object, could
never be art (according to a popular theory, presented by Michael Fried in Art and Objecthood,
1967). To see a subject as the art-piece in itself or in its acts was to subvert the claim that only
the passive, unchanging, transcendent, and static, with definite and delimited intention/meaning,
could be art. Subjectivity and art-meaning would be further revolutionized by future performance

artworks, which would reveal that body art posits not only subject as art-piece (and thus artistic
meaning as non-static), but also subject as object, existing in a constant oscillation between these
two (ODell 7-8, Jones 112). Jones explains the radical nature of involving the viewer, or any
body, in artistic meaning-creation through Frieds work. Acknowledging the viewer, the
literalist4 work breaks the primary rule ensuring the authority of modernist criticism, which, we
recall, legitimates itself as truthful through its claim to the disinterestedness of aesthetic
judgement. The acknowledgment of the viewer exposes her or his relationship to the object as
one that is specific, contingent, and above all interested... The literalist work is disquieting in
that it is uncontainable and not purely present in itself (Jones 112). Because work that involves
the viewer or the body reveals in itself an impossibility of completeness, it reveals as well the
works meaning as continual and fluctuating that is, as inhabiting a paradigm of multiplicity.
Through its basis in intersubjective meaning, performance art, dramatically more so than
Minimalist art, enacts this destabilizing multiplication of meaning. In such work, the role of
subjectivity and relation in meaning-creation is made unavoidably obvious. Jones elaborates on
how the nature of this multiplicity in body art forces a total reconsideration of not only art world
practices, but identity itself:
We can engage with [body art works] to rethink the premises of art critical and art
historical discourse, which still continue to read works of art (body art or
otherwise) by imputing presumably intentionally embedded meanings to them and
inferring a full subjectivity at their origin (the artist) as well as at their
destination (the interpreter herself). Such a feminist phenomenological
engagement (one that acknowledges our own contingency, particularities, and
vulnerabilities) would also entail a radical revision of the broader understanding
of postmodern culture and of subjectivity and identity in the most profound sense.
(Jones 235-36)
4 A term

coined by Michael Fried in the above-mentioned essay to describe minimalist art, which was decried for its
positing of the viewers experience of the piece as the source of meaning.

Performance art, through its insistence on subjectivity existing within both the artist and the
viewer, through its recognition of both as the (plural) origins of meaning in art, radically
redefines the nature of the subject, moving it from static, singular, and authoritative to the realm
of contingency and multiplicity.
Vito Acconci, a contemporary of the other artists mentioned here, interrogated this
redefinition of identity through a work entitled Trademarks. This was performed privately and
only once, with the intent that only its documentation would be made public.
Sitting naked on the floor of a photographer friends loft one day in 1970, Vito
Acconci enacted a series of contorted poses in front of a camera. Repeatedly, he
twisted his body and craned his neck as he bit deeply into his arms, legs, and
shoulders. In addition to causing pain, the bites left impressions of his teeth.
Acconci then covered these indentations with printers ink and used them to stamp
various surfaces, thereby producing signs of the bodys attack on itselfthe
trademarks that give this performance its title. (ODell 17)

The resulting pictures were presented in the magazine Avalanche as a two-page layout, with
eight photos of his contorted body surrounding an image of a bite-mark print on one page; the
facing page displayed an image of an actual bite-mark on his body, alongside poetic text in
which he describes his intentions during the work (ODell 17). Some of the text reveals his
desire to Stake a claim on what I have. Such a claim seems to be enacted by his subjective
existence, imposing on his body, his objecthood. The method of his declaration, however, is not
by the words he displays beside the images; it is by the visceral act of biting. It is the body itself
which claims the body. Trademarks is not, then, a subject claiming an objecthood, but an object
claiming an objecthood. In that very act, Acconci folds subjecthood and objecthood into one
another. The object makes a claim on itself, but by claiming it asserts itself as subject. Acconcis

attempt to claim his bodily presence as his own, as belonging to himself as a subject, then
culminates in his assertion of a simultaneous subjecthood and objecthood, or, more accurately, of
an un-split subject-objecthood.
Paraphrasing Heidegger, Owens explains that for modern man... the world exists only in
and through a subject who believes that he is producing the world in producing its
representation (Owens 342). In this frame of thought, women are unrepresentable as subjects,
because, Excluded from representation by [Modernisms] very structure, they return within it as
a figure fora representation ofthe unrepresentable (Nature, Truth, the Sublime,
etc.) (Owens 337). They can be only an image, never a subject always the representation,
never the represented. Hence the masculine desire to fix the woman in a stable and stabilizing
identity (Owens 349), so that man may have stable representation, and hence also the very
radical nature of disrupting the formulation of the female body as always and only object and,
particularly, of destabilizing and multiplying the meaning of such representations. Owens
connects the methods of feminism and postmodernism through their shared desire to radicalize
the subject in just this way. He claims that womens insistence on difference and
incommensurability may not only be compatible with, but also an instance of postmodern
thought, that the kind of simultaneous activity on multiple fronts that characterizes many
feminist practices is a postmodern phenomenon (Owens 339, 440). To expand on his claim, I
would argue that not only is feminist emphasis on difference an instance of postmodernist
thought (341), but that postmodernism itself is a feminist project, whether or not it is selfconsciously so. By deconstructing the subject, by decentering authority, by multiplying meaning,
by recognizing the simultaneity and non-hierarchical nature of difference, postmodern projects

 even those which reiterate representations that are oppressive to non-males are breaking
down not only the primacy of the masculine, but the structures which allowed for any primacy to
begin with. They move toward a new paradigm one much like that envisioned by Luce
Irigaray one which breaks away from the consolidating regime of (masculine) singularity to
allow for a continually expanding multiplicity.
The performances explored here clearly work toward the reintroduction of contingency,
objecthood, and multiplicity into subjecthood, through the means described above as Gina
Pane succinctly puts it, through The body, which is at the same time project, material, and
performer of an artistic practice (Vergine 196). This project thus seems possible through
performance art generally, without the use of masochism specifically. If, however, performance
art in general forces the recognition of the artist (and so of the viewer as well) as both subject
and object simultaneously, the very performativity of body art can allow this recognition to be
ephemeral, by the possibility of denying its reality outside of the time and space contained in the
performance itself. I argue that it is for this reason specifically that masochism has played such a
conspicuous role in the body of performance art works. ODell discusses the arguments of
American literary theorist, Leo Bersani, with regard to masochistic fantasy in general. Bersani
even suggests that there is a benefit to these masochistic distractions: they remind viewers of
their relation to real violence in the everyday world. Bersani regards the viewers engagement in
fantasy as a form of continual self-shattering that resists the identificatory closure suggested by
the rigid narrative structure of most art and literature. For him, this imaginary fragmentation is
enough to offset the possibility of an actual shattering of the body, of the mind, or of life
itself (ODell 5). For Bersani, to become a rigidly defined self would mean being actually

shatterable in the world, but to continually shatter ones selfhood in fantasy refuses that
possibility by creating a dynamicity and by denying the presence of a coherent self to shatter.
ODell contests the idea that fantasy is sufficient. Unless fantasy continually loops individuals
back to the materiality of the human body and to an understanding of its complexity as both
subject and object, invulnerable and vulnerable, fantasy risks becoming a frivolous avoidance of
the vicissitudes of daily sociopolitical relations in which violence is routinely meted out (ODell
5). To be confronted with a simultaneous subject-objecthood in performance, then, is not enough,
as the audience can use this space as one of fantasy as merely a means of negotiating
contradictions or instabilities within their own subconscious conceptions of the self, without
applying those instabilities to their understandings of their own real existences. ODell continues
on to describe how masochistic performance art denies this possibility. In the work of
[masochistic] performance artists... no matter how much fantasy such theatrics employed, the
audiences attention could never wander far from the reality of the artists self-tortured
bodies (ODell 5). Thus Gina Panes melancholic, yearning expression of love for her
audiences: If I open my body so that you can see your blood in it, it is for the love of you. ()
This is why I am so keen on YOUR presence during my actions [ellipses in original] (Pane 14).
Being looped back from fantasy to the body precludes the possibility of dismissing
confrontations as not real, because the absolute reality of self-inflicted bodily harm cannot be
denied, particularly when seen in person. In ODells words,
All masochistic performance work comments on traditional art by confounding
patterns of repression experienced in viewing traditional art. But these patterns are
not restricted to the viewing of art. They also involve its history and, especially,
the way in which art and art history construct one another. At least one purpose of
this repression... is to set up conditions for the transcendence of the viewer.

Masochistic performance has the potential to deconstruct these conditions and the
art forms for which they exist by making viewer relations obviouspainfully
obvious. The possibility of transcending to a fictional space beyond the obvious
materiality of that which is being viewed is thereby compromised. (ODell 67-68)

In masochistic performance, ignoring the viewer relation to the artist or the relation of the artists
and viewers bodies becomes an impossibility, due to its being palpably achieved through not
fantasy, but reality. The very operation of masochistic art is just that a denial of fantasy as the
transcendent, as reifying the unreal (and also a denial of fantasy as the site of a merely temporary
negotiation of the subject-object relationship itself contradictory for the Cartesian subject
to avoid the reality of these negotiations within the body). While performance art generally
reveals the body as subject-object, it is the extreme reality of masochistic performance which
emphasizes the absolute impossibility of transcendence, the absolute necessity of being both
these things, without possibility of escape through fantasy or illusion, by revealing a body that
both acts and is acted on, a body whose subjecthood and objecthood are inextricably entangled.
It breaks down the myth of unitary self, and fragments the subject, or, rather, reveals to the
subject its already fragmented nature, by showing it its simultaneous objecthood.
Performance art like the works described here revolutionize the Modernist subject
Abramovis Rhythm 0, by implicating the audience in her objecthood and then confronting them
so undeniably with her subjecthood; Burdens Shoot, through violently revealing the precarious
state of human contingency; Panes Sentimental Action, in unearthing the intersubjective sources
of artistic meaning; and Acconcis Trademarks, through the brutal assertion of the minds
potency being essentially embodied. Their use of masochism of the subject causing harm to
itself, rendering it quite visibly and emphatically also object refuses the possibility of

escaping this deconstructions implications. The viewer is forced, often with extreme difficulty
and discomfort, sometimes even visceral repulsion, to confront subject-objecthood, to confront
their own contingency (and thus mortality), and to acknowledge a multiple power that by its very
existence breaks down any stability they had imagined within singularity thus within any kind
of ultimacy, be it of meaning, truth, ethicality, divinity, or reality itself. Masochistic performance
art thus operates within the postmodern, feminist paradigm of multiplicity, operating at all times
to deconstruct the authoritative, autonomous, centered, unitary, masculine Modernist subject,
leaving in its place intersubjectivities, which operate through relations to each other, rather than
to a center, which defy the rigid dialectic of binary gender, which are ecstatically contingent and
dynamic, violent and playful. These works are not solely destructive, as they are often seen; we
must recognize that they participate forcefully in the project of constructing new paradigms of
(inter)subject(-object)hood.

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Figure 1. Rhythm 0 - Marina Abramovic - 1974

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Figure 2. Shoot - Chris Burden - 1971

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Figure 3. Azione sentimentale (Sentimental Action) - Gina Pane - 1973

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Figure 4. Trademarks - Vito Acconci - 1970

Works Consulted
Blessing, Jennifer. "Gina Pane: The Audience and Photography." On Archives and Archiving. Ed.
Richard Gough and Heike Roms. [London]: Routledge, 2002. 14-26.

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Chris Burden "Shoot" YouTube. YouTube, 04 Feb. 2008.
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Heartney, Eleanor. After the Revolution:Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. Munich:
Prestel, 2007.

Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota,
1998.

Kontova, Helen (1978) interview with Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Milan, October 1977;
published in Flash Art, 80-1 (February-April): 43-4.

Muse Des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in partnership with le Frac des Pays de la Loire. Gina Pane
Situation Idale . N.p.: Muse Des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 26 Apr. 2009.

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Nixon, Mignon. "You Thrive on Mistaken Identity." October 60 (1992): 58-81.
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O'Dell, Kathy. Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998.

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Pane, Gina. "Lettre Un(e) Inconnu(e)." Artitudes International 15/17 (1974): 14.
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Vergine, Lea. Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language. Milano: Skira, 2000.
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West, Kevin. "Public Offering: Sculptor Chris Burden, a Cult Figure on the L.A. Art Scene,
Unveils Monumental Projects on Both Coasts." W Magazine. N.p., May 2008.