Thinking Feeling Contemporary Art

Review of Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham: Duke UP, 2013.

In the summer of 2004, toward the tail end of my graduate studies, I spent six weeks at Cornell University, attending the School of Criticism and Theory. There I witnessed a memorable and dramatic public lecture and presentation by Richard Schechner, one of the key figures in the foundation of performance studies. The lecture focused on the meaning behind contemporary performance artworks that employ self-wounding and mutilation in various forms. After encouraging his audience not to turn away from the difficult material he was about to show, Schechner screened a lengthy montage of video documentation of such works, beginning, relatively innocuously, with Chris Burden’s 1971 Shoot piece and reaching a crescendo with Rocío Boliver’s Cierra las Piernas from 2003. As the artist on screen pushed a plastic Jesus figurine into her vagina and proceeded to sew it closed, the audience at SCT expressed audible discomfort and horror. One student got up to leave and fainted just outside the doorway to the lecture hall, at which point the event ground to an angry halt.
 
Reactions to the presentation after the fact were mixed but generally negative. Many of my colleagues felt duped by the sensationalism of the presentation and what they felt was Schechner’s inability to offer a coherent rationale for the difficult performances they had been asked, further, exhorted, to watch. Having some previous familiarity with the works in question and knowing well my own very low threshold of tolerance when it comes to blood and the violation of flesh—I have been known to faint myself—I chose to turn away for much of the presentation. As one of the few art historians in the crowd, I reasoned to myself that I understood the work on an intellectual level—that is to say, I felt I knew what the work was even if I had not experienced much of it directly, either in person or through video documentation—and thus felt I did not need to watch it. Like my theory-minded grad student peers, I found Schechner’s presentation to be something of a fiasco for the way it seemed to use these difficult performance works as a tool of emotional manipulation rather than elucidate their meaning on an intellectual and conceptual level.
 
Reading Jennifer Doyle’s important new book, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, I often found myself returning to Schechner’s notorious lecture and I have come to think that there was a lot more going on in that encounter—socially, politically, and affectively—than I, my colleagues, or perhaps even Schechner himself realized. At the crux of many of the works Schechner presented, and arguably of Schechner’s presentation itself (driven as it seemed to be by a desire to provoke and unsettle his audience) is the issue of what Doyle describes as “difficulty” in art. The concept of difficult art is certainly nothing new to art historians. As Doyle suggests, the difficulty of a Picasso painting, a Duchamp readymade, or a Donald Judd box sculpture is an intellectual one. The work may challenge the viewer with its austerity or critical complexity. It may require a certain degree of historical knowledge and conceptual rigor to access. It is not, however, incomprehensible. Indeed, as Doyle suggests, the difficulty of abstraction and conceptualism is not only addressed but also monumentalized within the institutional spaces of fine art. My choice to turn away from Schechner’s screening was born precisely of my art historical sense of intellectual mastery over such conceptual gestures as Duchamp’s and Judd’s. However, the “difficult” art that Doyle is interested in (and the kind of art in Schechner’s video montage) is difficult for a very different reason. It is often defined, either by intention or by prejudice, by its externality to conventions of the museum, the gallery, and art history as a discipline. The artworks addressed in this slim but formidable volume are works that defy clear, rational interpretation, operating instead in the terrain of feelings and emotions. How one might approach such work without resorting to either an overly schematic literalism on the one hand or a knee-jerk dismissal of sentimentality on the other, and what we stand to gain by threading this difficult needle are the critical lessons of this study. By learning to better engage works that operate in the realm of affect, we not only get a more accurate and socially inclusive understanding of the field of contemporary art as a whole, but we also begin to better understand affect itself a site of social and political possibility.
 
At the center of Hold It Against Me is an examination of the function of affect in contemporary art. The artists she writes about, among them Ron Athey, Nao Bustamante, James Luna, and Franko B, generally employ some aspect of performance in their work, and the affect Doyle is interested in is manifest both in the artist’s performance itself and the audience’s reaction to it. Many of these works—Ron Athey’s masochistic endurance piece Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle (2006), for example, or Franko B’s bleeding performances—may provoke dramatic and visceral affective responses in the audience member who may struggle witnessing and engaging with the artist’s body in pain. But not all works in Doyle’s book are so extreme. James Luna’s History of the Luiseño People, La Jolla Reservation Christmas 1990 (2009), for example, is alienating, but only because the drunken, hostile persona of Luna’s performance was off-putting and awkward. Similarly, Doyle begins the book with an illuminating anecdote about her own resistance to participate in the late Adrian Howells’ performance Held, a work that centers not on feelings of pain and suffering but rather on the mundane pleasures of domestic cohabitation. The piece invited a single “viewer” to spend an hour at home with the artist, drinking tea, watching TV, holding hands, and spooning in bed. That a scholar like Doyle, who is tough enough to assist Athey throughout the six-hour duration of Dissociative Sparkle by placing eye drops in his eyes while his lids are held open by fish hooks, would feel such profound discomfort with the domestic comforts offered by Held is revelatory, and gets to the heart of Doyle’s argument. The works in question are important not because they require us to feel a certain way—indeed Doyle’s own affective response to Held prevented her from participating in the piece at all. Doyle highlights the critical point, citing Irit Rogoff, that such resistance or the act of looking away need not be understood as a failure to engage the work. Rather, the heterogeneity of audience responses constitutes a vital part of what Doyle describes as “the fleshy complexity of viewership and audience” (14). These affectively difficult artworks are significant because of the way that the feelings they provoke, whatever they may be, offer a different, more embodied and more socially engaged way of thinking about art and the world it inhabits.
 
This alternate approach is particularly important because so many of the works under consideration here are by female, queer, and/or artists of color (the one key exception is an idiosyncratic but fascinating discussion of Thomas Eakins’ 1875 painting The Gross Clinic).  Echoing the work of José Esteban Muñoz, Darby English, and others, Doyle’s complex attention to the difficulties of emotion in contemporary art highlights and undermines the literalism so often employed in reading the work of artists of color, queers artists, and woman artists. James Luna’s famous 1986 Artifact Piece, in which the Native American artist “installed himself” in a glass vitrine in an anthropological museum, is a particularly potent commentary on this art historical tendency toward “literalization.” Artifact Piece cannily and critically presents artwork and artist as static, artifactual, relegated to the past with all other Native culture. However, by engaging the emotional terrain of these works, Doyle suggests that we may find a way out of the regressive critical tendency to rationalize and reduce these kinds of artwork to a mere representation of race, gender, or sexuality. Acknowledging feeling in contemporary art draws attention to that which is obliterated, when, for example, Ron Athey’s work is framed simply as “art about AIDS” because Athey is gay and HIV positive. Furthermore, engaging affect offers a different way to think about the conceptual project of such work, to realize its full complexity, as Doyle does when she delves into the physical, psychological, social, historical, and iconographical richness of a critically ignored and misunderstood artwork like Athey’s Dissociative Sparkle. In the process, she reveals Dissociative Sparkle to be, on both a personal and a public level, a work “haunted … by its history [and] an act of determined political defiance” (68).
 
What makes this book so brilliant and challenging (both for the reader, and I suspect, for the author) is that engaging these affective responses from a scholarly position is in itself a difficult task. Doyle is explicit about the social meaning of affect. Emotion, she notes, is produced through social convention and it is “where ideology does its most devastating work” (xi). But this fact does not make our feelings any less authentically or individually felt. To write a scholarly work about feelings, then, places the author in the tricky position of thinking and feeling simultaneously, of acknowledging public convention alongside private impulse, of rationalizing the sometimes irrational, and, often, of leaving things open ended. In response, the structure of Doyle’s book is demonstrative of this difficulty. It is episodic, meditative, even meandering at times, but it is also incisive and remarkably accessible for a work of such complexity and depth. As she weaves together a variety of disciplinary perspectives (art history, literary studies, and music theory among them) with her own first person encounters with provocative performance works, Doyle offers the reader a rare glimpse into not just the logistics of the works but the experience of them: interpretations convey feeling. Reading her description of Frank B’s performance I Miss You! (2003), I, too, found myself deeply unsettled, haunted by a performance I had never seen.
 
Such a maneuver is certainly significant for the way it does justice to the genre of performance art that is the primary focus of the work. While certainly less visually comprehensive than the video document, Doyle’s book offers a different, but I think equally important form of documentation of the works she has participated in or witnessed first hand. But perhaps most important to this art historian is the way Doyle’s attention to parsing feeling in contemporary art unsettles foundational assumptions in the history of art. What makes this book required reading for any scholar of modern and contemporary art is the way it complicates conventional art historical distinctions between formal innovation and narrative based or “literal” work. Modernist art has generally privileged the former over the latter, championing those artists who create difficult art by examining the ontology of the art object itself and simultaneously dismissing those who engage content and narrative as too straightforward to be considered avant garde. Doyle cannily reveals the way that this modernist notion persists even in the contemporary moment by revealing the way supposedly “literal” art is equally engaged in complexity through the feelings it produces. It is hard to overstate the significance of this move. The book challenges the instincts of many critics (myself included) to dismiss sentimentality in art as narcissistic, maudlin, and, ironically, too accessible. Thinking back to Schechner’s presentation, I realize that what I missed was the way that my own sense of intellectual mastery over the history of modern art, my cultivated scholarly “coolness” in the face of the difficult work in Schechner’s presentation, distracted me from my own affective response to the work and my emotional need to turn away. Doyle’s book is both an endorsement for and an example of what might happen once we venture away from the assurance of that cool scholarly detachment and into the less transparent but perhaps more revealing terrain of affective response. What Doyle discovers in that realm of feelings is not only personal sentiment, but also a complex site where ideology, aesthetics, social convention, and political possibility intersect.