Violence Sublime
by AMANDA MANITACH May 25, 2013
Libertines, monsters and the spectacle of pain: Aesthetic violence in the Pacific Northwest.
The only film that ever made me flinch is a 1975 Italian movie called Salò. In it, there’s a scene where 18 beautiful, adolescent hostages are forced to eat excrement out of a serving bowl during a banquet at the pleasure palace of four fascist libertines. Throughout the film, the young captives are repeatedly sodomized and tortured and eventually have their tongues and eyes cut out.
The film, based on Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, is director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critique of Mussolini, Nazis and abuse of power—but at times it feels like more of an indulgence. Salò was heavily censored for decades and banned in many countries. Cinephiles have since warmed to it, but it’s still shocking because its gratuitous imagery overshadows a moralizing narrative. It provides no comic relief, no apology for its lavish depiction of abuse. And it made me wonder what kind of monster I was for watching it.
I flinched, but was compelled to sit through the film, enthralled, even titillated. My voyeuristic pleasure made me complicit.
Violence in art has been lauded as a vehicle for catharsis, defended as a surrogate for real violence (get your rocks off playing a video game instead of shooting up a McDonald’s) and blamed for desensitization. Most of all, violence in art is a mirror reflecting the bleakest version of humanity. It hurts to look—and yet we’re mesmerized. Narratives of violence describe us more faithfully than most of the other stories we like to spin about ourselves.
Here in pacifist, passive aggressive Seattle, quite a few accomplished artists aestheticize violence in their work. If our tastes reflect something about us, then our regional style of violence betrays our cool intellectualism, barely masking a collective fascination with serial killers and the gruesome soap operas of infamous locals like Amanda Knox and Robert Pickton.
We like the storytelling, the romance. Our artists hold full-bore gore and shock at arm’s length, but they still plunge into dark matter. The appeal of this kind of art might be explained by the many clichés about this region, where we romanticize the nihilistic grit of grunge, where our city parks look like the haunted forests of fairytale, where we task ourselves with enduring dreary winters as though it were sport, lest we plunge headlong off the Aurora Bridge like a pack of sad lemmings.
Tapping into the region’s history, artist Gretchen Bennett is famous for sculptures of fallen deer and colored-pencil drawings of Kurt Cobain based on YouTube videos of his live performances. The softness of her technique misdirects the melancholy overtones of death in much of her work, including her recent series of delicate, shadowy graphite drawings made from stills taken from The Killing, a cable-TV series about serial murders that takes place in Seattle.
“The Killing holds DNA from Norwegian horror, British psychological thrillers and other TV serials filmed in the Pacific Northwest,” Bennett says. “This landscape, both actual and televised, is familiar to me—I’m in it. This work is about distilling the essence of an unknown. Searching for clues, for monsters only glimpsed.”
The Northwest is, after all, the setting for so many current stories of vampires, werewolves and other half-human monsters. Psychologically and literally, Bennett’s work taps into the gothic romance of the region, connecting wilderness with a kind of savagery.
Others local artists plug into a schticky, cartoonish version of violence. Enter Charles Krafft.
A few months ago I met up with Krafft at Fortuna Cafe, a family-run Chinese place in the International District with rows of golden roast duck hanging in the window. I met him for dinner because I wanted to talk about the recent controversy that exploded around his stance on white nationalism. (Krafft believes that Holocaust-related statistics were exaggerated.) Over steamed oysters and chicken feet, he told me how few of his controversial pieces, such as his Hitler teapots and other Nazi-themed items, ever sold. But people go crazy for his ceramic Delftware-inspired guns and grenades.
“Violence is part of the current zeitgeist,” Krafft told me. “It’s glorified like never before in history. American popular culture has become pathologically violent and is marketed globally.”
But the objects he makes don’t necessarily transcend any function beyond cute simulacra of instruments of death. They are what they are: decorative weapons, trophies of evil. Post-exposé, many people were outraged that the irony they perceived in Krafft’s work may actually be a genuine extension of the artist’s hostile political views. Or maybe Krafft’s audience was caught with their hands in the cookie jar, having enjoyed something that was never PC to begin with.
“I suppose I’m guilty of glorifying violence just by dint of the subject matter I’ve chosen,” Krafft said. “But this is checked by the surreal fragility of the functionless weapons I make.”
I nibbled at a chicken foot. Krafft is a really nice guy with razor-sharp wit, despite his vexing views. Are those views, like his artwork, intended to provoke? And if so, to what end?
“I’ve always made art that I like to look at and live with,” he said, “but lately it’s been less about me trying to provoke than about the peremptory outrage of others.”
Setting out on a more critical course, Stacey Rozich unveiled a vocabulary of violent imagery with her show Within Without Me, which opened at Roq La Rue Gallery last month. It included 22 watercolor paintings in Rozich’s folkloric, illustrative style but diverged from her usually tame subject matter with no end of sauced-up drunks, masked monsters with shotguns, decapitated beasts, spiritual elders hoarding piles of blood money and shrouded corpses waiting to be devoured by blackbirds. One painting called “We All Play the Same Games” showed masked monsters crouching on the ground playing cards, empty booze bottles scattered around, while a figure in a gimp mask cradles a distraught, rabbit-headed companion. In the background, a snow-white yeti lurks behind a leafy houseplant.
These trigger-happy monsters are scary not because of their grotesqueness but because they’re so human. Rozich’s sugarcoated commentary is sharp—and slyly subversive—because she throws in humor to make the horror palatable. People will hang this work over their couches because it’s terribly cute and because—at least at first glance—they relate to the characters for reasons other than the monstrosity on display.
“Pop culture is a great equalizer,” Rozich says. “Putting baby blue Nike Cortez’s on a bandana-patterned gun-toting mercenary was my way of tempering this heavy idea of impending violence. Those nostalgic touchstones were a great way for someone to tell me, ‘I used to wear those exact shoes in seventh grade!’ It somehow lightens the mood.”
Another type of violence plays out in the work of Ryan Mitchell, the founder of performance groups Implied Violence and Saint Genet. Mitchell’s performances bring violence to life, with real people subjected to real trauma. Not unlike the way I found myself guilty of voyeuristic pleasure watching Salò, Mitchell makes his audience complicit.
Also like Salò, Mitchell eschews comedic relief. There is, in fact, no relief at all. Endurance-based performances like 2010’s Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why at the Frye Art Museum build up grueling tension over hours as performers are subjected to subtly extreme conditions like dosing with ether, sleep deprivation, continual consumption of alcohol, blows to the body and freezing cold.
In 2011, Implied Violence changed its name to Saint Genet and staged an epic, four-part operatic performance called Transports of Delirium. At the start of the first show, Mitchell’s wrists, hands and white cuffs were covered with blood. Leeches had drained him for four hours leading up to the performance; he’d thinned his blood by drinking alcohol steadily. For the ensuing four or five hours, performers were instructed to breathe in and out of balloons filled with nitrous, suffocating on it till they stumbled around the stage in a trance, or danced, a slow-motion, hysteric tarantella. Mitchell’s violence—in the form of maddening feats of endurance and dominance—is the means to a specific end.
“Violence is an entryway to talk about death, which is the only thing humans don’t understand,” Mitchell said a few days before Saint Genet opened its latest work, Paradisiacal Rites, at On the Boards last month. He’d just returned from two weeks performing at the Donaufestival in Krems, Austria, and looked 15 pounds lighter from extreme blood loss from leeching. The conditions of the performance landed him in the hospital twice.
Mitchell subjects his audience to violent spectacle as an attempt at connection. “That’s what it means to be human,” he said. “To induce sympathy, to understand that your emotions, pain, your plight can be shared. That’s why theater exists.”
His interest in the psychology of violence stems in part from growing up in an abusive home. “Thinking back on it as an adult, what was interesting wasn’t the moment I was being abused, wasn’t the moment when panic was in the house or while there was screaming and yelling,” he says. “It’s the moments preparing to walk to school afterwards. Those transitions are the interesting points. The shame and sorrow is the depth of the work.”
Witnessing a performer get buried alive under a mountain of soil for five hours, which is a component of Paradisiacal Rites, then witnessing his eventual psychological breakdown and rebirth is not about the single stroke of violence, but about suffering, enduring and surviving something profoundly passive and mundane. After hours of such spectacle, the voyeur cannot help but form a bond.
The first time I went to Europe, my Buddhist-raised traveling companion balked at the gore in Medieval and Renaissance depictions of Christ’s crucifixion in museums. I found myself defending the violent imagery: “It’s illustrating sacrifice, an act of love. It’s beautiful.” A pastor’s kid, I’d been brought up around such imagery and I’d never given its violent nature a second thought. But his reaction made me realize how comfortable I was with images of brutality. They’d been integrated into my worship.
But then I think of the image of a protesting Buddhist monk in flames, as horrific as Grünwald’s putrid, twisted Christ or Pasolini’s captives groveling like dogs. Maybe moralizing about depictions in art is missing the bigger point: No matter our background, this is who we are.
In the Marquis de Sade’s novel Justine, his heroine strives to remain virtuous despite abuse by her captors. She’s finally killed not by insane amounts of violent sex, but a bolt of lightning that enters her body through the mouth and exits through her genitals. With this ridiculous climax, de Sade points out that Mother Nature’s amorality trumps all. No amount of human violence can ever surpass the impartial, destructive power of the natural world. The violent image isn’t always an easy one to digest, but there’s no denying that we glimpse ourselves reflected in Rozich’s monsters, in Bennett’s shadowy killers or in Mitchell’s performers, taunted and transformed by the sheer will to survive.
Photo by Daniel Hawkins