Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
the human body but significantly refrained from reflections on
the physically painful difference between the fine arts and
body art.
16 Brus' social critique - like most of the Viennese
actionists he bluntly attacked the decrepit bourgeois
attitudes prevailing in conservative Vienna and its failure to
deal critically with its Nazi past (cf. e.g. Schröder 1990:
71) - materialized on the level of corporeality in
performances such as Zerreißprobe (Endurance Test, 1971)
during which he presented himself in blatantly antisocial
fashion by appealing to the audience for certain banal favours
(for instance to shut the window or to give him a glass of
water) while ignoring their reactions or insulting them (by
peeing into the glass and drinking its contents). Brus thus
got to be known as the enfant terrible of early performance
art and was actually marginalized socially not only because of
his chaotic, dirty or sometimes even disgusting body actions
but also because he put his finger on something Judith Butler
thirty years later explicated theoretically: on pain as a side-
effect of social norm-giving and norm-maintaining processes
(related, not only etymologically, to poena or "punishment" -
Scarry 16).6 As Brus put it, solely the child who does not yet
know about social rules is still unhurt ("das Kind, das noch
nichts weiss von dem Kram, ist noch mit heiler Haut da", cited
in Schröder 86). The calculated social scandalon of body art
lies in the presumptuousness with which it seems to take over
traditional prerogatives of the state such as the negotiation
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (15 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57