Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
giving birth. Another example, which sheds an interesting
light on Stelarc's Suspension Performances, is an Indian
religious ceremony during which a young man chosen by the
community to bless the soil is lifted up in the air by hooks
inserted into the muscles of his back (239-240). Pöppel points
out that the man shows no signs of pain whatsoever during the
ritual and explains this by the cultural value and positive
connotations attached to the process. The decisive factor in
the negotiation of pain thus seems to be social conditioning
so that in (religious) ecstasy, trance and masochism, which
may be linked emotionally and mentally with positive features,
perceptions of pain can be blotted out by endorphins the brain
produces (249, 251). The frequent absence of pain in body-
centred art performances, especially when they are performed
live before an audience, are therefore not necessarily a
consequence of the artist consciously withholding all bodily
reactions but may be attributable to an ecstatic emotional
state of dis-embodiment triggered by the performance situation
itself.
28 The perceptible reactions to pain or unease which are
being articulated in performance art, however, are often
employed consciously as critical, antisocial gestures. Asked
whether he regarded body and performance art as a climax of
speechlessness within art history, Otto Mühl answered in 1994:
"Im Aktionismus wird eine neue Sprache eingeführt: die Sprache
des Bauches. Sie ist viel echter. Rülpsen, Scheißen, Brunzen,
Atmen, Röcheln. Der anderen ist zu mißtrauen. [...] Die
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (32 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57