Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
employed her own body as a "blueprint for the national
territory" (71) and has recourse to a Chinese form of slow
torture in order to illustrate her perception of present-day
Mexico in crisis. The so-called drop torture consists in
having water drip constantly on the head of the victim for
weeks until he or she either goes mad or the liquid perforates
his/her skull. From the point of view of gender it is
significant that Wolffer replaces water by blood and exposes
her abdomen ("where gestation takes place" - as she herself
points out) to the impact of drops for the duration of six
hours. Only in retrospect does she admit that the suffering -
both psychological and physical - was enormous, thereby
lending qualities of martyrdom to her action.
35 In stark contrast to the political performances just
analysed, in his Endurance Test (1971), the last of Günter
Brus's autoaggressive, bloody performances (in which he cut a
triangle into his thigh, cut his skull with a razor blade and
whipped himself), Brus set himself the almost impossible task
of circumventing all iconographic references to wounding and
injury in order to leave art historians completely puzzled
(Schröder 71). It was probably the Dionysian aspect of this
radical celebration of subjectivity unleashed and the
deliberate transgression of taboos both in the field of art
and in social life which made Hermann Nitsch praise Brus's
performance in the following way:
alles war verknappt, übersteigert, überhitzt, in die
perversion, in den schrillen irrsinn getrieben, die schönheit
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (40 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57