Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
Another widespread but more serious painful phenomenon is self-
harming behaviour (cutting, scratching, etc.), a form of
addictive, post-traumatic autoaggression teenage girls are
especially prone to. The definition provided in a newspaper
article on the subject (Kölner Stadtanzeiger, Moderne Zeiten,
May 11th/12th, 2002) lists cutting oneself with knives, razor
blades or shards of glass, burning, scratching one's skin
until open wounds develop, the tearing out of body hair, the
regular opening of healing wounds, knocking one's head against
hard surfaces and injuring one's genitals. While the
relationship between body art proper and non-artistic body
practices is difficult to determine, it is almost eerie to
realise that practically all forms of psychopathological
autoaggression have at some stage been presented as art in
public performances.
43 As far as pain is concerned, it seems that on the
whole, performative spectacles of cruelty have gone out of
fashion because of their waning impact on an audience which
has long grown accustomed to painful procedures of body
styling. Obviously, it is no longer sufficient to destroy the
integrity of the human body in order impress a contemporary
art public. Instead, the new target both for body artists and
for lifestyle aesthetes is the flawlessness of the body, which
provides an effective foil for any blemishes body artists may
choose to inflict on it. In a recent Spiegel article on the
status of the body in present-day culture and art, Ulrike
Knöfel cites the example of Swiss photo artist Daniele Buetti,
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (50 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57