suicide_as_performance_art sameolme The first I know about was that monk in Vietnam who burned himself up while sitting in meditation. Nowadays there's more audience participation. 041120 ... no reason i've heard of masochistic performance art. where the performer shoots into the audience. and the audience who is very aware of this. i don't understand, but then again, i'm not that sort of masochist. 041120 ... iNsEcUrE_GoTh_GiRL we've just studied the Vietminh and that monk who set himself on fire. There's a picture of it in our textbook....... thought provoking to say the least 041121 ... iNsEcUrE_GoTh_GiRl we've just studied the Vietminh and that monk who set himself on fire. There's a picture of it in our textbook....... thought provoking to say the least 041121 ... ivyducktwilightseto Attention up for grabs!! We all want it! Come and get it! Weeeeeeeee!!! 041121 ... Lesterson A guy sets himself on fire, a holy man at that and one response is "...thought provoking to say the least." I guess that's the inevitable exudate of a culture that coaxes the ever burning ember of our souls quiet agony into the state of exhausted moral or what is supposed to pass for exhausted moral postures. A world where some think one wastes themselves with words ladled from the fiery core of our passion, wastes oneself with impassioned gestures.. (unless it's a blistering aria of deprecation peppered with an inspiring cadenza of profanity) We assign a dubious value to anything that remotely resembles conviction, altruism innocence. Nothing personal IG. I guess what I'm talking about is the slow and insidious and eventual exanguination of the Human. The soul resembles a slow burning corpse waiting with fatigue for the funeral rites wich won't come for another 40 or 50 years. 041121 ... sameolme Oh, go fly a kite into an igloo full of snow men! 041121 ... sameolme That monk had a very powerful meditation. He used his death as an artistic statement against war. He killed himself as as an offering to humanity, much as Christ gave his life as an offering. In todays world the artists are offering other peoples lves along with their own. They are called suicide bombers. It is still a powerful form of expression, no TV magician crap. When the twin towers disappeared, the world changed. Thousands of people die every day with little affect, thousands of small children die of diarrea every day with little affect. I'm not sure where I'm trying to go with this, still just trying to understand. If you were aiming to promote peace with your death, or with your life for that matter, how could you do it as powerfully as a suicide bomber? 041121 ... maybe i*ll catch fire self_immolation 041122 ... Lesterson What about the loss of innocent lives? Suicide bombers casualties rarely affect the true source of the aggrieved person's distress. They only wind up spurring their percieved oppressor to escalate an already exigent campaign of ethnic circumscription. ---------------------------------------- (there has GOT to be a clearer way to say what i just typed. suggestions anyone?) 041122 ... iNsEcUrE_GoTh_GiRl here i may show my ignorance some of those ohsopretty long words you used to highlight exactly how callous or soulless i am or whatever you were trying to negatively imply about me... they were just unneccessary. Please.....if you want to critically analyse what i say, feel free. Just don't be quite so pompous with your choice of vocabulary. Anyway, i dont really get whether you are supporting what the monk did or not. to be honest, i don't really care. I have my opinions, you have yours. when i'm less tired and busy, i might reread what you put and carefully construct a reply so we can have an educated debate on the point of suicide bombing. until then i shall go and immerse myself in this shallow world we live in....let the soul ember burn out. 041122 ... Les I always post my responses to the sound of John Phillip Sousa marches blaring on my reconditioned Victrola. So you ARE passionate about SOMETHING. I think I ran across this page in the aftermath of an unpleasant encounter with 'he who will remain nameless' "my soul was about to soar and you cut it down!" Yeah. I'm sorry I made you the surrogate for my ...God do i SO want to obliterate that supercilious smirk off of his absurd little face!...Okay. I'm sorry I made you the surrogate for my dispaced pique at the erosion of human kinkness like some gnome emerged from a hole in the wall, straddles our chests while we're sleeping and sucks all the empathy out of us...there really DOES seem to be an erosion of the communion between the soul and the spirit and the mind. I feel a little bad and a lot embarassed. 041122 ... .... Or maybe there is a communion between body soul and spirit. It's just the resultant expression of said communion that you seem to have a problem with. 041123 ... David de Saxby Pendragon Yea. I, so there be no confusion. I indict all who sit and wring their hands and eschew thier manhood in some fraudulent moral code as they pray in the tedious tintinnabula of prayer made to a vain god. How thier god can STAND it! Can stand to look upon such fawning sychophantic creatures. Yea. So I care to the sum of ZERO about some Monk in his burlap cossack and flaccid piety who sets himself aflame. For even if I lay in my sick bed, my regal brow wreathed with beads of ever raining sweat, Death's whispers are in it It's gentle importunations to surrender supine and spent, this life that I have held lo these many years. The of it, of hate rage pain sickness and war feeds me. The fire feeds me. though my skin be cold to the touch, shaking as death begins to sink his scythe into me, I would rise and strain against the restraints that force me into such a weak and dishonourable posture of convalescance, refusing to acknowledge the sensation of a vulture gnawing upon my burning liver, Yea still I would shirk off the yoke of suffering sickness and death. I will be bold and insolent and leave in my tracks, in the wake of a singular and otherworldly truculence, the reek and ruin of their lives, their will their bowels split open and a river of putrefaction running in Havocs wake. And my enemy while yet even numberless with storehouses piled high with provisions would tremble at Hells' fire burning in my eyes. And as mothers bend to their mangled bodies to listen to the heart that would never sound again. Every corrupt church, every alter of commerce and progress would be desecrated. For such is the obstinate opposition of my heart. I would turn the fierce and the brave into white eyes pupiless eunicks wandering blindly into the deepest recesses of the most remote and inhospitable wilderness. For such is will and mettle of the Pendragons whose warrior madness and howling heart informs my art of the slaughter. To sit in a paupers room, that is neither auster, cold or grim, this elusive sense of the maiden head suffuses it's stale air. To sit in a paupers room by a candle's flickering light upon a wilting wick that cannot hold its flame and pore over the words of long dead sedentary men who spent their lives hoarding the written word and fought no battle, drove no armadas back into the sea. and to sit and sit while my world my people burn down around me. I will be bold, I will be insolent, I will be fierce and fly with heavy slaughter to end the useless bruising of their flailing hearts. 041123 ... D. Pendragon There it is bloody living color. You need not aspire to pluck out the mystery of my heart. 041123 ... D. Pendragon For such is my wrath so insuperable it is that in my warriors lust, lost in the dance that havoc let's fly in my heart, enraptured and swollen by fury that I become a living machine of carnage. My brow raining beads of sweat and deaths' whisper is in them. 041123 ... oE So what about suicide and the ultimate kind of martydom as a protest to the implacable tread of repression. While it may not derail a regime it can at least focus the worlds attention. It may even 'cause said repressive power structure to stumble, creating an albeit brief oppurtunity for a creative and agressive campaign of sabotague or at least some insidiously creative social engineering oppurtunities. ... 041123 ... once again And i see you... not with you fingers ink stained... there are no longer coveralls covered in splatters of paint. I see you even swept up the saw dust and mortar that littered the ground... But I see you there, the cement no longer rough looking, as you've scattered it with feathers... you look like a statue with your alabaster skin... am I your only audience? I see a canvas on the wall already marked with a plaque... "Still Life" and just below it your name so carefully carved and followed by two dates. one of them today. I begin to smell the smoke... you're burning words into your skin... and your blank eyes say nothing your lips stiched shut and silent. And I watch in silent wonder can you really know what you do? I see you take the knife to the throbbing life in your neck and I see you never hesitate as your life trickles away... And I see I am the only one left to read the words... I do not have to explain my art to you. 041123 ... oE nicely done 041123 ... Freak what about some simple blood letting... 041123 ... David deSaxby Pendragon Mayhaps thou speakest of flying into slaughter. Or mayhaps thou speakest of the crucibles held every year to inaugerate new knights in the order of Uther. Zounds! Methinks thou shouldest go to the blathepage cut. 041123 ... reue misdirection is truer to the course than that of the cardnial 041123 ... the horror...oldephebe.... uh... titus andronicus could kick some but as well 041229 ... RIC butt? 041229 ... highperson just don't be messy - some one will have to clean you up :) 041230 ... egger . 050104 ... phil boring! what the fuck! This IS SUICIDE as PERFORMANCE ART for christ's sakes! Jesus fuckign hole in a handchopped off basket rape nut squirrel, how much interesting more can you so totally get with it? good god. 050105 ... phil Suicide doesn't take the time to explain the pain of life. It expresses the level of torture evil can inflict. midget_suicide 050105 ... oE ya gotta admit though..it's a pretty catchy/provocative title 050105 ... phil a good use of the _ 050105 ... (les is boring) 050105 ... David De Saxby Pendragon Oh man. I've told him many many times the same thing. 050708 ... David de Saxby Pendragon I hath inscribed it with iron eternally into the face of rock. "Les. Thou art Boring." I hath said, Les though art the scrourge set upon the sleepless soul to torment. But uh he just kinda smirked, you know superciliously and finished eating his Wawa hotdog slathered in onions and cheese whiz. ... I guess he feels that this sylized manner of representing him self to the world is... what an obtuse analytical model he said in blah blah so then I said what of Foucault? and he said ****** 050708 ... daxle is it late enough for us to laugh at the idea of someone who calls themselves "insecure goth girl (uh make that wavier){ adding to this blathe? what?! you didn't expect me to change That much, did you? 050709 ... iNsEcUrE_GoTh_GiRl 'is it late enough for us to laugh at the idea of someone who calls themselves "insecure goth girl (uh make that wavier){ adding to this blathe? ' i'm sorry...is there something amusing here that i've missed? 050709 ... a thimble in time The suicide bomber is an artist looking to create mass spectacle. The world is a stage, and with help from the media, the audience is everyone. We like to think that the suicide bomber blows himself up out of religous conviction or even political ideology - for a cause that transcends his own death. But sometimes, the medium is the message: 'We will sow fear into your hearts. We will make you dread leaving your home. We will make havoc. We will create financial uncertainty and chaos. We can be anyone. We can strike you anywhere.' Al-Qaeda is not going to conquer the United Kingdom or the United States. They are simply going to terrorize them. That is the message. 050710 ... a thimble in time The suicide bomber is an artist looking to create mass spectacle. The world is a stage, and with help from the media, the audience is everyone. We like to think that the suicide bomber blows himself up out of religous conviction or even political ideology - for a cause that transcends his own death. But sometimes, the medium is the message: 'We will sow fear into your hearts. We will make you dread leaving your home. We will make havoc. We will create financial uncertainty and chaos. We can be anyone. We can strike you anywhere.' Al-Qaeda is not going to conquer the United Kingdom or the United States. They are simply going to terrorize them. That is the message. 050710 ... a thimble in time The suicide bomber is an artist looking to create mass spectacle. The world is a stage, and with help from the media, the audience is everyone. We like to think that the suicide bomber blows himself up out of religous conviction or even political ideology - for a cause that transcends his own death. But sometimes, the medium is the message: 'We will sow fear into your hearts. We will make you dread leaving your home. We will make havoc. We will create financial uncertainty and chaos. We can be anyone. We can strike you anywhere.' Al-Qaeda is not going to conquer the United Kingdom or the United States. They are simply going to terrorize them. That is the message. 050710 ... me . 050710 ... yeahAna Mendieta's primal scream WITH FIRE, WATER, BLOOD AND EARTH AS HER MEDIUMS, THIS CUBAN-BORN ARTIST WAS THE HIGH PRIESTESS OF PERFORMANCE WORK ON THE SURFACE THE DELI at Mercer Street and Broadway appears to be like any other of the numerous establishments in New York City offering customers the usual 24 hour service. But on the rooftop above, imprinted in a bed of tar, lies the final silhouette of one of this century's most crucial artists. How it got there is both horrifying and strangely relevant. On September 8th, 1986, Anna Mendieta plunged from the 34th floor of her apartment building to an untimely death. The 36-year-old Cuban-born artist had reached the pinnacle of success both in terms of etching out her inner visions and gaining world-wide recognition. Mendieta was both of her time and, more importantly, beyond her time. Although the styles she embraced could be labeled performance art, body art and earthworks, she was an artist who defied stereotyping and whose obsession with overturning new ground brought forth an aesthetic force of infinite magnitude. Ana Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948 to a socially prominent family that had played a significant role in the nation's history. Her great grandfather General Carlos Maria de Rojas was an important figure in Cuba's war for independence (1895-88) and her granduncle, Carlos Mendieta, was president of the nation in the 1930s. The Mendieta family, along with the general population, initially supported Castro's armed struggle against tyrannical rule. However, class contradictions became complicated and the Mendietas hesitated to incorporate themselves into the revolution. The Catholic Church, which was openly opposed by Castro's regime, also played a big role in the family's eventual counter-revolutionary stance. At the age of 13, Ana and her older sister Raquel were sent to a foster home run by nuns in Dubuque, Iowa, as part of the Pedro Pan Operation, which was set up to transport young Cubans to the United States to preserve their Catholic upbringing. The Mendietas would have preferred to flee the island together, but Ana's father was detained on multiple accounts of anti-Castroism. This abrupt uprooting was traumatic for the girls, as it alienated them from their family and the nuances of their culture at a very vulnerable age. Confronting her displacement, Ana turned to artistic exploration as both a therapeutic and self-searching venue. She studied art at the University of Iowa, receiving her B.A. in 1969 and her M.A. in painting in 1972. In search of a spiritual connection which conventional painting could not evoke, she re-enrolled the same year to work on a M.F.A. in the University's new multi-media and video program, which embraced the Center for New Performing Arts. "In this atmosphere, Ana's work exploded off the canvas", says Hans Breder, director of the University's program. Little did he know that her future works would literally exploded, as she adopted gunpowder as one of her many experimental tools. From her earliest explorations as a student in the multi-media program, Mendieta immersed herself in her work with a ritualistic fervor. Like other artists of the 70s, she focused on the personal process, distinguishing herself by pushing the concept of body and performance art to the extreme. As these new mediums afforded unique arenas for issues of gender, a significant number of women became involved in the movement. In early 1973, in response to several rapes on campus, Mendieta concocted a macabre scenario for the evening art class which was scheduled to meet in her room. Her classmates arrived to find her "tied to a table, bent over, nude from the waist down, and blood was all over the place," Breder comments. "It was a very dramatic piece that took a lot of risk." From then on, Mendieta continued to develop provocative images and subject matter in her art. Numerous ritualistic performance/acts in which she used blood combined with tempera have been preserved on film. Mendieta explains, "I started immediately using blood, I guess because I think it's a very powerful, magical thing. I don't see it as a negative force." In her 1973 filmwork, "Sweating Blood," simulated blood dripped slowly from her scalp down her forehead while the camera focused on her face, eyes shut in a trancelike state, as if possessed. She pursued this theme in two subsequent performances, "Blood Writing" (1973) and "Blood Sign No. 2" (1974). But it was with her 1982 "Body Tracks" series, in which she slid her arms that had been dipped in blood down a white wall, that Mendieta received her first national attention. The marks on the pristine wall were both a dramatic documentation of an action as well as an intriguing concretization of her own presence. She completely subjectified herself, using her entire body as a medium, yet maintained an objective eye as she investigated how video and photography could be used to document these ephemeral works. As the impact of Mendieta's exile became more evident in her work, she intensified her search for origins. "Having been torn from my homeland during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb. My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe." In an attempt to get closer to her roots, she studied the principles of santeria, the Cuban fusion of Catholicism and African Yoruba worship. Her library included works by the legendary Cuban anthropologist, Lydia Cabrera, who clarified that esoteric world where the rich lore of a displaced people is veiled within traditional Roman Catholic worship. Mendieta had been introduced to santeria by the servants of her childhood home yet only later, as an exile, did she realize its true value. Not only did she realize its true value. Not only did she empathize with the uprooted African peoples, but this form of worship provided her with a schematic philosophy based on the powers of the earth, linking nature and the spiritual realm. In early 1973, during an outdoor performance at Old Man's Creek in Iowa City, Mendieta rolled her naked, bloodied body in a bed of white feathers, transforming herself into the white cock which is customarily sacrificed as a preparatory rite for the Nanigos, a secret male society of santeria. She continued to draw on aspects of this cult through the early 1980s. In one piece, she performed the sacrifice for the camera as she stood naked, holding a beheaded white chicken that flapped its wings frantically, splattering blood on her body and the surrounding white walls. In 1981 she created a piece on a tree in Miami that was deemed sacred by the local santeria community. Mendieta explains how those believers received her work: "The santeros use a tree that in Spanish is called a ceiba and in English a cotton silkwood tree. It has very long roots that stick out. In Miami there is a tree like that which the santeros have claimed and the people do things to that tree when a healer tells them that they have to make a sacrifice. When I was there I decided to do a piece on the tree. I was in the Cuban section and collected human hair from the different beauty shops so I knew it was Cuban hair. Then I made a figure on the tree.... The last time I saw the tree, the people had added coconuts, chicken wings, all kinds of offerings. For a while they put a figure of Santa Barbara underneath it, cut an opening in what would be the face and stuck a shell in the mouth. They have really activated the image and claimed it as their own. Taino and other pre-Columbian mythologies, especially their fertility symbols, became tools to convey Mendieta's primal power. Life-nurturing elements such as fire, water, blood and earth charged her work with a presence which in santeria is known as ashe. Freely borrowing from her Cuban heritage, she applied a talismatic approach: "I believe in water, air and earth. They are all deities. They also speak...Those are the things that are powerful and important. I don't know why people have gotten away from these ideas." Nearly every summer, Breder took his students to Oaxaca, Mexico, for work study adventures to archaeological sites. Mendieta acutely identified herself with these sites and developed a reverential sense of scared place and space. These ventures put her in contact with a culture closer to that of her native Cuba, to which she would not return for another decade. "Plugging into Mexico was like going back to the source, being able to get some magic just by being there." In a mock ritual, she transformed an ancient burial site by imprinting its surface with a branding iron that had been crafted in the shape of her hand. In another performance/installation she commissioned the local cohetero, to make a fireworks silhouette of her body which was ritualistically ignited infront of an audience of her classmates and local townspeople. Once again, Mendieta's work was suspended somewhere between the subjective and the objective, as she stepped back to document the work photographically and watch the form burn in an act of self-demolition. Making art became a spiritual act. In creating her earth-body sculptures, Mendieta claimed her sites intuitively, working alone, preparing the land and deeming it sacred. Although she explored a vast range of multi-media works, her Silueta series is perhaps her most self definitive imagery. recreating her five-foot form wherever she staked out her ground, she was in continuous communion with mother earth. Eventually, Mendieta's work took on the image of the Goddess, moving away from the use of her own body to the archetypal symbol for woman. "The works recall prehistoric beliefs of an omnipresent female force whose body parts made the earth a living creature." Naturally, Mendieta's desire to create in Cuba was fierce, "it would only be logical to bring the Silueta series to its source." She carefully planned her 1980 voyage, as she knew it would be emotionally trying. At the end of her visit, she smuggled earth from Cuba and sand from Varadero Beach. "There is an African ritual which I think deals with the same ideas I explore in my art: When a native brings back a wife from Kimberly, they carry with them a little dirt from her homeland. Everyday she eats a little of this dirt to accustom herself to the change of residency. In a sense that is what I am doing here. By making my image in nature I can deal with the two cultures. My earth-body sculptures are not the final stage of a ritual but a way and a means of asserting my emotional ties with nature and conceptualizing religion and culture." Mendieta returned to Cuba in August of 1981 with the support of the Ministry of Culture for a one-month-stay. Inspired by pre-Columbian imagery, she carved her Esculturas Rupestres in the Escalera de Jaruco, ancient caves near Havana. It was a product that bound her forever with her ancestral land. By the mid-1980s, Mendieta had reached unprecedented heights as an avant-garde artist both internationally and within the elitist New York art scene. She had been awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1983, which entitled her to a private studio in this European art capital for one year, sponsored by the American Academy. Returning to New York City, she married the famous minimalist Carl Andre in January of 1985, although she continued to work in Rome for months at a time. This union perplexed those closest to her, as the pair was reported to be temperamentally and artistically opposed. he was the successful minimalist commanding unheard of prices for his uninvolved pieces while Mendieta steered away from the idea of art as commodity. It could be said that Andre and Mendieta were a true match for each other until the end. "What happened was we had...my wife is an artist...and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, uh, exposed to the public than she was, and she went to the bedroom and I went after her and she went out the window." Carl Andre's account of that fateful night of Mendieta's death was recorded when he called the emergency 911 immediately after her death. Ana Mendieta didn't have a chance to leave her version. Whether suicide or homicide, that tragic event opened up a stirring case that eventually acquitted Carl Andre. However, a careful scrutiny of the pieces in this complex puzzle leaves one both disillusioned and intrigued. The circumstances surrounding Mendieta's death remain ambiguous, and have polarized the art world in a manner reminiscent of the Dreyfus affair which split up France into two ideological camps in the nineteenth century. As Mendieta used her art to heal herself, her powerful images were lessons in potentiality for the viewer, often dissolving both ethnic and sexual barriers. Her gestures were autobiographical, not narcissistic. By continually demonstrating that her works were essential responses to the human condition, she challenged her audience, incited curiosity and ultimately acted as a liberating force. Making no concessions to the standard ideal of beauty, her potent, sometimes crude statements urge the viewer to go beyond the confines of the conventional. The boundless work created by this artist during her tragically brief career guaranteed her a niche in history. Today this work refuses to be silenced. Mendieta's vision remains as potent as ever, harboring great relevance for coming generations. 050711 ... oh wait... the preceding piece was written by this writer for some lofty manhatten arts/literary publication rachel something or other brilliantly done rachel 050712 ... William The Bloody "Blood is powerful, magical, I guess i don't see it as a negative thing/representation..." Bullocks!! What would authentic goths say to that? You know, about seeing blood as a primal, magical representation and actuater of force. 050714 ... Ouroboros hunger_artists 060603 what's it to you? who go blather from