...to a music-playing contest. Second, Franz Kafka's 1914 story "In the Penal Colony," where a man who has supposedly broken the law is inscribed with gothic letters spelling out the code he has transgressed. (1)

We are dealing with bodies that burst, bodies whose contours have been removed or punctured, bodies that have lost the clear differentiation between inside and out. The flesh of the convict in Kafka's story (guilty only of falling asleep while on duty) loses its capacity to differentiate the inside and the outside of the body; the internal flesh literally seeps out through the innumerable incisions and abrasions in his skin. In contrast, Marsyas loses his skin altogether and the massive flow of blood from the satyr's body becomes the River Marsyas.

The machine of retribution is described in horrific detail in Kafka's story: the "harrow" part, which consists of a plane of needles embedded in glass (so that the torture can be rendered visible to spectators) inscribes the condemned man's disobeyed commandment into his flesh in stages of increasing depth over a twelve-hour period. The man is never sentenced and never has a chance to defend himself, nor is he apprised of what is going on. The ultimate point seems to be to "teach" the offender his putative offence by literally writing it into his flesh.

Ovid's tale is, of course, equally gruesome. The crucial moment occurs when Marsyas clamours (to Apollo), "Help!, Why are you stripping me from myself?" Ovid continues:

But in spite of his cries the skin was torn off the whole surface of his body: it was all one raw wound. Blood flowed everywhere, his nerves were exposed, unprotected, his veins pulsed with no skin to cover them. It was possible to count his throbbing organs, and the chambers of the lungs, clearly visible within his breast. (2)

Crucially, the peeling away of skin is the peeling away of the very self. Without the flesh, the self presumably disappears.

The Marsyas and Kafka stories mark the shocking ambiguity of bodily rupture in relation to the real. Both are metaphorical tales about the rending of the skin that nonetheless rely on the visceral narration of brute material damage to convey their symbolic messages. The stories thus open up a series of issues key to this essay: the impossibility of separating the metaphorical from the material/ physical dimensions of bodily rupture; the crucial role of symbolic action and narration in conveying stories about human psychic pain (which is also, at the same time, physical pain); and, most crucially, the continuum of the not-real and the not-fake in acts involving corporeal splitting.

I could have used the terms "real" and "fake" rather than their negations; however, I prefer to invoke the increased ambiguity of the boundaries between what we imagine to be real and what we experience as fake that the negative forms provide. In this essay, then, I explore this continuum of the not-real and the not-fake to explore the limits of human presence and absence (and, in an abyssal telescoping of impossibilities, the inextricability of the two--and of life and death).

The Not-Fake

There is no such thing as "the real." By not-fake, then, I do not mean to suggest a definitively determinable category of body art practice. Rather, I want to point to a kind of body art gesture that pushes in the direction of what may seem to be not-fake (by posing itself as "authentic") while sustaining the possibility of the not-real.

Trying to "prove" that he or she is alive, the body artist slices and dices the skin. Trying to externalize internal pain (of the physical/psychic variety), the artist slashes, punctures, or otherwise ravages the exterior of the body. He or she makes psychic pain into a visible sign of/on the body. He or she marks physical pain (writing it, as if with Kafka's inscription machine) as a readable text. The artist (through the invocation or negotiation of pain) enacts the inextricability of emotions, thoughts and embodiment.

Gina Pane: in L'Escalade ("The Climb," 1971) she climbed a ladder the rungs of which had been adorned with razor blades; in Sentimental Action (1974) she traced rosettes of blood onto her arms with razors. "The red rose," she wrote, "transformed into a vagina by a reconstitution in its most present state, the painful one." (3) In Le Lait chaud ("Warm Milk," 1972), she first cut her back and then her face, then showed the audience members a videotape of their reactions to her acts of self-mutilation.

Through her use of video and other representational devices, Pane narrates bodily rupture--so insistently marked as not-fake by the resulting eruption of bodily fluids (here, blood)--as incurring representational effects (effects of the not-real). Pane's bleeding body creates a body of illustration: the shirt, marked (inscribed) with blood; photographs of her acts-in-process; videotapes of audience reactions. The latter strategy, in fact, serves to point to the unreality of all levels of the putative real--to the fact that Pane's brute embodiment manifested itself in and through others (shown on the videotape reacting to her).

Even in the most not-fake of body art events, the body is experienced as an effect of representation, an effect of the perceptions of others (as these bounce back to the exhibitionist and become part of her self-perception). And yet ...

Pane's pain (an alliteration that does not seem coincidental in its homophony) would have been immediate and viscerally experienced by "herself" but hot by her audience, who would only see her body over there, bleeding and rent; identification with perceived pain, after all, is not the same thing as bleeding oneself. Except for the fact that pain is always already narrated through bodily transformations that express it symbolically for the other. (4) If nothing else, masochistic body art makes this explicitly clear.

As Kurt Krens has noted, "No wound ever speaks for itself." (5)...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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