Visiting the Frye Art Museum

Implied Violence is a performance art group based in the Seattle area that work to depict violence and pain, exploring "ecstatic states produced by ether, sleep deprivation, blows to the body, extreme exertion, endurance, alcohol, or bloodletting by medicinal leeches" ("Frye...").  The way in which this group approaches pain as a potentially beautiful and interesting topic drew me in, and I had hoped that their current exhibit, depicting pieces from their performance of the same name through artifacts, video clips, and textual explanations, would offer some incite into the connections between the creative process, art-making, and pain.

The exhibition "Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why" builds upon the eponymous quote from Gertrude Stein's "Business in Baltimore," supposedly thematically drawing upon the ways in which repetition affect the mind.  According to Robin Held, deputy director of the Frye Art Museum, where I visited this exhibit, IV's show “connotes a heady mix of human desire, avarice, pride, despair, and striving... Its verbal construction with a dense visual result, its breathless repetition-with-a-difference, its change-within-difference, is territory long occupied by IV” ("Frye...").  The real trouble, however, was that the exhibit, unlike Stein's poetry, was neither interesting, emotionally moving, or beautiful.

Implied Violence.  "The World Turned to Ashes in His Mouth." 2010. Art Direction: Ryan Mitchell and Steven Miller. Photo: Steven Miller. 

If anything, "Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why" helped me to better understand what Artaud doesn't mean in his "theatre of cruelty."  While he may not have intended this presentation of emotion-producing drama to become the theoretical foundation for poetry-making, he certainly didn't mean it for unattractive, entirely abstract, displays of unrealistic violence.  I felt nothing communicated through these works, particularly not that which Artaud referred to as the "unique language halfway between gesture and thought" (89). 

Certain aspects of their show were interesting in theory, such as the binding of a great dancer in a painful corset to restrict her movements such that the dance itself became a dance of pain, but realistically, the dance was more a display of someone writhing unattractively (and a bit disturbingly) on the floor.  Another piece depicted various pictures in the stage of an IV actor who stayed up three days straight with fake blood plastered on his face-- the pictures depicted how the make up naturally left his face as time progressed and how the actor grew more and more haggard-looking.

The trouble, I think, is with the pain-inducing nature of these productions themselves.  While I'd like to think that much of these performances were lost in the translation to stills and clips, it seems unlikely that watching someone literally suffering (for the sake of art-production alone) could be anything but voyeuristic and, well... icky. 

Some of the sadomasochistic rituals of the players were interesting, such as the placing of leeches on the skin, yet I still would not feel inclined to watch these rituals.  Yet the images of these pain-inducing practices had no display of pleasure; the actors looked like they were simply gritting their teeth and bearing it for the purpose of entertainment-making.  As one who feels pain constantly and unintentionally, it almost felt as though these players were making a mockery of pain, flipping the bird at unwanted hurts and getting a power surge through the self-paining. 

On a more positive note, an exhibit called "Séance: Albert von Keller and the Occult" was showing at the museum as well, and considered themes of body, sexuality, death, the paranormal, and religion little explored elsewhere, such as the eroticism of a naked woman tied upon a cross, dying.  Perhaps the distinction lies in the manner in which von Keller seemed more to be musing upon the sexually-stimulating nature of such pained imagery, rather than condoning it, whether it existed in himself or not. 

Albert von Keller. Im Mondschein (In Moonlight). 1894.

Similar to Buddhist monks who are told to meditate upon the dead bodies of beautiful young women to control lust, von Keller sat with the dead bodies of the dead at a nearby morgue and drew them as they decomposed.  As time passed, von Keller expressed a sense of peace that overcame him, realizing that the corpses were not to be feared, simply accepted as the dead that had their own beauty.

Von Keller's work, versus that of Implied Violence, will further be considered in my poetry-making this week, as I explore the theme of fleeting beauty as related to our own fleeting beauty, that is, our lives.


Works Cited

Artaud, Antonin. Theatre and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press Inc., 1958.

"Frye Art Museum: Implied Violence: Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why." Frye Art Museum. 2011. 2 Jan. 2011. Web.