Abstract
Upon opening Dominic Johnson’s Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s, readers are confronted with the object of study at its limits, literally and symbolically embodied in performance: Johnson describes the meaningful destruction of a copy of his 2015 oral history of performance art, The Art of Living, in performances by Anne Bean and Ulay – two of the artists included in both books. Bean tied the book to a helium balloon while stripping its pages and Ulay soaked and froze it. Johnson writes that these performances are crucial counterintuitive responses to what artist–critics unbeholden to dominant methods and objects may seek in the ‘use’ of their work. Limitation, destruction, and the varied conceptual and physical harnessing of their attendant practices are at the core of how Johnson theorizes extremity. What he calls ‘the performance of extremity’ includes ‘extraordinary actions that strain against the common knowledge of art’s limits, specifically through performance’ (p. 21).
In working with extremity as such, Unlimited Action moves against expectations that the forms it takes will primarily consist of bodies placed at extremes, often as material corpora of self-inflicted pain, damage, or injury that were predominant in performance art of the 1970s. This historical context of masochistic limit-texts by artists such as Vito Acconci, Gina Pane, and Chris Burden has been explored by Kathy O’Dell in her well-studied Contract with the Skin (1998). Even though Unlimited Action focuses its analyses on performance art of the same era, the critical acumen on display here significantly departs in scope and intervention. Johnson asks us to consider the possibilities of undoing and dispensing with the very categories of artmaking, preservation, documentation, and the figure of the artist. Known for his own involvement in the world of provocative performance art as much as for his scholarship in the field, he moves away from the impulse to canonize, or to have the artists he explores follow the trajectory of a classificatory logic, or to have their work neatly congeal as a collective set of practices. Hence Unlimited Action is invested in non-canonical, less-explored live creations that have a more than tenuous relationship with established notions of performance or whose transgressions have been under-examined because of how they move through varied modes of historical marginality and difficulty in being enacted.
As largely inassimilable, illegible, and unthinkable, the works Johnson foregrounds challenge both the creators and audiences who experience them ‘in actions that smack of being too much, as well as not enough’ (p. 11, original emphases) such as Kerry Trengrove’s durational An Eight Day Passage (1977), which involved being sealed inside a cell and escaping by digging a tunnel underneath London’s Acme Gallery. Despite the excessive physical–mental taxing involved and its concomitant rugged masculinity, Passage becomes unreadable as phallic spectacle because it ‘recasts a kind of manual labour in order to elaborate the priority of experience . . . over art’, with the artist’s body emerging as a de-privileged site of gendered endurance (pp. 44, 31). Here, sheer excess (‘too much’) is bound up with its anti-climactic execution (‘not enough’): it is an example of hard work that is irreducible to becoming a ‘work’, which thereby betrays the normative promises of productivity or denouement for artist as well as audience.
Just as Johnson invites readers to relish the physical destruction of one of his own books through performances that epitomize the larger stakes of Unlimited Action so too does his study ask us to put aside our assumptions about creative processes and what they might mean to reflect im/possibility in/as art-making. The borders between what is possible and impossible in the realm of the performed work take shape through another of his key concepts in the book: ‘action’. Coextensive with, yet departing from Happenings in the 1960s, experiments in theatrical or movement-based art took hold in the 1970s as novel forms of creative process rather than in the production of art ‘objects’. As Amelia Jones (1998: 14) writes in theorizing body art versus performance art, ‘body art proposes the art “object” as a site where reception and production come together: a site of intersubjectivity.’ Actions rather than performances, bodies as body-objects, the actions of Johnson’s Unlimited Action name ‘acts that endanger artists, institutions, or audiences’ and have the effect of radically revising the expressive domains of the corporeal when tarrying with or dwelling in the types of aesthetically transformative risks undertaken in the book’s case studies (p. 21).
For Johnson, the anti-aesthetics at the heart of the project aligns with anti-authoritarian guerrilla activities that function at the edges of acceptability and, in some cases, even witness-ability. The cover of the book bears a photograph of the Kipper Kids (Brian Routh and Martin von Haselberg) and the book is dedicated to the late Routh (Harry Kipper of the performance duo). The Kipper Kids are the subject of the book’s fifth chapter but the ‘slapstick violence’ of their performances as modes of self-sabotage is presented as a way to think about all of the works included in the project (p. 157). Johnson describes the Kipper Kids’ drunken uncontrollability as part of their actions – called ‘ceremonies’ – manifesting in practices such as self-boxing routines and elaborate food fights. One part of the ‘food ceremony’ involved cover[ing] each other with industrial-sized cans of tinned spaghetti and tomato sauce, mushy peas and dustbins full of cranberry jelly followed by four buckets of paint that create fluorescent deluges. They fill each other’s jockstraps with dried herbs . . . spray-paint their own armpits as though using deodorants and coat each other with glitter. (p. 156)
In other ceremonies, they ejected food and threw ink into the audience. Such performances call up comparisons with Paul McCarthy’s food- and boxing-themed performances but, unlike McCarthy, the discomfiting admixture of ribald humor and puerile eroticism of the Kipper Kids was more akin to ‘drawn-out professional suicide’ and disinterest in their own reputations as artists rather than the formation of a new canon of transgression that would be historically welcomed by the museum (pp. 161, 176). The Kipper Kids exemplify how sabotage and recklessness – central terms in the book – revise notions about artists’ desires for recognition and remembrance. Paradoxically, Unlimited Action performs the opposite as a textual object: it indelibly offers longevity to the creators in question. As Johnson asks, once recklessness moves out of the hands of authority into the hands of artists, ‘might reckless artists demand a reckless kind of history, a stunt-like mode of theory or critical thought?’ (p. 195). Examples being Anne Bean’s refusal to document her performances or Kerry Trengrove requesting that his archive be destroyed after his death.
Fully conversant in anti-art, anti-performance, and anti-establishment characteristics, Unlimited Action takes care to incorporate the often overlooked but necessary connections with anti-music: experimental, noise, and sound art cultures and the heavily performative elements that come with them. In what is possibly some of the most comprehensive scholarly writing on COUM Transmissions in the context of performance, Johnson’s chapter on the provocations of the group showcases how the scandals primarily surrounding Mail Action (1976) and Prostitution (1976) confront the limit/lessness and lawless potentials of what can be performed. COUM’s members included Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (who died of leukemia in 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic), Cosey Fanni Tutti, and the late Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, all of whom, with Chris Carter, became industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle. Like Throbbing Gristle’s noisy re-purposing of musical instruments against their specifications and tape cut-ups inspired by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Mail Action re-purposed the postal and legal systems via a radicalization of mail art. Mail Action encompassed P-Orridge’s being charged with indecency for sending postcard collages of pornographic content and ‘using the postal system’s conventions for undeliverable mail . . . to extend the circulation of the artwork’ (pp. 102–104). Exploding the boundaries of promotion, documentation, and dissemination, P-Orridge sent invitations to the ensuing trial, which operated in the same scope with COUM’s use of negative media coverage of their activities to document their work (p. 94).
In dialogue with what S Alexander Reed (2013: 76) has written of COUM as ‘wander[ing] the territory of instinctual prurience, hoping to stumble upon some limit, to locate the unwritten, authoritarian laws of taste, decency, order, and humanity by exceeding them’, COUM’s investment in abject body exhibitionism and putatively extreme sexual display was primarily notable in Prostitution (1976) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and the subsequent performances that took place after it. Included in it were Tutti’s Magazine Actions, pornographic magazine layouts from adult publications where she appeared, and P-Orridge’s TAMPAX ROMANA mixed-media sculptures made from used tampons. Whatever sensory impressions that Unlimited Action leaves behind for readers to contemplate, its perspicacious theorizing of creative processes and eloquent descriptions makes field-changing imprints on our understandings of bodies and actions at the extremes of discernibility and margins of performance art history and, with Johnson’s encyclopedic knowledge, the significance of experiencing them is brought into much-needed relief.