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Blood for Money: The Value of the Bleeding Body in the Performances of Michael Mayhew, Ron Athey, and Teresa Margolles
by Lisa Newman
Traditionally, the human body, our body, not the stage, is our true site for creation and materia prima. Its our empty canvas, musical instrument, and open book; our navigation chart and biographical map; the vessel for our ever-changing identities; the centerpiece of the altar, so to speak. Our body is also the very centre of our symbolic universe a tiny model for humankind. . . - and at the same time, a metaphor for the larger socio-political body. If were capable of establishing all these connections in front of an audience, hopefully others will recognise them in their own bodies.1- Guillermo Gmez-Pea
In his 2004 manifesto, In Defense of Performance Art, GmezPea outlines the tenets of performance art and, in particular, its usage by artists to better respond to socio-political complexities and oppression in the speciic time, place, and context they live in. He also asserts that despite the variety of methods and approaches used by artists, a constant element of performance art is the use of the body as materia prima, or the irreplaceable lesh-and-blood vehicle of the artist. Because the artist is also a citizen, a part and product of a larger culture, their performances respond from their position within a social network. By presenting their own body as a microcosm of the larger socio-political body, they offer a catalyst for exploring and challenging cultural and economic validations of bodies in live performances.
Theatre Annual 66 (2013) 2013 by The College of William and Mary

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In this essay, I explore the use of blood in performance art as both a literal and representational determinant of the socio-cultural and economic value of the body. Using the examples of contemporary works by artists Michael Mayhew, Ron Athey, and Teresa Margolles, I argue that the materiality of blood makes explicit the socio-cultural value of the body through an intersubjective corporeal exchange with an audience, in that they allow for the assertion of agency and validation of the marginalized social citizen through provoking a shared perception of the body in crisis. There is a rich lineage of historical and contemporary artists who have positioned their non-normative bodies (i.e. as female, as queer, as non-white) within ephemeral performance works in resistance to the homogeneity and consumption of late capitalist commodity-based culture. Prime examples of such artists of the late 1960s and 1970s include Gina Pane, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Chris Burden. In the 1980s and 1990s Orlan and Stelarc underwent surgical transformations as art. The extraction of blood characterizes the work of Mayhew, Athey, and Franko B (2000s). However, an exhaustive survey is not relevant to the context of this essay. In the three works that Ive selected to investigate, the focus is neither the affective responses to pain or suffering of the body in the performance action, nor the religious symbolism of the wound, as in notable studies by Amelia Jones, Mary Richards, and Elaine Scarry, among others.2 Rather, I have chosen these examples speciically because they best illustrate: how blood is used to conirm both the presence and absence of the marginalized body; how it acts as an extensive historical document of the singular body, while also referencing a larger social connectivity; and how a body opened to the bodies of others lends itself to an account of what phenomenologist Rosalyn Diprose refers to as corporeal generosity in the performance art action as a form of exchange that leads to a better understanding of social alterity.3 The release of blood exposes the hidden life-force and private internal world of the body, and speaks to the shared substance of our mortality which supercedes Otherness and valuation through corporeal generosity. While the unique encoded history of blood asserts the bodys individual history and agency, when extended into the world it also references the larger disparities of socio-political validations of bodies and lives in cultural margins.

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The Hoped-For Body
In What the Body Cost (2004), Jane Blocker describes the body as oscillating between being both igurative and literal, or inscribed and lived. The struggle to escape these dualities is what she terms the hoped-for body, or, more speciically a body that is literal, physical, and material, and yet loaded with signiication; it is familiar, knowable, self-evident, and pure, and yet distant, elusive, impossible, and inscrutable. . . or, present, yet absent.4 Referring to the exploration of presence and absence in performance art, Blocker considers the use of blood as being proof of the bodys literalism, and an escape from representation. [B]lood remains and remembers, she writes, . . . blood has stood for the literal and has thereby been used to turn the hoped-for body upside down. But I also see blood more broadly as evidence of the bodys indeterminancy, its simultaneous living and dying.5 In other words, though blood is a tangible, indexical mark of the literal body, its visible presence outside of the body is also referential to the bodys absence by pointing to its impermanence, shifting identiication, and mortality. In addition to the shared commonality of blood, there is also the uniqueness of the inscribed data carried in blood as DNA, or what Blocker refers to as the bodys historiographic remainder, one that undermines the expectation that performance disappears.6 Indeed, blood has a unique subjective/objectivity it is the body, and it is not the body; it continues outside of its original housing of lesh as communal material, gaining social and economic value with the potential for transfusion into another body to further life. Conversely, if the body is already devalued, the spilling of blood points to the limitations of its ability to further its inscribed history and social usefulness through either corporeal or economic exchange. The anonymity of the blood used in Margolles performative installations directly reference lives which are always already on the verge of disappearance in their social marginalisation and precarious living situations. Mayhews complex 2010 performance, There is No Title, incorporates blood, money, chaining and an avid exploration of neutrality in the face of violence.7 By presenting the inancial transaction negotiated with the curator as well as the agreement that an artist fee would be paid in exchange for the performative act of spilling blood for an audience, Mayhew extended the exchange value of his blood as sample/example, pointing to historical decisions by Red Cross workers that made them complicit in their devaluation of transported prisoners during the Second

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World War, which, in turn, points to a continuation of complicity towards lives devalued during subsequent global atrocities. Similarly, Atheys blood in Self-Obliteration (2007-2011) is explicit in its pathology within the surviving body, and at the same time implied the absent lives of those who died of AIDS due to the US governments disavowal of the queer body during the initial outbreak in the 1980s and 90s. Margolles does not use her own body in her work but rather uses the remains of unclaimed bodies which were victim to drug wars in her home of Culiacn, Mexico. In De qu otra cosa podramos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?), exhibited in the Mexican Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, blood persisted despite the absence of its owners and was transmuted into a collective, empathic state of mourning and loss for lives ignored by their government while still alive. All three of these works coherently address important contemporary issues regarding the socio-political and economic value of the culturally marginalized body in both presence and absence as well as inside and beyond the frame of the art action. By contextualizing these works within the site of the body, the blood of the artist literalizes and references the constellations of blood and bodies which extend beyond the temporal and spatial limits of the performance. As a prelude to my accounts of performances of Mayhew, Athey, and Margolles, I present a framework for considering how the materiality of blood relates to the value of the body in these actions. Franois Lyotards description of the internal and external presence of blood as sanguis and cruor, respectively, offers an indespensible theoretical lens through which to read the connection between the body and its larger social context.

Sanguis/Cruor
In his 1992 essay, Prescription, Lyotard writes about the inscription of the law on the criminal body, as described in Kafkas In the Penal Colony, (1919). In this novel, Kafka illustrates a form of execution device in which, through the use of a harrow, an oficer of the law dictates as the machine writes the sentence on the body of the condemned . . .or rather, it cuts it into his body until he dies, bloodless.8 In his analysis of Kafkas text, Lyotard presents two deinitions of blood and how they relate to the body of the outlaw, (or in a broader sense, the marginalized citizen), and the inluence of the control of law on the body: Sanguis: the blood of life in the arteries and veins; and cruor:

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the blood that is spilled. The irst nourishes the lesh. It gives it its hue of blueness, its pinkness, its pallor, its sallowness, its earlymorning freshness, the ininite juxtaposition of nuances that drive the painter and the philosopher crazy; an immaterial matter. As for the law, this innocence of lesh is criminal. It must expiate this leshly innocence. The blood that lows is called cruor. Expiation requires cruelty. . . 9 Lyotard asserts two key differences between the hidden sanguis and the lowing cruor. One is the lack of primary inscription of the law on the former. The other is the evidence of the reassertion of its control over the body through cruelty on the latter: [T]he law needs the body, its own dwelling upon the body, as well as the bodys resistance to it, in order to inscribe itself, that is, to execute itself. And the law cannot be just without being cruel. If the law does not make blood low, it is not decipherable and therefore is not at all, has no existence. 10 In performances involving bleeding, the transformation of sanguis to cruor by the artist is a form of selfinscription, an assertion of the bodys agency, history, and resistance to the law through a reclaiming of the use of expiation it uses to legitimate itself. Using Kafkas metaphor of the harrow, the outlaw body as both inscribed and lived writes and sentences Michael Mayhew themselves by their own Image by Roshana Rubin-Mayhew. hand challenging the Courtesy of Rubin-Mayhew. jurisdiction of the law and exposing its ineficacy.

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This self-inscription is evident not just in the performative work of Mayhew and Athey; it is literalized in the narratives of tattoos that mark their bodies. The words inked on Mayhews head and body come from a performance in 2007 which involved words generated by stories of loss told to him by fourteen audience participants. From these stories, he chose fourteen words to be inked into his body, which he had prepared by washing and painting in his own blood, to become a living archive for the memories told.11 The more layered imagery on the body of Athey

Image by Ann Summa. Courtesy of Athey range from a crown of thorns on Atheys scalp and arrows on his back both references to Christian images of martyrdom and his own historical experiences with loss and suffering. Margolles does not use her own body or blood in her art. Instead, via her

Ron Athey

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employment in a Mexican morgue she acquires the means to incorporate the remains of socially marginalized, hidden bodies in the interest of giving them another chance to speak through the indexes of lesh and blood extracted from their corpses. In Lengua/Tongue (2000), she exhibited the severed, pierced tongue of a young heroin addict, acquiring the permission of the dead boys parents in exchange for the funeral costs which the family could not afford.12 The signiication of the tongue is both literal in its materiality as an organ of speech and symbolic of its silencing in the absence of the live body. It is referential of the young mans social inscription among others victim to poverty and social marginalisation, his tongue standing for people who effectively have no Teresa Margolles. Lengua (2000) voice, as well as his own http://monorapado.blogspot.co.uk/2011_05_01_ self-inscription through archive.html. the body modiication of the piercing and rejection of social normativity through association with alternative subculture.13 In these examples, the offering of cruor becomes an exposure of the hidden sanguis of lives; a reclaiming of embodied historicity and agency; and a gesture of communion. In Margolles use of the blood of bodies who were violently murdered, however, it is questionable whether there are limitations to the transformation of sanguis to cruor given the absence of either self-inscription or the exertion of the law. Here instead, the seemingly endless quantities of disembodied blood point to both a inal attempt at communal recognition through the artists performative interventions, as well as a refusal of validation of these lives by the State. The release of blood, to quote Mayhew, is a release, it is a letting go, it is a sharing, it is a revealing.14 Blood does not just color a wound;

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in these actions, the body is opened and blood is actively and fervently driven into the public arena of the performance. It is this visible cruor of the artist which offers itself as a gesture of giving, or a reaching out, and an allowance for intersubjectivity.

Michael Mayhew There Is No Title

Michael Mayhew (b. 1963) is an artist based in Manchester, England, who has performed internationally for over twenty years. His work is informed by what is happening in the world, whom he met that day, what hes heard or witnessed, what matters to [a] particular audience in a particular place and time.15 His performances often involve actions that explore intimacy within the artist/audience dynamic and are largely sitespeciic, responding to the context of the immediate space, the politics of the event, and the surrounding culture. The 2010 performance There is No Title was developed as both a new work and a revisiting of a residency and action developed in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2001. The earlier piece, 333, was inspired by a point of exploration presented to Mayhew by the residency curator: Who are we as Swiss? Mayhew spent the duration of the two week residency, (333 hours), contemplating the countrys neutral identity in a 35 metre Swiss Cross in a room constructed from 2x1 pine and sheets of Perspex (a transparent, shatter-resistant plastic alternative to glass) as a simulation of one of the bunkers still required by all Swiss citizens as part of their homes. The symbolic bunker constructed in the residency and its double in the 2010 performance referred to, according to Mayhew, an internal psychological bunker where one exercises neutrality as a form of defence whilst surrounded by belligerency.16 There is No Title was presented in Liverpool, England on September 18, 2010. The event took place in a temporary gallery space, an abandoned paint store curated by design group and presenting organisation Mercy and curator Nathan Jones and used for the duration of the city-wide Liverpool Biennial. Along with around forty other audience members, I was in attendance for the performance, which lasted for the duration of three and a half hours and which for me was an incredibly multi-layered and rich experience. Due to the limitations of space, here I describe portions of it relevant to this discussion. It should also be noted that, to date, there are no other published critical analyses of this performance by Mayhew, nor of any of his other

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performances. All quotations cited in this account are, unless otherwise noted, excerpted from the performance script, written by Mayhew. Mayhew began the performance with a spoken introduction in which he delineated two things: irst, the gallery space as being safe from the outside world, and second, a de-heirarchization of himself and the audience through a kind of invocation, or mantra: There is no war. There is no terror. There is no murder. . . There is no memory. There is no title. There is just me. He then explained that in order to do this work blood has been exchanged for money /Money exchanged for blood. More speciically, prior to the performance, he had given a vial of his drawn blood to the curator in exchange for an on-line bank transfer of an artist fee. Mayhew assured the audience that neither blood, nor money, actually touched lesh implying that exposure to either could generate some kind of contamination, imbalance of the exchange where something was lost, or danger to us, if the blood had been handled improperly. This transaction, Mayhew assured us, was clean and safe/safe & clean. This safety became potentially challenged, however, when Mayhew presented us with a dilemma: In exchange for an undisclosed amount I will remove a bag of blood from my body in order to execute this performance that has no title. Should I Michael Mayhew exchange more blood for more money? With an added question ~ How much is a bag of blood worth? With an added question ~ As an audience what is your participation in this act? With an added question ~ Would I still get the money if the vote was no for not giving blood? With my added questions : To whom does blood belong to once it leaves the body? Will it belong to the audience because we voted to allow the artist to give his own blood for an additional fee? Will it belong to Mercy, or the funding agencies which supported the event? What does it mean to be complicit in this decision? According to Diprose:

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On the one hand, insofar as the body is considered part of the person, the idea of freedom renders the human body inalienable. Possession of this body by another would at best commodify the person, at worst it would reduce the person to a slave. On the other hand, insofar as the body is considered a persons property, the right to do with it what one will should allow its alienation within an exchange economy.17 Therefore, by voting yes, would the audience be implied in the commodiication of Mayhew by Mercy, assuming that the blood, once removed from his body, was still an extension of his person? By voting no would he be denied his inalienable freedom to do what he wishes with his body, even if that means the audience witnessing a transaction of blood for money that is not sanctioned by UK law? The power of choice was presented in a transaction where the risks were unclear. There was a request for the active participation of audience members and we were led to think that as a result of our vote something would be gained and something would be lost. This disrupted our neutral positions as viewers of a performance; the body of a man would be opened and blood and money would be exchanged, or it wouldnt. Mayhew then offered the following caveat: You have no economic responsibility for the release of this blood. The blood is being used as an initial metaphor for becoming part of the we. As a metaphor for a state of neutrality. The release of blood for money is seemingly free to you. The money is being provided to Mercy on your behalf, we call this money public funding from the Arts Council of England. Therefore, by inviting the audience to participate in his decision to exchange blood for payment, Mayhew alluded to a desire to make the hidden systems of social structures, cultural production and economics transparent. Additionally, by positioning his own body both as literal and representative, his singular body became extended as part of the we of community. The majority of the audience voted no, indicating that more blood should not be given for more money. Mayhew responded with the following declaration:

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In accordance to the facts of history remembered and comfortably forgotten your vote of no has been heard yet over ruled. . . the consequence being that the general populace is in turn emptied and offered in exchange a comfortable existence. By overruling the vote, Mayhew drew attention to the power of State law to ignore opposition and to supplant dissent with comfort in the hope that this would lead to complacency. With the help of a volunteer, the extraction was made using an intravenous needle, tube, and collection pouch. There, Mayhews blood entered a transitory state between sanguis and cruor, between the visible and hidden. Blood lowed out of Mayhews vein into the surrogate vessel of the donation bag, a liminal space designed to be a way station between bodies. Once the extraction was completed, the audience was invited to touch or hold the bag of blood and feel the extended warmth of the interior of Mayhews body, offering a tactile as well as visual perceptive exchange. Not all participated in this interaction, though the few who did, including myself, appeared to hold the container gently as if it was a fragile, living entity. The clinical presence of the plastic donation bag offered reassurance that the process was still clean and safe/ safe and clean within the control of the law; and still a viable product within the donor bag. The audience was then invited to leave the ground loor of the space and descend into the gallery basement, or bunker, where they would be offered comfort through tea and wine. There, Mayhew continued with a narrative recounting his experiences in the Swiss residency Michael Mayhew. There is No Title, while he attached a series of long strips of gaffe tape from the ceiling September 18, 2010 Courtesy of Mayhew to the loor in an annexed corner of

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the room, giving the illusion of prison bars. From within his cell he hung the bag containing the extracted blood from a hook on a beam and drained a small portion of it onto a plate. On opposing walls, he then painted the outlines of the countries of Switzerland and the United Kingdom as he revisited the residency curators question regarding Swiss identity. He said: Something separated me from we because I was not part of that we. To answer the question I extracted blood as once blood leaves the body and so entering into the Swiss Sovereign State, the blood will then be owned by the state making part of what was me and what was mine ~ Swiss and so part of the WE. Through the transmutation of blood from sanguis to cruor through the extraction, Mayhews blood theoretically entered the territory of the State, and therefore subject to inscription of the law of State. Additionally, Mayhews desire to unite both his embodied self with the larger social identity speaks to what phenomenologist, Drew Leder, terms mutual incorporation. In this exchange, the desire for integration is corporeal, and therefore social; where ones subjectivity does not force the Other into the position of object, nor vice versa. We are cosubjectivities, supplementing rather than truncating each others possibilities.18 By describing his own longing for social inclusion to the audience through both narrative and the physical extension of his own blood through self-inscription, the borders of the countries were transposed with the boundaries of his own body. The audience then became positioned as citizens along with Mayhew, reaching perceptively across borders of lesh-and-blood in order to become WE as tiny models of humankind. Through the exchange of his literal body as referent to his desire for cosubjectivity, Mayhews goal was his inclusion into the we of the Swiss in a desire to merge the I and the We in a perceptual communion of the lesh. Or, as Leder suggests: In an even more radical way we supplement our embodiment through the Other.19 Through this connection, Mayhew presents both a literal and symbolic possibility of creating a shared experience which challenges the paradox of monetary exchange for social validation. In both performance and residency, Mayhew proposes that in a desire to overcome alterity, it is important to remember that we all bleed, and yet, as part of a larger we, are also complicit in governmentally

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sanctioned acts of violence. In the penultimate phase of the performance, Mayhew read the entirety of an interview with a Swiss woman, who during World War II helped her mother as a volunteer with the Red Cross to give soup, coffee, and blankets to Nazi prisoners as the trains they were held in passed through the neutral territory of Zurich on the way to extermination camps. The Swiss had agreed to let the transports through on the condition that they could give comfort to the prisoners. The confusion of the effort of giving comfort while refusing response to the terriied cries of the condemned is evidenced in the womans testimony: I dont think we wanted really to deal with this. What would happen... we knew they were going to Germany, we knew they were Jews, we knew about the concentration camps. But we also had a feeling that we had helped them, that we had done good and that the fact that they were now hollering at night, they shouldnt have done that because we had helped them. It was a very strange and ambiguous feeling and. . . in a way said that, look we have helped you and now youre making a big racket and now our good citizens cant sleep. And, of course, you know, this was wartime and we were all a little bit warped in our thinking, in our feelings.20 For the Red Cross volunteer, the outcome of the lives or rather, the ultimate deaths - of the prisoners was known, and providing comfort was a panacea rather than a rescue. This account, in the context of Mayhews line of questioning concerning complicity, interconnectivity, the I versus the We, the inside versus outside, as well as the questioning of neutrality and the inscription of the law of the State on the body, created a clear parallel to the role with which the audience was now presented in a second act of voting on whether or not more blood should be spilled. Mayhew explicitly referenced the interconnectivity, or constellation effect, that the spilling of his blood would represent in the inal action of the performance although, again, the risks and consequences were not clear. However, unlike his overruling of the irst vote, he assured us that this time his actions would be determined by a majority decision, regardless of the outcome. The vote was yes. Mayhew began the inal action by awkwardly securing one end of a white rope to a hook in the loor, and the other end to a red dog collar red and white being the colors of the Swiss lag - which he then fastened around

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his neck. He next shortened the rope, thereby pulling him into a hunched position. In one hand he held the script and with the other the bag of blood above his head. As the cruor lowed through the IV tube onto the loor, script, and Mayhews white dress shirt, he recited the entirety of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. This inal action was the crescendo in Mayhews exploration of the blurry distinctions between complacency and neutrality, presence and absence, usefulness and abjection, the I and the we, and the parallel exchanges of generosity and economics within the negotiation of blood for money. He Michael Mayhew There is No Title asserted throughout the performance that these questions were as much for him as they were for the audience. While no clear answers to these dilemmas were evident at the end of the evening, Mayhews work clearly embodied Diproses concept of generosity: [G]enerosity is not one virtue among others but the primordial condition of personal, interpersonal, and communal existence. And while understanding generosity as a prerelective corporeal openness to otherness may not guarantee social justice, it is a necessary move in that direction. 21

Ron Athey: Self-Obliteration

Born in 1961 into a Pentecostal family in Groton, Connecticut, Ron Athey took his irst steps into a world illed with inscription and expatiation. While he was in the womb, a vision of his Aunt Venas predicted that he would be a powerful minister. She reportedly witnessed a crackling blue force ield surrounding him at the time of his birth, and he was subsequently raised according to this prophesy and began speaking in tongues from an early age a skill which he continues to use in his performances although

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he denounced the church in his teen years. 22After battling drug addiction and contracting HIV in the mid-1980s, Athey began creating performances in reaction to the U.S. Governments persecution of HIV positive infected persons as expendable social deviants through its refusal to spend funding on education, prevention, or treatment. Atheys early works combined narratives and imagery expressing his disillusionment with the use of religion to justify violence; the works were inspired in part through his having witnessed, as a child, the outbursts of his schizophrenic mother. In the early 1990s he created the performance series Torture Trilogy, which involved wounding and blood-letting. These works might be read as an explicit reclamation of the Kafka-esque harrow of the law through selfinscription. Actions within the trilogy included the presentation of Athey as St. Sebastian, with arrows strategically piercing his chest and legs, and the insertion of numerous hypodermic needles in his arms in reference to his struggle with drug addiction. The literalness of Atheys still here post-AIDS body in crisis, in its state of both vibrancy and decay, places everything on the surfacedeath, religion, sex, all displayed, all intricately played with on the skinhis work indicates a life practice which does not use spatial metaphors of the deep, the hidden, the terrible to hold at a distance our most profound experiences. 23 By presenting his body as a kind of socio-cultural slaughter-bench, Athey offers audiences an honest look at the persecuted body in crisis. Distinctions between pain and love become limsy, as suffering transforms into ecstatic release in an arena that is not hidden, but open to all who are willing to participate. Mary Richards explains how through the act of witnessing, an audience serves this purpose, observing his tortured body, recognising him, conirming his subjectivity despite the cruel ministrations that sometimes appear to reduce his body to the level of object.24 In doing this, through empathic response, the witness body shares in Atheys reach for subjectivity, the hoped-for body, through the release of cruor. In a recent series of performances titled Self-Obliteration, the low of cruor from Atheys wounds is so great that his blood appears to visually swallow and obscure the artists body in a second skin. The performance both reveals and conceals and, like Mayhews, troubles the distinction between the hidden and visible in reference to the relationship between blood and the body. The cruor seems to return to a state of sanguis as it coats Atheys body with life while simultaneously marking his inevitable

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mortality. I witnessed this performance in multiple roles of cultural production: as audience member in Glasgow (2009), as an artist performing within a shared event in Victoria, B.C. (2008), and as curator in Portland, Oregon (2008). Unlike Mayhew, Athey has been the subject of much critical and theoretical writing and along with my own, I include accounts here by others who were in attendance at these performances of Self-Obliteration. The performance began with Athey naked on hands and knees on the top of a raised wooden platform, his face obscured by a long, blonde wig. On either end of the platform, vertical panes of glass doubled as mirrors by means a lighting affect. There was a soundscape of low tones, which rose and fell in volume like a slow pulse or a buoy bell. After a long introductory pause, Athey picked up a hairbrush and began to comb through the wig, irst in long downward movements and then upwards, teasing the hair into a huge back-combed mane and revealing his face both to himself in the glass and the audience surrounding the platform. After setting the brush down, Athey began to pull hidden pins from underneath the wig. As the irst trickle of blood appeared, it became apparent that these long needles were being removed directly from Atheys bald head. Though the source of the low was not a vein, as in Mayhews performance, it literally poured from multiple wounds on Atheys scalp. He removed the panes of glass and covered them with his blood before laying down on his back. He then proceeded to slide the glass over each other like guillotine blades on his supine body. 25 The glass became a barrier both to himself and the world, functioning simultaneously as a threat to occlude the body and self from making physical contact with others, and as a form of containment for the seemingly unending cruor. As he bled, the effort of sliding the glass became visibly more dificult, as he bled and his muscles began to shake. After a few more passes, he returned the panes to their stands and sat up. Both body and glass were covered in blood, obscuring any relection. The performance ended with Atheys signal to applaud, followed by his leaving the platform and the room. The duration of the piece was, in total, around twenty minutes. At all presentations of Self-Obliteration, volunteers with professional medical training were present to help Athey if his health was at risk during the performance. Security personnel were also there to make sure that the audience didnt touch the spilled blood. Reportedly, in Atheys previous blood-letting actions, there had been occasions where audience members had not only touched, but attempted to taste the infected blood.26 The

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Ron Athey Self-Obliteration, Portland, Oregon 2008 Image Courtesy of 2 Gyrlz Performative Arts.
desire to actually ingest Atheys blood perhaps stems from a need for ones own integration with the physicality of the artists body through literal internalization. In an extrapolation of Maurice Merleau-Pontys phenomenological theory of reversibility, or the mirroring of sensations between bodies, I suggest that this kind of physical response to the performance was elicited by not just an intellectual empathy, but a pre-relective corporeal desire to share in the cathartic release of Atheys bleeding.27 Perhaps it is the immediacy of the interaction which leads to the visceral meetings with Atheys body through voluntary actions such as the ingestion of his blood, as well as involuntary physical reactions such as vomiting, and in the case of the Glasgow event, fainting. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, since the same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world in witnessing the body of the other. For this reason, a corporeal response is elicited through pre-relective sensorial perception. 28 The sight, and even smell, of the blood reaches the body in a blur of synaesthesia before an emotional response is felt. In reference to Julia Kristevas famed analysis of the bodys simultaneous attraction and repulsion to abjection, Elizabeth Grosz writes: These reactions signal bodily functions which a rational consciousness cannot accept; yet the subject cannot adequately

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deny them either. They represent a body in revolt, a body disavowed by consciousness which it is yet unable to ignore.29 In other words, it is as if the body involuntarily reacts to meet the low of cruor with some comparable offer of ones own vulnerable liquid interiority in order to commiserate, or even merge with, the bleeding body. In the Glasgow performance, a spurt of blood arced out of Atheys forehead. When the low refused to abate, he futilely tried to stanch it by using the wig as a makeshift tourniquet in a tragic-comedic action. Both audience members and Atheys assistants looked nervously at each other in search of guidance. Should someone help? At what point do we intervene? Perhaps the audiences anxiety of stopping Atheys performance, even if it meant saving the life of the artist, would breach the rules of the exchange: he bleeds, we witness. Or, perhaps it was an act of social confusion similar to that expressed by the Red Cross worker in Mayhews performance. As representative of other, unseen, HIV+ bodies, Athey uses the literalness of his present body and blood to elicit a direct response. There was a sense then, both inside and outside the frame of the performance, of a negotiation of normative social/audience interaction askin to Mayhews investigation of complicity, as we stood by and watched Athey disappear. Ironically, the medical team on hand was busy helping members of the audience who had fainted. Completely obscured by blood that continued to low unabatedly, Athey concluded the action as several pounds of salt were poured onto his body. As art critic, Lyn Gardner, recounts: Each tiny lump must be a vicious blow on his skin, but he never linches. He is perfectly still, like an ancient battered rock: immense, blind and immovable. Buried alive. 30 The whiteness of the salt had the combined affect of both obliterating and cleansing Atheys body. After several silent moments, he rose inally and was helped down from the platform by his partner, Alfredo, and led offstage. Like Prometheus, Atheys body endures and heals only to be reopened again and again. The art criminal who refuses to die and thus escapes sentencing challenges the will of the law through its unwillingness to cede to it. His lesh and blood reference and literalize both his own unique embodied history and are also representative of the shifting metonymy of blood as symbolic of lives devalued in Western culture, speciically over the last four decades. In a recent interview with artist Thomas Bacon,

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Athey described this chronology of blood: No matter how personal the blood reference, there is irst a biological empathy thats either embraced or rejected. And then theres the contour of history: 70s blood= conceptual, 80s [to] early 90s blood = disease (speciically HIV in western world as the metaphor with plague became almost absolute), current return to blood = blood, (but always during war or in war-torn countries, the association with violence prevails). 31 The violent return of blood=blood in the work of Teresa Margolles, whose work is the subject of the inal part of this essay. Margolles uses reclaimed luids from the bodies of those killed in the drug wars of Northern Mexico as both literal index of absent bodies and representative in its quantity and anonymity of the socio-economic and governmental devaluation of these lives. Unlike the performances of Mayhew and Athey, which present their lesh and blood as simultaneously living and dying, in Margolless work the body is only present through its abject remains, activated and reanimated by the artist in a inal epitaph.

Teresa Margolles - What Else Could We Talk About?

Teresa Margolles was born in Culiacn, Mexico, in 1963. Culiacn, along with numerous other towns and cities across the North and West of the country, is inundated with violence related to drug wars. Since President Felipe Calderon took ofice in 2006 and launched an attack on cartels, over 47,500 deaths related to drug activity have been reported, as well as those simply caught up in the whirlwind of executions, decapitations, and shoot-outs. 32 In both her solo work and in collaboration with the group, SEMEFO (f. 1990) short for Servicio Mdico Forense, or forensic medical service (founded in 1990) - Margolles translates her experience collecting, cleansing, and disposing of the victims of violent acts into works that explore what she refers to paradoxically as the life of the corpses, or the fate of the bodies, what they experience after their death, and the connections between their lives before and their lives after death. 33 In the majority these works, however, the absent body is translated not as a whole, but through the detritus of blood, fat, shattered glass removed from wounds, and reclaimed water that had

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been used to wash the corpses. When actual body parts are used, as in Lengua, they are fragmented or hidden, metonymically represent[ing] a whole, and also many other bodies that remain entirely unseen, thus providing tangibility to the abstraction and the quantity of lives lost for viewers. 34 Leder describes the relationship of the living to the corpse as an end of intersubjective exchange: [D]eath is precisely what severs (or renders problematic) this cosubjectivity, inaugurating the objectiied relation. Whereas yesterday I cavorted with a living person, today I confront the physicality of the corpse. It lies there, strangely unmoving, unseeing lesh, no longer a play of absence and reference. Body qua body now emerges, freezing my gaze within its boundaries as the lived body never could. 35 However, in the absence of a complete corpse to position oneself against objectively, in Margolles works the viewer is left only with an index of visceral material, animated though dead, explicit though implicit, pointing to a life and body that experienced a violent death but whose history is unknowable. On the one hand, in these pieces death beyond any and all symbolisation just manages to remain visible as the dissolution of form. By means of artistic intervention, Teresa Margolles transports past life into a state of perceptibility, thus wresting the dead from anonymity and oblivion.36 On the other, it is unclear how the dead are wrested from anonymity and oblivion since lives are reported as statistical information, and the remains of anonymous bodies are reintegrated into liquid form as vapor or blood, as one of many. Though Margolles does not save these lives, she does render them visible in her works to draw attention to their loss; the dead are not represented, but presented. . . not illustrated; rather they are present in all their physical reality.37 The presence of these absent bodies was made evident through the prevalent use of reclaimed blood in Margolles major installation in the 2009 Venice Biennial Mexican pavilion, What Else Could We Talk About?, curated by Cuauhtmoc Medina. In this exhibition, the blood of the dead permeated the space as it was embedded in lags and tapestries and coated the loors of the palace. Blood reclaimed by Margolles and her assistants from execution sites was mixed with water to become a solution

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com/contemporary_art/2010/01/teresa-margolles-biennale-di-venezia-09/

Teresa Margolles What Else Could We Talk About? Venice Bienniale Mexican Pavilion 2009 http://www.marthagarzon.

used to mop the marble pavilion daily by assistants - family members of those killed in the drug wars -to form a layered skin or scab. Medina described the pavilion as feeling like a vector of contagion that invades us as we walk upon it; summoning the dead to follow the dead. 38 There is no distance between the blood and the viewer as the latter enters the installation and inds her/himself in direct contact with the remains of the dead. Unlike the other case studies cited here, Margolles work is only known to me through its documentation. My lack of direct engagement is unfortunate in terms of continuity of assessment of these three works, however, in this context, it also signiies a doubling of the distance of my own body from both the originary bodies of the victims and their spilled blood in the performance/installation. Where the bleeding bodies of Athey and Mayhew showed a visible transference of the living, hidden sanguis of the body to cruor; the narrative of blood here is hypertrophied and apparently endless in its sheer quantity and anonymity. Disembodied, the blood becomes shadow-like, a last thread of evidence of a life which continues to persist, both literally in its visceral materiality and in abstraction. Where the majority of the other exhibitions in the Biennial displayed art objects as indicative of their respective nations cultures, Medina suggests that Margolless work

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offers a harsher insight into the reality of Mexican culture through its ephemerality, and the absence of objectivity: The referent of violence. . .does not provide us with any context, since it features on a quasi-dematerialized level. The phenomenon to which it alludes cannot be articulated as metalanguage, nor is it iguratively lodged in any object. . .the almost nothing that is all thats left may not even be capable of being perceived as a work of art. No matter: what matters is that the artefact should at least agitate that phantom. . . Violence brought across into art only indicates that out there, the violence goes on. 39 Blood here both literalizes the death from which it originated, and references an ongoing continuum of violence in a network of past, present, and future lives connected by the tenuousness of their hidden life-force, or sanguis, and the risk of its loss through expiation. The cruor of Margolles subjects was not released by the harrow of the law nor through any moral determination of separating the guilty from the innocent. Rather, the absence of socio-political validation instead speaks to an unfocused violence which robbed the lives and bodies of their agency and historicity. In Kafkas paradigm, expiation by the law draws out the bodys sanguis so that it may be controlled by the State. However, for Margolles dead, cruor was not released through lawful expiation, nor through self-inscription as in the actions of Mayhew and Athey. For these bodies, their sanguis was never validated, as evidenced by the States refusal to acknowledge their cruor expiated by lawless violence. Thus, in the visceral coating of the palace loors, Margolles attempts to draw attention to how [w]hat was once a person, possessing a full range of potentials, laws, neuroses and lights, becomes reduced to a formless, infectious mass which she refuses to lay to rest in a quiet grave, only to be continued to be forgotten again by country and State. 40 The minimal use of representational images or art objects in Margolles exhibition focuses the attention on the absence-in-presence of the blood and lives as all thats left. The decision to minimize aesthetics in place of literalism within the context of the art market of the Biennial focused attention on the devaluation of lives within the economics of the drug cartels. This attention, in turn, was echoes in Margolless commentary on with the hierarchy of art market economies within systems of cultural production. Margolles explains:

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How can you not mop the loor of a Mexican pavilion at the Venice Biennial with the remains of the dead? . .If people show up and theres nothing on display, its because we cant say anything more other than simply mopping up with these victims bodies, and it has to be silent, without any parties, without anything else. A mop-up every day using those cadavers and we have to do it without judgment: I dont care if were mopping with the good guys or bad guys. Im merely bearing witness to a retelling of the facts: thousands of dead, and hundreds of children killed in the crossire. 41 Margolles indiscriminate use of blood eradicates hierarchies of class, race, age, and even legal and moral standing, and instead creates a universalizing sense of loss and the injustice of violence. The stark literalness of the mopping up displays the futility of stopping the violence. Instead, the process of mopping is a reversal of cleansing as the blood is layered onto the loor over the six months of the exhibition, making the presence of the dead more evident through time. In referencing lives unseen, the presence of blood indicates the bodys literality. The speciic act of death, and the restitution of the lives lost in Margolless installations, infuses the blood with afirmation of a historicity and narrative that cannot be substituted by or referenced through anything other than this blood from those bodies. In the living bodies of Mayhew and Athey, this historicity and assertion of social validation persists. As containers of both sanguis and cruor they pose important questions concerning the value of the marginalized body. Similarly, the blood of the dead in Margolless work continues as a literal document of bodies expiated by violent action, pointing to the limitations of sanguis and cruor through their devaluation as social citizens in life. These direct and sometimes brutal exhibitions of the fragility of life are proffered not as a perpetuation of expiation, but as a way to expose the disparities in validations of life with the hope that others will recognise them in their own bodies. Within my own experience of directly witnessing the bleeding body in performance, I have found myself acutely aware of the tenuousness of my own hoped-for body as both present and absent; of my singularity paralleled with a longing to integrate with the larger WE of the artist and the audience, and my complicity concerning the suffering of others. While these artists do not profess solutions to the disparities of social validation, an end to war or the AIDS crisis, by positioning their own bodies as being both literal and representative of these crises, they

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demonstrate that we are all complicit in these social issues. As artist Franko B reminds us: we are all bleeding inside. 42

Notes
1. Guillermo Gmez-Pea, In Defense of Performance Art, in Live: Art and Performance, ed. Adrian Heathield, (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 78. 2. Amelia Jones, Performing the Wounded Body: Pain, Affect and the Radical Relationality of Meaning,Parallax,15:4 (2009),45-67; Mary Richards, Specular Suffering (Staging) the Bleeding Body PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PAJ 88 (Volume 30, Number 1), January 2008, pp. 108-119; Elaine Scarry The Body in Pain (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 3. Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 112. 4. Jane Blocker, What The Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 15. 5. Blocker, What The Body Cost, 107. 6. Blocker, What The Body Cost, 17. 7. Mercy, supported by Diesel, present: Midnight Special #1: Michael Mayhew, accessed February 8, 2012, http://www. artinliverpool.com/?p=13400 8. Jean-Franois Lyotard, Prescription, in Toward the Postmodern,

eds. Robert Harvey, Mark S. Roberts, (New York: Humanity Books, 1992), 176. 9. Lyotard, Prescription, 180. 10. Lyotard, Prescription, 184-185. 11. Roshana Rubin-Mayhew, email message to author, February 21, 2011. 12. Julia Banwell, Agency and Otherness in Teresa Margolles Aesthetic of Death, in Other Modernities, Universit degli Studi di Milano, No. 4, 2010, accessed on August 4, 2012, riviste.unimi.it/index. php/AMonline/article/download/688/909. 13. Banwell, Agency and Otherness in Teresa Margolles Aesthetic of Death, 48.

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14. Michael Mayhew, There is No Title, 2010, unpublished performance script, courtesy of the artist. 15. About Mike, Michael Mayhew website, accessed on January 10, 2011, www.michaelmayhew.com/aboutmike.html 16 Mayhew, There is No Title, unpaginated script. 17. Diprose, Corporeal Generosity 46-47. 18. Drew Leder, The Absent Body, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 94. 19. Leder, The Absent Body, 94. 20. From Mayhew, There is No Title, source of interview is unknown, my use of italics. 21. Diprose, Corporeal Generosity, 5 22. Ron Athey, unpublished text for Automatic Writing performance, 2010, courtesy of the artist. 23. John Edward McGrath, Trusting in Rubber: Performing Boundaries During the AIDS epidemic, TDR, Vol 39, 2, Summer (1995), accessed on September 28, 2010, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/1146443, 36. 24. Mary Richards, Ron Athey, A.I.D.S, and the Politics of Pain, Brunel University, (unknown date of publication), accessed on August 11, 2012, http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol0302/index.html, 14. 25. Ron Athey in conversation with Dominic Johnson,Perverse Martyrologies: Ron Athey and Dominic Johnson in Perform, Repeat, Record, eds. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathield (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 514. 26. Athey in conversation with the author, Portland, Oregon. April, 2008. 27. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis tr. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 28. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 134. 29. Elizabeth Grosz, The Body of Signiication in Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, eds. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin, (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 1990), 89 30. Lyn Gardner, National Review of Live Art. Various venues, Glasgow, in Guardian, Monday 22 March 2010, accessed on January 13, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/mar/22/national-review-oflive-art/print 31. Ron Athey in conversation with Thomas Bacon, Traces of

Being: A Document of Absence in Words activate, Issue 1, Volume 1

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(Spring 2011) , accessed on August 11, 2012 http://www.thisisactivate.

net/2011/05/14/traces-of-being/ 32. Olga Rodriguez, 8 Bodies Found Inside Car in Northern Mexico, Associated Press, August 10, 2012, accessed on August 14, 2012 http:// news.yahoo.com/8-bodies-found-inside-car-northern-mexico-035933342.html?_ esi=1 and Cuauhtmoc Medina ed. Teresa Margolles: What Else Could

We Talk About? (Barcelona: RM Verlag, 2009), 15. 33. MMK-Frankfurt,Teresa Margolles: Muerte Sin Fin, exhibition text, April 24 August 15, 2004, accessed on January 1, 2012 http://

Death, 49. 35. Leder, The Absent Body, 146. 36. MMK-Frankfurt, Teresa Margolles: Muerte Sin Fin, unpaginated text. 37. MMK-Frankfurt, Teresa Margolles: Muerte Sin Fin, unpaginated text. 38. Cuauhtmoc Medina, Materialist Spectrality, in Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Cuauhtmoc Medina ed. (Barcelona: RM Verlag, 2009), 29. 39. Cuauhtmoc Medina, Materialist Spectrality, 24, 26. 40. Cuauhtmoc Medina, Materialist Spectrality, 26. 41. Teresa Margolles in conversation with Taiyana Pimentel, Conversation Between Taiyana Pimentel, Teresa Margolles and Cuauhtmoc Medina in Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About?, Cuauhtmoc Medina ed., (Barcelona: RM Verlag, 2009), 89.

www.mmk-frankfurt.de/en/ausstellung/current-exhibitions/exhibition-details/ exhibition_uid/2579/ 34. Banwell, Agency and Otherness in Teresa Margolles Aesthetic of

42. Franko B, I Feel Empty, in Live:Art and Performance Adrian Heathield ed. (New York:Routledge, 2004), 226.