5. An Experimental Hermeneutics of the Self

If Foucault is right when he says that the modern subject is a subjugated subject, tied to its own identity in an oppressive and constraining way (Foucault 1982: 781), then what forms could a self that was no longer subjugated take? I have stated before that I do not want to be prescriptive about what form a self should take, but we can still consider what possibilities for selfhood could allow us to respond to the critical concerns discussed in the previous chapter. Here, I think we can usefully compare the different ways a constructed self can relate to identity with Nietzsche’s insights into how we can relate to beliefs. Nietzsche attacks fanaticism and the need for convictions, celebrating the contrary. ‘Freedom from convictions of any kind, the capacity for an unconstrained view pertains to strength’ (Nietzsche 2005a: 184). But he also criticises an inability to affirm or deny: ‘the sceptic, that gentle creature is all too easily frightened. His conscience has been trained to jump at every no, or even at a decisive and hardened yes, and to feel it like a bite’ (Nietzsche 2002: 100). He warns us as much of the danger that one cleaves to a sceptical stance as of dogmatically cleaving to one’s beliefs. And he calls instead for the need ‘[n]ot to be stuck in our own detachment’ (Nietzsche 2002: 39). What Nietzsche praises instead of either cool detachment or rigid belief is a capacity to embrace, pursue and explore beliefs and values, which provide the framework in which we live and act,¹ combined with the cultivation of an ability to question, move between and ultimately let go of beliefs and values when we need to.² My suggestion is that one way to be a non-subjugated self, in contrast to a self that relies on a fixed and rigid identity in their interpretation of experience, actions, etc., would be to be a self who is capable of embracing and employing a particular identity, but who also has the capacity to let go of, or be untied from, this identity, and thus may move between and play with different identities. Identity can be understood in terms of what we take to mark us out as individuals, an answer to the question, as Ricoeur frames it, of ‘who did this?’ (1988: 246), a question which already interprets the motivating force of various agential drives and activity of automatic bodily processes as cohering in an individual. But identity also connects to broader social and political categories, or group identities such as our gender or class. Identity answers the question of ‘who did this?’ by picking out a particular individual with a particular character and provides a framework in which we act and understand our actions that can encompass both a particular character and shared group identities. Thus, to be untied from our identity is to accept a fluidity in what we are, which allows us to detach from our existing personal sense of our character, and the patterns of behaviour this may involve, and from the proscribed social and political identities this may incorporate. As well as a capacity to move between and take on different identities, this fluidity might also involve either alternative frameworks of action and interpretation to social and political identities, or very different identities to any we currently find in our cultural library (for instance one that is able to accept a greater degree of diversity, ambiguity and even contradiction). How then, could a more fluid way of relating to oneself be achieved?

Firstly, if Foucault is right when he claims that modern selves are problematically tied to their identity, then they need to be untied. Here criticism is, as explored in the previous chapter, crucial. It allows us to expose the ways in which selves become tied to identities, and particular identities are constructed, and thus to view these identities as contingent. And it exposes the power strategies that both work to deny this contingency and to present particular modes of selfhood as a normative requirement. In the previous chapter, we examined the role that visual art can play in exposing various ways in which the self is continually being constructed and in which we are actively involved in constructing ourselves and others. We saw how narrative is only one among many interpretative practices that contributes to self-construction and emphasised the importance of images as another means by which identity norms are established and often presented as given. We considered, employing Foucault’s understanding of power, how such technologies, that work to produce certain kinds of self, operate in the context of particular power regimes and complex power relations, and may work to reinforce those regimes or serve the goals of others. We saw how the identification of a self with particular images or narratives– and the group identities or cultural tropes they are equated with, such as the femme fatale or working-class wife– is limiting. But we saw also that the reduction of our identity to images or narratives generally, the assumption that the alternative to a particular identity is always another image or story, can itself be limiting. The example of Cindy Sherman highlighted how we identify women with particular types that we construct using visual cues, but her later work also suggests the presence of bodily processes that are in excess of these culturally coded images. Artworks can gesture towards what is being excluded from existing norms of selfhood. Becoming aware of the ways in which selves are constructed, the role of power, and the exclusions that are effected in establishing particular models or means for self-construction, is a crucial step in opening up the space for new forms of self-construction and in cultivating the self-awareness to avoid simply reproducing the same forms of oppression.

If we are to be untied from our identity we also, however, need to create new identities, or alternative frameworks of interpretation and action that offer alternative modes of selfhood. This requires experimentation and creativity. Here we return to the excess, to the processes that cannot be contained in a story or an image, to what does not fit the mould. Exploring and engaging with the aspects of bodily process and drive activity that are not captured in culturally coded images and narratives can provide resources for this experimentation. A starting point in developing a broader hermeneutics of the self is to explore the processes, and where they can lead, which existing norms of both artistic construction and self-construction work to exclude. Innovation in artistic practice can employ processes that we currently ignore or even expunge, and innovate new hermeneutic practices, thereby making these processes available as resources for self-construction. Art practice can also, however, remind us of the material limits of this experimentation. I am following Foucault in advocating that we work to untie ourselves from the identities that are imposed on us by cultural and social demands and shaped by the power strategies of others. One way this could be achieved is by becoming less attached to any given identity and more able to untie ourselves and move between them. Another is to pursue a more autonomous practice of the hermeneutics of the self, shaping the formation of the identities we attach to according to our own goals, rather than those imposed on us by others, with an accompanying awareness of the workings of power relations and their tendency to induce us to shape ourselves in certain ways. However, I am not suggesting that we, individually or as a cultural group, face no limits to our self-invention. In addition to the fact that we are always operating in the context of a given culture, even as we seek to critique or challenge it, we also, as I stressed in Chapter 3, always operate within the logic of the material processes of our bodies. Further, in addition to exploring potential processes of self-construction, and foregrounding their materiality, artworks can directly contribute to self-construction by engaging and affecting bodily processes through their physical effect on us. Artworks can physically persuade– acting on our senses and our drives to produce physical responses and to influence the direction and interaction of the diverse processes that contribute to our self-construction.

But, as well as the innovation and creation of new identities and modes of being, we need to avoid simply reconstituting a subjugated self that cleaves to its new identities just as rigidly as we did to the old. This will be supported by critical practices that cultivate an awareness of the operation of power, a vigilance against stepping into new traps. Thus, visual art as a critical technology has a role to play not just in opening up space for creativity, as discussed in Chapter 4, but in maintaining it. But this requires more than the critical awareness of the operation of power cultivated by the artworks explored in the previous chapter, it requires a capacity for unlearning and relearning. In this chapter, I will explore artworks that help us do this. Continually breaking habits, unlearning what becomes rigid and ossified, is supported by the cultivation of a playfulness that art can facilitate. To maintain this playfulness and avoid the lure of new traps we also need to encourage in ourselves a capacity for incorporating a diversity of interpretative processes and an ability to move between them. Learning new ways of being implies the need to cultivate new habits, alter the vicissitudes of our drives, develop new muscle memories, which art practice again can facilitate, both by way of example and by way of its physical effects on us.

In this chapter, I want to consider different strategies that artists have employed to go further than the disruption and displacement of dominant images and narratives, to question the completeness of images and narratives and their equation with identity by engaging with processes that they exclude. How have artists explored and engaged the body beyond culture, worked to break habits, cultivate playfulness, and engage drives and other bodily processes, thereby producing new trajectories in them? Artworks that achieve these effects are, or could be taken up as, technologies of self-construction that go beyond criticism and contribute to creating something new. I will first consider the strategy of re-appropriation, considering the example of Claude Cahun as one creative response to critical insights into how cultural images can operate as an oppressive technology. But I will argue that we need to go further than re-appropriating– or even inventing new– images or narratives. Indeed, I think that Cahun’s success in escaping from socially proscribed templates for identity comes from her actions and are not reducible to her images. I will consider how various artists, including Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann, have tried to evade being constituted in terms of an image, by actively stepping out of the frame. I will go on to consider how various artists find opportunities for exploring bodily processes that cannot be captured in a culturally coded figure, by using their own bodies (ORLAN, Carolee Schneemann, Yvonne Rainer, Rebecca Horn), by invoking an absent body (Mona Hatoum), and through the engagement of the audience’s body and drives (Marina Abramović, Steve McQueen). I will end by considering how artists may seek not only to reveal but to affect the drives of the spectator (Herman Nitsch). I am not looking to visual art to provide one template for constructing a self, as the novel has been used on the narrative model of selfhood, equating self-construction with the activity of constructing a character in a plot. Rather, visual art offers diverse ways of disrupting existing models of the self and diverse hermeneutic practices that can be incorporated into a plural hermeneutics of the self. It can thus operate as a vital tool in a project of expanding our hermeneutics of the self towards a more diverse practice that embraces its corporeality.

One tactic which aims to go beyond the criticism of imagery, both visual and literary, and its role in constructing and also constraining identities, is re-appropriating this imagery. Re-appropriation involves taking control over the images and terms that have been used to subjugate us. This can go beyond the act of self-assertion involved in taking ownership of a particular symbol or term that has been used to denigrate or oppress us. Re-appropriation can involve new interpretations of the meaning of the imagery involved. In the previous chapter, I discussed Meyer’s analysis of the use of mirrors in the representation of women in the history of art, and how this imagery reinforced the stigmatisation of women as vain and obsessed with appearance, and potentially the internalisation of this as part of their identity. Mirrors in paintings have served to entrench the norm of women as narcissists, which in turn has worked to undermine their autonomy (Meyers 2002: 114). Meyers continues this discussion with a consideration of women artists who have reclaimed and reconfigured the image of the mirror.

One such artist is the self-named Claude Cahun (née Lucy Schwob). Born in 1894, Cahun was associated with the surrealist movement and her main artistic production made public in her lifetime was her writing. She also produced collage in the surrealist tradition. Cahun was Jewish and identified as a lesbian. With her stepsister and partner Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Moore) she engaged in political resistance to fascism. Cahun and Moore left France for Jersey, and were imprisoned there under Nazi occupation, surviving the Second World War but with a severe cost to their health. In her own life Cahun pushed gender categories with her appearance, cutting her hair short and often dressing in men’s clothes, and with her change of name from Lucy to Claude. The photographs that survive her, largely unpublished in her lifetime, sparked a retrospective interest in her work, and in particular in its performative element and the challenge it poses to traditional gender identity. These photographs are labelled as self-portraits but are taken by her partner Moore and might be better viewed as collaborative in authorship (Ades 2017: 176). The series of photographs are intimate, often playful, and defy categorisation according to our expectations of male or female. They include a coquettish image from a series ‘I am in Training Don’t Kiss Me’ (1927), which blends male and female symbols. In one of the pictures from this series she purses rouged lips while holding weights, her hair short and slicked back, apart from two curls on her forehead, the flatness of her chest highlighted by the black circles over her nipples. More sombre is an earlier portrait, in profile, wearing a man’s jacket that mimics a picture of her father and highlights their resemblance (Self-portrait [in Profile, Wearing Corduroy Jacket] c. 1919). In others she wears dresses, for example a series in which she dons a plaited blonde wig and an austere expression, performing the role of Elle from the folk tale Blue Beard, who escapes the bloody fate of her predecessors in matrimony (Self-portrait [Double Head Image as Elle in Barbe-Bleue]; Self-portrait [as Elle in Barbe-Bleue], 1929). A later series of portraits include Cahun in a peaceful pose, with eyes closed, sun on her face, seated behind a window frame in a feminine playsuit (Self-portrait [in Window of La Rocquaise], 1938). These pictures offer an immense diversity of images but also of possible identities. The photograph that Meyers focuses on in her discussion of the imagery of narcissism is Self-portrait (Reflected Image in Mirror with Chequered Jacket) (1928, Figure 5.1). In this brightly lit photograph, Cahun, with short-cropped hair and bronzed skin, poses close to a mirror, making a clear allusion to the Narcissus trope. But she looks not at her reflection in the mirror but out at the viewer, confident and in control. The effect is a doubling in which the persona with a confident gaze that meets ours is different from that of the reflection, whose eyes seem to gaze into the distance with a sense of melancholy, and whose throat is exposed, suggesting vulnerability. Meyers suggests that Cahun’s androgynous appearance in this photograph, combined with her look being turned on the viewer of the photograph rather than being directed towards her own reflection, prevents the image from being read as the narcissistic pursuit of beautiful appearance, and thus as continuous with the history of painting women with mirrors. For Meyers:

Cahun is refiguring the mirror as a self-determination appliance – on the one hand, a repository of inner feelings that the individual sometimes prefers to keep private and, on the other hand, a receptacle for testing out modes of social self-presentation. Abrogating the laws of light refraction, Cahun’s pair of mirrors does not create a visual echo chamber that traps her in the psychic/psyché economy of feminine narcissism. Together the literature and the metaphorical mirror create a breathing space in which she can experiment with and personalize a novel gendered and sexed look.

(Meyers 2002: 140)

Cahun thus takes up the symbol of the mirror and gives it a new meaning, utilising it as a tool of self-determination where it has previously been used as tool of oppression. The woman/mirror imagery is reclaimed and reinterpreted.

Meyers does not suggest we stop with appropriating and giving new meanings to patriarchal imagery. She stresses the importance of ‘feminist counterfigurative initiatives’ (Meyers 2002: 57). And she demands that feminists should aim at ‘fashioning and disseminating emancipatory gender imagery’ (Meyers 2002: 192). But the creation of new imagery which Meyers calls for is still not enough. The very possibility of reducing women to an image or a narrative that can be imposed on them has to be disrupted. The power of Cahun’s self-portrait comes from far more than her referencing the trope of images of narcissistic women with mirrors, it comes from more than the image itself insofar as we can comprehend it in culturally coded terms. The picture works as a challenge to the stereotype of women as shallow narcissists because the action it testifies to takes it beyond the level of simply quoting the woman/mirror image back at us. Cahun’s gaze meets ours, and we feel her presence and her defiance. The photograph also testifies to the varied play with dress, hair and posture that she continually engaged in, and to the challenge her own self-fashioning raised to binary gender identities.

Cahun has been recognised as a precursor of later artists who perform for the camera (Ades 2017: 185). Where Sherman’s Film Stills quote our cultural language in ways that reveal the reduction of women to coded images, Sherman slipping between different tropes of femininity according to the artifice of the image (which encompasses both her costume and make-up and the stylistic markers of the image itself), Cahun refuses to fit into any of the available tropes. Cahun’s work looked at as a series of diverse images is witness to her playful experimentation and the creation of alternative identities. She appears sometimes as decidedly feminine, sometime straightforwardly masculine, sometimes utterly androgynous, sometimes as combining elements of the feminine and masculine, but never as a clear type. Cahun wrote ‘Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me’ (Cahun 2007: 151). Moore’s photographs of Cahun are thus traces of performative activity which is not limited to what is contained in the frame. When Cahun looks out at us from the picture in Self-portrait (Reflected Image in Mirror with Chequered Jacket) (Figure 5.1), she refuses her reduction to a coded image and establishes an identity that exceeds the culturally recognised identities that were available at the time. Her activity is crucial to her successful re-appropriation of the women/mirror image, allowing it to transcend the mimicry of parody or pastiche and instead assert a novel identity.

Activity refuses equation to an image or a narrative. In his discussion of Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer’s choreography and performance of Word Words (1963) with the Judson Dance Theatre, Henry Sayers suggests that when watching the repetition of their dance movements our attention is drawn to the body’s actions. They succeed, Sayers argues, in ‘removing the body from the gaze by returning it to activity, to the condition of always doing something. It anticipates, that is, the role that acting will assume in feminist performance by the end of the decade’ (Sayers 1989: 118–19). The need to avoid being constituted by others led many feminist artists towards performance, in which their own activity refuses reduction to what can be culturally coded. ORLAN’s Attempting to Escape the Frame with Mask No. 3 (1965), in which she clambers awkwardly, naked and masked, out of the confines of a gilt frame, reaching through the restrictively small round opening, can be seen as symbolic of this refusal. ORLAN is best known for her radical and controversial performances in which she undergoes a series of plastic surgeries, incorporating into her performances standards of beauty taken from the history of art, while remaining conscious and reading from texts, the surgery broadcast to live audiences. This series of works is collectively described as Re-incarnation of Saint ORLAN and began in 1990, but it incorporates particular and carefully orchestrated performances. There are various artists, including ORLAN and Stelarc, whose work includes, though is not reducible to, an exploration of the implications of medical technologies. My focus in this book is on the myriad ways in which self-construction is always occurring and can occur, and specifically the limits of a narrative theory as an account of this hermeneutic process. My concern is to argue that visual art broadly construed can help us explore and expand our understanding and practice of a hermeneutics of the self. This can of course incorporate developments in information and medical technology, and these can be seen as continuous with artworks operating as technologies of the self, which modify the body through, for example, the cultivation of new habits. However, I have made the decision that to adequately enter into the complexity of the debates that radical modifications through modern technologies– employing for example robotics, implants or genetic modifications– open up around what constitutes the human or posthuman is too much of a diversion from my focus in this book. The use I wish to make of the example of ORLAN here, therefore, leaves untouched various questions her work raises in relation to the latter topic. In ORLAN’s evolving and controversial performances she both disrupts iconic imagery of beautiful women, such as Botticelli’s Venus and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and refuses to become an image herself. Conscious and performing as she undergoes surgery, continually changing her own physical appearance in a series of operations, not only is ORLAN refusing reduction to an image she also refuses reduction to appearance by making her appearance mutable.

Carolee Schneemann explicitly refers to the motivation of avoiding passive constitution in discussing her work. Schneemann, who saw herself fundamentally as a painter, and who ‘enlarged her canvas’ using happenings and performance, declared the need to use ‘live body action’ because film ‘permits the passive viewing’ (Schneemann 1997: 32, 236).³ Schneemann suggests that the use of her body in her artwork challenged the assumption that she ‘WAS PERMITTED TO BE AN IMAGE/BUT NOT AN IMAGE-MAKER CREATING HER OWN SELF-IMAGE’ (Schneemann 1997: 194). Schneemann’s extensive performance work includes Meat Joy (1963)– a group performance which builds to the ecstatic contortions, interactions and piling up of eight naked bodies smeared with paint and raw meat, which Schneemann herself claims had ‘the character of an erotic rite: excessive indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material’ (Schneemann 1997: 63)– and the solo performance Interior Scroll (1975), in which she reads from a scroll that she pulls out from her vagina. The later performance she repeated as an action in 1977 at the Telluride film festival in order to ‘stand out step out of frame’ (Schneemann 1997: 237). Thus, for women artists, one pull to performance, of, as Sayers puts it, returning to activity, was that it offered a means of taking control and escaping the framed image, refusing passive constitution by others. Replacing an image of the body with the body itself does not, as I will discuss below, evade the problem of objectification, and the body of the female artist is still subject to the male gaze. Perhaps Sayers’s claim that we remove the body from the gaze through activity is too strong, but in their activity Rainer, Paxton, ORLAN and Schneemann all refuse to let themselves be held in the gaze, to be fixed as an image or constituted by it. Their work can thus be viewed as practices that refuse constitution by the other and thus as contributing to a hermeneutics of the self that aims at a non-subjugated self.

Performance art that employs the body, however, is more than an escape act, dodging being trapped by an objectifying eye. For many artists, performance also aimed to engage, for both artist and audience, ‘new ranges of emotion’ (Sayers 1989: 95). Performance art hopes to open up new perspectives on the body by using the body in novel ways and engaging the body of the audience. How can artworks operate as experimental technologies of the self which not only evade constitution by an objectifying gaze that images are subject to, but which also allow us to incorporate into our hermeneutics of the self that which images exclude? In the next section, I want to consider a variety of artworks including but not limited to performance, which explore different perspectives on the body and induce new bodily experiences in the viewers. They can thereby hope to engage, and make available to our hermeneutics of the self, bodily practices in excess of the codification of image or narrative. In this way, visual art can act as a technology of the self which can discover and explore but also affect bodily processes.

In speaking of the motivation behind her series of tableaux, Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera (1963), constructed using her own naked body combined with other materials such as paint and feathers, Schneemann says she sought ‘to “conceive” of my body in manifold aspects which had eluded the culture around me’ (Schneemann 1997: 52). How can we express and engage bodily processes that elude culture; the excess that refuses the mould, the ‘something’ beyond representability that we have seen is gestured towards by Bacon and Sherman, who employ but also disrupt the figure? One tactic is to invoke the body without figurative representation. The figure operates within a cultural visual language, even when pushed to its limits, as with Bacon. Employing the body without figurative representation is an opportunity to explore bodily processes without the coding that figurative art inevitably involves.

One way that I think figurative representation of the body, and thus its reduction to codes, can be avoided is through the use of actual bodies, as in performance work that uses the body, such as Schneemann’s aforementioned group performance Meat Joy (1963). Amelia Jones notes the concern that the presence of the female body is ‘necessarily participating in the phallocentric dynamic of fetishism’, which led feminist artists such as Mary Kelly to exclude the body from any visible presence in their work (Jones 1998: 24). But as Jones argues, it is not inevitable that the body remains purely a ‘fetish object for a pleasure seeking male gaze’ (1998: 27). As Berger suggests ‘the nude is always conventionalized– and the authority for its conventions derives from a certain tradition of art’ but ‘[a] naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude’ (Berger 1972: 53, 54). The artist can challenge the audience to engage in alternative ways of relating which do not involve turning the artist into an object. At the same time, Jones cautions against viewing body art, which she understands as performance and multimedia art that uses the artist’s body, as delivering an unmediated body to the viewer (1998: 33). I think Jones is right both to assert on the one hand the radical possibilities of an artist using their own body, refusing the assumption that the reception of body art is predictable and fixed within our existing problematic ways of seeing and interpreting, and to also insist that this body is never a ‘whole’ that offers up a final meaning. It is this completeness of identity that images and narratives promise us, and normatively insist on, that the body of the artist can disrupt through activity. However, when Jones asserts the incompleteness of the meaning of the body artwork, it is because any meaning for her is ultimately dependent on the interpretative context in which the viewer interacts with it. Certainly, the artist, even while refusing passivity, does not have complete control over the reception of their work, and with body art the interpretation of their body. But while I agree with Jones’s emphasis on intersubjectivity as integral to the effects of live performance, and with her insistence on the incompleteness of meaning, I reject the claim that ‘the body art work only has meaning in virtue of its contextualization within the codes of identity that accrue to the artist’s name/body’ (Jones 1998: 34). This is to remain too closely aligned to a textual understanding of hermeneutics, in which the body, or any artwork, stands in for the book. Jones uses a Derridean framework to liberate the body artwork from authorial determination, insisting rather on the open-ended creation of meaning in the interpretative encounter with the reader/viewer. But I think artists can engage the body in ways that are not subsumed by codes of identity. The use of the body in an artwork allows us to explore the interpretative processes that the body itself is continually engaged in, and which elude representational convention. Interpretation does, as Jones reminds us, always operate in an intersubjective and cultural context, but it is not limited to what can be ‘read’ off the work, it is already occurring in processes of bodily activity and artistic creation.

Performance artists have often experimented with their own and other performers’ bodies, for instance Schneemann suggests in her notes that ‘[t]he voice expresses pressures of the total musculature so that we may discover unique sounds possible during specific physical actions’ (Schneemann 1997: 10). She states further that this exploration of what the body can do, how the body will be affected, is crucially ‘not a predictable, predetermined process’ (Schneemann 1997: 10). Performance art that uses the body thus provides an opportunity to explore the potential of bodily processes to experience and enter into new perspectives on the body. It can be seen as an experiment in the materiality of the body, exploring its possibilities and its horizons, the logic of its inherent processes, the extent to which the trajectory of these processes can deviate, and the limit of its plasticity. If the body is not treated as fixed, offered in its presence as complete, but is rather recognised to be mutable, open to new interpretations and engaged itself in forming new interpretations, then its activity can be a means of exploring it potentialities and creating new and multiple meanings. We do not have to accept either Pollock’s view that the female body cannot be employed in art because it will always be determined by an objectifying gaze, nor the fetishisation of presence which Jones cautions against, if we remember that the body is never static. Rather, in bodily activity, as Sayers emphasises in his discussion of Paxton and Rainer, we find a refusal of any single or final interpretation because activity exceeds any fixed interpretation.

The exploration of the body, and the potential interpretations it can generate, applies to the bodies of the audience as well as the body of the performer. For Schneemann, her performance works are extensions of her painting-constructions, though the:

force of a performance is necessarily more aggressive and immediate in its effect […] the spectator is overwhelmed with changing recognitions, carried emotionally by a flux of evocative actions and led or held by the specified time sequence which marks the duration of the performance.

(Schneemann 1997: 10)

While Schneemann suggests that we are more active visually if looking at a painting, construction or sculpture, she claims that ‘[d]uring a theater piece the audience may become more active physically’ and:

their physical reactions will tend to manifest actual scale—relating to motions, mobilities the body does make in a specific environment. They maybe have to act, to do things, to assist some activity, to get out of the way, to dodge or catch falling objects. They enlarge their kinaesthetic field of participation; their attention is required by a varied span of actions, some of which may threaten to encroach on the integrity of their positions in space.

(Schneemann 1997: 10)

The proximity of the audience is crucial to the effect of Schneemann’s work and that of other performance artists. With Meat Joy, for example, ‘the audience were seated on the floor as close to the performance as possible’ (Schneemann 1997: 63). According to Schneemann the audience of a performance or happening ‘may find their bodies performing on the basis of immediate visual circumstances […] at the same time their senses are heightened by the presence of human forms in action and by the temporality of the actions themselves’ (Schneemann 1997: 10). Thus, discovery concerning the body’s possibilities concerns the audience’s interactions with and reactions to the performance as well as the performer’s experiments with their own bodily functions and capacities.

If artworks are going to operate as technologies of the self that can reveal, engage and affect bodily processes and drives, pursuing their potential beyond the limits of cultural norms, then they need to induce us to take new perspectives on the body, and open up new ways of experiencing our bodies. One artist who achieves this is Rebecca Horn with her sculptural body extensions, which she describes as allowing her to ‘perform certain experiments upon myself’ (Haenlein 1997: 16). For example, within the film Performances II (1972), Horn wears gloves with metre-long black extensions to her fingers, which she calls Handschuhfinger (Finger Gloves). These prostheses, fashioned from wood and fabric, simultaneously extend and restrict her bodily capacity. She can reach further with her extended fingers than with her bare hands. The gloves are light and easy to move, and she can grasp objects and touch with them. She is, however, isolated from the world when she wears them and distanced from the objects that she touches with them. Horn claims that she abandoned using her own body in her art because these experiments remained in the ‘the realm of personal experience’ (Haenlein 1997: 16). However, I think the film footage, and to an extent the artefact of the gloves themselves, and the photographic image of Horn wearing the gloves (Figure 5.2), render tangible for us the significance of tactile connection to our interpretation of the world. The importance of the haptic is registered through the interference that gloves interject into our normal tactile relationship with objects. There is still touch; Horn even suggests that ‘the lever action of the lengthened fingers intensifies the sense of touch in the hand’ (Haenlein 1997: 58). But this touch is mediated by the material of the gloves and the distance they create. It is an unfamiliar touch. It thereby physically reminds us of tactility as a mode of interpretation that can contribute to self-constructions, prompting us to pay attention to the significance of tactile sensation. As Lynne Cooke suggests with Finger Gloves ‘sight cedes to touch in firmly locating, grounding and positioning the self in the world’ (Haenlein 1997: 23). Horn’s experiment makes us aware of tactile modes of interpretation that already play a role in shaping the kind of self that we are and permits us the option of giving greater emphasis to, or directing this form of interpretation towards, particular goals of self-construction and reconstruction. It thus expands the interpretations that we can incorporate into our hermeneutics of the self.

Yvonne Rainer’s work, in which she choregraphs task like repetitive action, also gives a new perspective on the body and its potential. For instance, in the dance Trio A (choreographed in 1966 and filmed in 1978), we see a flow of movements: bending, swaying, squatting, kneeling, rolling, standing and lying down. Watching it we become of aware of the effect of rhythm and gravity on the body. Also, with its lack of any music, we witness the specificity of the rhythm of different bodies, as when the dance is performed together by more than one dancer the duration varies between them (Bryan-Wilson 2012: 54). We sense that the dancer’s movements have their own logic and impetus, conserving energy, or expressing forces. Through engaging with Rainer’s artwork, we come to understand that movement is another mode of interpretation, and thus provides another possibility of self-construction within a corporeal hermeneutics of the self that incorporates multiple interpretations.

The interconnectedness of bodily movement and our sense of self has been highlighted by Iris Marion-Young in her seminal essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ from 1980, which discusses the gender differences in movement and the occupation of space (Marion-Young 1990). Her starting point is Erwin Straus’s observations of the differences between how even very young boys and girls approach throwing a ball differently. The girl does not employ her whole body in the way that a boy does. But this, Strauss acknowledges, cannot be explained through physiological sexual difference. Marion-Young expands this to consider more widely the differences in movement and style of women’s and men’s bodies:

Even in the most simple body orientations of men and women as they sit, stand and walk, one can observe a typical difference in body style and extension. Women generally are not as open with their bodies as men are in their gait and stride. Typically, the masculine stride is longer proportional to a man’s body than is the feminine stride to a women’s. The man typically swings his arms in a more open and loose fashion […] Women tend not to put their whole bodies into engagement in a physical task with the same ease and naturalness as men. (1990: 145)

Marion-Young thus notes how bodily movements are interactive with gender identity (which in turn is part of a particular identity that a self is more or less tied to).

What does Rainer’s Trio A add to this analysis? Julia Bryan-Wilson, in reflecting on Trio A, considers the nature of dance practice:

There is something in dance called ‘muscle memory’—the capturing of movement within your flesh so thoroughly that when you move, you can do so without much conscious thinking. The body can contain and store thought, history and meaning; it is capable of holding and learning and even teaching the mind. (2012: 69–70)

Trio A shows us then, how, through muscle memory, various patterns of interpretation – how we swing our arms, how we stride, how we throw, etc.– which may support and express particular identities, are established.

Schneemann suggests that if she had ‘only been dancing, acting’ she ‘would have maintained forms of feminine expression acceptable to the culture’ (Schneemann 1997: 194). But she was also directing the theatrical productions that she performed in and thus creating new forms of expression, while Rainer choregraphs a radically different kind of dance expanding its vocabulary from established gendered expressions. Hence, as a choreographed dance performed by different dancers Trio A demonstrates not just how gestures and patterns of movement that follow culturally acceptable lines form, but also the possibility of unlearning these patterns, and establishing new interpretations of movement. Schneemann, reflecting on her group performance works, claims that while their character depends on spontaneous movement and gesture, ‘each particular work took a great deal of training for us to reach a fluid physical inter-relation that isn’t inherently part of our culture’ (Schneemann 1997: 184). If we can train ourselves to unlearn patterns of moving and relating, then we create space for new gestures and movement, and develop new muscle memories that break with culturally established forms. Of the dancers she works with Schneemann says ‘their bodies are capable of feats’, from a tradition of movement that their body knows, they must reach towards ‘the forms which they must search to break clear of past traditions’ (Schneemann 1997: 17). Rainer’s and Schneemann’s artworks thus provide us with examples of how new bodily interpretations can be developed that do not conform to the bodily expressions that express, and work to tie us to, our existing culturally established identities.

At the same time a work such as Rainer’s Trio A makes us aware that new interpretations, the cultivation of new muscle memories, must work with the material of the body, the body’s weight and susceptibility to gravity, its flexibility and range of movement have to be expanded gradually and ultimately have their limits; joints have a maximum rotation, muscles can only be stretched so far without injury. Just as Louise Bourgeois observed how the materials of her sculptures both pushed into new concerns and presented resistances, the body has its own tendencies of movement and limits of plasticity. Trio A can teach us about the possibility and limitations of movement as a mode of interpretation that can be incorporated into the multiple practices that contribute to our self-construction. Thus, it is an example of how performances which use the body can explore bodily processes that escape figurative representation, allowing us to inhabit new perspectives. Learning from Trio A, we can start to experiment with where these processes can take us and with what ways they can contribute to a hermeneutics of the self that does not merely reproduce oppressive forms of subjectivity. But Rainer’s piece is also an example of how artworks must experiment with the body in a way that is sensitive to the trajectories and limits of bodily process. Hence, Schneemann’s desire in her artistic endeavours for a dance in which the dancers ‘are aware of the impulse, the necessity by which they move and its implicit diminution or contrary flow’ (Schneemann 1997: 18). Thus, the search for new movements and forms cannot be a rupture but a gradual retraining and development that still works with our underlying corporeality. Just as a sculptor must develop a feeling for the vicissitudes of their material, working with the ‘fundamental life of any material’ they use (Schneemann 1997: 9), the artist who works with the body develops a feel for its various processes, and their pliability or intransience, and thus offers us a resource for understanding the materiality of our self-construction.

These examples of work by Schneemann, Horn and Rainer are all performances which employ the artist’s body. They all illustrate that artworks can be employed by us as technologies of the self that allow us to unlearn patterns of bodily interpretation, develop new experimental interpretations and engage in play in trying out different interpretations. They do this through the bodily activity of the artist, as well as the bodily effects of the work on its audience. But the body can also be invoked in its absence. In many of the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum’s pieces the body is not present but it is intimated. In an interview with Janine Antoni, Hatoum suggests of her own work that ‘[t]he sculptures based on furniture are very much about the body’, we encounter a body that is not there and ‘they encourage the viewer to mentally project him or herself onto the object’ (Archer et al. 2016: 143). An example is the disturbing Day Bed (2008), a scaled-up grater which both invites that one recline on it, with its chaise-lounge like proportions and shape, and at the same time with its sharp surface prohibits it, reminding us of the vulnerability of our flesh.

Hatoum’s use of familiar furniture and objects that we associate with the domestic sphere evokes bodily presence through absence. The body is the missing element suggested by the expectation of our habitual interactions with and reliance on these objects. The body’s interconnection with objects, the way they extend its powers, but also the way we desire them and attach to them, is thus one perspective that Hatoum brings to light. Her works using household objects, for example the electrified kitchen implements in Home (1999), employ the familiar in uncomfortable new contexts that emphasise danger and alienation. The use of objects we might associate with home, family and comfort makes their subversion all the more disturbing and threatening. Hatoum wants the body of the audience to interact with her artworks, claiming that the aim is that ‘the viewer is somehow implicated or even visually or psychologically entrapped in some of the installations’ (Archer et al. 2016: 143). This is the case for instance with The Light at the End (1989). The piece consists of six red, hot bars emitting heat and red light at the end of a dark narrowing space. From a distance the viewer sees six red lines in the dark, but as they approach they experience the heat of the bars, a physical warning, transmitted sensually, not to come too close. Guy Brett describes his personal experience of the artwork:

The moment of transition from optical to bodily sensation was an unforgettable experience, a kind of Zen satori. Light changed to heat and the visual sense was perturbed and enlarged by the sense of the body as a whole, arousing a disturbing complex of feelings. Attraction to the warmth was mixed with fear. The barrier appeared to be permeable but associated with great risk and danger. At that moment the habitual connection of the eye with detachment and distance was challenged. It became almost physically impossible simply to ‘look on’ in a state of neutrality, and you felt yourself responsible for your actions.

(Archer et al. 2016: 60, 63)

Brett’s own body is affected by his engagement with the artwork and he is brought to a new understanding through this bodily experience. He experiences an interconnection between his senses and his emotional reactions and drives. This allows him to achieve an understanding, at the level of bodily experience not abstract theory, that vision is a bodily perspective rather than an objective and distanced mode of contemplation. As Nietzsche would have it ‘an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something’ is ‘an absurdity’ (Nietzsche 2007: 87). With The Light at the End, the interpretation of the eye that sees the bars of red lights comes to incorporate the interpretation of the senses that feel the heat, and that of the drives that attract and repel us towards this heat. Engaging with this piece asserts the interconnection of different modes of bodily interpretation and militates against both the privilege of vision and its distortion into the absurdity of a neutral and objective gaze. It is thus an instance of an artwork working to show us the presence of multiple interpretations and the potential of incorporating them in their interactions, both symbiotic and antagonist, as part of our hermeneutics of the self.

With Hatoum’s Corps Étranger (1994) the body is once again present, filmed in its interiority with an endoscopic camera, but not subverting the conventions of representation and clearly not offered as a figure. Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones claim that by turning the body inside out Hatoum challenges the construction of the body as ‘codifiable’ and thus ‘“possessable or exchangeable”’ (Warr and Jones 2000: 42). The viewer is swallowed up in the footage of Hatoum’s own body. Hatoum describes this work, an installation that incorporates footage of her own insides, thus:

There is basically one sweeping shot surveying the surface of the body in extreme close-up in a claustrophobic way. We then follow the camera as it penetrates inside the body through various orifices into the stomach intestines, vagina … I wanted to give the feeling that the body becomes vulnerable in the face of the scientific eye, probing it, invading its boundaries, objectifying it … on the other hand when you enter the room, in places, you feel like you are on the edge of an abyss that can swallow you up, the devouring womb, the vagina dentata, castration anxiety.

(Archer et al. 2016: 131)

It is a work that extends Hatoum’s long-standing interest in surveillance. It involves a Foucauldian critique of visibility and examination, the camera violating the last vestiges of our body: its interior, the gallerygoer invading this space, literally treading on it, when they enter into the installation. But it also involves a new experience of the body. Warr and Jones suggest the experience of this installation is such that ‘[o]ur desire to present ourselves (our bodies) as coherent containers of our chosen identity is thwarted through our identification with the mucoid tunnels beneath’ (Warr and Jones 2000: 42). We are reminded of the hidden orifices, fluids and processes that culture would have us forget. Self-construction that would exclude this continual bodily activity of swallowing, digesting, secreting is revealed to be a self-construction based on denial, which seeks a sanitised and artificially complete identity in place of the fluid processes that may invoke disgust. We are reconnected with the excess of bodily process that image or plot excludes.

Installations allow artists to play on the potential of artworks to affect our senses and our bodies in different ways and engineer bodily experiences in the audience members. Steve McQueen’s film Bear (1993) for instance depends on the controlled conditions of its viewing for its full effect. Bear projects a black and white film of two naked black men, one McQueen, sparring but also smiling and winking, the mood shifting between threat and flirtation. Due to the size of the screen and the close-up shots the wrestling, dancing, shifting figures are larger than the viewer. The polished floor of the gallery reflects the image, ensuring the viewers implication in the scene. McQueen says of the work:

Projecting the film on to the back wall of the gallery space so that it completely fills it from ceiling to floor, and from side to side, gives it this kind of blanket effect. You are very much involved with what is going on. You are a participant, not a passive viewer. The whole idea of making it a silent experience is so that when people walk into the space they become very much aware of themselves, of their own breathing.

(Bickers 1996: 2)

The different angles, the larger-than-life size of the bodies on screen, and the silence allow the audience to take a new perspective on the bodies of the two men acting in the film, but also to experience their own body as viewers. We are, as McQueen himself says, aware of our own breathing when we engage with this work. McQueen succeeds in his aim to make the audience aware of the movements and processes of their bodies, of their physicality. But I would add that the audience also become aware of their desires. In the previous chapter, we saw how Sherman’s Film Stills give the viewer a critical awareness of the way in which we as viewers construct the identity of the various women she dresses up as, according to the cultural types the given image suggests to us. In these early works, Sherman addressed the active role of the viewer in the constitution of the identity of women and their objectification. But McQueen gives us an awareness of ourselves as more than viewers, we feel ourselves as living, breathing, desiring, sensual and corporeal. We are bodies looking at, responding to, bodies, though inevitably bodies that have a cultural reality which includes the interpretative frameworks of race, sexuality and gender. As with Hatoum’s work, the idea of vision as independent of other modes of interpretation is again undermined. We are forced to confront that all modes of interpretation, including vision and desire, interact. This awareness, achieved through engaging with a work of art, thus opens up new possibilities for incorporating a range of interpretations into our hermeneutics of the self.

I began this book by considering the different reactions invoked by Goya’s Disaster of War prints. In Chapter 1, I considered how Nietzsche and Freud’s theory of drives explained the multiplicity of interpretations active in the moment of encountering an artwork. We also saw how the complexity of our experience of artworks, and the account of this in terms of a multiplicity of active drives, presents a challenge to the idea of a unified self. I have argued that the self should be understood as formed through various interpretative processes and practices and contingently uniting this diversity. The theory that the self incorporates a multiplicity of drives providing different interpretations and impetuses to act challenges the idea that we can equate the self with a simple, conscious agency. This, as discussed in Chapter 3, requires that we rethink our understanding of the agency of self-construction. It presents a challenge for projects in which we want to direct our self-construction towards particular goals and forces us to accept that any such trajectory may be subject to competing demands. The idea that the agency of self-construction could be multiple, sometimes unconscious, with shifting collaborations and loci of dominance, however, opens up possibilities, as well as challenges, for projects of self-cultivation and self-transformation that we may undertake as part of our hermeneutics of the self. It allows for a diversity of technologies of the self affecting us at various levels, which need not be conscious and which can contribute to our self-construction, self-cultivation and reconstruction.

Various artists deliberately explore and seek to engage and affect the drives. In defending body art, Jones argues that the critical strategy of distanciation advocated by Pollock is not the only way artworks can be politically critical and radical. Distanciation aims to induce the active participation of the viewer through tactics of defamiliarisation, which thus ‘liberate the viewer from the state of being captured by the illusion of art’ (Pollock 1988: 163). By contrast, Jones argues that ‘body art practices solicit rather than distance the spectator’, but eliciting pleasure does not preclude the active participation of the audience in the development of new interpretations and ways of relating to each other (Jones 1998: 31). Schneemann’s work, for example, can be seen to incite pleasure and engage our libidinal drives, but why should this be limited to reproducing the desiring male gaze rather than exploring alternative forms and manifestations of desire? Assuming that is that we are armed with a critical awareness of the desiring male gaze, and its internalisation by women, which various visual artists, as discussed in the previous chapter, have equipped us with. Schneemann claimed that ‘[a]lienation from our physical joys, constrictions in the scope of our own physical natures, meant endless disasters, acts against our own deepest needs’ (Schneemann 1997: 194). Schneemann thus positioned her celebration of the libidinal, involving the seduction of the viewer, as potentially liberating. Her work conceived thus, works on us and potentially changes its audience by working on their drives.

Artworks can operate as technologies that engage the drives on two levels. Firstly, as I discussed above, in terms of expanding perspectives on the body and its processes it makes us aware of bodily processes such as drive activity and thus makes this activity a potential resource in our deliberate self-experimentation. Artworks can help us to fulfil the task that Nietzsche sets us: ‘to look into the world through as manyeyes as possible, to live in drives and activities so as to create eyes for ourselves’ (Nietzsche 1988: vol. 9, 494–5). In various ways artworks can enable us to inhabit and explore the drives. Some performance artists have gone further than stimulating and provoking the drive reactions of their audience and invite the audience to express drives in actions. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) instructed the audience to cut away pieces of her clothing with scissors. Going further, Marina Abramović’s infamous Rhythm O (1974) invited the audience to use any of 72 objects laid out on a table ‘as desired’, with Abramović positioning herself as ‘the object’. This performance in Naples lasted six hours. The objects chosen could produce pleasure, pain or even death, and included a feather, bandage, soap, saw, whip, knife and a gun. Her clothes were cut off, her skin cut, the gun was aimed at her, other audience members intervened. The audience were allowed to caress her or harm her. The performance demonstrated the presence of sadistic and violent drives, operating as a shocking revelation of their continual activity and potency. The participants explored drives in their activity. Thus, artworks can furnish us with a greater awareness of the interpretative activity of our drives in both breadth and depth, allowing us to become more aware of the diversity of drives and thus the range of perspectives they establish, and enabling us to inhabit and live in particular drives. Artworks can thereby expand the interpretations that we are able to incorporate as part of our hermeneutics of the self, which can employ a range of technologies in the interpretative process of self-construction.

Secondly, in addition to exposing and exploring drives, artworks can also hope to affect the trajectories of the drives, for instance by providing them with new objects, which in turn affects their character, or with new possibilities for expression and release. In Chapter 1 we noted that Freud added to our understanding of drives the important recognition that the objects that drives are directed towards, including other people, affect their trajectory and the character of these drives. Artworks can themselves operate as objects for our drives, modifying them in the process.

An artist who goes to extreme lengths with the aim of providing a release for drives that are otherwise suppressed in civilised society is the Austrian artist Herman Nitsch. Nitsch’s work makes reference to both Dionysiac and Christian rites in his ritualistic and dramatic performances, employing for instance the crucifix, animal sacrifice and frenzied dance. Intense, loud music, naked actors, gutted animal carcases, the ripping apart of flesh, all feature. Between 1962 and 2020 Nitsch has staged multiple performances as part of his OrgienMysterien Theater (OMT). The most extensive of these is the 100th action, 6-Tage-Spiel, a six-day performance in 1998 at his estate in Prinzendorf, involving 100 actors and 180 musicians. Actions were spread out across the estate and viewers had no fixed schedule. Susan Jarosi notes that Nitsch’s work involves a ‘conspicuous consideration of audience’ and aims to produce ‘intensified registration of sensation’ and ‘catharsis’ (Jarosi 2013).⁴

Discussing his work, we come head to head with a problem of writing about performance art generally. If the effect of the work depends on its proximity and immediacy as live performance, then reports, videos and photographs will always be inadequate to convey the experience for the audience. Given Nitsch’s emphasis on an immersive experience and sensory overload this is particularly pertinent in considering his work. It is necessary therefore to appeal to subjective descriptions by those, such as Jarosi, who have been present at his OMT events. She describes one of the actions in the six-day play as follows:

On the afternoon of the second day, for example, the major action staged in the courtyard comprised a series of vignettes that layered elements of religious ritual and mythological narrative […] This action engaged the participation of all the actors and assistants and every musician; audience members could approach the proceedings from any angle, but were never permitted to participate directly. Nitsch orchestrated the events, directing his chief assistant, who in turn supervised actors assigned to undertake either ‘passive’ or ‘active’ tasks, which served as metaphors for contrasting states of being: passive performers remained inert, tied to crosses, blindfolded, often naked, and subject to actions such as being inundated with blood and draped with entrails; active performers transported the bound actors, poured the blood and rent the entrails, and also smashed and stomped on grapes and tomatoes […] The effect was of choreographed chaos, produced from highly structured, programmed, and precisely executed tasks characterized by dynamic excess and frenzy. The string orchestra, the heurige band, and the church bells played raucously; the synthesized sounds droned incessantly; sirens blared, bodies milled, geese ran about.

(Jarosi 2013: 836–7)

Jarosi describes her own ‘immersive experience’ as involving a range of competing responses, which included an instinctive flight reaction (Jarosi 2013: 858). Nitsch’s emphasis in describing his work is on a release or working through of drives in the context of sensory overload or orgiastic frenzy (Jarosi 2013: 843). Nitsch’s website describes the OMT as ‘comparable to psychoanalysis’, thus Nitsch’s explicit aim, in line with Jarosi’s presentation of his work, is to work on and release repressed drives, and, as stated on the website, to render viewable the repressed. Nitsch states that the ‘technique of the play helps us’ in ‘plumbing to the depths of the reality of our drives, usually remaining uncharted territory. repressed areas are unearthed and lived out’ (Nitsch n.d., a). But crucially this is an aesthetic process which recognises the bodily nature of the drives, and thus engages them through sensual and physical experience. Nitsch states that the OMT’s effect on the drives works through the ‘sensory sensations evoked by the actions, which, once the censors are overcome, disinhibit and intoxicate’ (Nitsch n.d., a).

Further, the aim of the work goes beyond the individual cure of neurosis and hopes to induce in us a new experience of the world in which ‘the rapturous intensity of existence must spread over all areas of being, across everyday life. a world overcome with cheerful joviality should allow us to serenely immerse in all possibilities of enjoyment. all the senses have to be intensified and sensitized’, which echoes Nietzsche’s call for a gay or joyful science (Nietzsche 2001; Nitsch n.d., a). Nitsch’s work can thus be seen as a technology, he himself describes it as an instrument (Nitsch n.d., b), which has the potential both to expose the multiplicity of our drive interpretations and allow us to ‘live in’ them as Nietzsche advocates, but also to work directly on the vicissitudes of our drives allowing repressed complexes to be worked through, and drives to find new forms of expression. Nitsch self-consciously positions his art as a form of communal therapy and thus as a technology of the self that acts directly on our drives. It is thus an example of the possibility of artworks not only modelling and exploring processes, including drive activity, that contribute to our self-construction, but affecting and alternating these processes and thus the self that is being constructed.

The artworks discussed in this chapter invite us to inhabit new perspectives, exposing and affecting our bodily processes. These processes encompass the operation of our senses, muscle memory, gesture and drive activity. In doing so they both reveal the myriad of bodily interpretations that can contribute to our self-construction and act on these interpretative processes. As the artist Joseph Beuys says, ‘every person continually performs material processes’ (Beuys 2004: 21). Artworks make us aware of and affect these processes. They thus operate as experimental technologies of the self. They take us beyond the important work of criticism, which reveals both the ways in which the self is constructed in the context of power relations and the contingency of the normative standards of self-construction. The artworks discussed in this chapter show us that artworks can go beyond criticism and assist us in the task of unlearning habits and reactions and of developing new ways of interpreting.

The artists I have focused on this chapter emphasise the effect of their work on the body of the audience, they see the interpretation of their work as involving the physical reactions of the viewer. With Ono and Abramović the audience becomes part of the creation of the artwork. Their pieces provide instructions to the audience but offer themselves up as passive objects. But other artworks are explicitly collaborative and aimed at establishing an interactive creative process. Rainer’s Trio A is a piece that she has transmitted to other dancers including non-professionals. It becomes a communal work, a practice that can be shaped collaboratively and participated in actively, practised and not merely received by, or acting on, others. Beuys understood his artworks to include discussions with audience members, for example in his Directional Forces (1974). This piece created stacks of blackboards drawn by Beuys but also involving the input and interventions of visitors. Caroline Tisdall recounts that ‘[t]he principle idea of Directional Forces was that the work should grow through the course of time and the intervention of visitors’ (Tisdall 1998: 109). Participating in collaborative art practice such as dance or dialogue can be taken up by the audience as part of a hermeneutics of the self. Volker Harlan explains the context of a discussion with Joseph Beuys, which was, Harlan recounts part of a frequent gathering of a group of young people trying to understand ‘the world, society and ourselves’.

Essentially our questions related to how we should lead and shape our lives. It seemed natural therefore to concentrate not only on theoretical considerations but also to engage with specific, practical exercises. Such exercises were essentially artistic in character, and did not serve any immediate, external purpose. They did not serve to prepare an exhibition or a publication, but solely to ‘come into movement’ ourselves. To discover new forms and ways of living. And even if these forms were not new, they were at least self-discovered; for in discovering them ourselves they remain available to consciousness and can then– more or less– be implemented in all areas of practical life.

(Beuys 2004: 5)

This summary by Harlan of the meetings he engaged in can be taken, I think, as a summary of how artistic practice, conceived broadly, can be incorporated into a hermeneutics of the self, as discovery of, but also making available for implementation, new forms and ways of living. Beuys claimed that every human being is an artist (Beuys 2004: 2). Speaking at the New School in 1974, he said he was there to speak about ‘the whole question of potential, the possibility that everybody can do his own particular kind of art and work for the new social organization’ (Beuys 1990: 8). Beuys sought to break down the boundaries of what we conceive of as art, advocating the possibility that social and political action can itself be conceived of as artistic action in his notion of Social Sculpture. This is a notion that I will return to in the Conclusion. Given that our self-construction operates in the context of the social and cultural world in which we operate, the possibilities of our self-construction are expanded not only by directly operating on ourselves through a variety of hermeneutic practices but also in the transformation of our social environment in which these practices operate. The boundaries between artistic practice, practices of self-construction and practices of social engagement are thus fluid.