PERFORMANCE ARTISTS--VIRTUOSOS OF VITRIOL

So, you think you know nasty ? Quite obviously, you haven’t been pummeled by much performance art lately.

Today’s performance artists are the grand marshals of the gross-out parade: virtuosos of vitriol, scientists of scatology, masters of malediction. It’s not only that they say the most outrageous things or engage in bizarre, bestial rituals that stretch the limits of the obscenity laws.

Oddly enough, America seems to appreciate this kind of nastiness, perhaps seeing in it a reflection of itself in the virulent spiral of images that now seems so definitive of fin de siecle post-modern life. In the past year, Eric Bogosian and Ann Magnuson, two performance artists who have specialized in satirizing mass-media images, have entered into mainstream American culture, Bogosian to Broadway and Magnuson to a career in film (most recently, in Susan Seidelman’s “Making Mr. Right”). Ironically, the nastier performance artists get, the more they seem to be rewarded.

What distinguishes the nastiness of many performance artists is that they quite often mean these terrifying, scabrous things; worse than that, they think that what they do is better for you than the kind of errant nastiness you see each night on TV. Indeed, performance may be the only form of art today where nasty really is what nasty does .

Case in point: Karen Finley’s notorious performance in which she angrily covers her naked backside in sticky yams while delivering a screed against the sexual brutality of men. It’s not the yams that make Finley’s act so disturbing, but the intense, cathartic release of energy that accompanies it--the nastiness of the brutalizers expressed through Finley’s own act of self-victimization.

Similarly, when the Butoh dancers Sankaijuku suspended themselves upside down from the sides of buildings, or the women in Pina Bausch’s Wuppertaler Tanztheater repeatedly hurled themselves into walls in Bausch’s “Bluebeard,” the sheer violence of these actions became secondary to the very real danger that the performers were constantly exposed to: so real that one of the Sankaijuku dancers died in a fall during a performance in Seattle in 1985.

Of course, these artists are not the first performers to use their bodies as vehicles for violent artistic expression. In 1971, the California artist Chris Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm from 15 feet away. That same year, artist Vito Acconci masturbated under a ramp built into a gallery while visitors walked above him.

Another artist known as Stelarc regularly implants hooks in his skin and hangs horizontally from wires attached to poles planted 10 feet apart. More recently, Los Angeles-based performance artist Johanna Went has perfected her own form of nastiness by covering herself (and her audiences) with the bloody entrails of freshly killed animals. Dancer Ishmael Houston-Jones simulated copulation with a dead goat in a performance concerned with the deadly AIDS virus. ( That kind of nastiness can only be inspired by sheer terror.)

However, even these examples of bodily violence pale beside the horrific malevolence of Survival Research Laboratories, a San Francisco-based performance group that constructs massive, medieval-looking, fire-breathing machines from surplus war materiel. An SRL performance is nothing less than an entire war in miniature, one noisome, clanking, maximally evil machine pitted against another in a potent reminder that whatever nastiness exists in performance is nothing less than a reflection of the lethal violence that exists all around us, especially in military warfare.

Needless to say, not all performance art is so overtly nasty. For many younger performance artists, the entire notion of performance art provocation--the challenge to the implicit decorousness of formal theater--now seems tired and ineffectual. Provocation, it seems, has no meaning when audiences are swamped by a surfeit of provocative images from advertising, television, and even from performance. Instead of provocation, these artists want to formalize the old shock values. Younger artists want a new kind of nastiness, at once both more personal and more capable of “appropriating” images from the mass-media--substituting “our” messages (those that subvert) for “theirs” (the ideology of the status quo).

Annie Iobst and Lucy Sexton, two women who are known collectively as Dancenoise and are often thought of as pioneers of this “trash consumerist” aesthetic, regularly combine their own twisted variants of TV sitcom cliches with bizarre props that are hidden in their costumes. “It wasn’t my idea to put chickens in our bras!” one said during a recent performance while pulling a raw chicken leg from her chest.

“Well,” countered the other, pulling a live fish from her pants, “it wasn’t my idea to put these fish in our undies!”