1

2011 « Le Réel à l’épreuve de la scène : l’esthétique du choc » in André Helbo Savoirs et

représentations, De Boeck, avril 2011. Traduction en anglais, « From Event to
Extreme Reality. The Aesthetic of Shock », in The Drama Review, New York, Winter
2011, Vol. 55, no 4 (T212), p. 51-6.

From event to extreme reality – the aesthetic of shock1

Josette Féral

UQAM

The theatrical stage has always oscillated between immediacy

and mediation, between reality and fiction. This is not to say

that there is a principle of exclusion between these two

polarities, at best there is a gradation, a balance, perhaps even

a complementary relationship. Numerous performances draw upon this

balance for their power, and it also provides the clearest method

of determining the originality of a particular artistic practice

when compared to another.

However, we live in an era where many directors and artists

in all disciplines seek to move beyond representation by bringing

1
A shorter version of this paper was presented at the
colloquium’s “Theatrical Knowledge and Performance” [“Savoirs et
Performance Spectaculaire”] (Brussels, April 23-24, 2010). The
French version of this text has appeared in the Colloquium
proceedings. « Le Réel à l’épreuve de la scène : l’esthétique du choc » in André Helbo Savoirs et
représentations, De Boeck, avril 2011. (2011).
 2

reality onto the stage, by creating the event, in truth, by

introducing the spectacular. These forms call upon a stage

presence that abruptly seizes on the audience and violently

affects them. The originality of certain of the most interesting

and innovative artistic forms is to work specifically with the

breach between the real and the theatrical, the representative and

the immediate (which takes priority), the illusion and the

unmediated event. Of course, the shows of Jan Lauwers come to

mind, with his dancing and singing actors (notably Benoît Gob at

the beginning of Isabella’s Room), but also those of Romeo

Castellucci (particularly Inferno, where in the play’s opening

scene Roméo is assaulted by trained attack dogs, or the mountain

climber who nimbly climbs the walls of the Palais des Papes in

Avignon, keeping the audience in suspense for more than half an

hour).

To these more and more common on-stage examples, one can also

add examples of a different nature that nevertheless create “real”

events within a play, such as that of Alan Platel, who brings a

blind man on stage to walk a beam over a void in Allemaal Indian,

or even Pippo Delbono, whose actors Bobo, who is mute and deaf,

Gianluca, who has trisomy 21 (Down syndrome), and Nelson, a former

homeless man, bring their physical limitations onto the stage. The

company Hotel pro forma presented a similar case (though of a

different variety) twenty years ago when they used actors with
 3

actual dwarfism in their adaptation of Snow White. The actors

often departed from the Grimm fairy tale in order to explain,

without pathos, the realities of life as a little person.

I would like to focus on one particular form of the emergence

of the real on stage, the presentation of exceptionally violent,

extreme scenes, which are easily located because of the shockwave

they create within various artistic forms: theatre, cinema, visual

arts, and performance. My theory is that these scenes bring art,

particularly theatrical art, out of its theatrical framework to

create the event, in truth, the spectacular, on stage by

substituting a violent performativity accompanied by sense of

extreme presence identical to that experienced when faced with a

real event.

This violence is not a new phenomenon. It has been present

in performance since the nineteen-sixties, but recently it seems

to have re-emerged in a new way. Where once the forms of stage

violence aimed at bringing an absolute presence to the stage and

at re-examining the question of representation, today violent

scenes seem to try and establish a new method of soliciting the

spectator. This method contravenes all uses, defies censorship,

and delivers heavy blows to the spectator. What do such scenes

offer in terms of finality? What kind of aesthetic do they

establish? What relationship do they have to representation on

stage? What perceptual strategies do they put in place?

 4

I would like to provisionally call this the aesthetic of

shock, borrowing and slightly modifying Paul Ardenne’s phrasing

in his book Extrême: Esthétiques de la Limite Dépassée, which

speaks of shock aesthetic.

I will begin with a few examples, chosen from various

artistic fields (theatre, cinema, visual arts, and performance) in

order to analyze their outlines and examine what they reveal about

this very unusual relationship to the real and the links they have

to theatricality and performativity.

The first example is the softest. Rwanda 94 is a six hour Commentaire [JF1]: Photo 1

play known throughout the theatrical world that borrows from

different aesthetic forms (oratory, testimony, documentary,

conference, fiction). It was staged in 2000 by Delcuvellerie2

after a very long period of research on the Rwandan genocide. I

want to pay particular attention to the insertion of a documentary

film excerpt within the play. This film shows thousands of deaths

caused by the genocide and all the violent acts that the event led

to. One scene, just a few seconds long and shot from a distance,

2
Jacques Delcuvellerie is a French director who settled in
Belgium. He has founded the GROUPOV in 1980 and has directed it
ever since.
 5

is particularly violent: the execution of a Tutsi rebel, performed

with a machete3.

It is a slice of reality imported “as is” into the theatrical

framework, but the image is mediated. It is a reality whose

violence the spectator confronts face to face. Despite all of the

fictional apparatus that precedes and follows the film, this

reality hits the audience like a brick, jarring their

sensibilities to such a point that it eradicates aesthetic

distance, leaving only the event. The cinematic frame, itself

within the frame of the play, is unable to entirely erase the

horror of the act happening before our very eyes. The action

projected on the screen is so violent in what it evokes that it

possesses additional presence, causing the spectators to move

outside of their usual comfort range.

In the process, the spectators’ gazes and their entire bodies

are engrossed, caught up in the horror. Thus, with each new

viewing, this execution of a human being in all its violence is

replayed, along with the shock the spectators’ experience4. Yet

3
One could also add the true first hand account of Yolande
Mukagasana, a survivor of the genocide, who tells the story of
the deaths of her three children and her subsequent escape in
the opening of the film.
4
I would like to add one important peripheral detail that
demonstrates that the screening of such scenes must be done with
caution in an artistic context. In effect, when it was shown at
the opening of a FIRT (Fédération Internationale pour la
Recherche Théâtrale) conference in August, 2001 on Transactions:
Culture and Performance, held in Sydney, Australia, this scene
 6

this shock is simultaneously tied to empathy for the victim,

consternation at human barbarity, repulsion and rejection when

faced with the act committed, but also incredulity. Are they

really reading these images correctly? Their imaginations easily

fill in any flaws in the images.

Several questions arise from this first example: What changes

are occurring in theatre with respect to the phenomenons of

theatricality and performativity? In what terms can we analyze the

action? Is this really a case of moving beyond the framework of

the stage?

This engrossment of the gaze necessarily eradicates

theatrical distance, a distance which, as I mentioned earlier, is

necessary to the recognition of theatricality. All that remains is

the performativity of the action, a performativity that goes hand

in hand with the emergence of the event.

When they occur, these moments indicate a rupture, whether

violent or not, that suspends the representation in order to allow

the factual, and thus the present, to emerge on stage. They create

provoked a hostile reaction among participants who felt

violated. This reminds us of the necessity of framing the event,
as the framework was found to be insufficient by certain
audience members. One might question the reasons behind the
impossibility of absorbing reality in all its violence
experienced by the spectators, when television screens
incessantly present us with scenes of death (see the war in Iraq
or Afghanistan). What makes such scenes “unwatchable” and quasi
obscene in the context of spectacle when they are rendered
mundane in the medias?
 7

an event. The stage suddenly loses the play of illusion, of the

pretend, the as if, and the spectators find themselves face to

face with a reality that has emerged where they least expected it,

a reality that modifies their initial contract, once implicit,

surrounding the representation.

It is in these terms that the theatrical event can be

defined. It appears as a moment that surprises the spectators and

causes the real to emerge on stage outside of any process of

representation, illusion, or stage fiction. This event - which, in

its more extreme forms, can stage uncensored deaths (of animals,

of humans) in various ways - seizes upon the spectators’ senses

and addresses itself directly to their emotions, creating a quasi

immersion in the action that prevents all critical distance. The

spectators find themselves, if only for a few moments, constrained

by the event itself into renouncing the “suspension of disbelief”

that theatrical research and theories of communication have

defined as the basis of the credulity necessary to theatrical

action.

To put it differently, one might say that a theatrical event

is the moment where the theatrical illusion is interrupted and the

stage is shaped by an action that emerges without mediation (but

not without a frame), leaving room for chance or risk.

Of course, the unexpected and unforeseen emergence of the

real on stage can be of a different nature and have varying

 8

effects on the spectators according to the intensity of its

emergence and the nature of the action5. In all these cases, the

tacit contract initially existing between the artist and the

spectators seems to suddenly disintegrate and the spectators find

themselves forcibly propelled into a reality that seems to extend

beyond the frame of the stage.

Paul Ardenne named this phenomenon, which was abundantly used

in the performance art of the nineteen-seventies, extreme art. It

is the staging of another’s death that, much like the Roman arena,

elicits a voyeuristic fascination in the audience’s gaze that thus

externalizes their own relationship to the void and the violence

that inhabits it.

Of course, by creating the event on stage, this recourse to

the real emerges as the way to circumvent theatrical illusion and

representation for the benefit of an immediate presence that

eliminates the mediation of a story or a dialogue spoken by an

actor and performance and illusion of any sort. The thinking that

guides this practice, of course, is one of many lines of thought

5
The procedure is not new in itself. In the past, companies such
as those of The Living Theatre or Boal’s “invisible theatre”
made abundant use of this method. More recently, companies such
as Fura dels Baus, Hotel Pro Forma and directors such as Victor
Garcia, Jan Lauwers, Alain Platel, Pippo Delbono, Romeo
Castellucci, Christoph Marthaler, and Heiner Goebbels have all
used this process. However, their objectives, and the effects
they obtain, are entirely different from the effects obtained
here because they are not evoking death, whether the death of
humans or of animals, through violence.
 9

engendered by a dialogue on the re-examination of representation

that has been extensively analyzed by Jacques Derrida and Philippe

Lacoue-Labarthe.

There is a genuine rupture in the order of the performance

that accounts for the spectators’ surprise at having to change

their perceptual register in order to be in sync with what they

are presented with. They exit fiction in order to enter reality.

Moving beyond narration, breaking the theatrical illusion,

the event creates an eruption in the course of the spectacle,

taking the spectators by surprise and forcing them into a mode of

reception that differs from what traditional spectacles have

accustomed them to. Suddenly the spectators’ situation shifts and

they find themselves surprised at the very least, sometimes even

hypnotized, and always “dumbfounded,” in an unexpected place and

time. This place and time are not those of the performance, but an

“other” space, where they are faced with actions that “disturb”

them and are presented to them without mediation. They find

themselves removed from the temporality of the performance and

immersed in another time, an “other” time, as if frozen in place.

The spectators’ attention is constrained; their senses are

brutally interpellated, forcing them to follow the action without

any distance, without the possibility of seeing an aesthetic

dimension to what is presented to their gaze.

 10

The emergence of this event at the very core of the

performance could be explained by the brutal suppression of the

theatrical framing that defines (and protects) the actor, and by

the sudden immersion of the actor in an action that is completely

outside of all representation. In Schechnerian terms, one might

call it a performative action.

The first effect of this emergence of reality is to surprise

the spectators and modify their gaze and the tacit contract, once

traditionally ensconced, that guarantees a show as a place of play

and illusion. However, if this is truly a characteristic of

current theatre, a theatre inherited from the wave of performance

art in the nineteen-sixties, and the confluent influences of

Artaud, the Living, and Grotowski that still affect the stage, it

is the quality that illuminates how numerous current theatrical

experiences have effectively divested themselves of any

relationship to representation, illusion, story, and sometimes

even performance itself.

The second effect is clearly the absence of referents. It is

true that the spectators, fascinated by the violence of the

action, the risk that the artist voluntarily undergoes, and the

real danger that threatens, try to distinguish between what has

been planned and controlled and the ever-present possibility of

accident. They are carried away by the potential of the action’s

immediacy and its extreme presence. These performative moments

 11

most often operate at the limits of the symbolic, in the pure

factual6.

Yet, despite the autonomy of the event (even when planned),

despite the emergence of reality on stage, this does not negate

theatricality. In effect, the spectators have never moved beyond

the theatrical frame. It remains, limiting and enclosing them. It

is this framing that gives the event meaning, and that makes it

even possible to view it as a work of art. Thus, theatricality has

never truly disappeared from the process. It remains as an

indispensable framing device. It is what makes what is offered to

the gaze visible. In the absence of this frame, we would find

ourselves in pure performativity, and thus be absorbed by the

action as we would be in the real, without critical distance.

However, a work of art requires precisely this distance provided

by theatricality.

This means that in theatre, onstage – whether this is in a

theatrical venue or a public space – all performative action calls

upon theatricality7. Theatricality is what gives it meaning and

6
I believe that in certain cases, particularly those I mention
here, it is incorrect to say that in these cases, the action has
no referent outside of the present moment. In effect, in the given
examples, even if we are plunged into reality and death is being
directly experienced, even if the performativity of the moment
dominates the artistic framework, the absence of referents beyond
the stage that forms the basis of the definition of performativity
is illusory.
7
Elsewhere (see Féral, Theatricality issue, Substance, vol.
31, no 1 and 2, 2002, 318 p, pp 3-13), I have stated that
 12

inscribes it within the symbolic. It is also what gives it its

aesthetic dimension. The work may, of course, work to erode this

theatricality and try to eradicate it. The work may explore its

confines, its limits, but theatricality endures, like the phoenix

rising from its own ashes. It is only because of the pervasiveness

of theatricality that the spectators remain in their seats,

impassive, regardless of what occurs, and that they are willing to

observe these works, as brutal as they are, and consent to

consider them as works of art.

Any theatrical frame re-establishes the theatricality of

performative action in its entirety. In fact, is has never quitted

the stage. It is what makes performativity identifiable in

artistic and aesthetic terms; otherwise the spectators would find

themselves in the purely factual.

However, this aesthetic frame is problematic in the respect

that the artistic envelope causes the event to lose some of its

acuity. For instance, an initial analysis illuminates the fact

that if the Hutu rebel completes an action, if the film “shows the

doing,” as Schechner puts it, the spectators cannot help but

plunge into the performativity of the action occurring before

theatricality comes from three rifts: the rift between

eventness and representation, the rift between reality and
fiction at the heart of illusion, and the rift between the
semiotic and the symbolic at the heart of the actor’s play.
Theatricality necessarily creates the space of the “other” and
can only emerge through the recognition of this otherness. It
operates at the level of space and time.
 13

their eyes. But to recognize this performativity, to give it a

name, is to implicitly frame the scene and introduce a distance

between the spectators and the object of their gaze. In other

words, the performativity of a theatrical action can only be read

on the basis of theatricality, because it is theatricality that

creates the framework necessary to recognize the artistic and

aesthetic dimension of the scene. Michael Fried8 thoroughly

understands this. Thus, as we have established elsewhere, this

theatricality creates a rift between reality and “fiction.” To do

this is at minimum, to play with, and at most, to totally erase

the murder thus presented, leaving only the accomplished action

without any consideration of the “actors.”

In effect, as I previously noted, to recognize the

performativity of action – and consequently, its theatricality,

because the two go hand in hand – is to create the cleavage

between reality and fiction that I discussed earlier.

Theatricality, by its very nature, necessarily inscribes a

cleavage in space and time, creating a schism in the continuity.

It designates the space and time as different from those of the

spectator, while performativity brings the spectator to be drawn

into the action, to enter into its space and temporality.

Theatricality calls up a different space and time and designates

8
Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality painting and
beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1980.
 14

it as the space of the “other”. This space can be pre-existing

and programmed (theatrical frame) or deliberately called up by the

spectators’ gaze. In theatricality, it is a question of

recognizing the “otherness” of the other as understood by the

spectators’ gaze; in performativity, the spectators are absorbed

within the action, they are in the absolute presence of the event,

including its time and space. This is the fundamental difference.

Performativity needs the other, so to speak.

Things occur differently on reality’s stage, a stage that is

fixed in the real. Spectators are in the space of the other,

linked to the performer in a quasi fusion; they are absorbed,

hypnotized by the action taking place. Each micro sequence of

events garners their complete attention. Thus they are not in a

position of aesthetic distance, judgment, or analysis. They

themselves are within the process, within the performativity of

the action and the moment. Like the performer, the spectators are

at the heart of the action. Any distance evaporates. They are

within the intimacy of each micro-action9.

This theatricality of action is the essential requirement for

locating performativity within the artistic context, whatever it

may be (theatrical, choreographic, media, pictorial, or

cinematic…). Yet placing theatricality at the center of a

9
But they can also choose to remain outside of the action by
deciding to observe it with indifference.
 15

particularly violent event is somewhat problematic, because it

makes the death of another into a quasi insignificant

consideration by reducing it to an element of the spectacle. It

diminishes the other to the role of an object, a mere pawn in

service of the aesthetic work. Thus, it abstracts the individual

in order to benefit the work. Isn’t there something obscene about

using such moments to generate theatricality? Answering this

question necessitates a departure from the aesthetic domain in

order to enter into considerations that, if not ethical, are at

least moral.

In his book, Extrême: Esthétiques de la Limite Dépassée

[Extreme: The Aesthetics of Breaking Boundaries], Paul Ardenne

observes that the question this raises is how to “reread the image

of brutal reality” and what art can bring to it without

necessarily falling into a disdain for the subject (2006, 318). In

effect, to consider these images or moments as works of art is to

remain silent in the face of thousands of deaths. It is to divide

oneself from the very violence of the action presented as well as

its meaning. As Paul Ardenne says, it is to remain on the outside

while humiliating the victims.

The direct observation offered by the image humiliates the

victim, aestheticises the sacrifice, or never fully conveys

their suffering beyond the visible. (2006, 388)

 16

The second example shifts the question to the field of cinema

and takes it even further10. It is Patricio Guzman’s 1975 film La

Batalla de Chile: la lucha de un pueblo sin armas11 [The Battle of Commentaire [JF2]: Photo 2

Chile: the struggle of a city without arms]. The film’s original

objective was to show the different stages of the popular Chilean

revolution. Guzman wanted to document the resistance amongst the

Chilean bourgeoisie seeking to maintain their privilege. Guzman

writes:

At the time, I wanted to show the anonymous faces, the

millions of sympathizers and militants engaged in the

political turmoil12.

However, after several months of filming, he realized that he

was not filming the Chilean revolution as he intended, but rather

the counter-revolution driven by a faction of the army supported

by the United States. This counter-revolution would lead to

Pinochet’s dictatorship. Within this documentary that recounts,

among other things, the events of June 29th, 1973, Patricio Guzman

incorporates a section of raw footage shot by his young cameraman,

Jorge Muller Silva, who died before Guzman’s eyes as he filmed it,

10
I would like to thank Emilie Houssa, whose thesis, currently
in progress at the University of Quebec at Montreal, introduced
me to this example through a presentation given at our 2007
research group, “Theatricality and Performativity.”
11
The film comes in three parts : La insurrección de la
burguesía, 1975; El golpe de estado, 1977 ; El poder popular,
1979.
12
http://www.editionsmontparnasse.fr/titres/la-bataille-du-chili
 17

mortally wounded by a soldier’s bullet. Silva’s camera films his

assassin as well as his own death. Consequently, the spectators

directly witness the cameraman’s death through his lens. They do

not see the cameraman fall. They only perceive the effect through

the image the cameraman sees before he falls. In other words,

Jorge Muller Silva’s camera films the soldier aiming at him, and

then the image flickers. The screen goes black. The camera goes

out. These few seconds are weighted with emotion. The spectators

never see the cameraman behind the lens, but they sense his

presence by the direct effect. This is a depiction of a man’s

death.

It goes without saying that the image has an emotional impact

for the spectator as well as the director who chose to keep it in

the film. Strictly speaking, there is no representation of the

event, but the cameraman’s death is metonymically evoked in the

fade to black and in the information the spectators receive just

prior to it. For a few moments the audience leaves the documentary

distance behind in order to plunge into the event, the sudden

emergence of reality that, like Rwanda 94, evokes the end of a

human life. The narrative, archival and documentary framework

dissolves. Representation is no longer uppermost. For a few

moments, we are no longer in simple documentary. The scene

produces an intense presence effect. Then the story resumes and

 18

the spectators recover the distance imposed by film on the

transmission of information.

In contrast to Rwanda 94, in this case we are within a medium

– documentaries – that not only permits the emergence of reality

on stage, but that essentially is constructed from scenes drawn

from reality, because the images that make up the film reconstruct

various moments of reality itself. However the violence of this

death jars the spectators and draws them out of the artistic

framework that allows for a certain form of critical distance. The

death of young Jorge Muller Silva is replayed without abridgement

as if, with each screening, it occurs anew for the spectators,

preventing them from seeking refuge in an illusory representation.

As in the previous example, this emergence of the present that

interrupts the representation interpellates us in the respect that

the violence of the image seems to suddenly burst the boundaries

of the artistic and aesthetic frame, leaving only the

pervasiveness of the real. The performativity of the event is

manifested through this means. The question that arises is the

following: has the theatricality really been erased?

Let us say that, far from ceding its rights, representation

remains. The film demands it. Although the death is shown

unabridged, with no apparent distance between the spectators and

event, the thin layer of film slides between them, bringing an

artistic, documentary framework that is also theatrical. In

 19

effect, even though the image has caused the event to emerge into

the spectators’ present for a fraction of a second, the

representation of the young cameraman’s death is only suspended

for a moment, and quickly reclaims its dominion. The spectators

remain in the position of voyeurs faced with a work. It is this

recognition of the theatricality of the scene that ensures the

aesthetic component.

When placed alongside the two previous examples, a third

example13, borrowed from the field of visual arts, allows us to

further pursue our examination. It is an exhibition at Beaubourg

by a Franco-Chinese artist named Huang Yong Ping. The artist

13
It would also be possible here to discuss the well-known
performances of Chris Burden and Serge Oldenbourg, who both play
with the idea of their own deaths, framing them with a staging
where risk flirts with death. The most striking examples are
Burden’s Shoot (1971) and Oldenbourg’s Solo pour la Mort [Solo
for Death]. In Shoot, Burden asks his assistant to shoot him in
the arm with a 22 calibre long rifle (California, 1971); in Solo
pour la Mort, Oldenbourg plays Russian roulette with a revolver
in front of an audience (1964). Of course, Serge Oldenbourg’s
action in actually playing Russian roulette in front of 400
spectators gathered in the Expression Libre gallery is more
extreme than that of Chris Burden, who, one imagines, chose a
friend who was a good shot, or the action of Franko B in pushing
the boundaries of sacrifice to the point of symbolically opening
his own veins. In the case of Burden, it is a question of
assumed risk, in that of Oldenbourg, it is a deadly game where
it is understood that death can intervene unexpectedly. In both
cases, the spectators are confronted with an experience at the
limits (and of the limits).
Of course, such performances overturn the balance of
representation, jar the spectators and shake their perceptual
habits. Yet paradoxically, Ardenne claims that the artistic work
limits this, causing such performances to lose some of their
extreme nature through the very fact of being representations.
 20

wanted to exhibit a vivarium as a work of art in the 1994 Hors

Limites [Beyond Borders] exhibition. Huang Yong Ping’s work,

entitled “Théâtre du Monde” [“Theatre of the World”], placed Commentaire [RS3]: I think Meiling
discussed this work in her TDR article. If
so, reference it. Surely she discussed
grasshoppers, cockroaches, tarantulas, millipedes, lizards, skinks parallel « l ive death » art. I HAVE NOT
BEEN ABLE TO FIND THIS
REFERENCE
and scorpions under a dome shaped like a turtle’s shell. According
Commentaire [JF4]: Photo 3

to the commissioners of the exhibition, this work represents “a

microcosm of global conflicts” and “incites people to serious

reflection on the dynamics of power in contemporary society”.

Banned from the Pompidou Centre, this scandalous work was

also turned away from a Vancouver art gallery for ethical reasons

(cruelty to animals), following a complaint by the SPCA due to the

fact that the work placed animals that prey on each other into the

same environment14. The particular interest of this example does

not come from the nature of the work itself, because the various

14
Born in 1954, the Fujian province in China, Huang Yong Ping
created the DADA Xiamen group in 1986. Among the most radical
Chinese artists, the members were inspired by the works of
Marcel Duchamp, the Dada movement, and risk in the artistic
world. Following his participation in the 1989 exhibition
Magiciens de la Terre [Earth’s Magicians] at the Centre
Pompidou, Huang Yong Ping has lived and worked in France while
exhibiting internationally. “Huang Yong Ping denies that art
evolves in a closed loop. He believes that it is both difficult
and dangerous to portray actual events without illustrating them
and without using the sensationalism of the event itself. All of
his work is devoted to this experimental examination. As a
creator, he seeks to understand how art can establish
relationships with society without losing its independence […]”
(http://artsup.fr/JPGP/JPGP_Huang_Yong_Ping.htm). He observes:
“As soon as art becomes slightly subversive, it is not
understood or rejected, it’s sad”
(http://alaintruong.canalblog.com/archives/2007/04/08/4562896.ht
ml).
 21

creatures forced to coexist are subject to an experience that

echoes their actual living conditions in nature, though one might

object that in nature, they are not trapped in a confined space

and have the very real possibility of escape.

Violent though the work may be, it is not substantially

different from the cock fights commonly held in certain parts of

the world, or even from the bullfights that are a national sport

in several Latin countries. The violence of the work comes rather

from the fact that it is presented as a work of art, and thus

acquires a legitimacy that leaves only its representative,

symbolic value. However, in contrast to the two previous examples,

in this case the work is located firmly within reality and carries

“eventhood” within it. The creatures’ violent acts towards each

other, made theatrical in this format, occur before the audience:

the animals devour each other, deaths occur, and the aghast,

uncomfortable spectators witness a work that simultaneously

strikes and violates them.

Must they necessarily see it as a work of art? This is the

question. To what degree does the presence of an audience

legitimize the kind of practices that transform real violence into

an object of representation? Can the spectator move beyond the

action occurring before their eyes? Is there not an obscenity in

thus endorsing certain forms of gratuitousness on stage?

 22

This question has already been raised in the nineteen-

sixties, but it seems that this new form of violence as spectacle

is more twisted in the respect that the issue of stage presence

(which once legitimized this type of practice) is not even raised

here. The artist does not construct the work out of concern over

reality. The work is directly inscribed within representation,

inviting the spectators to follow it into the reality that

obliterates its initial violence, allowing it to be read as an

entirely symbolic violence. The violence only exists as a metaphor

for the violence of the world. The work has become tautological,

and is intended to allow the spectators to deal with the effective

violence of the action occurring before their eyes.

If there is truly performativity of the action, we are within

our rights to ask ourselves, where is the work’s theatricality? In

order to see it, we need that distance that places artistic works

outside of pure “eventhood” and gives them another meaning that

obliterates the effective nature of the action taking place.

Everything is possible in the name of art. This is what the

performance art of the nineteen-sixties has already established.

Paul Ardenne has thoroughly and quite correctly analysed the

nature of the gaze we bring to bear on this type of so-called

extreme performances. He affirms that these performances are based

on unfamiliarity (scenes that are beyond what we are accustomed to

seeing), repulsion (what is shown is something that we would

 23

ordinarily refuse to view, that we don’t want to see), the desire

to be confronted with content that we usually avoid but that we

want to see, even as we want to avoid it, extravagance (the gaze

wants to encounter something that is entirely other, a radically

other performance), and exteriority (a fundamental element,

according to Ardenne). He terms it shock aesthetic, meaning an

aesthetic that is supposed to have the power to simultaneously

liberate and inhibit.

In principle, pleasure frees us from trauma. By enjoying

myself, I take revenge on frustration, with the same stroke I

make fantasy tangible and eradicate it. […] Confronting an

extreme image is both liberating and inhibiting, it becomes a

traumatic pleasure. Pleasure and trauma are united in the

search for the extraordinary, along with panic and dread. An

affective destabilisation occurs. (Ardenne 2006, 54-56)

Ardenne observes that it must be understood that the desire to see

a violent image is related to our own internal violence, whether

it is more or less accepted.

To want to see violence is to sense our own intimate

violence, hidden in dark corners of our psyche, to endure our

own disavowed potential for brutality, our inclination to

sadism and masochism, the diffuse and tyrannical existence of

our visual unconsciousness. In fact, not all desires for

visualisation are things that can be “lived out”: for many of

 24

us, several remain impossible and out of reach. This is, in

fact, the “raison d’être” for viewing violence. In libidinous

and narcissistic terms, this is its function: to confront us

with our own “unliveable” desires, even if the price is the

most severe self-disgust and powerlessness. (Ardenne, 2006,

310)

Or rather (44):

The “extreme” image is one that assaults the exterior,

one that is not in me, but beside me, one that I do not

find preformed in my ordinary stock of mental images

(or hidden among them, buried somewhere in the opaque

terrain of my visual unconscious)15.

The question raised by Huang Yong Ping’s work concerns the

caution that spectators bring to this type of work, a

caution that minimises the event in itself – that of the

insects really eating each other – leaving only the

spectacle of art in action visible.

15
Paul Ardenne adds: “The opposite is true for the extreme
spectacle, which allows for this upheaval, because it is extra
or super. The power of the extreme spectacle lies in its power
to disturb, its capacity to violate comfort, to break down our
defences, to genuinely push us into panic. In this case we are
buried in emotion to the point of being physically incapable of
response. In other words, jarred, damaged. Is this the pinnacle
of emotion? It seems to be due to this unique quality of the
extreme spectacle, where emotion is thoroughly exploited, with a
maximum return: the art of degradation” (96).
 25

Isn’t there something obscene in this situation? In my

opinion, the transformation of the events of September 11th into

a spectacle smacks of this obscenity.

In these cases, the law of no return, a law that establishes

the tacit contract with the spectators and that wants all

performers to find themselves in the same state of integrity at

the end of the play as at the beginning, is refuted, displacing

the stage towards performance and not the theatrical stage. Paul

Ardenne says that this type of spectacle goes beyond the

boundaries of the everyday (nothing obliges the artist to risk

his life), those of propriety (killing oneself in public

transgresses social conventions), those of aesthetics (the

performance is well beyond a strictly visual image to be watched

and is based in a dangerous game), and those of psychology (it

is expected that artistic practice will offer some benefit

through creation, a narcissistic satisfaction, or even a

sublimation… but here, that artist is invoking potentially real

death). We are becoming a society where the cult of emotion and

the extreme is almost unequivocally deemed to be positive,

leaving aside the moral criteria related to these kinds of

manifestations.

Once again, the question of ethics arises, not in the

form of “how far can art go?” but rather as “how far is the

spectator that I am ready to go in order to accept a work as

 26

artistic?” It brings to mind a remark by Richard Schechner

during a 2008 conference in Sao Paulo when he was confronted

with this realization: “Art can be bad.” It is as though art

is no longer subject solely to aesthetic judgment and

becomes part of the domain of ethics.

This seems to be the perspective from which we should

analyze the ambiguity of Stockhausen’s affirmation about

viewing the September 11th attack on New York’s World Trade

Center as an artistic work16. Even when considered in its

proper context (it seems Stockhausen was talking about the

forces of evil when a journalist asked the question), this

comment continues to provoke many reactions, and justly so.

In effect, it raises the same questions as our examination

of the spectators’ responsibility and the importance of the

view they bring to events.

As in the case of Huang Yong Ping’s work, “Théâtre du

Monde” [“Theatre of the World”], talking about art in this

context renders the event abstract, leaving only its

symbolic dimension17. It erases the violence of reality

16
See Richard, Schechner [2009]. « 9-11 As a Work of Art ? »,
PMLA 124, 5: 1820-29.
17
Baudrillard proposes that the only response possible after
such an event is an analysis that is “eventually just as
unacceptable as the event itself” (Baudrillard 2002, 24), a
radical notion that does not attempt to make sense of the event.
“The challenge is no longer in the explaining, but in a duel, in
 27

(such as Jorge Muller’s Tutsis, the carnivorous insects, and

Serge III risking his life) and projects an artistic

legitimacy. Baudrillard’s assessment offers a copious

illustration of this. In the September 11th attacks he saw a

spectacular performance consciously orchestrated by the

terrorists, a staging that captured the imagination of a

public that today is accustomed to understanding reality

through images projected on a screen.

Because of terrorism, they [the towers] have become the

most beautiful buildings in the world – something that

they were not when they existed. Whatever one might

think of their aesthetic qualities, the Twin Towers were

absolutely a performance, and their destruction is

itself an absolute performance. (Baudrillard, 2002, 18)

Of course, nothing prevents us from recognizing the

performativity, even the theatricality of the September 11th

attacks (or that of the Hiroshima bomb). The photogenic

quality of these events, which has been abundantly exploited

by the media, could legitimize their inclusion in the world

the respective challenges of thought and the event” (Idem 24).

All thought about the event must abandon all references, all
concepts. “Certainly the system will continue, sadly without any
end, not even that of its apocalypse. Because the apocalypse is
already there in the form of the inexorable dismantling of
civilization, and perhaps even the species. But what is
disassembled must still be destroyed. And thought and event each
play a part in the symbolic act of destruction” (Ibid 25).
 28

of art, but doing so nullifies the events themselves. The

very violence of the events is minimized, as though it were

possible to treat human life as a pictorial element (such as

colour, light…).

In our society there is a sort of trivialization of the

image caused by the media. For example, by emphasizing the

“photogenic” aspects of the film segment and its unique

perspective, and deemphasizing the lives lost, the

continuous loop of the airplanes crashing into the two

towers has made these images so familiar that they no longer

possess any cathartic power. They are consumed as “works of

art” and have lost much of their violence and impact.

The image has been aestheticised, leaving the spectators

on the outside of the event itself. The spectators forget

the horror of the suffering and broken lives evoked in the

image they are looking at, and shift into observing it as a

work of art. The aestheticised image dominates,

demonstrating first a dematerialization of the event by the

media, and then its later re-materialization outside of the

aesthetic perspective.

This is a case of conscious and freely undertaken

aestheticising of a violent image, which Stockhausen seems

to be recognizing in his famous remark.

 29

In this perspective, which gives precedence to the

photogenic quality of the event, spectators find themselves

integrating the event into an artistic process, transforming it

into a scene of spectacle, an object of the gaze, projecting the

theatricality that I am evoking onto it and thus necessarily a

distance between the observer and the observed. But there are

also other purely gratuitous scenes of extreme violence that

spectators can view, either voyeuristically, or to test the

limits of their own endurance. This is the case in the execution

of businessman Nick Berg (Nicholas Even Berg) that was broadcast

on the internet and can be viewed by some. Gratuitous and

obscene violence. Yet this execution, just like the gaze that

voluntarily takes it in, has something obscene in it, which was

experienced by those who have seen the video clip. This example,

given by Paul Ardenne, shows the extent to which aesthetic

mediation is necessary in order to absorb the violence of an

event or a work.

Let me quote some viewers reaction from Ardenne’s text: “My

unhealthy curiosity (of which I am ashamed) led me to view this

terrible video, I wasn’t able to view it to the end, I covered

the screen and turned off the sound.” Another reaction: “Yes, I

have seen that video, and words fail me to describe it… I think

that they simply aren’t words to accurately describe what I

felt. I’d like to turn the clock back a few hours so that I
 30

could choose not to see it, but it’s too late.” Yet others said:

“I was so disgusted that I wasn’t even able to watch the whole

video…” […] “I never should have watched that internet video! I

thought I was pretty callous, and I was crying by the end. The

screams, and those men who wouldn’t stop! I regret watching the

tape and I think I’ll regret it for the rest of my life!” (2006,

312). The reason for these reactions, according to Ardenne,

comes from the fact that the event is not framed by any

narration or artistic work that would show it as a memoriam, or

that would legitimize it by constructing a story in order to try

and find meaning in it.

Violence, risk, danger, aggression. In the examples I

have mentioned, the spectators receive the torrent of events

aimed at them without apparent symbolic mediation. They are

suddenly projected into a reality that they did not choose

to confront, a reality that the classic form of their

initial contract did not necessarily promise18. The

spectators are silently, but visibly, shaken, and sometimes

they are even pleased by the clash that jars and provokes

them, a shock that assails all of their senses and that

awakens them, drawing them out of the comfort of illusion,

18
The theatrical contract postulates a stage fiction even if the
theatre has incessantly questioned that illusion since the
nineteen-sixties.
 31

fiction, and the representative that they were expecting.

These moments, that I call theatrical events, rearrange the

framework of sensations and perceptions, confirming Paul

Ardenne’s observations on these issues (57) .

In the more serious productions of Castellucci (the mountain

climber, the dogs, the contortionist from Genesis: From the

Museum of Sleep), it is, of course, a question of controlled

overexcitement, a masterful exploitation of spectacle, but these

performances nevertheless exacerbate the contrary forces of

preservation and destruction (Ardenne 2006, 92) in human beings

(abnormality, prowess, risk, danger…). Even these more neutral,

softer forms of the emergence of reality on stage cause

spectators to re-examine, forcing them to move beyond their

familiar perceptual habits, jarring them in their reactions and

expectations. This is why the superlative spectacle (mountain

climber, contortionist) is not enough to unbalance the

spectators. It is too conventional and too predictable. At

least, this is what Ardenne suggests, as he attempts to create a

typology that distinguishes extreme arts from superlative arts.

Only the first produces an effect. The second entertains, gently

disturbs, and provokes amazement. We are in the world of

childlike wonder, dreams, and the imaginary, not the destructive

forces at the heart of human beings. Ardenne further extends his

analysis by showing us that many works are quick to astonish,

 32

yet they are not extreme. Even considering the risk of disaster,

they have a propensity to justify it through story and

aestheticise it. They are also inscribed within the logic of

catharsis, which makes them figures of order, not the opposite.

This is not the case for the website Rotten.com, which Ardenne

refers to. The site offers the worst insanities that can be

submitted to the eye. The site presents real images in their raw

state (war atrocities, accidents) with the aim of offering the

spectator a genuinely unpleasant uncensored experience by

eliminating any story that goes along with the image. And it

succeeds.

This aesthetic pursues the extraordinary; it pursues

voluntarily exhibited violence, pushing the boundaries of

representation (G. Didi-Huberman, Images In Spite of All).

Images that cannot be represented are nevertheless offered

to the gaze: summary execution (as in the case of the Tutsis

in Rwanda 94), uncensored death (as in the case of Patricio

Guzman’s Argentine cameraman in La Batalla de Chile, and

animals devouring each other (as in the case of Huang Yong

Ping’s Theatre of the World. The images are unsustainable,

and yet are sustained, even enjoyed (see the defence of

bullfighting in Spain as a national heritage). This is what

Ardenne calls traumatic enjoyment. This enjoyment operates

 33

on the classical principle of catharsis and allows the

purging of our most unspoken desires, particularly those

related to murder.

References

Ardenne, Paul. Extrême: Esthétiques de la Limite Dépassée. Paris:

Flammarion, 2006.

Baudrillard, Jean. Power Inferno: Requiem pour les Twin Towers,

Hypothèses sur le Terrorisme, La Violence du Mondial. Collection

L’Espace Critique. Paris: Galilée, 2002.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images Malgré Tout. Paris: Les Éditions de

Minuit, 2003.

Images in Spite of All, The University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Féral, Josette (ed). Theatricality issue, Substance, vol. 31, no 1

et 2, 2002, 318 p.

Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality painting and

beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1980.
 34

Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies – An Introduction. New

York: Routledge, 2002.

Richard, Schechner . « 9-11 As a Work of Art ? » . PMLA 124, 5:

1820-29, 2009.