The Stripper: Victim Art
and the Art of Suffering

Bowling Green State University is hunkered deep in the conservative Midwest, in a glacial region known as The Great Black Swamp. On the evening of the day I arrived, I was surprised to find myself part of the audience in the university’s gymnasium, watching a full-blown striptease. There in 1996 to attend a pop-culture conference, and toting not only a change of clothes and the paper I would deliver, but my Midwest Methodist upbringing as well, I did not expect to see a naked dancer. In retrospect, I like to think my expectations (or lack thereof) had less to do with the moral and ethical issues involved than with issues of art—with what can be called art and what cannot. I’m a writer, after all, who was initially trained as a painter and sculptor. Theoretically, these habits of thought equip me for objective judgments regarding art. The problem is, how does one separate art from the sticky sociological questions? While aesthetic has to do with form and morality with virtue and vice, it can be nearly impossible to separate art from morality, because art is a manifestation of, and an experience arising out of, human consciousness. As Susan Sontag has said, at some level art and morality are connected.

So, though I was there to add my paper to the heap of theories about popular culture, I found myself wondering first about the propriety of striptease at a university, and secondarily about the art of it. Like all good academics, I told myself I needed to experience the event before I could comment on it; and after all, like the other participants in the conference, I had come there to think, and to talk about thinking, to mull over implications. And this had plenty of those.

A conference flyer was billing the evening’s performance as “transgressive.” With a background in visual art, I have written and produced stage poems, which, I like to imagine, are edgy little dramas attempting some sort of marriage between art and the irascibly unkempt life of human behavior. They are, in a broad sense, political. Maybe this performance would be something along that line.

When I walked into the university gymnasium where the event was being held, the lights were already down, and up front, a woman, naked, was twisting and gesticulating in a blue light, on a stage fixed up for the occasion in one corner of the gym. In the blue light, she writhed, from time to time pushing out her ample rump for us, rotating and grinding, as if to hypnotize, turning herself this way and that, swinging her leg over a chair and back, turning, swinging. “What’s this?” I whispered to my friend, a colleague from the university in Michigan where I was teaching at the time. “Looks like a stripper,” she whispered back. “I feel strange, watching this,” she said after a few minutes, and left. I drifted over behind the last row, transfixed as I walked, fascinated by the undulant figure up there.

Those of us watching were educators, of course, which presumed we would be receptive to a striptease act, as long as it was called a performance and not a show, a distinction that strikes me as perilously subtle. Aside from vocation, we were fairly diverse, a conglomerate of ages, a mix of men and women, some graying, others younger than the woman onstage. But it soon became evident that, like my friend, a significant number in the audience were not at all receptive. Some were shifting in their chairs, and more than a few, after awhile, crouched beneath the light, and duck-walked into the aisle and out. I stayed where I was, standing at the back of the room, watching people watching her.

For the duration of the dance, I felt drawn to the grace of her swaying figure, yet she seemed aggressively to push her nakedness at us, as if to say, “Take this!” But something plaintive too, as if she wanted us to like what she was doing, a vulnerable presence up there, this woman, putting on her Ritz for us, for the crowd of seeing eyes. At the end of her forty-five-minute act, as the lights came up in a blast of yellow, she turned and, wobbling a little in her glittery heels, unceremoniously left the stage. This new light washed the woman clean of illusion, and suddenly, threadbare reality ruled. The harsh glare revealed a scratched-up chair, cobbled-up flats that were actually sheets hung on a wire, the stage too ordinary for what had seemed transcendent moments before. Though the lights were clearly up, the audience just sat there, either stunned, or confused, or unwilling to acknowledge that the show was over. No one was clapping. After about a minute, during which I could hear people whispering, could hear them breathing, could hear the shuffling of their bodies in the plastic chairs, the woman came back out. Again, shyly naked in a way she hadn’t been while she had danced in the blue-violet light, I saw a woman in her forties, pale, body on the plump side, a woman without props. Her arms uncomfortably at her side now, the bulk of her large breasts and belly somehow more exposed, she announced in a small voice, “It’s over. It’s over,” and, with her back to us, she walked unsteadily out through the sheet-curtain.

At the reception afterward, I made my way over to the group of people who were surrounding her. Close-up, she looked tired, her large eyes rimmed with mascara and eyeliner that had smudged from the sweat of exertion and hot lights. Her dyed hair was black and curled randomly about her face. She was older than she’d looked earlier, and overweight, more so than it had seemed from the back of the gym. She wore a short top that exposed a roll of flesh around her middle, and her tight stretch pants made all the irregularities of her figure stark and unambiguous. She explained to us that she had been a stripper in Chicago, but had moved out West, and was spotted by someone out there who had urged her to become a performance artist. Earlier, I had heard in the buzz of party talk that she was HIV-positive, which she now cheerfully confirmed. “A critic in Chicago calls my act transgressive,” she said proudly. Her use of the word seemed awkward, pronounced with a kind of conspiratorial carefulness, as if it were part of a code she was beginning to get the hang of. In her enthusiastic explanations, there was a brutal disjunction between her talk of her act as art, and her admission that she had HIV. In this context, that dismal fact took on a mean objectivity, as though any gesture of sympathy and compassion from those of us crowded around her would diminish the power of her creation. At any rate, as I would have been with any stranger, I was hesitant to press the issue of her illness, though it seemed almost that her HIV status was part of the act—that our knowledge of it was important to its total effect. Perhaps she imagined it pounded home the cruelties of the whole strip-club scene, or exposed the hypocrisies of cultural attitudes that make stripping a huge industry. Or maybe this confessional was her own private Idaho, so to speak, a way to communicate to us the outsider’s life she’d had “back there” in Chicago.

I don’t recall much else about the talk that night, but the discomfort I felt from her candid discussion of the disease as it related to her performance continued to bother me. She seemed animated by our serious questions; clearly the subject of her HIV, at least as it related to her status as artist, was not off-limits. It was as though, for her, the candidness itself were contributing to the art. In fact, like many who are HIV-positive, she didn’t appear ill. She’d been pretty energetic during her performance. At the reception, she talked with us for about fifteen minutes, during which time I struggled to be convinced of a plausible distinction between what she had done as a stripper, and what she’d done in her identity as artist—what we had witnessed under the banner of performance art, and more importantly, what role our knowledge of her diagnosis had in our consideration of the merits of her dance as art.

A few years earlier, the Power Center in Ann Arbor had put on an internationally acclaimed show, conceived and directed by Bill T. Jones, called Still/Here. To obtain a documentary truthfulness, Jones interspersed the rousing dance numbers with voice-overs of people who had been diagnosed with cancer or AIDS. In carefully selected and edited clips, the audience heard fragments of dialogue from people who had for months prior to the production participated in what Jones had called Survival Workshops—support groups he had formed for the express purpose of mining these sessions for material for the show. The taped bits of dialogue formed one of the show’s central—and most disturbing—aesthetics. In voice-over, we heard snippets of people’s suffering, along with sound bites of bravery and stoicism, as well as the banalities of treatment routines. At the time of its London debut a few months earlier, Arlene Croce had written in The New Yorker that Still/ Here amounted to victim art, and that it was, like other such art, voyeuristic.

I have lived much of my adult life with a disfiguring chronic disease, and throughout 2001 fended off a bout of Lymphoma, so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the cultural and personal collision between physical self and physical world. From time to time, I have written about my experiences with illness, and inevitably, I struggle with the issue of disclosure: how much to tell, and how to tell it. Always, there must be, for me at least, some larger context within which to place what I think of as the intimate details that make up the experience of living with physical affliction. One of the problems in exploring personal illness is that it is, above all, about one’s body, so intimacy is the order of the day, intended or not. You simply cannot talk about your bones, or your gut, or your brain, without tunneling into some close psychological quarters. Aside from the intimacy, there is the awkward response any such material risks: that is, that the reader (or viewer) will be inclined to feel pity for you. Control of the degree and kind of emotional response such a project invites is a measure of its success as art. So, insofar as her argument addressed the suffering, I had to agree with Croce and others that Jones’s show was seriously flawed, qualifying as victim art. Its sentimentality outweighed its art, not because the performance itself was inept, but because of something much more difficult to define: a sense of disjunction that was occurring somewhere between flashes of anguished images and the eloquence of the dance.

At whatever moment my discomfiture occurred there in the darkened theater, it came creeping in on its belly, in the midst of evocative and moving passages of dance, and of lyrics (composed of a pastiche from the “interviews”) sung to gorgeous sounds emitting from violins and bells. Parts of the production had soul and power. But despite the successes of its choreography, and its innovative splicing of video with choreography, Still/Here ultimately came up emotionally inert. Its attempts to embody the physicality and garishness of such private experience resulted in garishly rendered moments in which, at one point, for example, lips, teeth, and innards flashed on a screen to the weird dialect of those sound bites of workshop anguish, punctuating gimmicky visuals that can only be called violently comic. The problem was not so much that Jones’s pyrotechnics solicited sympathy (one of Croce’s complaints, and a common complaint toward victim art in general) but that the solicitation was based on plagiarized suffering— on emotions spontaneously occurring among Jones’s “subjects” during the Survival Workshops. Plagiarized because the subjects, who presumably had been aware of Jones’s intent from the first, nonetheless had no real control over the ways in which art would distort and transmogrify their dialogues.

Of course, Jones’s attempt to bring art and suffering into synthesis is not new, and probably was in a very real sense personally cathartic, since Jones himself was HIV-positive. The essential impulse represents a primary and longstanding prerogative of art, to embody the human condition, especially its miseries. As we know, artists have long interpreted affliction, but it has been the convention of art to employ representative suffering: actors on the stage, saying the words of playwrights—Tennessee Williams, Beckett, et al.; paint on the canvas—Gericault’s famous Raft of the Medusa comes to mind, but name any painting, sculpture, play, or other medium that depicts human suffering: the medium mediates.

The extreme opposite of mediated suffering is body art, in which an artist uses his or her body as “canvas,” an event that is by definition polemic. Body art, in its use of self as object, creates of the flesh a kind of discursive field in which the controversy of self and world may play itself out. Or body becomes surface, texture, a kind of screen upon which certain aesthetic theories may be invoked. Some body artists practice self-mutilation, in which the artist injures herself or himself with a razor or some other instrument, either in live performance, or as a videotaped event. The act of self-injury is controversial to begin with (mainly for its capacity to desensitize the viewer, what Susan Sontag calls the “suppression of squeamishness”), but its presence as art demands that we reduce pain to a material that shapes the art. And that’s the dilemma. For the mentally sound viewer, the cuts cannot be viewed as mere marks, or the blood as paint. A wound carries the onus of suffering. We cannot escape the pathos, and the tragic implications, of the wounded body. When we are asked to escape these responses, for the sake of art’s aesthetic, the power of art is derailed.

Though the performances at Ann Arbor and Bowling Green fall somewhere between representative suffering and the masochism of cutting, in the employment of actual suffering victim art in general, and these two events in particular, cross a crucial line. For Jones, the deliberate harvesting, if I may use that term, of others’ accounts of suffering, and of their images, gives fuel for the charge of exploitation, both of the suffering subjects, and of the audience’s attention. At Bowling Green, the hiring of the HIV-positive dancer to “entertain” conferees presented a similar dilemma. Not only was the dancer ill, but the audience was bound to draw a connection between the stripping and her illness.

Yet neither exploitation nor voyeurism, per se, are aesthetic problems; they are moral and ethical ones. And while exploitation contributes to a breakdown of the aesthetic (I’ll come back to that later), the effects of moral and ethical judgments must be sorted from formal problems a suffering subject imposes on art’s aesthetic if we are to make any sense of victim art as failed art.

Establishing the boundaries between form and content is an arbitrary exercise, at best—content drives the art, the art drives content— yet it’s important to try to illuminate particular dynamics at play in so-called victim art. The most crucial dynamic, of course, is the suffering, which is the hallmark of such art. But suffering is not just its hallmark, it is its raison d’être, aimed straight at art’s aesthetic, a primary value that is essentially formal, a value that ultimately gains coherence through the intellect, within the interpreting part of the brain we call consciousness, and where, as Sontag reminds us, we make our judgments about art.

Of course, emotional content, even intense emotional content, has long informed art’s aesthetic. Consider the dictum in some critical circles that art must be felt in order to be appreciated, that art ought to be “pure experience.” Certainly the presence of the suffering subject calls for the audience to “feel,” to give itself over to the pathos embodied (in every sense of the word) in the performance up on the stage. Yet emotional content that ignores the limits of its form risks charges of sentimentality, of vulgarity and triteness, and (often in conjunction) failure of the art itself as a coherent experience. It’s true, too much feeling overwhelms the aesthetic. And it’s safe to say, no experience (art or otherwise) is ever pure. We bring our biases to bear, forming prejudgments that derive from our common stories, and the story of victim art is its suffering. Yet art is a deliberate act, a cultural construct. Interpretation of form, certainly of postmodernist form, tends to gather its tenets from intellectual, rather than emotional, values. Sooner or later, emotional response, no matter how legitimate, comes up against the structured dictates of formal assessment.

Meanwhile, out in the world, emotional response helps define us as human. Our awareness of a fellow sufferer calls forth the responsibility that we do whatever we can to alleviate the suffering. In the culture at large, we excoriate those who would stand by while another suffers. Probably the most famous instance happened in 1964, in Queens, in a case involving Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death on the street in front of her apartment building while neighbors looked passively on. As a country, we were horrified, as much by the passivity as by the stabbing. The thought of doing nothing in the face of violence goes against our sense of basic human decency. Yet certain art seems to draw on passivity for its power. In Still/Here, audience awareness of suffering was essential to audience response. The audience knew up front that Still/Here would draw from actual dialogue and videotaped sessions— the program said as much.

The suffering that informed the striptease was not so overt. Its effect relied more on innuendo and surprise. The flyer said nothing about either HIV or about the nature of the dance. The audience learned of these incrementally, a knowing that came in on cats’ feet—first, in the initial realization in the darkened gymnasium that this was a strip act, and later, in the discovery that the dancer was ill. Between rumor and disclosure, illness became part of the audience’s experience.

In each performance, the audience was the watcher, the performers the watched. This seems so basic an observation as to be unworthy of mention, but critics and art historians have long acknowledged the complexities at work in this dynamic relationship. Surely an audience appears passive enough, individuals sunk in chairs, glancing eagerly at the stage, talking in hushed tones, waiting for the curtain to rise, the lights to dim. The watcher is an open vessel of expectation and desire, not only straining to take in whatever is presented, but also straining to make sense of it, longing for meaning, and not just for any meaning. The meaning. Meaning requires our interpretation. Like audiences everywhere, the audiences at Bowling Green and at the Power Center brought with them a conglomerate of personal experience with, and communal stories about, suffering. In a jumble of bodies and thoughts, their attention came wrapped in narratives of suffering, universal ideas that ensured commonalities of response.

Probably the most powerful narrative involves the physical bond an audience shares: a common biology. And it is a powerful bond indeed, one of the many intrigues that wire the body to the mind. Through our common biologies, we comprehend suffering in all its permutations as an experience of the body. Suffering, whether mental or physical, travels along the body’s circuitries: impulses of suffering flying from synapse to synapse, experienced as sensation born and bred in the nerves, and ultimately commemorated in the culture as narratives of pain.

We are creatures of the habit of story-telling. We tell stories on each other, we tell stories about each other. We make charges of fraud and incompetence, of treachery and blame. In the stories of our pain, we make claims of love and pity, mercy and disgust, and on and on we draw from the repertoire of emotion and entanglement that marks human interaction. These stories become entrenched. They become signals, telegraphing our beliefs and attitudes toward suffering. Theorists have suggested that our primary story of suffering derives from the suffering of Christ (a story that C. S. Lewis called a “true myth”) with its indelible conflation of suffering with the stigma of exile; it is the story of the outcast. Within that story, we embed our personal suffering. This palimpsest of experience and myth, along with our bodily empathies, bear mightily upon our perceptions of suffering in art. Yet they are formed out of real experience, rooted not within the fictive frame that is art, but within the nerve-littered field of the body.

Through the dynamics of the body and its narratives, we become not just watchers of the suffering, but arbiters of its social and political value. Through our judgments, we participate in the creation of the suffering subject. In both the striptease and the Jones production, the suffering subject was interpreted through audience awareness of cancer and HIV, through its tale of back-alley needles and unprotected sex: blame, onus, the mark of the outcast. It’s a story belonging not only to AIDS and HIV but to striptease as well: the stripper as sad figure, a pitiable soul contaminated by lust and money. Art or no art, striptease carries with it the onus of cigar stink and sweat, hands groping at flesh, an audience greasing the air with their hoots and hollers, ones, tens, twenties fluttering as the dancer writhes. Truth or fiction, it hardly matters. Striptease is burdened with certain assumptions of a life that is bleak and lonely and sleazy.

Striptease might very well produce its greatest effect when performed in out-of-the-way dives that, intentionally or otherwise, have the effect of enhancing the perception that, as watchers of the strip act, we are entering forbidden territory. The dance (if not the dancer) relies on the stigma of the outcast for its appeal, as the promoters surely do.

Our stories insinuate, suggest there are hypocrisies. The dancer, after all, has put herself up there. She is not one of us. She is even called an “exotic” by her promoters, or in the case of the Bowling Green stripper, “transgressive.” Both terms define a foreignness, a deliberately fostered estrangement. Add to this the ingredients of pain and disease. Add to this HIV and AIDS. The performance on the one hand calls our attention to the sexual body, and on the other, to the body diseased, the body as outcast. In striptease as art, we are being required to reconcile the alluring body with the body’s disintegration through dissipation and disease, a suffering elaborated upon through the audience’s interpretations.

Just as striptease counts on the outcast narrative to enhance audience response, and the sufferers themselves collaborate—when the stripper strips, and brings her HIV status to the party, so to speak, and when the Survival Workshop participants bring their suffering into the limelight of our regard—the audience resists. The suffering itself becomes suspect. Political irony gets lost.

At first glance, the suffering subject in each production seems to be courting distinctly different political ends. After all, the striptease aimed to exploit the outcast status, while it was the aim of Jones’s production to denounce it. In fact, though, it’s a difference of strategy more than of ultimate effect. Each was designed to expose the hypocrisies of the narrative. Each relied on the audience’s presumption of its own “innocence.” Each used actual suffering to create political and social controversy. Yet the suffering intervened. In both productions, suffering, because it was real and not staged, and because the stories buzzed around and within it, was reduced to a kind of white noise within which the audience struggled to discern the contours of the form.

It’s important to remember that, while narratives of suffering reflect something essential about our perceptions of the reality of suffering, they reveal precious little about the unique experience of the individual sufferer. Even so, that does not stop the stream of judgments we make based on the hobbled “truths” of our stories. In the case of the striptease dancer, whether she actually suffers, or to what degree, is not the point. The point is, we think she does. In the case of the dancer at Bowling Green, and the workshop participants whose revelations become backdrop, through our narratives of ruin and shame, suffering becomes the measure by which the audience judges the art.

The problem with such judgments is that they are based on sentimental, fundamentally flawed, perceptions of reality. Because the messages of our stories are mixed, and because judgment is an inevitable outcome of an audience’s attention, the presence of a suffering subject brings into serious question the legitimacy of any judgment the audience makes about such art. The audience itself experiences confusion of motive—not only their own, but the artist’s motives as well. This creates a fracture in the art’s overall coherence. The fracture worsens when confusion inhibits the full play of our sensibilities on the aesthetic, drawing on those sensibilities to decipher our feelings toward the suffering subject.

Simply to put forth the problem of victim art as exploitive or as sentimental, to dismiss victim art as failed without examining the ways in which the suffering interferes with the art, is to miss the formal dislocation that excessive subjectivity and havoc of judgment bring to the aesthetic. For that matter, use of the term “victim art” itself is misleading. Its failures become stalled in our moral and ethical judgments. Victim art is not solely a question of right or wrong art; it is also, and perhaps even primarily, a question of a compromised aesthetic: to present as a formal element a person in pain is to invite a struggle between one central aspect of art and another. This is the crisis, that we are roused to attention on opposing fronts—on the one hand, our mental life is busily knitting a tale that insists that we are not at all like the body we are beholding, while on the other, we are drawn to it because we are that body—a situation in which, as Heather McHugh suggests in her essay “A Stranger’s Way of Looking,” we are watching ourselves. Against our stories of rejection and shame, the presence of the suffering subject implores us to respond in empathy. We are pushed simultaneously away from suffering (it belongs not to us, but to the outcast body up there on the stage) and toward it (it dwells within us, within our very tissue; we are its purveyors, its carriers, its victims).

Unambiguously, suffering was the political (and aesthetic) coin of these productions. It was meant to drive both the art, and certain political points, home. In which case, does suffering—actual suffering—inevitably relegate art to the bin of spoiled art? Must we abandon it to the charge of exploitation? Voyeurism?

Not necessarily. Art that relies on a suffering subject can and does succeed, at times spectacularly. The merciless lens of Diane Arbus, for example, photographs in which the maimed and the socially outcast hang mute in their frames, and tell whatever her lens and the dynamism of a subject’s personality allow, has drawn criticism of exploitation. Yet even if we accept that her subjects were somehow hapless and were being “used” by her, what of the ultimate result, the photograph itself? We look, we partake, we feel repulsed or shocked or perhaps even outraged, but to my mind Arbus’s photographs confront, an effect that effectively overrides the ethical question of exploitation. Once committed to the context of the photograph, these “real-life” images stand alone in a stifling reality, unadorned by the body in performance. It’s true, as many (including Sontag) have pointed out, the subjects almost invariably are posing, which transforms their outcast status into a kind of self-conscious “act.” But I would argue that the photographs themselves stand still. Posing, or posturing, require a certain extravagance in order to be seen as performance, and Arbus’s photographs (primarily because they are photographs) achieve a suspension of time, in effect freeze-framing not only the suffering subject, but the bullying stare. Our stare. As reification of public attitudes toward the outcast, Arbus’s pictures stand in for the eye, they do not divert it.

Krzysztof Wodiczko’s video projections achieve a similar political clarity, perhaps because the monumentality of the images—a homeless man slumped in dejection, his image thrown on a statue in Union Square, for example—puts suffering into a larger-than-life context. Like Arbus’s, his work presents an image that dwells in an interminable present, allowing political resonance without the voyeuristic lure of entertainment. In each of these artist’s works, our apprehension of the plights of the suffering subject is not confused by a performing body.

Other artists have worked with the symbols of suffering, among them Andy Warhol, whose replications of the electric chair are chilling. There are no people in the chairs, yet work like Lavender Disaster, in part because of its large scale and the replicating image of that one empty chair, awash in lavender, moves us. A contemporary of Warhol’s, Cy Twombly, uses language to evoke and provoke a politicized response to suffering. I’m thinking of his In the Hospitality of War / we left them their dead / as a gift / to remember us by. The sculpture itself consists of a crude wooden box, half shut, with gobs of plaster oozing out. The words (from Archilochus, translated by Guy Davenport) are scrawled on the box lid. It’s a disturbing piece, in part because the suffering subject is nowhere to be seen. Any suffering is buried somewhere beneath Twombly’s unself-conscious aesthetic. Absence of a suffering subject commemorates the suffering without calling on the body’s vulnerabilities to makes its case.

All of this suggests that the range and degree of obliquity of the expression of suffering in art goes far in determining the strength of its aesthetic (Dickinson’s “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”). The more overt the suffering (the closer it comes to the suffering body), the trickier it is for a particular work to achieve aesthetic power. And when the suffering is juxtaposed with prettification, art cannot hold. Just so, Jones weaves images of the sufferers in and out of the pleasing sights and sounds of dance. And while the strip act seems on the surface to be confrontational, as Arbus’s photographs are, in fact, the dance is alluring, as Arbus’s images are not. Regardless of the murkiness of its narrative (or because of it), striptease comes to us packaged for pleasure.

In each production, the audience was required to interpret the suffering through dance, and this sets in motion yet another struggle between the suffering body and the aesthetic. It is not just the prettiness of the dance, or its allure, that causes disjunction. It is each project’s attempt to divide our attention between what is real and what is contrived. In both performances, the real exposes the frailty of the unreal—in the face of real suffering, the dance, no matter how beautiful or compelling, is exposed essentially as a contrivance, which weakens its aesthetic by breaking the illusion that the dance is natural—that it is motion without guile. Against the anguish, we are acutely aware of the body in performance. More difficulty comes when we realize our complicity, not only in the cultural hypocrisy projects like these point to, but also in the hypocrisy that the projects themselves devise for us. Being entertained by the beautiful, healthy dancers of Still/Here, while the effects of cancer are being flashed in pictures of body parts, burdens us (and the aesthetic) with the calumny of our passivity in the presence of actual pain.

The Bowling Green performance compelled the audience to regard a dancing body that was, in effect, made sick by the audience’s own appetites. But the deeper irony lies right at the altar of those appetites. The misery of the outcast as political fodder required the audience to condemn cultural practices it was, through its stories and by virtue of its very presence, authoring—and authorizing. Artists like Jones, and certain critics such as the one who called the stripper’s act “transgressive,” as well as the Bowling Green organizers, in underwriting—or in Jones’s case, creating—projects that mean to illuminate cultural exploitation and detachment, become the detached exploiters. That is the ethical problem. The formal problem is this: that the employment of actual suffering in art robs Peter to pay Paul. Suffering, when it competes with the aesthetic for our attention, hence our judgment, gets robbed of its capacity to move us, while its presence robs the aesthetic of its value.

I go back to Sontag, whose Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors are seminal works that focus on the cultural mythology of illness, and who has said that to declare as its central virtue a thing as “interesting” amounts to a form of nihilism. In the strip performance, what beyond the controversy and titillation had occurred? And within that somewhat dreary inquiry, a more critical issue looms; that the suffering subject in both events seriously complicates our capacity to respond with genuine mercy and compassion, because if we are to regard the performances as art, we must privilege the aesthetic above anything else, including our capacity to feel.

At some point in the judgment of art, the aesthetic gets bound up in the cool fumes of analytical thought. That is the lot of postmodernism. Needless to say, as a way to apprehend the nuances of suffering, such detached regard (or as Heather McHugh calls it, the “coolness of regard”) does not bring us closer to the role of suffering in our lives, or in art. I’m not suggesting that we ought not to look coolly on illness, to use our intellect—that is Sontag’s primary thesis, after all, that we demythologize illness in order to think more clearly about its social and medical implications. But to present simultaneously art and actual illness is to invite further confusion. If we are moved by the suffering to the extent that actual suffering ought to move us, then perforce we have been moved outside art’s fiction, into the realm of the real. This creates a crisis of attention. Sontag’s argument that illness must not be romanticized—mythologized—is relevant here. That’s precisely what art does, inevitably, to any subject it treats. The romance comes from the context of art itself. In both Still/Here and in the striptease, the couching of the sufferer in what is revealed as art’s diversion causes pain to be made either beatific or vulgar, hence simplistic and therefore falsely symmetrical, distorting not only the aesthetic, but also the suffering.

To be sure, the question of consciousness (whether in terms of artist intent or viewer response) in art is a thorny one. It goes straight to the heart of the argument here, traversing the territory where art hashes out the truth of its subject, and its subject matter. In important ways, both the dilemma and the point of these performances dwell there, at the nexus of what is true and what is false in the material and concept of art, as defined by certain ideas these artists wished us to draw from their work. Each performance courts the division between art and life. Still/ Here does so by slapping us awake from the dream of dance with the flashing images and spatter of voices that we know are coming from actual people who are actually ill. The strip act is far more subtle. It simply moves the striptease from its fictive strip-joint stage, where the audience has no illusions about what they are doing there, and places it within the fictive context of art, where the audience cannot be sure at all what they are doing there. In either case, reality intervenes, not up on the stage, but within us, experienced as an inchoate flurry of competing values.

These performances use documentary material or “real” people in what are essentially art’s fictions and, as we’ve seen, this creates unmanageable telegraphy: the audience is left not knowing how to decipher the signals it’s getting. There is confusion, rather than clarity. Dance as a form of fiction represents a pact with the audience. When the dance revolves around suffering, the audience is assigned an impossible task: we must suspend our disbelief if we are to believe the art. But the presence of the suffering subject does not permit us to do so. If we cannot suspend our disbelief, we cannot suspend our stories. If we cannot suspend our stories, we cannot escape them. If we cannot escape them, we cannot believe the art.

And just what about the art of these two performances are we meant to believe?

At this stage in the history of art, certain truths have become timeworn, and hardly worthy (strong enough in aesthetic value) to be taking front and center in our consciousness. For example, as far as the conference event goes, the question of whether striptease can be seriously considered high art is fair; or it’s fair to examine striptease for its cultural fetishness or some such. On the face of it, the strip act challenges as arbitrary the distinctions we make between high and low culture. But this by itself could hardly be called ground-breaking— after all, art has been standing on that ground for nearly a hundred years, in a stream of innovation culminating in Ezra Pound’s dictum to “make it new.” Since the Dadaists, and to some extent before that, artists have been dissolving the line between high and popular culture—it’s what modernism and the whole postmodern period have been about. In myriad ways, our assumptions have been, piece by shocking piece, exploded. If the striptease performance were meant only to challenge its prerogative to be called art, it would have to be called very lame art indeed.

No matter how you cut it, whether from a professorial or feminist or theorist’s point of view, stripping is a risky way to make a living. But here, at Bowling Green, this dancer had the protection of Art. She was being elevated, reinvented as it were, by this altered context. Would context alone not rescue us, and her? Ostensibly at least, the motives of the audience were above reproach, this elevated context providing it the assurance that the watching would be intellectually, rather than sexually, driven. For the audience, this seemed a reasonable assumption.

If what she was doing was performance art, the audience’s concerted gaze had the blessing of good intentions as an essential part of the dynamics of the “piece.” But if the concerted gaze is essential to art, it is at least as essential to the striptease. It is for the gaze a stripper works, for the audience’s sexual response. Granted, any performance artist needs that gaze, for intellectual and perhaps spiritual heat (and sometimes, of course, for sexual heat, but as emanation, not as manipulation). Regardless of what we’re supposed to feel, our common biology intervenes in ways that cannot be easily mitigated by the “coolness” of our regard. Physical response trumps intellectual response every time, and in the midst of her sexually explicit performance, no matter that the audience was doing their watching within university boundaries, they were, as they would be as watchers of erotic dancing anywhere, aroused—not only by the erotic body, but also what surely is worse, by the suffering one.

Just as strip-joint audiences are called to attention by a nakedness, by the body performing sexually explicit maneuvers on that gymnasium floor, it was called to precisely that nakedness, those maneuvers. The fact that they were supposed to pay attention for different reasons is not persuasive enough to sustain the performance as art. In both Chicago’s strip clubs and at Bowling Green the dance was about sex. In both the striptease and Still/Here suffering was the subtext. The difference lies only in how the audience thought about the performance afterward. Is it possible for something to be art only in retrospect?

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of these productions (and of victim art in general) is that ultimately the effect of the dance depended on lack of engagement with the sufferer’s pain, even as it openly solicited it, turning the audience’s passion, not toward the cessation of the pain, but toward the continuance of it for the sake of art. Dance had the unhappy effect of nurturing audience sympathy for the sake of the aesthetic. I’m not saying that suffering cannot be apprehended through the aesthetic, only that it cannot be apprehended through a confluence of the suffering body with the performing one.

As we know, suffering has been one of art’s primary coda. But art is art—that is, artifice. It is a translucent screen through which we may safely view the awful and awesome truths of human existence. Think of Beckett. Think of End Game, the huge spaces and understated dialogue of the fictive sufferers, Hamm and Clov. We are moved by Beckett’s work, in part because the persons onstage are only pretending to suffer, a distinction that clears the way for the audience’s intellect to inform the emotions without sacrificing them to the aesthetic. Our emotional response becomes integral to the aesthetic, rather than a fugitive from it.

The use of actual suffering impedes certain art in part because illness and its sufferings are imprinted on our very genes. We all know what it is to suffer. Our biologies rely on our knowing. Art cannot tell us anything new about specific bodies in pain. What art can do, and has for centuries done, is to bring to us experience that is uncontaminated by the real. It can offer a truth-telling space that allows us to gaze past suffering reality, to experience representative, thus mediated, pain, which allows us to gain the intimacy necessary for enlightenment. It cannot show us real suffering, and then instruct us to ignore it.

If consciousness-raising was the point in these performances, the message came through garbled. If art was the point, the hyperactive intrusion of actual suffering was the downfall. Of course, art can and has raised public consciousness. Artists who take suffering as subject matter, rather than subject, permit the possibility that the aesthetic will guide us toward a mediated emotional response, which in turn allows us to regard suffering outside ourselves without extracting from us our own pain. Otherwise, art asks us to do too much—to ignore the suffering in order to apprehend the aesthetic, a condition that makes not only the aesthetic irrelevant, but mercy as well. In the end, if we accept the suffering subject as a legitimate sacrifice, we live on the ashes of art.