Monday night, the magician David Blaine attempted to break the world record for holding one’s breath. He also tried to do it underwater after living for seven days and seven nights in an eight-foot transparent sphere designed by his partner Tom Bramlett. He ate and relieved himself through tubes, and visitors could observe and interact with him all week, 24 hours a day. The apex of his performance was aired Monday night on prime time television: Blaine attempted to hold his breath for over 9 minutes (in order to break the world record of 8:58) while trying to escape from 150 pounds of metal shackles holding him captive in the sphere. The commercials airing in between the antics cost advertisers over $120,000 for 30-second spots. David Blaine failed at his attempt at a breath-holding world record; in fact, he was unconscious and having convulsions when he was rescued from his 8-foot aquarium at the conclusion of the event. In the post-spectacle analysis, one newscaster remarked, with a quivering triumph in her voice, that David Blaine was the “ultimate performance artist.” I am not so sure.
In June of 1990, four National Endowment of the Arts grants were vetoed by John Frohnmayer. The four individuals singled out were all controversial performance artists who had strong, polarizing political discourses, and the grants were vetoed after having been recommended for awards by the NEA peer review panel. Three of the rejected artists, Tim Miller, and John Fleck and Holly Hughes were gay and their work dealt with homosexual issues; the fourth, Karen Finley, was rejected because of strong feminist themes portrayed in her work. The endowment had been under attack the previous year, and had been criticized for funding supposedly “lewd” work. The National Campaign for Freedom of Expression rerouted NEA funds and other money to help support and fight for the artists. At the time, a spokesperson for the NEA said this would be a direct violation of grant regulations. In 1993, after an arduous court fight, the members of “the NEA Four” received compensation surpassing their grant amounts when the courts ruled in support of the artists.
I remember the first time I heard of Karen Finley. It was back in the mid-1980s, at which time she was primarily known for one action in particular: putting canned yams (out of the can) up her butt, in front of an audience. At approximately the same time, homoerotic photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe generated particular outrage among some members of Congress, including North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms. Mapplethorpe also photographed subjects (including himself) with objects in their anus. But in as much as Karen’s work was sexual in nature, it was also fiercely “real”—it was performed as opposed to captured in still photographs.
Since the 1980s, I have been fascinated and intrigued by performance art; I scalped one lone ticket to Finley’s show wherein she covered her naked body in chocolate and bean sprouts, I saw the early work of Danny Hoch, Anna Deavere Smith, Annie Sprinkle, Ann Magnuson, Carolee Schneeman, and the musical performance art of John Cage and Glenn Branca. Many of these experiences left me emotionally shaken and incredibly inspired.
Here is a (very) brief timeline of performance art:
1908: The Futurists led by poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Site for Futurist Manifesto of 1908.
1916: The beginning of Dada,” a small group of people that met for only a few months at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland. Hitler negatively mentioned the Dada in his Mein Kampf. One of the groups primary performers was Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (also known as Frank Wedekind). Of the Zurich Dadaist’s there was Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings.
1920s: The German Bauhaus. One performer from this period was Oskar Schlemmer.
1930s: The Black Mountain College, in North Carolina. Major performers were John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller. All of these performers subsequently became known for other artistic achievements but all participated in performance art.
1950s and 1960s: Kaprow’s Happenings . Happenings had a good run through the 1960’s. Robert Morris performed in 1965 and Yves Klein in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. One of my favorite artists, Joseph Beuys was associated with the art movement Fluxus, as was a young female artist named Yoko Ono.
1970s and 1980s: Performance Art became much more sexually political in the 1970’s and was propelled into the main stream media in the 1980’s by “Queer Theater.”
The 1990s is often considered the golden age of Performance Art. It “came out” of the gay clubs and into Lincoln Center, with Karen Finley’s infamous chocolate show. It is also a time when poetry readings officially morphed into performance art at the Nuyorican Poetry Slams in New York City’s East Village.
So you can imagine my curiosity and trepidation about David Blaine’s performance at Lincoln Center Monday night, 15 years since Finley’s Lincoln Center tour de force.
For those that might not be fully aware, the underwater breath-holding stint was not David Blaine’s first foray into mass-produced cultural “events.” An accomplished and rather impressive magician, Blaine’s previous public feats included balancing on a 22-inch circular platform atop a 100-foot pole for 35 hours, being buried alive in a see-through coffin for a week and surviving inside a massive block of ice for 61 hours, all of which were performed in New York. In 2003, he fasted for 44 days in a suspended acrylic box alongside the Thames River in London. During his recent underwater excursion on the upper West Side, he apparently greeted all his fans and witnesses through the water bubble he lived in. But some critics questioned the validity of Blaine’s attempt to break the breath-holding world record, as judges from the International Association for the Development of Apnoea (AIDA) would have had to attend Blaine’s attempt for any record set to be officially recognized, and they were not present at the event. Their non-attendance has not been mentioned by the Blaine or his publicists, probably because under the AIDA’s rules they would have had to spend at least two hours with him prior to his record attempt.
This is what The New York Times had to say about this spectacle: “If the performance seems a bit out of character for the environs of Plácido Domingo, Yo-Yo Ma and Suzanne Farrell, Mr. Blaine’s feat could also be said to explore the boundaries of art and commerce, encompassing the culture’s obsession with reality television while experimenting with the limits of human achievement. For a society growing tired of celebrities eating bugs and aspiring actors playing mind games with one another on a deserted island, Mr. Blaine’s placidly floating figure elevates spectacle to a sort of performance art.”
But was Blaine’s feat really performance art or was it actually a performance stunt? Tom Bramlett’s sphere was indeed magical, but as I frightfully watched Blaine held captive within it while holding his breath for 7 minutes and 2 seconds, I felt myself wishing for more. I wanted the stunt to have some context: a visual statement, a political message, the setting-forth of a belief, even something as simple as a point. I wanted to be transformed by the magnitude of the experience. I wanted the million plus dollars he spent on the attempt to…well…be worth it. At the conclusion of his program the only metamorphosis I felt was relief that he didn’t drown and a creepy kind of disappointment that he failed in his attempt to set a world record while the whole world looked on. Then there was a commercial break, and I started watching What About Brian?, the quirky new program scheduled on ABC’s prime time Monday night line-up.
Debbie
I share much of your point of view. Blaine's antics are merely spectacle. There really doesn't seem to be anything more than the stunt.
This doesn't mean that I don't think his tricks are interesting, but I place Blaine in a lineage that contains Houdini and Copperfield, not performance artists.
On May.10.2006 at 08:37 AM