Performing Chronic: Endurance Art and Chronic Illness

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Mart in O'Brien] On: 03 March 2015, At : 10: 34 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ rprs20 Performing Chronic: Chronic illness and endurance art Mart in O’ Brien Published online: 26 Sep 2014. Click for updates To cite this article: Mart in O’ Brien (2014) Perf orming Chronic: Chronic illness and endurance art , Perf ormance Research: A Journal of t he Perf orming Art s, 19: 4, 54-63, DOI: 10. 1080/ 13528165. 2014. 947138 To link to this article: ht t p: / / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 13528165. 2014. 947138 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. 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Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions Performing Chronic Chronic illness and endurance art Downloaded by [Martin O'Brien] at 10:35 03 March 2015 MARTIN O’BRIEN 54 For Bob, masochism means endurance … endurance over his own limitations. It’s very much (I don’t want to use the word ‘Zen’) a meditation process where you ‘will’ yourself into another state of consciousness. Sheree Rose in Andrea Juno and V. Vale (1993: 108) I will begin this article with a memory. I distinctly remember, far before this research project was even a twinkle in my eyes or before I was making performance work, accidently stumbling upon an image, in a book, of a male groin sewn up – the skin of the scrotum wrapped around the penis and sutured. Two nails were through the front edge of the scrotum, attaching it to a piece of wood. I was about 18 years old at this time and attempting to understand my identity as a queer man and as someone with a life-shortening chronic illness. I was still unaware of the potentials of performance to be a space in which these politics could be explored but this image changed my life. At irst it was the affective power of the photograph that struck me. I let out a quiet squeal, trying to contemplate what it must feel like. My eyes glanced around the page of the book, which was the hugely signiicant survey of work and writings on the body and performance by Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, The Artist’s Body (2000), and noticed the name Bob Flanagan, an artist whom I had never heard of, along with another image of the artist lying in a hospital bed with Sheree Rose sat next to him. My heart stopped when I read the description: ‘[a] life-long sufferer from cystic ibrosis, Flanagan began to make art in order both to explore and express his masochistic sexual desires, and to combat his physical pain’ (Warr and Jones 2000: 109). I couldn’t believe PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 19·4 : pp.54-63 http: //dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2014.947138 it. Here was an artist making performance about my disease. This moment completely changed the way in which I thought about my own identity and the relationship between performance and illness. Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose met in 1980 at a Halloween party and began making performance work together in 1981. The relationship lasted for sixteen years until Flanagan’s death from cystic ibrosis (CF) in 1996, at the age of forty-three, which at the time meant he was one of the longest living survivors of the disease. Flanagan attributed his longevity to his lifestyle. As a masochist, he lived in a full-time mistress/slave relationship in which he was completely submissive to Rose. BDSM was a lifestyle, not just sex. Flanagan endured as both a person with cystic ibrosis and as a masochist. As the opening quote articulates, Flanagan understood masochism as a form of endurance. Masochism functions as a form of self-imposed endurance. This article, then, will consider the implications of self-imposed endurance in relation to illness, particularly cystic ibrosis, and the medical regimen associated with this. Signiicantly, I will be considering this from the position of a cystic ibrosis sufferer and an artist who has worked on solo projects, as well as collaboratively with Sheree Rose on performances concerned with the legacy of her work with Flanagan. Throughout the article I will refer to Flanagan and Rose as ‘Flanagan/Rose’ when discussing their collaborative work. During the sixteenyear relationship the two collaborated on all performances and artworks. The art and/ as life project they practiced was born out of a relationship of love and trust. In much ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online © 2014 TAYLOR & FRANCIS ibrosis in 2004. The nature of this research is necessarily interdisciplinary, drawing upon theoretical material from medical sociology as well as from art history, philosophy and performance studies in order to understand a theory of endurance in performance that takes account of the effects of illness. This essay is part of a larger research project that considers the complex relationship at play within Flanagan/Rose’s work between medicine and masochism, between art and life, between pain and pleasure, and the signiicance of this work for contemporary performance makers and people with cystic ibrosis. Downloaded by [Martin O'Brien] at 10:35 03 March 2015 academic writing Flanagan often receives sole credit for the work, as the most physically present in the performances, at the expense of Rose. None of the works created during their lives together could have existed without the other. I want to acknowledge the process of collaboration, as both artists always did, and simply indicate this through the way in which I speak about them. By referring to them as Flanagan/Rose I hope to highlight this process. I will discuss a speciic work by Flanagan/Rose, as well as an example of my own practice and a performance by the extraordinary British artist Jill Hocking, who sadly died from cystic ■ Bob Flanagan's Supermasochist performance, Berlin, 1995. Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose Collection. ONE Archives at the USC Libraries O ’ B R I E N : PERFORMING CHRONIC 55 ENDURANCE ART Downloaded by [Martin O'Brien] at 10:35 03 March 2015 The term ‘endurance art’ has been used within performance scholarship in a variety of ways. It has been, problematically, used interchangeably with durational performance and as one of many ways – others including hardship art, ordeal art and even body art – of describing work in which sufferance or pain is central to the practice. Performance scholar Adrian Heathield unpicks what he sees as the relationship between duration and endurance within art practices: The term ‘durational’ is often used then to indicate an art work that draws attention to its temporal constraint as a constitutive element of its meaning. The meaning of the word duration itself, evolving from the Latin duratus [to last], is bound into the notion of persistence, of remaining through time, and is separable from but shadowed by the term endurance, often associated with sufferance. ‘Endurance art’ was frequently deployed as a nomination in relation to early Performance Art and Body Art, with its use of the body in extremis … it assumes the experience of pain as a primary focus. (Heathield 2009: 22) My interest, in this essay, is in endurance. I am concerned with endurance as a way of persisting through an experience of sufferance or dificulty. In her programme notes for the 2008 exhibition Endurance, Tracey Warr poses the question of what distinguishes endurance art from other forms of cultural endurance practices and, importantly, what these practices have in common: Where does it [endurance art] sit in relation to concepts and practices of endurance in the wider culture ranging through Ernest Shackleton’s epic story of Arctic survival, religious acts of endurance by Jain monks, Himalayan yogis or Christian ascetics, entertainment spectacles and stunts by Houdini, David Blaine or Evel Knievel, feats in The Guinness Book of Records or Japanese gameshows? What do all these endurance acts have in common and how do they differ? (Warr 2008: 4) In the inluential 1983 essay ‘Art in the dark’, Thomas McEvilley studies endurance art, 56 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 19·4 : ON MEDICINE which he uses interchangeably with ordeal art, hardship art and vow art at various points. McEvilley makes some astute readings of the very nature of these performances of endurance. He suggests that endurance activity, in general, demands: a quality of decision-making that involves apparent aimlessness along with ine focus and rigour of execution. This is a mode of willing which is absolutely creative in the sense that it assumes that it is reasonable to do anything at all with life; all options are open and none is more meaningful or meaningless than any other. (McEvilley 1983: 226) McEvilley builds upon this by considering the nature of endurance in art practices and what is at stake in these performances of duress: The irst thing to notice about these artists is that no one is making them do it. The second is the absolute rigour with which, in the classic performance pieces, these very unpragmatic activities are carried out. This peculiar quality of decision-making has become a basic element of performance poetics. (McEvilley 1983: 226) McEvilley raises some important issues that lie at the core of my investigation into the nature of endurance art. Of particular importance is the fact that these acts of endurance are undertaken voluntarily. It seems that McEvilley considers choice as a key concept within endurance art. This notion, at irst, seems reasonable: an artist chooses what to do in a performance and if they decide to involve endurance that is their prerogative. But I want to suggest that works of endurance in which illness is present may problematize this concept or, at least, complicate the relationship between choice and endurance art. In his unpublished keynote address at the 2010 Performance Matters symposium in London, performance theorist Fred Moten suggested that the nature of endurance, common within performance, can be seen in forms of human life characterized by suffering. In doing so he references the political philosophy of Lauren Berlant and what she terms ‘slow death’. Berlant suggests that ‘slow death refers to the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration Downloaded by [Martin O'Brien] at 10:35 03 March 2015 of people in that population that is very nearly a deining condition of their experience and historical existence’ (2011: 95). Berlant uses her notion of slow death to discuss obesity. I want to consider how the concept may also be useful for considering the chronically ill. For an illness, such as cystic ibrosis, which has historically been seen as a death sentence from birth, slow death becomes a way of understanding the conditions of existence and, as such, a critical tool for discussing life and art under these conditions. Moten continues with a provocation: The endlessness of death in life, of life under a death sentence, of slow death passed on, is not easily to be valorized … one wonders if the people in the population to whom Berlant refers are conscious of their endurance as art, as meditative practice, as a monastic sociality of study, as what Hsieh calls ‘slow suicide in a constructive fashion.’ What if the poor wonder what life means to them, from within its duration, its internal temporal constituency. (Moten, 2010) Moten considers what it means to live within slow death, to exist with a death sentence from birth and provocatively questions whether there are not only similarities between endurance art and forms of endurance in life but whether lives characterized by endurance can be seen as art. The difference seems to return us to McEvilley and notions of choice. If people live within the duration of slow death then there is no way out; it is a life lived under duress. Endurance art, however, is performed for a period of time and the hardship does not match that of human suffering in other contexts. There is a very interesting context in which Moten’s work can offer an insightful perspective on the relationship between endurance in art and endurance in life. What is at stake when an artist, such as Flanagan, whose life is lived with illness, frames this existence with an endurancebased art practice? The notion of choice becomes more complex in this context. Flanagan chooses to work with his body in particular ways but this emerges out of an embodied life of endurance. I am interested in the ways in which artists with illness have exploited their own life in slow death as an art practice and, in this article, the ways in which they have worked to re-embody this life and perform it. In order to contextualize these practices I shall outline some theoretical material on the phenomenological experience of chronic illness. CHRONIC TIME The nature of a chronic illness, such as cystic ibrosis, means it is marked by an inability to cure; instead the chronically ill body is a regulated one. In his short phenomenological study of cystic ibrosis, the philosopher and cystic ibrosis sufferer Jehangir Saleh suggests: The work of regulating the body is the experience of having to defer my desires and projects, that is, defer my will to the ‘will’ of a bodily cycle. My worldly endeavours must be ‘clocked’ in order to accommodate the demand put on me by the CF lungs to clear them. (Saleh 2010: 13) The maintenance of a chronically ill body involves a form of submission in order to survive. Saleh suggests, ‘I thus experience myself “regulated” by the demands of the chronically ill body’ (Saleh 2010: 3). Medical sociologist David Morris suggests that chronic disease can be deined by time. It is a disease of time. The term ‘chronic’ has its roots in the same place as our word ‘chronology’: the Greek word Chronos. Chronos was also the name of a god, who was the personiication of time. Morris goes on, borrowing terminology from Heidegger, to suggest that sufferers of chronic illness feel a disturbance of temporality, which will dominate the management of time: … in the form of the rhythms of the treatment regimen in which that-which-must-alreadybe-provided comes to the fore. Even if this domination has a periodic character (clustered around periodic treatments) it is inescapable, precisely because lodged in the chronic character of the disease. I call this kind of chronically disturbed provisional time ‘chronic time.’ (Morris 2008: 414) Morris continues to suggest that, although the speciics of this temporal realm can vary between diseases, O ’ B R I E N : PERFORMING CHRONIC 57 Downloaded by [Martin O'Brien] at 10:35 03 March 2015 common to all chronic disease, is the way that death, not as the limit of one’s possibility (Tod), but as biological demise (Ableben), becomes thematic as a matter of time (rather than temporality), something to be clocked, something to which and against which all other clocks are clocked and measured. (Morris 2008: 417) He proposes that this thematization of demise also thematizes, as Heidegger would have it, a being-towards-death. Here, I suggest, endurance comes into play. To endure is to persist through something dificult, to last, to survive. For example: to endure this ordeal, or this moment, or this ultra-marathon. Chronic illness demands the body to be regulated. This regulation revolves around the management of the disease, involving regular treatments at particular times and surveillance over the body through hospital visits and bodily samples. It is in this regulation that the temporal disturbance occurs – chronic time – where the sufferer must submit to illness and the regime that this entails. The regulation of the chronically ill body aims to slow the demise, to persist as long as possible. I endure the regulation of my body in order to survive, in order to continue being-towards-death, rather than arriving at biological death itself. In cystic ibrosis it is not a foreign force or growth that causes death but, instead, the body drowns itself by overproducing mucus. Saleh goes on to suggest that in submitting to the chronically ill body and its cycles one experiences the body as being beyond the self. I am my body, which means that I am inextricably bound to something that has a life of its own. Yet these processes are lived-through by me. They are felt in the midst of my worldly engagements. The patient with a severe lung infection is coughing up cupfuls of blood. She is in pain. In these experiences, she feels subjugated by her body. These experiences require her to be a body, and for her body to have a life of its own. This is something that the chronically ill individual, insofar as her bodily disruptions are here to stay, is put in a position of facing. (Saleh 2010: 15) It could be argued, then, that the chronically ill individual, with cystic ibrosis, endures their own 58 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 19·4 : ON MEDICINE body. The embodied individual experiences the world through her body, but this is a body turning against itself. The experience of existence becomes foregrounded within illness. Drawing on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, who states ‘the body is revealed by illness and is likewise suffered by consciousness’ (Sartre 1956: 443), art historian Amelia Jones suggests that ‘[i]n phenomenological terms, illness concretizes the body, forcing the subject to become hyperaware of her or his body in pain’ (Jones 1998: 230). I, as a sufferer of cystic ibrosis, endure my body as one turning against itself. But I also endure my body as a regulated one. I suggest that experiences of endurance are central to the existence of the chronically ill. This is manifested through the enduring of the sick body itself but also through the regulation of the sick body. THE BIOPOLITICAL EXPERIENCE OF CHRONIC ILLNESS I am arguing that the experience of endurance within the lived experience of chronic illness is twofold. First, as already suggested, is the experience of the sick body itself. In cystic ibrosis this is a body slowly killing itself. The second manifestation of endurance is experienced through the regulation of the body by biomedical regimes. French philosopher Michel Foucault’s philosophical/historical work on bio-politics explains that bio-power emerged as a way of ‘administering life’ (Foucault 1978: 139). Bio-power negotiates the intersections between government control and a self-discipline in which individuals govern themselves in order to stay within social norms, which leads to the ‘normalization’ of people. Michel Foucault suggested that the construction of knowledge around the body by medicine positions medicine as a major institution of power and leads to the production of docile bodies. Bio-power has two forms, which are ‘linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations’ (Foucault 1978: 139): … the irst to be formed, it seems – centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its Downloaded by [Martin O'Brien] at 10:35 03 March 2015 forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of eficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population. (Foucault 1978: 139) In his highly inluential work Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison, Foucault relates the disciplining of society to the rhetoric of the body-as-machine: La Mettrie’s L’Homme-machine is both a materialist reduction of the soul and a general theory of dressage, at the centre of which reigns the notion of ‘docility’, which joins the analysable body to the manipulable body. A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved. (Foucault 1977: 136) The chronically ill body is subject to regulation from biomedicine as the epistemic authority on the body. Biomedicine attempts to subjugate the chronically ill into a selfdisciplining, docile body. Foucault’s wellrehearsed theory has, perhaps, been underutilized in discussions of chronic illness and disability. Sociologist Carol Thomas has suggested: [T]he history of the institutionalisation of disabled people would seem to cry out for Foucauldian-inspired analyses. But medical sociologists working in the Foucauldian oeuvre have actually paid very little attention to the lives of chronically ill and disabled people, or indeed to ‘real bodies’ in general; and for poststructuralists, the default body has been the ‘healthy’ body. (Thomas 2007: 38) Bryan Turner offers a possible reason for this, which gets closer to the core of my interest: Foucault rejected both phenomenology and existentialism to develop an understanding of social and cultural relationships as products and discourses. The result was to expunge an interest in the actual phenomena of the experience of everyday life. Foucauldian poststructuralism has examined the enormous variety of discourses by which ‘bodies’ have been produced, categorized, and regulated … At the same time, it denies the sensuous materiality of the body in favour of ‘antihumanist’ analysis of the discursive ordering of bodily regimes. (Turner 2001: 255) I am concerned with physical endurance and the ‘ordering of bodily regimes’ (255) and inding a way of discussing this in relation to illness without denying the ‘sensuous materiality of the body’ (255). I have demonstrated the ways in which endurance features, as a central constituent of chronic time, in the life of the chronically ill. In the remainder of this article I will turn to performance practices in order to consider the convergence of endurance art and endurance within lives lived with illness. PERFORMING IN CHRONIC TIME: ILLNESS AND ENDURANCE IN ART AND LIFE Flanagan’s 1994 performance, Rear Window, named after the 1954 suspense thriller ilm of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock, was one of his last S/M-based performances before his death in January 1996. The performance took place in a hotel, with Flanagan in one room and the audience positioned in another, across a courtyard directly opposite to Flanagan. The audience were able to see through their window into Flanagan’s room. The audience witnessed Flanagan in the inal stages of the disease. He was naked, thin, frail and visibly sick. His body was decorated with a mixture of medical and S/M paraphernalia: nipple clamps and a weight hanging from his penis and testicles, and tubes running from a portable oxygen machine up Flanagan’s nose to help him breathe. Unlike the work Flanagan/Rose had become known for, here Flanagan was alone in the room and the performance lacked the interaction with an audience, such as speaking to or with them, so common in their work. The performance lasted for approximately one hour and consisted of O ’ B R I E N : PERFORMING CHRONIC 59 Downloaded by [Martin O'Brien] at 10:35 03 March 2015 60 Flanagan setting up and administering a wine enema. Flanagan illed a hot water bottle, sporting a long transparent tube running from inside it, with red wine and attached it to the stand of his portable oxygen tank. After setting up the procedure he lay lat on his stomach, on the bed, and inserted the tube into his anus, where he remained until the end of the performance. Rear Window is a clear reference to and subversion of the themes and politics of the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock ilm by the same name. In Hitchcock’s classic, the protagonist, Jeff, is a professional photographer left wheelchairbound after breaking his leg. The ilm follows the photographer, who spends his time watching his neighbours across the courtyard through his back window. Jeff, disabled by an injury, becomes an obsessed voyeur in a ilm that ‘addresses the concepts of voyeurism and exhibitionism and explores the nature of their interconnectedness’ (Belton 2000: 4). The narrative of the ilm follows Jeff’s suspicion of murder in one of the lats and his obsessive attempts to prove this. In the Flanagan/Rose Rear Window the themes of voyeurism and exhibitionism are taken on but are imbued with a different political sensibility. Instead of the disabled man watching and becoming the obsessed voyeur, the gaze is subverted and Flanagan, a disabled man and self-confessed exhibitionist, is the one watched. The audience are placed in the position of voyeur; because of the way in which the performance is literally framed by the hotel room windows the reading is explicitly that Flanagan’s actions are part of his everyday activity and the audience become an invisible spectator to this. Flanagan’s visibly suffering, sick body negates the 1950s Hollywood romanticism of the suffering artist present within Hitchcock’s ilm and opens up a window into existence within the duration of slow death. Film studies scholar John Belton suggests that within the Hitchcock Rear Window the pleasure Jeff ‘derives from watching his neighbors without their knowledge or permission is essentially sadistic … It is a pleasure based on PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 19·4 : ON MEDICINE domination’ (Belton 2000: 7). Flanagan, then, takes on his familiar role of the masochist and here places the spectators in the position of sadistic viewers. That is, the viewer witnesses Flanagan performing sexual/medical activities in a private space. Flanagan’s actions are framed by the performance context but the implication of the work is that this is part of his daily engagement with his body as sick, the medical regime he goes through and his BDSM lifestyle and that, as spectators, we are privy to this as voyeurs. Art historian Meiling Cheng considers the complex relationship between the inliction of pain in Flanagan/Rose’s life-as-art practice and the pain of cystic ibrosis: The art practised by Flanagan is then simultaneously an engagement with life traumas and a search for body healing. In this context, the sensual violence is a self-prescribed homeopathic medicine that confronts the pain caused by the invading foreign bodies – be they organic, chemical or mechanical – by producing self-willed pain. Such a strategy does not so much relect a sensorial substitution of pain with pleasure than to suggest an instant translation of selfdetermination however painful, into pleasure. (Cheng 2000: 229) Cheng suggests that, for Flanagan, S/M becomes a form of treatment: an alternative form of medicine. The notion of S/M as a technique for helping Flanagan’s health extends his own words; Flanagan famously attributed S/M as the reason that he lived as long as he did. This concept is comically addressed by Flanagan’s tag line to ‘ight sickness with sickness’ and in his song to the tune of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ (written by the Sherman Brothers), ‘Supermasochistic Bob has Cystic Fibrosis’ in which Flanagan sings, ‘CF would have killed me if it weren’t for S and M’. In Rear Window, Flanagan is seen administering a wine enema – the enema being a medical procedure appropriated for masochistic purposes. The equipment utilized by Flanagan for the procedure consisted of his own medical apparatus, as well as household objects, such as the hot water bottle. The action Downloaded by [Martin O'Brien] at 10:35 03 March 2015 can be read as a replacement of medicine with S/M. As the spectator witnesses Flanagan, alone and near to death, one can read the action as a inal desperate attempt at cure, prolonging of life or at least at subduing or replacing the pain of dying. The endurance associated with S/M becomes a means of both expressing and ighting the endurance of illness. Flanagan’s duration of slow death is laid bare in performances of endurance that make public the private activities of medicating chronic illness and BDSM lifestyle. The little known British performance artist Jill Hocking was born in 1979 and died of cystic ibrosis in 2004. Her only public performance was her 2002 work S(Mothered). From 25 to 28 May, Hocking was installed in a garage in Nottingham for two hours a day. It was during the same year that Hocking’s health took a dramatic turn for the worse and an early death seemed inevitable. By considering Hocking’s work I hope to outline the relationship, within chronic illness, of endurance to life and art. The only writing available on this performance is a statement of intent by Hocking: I am using my body as a source of enquiry. I am attempting to strengthen my interior self as my exterior weakens. I am taking control of my body by learning to live inside it. I am sewing cabbage together to make a blanket. I am going to continue until it is large enough to cover myself. I am going to lie underneath it and wait. Soon the smell will be unbearable. (Hocking 2002) I ind reading these words, as a fellow cystic ibrosis sufferer, knowing she passed away at the age of 24, almost unbearable. I have never seen footage of Hocking so my analysis here relies on images and descriptions of the work; because of this it is important to note that this is not a full performance analysis of her work, rather I am interested in the way in which endurance functions over the long duration of the work and the possible political implications of this. Hocking works with the long duration of the installation by constructing a regime that must be followed. Hocking must return to the garage at the same time every day, for the three days of the work, in order to install herself for two hours. The entire period of the installation becomes incorporated into the discipline of the work and the conditions for existence. Over the three days the cabbage leaves began to rot. The consistency of the rotting cabbage strongly resembles that of the extra thick mucus produced by a body with cystic ibrosis. The cabbage, then, becomes a metaphor for illness, both as an explicit reference to the body’s byproducts, mucus as the bodily luid most often responsible for death in CF, and the deterioration of her body. Both the image and smell of decay were prominent in the space as time passed, with Hocking herself lying corpse-like underneath the rotting vegetables. Foucault proposes that the sick living body is the anticipation of the corpse it will become (1973: 162). This, then, is a rehearsal of the inevitable for Hocking. The work acts as a confrontation with her own mortality, while emphatically reminding the audience of death, and the inevitability of it, not just for Hocking but for everyone, a memento mori for the viewer. The audience remain passive, but working with the actual presentation of decay rather than the re-presentation of it the audience are forced into an encounter with death and decay as it manifests itself explicitly in the rotting vegetables and more subtly through the body of Hocking. My own 2011 performance Mucus Factory explicitly addressed notions of endurance and illness. The performance has been shown several times in different contexts, in the UK, US and Europe, and has been performed over a range of time frames from three to nine hours. Mucus Factory is based around a repetitive cycle of actions. The irst two are physiotherapy techniques appropriated from medical practices for cystic ibrosis in order to loosen mucus on the lungs. These techniques consist of laying on a postural drainage frame, which looks like an inverted bed with the head lower than the feet, and beating my chest; and, bouncing on a trampoline. The large quantities of mucus coughed up during these activities were stored in small specimen jars. The inal part of the O ’ B R I E N : PERFORMING CHRONIC 61 Downloaded by [Martin O'Brien] at 10:35 03 March 2015 62 cycle was to use the mucus as a material. I used the mucus as an adhesive to stick glitter to my body, as hair gel and as lubrication to insert a dildo-shaped mouth-piece from a nebulizer into my anus. Performance becomes a space in which endurance can be re-thought – a space in which we can consider what life means from within the duration of slow death, within the temporality of chronic time. It is dificult to consider human endurance as art when that endurance is caused by an illness such as cystic ibrosis but, within my own practice, I am able to ind agency within self-imposed endurance. In Mucus Factory I worked to reembody and excessively perform embodied lived experiences. I am able to transmute the endurance of illness into an aestheticized practice of self-imposed endurance. In this space, submission to daily life cycles does not happen, and instead the disciplined practices of self-healing become performed statements of identity and existence. Gianna Bouchard notes that ‘Live Art can erode and undermine the perceived creeping loss of agency over our bodies, reclaiming them from the dominant discourses of medicine and science’ (2012: 94). In these moments of performance my existence is framed by my own self-determination. My endurance is my, often lawed, attempt to claim my own body as mine and as me. Writing about Mucus Factory, performance academic Brian Lobel suggests that the work highlights ‘both O’Brien’s endurance as a performer as well as his endurance as an individual with CF’, and, in doing so, ‘demonstrating his own performance stamina, Mucus Factory lipped the disempowered, enduring body [of the chronically ill] into an empowered body [seen within performance] capable of such endurance’ (2012: 97). The implication of this reading is that my endurance, as a performer, is able to destabilize any ixed deinition of sickness, although paradoxically endurance itself is a deining feature of this sickness, and, in doing so, it challenges the epistemic authority of contemporary biomedicine. There is a complex relationship between performances of PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 19·4 : ON MEDICINE endurance and Moten’s endurance of life under a death sentence. Self-imposed endurance, for those of us who are sick, becomes an act of empowerment – an insistence that my body is anything other than docile and a deiant claim that I am my body and my body is mine. As performance academic Dominic Johnson suggests, works that utilize endurance, hardship, excess or pain ‘may provoke relection upon what it means to strive towards selfdetermination as a modality of one’s being in the world’ (2012: 146). In her ground-breaking book The Scar of Visibility, disability and performance studies scholar Petra Kuppers discusses performance that actively works with the ‘reembodying of medically derived body knowledge’ (2007: 203). The structure of the piece – the repetition of regimented cycles carrying out actions that draw attention to the leshy materiality of my body and expose the individual physiology of cystic ibrosis – relected the regulated body and the way in which the sufferer of chronic illness must relentlessly treat, maintain and clock the body. Mucus Factory then became a performance of a life under a death sentence. An embodied experience of existence within the duration of slow death was re-embodied and excessively demonstrated within the space of performance over a shortened period of time. The performance functions as a metaphor for illness experience. In Hocking’s performance her static body under the rotting cabbage acts as a momento mori. Her corpse-like body lay in a rehearsal of death as she herself neared the end of her life. My more physically active engagement with endurance, however, performs a pursuit of survival at a different stage in the progression of the disease. Both Hocking and I, however, expose the slow death of cystic ibrosis. This is not the performance of endurance discussed by McEvilley in which artists work with self-imposed endurance concentrating on ‘the purity of doing something with no pragmatic motivation’ (1983: 226). Our performances are necessary excavations of human experience. These are bodies with disease, demanding the possibility of Downloaded by [Martin O'Brien] at 10:35 03 March 2015 self-agency and imagining the capability of choice from within lives deprived of these by sickness and the intense medical routines that this demands. There exists a tension in the practices I have discussed in this article. This is a tension between the voluntary endurance in performance and the endurance of a life lived within the duration of slow death. Within serious chronic illness, such as cystic ibrosis, existence is keenly felt as ‘the embodiment toward death as a way of life’ (Berlant 2011: 114). As Saleh has suggested, I am my body but the experience of cystic ibrosis is that of the body turning against itself. I submit to the needs of my body, I submit to medicine in order to survive – in order to endure longer. The practices of endurance art can be read as a metaphor for life under these conditions, as well as an attempt at claiming agency over the body. This reading is a little too simplistic, though. Using the materials of the body and the appropriation of daily practices, works such as these re-embody and excessively perform life under slow death. Performance offers a context in which endurance can be re-thought; the self-imposed endurance allows the experience of the body to be owned by the artist. It becomes an act of personalpolitical empowerment. REFERENCES Belton, John (2000) Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Berlant, Lauren (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press. Bouchard, Gianna (2012) ‘Skin deep: Female lesh in UK live art since 1999’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(1): 94–105. Cheng, Meiling (2000) ‘Bob Flanagan’s body double’, in Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones (eds) The Artist’s Body, London: Phaidon Press Limited, p.229. Heathield, Adrian (2009) Out of Now: The lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh, London: Live Art Development Agency. 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