Content warning: mentions of sexual assault and eating disorders.
I’ve been thinking about performance art lately. Yoko Ono performed Cut Piece in 1964, in which she allowed audience members to snip her clothes with scissors until she was left naked. Ten years later, Marina Abramović performed Rhythm 0. In it, she stood at a table surrounded by seventy-two props. Perfume, paper, wine, bread, crowbar, gun. For six hours, audience members were invited to use the props on her as they pleased. In her instructions to the audience, she wrote: “I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility.”
Accounts of the performance are sparse, and they conflict with each other—such is the nature of performance art. It’s agreed upon that Abramović was sexually assaulted during the performance; that the crowd broke into factions, based on their desires to harm or protect her; that she was given roses, that her throat was slashed; and that, after the performance, when she walked toward the audience, they fled. It’s not agreed upon whether the performance lasted for its intended six hours—some say it was halted early by the audience—or whether the instructions were written on the wall, or announced via loudspeaker. Some accounts say the violence was perpetrated by passersby invited in from nearby streets, while others maintain that members of the art world were eager participants.1
The piece has been analyzed to death for the last fifty years; it’s as canonical as canonical gets. The violence, of course, wasn’t a foregone conclusion, which leads some critics to analyze through the lens of the relationship between violence and group identity formation. Others focus on the provocative nature of passivity: does an invitation to objectify actually allow for a true objectification, or is there a latent aggression within the invitation that refutes objectification? In his assessment of Rhythm 0, Smith University professor Frazer Ward spends several pages on the gendered aspect of the performance. “One conclusion that might be reached,” he writes, “is that Rhythm 0 is a hyperbolic demonstration of the construction of female subjectivity from without, or of female subjectivity as purely exterior, an imposition.”2 This imposition can be seen in the mirror presented to Abramović, upon which an audience member had written in lipstick the words “IO SONO LIBERO” (“I am free” in Italian). The subject in question can’t be her; “libero” is a masculine adjective, and the phrase should have read “IO SONO LIBERA.” She stared, expressionless, into the mirror, a man’s liberation imposed upon her still image.
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I’ve had this idea for a piece of performance art, something akin to Rhythm 0. I’d like to sit in some quiet room on Yale’s campus. The wall behind me would be divided into two sections: on one side, I’d hang some of my old clothes I haven’t thrown out. My original birth certificate would be taped up, along with some of my childhood poems and other such artifacts. On the other side, I’d have some newer clothes, my amended birth certificate (once I get that sorted out), my medications, and more recent writings. A wall for boyhood and a wall for girlhood. I’d sit silently at a table for a few hours with some props laid out around the room: hairbrush, pen, lipstick, scissors, carrot, paring knife, alcohol, razor blade. Et cetera. And, like Abramović, I’d remain passive and let audience members use the props however they desire for the performance’s duration.
Abramović has said the intention behind Rhythm 0 was to see how far an audience would go in the absence of responsibility. I’m not interested in revisiting that question, it’s been answered well enough. I’m interested, instead, in two things: endurance and murder.
I don’t mean that I want someone to stab me to death. I don't. But I want to kill the boy I used to be, and I keep returning to this thought as a means of accomplishing it. I hated him; I think I still do, even if I view him with a bit more sympathy now. I want to sit with him in a space where my relationship to him is out of my control, where I can be dressed up in his clothes, where his birth certificate can be torn up, where my present self only exists insofar as a stranger wants her to. I’ll sit with the old self, he’ll exist for a brief moment, at the end of it he’ll be dead, and io sarò libera. Yale is the spot for it; I entered campus as a boy, and the last four years have been miserable because of it. I made no close friends for the first two years. I’ve cut out acquaintances and professors whose only mistake was knowing me pre-transition. I once dropped a class because another girl passed better than I did. I still feel like I’m running from the lanky teenager in the photo with my dad on Old Campus.
So, really, this exercise isn’t passive at all. It’s a selfish fantasy, and I know exactly what I’d want from it. But the path toward death would be out of my control, given into the hands of a community I associate with the dying self, if only because I don’t believe there could have been another way.
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Before transitioning, I had the spirit of an endurance artist. As a kid, I wore shorts in the winter, until one day my dad told me I had to start wearing pants or people would think I was being neglected at home. I liked watching my hands turn bright red in the cold. I intentionally overpacked or underpacked for every journey. I’ve made multiple walks to New Haven’s Union Station in subfreezing temperatures, with sixty or seventy pounds of luggage. In high school, I continued working at Taco Bell until 12 a.m. on school nights after I stopped needing the money. In all of these situations, I told myself I was practicing self-reliance; the more hell I put myself through now, the more I’ll be able to endure later.
Self-reliance was a bit of a catch-all word for me, encompassing control and emotional numbness. I used to be able to consciously change my opinions of people. If I thought a crush wasn’t reciprocated, I would wake up the next day with no feelings (positive or negative) for that person. When I was seven or eight, my dad called me a camel due to my ability to go without food or water, and, when I developed eating disorders a few years later, I thought back to that comparison with pride. When I was thirteen, I played a game where, for a few months, I would limit myself to ten or fewer words per day. I wanted to maximize the efficiency of each word, and I wanted to grow without human relationships.
I’ve retained some of these behaviors. I retreat from people when they’re upset with me, regardless of the cause. Some part of me still believes I can exist alone, truly alone, and that same part of me tries to create a world where that’s the case. I still feel the need to exist outside everything, to resist any ties where people have obligations to me and I have obligations to them. This is why I’m a God-awful student. I start seeking a clean break from my physical and social surroundings every couple of years.
But I’ve lost my emotional numbness which allowed me to live like that for most of my life. I feel things, I feel them often, I miss people, and I miss them with my full chest. Maybe this makes me less of an endurance artist, or maybe it makes me more of one. Either way, I don't think it's tenable for the rest of my life. And maybe my performance art fantasy is indicative of the problem, or maybe it’s a solution—just one more clean break, this time from a former version of myself, and I’ll-be-so-fucking-normal-I-swear. Unlikely. But I do think there’s something productive to this sort of ritual. It’s like burning photos of your ex (or, in the case of Abramović’s relationship with Ulay, it’s like walking 2500 kilometers across the Great Wall of China to meet your ex in the middle and say “bye”). There’s a version of myself that I want to be, one that embraces dependence and obligation in relation to community, and I think I need to do something drastic to create her.
1. Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience (2012), 119-121.
2. Ibid., 127.