Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment

Product Information

Holly Connolly: What I love about your work as a critic is that you’re able to find meaning and value in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, so that your criticism often adds a new depth or dimension to the work itself. What do you think the role of the critic is? Snow’s ability to move from niche performance art to the messianic iconography of millennial Americana is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Indeed, through unlikely commonalities, Snow draws together performance artists such as Chris Burden, Nina Arsenault and Bob Flanagan with Buster Keaton and Johnny Knoxville. Snow is evidently more than aware of the liberties she takes, broadly it is the ambitions and posed ‘stretches’ and ‘spirited interpretations’ that are the most engaging turns in the text. These passages not only provoke thought and add a certain lingering sheen of question to the art and entertainment she explores, but also, resonate further with a little more digging. Snow admits the line ‘this is for the birds’ is not present in the current edit of the clip now available on YouTube. Ultra-rigour is not what is on offer here, rather it is the energetic interpretations. When watching the scene, her comments around a ‘different kind of queering’ unfurl into ever more significance and relevance (as the digression to Agamben above is no doubt a register of). When watching ‘The Human Barbecue’ one cannot help but notice that Knoxville is so heavily clad in fire protection he cannot move, he must be dressed like a gilded cage princess, or a bizarre Kardashian fashion stunt. He can barely walk unaided and must be walked over to the fire pit, and, madly, also be helped up, lifted and pulled away by others. He is like a doll, except he can speak with an unsure voice, his eyes darting nervously, and, of course, he can feel and fear pain. Indeed, it is these rather ambitious flights (as Snow declares them to be) in Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment that are so rewarding and resonate.

Snow has somehow created an enjoyable—indelible- book-length meditation on pain. Most notable is its critical analysis of hurt in the culture industry at large.”– Stephanie La Cava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You. Though the works in Which as You Know Means Violence produce entertaining or spectacular forms of injury, scarification, blood, and pain, much of this kind of art is also about carefully controlling the execution of a plan, or about training and restraining the body in judiciously managed ways. Perhaps the rub, then, is that while it is a very human impulse to desire death-defying mastery over the self, what these works tend to always reveal is that despite our best efforts, we are complexly vulnerable to a world, and others, that we cannot always control. Numerous studies examine empathy in terms of observation of physical pain and immediate pre-conscious responses, such as heart rate, dilation, cortisol, adrenalin, FMRI. This is not cognitive empathy, but an immediate pre-conscious autonomic response. It is not ruminated over, not a moral question, it is something one cannot help. Very much like laughter. Laughter is not language, humans without language (often as a result of damage to the part of the brain largely responsible for language) can still laugh. Empathic winces for the fallen and laughter operate in a space siloed from conscious thought and language. This is curious—and Snow does reference the nature of laughter briefly with some lurches to archaic references like Hobbes—but not as curious as one of the comments Snow provides from Korine regarding the uncompleted film Fight Harm. “I really wanted to make a perfect comedy, and I thought that pure violence, and the repetition of violence, would [achieve that]. I thought it would just build. I thought the repetition of the violence would just negate it, and it would just build and build into something humorous.”Zupančič’s chapter ‘Repetition’ in The Odd One In: On Comedy opens with the famous line of Marx from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ Lines later, she writes that repetition is ‘among the most prominent comic techniques.’ But not just comedy: An effort at perfectible practice or pace, more than pain, lies at the centre of most of the performances. Abramović and Chris Burden don’t mutilate themselves as a result of self-hatred but to consider the human body and its limits. Snow gives us terms for the ‘the grace and violence’ of Korine and Keaton. (It’s worth quoting Snow’s entire description of Keaton in full: ‘He repudiates the sin of boringness by being unpredictable, the chaos of him rippling across what was previously lifeless as if something very heavy — as heavy as love, or God, or the iron door of a bank vault — had been tossed into a lake.’) Korine, Keaton, Abramović, Knoxville: they do anything to condemn ‘the sin of boringness’. Review of Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment by Philippa Snow (Repeater Books, 2022) A blending of art and pop cultural criticism about people who injure themselves for our entertainment or enlightenment.

Though this is her first published book, as both a critic and essayist Snow is prolific, with bylines in Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Frieze, Vogue and many more. Her writing has a singular quality: one of the pleasures of reading her is that certain fixations – Lindsay Lohan, the films of David Lynch , the bind of heterosexuality – repeat, so that her work has a particular Snow sensibility. A brilliant, bracing and often funny debut, Philippa Snow’sWhich As You Know Means Violencecasts a compassionate but rigorous critical lens on self harm as art and art as accident. The smartest book I’ve read all year, and one I will return to for years to come.”– Allie Rowbottom, author o f Jell-O Girls and Aesthetica. Svelte and smart analysis… Snow has a witty and sleek style, approaching the subjects of life, art and performance pushed to their extremes with sensitivity and care. This is a book about pain and hurt that, somehow, is both provocative and immensely pleasurable to read.”– Anna Cafolla, The FaceIn 2020 his first music book was published: Into The Never, a deep dive into the Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral album, was published by Rowman and Littlefield, his first novel, Politics Of The Asylum about a cleaner in a collapsing hospital was published in 2018. Cannot express how much I enjoyed reading this. Apologies to all the friends that have met up with me over these weeks and have had to listen to my gushing stream of praise for this book, its ideas and all the artists mentioned within its covers.