Please push pins into my body

I’ve been meaning to post something about Chris Burden and I think now is the right time. If you click on his name in the Hall of Fame on the right, it takes you to a video in which he talks about his art in the early 1970s. That’s the period that got Chris Burden a lot of attention — that’s when he did what I would call his Body Works.

For example, a performance called “Back to You.” Here’s his own description of the piece:

Dressed only in pants, I was lying on a table inside a freight elevator with the door closed. Next to me on the table was a small dish of 5/8″ steel push pins. Liza Bear requested a volunteer from the audience, and he was escorted to the elevator. As the door opened, a camera framing me from the waist up was turned on, and the audience viewed this scene on several monitors placed near the elevator. As the elevator went to the basement and returned, Liza told the audience that a sign in the elevator instructed the volunteer to “Please push pins into my body.” The volunteer stuck four pins into my stomach and one pin into my foot during the elevator trip. When the elevator returned to the floor, the door opened, the volunteer stepped out, and the camera was turned off. The elevator returned to the basement.

Four pins in the stomach and one in the foot isn’t so crazy, but he did many more extreme performances. In “Through the Night Softly” he crawled on his belly through broken glass; in “Shoot” he had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22; in “Five Day Locker Piece” he spent five days in a locker.

I learned about Chris Burden 20 years ago when I went to see a major retrospective of his work. I think I went to that show 15 times or more. There’s so much more to his work than the body pieces that get all the attention, but what impresses me is how doing shit to his own body was at the center of so much of his work. It’s yet another one of those fascinations of mine that makes so much sense in retrospect. I was drawn to this smart and interesting artist who used his body in such extreme ways. 

I also like that he had a very loose “let’s try it and see what happens” approach. He had no idea what a volunteer would do when invited to push pins into his body. I’m trying to maintain that attitude toward my S&M adventures. 

Earlier this evening Miss Mitsu stuck many, many needles into my body.

One hundred needles.

There was a lot of blood.

Fuller details (and possibly photos) will appear soon.

[I cannot believe I wrote this just hours after that session. This guy is fucking crazy.]

Body Play

One of the names in my Hall of Fame on the right there is Fakir Musafar. I learned about him from this book:

I first encountered this book in my favorite record & comic shop in the late 1980s — this book came out in 1989, so it was the very late 80s indeed. This is a perfect example of the long, slow awakening of my kink. I flipped through this book 100 times in the shop before I worked up the nerve to buy it. I don’t know what i was worried about.

It’s a great book full of all sorts of examples of body modification — mainly tattooing and piercing — but the long interview with Fakir is something special. This guy started playing with pain and other body modifications when he was very young, inspired by the images in National Geographic and other sources. Here’s a picture of a wasp-waisted Fakir in 1959:

Even better than these pictures is the text of the interview. Here’s a nice chunk:

Interviewer: People are always asking: why should you do things like get pierced or get tattooed? You gave us three reasons: 1.) religious/spiritual benefits, 2.) social status or for adornment, and 3.) sexual pleasure.

Fakir: Well, we’re all suffering from a lot of repressive conditioning which you can’t undo in just a mental way. Most of it has to do with sexuality and sexual energy. If you get into any practices of other cultures you’re bound to be involved with a lot of sexuality in other states and guises that aren’t even acknowledged as being in existence in this culture. And a good shamanistic answer to Why do these things? is BECAUSE IT’S FUN! It’s more fun than getting on a bus and going to work in the morning. It’s more fun than going to a college and getting a Ph.D. It’s more fun for you, and it can sometimes be a lot of fun for people around you. I mean: what’s wrong with that? Is there a law against having fun?

Experiencing ecstatic states: why would one want to experience an ecstatic state? Well, you might learn something out of it. You might be able to help others. You might see other worlds. There may be all kinds of reasons, but basically you do it because it’s fun! Why not?

…I know the idea is odious and alien to our culture that one would deliberately impose restrictions on movement and freedom of the body, but mankind throughout history has always done this. The lessons that can be learned and the life that can be led by doing this far transcend what can be learned by being comfortable. Being comfortable isn’t necessarily living a “good” life–that’s the myth, but it’s not true. Living an uncomfortable life is sometimes far more satisfactory than a placid, bovine existence.

To not have encumberments, to not have holes in your body, to not have tattoos may be debilitating–this is something that people have to consider. They may not be getting the most out of life because they don’t do these things–that’s the point. People may be missing beautiful, rich experiences because of cultural bias and conceit.

Elsewhere in the interview he talks about how everyone owns their own body and can do whatever the hell they want with it. I am totally sold on his notion that we can learn a lot more from discomfort and pain than we can learn from comfort and luxury. Which is where this ties back in with the zen/Budhist stuff I’ve been reading. Suffering is a big part of life. That’s noble truth #1: Life Is Suffering. Instead of expending all your energy desperately seeking comfort and avoiding pain, maybe there’s value in learning to experience the pain along with the joy?

I especially like Fakir’s statement “we’re all suffering from a lot of repressive conditioning which you can’t undo in just a mental way.” I have done several years of conventional therapy — the Talking Cure — and I feel like I have reached a limit on the progress I can make by simply talking about things. Talking through some issues has been a valuable experience, but right now I’m just beginning to appreciate the foolishness of ignoring the body.