4 - The Pain of Others: Performance, Protest and Instrumental Self-Injury

Summary

…can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.

—Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

This chapter takes as its point of departure the idea that in and through the bodies of unauthorized Australian noncitizens, the Australian state produces a symbolic excess. The marked, managed bodies of irregular noncitizens are constructed as surplus to the nation's human requirements. Moreover, excess becomes coterminous with waste in the collective national consciousness: through the inherent indignity of incarceration, and particularly via reported acts of self-injury such as sewing lips and refusing food, asylum seeking noncitizenship comes to represent an abject corporeality, and noncitizens themselves the objects of intense responses of pity on the one hand or disgust on the other. I examine the instrumentalization of asylum seeker self-injury via an analysis of its representation in Australian performance art, theatre and protest. The case studies that form the subjects of discussion are Mike Parr's durational live art piece, Close the Concentration Camps (2002), in which the artist's mouth, eyes and ears were sewed together; Mireille Astore's site-responsive installation at a Sydney beach, Tampa (2003), which saw the artist emplaced in a cage-like structure each day for eighteen days; solidarity fasts by Australian activists and celebrities, most of them undertaken in public spaces (2002–04); and former detainee Shahin Shafaei's solo touring play about a hunger striker, Refugitive (2002–04). These works are framed in terms of ‘instrumental’ self-injury because, first, they sought broadly to amplify the effects of political self-injury by detained asylum seekers—that is, self-injury structured as protest and intent on communicating with others—thereby highlighting the way the self-injuring body puts itself to ‘anti-work’ in extremis; and second, because in each case, the representative or performing bodies became acutely and evidently vulnerable.