An esthetics of masochism? The author wonders if the curators of an Austrian exhibition on masochism in art erred in taking an overly literal approach to their subject - Report From Graz - Critical Essay

Art in America, April, 2004 by Barry Schwabsky

I suppose it was inevitable. When a friend asked what I was working on and I said, "I'm trying to write about masochism," she replied, "Isn't that tautological?" Masochism is one of those topics that's hard to mention without prompting a joke. You needn't be a doctrinaire Freudian to recognize that this is because it's a topic that makes people nervous. But besides the fact that it involves sexual activity of a sort psychoanalytically deemed perverse, there may be another reason why masochism makes people nervous--the fact that talking about it always ends up involving the speaker in paradoxes, contradictions and, in fact, tautologies.

Even Gilles Deleuze, in his classic essay on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), can't help passing on the "popular joke" that "tells of the meeting between a sadist and a masochist; the masochist says: 'Hurt me.' The sadist replies: 'No.'" (1) In fact, Deleuze gets so nervous that he has to distance himself by remarking that what he's just related is "a particularly stupid joke," as if he didn't notice how it supports his assertion, elsewhere in the essay, that sadism and masochism are not complementary practices but two distinct structures. Despite their alleged common basis in the concomitance of pleasure and pain, he says, "the concurrence of sadism and masochism is fundamentally one of analogy only; their processes and their formations are completely different," and so the Freudian construct of "sadomasochism" is a mirage. (2) Still, it's not easy to speak of masochism for long without invoking sadism, and vice versa. "Sade and Masoch are not merely cases among others," Deleuze says, "they both have something essential to teach us." (3)

How do you know when you are dealing with objects or images imbued with the mental structure of masochism? It was precisely by running roughshod over the niceties of this question that Peter Weibel, along with his co-curators Christa Steinle and Elisabeth Fiedler, put together the massive exhibition "Phantom der Lust: Visionen des Masochismus in der Kunst" (Phantom of Desire: Visions of Masochism in Art), which took place last summer at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria. Although some municipalities might have looked for other ways to use the abundant European Union funding that comes with the yearlong designation as European Cultural Capital, which Graz was granted for 2003, Austria's second city was simply making the most of its perverse heritage: Sacher-Masoch was a professor of history at the University of Graz, while Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), whose pre-Freudian Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) is the source for the coinages "sadism" and "masochism," taught psychiatry there.

But what to include in an exhibition on masochism in art? Certain works, mostly photographic, were obvious choices: Noboyushi Araki's shots of bound women; Tracey Moffatt's "Laudanum" series; Robert Mapplethorpe's S&M images. And then there are works that will easily come to mind by the likes of photographers Joel-Peter Witkin, Helmut Newton and Richard Kern, or their precursors such as Hans Bellmer or Pierre Molinier. All these evoke the requisite themes of pain, humiliation, bondage and fetishism. In fact, photography took pride of place, if only because the works in the show were approached by the curators more as documents than as inventions.

Not surprisingly, the curators made room for a lot of performance-based works, many of which take experiences of pain as their substance. Viennese Actionists such as Gunter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler were included, of course, as were Valie Export, Gina Pane, Stelarc, Bob Flanagan and Paul McCarthy, but, strangely, not Vito Acconci or Chris Burden. (As it happens, outdoor sculptural works by Acconci and Burden were included in Graz's wider 2003 contemporary arts festival.) The performance artists, too, were present mainly through photographic documentation. Video works on view were typically of a similarly documentary nature.

The camera doesn't fantasize, even if those who pose for it do. The draftsman's hand, by contrast, can only invent. The other side of the exhibition consisted of a large quantity of drawings and prints, ranging from the "classics" of the genre by fin de siecle illustrators Franz von Bayros, Aubrey Beardsley and Felicien Rops, to more recent manifestations such as Tom of Finland's pencil drawings or the comics of Guido Crepax and Tomi Ungerer--all works, incidentally, at a considerable remove from anything resembling a modernist mainstream, and often essentially subcultural. One should also mention the visual art works of litterateur's, like the grand-scale color pencil drawings, based on his own novels, by Pierre Klossowski; the drawings of Heinrich Mann (his novel Professor Unrat was the basis of the film The Blue Angel), of which I had not previously been aware; or the writer Bruno Schulz's drawings and prints. For various reasons, these works, too, are distant from pictorial modernism.