Escape Velocity (26 page)

Therrien fastens meanings of his own to this chain of associations. In Nomad magazine, he points out that in Ritual Mechanics

there is the person who is drumming on the human body [and] the . . . person who is being drummed upon. The dominant person . . . shows that there is usually one dominant force behind a lot of the dogma that runs the machine. [W]hether that [person] is a pope or a dictator, there is still someone who

is driving the agenda, and . . . everyone else is . . . just along for the ride. [That's the] idea with the caged man. It's more than just the caged body: often, it's the caged intellect that you are dealing with, where that intellect is trapped in that machine.*'^

Much of Therrien's work images rehgion as a technology that amplifies the effects of powder. "The men at the top of the Catholic church are deciding w^hat's acceptable for Catholics in particular and human beings in general," he says. "In 1993, John Paul II issued a comprehensive list of new dogmas, an encyclical called The Splendor of Truth.' It explains what can and can't be done, from homosexual acts to premarital sex, and even in the face of all this danger involving sexual contact the church is still saying that condoms are not allowable under any circumstances."

Staged at CRASHarts, an alternative artspace in Phoenix's industrial zone run by Therrien and his wife Helen Hestenes, Comfort/Control's 1987 performance Index (Machines for the New Inquisition) pondered the church's use of the machinery of control, be it instruments of torture or systems of signs. Wielding his hot-wired drumsticks, North thundered out liturgical accompaniment on empty fuel tanks, his face lit by spitting sparks. The phallic Ninety-Degree Machine and the Fetal Cage-a gondola containing a performer in a fetal crouch, attached to a pendulumlike contraption-alluded to the lightning-rod issues of AIDS prevention, birth control, and abortion rights while the Index flashed recombinant phrases reminiscent of the Party slogans in 1984: "truth is power," "power is god," "the body of LIFE," "the life of THE BODY." As if on cue, the pope's motorcade passed by the site shortly after the performance ended.

''Index spelled out some of the same ideas that were involved in the Inquisition," says Therrien. "The pope was coming to Phoenix, so I tied this information display technology to a huge, mechanical cross that had a closer relation to [the technology of the Inquisition] than it did to, say, assembly-line robots from the twentieth century. Even though the cross was automated, it was designed to control the body, which is what they were attempting to do with the Inquisition machines. Some were designed purely to destroy, but others were designed to slowly inflict pain, using screws and pulleys and tremendous force, enabling the victim to find the purity within

his own religion. During that period, some of the best engineers in the world were developing devices to help people renounce the demons within-the barbaric thoughts, the primitive urges."

Index reminds us that the history of the Inquisition is one of bodies rendered tractable and minds made pliant by instrumental technologies that made possible what Rossell Hope Robbins has called "a science of applied cruelty": eye-gougers, spine-rollers, spiked heating chairs, Spanish Boots (a bone-crushing vice "enclosing the legs from the ankles to the knees, operated by screws or wedges"), and thumbscrews (hailed enthusiastically in 1684 as "a new invention and engine . . . that had never been used before").^'

But the Inquisition is equally a story about bodies-translated, by the witch finder's art, into texts whose warts, moles, carbuncles, excrescences, birthmarks, scars, tattoos, and other abnormalities constituted a legible record of unholy transactions. Shaved and exhaustively examined for devil's marks, the hidden truths that the eighteenth century demonologist Ludovico Maria Sinistrari contended were "imprinted on the most secret parts," bodies were made to testify against their owners.^^

Of course, the Inquisition's technics of behavior modification was not confined to crank-operated engines of torment; it applied, as well, to subtler technologies. The Index, the Roman Catholic church's official list of forbidden books, impoverished intellectual life in sixteenth century Europe by restricting information access-caging the intellect, to borrow Therrien's phrase. (Extraordinarily, it was only abrogated in 1966.)^^ Therrien's Index, which "presented controversial information on current moral and social issues," was in fact an anti-Index, contravening the official one.

Therrien updates the inquisitor's search for witch's marks in his critique of the political uses of medical technology. Comfort/Control performances often incorporate electrocardiogram monitors whose registrations function as musical elements, sources of visual imagery (the Body Drum's vital signs jogged across video monitors), and visible evidence of surveillance. "I'm fascinated by the whole privacy issue," he says, "and my use of medical technology in performance has partly to do with the idea of technology invading the privacy of your body. To get life insurance, I had to answer a lot of questions about my medical history, sexual preference, drug use. They used blood and urine tests in their

final analysis, saying, in effect, 'If you're lying, we can get your body to tell the truth; "

Therrien plans to make more extensive use of medical equipment in future performances, a decision prompted by his belief that "medical technology, from the electronics in heart monitors to the genetic research being done in labs, is beginning to control us as well as provide us with increased longevity and a more comfortable life." Since a friend was blinded by chemotherapy, Therrien's thoughts have often turned to the irony of technologies that postpone death but diminish the quality of life. "Technology is beginning to strip people of their dignity; they're not allowed to complete the normal cycle of life and death," he observes. "People now have the means to survive even as total invalids if they can use their brains, but for every Stephen Hawking there's probably a thousand people, covered with bed sores, who can't roll over by themselves. And there will be a lot more like them because we'll be able to keep so many people alive. We're already starting to make decisions [about who lives and who dies]."

This train of thought leads naturally to the historically intertwined subjects of euthanasia and eugenics, whose shadows sometimes creep across debates about America's overburdened health care system, the population explosion, and genetic engineering. "They're able to determine early on whether or not you'll have a child that will have certain birth defects," says Therrien, "and you can choose to terminate that life or not. Already, in the so-called 'clean,' untainted vision of eugenics, they're talking about gene fixing, where they'll go in and remove the genes that are considered 'undesirable' and replace them with good WASP genes, changing the skin or eye color of unborn children."

As his interest in the delicate machinery of genetic engineering suggests, Therrien's attempts to trace the crossed wires of power, violence, bodies, and technology do not stop at inquisitional engines or the assembly lines of heavy industry. The presumption that information media are tools that modify their users, and not always for the better, underwrites much of his work. Tellingly, Therrien (whose performance space takes its name from the Ballard novel) cites "Ballard's vision of the way people tend to look at violence" as a formative influence on his figuration of TV as a pathological medium. In his introduction to the French edition of Crash, Ballard cited "the death of affect" as "the most terrifying casualty" of

a world ruled by fictions of every kind-mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising . . , the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities w^ithin the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen.^"*

Therrien's first public perforrmince-Comfort/Voyeur (1983), in w^hich the artist craw^led through broken glass beneath a structure supporting a TV and an easy chair-spoke to the terminal voyeurism and flattened affect that are the putative result of a steady diet of splatter news and prime-time violence. It w^as informed, in part, by a 1981 new^scast he had seen about a despondent, jobless man w^ho phoned a TV station to inform the w^orld of his decision to commit suicide by setting himself on fire. A crew was dispatched to document the event, and when it arrived, the man-who had been waiting for the media-doused himself with gasoline. In a black comedy of errors, it was soon discovered that he had no matches; a resourceful cameraman produced a pack, and the show went on. It was only after the crew had secured enough ratings-friendly footage of the wretch in flames that bystanders came to his aid.

"They showed it on the news again and again, and I remember people laughing about how ridiculous it was," marvels Therrien. "Anyone who waits for the cameras so he can kill himself before the media is obviously disturbed; the man needed help, not a pack of matches. But what really disturbed me was the way that people watching television treated the event: For them, it became entertainment."

The psychogeography of Therrien's industrial rituals is contiguous with the irradiated terrain of Ballard's novels, that "brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape."^^ It overlaps, as well, with the dark places illuminated in Francis Bacon's paintings: butcher shops and torture cells, Eichmann's booth and Hitler's bunker. Bacon, like Therrien, obsessed on the ill-fated conjunction of bodies and machines, though the painter's references were drawn from another era: corpses buried by buzz bombs in the rubble of the blitz, "the tortured creatures in the waxwork show of the atrocities of concentration camps."^^ And, like Therrien, he used the desacralized Crucifixion as an electrified prod to jolt his viewers. The

painter's obituary, written by the art critic Brian Sewell for the Evening Standard, is made to measure for Therrien:

He took the Crucifixion, stripped it of all its Christian implications, and invested it instead with the universal beastliness of man and abattoir. ... He used the ideas of the trap, the cell, the cage, the X-ray and the heavy fall of light to imprison and torment his subjects, to distill the violence, and to assault complacent senses ... so that we might contemplate ferociously profane images of cruelty and despair and see in them an inheritance from the great Renaissance themes of religious and temporal power. ^^

Both themes abide-and often coincide—in Therrien's work, which has anatomized power from the first. Boot Camp—Indoctrination into an Ordered System (1983) was a covert operation conducted at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in which the artist took advantage of an ROTC recruitment effort whereby potential enlistees were allowed to undergo basic training without further obligation. Intrigued by "the uses and misuses of discipline and the idea of control," Therrien secretly documented the six-week experience with a microcassette recorder hidden inside his uniform and a miniature thirty-five-millimeter camera concealed in his ammo pouch.

Boot Camp was Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket come to life. "It was a program of continual abuse," reflects Therrien. "People died during my training, and one cadet sustained permanent brain damage from heatstroke. They allowed the cadets to drink beer at night because they wanted you to know what a great experience the armed forces was, and if you didn't drink enough water the next morning, you'd dehydrate. Once you reached that point, it would only take four or five minutes for your brain to reach 109, 110 degrees. We were in the field, shooting M-60s, big machine guns, and this guy's body overheated. They couldn't get him into an ice bath fast enough, so he got cooked."

Therrien's 1993 "spectacle of mechanical propaganda," Information Machine: Ideological Engines, sounded a somewhat more hopeful note. He cites it as the point at which Comfort/Control's bodies, formerly the powerless subjects of instrumental technologies and dominant ideologies, "began to resist."

Performed in the cavernous Cathedral Room at the Icehouse-the former ice factory that houses CRASHarts as well as the artist and his (ami\y-Information Machine featured a three-story structure resembling a medieval siege tow^er made out of pipes. Timothy North stood on top of it, raining blow^s on the suspended, spread-eagled performer w^ho served as the Body Drum; the Ninety-Degree Machine hung from its low^ermost section; and the Fetal Cage sv^^ung back and forth in front of it, crisscrossing its midsection.

Directly behind the tower stood the Arm of Life, a platform surmounted by a standing figure, arms outstretched like a crucified Christ, his body encircled by a fifty-thousand-watt halo of quartz lights. The man's face was masked by a square plate inset with a twelve-thousand-watt light array, and jutting from the crossbar covering his loins was the robotic arm that gave the structure its name. At intervals, the piston-driven limb swung up, its finger tapping a plate strapped to the figure's chest and activating the array; a flash of seemingly solar brilliance flared up and winked out, leaving the audience blinded.

"The Body Drum is being hammered but at the same time it's activating the computer," explains Therrien. "It accepts this punishment and survives, so even though it's in an extremely passive and vulnerable position, there's still a sense of power. And the halo of light gives the body in the Arm of Life power, even though the light is part of the control relationship in the sense that it's being ignited by the man who's pounding on the Body Drum."

Viewed head-on, the Body Drum, its arms and legs arranged in an X, aligns with the cross-shaped figure in the Arm of Life to form da Vinci's famous study of a male figure with arms and legs spread, straddling a circle. To Leonardo, the drawing-Proportion^/ Study of a Man in the Manner of VitruviuSy widely known as "Vitruvian Man"-was archetypal as well as anatomical, referencing the Romanesque symbol of man the microcosm, the sweep of his limbs "eternally tracing the perfect geometry of God's creation," as Martin Kemp puts it.^^ In Therrien's hands, it is a profoundly ambiguous image, at once evocative of rapture and torture, of our everlasting attempts to push the envelope of what it means to be human while somehow retaining our humanity. An icon of a sublime humanism that sees in humankind the measure of all things, it is created, ironically, by overlay-