Close Curtain: Death Drive As a Mode of Critique in Art
Paul Virilio’s haunting echo of Walter Benjamin’s exhortation was sounded in the wake of 9/11. If indeed contemporary art is a casualty of war, then recognition of its participation in traumatic historical realities would be a prerequisite for productive discussion. That our contemporary existence is marked by cultures of trauma would seem beyond dispute.
This article outlines three themes, Death Drive, ASCO, and Vienna Actionists. These are tied together in the service of examining how the theory of the Death Drive can be applied to analyze artworks that deal with subjects such as trauma, war, issues of mental health, and death. The paper claims that drawing comparisons and examining relativity between artworks that differ in culture, time, and regionality, can be done so by applying the Death drive theory. The theory was first conceived of by a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, Sabina Spielrein. Generally, the theory suggests that the human psyche can go opposite of the creative drive, often when trauma is unresolved. This opposition to the creative force results in reliving the trauma, risk-taking behavior, and violence. Later, psychoanalysts extended the death drive to the realm of thoughts, using it to describe the perpetual state of unfulfillment, the formation of delusions, and drug dependency. The paper describes the art of ASCO, a Chicano artist collective from the civil rights era in Los Angeles and the art of Vienna Actionists, an art collective active post-WWII. Both art collectives made art surrounding themes of disgust with war, trauma, and death. The paper suggests that two very different artist collectives can be compared, irrespective of their difference in culture, region, and place in history by examining their art through the lens of Death drive theory.
The Death Drive and Art
Much of art is created in response to death. Memento mori still lifes, that often included human skulls in the composition, are such an example. These artists wanted to keep the view of death within sight in order to appreciate life all the more. However, around the turn of the century the art that was created in response to death took a very different turn. World wars were on the rise and the advancement of the industrial age gave way to machines of war that could take human life on a scale never before imagined. If war was once a noble act of valor, now war had become a matter of applied science that ended life beyond any recognizable semblance of humanity. Atrocities of war were carried out to a degree that became immeasurable by any standard. The world entered the age of death and the culture of death was born.
Sigmund Freud conceived of the death drive after seeing the events of World War I unfold. He needed to know how soldiers could abandon any sense of self preservation and knowingly charge out of trenches to their deaths. From this he formulated the death drive and called this facet of human psyche Thanatos. In direct opposition to the death drive Frued identified the creative force, Eros. Coming from the greek myth, Eros fell in love with Psyche, the name given to the framework from with the mind operates. Thanatos was the representation of non-violent death in greek mythology. Eros was the god of love and son of Chaos. This is an interesting choice to attribute to the creative force, held in relation to Thanatos, as the child of the void [Chaos]. Freud likely took the idea of the death drive after expounding on a work from his contemporary Sabina Spielrein, from her work “Destruction as the cause of coming into being” from 1912. In short summary, Freud’s death drive is the component of certain human psychology that is motivated toward aggression, risky behavior, and reliving trauma. Attempting to move beyond his theory of the unconsciousness based upon sexual drives Freud argues that the unconscious is also shaped by death drives that create conflicts within the ego.[Nambrol]
Although this paper will use these theories as a means to understand the motivation and the meaning surrounding artworks the psychology community today has moved forward. Still used as a foundation to expand from, like the psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klien who identified three models of the death drive. It’s from these models that analysis of art is most useful. The first model is taking the instinct to destroy deeper into the realm of thought where the mind can actually destroy thinking, especially when these “thought objects” are sources of unfulfilled wishes. To put this more simply, some minds would rather self destruct rather than face lack. Or rather, the mind destroys thoughts that it can not handle. The mind actually destroys the part of itself that realizes the impossibility of the attainment of certain needs and desires.
An example of this self annihilation would be a romantic relationship that ends in break up. In this case, the brokenhearted would rather turn off or put to death the part of his psychic function that craves the fulfillment of being with their lost love. Further, in this model of the death drive, the mind of the broken hearted may go as far as to fabricate an illusion that their wish has already been fulfilled. The second model is another sort of mental death drive that continually resigns itself towards passivity, this is presented most often in habitual self sedation through the use of mood altering substances. The third model is the continued paralysis of the subject, this version of the death drive is a sadistic perpetuation of the deadening of thought. The death drive is a mental process to cope with unbearable pain. Overall, the death drive is a mental function that eliminates the capacity to think thoughts which are unbareable.
As it applies to art, these notions of internal self destruction are useful in understanding the two artists that are highlighted in this paper. In the following chapters the works of ASCO and the Vienna Actionists will be given an overview and an attempt will be made to see their art from the perspective of the death drive. In the service of the claims made by this paper, these two very different but equally substantive groups of performance artists will be paralleled. The first will be the Viannese Actionists, a performance art group that was active in post war Vienna whose controversial work surrounded notions of death. From this group, it’s founding member Herman Niche will be highlighted. The second is the Los Angeles based Chicano performance art group ASCO who were active in the 1960’s and 1970’s during the civil rights movement. From this group, one of the founding members will be highlighted, Harry Gamboa Jr. The reason these two very different groups are being paralleled is to illustrate how the death drive can be used to analyze art across cultural and regional lines. Death is the ultimate unifying human experience, there isn’t a culture or a people that do not in some way honor, fear, mourn, and complete life through the death experience.
ASCO’s Harry Gamboa Jr. and the Vienna Actionists
In 1943 an event known as the Zoot Suit Riots took place in Los Angeles. Young Chicano men were hunted down by active US military and were beaten and killed. Instances such as these have been common throughout american history, where vicious forms of violence were carried out on the Mexican-American population. These trauma inducing events have stayed in the collective psyche of Chicanos and this trauma is often represented in the imagery of their culture. Icons such as “La Sad Girl,’’ a tearful young woman that represents depression appears in the form of tattoos and airbrushed paintings on the hoods of lowriders. “Smile Now, Cry Later”, another common phrase that appears frequently in Chicano iconography can mean to represent bi-polar disorder. These are examples of how Chicano art is used as a way of expressing the effects of trauma, poverty, and oppression. It’s from this vein of creativity that in 1973 the performance group ASCO was born. The founding members of ASCO are Harry Gamboa Jr, Pattsi Valdez, Gronk, and Willie Heron. The name of the artists collective further illustrates the claim made by this paper, ASCO means disgust or repulsion in Spanish. On why this name was chosen Gronk is quoted as saying “A lot of our friends were coming back [from the Vietnam War] in body bags and were dying, and we were seeing a whole generation come back that weren’t alive anymore. And in a sense that gave us nausea … that is Asco, in a way.”
In an interview published for the Journal of American Drama and Theatre by Jennifer Flores Gamboa talks about the violence experienced by him as a Chicano. He mentions that he had to escape violence and was was also physically attacked several times. Trauma such as this is re-lived again and again according to the theory of the death drive. Frued noted that soldiers he was treated would commonly have recurring nightmares of what they experienced in the war. He wanted to understand why the mind would perform in this irrational way and concluded that these soldiers all exhibited death drive tendencies.
The people of Europe suffered post-traumatic stress disorder enmasse after the events of World War II. Art became a method of dealing with this PTSD. The Viennesse Actionists were an art collective that created extremely graphic performances using slaughtered animals, blood, and other bodily fluids. These performances were considered extremely avant garde at the time and on more than one occasion the police became involved to stop them from happening. One of the founding members of the art collective was Herman Nitsch. Nitsch created what he dubbed the Orgies Mystery Theater. Through this performance Nitsch addressed violent mythological subjects such as the passion of Christ, the castration of Dionysos, regicide, and sado-masochism.
The re-living of trauma and the creation of trauma as visual arts is useful to the examination of art through the notion of the death drive. Nitsch, through his actions and the public performances of the Orgy Mystery Theater was creating a simulated trauma experience. Some of these trauma inducing actions included using the slaughtered carcass of a lamb to make a reenactment of the crucifixion, then taking that same carcass and swinging it wildly, beating it against the ground. This act and others involving simulated mutilation created a traumatic memory for the participants. These actions also serve to create dissociation in the minds of the viewers. Dissociation is a ‘state of profoundly disordered brain function associated with a severe degree of fragmentation of perception’, dissociation is initiated when the recognition of unavoidable danger shifts to surrender [Jarosi].Another term for this is abreaction. Abreaction is a psychoanalytic term for reliving an experience to purge it of its emotional excesses—a type of catharsis. Sometimes it is a method of becoming conscious of repressed traumatic events.
