Artists have long used their own bodies as tools and weapons in punishing performance pieces, from Chris Burden, who invited a friend to shoot him in the arm in a California gallery in 1971, to Marina Abramovic, the Serbian conceptual artist.
Fatima Hellberg, the director general of the Mumok Museum of Modern Art in Vienna said she saw links between Holzinger’s work and that of Abramovic, whose six-hour piece, “Rhythm 0,” involved placing 69 objects, including a gun, a bullet, an ax and knives, on a table and inviting the audience to use them on her however they wanted.
A work like Holzinger’s “confronts people with the limits of ethics, the limits of their perception of self,” Hellberg said. “Those kinds of moments in Abramovic’s work are also really instructive to understand the figure of pain in Holzinger’s work,” she added.
Hellberg pointed to the artist Gina Pane climbing a spiked ladder on her hands and knees until she was too injured to continue, in the 1970s, and Ana Mendieta’s 1972 series “Untitled (Glass On Body Imprints)” which documented the artist pressing herself onto panes of glass that distorted her body.
“We’re quite obsessed with our bodies, and modification through various supplements, but also through surgery, fillers, Botox, whatever it might be,” Hellberg added, noting the “return to the body as a site for performance and as a material.”
The self-harm that Holzinger’s shows feature has caused distress and disgust; some audience members required first-aid treatment for severe nausea after performances in Stuttgart, Germany, according to a theater there.
