by Mark Dery
Much of Therrien’s work images religion as a technology that amplifies the effects of power. “The men at the top of the Catholic church are deciding what’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”).61
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.62
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.)63 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 within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen.64
Therrien’s first public performance- Comfort/Voyeur (1983), in which the artist crawled 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 was informed, in part, by a 1981 newscast he had seen about a despondent, jobless man who phoned a TV station to inform the world 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 th
e 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.”65 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.”66 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.67
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 family- Information Machine featured a three-story structure resembling a medieval siege tower made out of pipes. Timothy North stood on top of it, raining blows on the suspended, spread-eagled performer who served as the Body Drum; the Ninety-Degree Machine hung from its lowermost section; and the Fetal Cage swung 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- Proportional Study of a Man in the Manner of Vitruvius, 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.68 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 overlaying tableaux of ritualized dominance and submission: one man bludgeoned by another, a third pinioned in a ring of fire and set ablaze from the neck up.
Information Machine is a junction box with a series of circuits branching off it: the body, technology, religion, and politics, all of them paths for power. Of course, power is not only a cultural phenomenon but a natural one as well. Having considered technology as a religion and religion as a technology, Therrien turns, finally, to a contemplation of power in the most literal sense, as an elemental force.
“I like the feeling of live electricity, the power that’s present there; it’s something that’s always fascinated me,” he says. “I’m interested in electricity as an analogy for life and at the same time death.” Therrien is intimately acquainted with the dangers of high voltage: He once felt the kiss of 220 volts while thwapping with metal drumsticks on an electrified plate he mistakenly thought was dead (it was, until someone switched on the power without warning). Moreover, the Icehouse is uncomfortably close to an electrical substation, and the growing concern over the potentially hazardous effects of long-term exposure to electromagnetic fields has not escaped Therrien’s notice. Still, he is seduced by the brutish beauty of the substation, with its hunkering transformers and gargantuan cables.
“I’d love to have a nice little bungalow among all the transmission towers, although I wouldn’t want to spend more than a few minutes there a day,” he muses. “There are these gigantic power cables going down the street-I think they’re four-hundred-thousand-volt lines-and when you stand near them, you can feel an incredible hum underneath. You can hold up a fluorescent tube and it will illuminate, just from the immense power in the air!”
Therrien the rhapsodist has much in common with the awestruck journalist who asked of London’s Battersea Power Station in 1934, “Is it a cathedral?” (The station’s architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, also designed the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral and was later said to have erected two houses of worship, “one for God, one for Electricity.”69) In Comfort/Control performances, Therrien makes use of “electricity as a metaphor for a supreme being.”
“When people try to explain God, they do it on a spiritual level,” he says. “Well, what is God made of? Does He have mass? It seems to me that the only thing God could be, if God exists, is electricity or some type of electromagnetic force or radiation. The descriptions of God as pure and white and blinding in illuminated manuscripts sound very much like electricity. It’s electricity, in essence, that makes our integrated circuits sing-all of those electrical impulses running through us, making the body’s mechanism move. In Frankenstein, electricity is a
life-giving force; now, they use defibrillators to bring people who are dead back to life. I would love to be hit by lightning and live. The idea of having all of that power, supposedly as much as a nuclear explosion, pass through your body is absolutely phenomenal; it must be like being touched by God. When I see the Sistine Chapel ceiling, with God reaching out and touching Adam, I envision a spark gap–zap!”
5 /
ROBOCOPULATION
Sex Times Technology
Equals the Future1
Cybersex in The Lawnmower Man. © 1992 New Line Productions, Inc., and AlliedVision/Lane Pringle. All rights reserved. Photo by Douglas Kirkland; computer animation by Angel Studios, Carlsbad, CA. Photo appears courtesy of New Line Productions, Inc.
Sex Machines
Different writers have described “the sexual frenzy of factories,” obsessive rhythms, exhalations, cries, panting sounds, shining dart-pointed instruments, articulated rods dripping with sweat, simulacra of inexhaustible loves. Could not man himself become a machine in his amorous activity and make love indefinitely, like a machine?
–Marcel Jean2
James Brown’s sentiments, exactly. In “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” Brown reinvents himself as a plug-in stud, tireless as a punch press but still salty with sweat, soft to the touch. He imagines himself a prosthetically enhanced satyr who retains enough of his humanity to be able to savor the pleasures of the flesh. Cyborged, Brown has the best of both worlds, thrilling to the fevers and “cold sweats” of human passion but performing with locomotive endurance.
Brown’s fantasy is only one narrative thread in the conceptual knot that Marshall McLuhan, writing in 1951, called “one of the most peculiar features of our world-the interfusion of sex and technology.”3 This bizarre union, according to McLuhan, was “born of a hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique, on one hand, and, on the other, to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way.”4 This last motif, to which McLuhan gives only perfunctory attention, has been taken up in cyberculture, where it is ornately embroidered in collective fantasies.
