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The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
“This is criticism at its best.” —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimately offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.
Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimately offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.
306 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 11, 2011
532 people are currently reading
17440 people want to read
About the author
Maggie Nelson
41 books4,631 followersMaggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (Free Press, 2007; reissued by Graywolf, 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (U of Iowa Press, 2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She writes frequently on art, including recent catalogue essays on Carolee Schneemann and Matthew Barney. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, art, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, and Wesleyan University. For 12 years she taught in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts; in fall 2017 she will join the faculty of USC. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 393 reviews
April 22, 2023
i would read maggie nelson's grocery lists but it appears i don't have access to those. so i'll settle for everything she's written.
this wasn't my favorite topic or my favorite maggie nelson, but everything she writes about is interesting.
and as someone whose resting state is bored, that's not nothing.
bottom line: maggie nelson hive wins again!
3.5
this wasn't my favorite topic or my favorite maggie nelson, but everything she writes about is interesting.
and as someone whose resting state is bored, that's not nothing.
bottom line: maggie nelson hive wins again!
3.5
July 6, 2016
3.5 stars
A thorough, disturbing, and intelligent book about cruelty and how we interact with it today. Maggie Nelson addresses an ambitious set of questions: with so many images of war, torture, and horror available to us, how do we best process such media to motivate us to act? Why do we draw such pleasure from gory video games and humiliating reality television shows? How do we separate cruelty and violence - and can cruelty coexist with love? Nelson alludes to a plethora of performance artists, philosophers, writers, sculptors, and filmmakers in The Art of Cruelty, ranging from Antonin Artaund to Susan Sontag to Yoko Ono and many more. Instead of delivering any kind of final verdict about cruelty, Nelson cleaves out space for the many complexities that come with it, urging us to examine cruelty with a critical and nuanced lens.
Nelson has such a fierce brain. Her intellect pulsed through these pages. Whether she wrote about how "the mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism... characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity," the awful and misogynistic ways society glorifies female victimhood, or the difference between witnessing cruelty on the page vs. on the screen, her analysis delved deep enough to pull insight even from the most nauseating of subjects. She keeps her heart open, too, writing both about the emotions and the thoughts inspired by art portraying cruelty. If you enjoy aristic, cultural, or literary criticism, this book may appeal to you, as Nelson holds nothing back in her pursuit for what cruelty has - and does not have - to offer us.
I lower my rating of The Art of Cruelty because I got lost in her writing sometimes. This in part falls on my shoulders because I did not recognize many of her allusions. However, Nelson throws out so many references on top of one another that her own voice gets submerged in the mix on occasion. i wanted more coherent and collected synthesis as opposed to an onslaught of artists and their works. Though Nelson aims to raise questions instead of providing answers, I still wish she had come down with a more thorough argument in some chapters of this book.
Overall, a fascinating and difficult book that will make you more aware of and thoughtful toward the cruelty and violence so common in our culture. You may not walk away from this book feeling any better, but you will have gotten smarter, more woke, and more uncomfortable. And that may just be what we need more of in this world.
A thorough, disturbing, and intelligent book about cruelty and how we interact with it today. Maggie Nelson addresses an ambitious set of questions: with so many images of war, torture, and horror available to us, how do we best process such media to motivate us to act? Why do we draw such pleasure from gory video games and humiliating reality television shows? How do we separate cruelty and violence - and can cruelty coexist with love? Nelson alludes to a plethora of performance artists, philosophers, writers, sculptors, and filmmakers in The Art of Cruelty, ranging from Antonin Artaund to Susan Sontag to Yoko Ono and many more. Instead of delivering any kind of final verdict about cruelty, Nelson cleaves out space for the many complexities that come with it, urging us to examine cruelty with a critical and nuanced lens.
Nelson has such a fierce brain. Her intellect pulsed through these pages. Whether she wrote about how "the mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism... characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity," the awful and misogynistic ways society glorifies female victimhood, or the difference between witnessing cruelty on the page vs. on the screen, her analysis delved deep enough to pull insight even from the most nauseating of subjects. She keeps her heart open, too, writing both about the emotions and the thoughts inspired by art portraying cruelty. If you enjoy aristic, cultural, or literary criticism, this book may appeal to you, as Nelson holds nothing back in her pursuit for what cruelty has - and does not have - to offer us.
I lower my rating of The Art of Cruelty because I got lost in her writing sometimes. This in part falls on my shoulders because I did not recognize many of her allusions. However, Nelson throws out so many references on top of one another that her own voice gets submerged in the mix on occasion. i wanted more coherent and collected synthesis as opposed to an onslaught of artists and their works. Though Nelson aims to raise questions instead of providing answers, I still wish she had come down with a more thorough argument in some chapters of this book.
Overall, a fascinating and difficult book that will make you more aware of and thoughtful toward the cruelty and violence so common in our culture. You may not walk away from this book feeling any better, but you will have gotten smarter, more woke, and more uncomfortable. And that may just be what we need more of in this world.
June 14, 2017
I've become more and more caught by social cruelty in recent years - stopped short, eyes blinking, "You're kidding me, right?" caught by it - and I think this is because I'm growing older. I just have this tendency to imagine, in an incredibly solipsistic way, that everyone's maturing with me. That we're all in this together. That as the years pass we're all having (not the same but) similar experiences, learning similar lessons, absorbing similar outlooks on the realities of this life-thing, and so it always shocks me when I come across someone who's doing some genuinely thoughtless sort of damage to another human being. Really base, stupid sort of stuff that's not going to result in more than the briefest instant of one-upsmanship. It's often of the wink-wink, nudge-nudge variety that leaves its object slumped in shame and me, unwittingly drafted as a witness, cringing beneath the onslaught of an entirely disproportionate amount of empathy and rage. (Disproportionate to the act, completely proportionate to the senselessness.) I'm tired of this, worn out by it, feel pretty powerless against it, and so a thought-filled book titled The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning is going to have a certain appeal.
Maggie Nelson, a poet and teacher, takes on the subject of cruelty (and violence and brutality) as they appear in art, film, photography, cyberspace, fiction, theater, culture and pornography. For those unfamiliar with criticism, this is not a lecture or a diatribe. It's the separation and examination of a series of stock ideas and rationales. It's the creation of an intellectual space within which one can better think about these elements of existence. What purpose do they serve? What do they mean? What can I learn here, and how can that help me to better understand the reactions they engender? Nelson opens her mind and dumps the contents out with no further intent than to ponder, process and connect.
Topics touched upon include artistic violence as catharsis, as confrontation, as distraction; censorship vs. engaged withdrawal; the difference between truth and fact, spirituality and knowledge; denial, repression, power and control. Time is spent with Aristotle and Freud, Plath, Sontag, Didion, Warhol, Artaud, Francis Bacon, the Marquis de Sade, Wittgenstein, Kafka and many more. Much avails itself to quotage. Here's a section I liked on honesty:
For not all frankness is created equal. "Brutal honesty" is honesty that either aims to hurt someone or doesn't care if it does. ("No one wants to be friends with you." "You smell bad." "You've always been less attractive than your sister." "I never loved you.") While the words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see "brutal honesty" not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn't necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it - something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.
Nelson succeeds on many levels with this work. There were certain references that overshot my experience - especially concerning performance art - but they passed quickly as the focus realigned. (And I should include a warning here. The material on pornography is graphic, to my eye understandably so, yet those with heightened sensibilities might take heed.) Be assured, though, the majority of the provocation is intellectual. If you're ready to expand your mind; agree, disagree, accept, reject and reassess the subject of cruelty - this is the place to go.
Maggie Nelson, a poet and teacher, takes on the subject of cruelty (and violence and brutality) as they appear in art, film, photography, cyberspace, fiction, theater, culture and pornography. For those unfamiliar with criticism, this is not a lecture or a diatribe. It's the separation and examination of a series of stock ideas and rationales. It's the creation of an intellectual space within which one can better think about these elements of existence. What purpose do they serve? What do they mean? What can I learn here, and how can that help me to better understand the reactions they engender? Nelson opens her mind and dumps the contents out with no further intent than to ponder, process and connect.
Topics touched upon include artistic violence as catharsis, as confrontation, as distraction; censorship vs. engaged withdrawal; the difference between truth and fact, spirituality and knowledge; denial, repression, power and control. Time is spent with Aristotle and Freud, Plath, Sontag, Didion, Warhol, Artaud, Francis Bacon, the Marquis de Sade, Wittgenstein, Kafka and many more. Much avails itself to quotage. Here's a section I liked on honesty:
For not all frankness is created equal. "Brutal honesty" is honesty that either aims to hurt someone or doesn't care if it does. ("No one wants to be friends with you." "You smell bad." "You've always been less attractive than your sister." "I never loved you.") While the words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see "brutal honesty" not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn't necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it - something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.
Nelson succeeds on many levels with this work. There were certain references that overshot my experience - especially concerning performance art - but they passed quickly as the focus realigned. (And I should include a warning here. The material on pornography is graphic, to my eye understandably so, yet those with heightened sensibilities might take heed.) Be assured, though, the majority of the provocation is intellectual. If you're ready to expand your mind; agree, disagree, accept, reject and reassess the subject of cruelty - this is the place to go.
February 9, 2023
I was excited to read this book after reading the laudatory review on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, but honestly I found "The Art Of Cruelty" a bit of a disappointment. In part this is due to the fact that I was most interested in reading a critique of cruelty as it is manifested in contemporary visual and performance art, and it turns out the focus of this work is much broader. This is a very personal, subjective work of criticism, most heavily informed by the author's obvious affinity for Buddhist thought and old-school feminism. It is also takes a rather scattershot approach to the subject, leaping from literature to drama, to film. to art, but frustratingly focusing on only a very limited number of artists while ignoring some of the most relevant subjects for such an inquiry.
Francis Bacon is central to her analysis of the visual arts, her touchstone throughout; the work of Paul McCarthy, Chris Burden, Diane Arbus, Yoko Ono, Marina Abromovic and Karen Finley are also briefly addressed. But there isn't a single mention of Bruce Nauman, whose aggressive and often clausterphobic phenomenological work arguably is the most relevant to her subject. The list of artists and writers she addresses are mostly women, and one senses that rather than thoroughly researching her subject and writing on the most appropriate exemplars of her theme, she instead largely sticks to the comfort zone of those women artists with which she is already most familiar. To a large extent she also facilely equates 'cruelty' with 'violence' (particularly violence towards women), skewing the balance of her whole analysis and ignoring some of the subtlest and best work out there.
Beyond visual and performance art, of course Artaud is here, as is Sylvia Plath; refreshingly (and aptly) so is Ivy Compton-Burnett. A few pithy points are made. But overall there is little cohesion and no real development of any central argument. In closing, Nelson finally presents something of a thesis, almost as an afterthought; it's something along the obvious lines of "the employment of cruelty in art is justified if it is socially redeeming/enlightening and does not just add to humankind's natural state of suffering". For this reader at least, it's just not that simple.
Francis Bacon is central to her analysis of the visual arts, her touchstone throughout; the work of Paul McCarthy, Chris Burden, Diane Arbus, Yoko Ono, Marina Abromovic and Karen Finley are also briefly addressed. But there isn't a single mention of Bruce Nauman, whose aggressive and often clausterphobic phenomenological work arguably is the most relevant to her subject. The list of artists and writers she addresses are mostly women, and one senses that rather than thoroughly researching her subject and writing on the most appropriate exemplars of her theme, she instead largely sticks to the comfort zone of those women artists with which she is already most familiar. To a large extent she also facilely equates 'cruelty' with 'violence' (particularly violence towards women), skewing the balance of her whole analysis and ignoring some of the subtlest and best work out there.
Beyond visual and performance art, of course Artaud is here, as is Sylvia Plath; refreshingly (and aptly) so is Ivy Compton-Burnett. A few pithy points are made. But overall there is little cohesion and no real development of any central argument. In closing, Nelson finally presents something of a thesis, almost as an afterthought; it's something along the obvious lines of "the employment of cruelty in art is justified if it is socially redeeming/enlightening and does not just add to humankind's natural state of suffering". For this reader at least, it's just not that simple.
April 28, 2016
REVIEW
Maggie Nelson has become one of my favorite writers: intelligent, with beautiful prose written with precision, personal yet always aware and tending to the larger picture. To review a work such as The Art of Cruelty is a daunting effort. The book is extremely complex and dense. It examines what art is as much as the role of cruelty in art (and, sometimes, in life).
The catalogue of painters, sculptors, performance artists, filmmakers, philosophers, and writers is intimidating and impossible to justice to. Of course, Antonin Artaud, with his Theater of Cruelty, and the Marquis de Sade are here but also Susan Sontag, Sylvia Plath, and Henry James. Performance artists such as Nao Bustamente, Karen Finley, Yoko Ono, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, and Marina Abramovi’c, are all examined. The list of quotes I jotted down is almost as long as any review I could write would be).
That being said, I think what this book gave to me was the interest in exploring what makes us uncomfortable, what is unsettling (although not necessarily violent). Nelson writes, “…an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level.” P.28 “…it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet…” p.28 sums up how I feel about this book and the sense that only through multiple readings would I get a better sense of what it is about.
Nelson’s focus (as the title implies) is on the use of cruelty in art (in its broad sense of the visual arts, literature, performance art, theater) but she also makes connection to life in the “real” world, including Puritanism and Abu Grahaib and the use of torture. She questions whether cruelty in life or art is cathartic, if in fact such a thing as “catharsis” exists. She questions the value of cruelty as an end in itself, as an expression of some ultimate truth about either humanity or art.
Representations of cruelty may move us but, as Susan Sontag pointed out, not necessarily to action. “Literature is not self-help” (p.127). Violence can become a kind of porn that leads to nothing beyond itself (or worse). “Cruelty bears an intimate relationship to stupidity as well as to intelligence, and I am not interested in stupid cruelty….” (P. 124)
There is no simple understanding of what cruelty means or accomplishes. “By virtue of its being multiply sourced, art cannot help but offer up multiple truths.” (p.117) Always, Nelson seems to come down on the side of complexity. I was not always clear about her own stance vis-à-vis cruelty, other than she seems to dislike it as an expression of some ultimate truth or artistic summation of human experience. Yet she seems obsessed with the work of Francis Bacon, whose painting are saturated in blood and violence (she devotes a great deal of space to the reduction of the body, in various artists including Bacon, to “meat”-but she does spend a great deal of space on it).
Nelson examines the way artists have used cruelty, explicitly or implicitly. Yoko Ono with her performance work “Cut Piece” or Marina Abramovi’c with her “Rhythm O” both leave themselves vulnerable with instruments of violence (a scissors in Ono’s case, a gun in Abramavi’c’s) at the disposal of a participatory audience. With these pieces, an others, Nelson also examines the 1) use of the female body and its history of victimization and 2) the complex issue of consent in violence.
I seem to have side-stepped a lot of Nelson’s examinations of more brutal work. I suppose one of the strengths of this book is that it has many points of entry for the reader and many paths to wander along. She certainly spends a great deal of space discussing art works of great gore, although I find her exploration of the violence in Plath’s poetry of more interest to me personally. However, she does make a case for withstanding the discomfort in cruelty to see where it takes you. On the other hand, she writes of the exhilarating feeling of walking out on something or closing the book on something or just turning away for something that feels (as one complainant puts it) “too poisonous to ingest” without any salutary benefit.
I think Nelson left me with what Henry James called “the right degree of bewilderment” (p.198), not sure where Nelson stands on the overall topic of cruelty. She writes about a particular work “I like it…because it bothers me, and I’m not sure why….it places us in the ‘lived moment of contraries where we all have to deal.’ I’m not sure where this is, but I’m glad to be here.” (pp.183-183) Which is how The Art of Cruelty left me: not exactly sure where I was, bothered by a lot of what I had read, but definitely glad to be there.
Maggie Nelson has become one of my favorite writers: intelligent, with beautiful prose written with precision, personal yet always aware and tending to the larger picture. To review a work such as The Art of Cruelty is a daunting effort. The book is extremely complex and dense. It examines what art is as much as the role of cruelty in art (and, sometimes, in life).
The catalogue of painters, sculptors, performance artists, filmmakers, philosophers, and writers is intimidating and impossible to justice to. Of course, Antonin Artaud, with his Theater of Cruelty, and the Marquis de Sade are here but also Susan Sontag, Sylvia Plath, and Henry James. Performance artists such as Nao Bustamente, Karen Finley, Yoko Ono, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, and Marina Abramovi’c, are all examined. The list of quotes I jotted down is almost as long as any review I could write would be).
That being said, I think what this book gave to me was the interest in exploring what makes us uncomfortable, what is unsettling (although not necessarily violent). Nelson writes, “…an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level.” P.28 “…it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet…” p.28 sums up how I feel about this book and the sense that only through multiple readings would I get a better sense of what it is about.
Nelson’s focus (as the title implies) is on the use of cruelty in art (in its broad sense of the visual arts, literature, performance art, theater) but she also makes connection to life in the “real” world, including Puritanism and Abu Grahaib and the use of torture. She questions whether cruelty in life or art is cathartic, if in fact such a thing as “catharsis” exists. She questions the value of cruelty as an end in itself, as an expression of some ultimate truth about either humanity or art.
Representations of cruelty may move us but, as Susan Sontag pointed out, not necessarily to action. “Literature is not self-help” (p.127). Violence can become a kind of porn that leads to nothing beyond itself (or worse). “Cruelty bears an intimate relationship to stupidity as well as to intelligence, and I am not interested in stupid cruelty….” (P. 124)
There is no simple understanding of what cruelty means or accomplishes. “By virtue of its being multiply sourced, art cannot help but offer up multiple truths.” (p.117) Always, Nelson seems to come down on the side of complexity. I was not always clear about her own stance vis-à-vis cruelty, other than she seems to dislike it as an expression of some ultimate truth or artistic summation of human experience. Yet she seems obsessed with the work of Francis Bacon, whose painting are saturated in blood and violence (she devotes a great deal of space to the reduction of the body, in various artists including Bacon, to “meat”-but she does spend a great deal of space on it).
Nelson examines the way artists have used cruelty, explicitly or implicitly. Yoko Ono with her performance work “Cut Piece” or Marina Abramovi’c with her “Rhythm O” both leave themselves vulnerable with instruments of violence (a scissors in Ono’s case, a gun in Abramavi’c’s) at the disposal of a participatory audience. With these pieces, an others, Nelson also examines the 1) use of the female body and its history of victimization and 2) the complex issue of consent in violence.
I seem to have side-stepped a lot of Nelson’s examinations of more brutal work. I suppose one of the strengths of this book is that it has many points of entry for the reader and many paths to wander along. She certainly spends a great deal of space discussing art works of great gore, although I find her exploration of the violence in Plath’s poetry of more interest to me personally. However, she does make a case for withstanding the discomfort in cruelty to see where it takes you. On the other hand, she writes of the exhilarating feeling of walking out on something or closing the book on something or just turning away for something that feels (as one complainant puts it) “too poisonous to ingest” without any salutary benefit.
I think Nelson left me with what Henry James called “the right degree of bewilderment” (p.198), not sure where Nelson stands on the overall topic of cruelty. She writes about a particular work “I like it…because it bothers me, and I’m not sure why….it places us in the ‘lived moment of contraries where we all have to deal.’ I’m not sure where this is, but I’m glad to be here.” (pp.183-183) Which is how The Art of Cruelty left me: not exactly sure where I was, bothered by a lot of what I had read, but definitely glad to be there.
May 31, 2016
Sharp, well-thought-out, relevant survey of cruelty in 20th century art, centering loosely on Artaud and engaging with questions of artistic obligations w/r/t torture, pain, and brutality. Nelson has a bad habit of over-praising her source material (everything is either "justly famous" or "iconic" or "important" and often they are NONE of these things) that became more grating as I read on, and also has a frustrating fixation on a couple of figures (Francis Bacon, Brian Evenson) who never quite hold the water that she's hoping for. But other sections, like the one on Chris Burden, are illuminating and the more personal the book gets, the better it is. Her experiences with her own students were particularly strong.
August 5, 2011
I am profoundly more knowledgeable and disturbed since reading this book. Highly recommended.
January 30, 2019
There is a lot to ponder here. I wish it had been more logically ordered. Nelson moves among genres--theater, art, performance art, found art, pornography, novel, poetry, photography, art criticism--in a nondiscriminatory way. I frequently had trouble seeing the synthesis she evidently saw in her wish to discuss together representations of documented, actual cruelty (Abu Ghraib) vs. staged artful cruelty (for example, Yoko Ono's performance art, "Cut Piece"). In this way Nelson's work differs markedly from Susan Sontag's remarkable Regarding the Pain of Others, which laser-focused on the problem of our response to photography that depicts actual, terrible acts.
Also, I wish Nelson had spent more time discussing when the art of cruelty claims veracity and instruction as its reason to exist. Sometimes the examples of cruelty in the works I'm thinking of are so graphic and detailed and exhaustive that I wonder when they become exploitative rather than instructive. In spite of the existence of the dismissive label of "victim art" for these works, it also seems to be important to the audience that the artist has actually been a victim--otherwise the work might be deemed less authentic or genuinely exploitative. If you have been a victim of such acts then your work is absolved from being called exploitative and is called "true" and "brave" instead. I'm not sure if "I experienced it" works as an aesthetic or moral argument for judging art--it seems that the art object or novel or poem should stand on its own. Nelson does discuss works in this category of "cruel" but her argument is diluted by the scope of her examples.
Also, I wish Nelson had spent more time discussing when the art of cruelty claims veracity and instruction as its reason to exist. Sometimes the examples of cruelty in the works I'm thinking of are so graphic and detailed and exhaustive that I wonder when they become exploitative rather than instructive. In spite of the existence of the dismissive label of "victim art" for these works, it also seems to be important to the audience that the artist has actually been a victim--otherwise the work might be deemed less authentic or genuinely exploitative. If you have been a victim of such acts then your work is absolved from being called exploitative and is called "true" and "brave" instead. I'm not sure if "I experienced it" works as an aesthetic or moral argument for judging art--it seems that the art object or novel or poem should stand on its own. Nelson does discuss works in this category of "cruel" but her argument is diluted by the scope of her examples.
March 7, 2012
i'm a little biased in this rating, because the art of cruelty is pretty much custom-made for me. nelson's obsessions - violence, empathy, representation, gender, horror, community, politics - are virtually identical to my own. she likes a lot of the same art as me too (ana mendieta, william pope l., paul mc carthy) - and even hates some of the same stuff (funny games, for example). in addition, she writes in a personal, theoretical-but-accessible style not unlike rebecca solnit or susan sontag that i also find irresistible. there was pretty much no way i was giving this less than 5 stars, haha...
beyond all that, this is a deeply personal look at images/representations of violence. accordingly, there are big name people that never show up in the analysis, as well as some idiosyncratic digressions that reflect the author's interests. so if you're looking for a rigidly arranged analysis of contemporary culture, you might find yourself disappointed by the digressions into eastern spirituality or the fact that yoko ono shows up more often than francisco goya as the subject of analysis. i found all this refreshing. nelson realizes that "cruelty" is too immense a subject to cover with any kind of grand authority, so she gets right to the work she really has something to say about. she jettisons a lot of crapola along the way too - i can't tell you how happy it makes me that this book does NOT include a few token pages about the chapman brothers.
beyond all that, this is a deeply personal look at images/representations of violence. accordingly, there are big name people that never show up in the analysis, as well as some idiosyncratic digressions that reflect the author's interests. so if you're looking for a rigidly arranged analysis of contemporary culture, you might find yourself disappointed by the digressions into eastern spirituality or the fact that yoko ono shows up more often than francisco goya as the subject of analysis. i found all this refreshing. nelson realizes that "cruelty" is too immense a subject to cover with any kind of grand authority, so she gets right to the work she really has something to say about. she jettisons a lot of crapola along the way too - i can't tell you how happy it makes me that this book does NOT include a few token pages about the chapman brothers.
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June 22, 2022My frustration with Maggie Nelson is highlighted more than ever in this book, she is SO trapped within academia and every time she gets even a little bit close to confronting that, she just recedes back into it. This book is incredibly inaccessible unless you've spent a significant amount of time reading within the academic institution's rigid, unrelenting canon. Her argument in this book, which isn't at all really CLEAR at any point, is completely entrenched in "how many obscure niche performance artists and literary theorists can I name drop?"
July 30, 2017
In this collection of essays, Maggie Nelson looks at the role of cruelty and violence in art and poses ethical questions surrounding that topic. Her examples take in fine art, poetry, performance art, dance, film, photography and television and her criticism has a feminist and Buddhist slant. These essays certainly gave food for thought but I didn't enjoy this book as much as the other of hers I have read and loved (The Argonauts). At times, I found this one slightly rambling and repetitive.
February 3, 2026
A critical exploration of how violence and cruelty are represented across art, film, and literature. Nelson discusses the nature of voyeurism, examining the thin ethical line between acting as a witness to suffering and simply becoming a consumer of it. And that line is very thin; modern society teaches us to approach everything through the lens of consumption. Even now, as I review this book among a hundred others I'll read this year, what am I really doing? I'm working through an endless to-read list, posting my successes on a platform designed for volume, where books are merely content to fill the void. In our daily lives, there's so much more of everything—entertainment, books, products, news, emotions, opinions—and this has fundamentally changed how we interact with art.
Nelson understands this. Our consumerist mindset is exactly why shock value in art has lost its edge. She challenges that old-school, avant-garde belief that exposing an audience to brutal imagery will inevitably lead to some kind of moral/spiritual awakening. Come on, it's 2026—that theory is beyond antiquated. We have become too desensitized by horrors on the news for any gallery piece or work of art to cause a massive revelation amongst society.
Nelson goes on to make an interesting point about art: that our obsession with feeling the experience others can actually be a form of narcissism. By trying to inhabit someone else's pain, we often end up making their suffering about our own emotional experience. We live in a culture that demands reaction; we are told we must either love or hate, and neutrality is unforgivable.
Nelson disagrees. She argues for becoming a neutral observer, to possess the ability to not engage. This can be tool for preserving our sanity and autonomy in a world that uses cruelty to hijack our attention. It is a refusal to be emotionally overwhelmed by every nightmare we see in the news. We are constantly bombarded by political events, real life suffering. I would agree that this kind of detached observation (that draws parallels to Buddhism) is more relevant than ever.
Nelson understands this. Our consumerist mindset is exactly why shock value in art has lost its edge. She challenges that old-school, avant-garde belief that exposing an audience to brutal imagery will inevitably lead to some kind of moral/spiritual awakening. Come on, it's 2026—that theory is beyond antiquated. We have become too desensitized by horrors on the news for any gallery piece or work of art to cause a massive revelation amongst society.
Nelson goes on to make an interesting point about art: that our obsession with feeling the experience others can actually be a form of narcissism. By trying to inhabit someone else's pain, we often end up making their suffering about our own emotional experience. We live in a culture that demands reaction; we are told we must either love or hate, and neutrality is unforgivable.
Nelson disagrees. She argues for becoming a neutral observer, to possess the ability to not engage. This can be tool for preserving our sanity and autonomy in a world that uses cruelty to hijack our attention. It is a refusal to be emotionally overwhelmed by every nightmare we see in the news. We are constantly bombarded by political events, real life suffering. I would agree that this kind of detached observation (that draws parallels to Buddhism) is more relevant than ever.
January 22, 2016
i really enjoyed this -- tho 1 part im confused abt / take issue with. she talks about "daddy" where plath compares the doings of her father to those of the nazi regime, and addresses the indignation of jewish critics re: this poem, and while she makes an interesting point that plath wasn't necessarily drawing equivalencies (tho maggie nelson doesnt offer any alternatives), her ultimate point asks, "And why ring the 'appropriateness' alarm, when the injunction to behave appropriately--as both Plath and Walker know well--is but a death knell for art-making, especially for women?" but there is, or at least should be, a distinction between pushing the boundaries of 'art-making' and disregarding deeply personal / painful histories.
she also compares this to one of black artist kara walker's pieces in which she states "all black people in america want to be slaves a little bit", in an attempt to equate + categorize both under the same label of 'boundary-pushing'. maybe these 2 works do question what's 'appropriate' in art - but nelson forgets that the two artists are approaching this from completely different realities. who is nelson, as a white woman, to police walker's usage of her own black history in her own art? and who is nelson, as a non-jewish person, to devalue jewish responses to abuses of their own history by other people (by plath)?
and then 20 pages later nelson is saying about jenny holzer's "lustmord", it "could easily be accused of 'vicarious possession,' artist Adrian Piper's term for the 'inappropriate level of imaginative involvement' that characterizes the attempt to speak for others, especially others who have been deprived of the right to speak for themselves." she also mentions another aspect that's "politically rotten" about holzer's piece -- "the fear--or the conviction--that certain consciousnesses or hearts or events should not be rendered poetically" which then im going to ask, isnt that a death-knell for art-making, and werent u just trying to speak over / for jewish ppl and black ppl respectively. this probabbly doesnt make sense its 1am im tired. i want 2 add onto this later bc this bothers me a lot. i dont think nelson can ever understand Other Peoples' erasure / flippant uses of a very violent part of ur ethnic / racial / religious past. im still giving this 5 stars tho cos the rest of this i loved enough 2 make up for it
she also compares this to one of black artist kara walker's pieces in which she states "all black people in america want to be slaves a little bit", in an attempt to equate + categorize both under the same label of 'boundary-pushing'. maybe these 2 works do question what's 'appropriate' in art - but nelson forgets that the two artists are approaching this from completely different realities. who is nelson, as a white woman, to police walker's usage of her own black history in her own art? and who is nelson, as a non-jewish person, to devalue jewish responses to abuses of their own history by other people (by plath)?
and then 20 pages later nelson is saying about jenny holzer's "lustmord", it "could easily be accused of 'vicarious possession,' artist Adrian Piper's term for the 'inappropriate level of imaginative involvement' that characterizes the attempt to speak for others, especially others who have been deprived of the right to speak for themselves." she also mentions another aspect that's "politically rotten" about holzer's piece -- "the fear--or the conviction--that certain consciousnesses or hearts or events should not be rendered poetically" which then im going to ask, isnt that a death-knell for art-making, and werent u just trying to speak over / for jewish ppl and black ppl respectively. this probabbly doesnt make sense its 1am im tired. i want 2 add onto this later bc this bothers me a lot. i dont think nelson can ever understand Other Peoples' erasure / flippant uses of a very violent part of ur ethnic / racial / religious past. im still giving this 5 stars tho cos the rest of this i loved enough 2 make up for it
February 26, 2014
Maggie Nelson writes:
Even if and when Santiago Sierra’s diagnoses are spot-on, the pity he has expressed toward his subjects gives me pause, and evaporates whatever interest in the work I might have otherwise been able to muster. For this pity doesn’t just stand behind the scenes; it also structures the forms of the artwork at hand. As he told the BBC about 10 people paid to masturbate, “Nobody said no and for me that was very tough. When I made this piece I would go to bed crying.” It’s one thing to set up situations that aim to alert the world – even if just the art world – to the bad news of radical exploitation, even if one feels the lamentable need to exploit others to make one’s point. It’s quite another to decide in advance on the terms of human dignity (i.e., that a willingness to film oneself jerking off for money signifies that you have none), set up situations which prove (to you) that someone is utterly debased, then weep over the fulfillment of your puritanical prognostication.
Even if and when Santiago Sierra’s diagnoses are spot-on, the pity he has expressed toward his subjects gives me pause, and evaporates whatever interest in the work I might have otherwise been able to muster. For this pity doesn’t just stand behind the scenes; it also structures the forms of the artwork at hand. As he told the BBC about 10 people paid to masturbate, “Nobody said no and for me that was very tough. When I made this piece I would go to bed crying.” It’s one thing to set up situations that aim to alert the world – even if just the art world – to the bad news of radical exploitation, even if one feels the lamentable need to exploit others to make one’s point. It’s quite another to decide in advance on the terms of human dignity (i.e., that a willingness to film oneself jerking off for money signifies that you have none), set up situations which prove (to you) that someone is utterly debased, then weep over the fulfillment of your puritanical prognostication.
March 19, 2020
Remember in college when you had to bullshit an essay so you would spend verbose passages loosely linking together an almost arbitrary selection of sources without really saying anything overall, just kinda vaguely commenting throughout and hoping that you could claim some sort of thesis by the end?
January 6, 2022
The kind of inaccessible high-modernist academic theorising that could cozily co-exist with a fascist world, despite its liberal bleating. A book that fascists would not be bothered to burn.
February 5, 2013
This was incredibly eye-opening, but a little flawed.
It was so satisfying to have someone take on the old avant garde tactic of "shock the audience out of their complacency" with skepticism. Nelson takes it as her premise that art that explores/practices cruelty typically uses this as its justification, and she roundly critiques it. Dismantles it, really: with many many examples from visual art, performance/body art, writing, film and more, she is able to dissect effective and interesting uses of cruelty as a tactic versus completely gratuitous ones. And all with very human anecdotes of her own life and perspective and experience of these works: one memorable example was her experience of watching an Elizabeth Streb performance right on the heels of a friend becoming paralyzed in a bike accident. I also appreciated references to her students' work at CalArts and their problematic uses of cruelty and violence.
Not so long ago I was one of those students making work from the perspective of that tautology - that cruelty is justified by the audience's presupposed condition of needing (read: deserving) it. To the end of reaching some higher plane of enlightenment or agency. I now am much more sensitive to the fact that it's often just an oppositional stance to hide weak work behind; and much, much more interested in an empathetic relationship to audience. It is a self-negating principle. As Nelson states: "The most interesting of this work--past, present, or future--is or will be that which dismantles, boycotts, ignores, destroys, takes liberties with, or at least pokes fun at the avant-garde's long commitment to the idea that the shocks produced by cruelty and violence--be it in art or in political action--might deliver us, through some never-proven miracle, to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative, and just way of inhabiting the earth, and of relating to our fellow human beings. For as Arendt puts it succintly in On Violence, 'The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.'"
I would give this about 4.5 stars for a few shortcomings: One was that I sortof expected a conclusion that tied together all her observations, but the book was more about deconstructing themes and foci of cruelty (chapters on the face, body-as-meat, etc), than about reaching a net result. I also thought "Cruelty" itself was an ill-defined term, for all her exploration, and could have used a concrete definition as a starting point.
It was so satisfying to have someone take on the old avant garde tactic of "shock the audience out of their complacency" with skepticism. Nelson takes it as her premise that art that explores/practices cruelty typically uses this as its justification, and she roundly critiques it. Dismantles it, really: with many many examples from visual art, performance/body art, writing, film and more, she is able to dissect effective and interesting uses of cruelty as a tactic versus completely gratuitous ones. And all with very human anecdotes of her own life and perspective and experience of these works: one memorable example was her experience of watching an Elizabeth Streb performance right on the heels of a friend becoming paralyzed in a bike accident. I also appreciated references to her students' work at CalArts and their problematic uses of cruelty and violence.
Not so long ago I was one of those students making work from the perspective of that tautology - that cruelty is justified by the audience's presupposed condition of needing (read: deserving) it. To the end of reaching some higher plane of enlightenment or agency. I now am much more sensitive to the fact that it's often just an oppositional stance to hide weak work behind; and much, much more interested in an empathetic relationship to audience. It is a self-negating principle. As Nelson states: "The most interesting of this work--past, present, or future--is or will be that which dismantles, boycotts, ignores, destroys, takes liberties with, or at least pokes fun at the avant-garde's long commitment to the idea that the shocks produced by cruelty and violence--be it in art or in political action--might deliver us, through some never-proven miracle, to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative, and just way of inhabiting the earth, and of relating to our fellow human beings. For as Arendt puts it succintly in On Violence, 'The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.'"
I would give this about 4.5 stars for a few shortcomings: One was that I sortof expected a conclusion that tied together all her observations, but the book was more about deconstructing themes and foci of cruelty (chapters on the face, body-as-meat, etc), than about reaching a net result. I also thought "Cruelty" itself was an ill-defined term, for all her exploration, and could have used a concrete definition as a starting point.
Read
October 25, 2017“While the two words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see “brutal honesty” not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn’t necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it—something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.”
Mind is in a tangle but this was brilliant. Review to come. Maybe.
“So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world’s most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn’t even begin to engage art’s most exciting provinces.”
“Writing hasn’t changed a thing; when the writer puts down the pen, no matter how lucid or brutally honest his insights may have been, it is back to business as usual, which means, in this case, shooting up. This is depressing, but its honesty heartens me. It disallows the delusion that the act of writing necessarily connects us to humanity, that it will help us quit noxious substances, that it will restore us to love lost, or at least serve as a consolation. Literature is not, after all, self-help.”
Mind is in a tangle but this was brilliant. Review to come. Maybe.
“So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world’s most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn’t even begin to engage art’s most exciting provinces.”
“Writing hasn’t changed a thing; when the writer puts down the pen, no matter how lucid or brutally honest his insights may have been, it is back to business as usual, which means, in this case, shooting up. This is depressing, but its honesty heartens me. It disallows the delusion that the act of writing necessarily connects us to humanity, that it will help us quit noxious substances, that it will restore us to love lost, or at least serve as a consolation. Literature is not, after all, self-help.”
May 14, 2022
Sometimes I cringe a little when reading Maggie Nelson because she is so relentlessly politically correct, and she is so caught up in the mindset of Poststructuralism. She has a tendency to use jargon words from academia like "binary" and "precariousness" that irk me, but she is such a good writer, is so smart, has such a broad cultural perspective and has such good insights into the making and appreciation of all forms of artistic expression that a few pages after each cringe, all is forgiven and I'm back to loving her every word.
In this book she poses many questions about the place of cruelty and truth in art. How far is too far in the portrayal of cruelty? When is it exploitative? When is it legitimate as an expression of an artistic point of view or a social purpose? Is it legitimate to use it shock us? Where do you draw the line between legitimate art and mere exploitation? Or can you draw the line? Or is there a line at all? Ms. Nelson has points of view on all of this, but very little is offered up in the way of final answers. She mostly leaves it to the us to draw our own conclusions within the general framework that she establishes. I liked that about the book because in dealing with this subject, it is very easy to fall into smugness or to take a lecturing tone.
My main issue with this book is that it feels a bit out of date or at least incomplete. In the wake of President Trump, fake news, QAnon, the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the recent developments on the front of reproductive rights and all of the other craziness of the past few years, I don't think that any of us can look at cruelty or truth in the same way that we once did. There is a new tendency on all sides of the social and political spectrum to see issues of cruelty and truth in a new way that affects our perceptions of both art and reality. I'd love to see Ms. Nelson deal with these issues in a follow up book or a new edition of this book that would, I think, materially alter the ways that she addresses some of the questions that she poses.
In this book she poses many questions about the place of cruelty and truth in art. How far is too far in the portrayal of cruelty? When is it exploitative? When is it legitimate as an expression of an artistic point of view or a social purpose? Is it legitimate to use it shock us? Where do you draw the line between legitimate art and mere exploitation? Or can you draw the line? Or is there a line at all? Ms. Nelson has points of view on all of this, but very little is offered up in the way of final answers. She mostly leaves it to the us to draw our own conclusions within the general framework that she establishes. I liked that about the book because in dealing with this subject, it is very easy to fall into smugness or to take a lecturing tone.
My main issue with this book is that it feels a bit out of date or at least incomplete. In the wake of President Trump, fake news, QAnon, the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the recent developments on the front of reproductive rights and all of the other craziness of the past few years, I don't think that any of us can look at cruelty or truth in the same way that we once did. There is a new tendency on all sides of the social and political spectrum to see issues of cruelty and truth in a new way that affects our perceptions of both art and reality. I'd love to see Ms. Nelson deal with these issues in a follow up book or a new edition of this book that would, I think, materially alter the ways that she addresses some of the questions that she poses.
September 3, 2011
I admire Maggie Nelson for the way she approaches her subject: art (painting, writing, cinema, dance, performance art) that either employs cruelty (to the art-maker or to the audience) or depicts it. She is curious, unafraid of being or seeming "too interested," yet at the same time ready to tell us when her ethics are offended or her gorge rises. It's true: much art either courts or skirts or revels in cruelty. Does that make it offensive or bad? Clearly Nelson doesn't think so, but she also doesn't think cruelty in art should get a free pass. She wants to know why certain acts or depictions affect us (or at least her) the way they do, why it might be worth viewing "cruel art," why certain works in this genre are powerful while others fail or even seem ridiculous. Among the artists she explores in some detail are Francis Bacon, Franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Brian Evenson, Lars von Trier, Kara Walker, Paul McCarthy (not McCartney--I kept misreading it!), Elizabeth Streb, Chris Burden, and Yoko Ono.
If I fault the book for anything, it's that it's so compacted--the book bears the mark of being written by a very careful thinker and writer, one who has gone over and over her prose so many times that all the fat is gone. Which oddly resulted (if I'm correct) in my not always being able to follow Nelson's train of thought. I needed a little more hand-holding, perhaps, since not all of the artists were familiar to me and Nelson's thinking is very nuanced. I probably will need to read the book again to take in all that it has to give.
If I fault the book for anything, it's that it's so compacted--the book bears the mark of being written by a very careful thinker and writer, one who has gone over and over her prose so many times that all the fat is gone. Which oddly resulted (if I'm correct) in my not always being able to follow Nelson's train of thought. I needed a little more hand-holding, perhaps, since not all of the artists were familiar to me and Nelson's thinking is very nuanced. I probably will need to read the book again to take in all that it has to give.
August 23, 2021
Okay. So. I hated this. And not in a "It was infuriating" way, just in a "Wow! This sucks" way. And that's harsh, I know. Maybe it isn't even fair at all - after all, I know very little about art or its critics, and this book clearly belongs to a discourse I'm wildly unfamiliar with. But that means very little to me, especially because it literally just isn't my job to be totally familiar with the discourse. No doubt I will reconsider, and perhaps some of Nelson's critiques might become more relevant as I learn more, but I don't think this fundamental impression will shift all that much.
Many of the reviews I've read of this book have followed this general pattern: "This book doesn't make many conclusions, but this is a good thing, because it opens up a discussion, introduces the reader to new art, and asks questions without attempting to solve them." I find that utterly ridiculous. If I wanted to be introduced to new art without someone else making conclusions for me about it, I'd just go to Wikipedia and scroll for hours. I am also not all that convinced by the common reviewer sentiment that "Even if the book doesn't say a lot, Nelson's exquisite writing kept me going". I didn't find her writing all that great (it kind of just felt like a combination of, say, Solnit with some academic. Which isn't a bad thing, but definitely not groundbreaking), and the only thing that kept me going to the end was the art itself. But that has very little to do with this book, and again, the same thing could be accomplished by a nice journey into Wikipedia.
Basically, this book says nothing. When it gets close to saying something, it pulls back, almost like it's afraid to make a conclusion (even a tentative one. Maybe not even a conclusion at all, but something on the way there!). And I understand that this may be part of the point; art might even be defined by the way it evades conclusion. But if you are going to write a book about cruelty in art, you might want to be prepared to make a claim about cruelty in art. Now, if you want to publish a series of diary entries or blog posts about your personal reactions to art, fine. But don't act like it's "A Reckoning".
Perhaps a significant reason for my vitriol comes from the weird apolitical and ahistorical nature of much of the book. That's not to say you have to adopt a historicist view of art at all, but to ignore the political, historical, and social dimensions of art is almost offensive. Nelson herself seems to be conscious of this, actually, and she does address it somewhat in the concluding chapters. But here, there's something even weirder than ignoring the historico-political. For at the end, when she finally decides to address politics, it is because she finally addresses black women - as if the only thing that is inherently political is blackness, womanhood, black womanhood. Why is it only the black woman dealing with slavery and personal trauma whose work draws the strongest, most lucid critique of narcissism in art? When Bacon, Warhol, and Artaud create, they are producing something autonomous, something worthy unto itself of critique (or, in Nelson's case, of admiration). But when Walker creates, her work is inextricably tied to her, or, to her black womanhood. It's perfectly legitimate to consider the creator in an analysis of the creation. But such a framework should then be applied universally. Otherwise we end up where we already are, where white men speak to all and everyone else must keep to themselves, for their work is too charged, too political, too specific to be universal.
In her discussion of Sierra, she says that "the artist has the power neither to restore nor to annihilate" the dignity of their subject (128). I find this ridiculous. Maybe the artist doesn't have that power (though I think they probably do), but the artist is a human being. Human beings do have that power, and to suggest that art exists outside of the human sphere even in a discussion of cruelty is almost appalling to me. But maybe the book can get by with that because it does not make conclusions. I would almost call that cowardly, especially when we are dealing with cruelty. All of this to say, art is not just between the creation and the viewer. It emerges out of a specific context, and it emerges into specific contexts, over and over again each time it is considered. To separate it from those contexts, to mention in passing Abu Ghraib as though it is aesthetically and politically analogous to women creating grotesque performance art is to me immensely cruel, and not in the way Nelson implies.
Where she does make points, and where this book is the strongest, is in regard to the violence against women's bodies. But I think these points are made better and more fiercely elsewhere (Machado's Her Body and Other Parties comes to mind), so they don't really redeem anything in my view. There is also a surprising lack of reference to queer and postcolonial criticisms (and, of course, black and BIPOC criticisms, though I don't know as much about those and do not feel prepared to comment on them in more detail). Edward Said, for example, has some interesting things to say when it comes to cultural production and cruelty, but perhaps Nelson's apolitical lens and (legitimate, though limiting) focus on bodily horror prevents her from engaging him.
TL;DR: At best this was boring, and at worst it was appalling.
Many of the reviews I've read of this book have followed this general pattern: "This book doesn't make many conclusions, but this is a good thing, because it opens up a discussion, introduces the reader to new art, and asks questions without attempting to solve them." I find that utterly ridiculous. If I wanted to be introduced to new art without someone else making conclusions for me about it, I'd just go to Wikipedia and scroll for hours. I am also not all that convinced by the common reviewer sentiment that "Even if the book doesn't say a lot, Nelson's exquisite writing kept me going". I didn't find her writing all that great (it kind of just felt like a combination of, say, Solnit with some academic. Which isn't a bad thing, but definitely not groundbreaking), and the only thing that kept me going to the end was the art itself. But that has very little to do with this book, and again, the same thing could be accomplished by a nice journey into Wikipedia.
Basically, this book says nothing. When it gets close to saying something, it pulls back, almost like it's afraid to make a conclusion (even a tentative one. Maybe not even a conclusion at all, but something on the way there!). And I understand that this may be part of the point; art might even be defined by the way it evades conclusion. But if you are going to write a book about cruelty in art, you might want to be prepared to make a claim about cruelty in art. Now, if you want to publish a series of diary entries or blog posts about your personal reactions to art, fine. But don't act like it's "A Reckoning".
Perhaps a significant reason for my vitriol comes from the weird apolitical and ahistorical nature of much of the book. That's not to say you have to adopt a historicist view of art at all, but to ignore the political, historical, and social dimensions of art is almost offensive. Nelson herself seems to be conscious of this, actually, and she does address it somewhat in the concluding chapters. But here, there's something even weirder than ignoring the historico-political. For at the end, when she finally decides to address politics, it is because she finally addresses black women - as if the only thing that is inherently political is blackness, womanhood, black womanhood. Why is it only the black woman dealing with slavery and personal trauma whose work draws the strongest, most lucid critique of narcissism in art? When Bacon, Warhol, and Artaud create, they are producing something autonomous, something worthy unto itself of critique (or, in Nelson's case, of admiration). But when Walker creates, her work is inextricably tied to her, or, to her black womanhood. It's perfectly legitimate to consider the creator in an analysis of the creation. But such a framework should then be applied universally. Otherwise we end up where we already are, where white men speak to all and everyone else must keep to themselves, for their work is too charged, too political, too specific to be universal.
In her discussion of Sierra, she says that "the artist has the power neither to restore nor to annihilate" the dignity of their subject (128). I find this ridiculous. Maybe the artist doesn't have that power (though I think they probably do), but the artist is a human being. Human beings do have that power, and to suggest that art exists outside of the human sphere even in a discussion of cruelty is almost appalling to me. But maybe the book can get by with that because it does not make conclusions. I would almost call that cowardly, especially when we are dealing with cruelty. All of this to say, art is not just between the creation and the viewer. It emerges out of a specific context, and it emerges into specific contexts, over and over again each time it is considered. To separate it from those contexts, to mention in passing Abu Ghraib as though it is aesthetically and politically analogous to women creating grotesque performance art is to me immensely cruel, and not in the way Nelson implies.
Where she does make points, and where this book is the strongest, is in regard to the violence against women's bodies. But I think these points are made better and more fiercely elsewhere (Machado's Her Body and Other Parties comes to mind), so they don't really redeem anything in my view. There is also a surprising lack of reference to queer and postcolonial criticisms (and, of course, black and BIPOC criticisms, though I don't know as much about those and do not feel prepared to comment on them in more detail). Edward Said, for example, has some interesting things to say when it comes to cultural production and cruelty, but perhaps Nelson's apolitical lens and (legitimate, though limiting) focus on bodily horror prevents her from engaging him.
TL;DR: At best this was boring, and at worst it was appalling.
October 11, 2024
Love Nelson’s framing of these discussions. Never too philosophical, never too bounded by claims of artist intentions or critical reception. Nelson’s prose is fluid, floating between the same few critical positions, always anchored on the question:
“What do we make of this body of art, of cruelty?”
Equally grounded in artistic practice and living, Nelson slowly and steadily argues that the answer to this question lies in the whole of all plural and conflicting dimensions in which cruelty becomes something else.
“What do we make of this body of art, of cruelty?”
Equally grounded in artistic practice and living, Nelson slowly and steadily argues that the answer to this question lies in the whole of all plural and conflicting dimensions in which cruelty becomes something else.
September 30, 2024
As someone who was unreasonably committed to living a harm free life, this book preached to my delighted choir.
I tried to see/read the art referenced, when it was sensible; I am scarred.
I tried to see/read the art referenced, when it was sensible; I am scarred.
May 7, 2017
I went into this book with certain expectations and finished it in a completely different place.
When Nelson titled her book "The Art of Cruelty" she emphasized the "art" part. The majority of the book discusses performance art and the nature of its interaction with us as spectators.
One example I found particularly thought provoking was her examination of Yoko Ono's performance of "Cut Piece", where Ono sits silently on the stage with a pair of scissors in front of her. The audience is free to come to the stage and use the scissors to cut pieces of her clothing if they choose. Watching this video on YouTube, it's clear that there is an initial reluctance to be cruel to her. Many cut tentatively or small pieces. Until the end where one man gleefully cuts off huge swaths of clothing, including her bra. Nelson asks, is this cruelty? Ono willingly participates, knowing this is likely to happen, and yet as a spectator we are still taken aback by the meanness of it.
Reading this book, I thought quite a bit about the dynamics of crueltynot only about the art world(which I knew little about but learned a great deal) but cruelty in our everyday lives and public discourse as well. This book can be dense and difficult to read at times but it's well worth the effort.
When Nelson titled her book "The Art of Cruelty" she emphasized the "art" part. The majority of the book discusses performance art and the nature of its interaction with us as spectators.
One example I found particularly thought provoking was her examination of Yoko Ono's performance of "Cut Piece", where Ono sits silently on the stage with a pair of scissors in front of her. The audience is free to come to the stage and use the scissors to cut pieces of her clothing if they choose. Watching this video on YouTube, it's clear that there is an initial reluctance to be cruel to her. Many cut tentatively or small pieces. Until the end where one man gleefully cuts off huge swaths of clothing, including her bra. Nelson asks, is this cruelty? Ono willingly participates, knowing this is likely to happen, and yet as a spectator we are still taken aback by the meanness of it.
Reading this book, I thought quite a bit about the dynamics of crueltynot only about the art world(which I knew little about but learned a great deal) but cruelty in our everyday lives and public discourse as well. This book can be dense and difficult to read at times but it's well worth the effort.
May 3, 2024
I have heard so much about Maggie Nelson and just started reading her recently. I started with Bluets which was so profound, and it was just by describing the color blue. I think I should have gone to another Nelson book and not this one, as I was very frustrated with it. It seems to me that she went on for 250+ pages to say that in life and art, things are nuanced: there is no good/bad, right/wrong, and that the world is more complex than that, which I agree with; it just seemed to not really go anywhere beyond that. I feel like she could have gone deeper into one direction instead of talking too broadly about the media, literature, contemporary artists/visual art. I found myself over and over again, so what?
August 31, 2025
A wonderful examination of violence and “cruelty” in art. Parts of it felt a bit too long and unfocused but Nelson’s insights are so interesting. She’s a great writer and what she says is different from what I normally hear on these topics.
January 30, 2021
Full review is here...
https://wordpress.com/view/jakestakes...
I have a particularly warm and loving aunt who is a librarian and a mom too. I remember a time at her house when I found myself trying to defend my love of David Lynch to her while sipping tea. I was at a bit of a loss, and it was a pretty uncomfortable experience. Anyone who has ever experienced confusing tensions or misgivings about their admiration of certain violent or disturbing paintings, novels and films will find this book fascinating. It is a brilliantly critical and nuanced exploration of the relationship between art and cruelty.
Trying to define art in contradistinction to entertainment is a mugs game. The two always bleed into each other and exist on a spectrum. Considering where a movie or book is on that spectrum is a much more worthwhile way to go about it. It’s relatively easy to criticize the use of violence on the extreme entertainment end of the spectrum. Shows like Game of Thrones appeal to our nostalgia for sword fights, dragons and zombies, and then generously sprinkle in the titillating smut, rape, torture-porn, and general mutilation to keep watchers transfixed. But what about the graphic gore of David Lynch, or the violence in Michael Haneke’s films? This is where it becomes more interesting. It’s more difficult to grapple with violence or cruelty in art because the motives are ostensibly better, or at least more complicated – truth, knowledge, heightened awareness and sensation, questioning and curiosity. However, the word art can also function as a convenient alibi for all sorts of crappy, ulterior motives. Did it ever seem to you that an artist was using violence for shock value and publicity? Sometimes I wonder if certain artists preciously cultivate an aura of darkness and gravitas so as to woo viewers and dealers, just like that shyster on the dating-site who plays the dark-and-mysterious type to get some ‘action’.
When is cruelty and violence in art worthy of our attention and deserving of our thought? How the hell do you defend those scenes in Blue Velvet to your favourite auntie?! Maggie Nelson tackles these tangles with aplomb. She is scholarly and imaginative. Her criticism is incisive and free of moralizing or didacticism, and there are many slick callings of bullshit – for example, her answer to those who defend gratuitous violence in entertainment by relating it to Greek plays and their socially cathartic benefits.
“When Aristotle used the term ‘catharsis’, he was talking about Greek tragedies, which are, without a doubt, violent, often gruesomely so (although a tragedy has the most violent acts take place off-stage). What was at stake for Aristotle vis-a-vis catharsis, were the emotions of ‘pity and terror’ aroused by the play, not the ability to hold down one’s lunch while watching a woman being forced to drink internal organs that have been ground up in a blender.” (a reference to the movie Captivity)
Perhaps this metric is one way to gauge where a movie is on the entertainment-art spectrum. Does the violence seem like an end in itself or a means towards something else, such as pity or scrutiny.
David Foster Wallace puts it so nicely in his essay, David Lynch Keeps His Head, that I can’t resist including this quote.
“Unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. This is why violence in Lynch’s films, grotesque and coldly stylized and symbolically heavy as it may be, is qualitatively different from Hollywood’s or even (Tarantino’s) anti-Hollywood, hip cartoon-violence. Lynch’s violence always tries to mean something. Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching someone’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”
The title of Maggie Nelson’s book expands off of the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ as it was coined and practiced by the surrealist poet and playwright Antonin Artaud. She links Artaud, Francis Bacon, Eugene Ionescu, and other modernists to “shock and awe” artistic movements like Surrealism, Futurism and Dada, and also to the iconoclastic figures of Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade. She then branches out to engage with more recent and contemporary visual artists, performance artists, writers, poets, film directors, and philosophers.
Painter Francis Bacon, a key figure in this book, was as provocative with words as he was with his macabre images. He claimed that the singular goal of his art was to ‘return us to life more violently’. Playwright Eugene Ionesco seems to have shared Bacon’s objective. He wrote,
‘To tear ourselves from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a bludgeon blow.’
Nelson asks whether contemporary art making is stuck in habits of thought from a century-old, revolutionary avant-guard modus operandi that is somewhat dated and perhaps out of place in our violence-saturated media landscape, in which the image dominates. She responds to Ionescu’s words.
“If such recourse to inflictions appeared once in a blue moon, it might not seem so strange. But given how often it recurs in twentieth and twenty-first-century artistic rhetoric, I feel compelled to ask, what kind of knowing is this, that is supposedly accomplished by striking?”
I can’t help but wonder if people submit themselves to such ‘striking’ simply to escape their boredom? Does it actually ‘bring us to life’ as Bacon and Ionescu would wish, or just leave us feeling concussed in an internet-age already awash with images of global catastrophes, and brutality? Are we so desensitized to all of this that we need further overwhelming sensory assaults from art and entertainment to pass the time?
Artists argue that their purpose in ‘striking’ and provoking is to shake people awake to some kind of truth or reality, or even just an enlivening new perspective. I like this idea and believe that good art often does this. But the idea is a bit of a pandora’s box too. ‘Truth’ and ‘reality’ are tricky words, and artists seem to take all sorts of ham-fisted liberties with them. This passage of Nelson’s is brilliant.
“The artist standing bravely in the face of the (inconvenient, brutal, hard-won, dangerous, offensive) truth, the artist who refuses to ‘evade facts’, or who can stare down ‘what the world really looks like’ – what could be more heroic? Critics love the rhetoric used by artists such as Arbus and Bacon because it bolsters the sense that art and artists can rip off the veil, they can finally show us what our world is “really like”, what WE are really like. I mean it as no slight to these artists (both of whom i admire), nor to the practice of truth-telling (to which I aspire) when I say that I do not believe they do any such thing. Bacon shows us Bacon figures; Arbus shows us Arbus figures. This isn’t to say that Bacon’s paintings don’t tell us quite a bit about the human animal, especially when caught in a spasm of despair or carnage, or that Arbus’s photos don’t communicate quite a bit about the human animal in its freakiness, loneliness, absurdity or abstruse ecstasy.”
‘Truth’ can be a convenient alibi for subjecting one’s audience to all kinds of things, or even just publicly indulging in one’s own inclinations and obsessions. Even assuming that a truth is genuinely worthy of attention and consideration, the question remains, what does that knowledge do? What is the effect or usefulness of conveying such truths, and what exactly is the artist’s intent behind doing so? Also, is it really new knowledge? If not, what is the effect of getting banged over the head repeatedly with what we already know? This is a big muddy area that Nelson digs into with her analysis of individual artists and artworks. I love how she skillfully ferrets out the ways in which certain artists are dishonest with their audience, and even, plausibly, with themselves. Is an artist actually revealing or mirroring the dark truths in the hearts of their audience, as some claim to? To what extent are they just projecting themselves onto others?
Nelson calls bullshit on writer Brian Evanson who said in an interview, ‘I disturb nobody – I only give them an occasion for disturbing themselves….[my readers] have externalized their fears in me, but what they really fear is what they see of themselves in the stories.’
It sounds as if Evanson is trying to wipe his hands clean with this kind of slick gab. Nelson compares a quote from the equally disturbing video artist Mike Kelley which totally flips the script. ‘I make art in order to give other people my problems.’ This refreshing honesty starkly contrasts Evanson’s presumptuous condescension.
In the cases of Artaud, Bacon and Sylvia Plath, Maggie Nelson’s ambivalent admiration makes things more interesting. She struggles throughout the book to hold them to account while ultimately defending them as well. She questions Bacon’s recourse to ‘Truth’. He claims his art is accessing “the brutality of fact”. She questions whether, “he is simply illuminating his own vision, justifying his own practice or predilections.”
It seems to me that the problems here are more to do with Bacon’s spoken rhetoric about his art, rather than one’s experience of his paintings speaking for themselves. I wonder if Bacon relished provoking with words, or if he, like many artists (I’ll wager), had to grudgingly play that publicity game in order to advance himself. Why become a painter if you can communicate what you want to in words? The painters I know personally absolutely hate having to talk about their paintings.
Nelson does come around to Bacon’s defence though. I share her admiration for his genius and originality. She characterizes the subject of his art as our “situation of meat”, but suggests that while looking at his paintings, “a fierce kind of empathy can arise”. She continues,
“If, at the very least, we are human, we must concede that humans evidence an ongoing interest in becoming, at certain times, and in certain contexts, things, as much as in turning other people into things. The spectre of our eventual ‘becoming object – of our (live) flesh one day turning into (dead) meat – is a shadow that accompanies us throughout our lives[…]this shadow is thicker for some than others. Certainly it was thick for Bacon.”
According to Nelson, the same could be said about Sylvia Plath whose poetry she characterizes as a “dark generosity”. What a compelling description! It seems like a challenge, and an invitation to open up, in spite of the risks, to these kinds of artists, especially when it feels like their art is communicating in a non-didactic way, and is leaving space for processing and interpretation.
With evolutionary biology and 20th century history in mind, (all of history for that matter) it’s hard to just dismiss Bacon’s idea of “the brutality of fact”, or Plath’s “O-gape of complete despair”. As a species, we seem uniquely able to comprehend our own mortality, and, paradoxically adept at going through our lives with seeming disregard for this fact. We display a, perhaps corresponding, propensity for sadism and destructiveness. We also have a talent for denying or just being oblivious to these things in ourselves. (For a fascinating evolutionary-psychological angle on our surprising ability to live in denial of death, check out the book ‘Denial: Self-deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind’, by scientist/physician Ajit Varki.) It would seem that people have varying levels of awareness or access to these types of realities. I agree with Nelson that “this shadow is thicker for some than others.” And I like her idea that art which you may find disturbing can nevertheless be motivated by a “dark generosity“ and result in “a fierce empathy”. Art can be a miraculous transmutation of an artist’s suffering, anxieties, or any intense experience, into a gift. That gift may be experienced as an unsettlingly alien taste of their world. Suffering need not remain isolating and meaningless. D.F.W.’s descriptions of depression in his novel Infinite Jest come to mind. I could never have known that such a kind of depression existed before reading that. I can’t blame a friend of mine for finding those descriptions too hard to take, and feeling assaulted by them. Nor do I judge myself for finding them gripping and revelatory.
I’d add that films are not as ideal for this type of artistic communication. The moving image is intrinsically bossier than other mediums. (I’ve included another passage from David Foster Wallace’s essay on Lynch that perfectly describes this aspect of the film medium. It’s at the end of this review if you’re curious.) The written word does not affect the flight-or-fight-response parts of the brain in the way that images do. Also, you can put a book down and take a break, or just let your mind trail off on digressions. A painting is an image, sure, but it is a frozen one that you can walk around. Nothing has quite the same power to emotionally brutalize than the sound and motion picture. It’s no surprise to me that several film directors come under heavy attack in The Art of Cruelty.
Speaking of which, it was so satisfying to see Nelson call bullshit on filmmaker Michael Haneke for his supposedly high-minded art-film and anti-Hollywood satire Funny Games, along with its recent American remake. This Palme d’Or-nominated film was recommended to me years ago by a good friend. I regretted watching it. As a footnote to this review, I’ve included a long critique of this acclaimed film with some of Nelson’s thoughts on it too. Interestingly, the film features a John Zorn (his band Naked City) soundtrack. Zorn is a consummate businessman, as well as a great composer and sax player. Naked City’s music, per se, is amazing and original, but Zorn’s marketing and cover art seems like titillating gore and smut to me. He presents it as ‘Art’ and ‘Truth’, but mainly it’s just a sales tactic.
Nelson also calls bullshit on filmmaker Lars Von Trier, and many less famous authors and performance artists. As a counterpoint to all of the artists mentioned in this review hitherto, she discusses John Cage’s musical philosophy, and Bertolt Brecht’s theatre of activist, social engagement. Their art can be just as unsettling, enlivening and subversive, while seemingly free of cruelty. I’d add Marcel Duchamp and Jim Jarmusch, as glowing examples, to that unique list.
(the rest of this review is avail at https://wordpress.com/view/jakestakes...). Goodreads has a 15,000 character limit.
https://wordpress.com/view/jakestakes...
I have a particularly warm and loving aunt who is a librarian and a mom too. I remember a time at her house when I found myself trying to defend my love of David Lynch to her while sipping tea. I was at a bit of a loss, and it was a pretty uncomfortable experience. Anyone who has ever experienced confusing tensions or misgivings about their admiration of certain violent or disturbing paintings, novels and films will find this book fascinating. It is a brilliantly critical and nuanced exploration of the relationship between art and cruelty.
Trying to define art in contradistinction to entertainment is a mugs game. The two always bleed into each other and exist on a spectrum. Considering where a movie or book is on that spectrum is a much more worthwhile way to go about it. It’s relatively easy to criticize the use of violence on the extreme entertainment end of the spectrum. Shows like Game of Thrones appeal to our nostalgia for sword fights, dragons and zombies, and then generously sprinkle in the titillating smut, rape, torture-porn, and general mutilation to keep watchers transfixed. But what about the graphic gore of David Lynch, or the violence in Michael Haneke’s films? This is where it becomes more interesting. It’s more difficult to grapple with violence or cruelty in art because the motives are ostensibly better, or at least more complicated – truth, knowledge, heightened awareness and sensation, questioning and curiosity. However, the word art can also function as a convenient alibi for all sorts of crappy, ulterior motives. Did it ever seem to you that an artist was using violence for shock value and publicity? Sometimes I wonder if certain artists preciously cultivate an aura of darkness and gravitas so as to woo viewers and dealers, just like that shyster on the dating-site who plays the dark-and-mysterious type to get some ‘action’.
When is cruelty and violence in art worthy of our attention and deserving of our thought? How the hell do you defend those scenes in Blue Velvet to your favourite auntie?! Maggie Nelson tackles these tangles with aplomb. She is scholarly and imaginative. Her criticism is incisive and free of moralizing or didacticism, and there are many slick callings of bullshit – for example, her answer to those who defend gratuitous violence in entertainment by relating it to Greek plays and their socially cathartic benefits.
“When Aristotle used the term ‘catharsis’, he was talking about Greek tragedies, which are, without a doubt, violent, often gruesomely so (although a tragedy has the most violent acts take place off-stage). What was at stake for Aristotle vis-a-vis catharsis, were the emotions of ‘pity and terror’ aroused by the play, not the ability to hold down one’s lunch while watching a woman being forced to drink internal organs that have been ground up in a blender.” (a reference to the movie Captivity)
Perhaps this metric is one way to gauge where a movie is on the entertainment-art spectrum. Does the violence seem like an end in itself or a means towards something else, such as pity or scrutiny.
David Foster Wallace puts it so nicely in his essay, David Lynch Keeps His Head, that I can’t resist including this quote.
“Unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. This is why violence in Lynch’s films, grotesque and coldly stylized and symbolically heavy as it may be, is qualitatively different from Hollywood’s or even (Tarantino’s) anti-Hollywood, hip cartoon-violence. Lynch’s violence always tries to mean something. Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching someone’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”
The title of Maggie Nelson’s book expands off of the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ as it was coined and practiced by the surrealist poet and playwright Antonin Artaud. She links Artaud, Francis Bacon, Eugene Ionescu, and other modernists to “shock and awe” artistic movements like Surrealism, Futurism and Dada, and also to the iconoclastic figures of Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade. She then branches out to engage with more recent and contemporary visual artists, performance artists, writers, poets, film directors, and philosophers.
Painter Francis Bacon, a key figure in this book, was as provocative with words as he was with his macabre images. He claimed that the singular goal of his art was to ‘return us to life more violently’. Playwright Eugene Ionesco seems to have shared Bacon’s objective. He wrote,
‘To tear ourselves from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a bludgeon blow.’
Nelson asks whether contemporary art making is stuck in habits of thought from a century-old, revolutionary avant-guard modus operandi that is somewhat dated and perhaps out of place in our violence-saturated media landscape, in which the image dominates. She responds to Ionescu’s words.
“If such recourse to inflictions appeared once in a blue moon, it might not seem so strange. But given how often it recurs in twentieth and twenty-first-century artistic rhetoric, I feel compelled to ask, what kind of knowing is this, that is supposedly accomplished by striking?”
I can’t help but wonder if people submit themselves to such ‘striking’ simply to escape their boredom? Does it actually ‘bring us to life’ as Bacon and Ionescu would wish, or just leave us feeling concussed in an internet-age already awash with images of global catastrophes, and brutality? Are we so desensitized to all of this that we need further overwhelming sensory assaults from art and entertainment to pass the time?
Artists argue that their purpose in ‘striking’ and provoking is to shake people awake to some kind of truth or reality, or even just an enlivening new perspective. I like this idea and believe that good art often does this. But the idea is a bit of a pandora’s box too. ‘Truth’ and ‘reality’ are tricky words, and artists seem to take all sorts of ham-fisted liberties with them. This passage of Nelson’s is brilliant.
“The artist standing bravely in the face of the (inconvenient, brutal, hard-won, dangerous, offensive) truth, the artist who refuses to ‘evade facts’, or who can stare down ‘what the world really looks like’ – what could be more heroic? Critics love the rhetoric used by artists such as Arbus and Bacon because it bolsters the sense that art and artists can rip off the veil, they can finally show us what our world is “really like”, what WE are really like. I mean it as no slight to these artists (both of whom i admire), nor to the practice of truth-telling (to which I aspire) when I say that I do not believe they do any such thing. Bacon shows us Bacon figures; Arbus shows us Arbus figures. This isn’t to say that Bacon’s paintings don’t tell us quite a bit about the human animal, especially when caught in a spasm of despair or carnage, or that Arbus’s photos don’t communicate quite a bit about the human animal in its freakiness, loneliness, absurdity or abstruse ecstasy.”
‘Truth’ can be a convenient alibi for subjecting one’s audience to all kinds of things, or even just publicly indulging in one’s own inclinations and obsessions. Even assuming that a truth is genuinely worthy of attention and consideration, the question remains, what does that knowledge do? What is the effect or usefulness of conveying such truths, and what exactly is the artist’s intent behind doing so? Also, is it really new knowledge? If not, what is the effect of getting banged over the head repeatedly with what we already know? This is a big muddy area that Nelson digs into with her analysis of individual artists and artworks. I love how she skillfully ferrets out the ways in which certain artists are dishonest with their audience, and even, plausibly, with themselves. Is an artist actually revealing or mirroring the dark truths in the hearts of their audience, as some claim to? To what extent are they just projecting themselves onto others?
Nelson calls bullshit on writer Brian Evanson who said in an interview, ‘I disturb nobody – I only give them an occasion for disturbing themselves….[my readers] have externalized their fears in me, but what they really fear is what they see of themselves in the stories.’
It sounds as if Evanson is trying to wipe his hands clean with this kind of slick gab. Nelson compares a quote from the equally disturbing video artist Mike Kelley which totally flips the script. ‘I make art in order to give other people my problems.’ This refreshing honesty starkly contrasts Evanson’s presumptuous condescension.
In the cases of Artaud, Bacon and Sylvia Plath, Maggie Nelson’s ambivalent admiration makes things more interesting. She struggles throughout the book to hold them to account while ultimately defending them as well. She questions Bacon’s recourse to ‘Truth’. He claims his art is accessing “the brutality of fact”. She questions whether, “he is simply illuminating his own vision, justifying his own practice or predilections.”
It seems to me that the problems here are more to do with Bacon’s spoken rhetoric about his art, rather than one’s experience of his paintings speaking for themselves. I wonder if Bacon relished provoking with words, or if he, like many artists (I’ll wager), had to grudgingly play that publicity game in order to advance himself. Why become a painter if you can communicate what you want to in words? The painters I know personally absolutely hate having to talk about their paintings.
Nelson does come around to Bacon’s defence though. I share her admiration for his genius and originality. She characterizes the subject of his art as our “situation of meat”, but suggests that while looking at his paintings, “a fierce kind of empathy can arise”. She continues,
“If, at the very least, we are human, we must concede that humans evidence an ongoing interest in becoming, at certain times, and in certain contexts, things, as much as in turning other people into things. The spectre of our eventual ‘becoming object – of our (live) flesh one day turning into (dead) meat – is a shadow that accompanies us throughout our lives[…]this shadow is thicker for some than others. Certainly it was thick for Bacon.”
According to Nelson, the same could be said about Sylvia Plath whose poetry she characterizes as a “dark generosity”. What a compelling description! It seems like a challenge, and an invitation to open up, in spite of the risks, to these kinds of artists, especially when it feels like their art is communicating in a non-didactic way, and is leaving space for processing and interpretation.
With evolutionary biology and 20th century history in mind, (all of history for that matter) it’s hard to just dismiss Bacon’s idea of “the brutality of fact”, or Plath’s “O-gape of complete despair”. As a species, we seem uniquely able to comprehend our own mortality, and, paradoxically adept at going through our lives with seeming disregard for this fact. We display a, perhaps corresponding, propensity for sadism and destructiveness. We also have a talent for denying or just being oblivious to these things in ourselves. (For a fascinating evolutionary-psychological angle on our surprising ability to live in denial of death, check out the book ‘Denial: Self-deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind’, by scientist/physician Ajit Varki.) It would seem that people have varying levels of awareness or access to these types of realities. I agree with Nelson that “this shadow is thicker for some than others.” And I like her idea that art which you may find disturbing can nevertheless be motivated by a “dark generosity“ and result in “a fierce empathy”. Art can be a miraculous transmutation of an artist’s suffering, anxieties, or any intense experience, into a gift. That gift may be experienced as an unsettlingly alien taste of their world. Suffering need not remain isolating and meaningless. D.F.W.’s descriptions of depression in his novel Infinite Jest come to mind. I could never have known that such a kind of depression existed before reading that. I can’t blame a friend of mine for finding those descriptions too hard to take, and feeling assaulted by them. Nor do I judge myself for finding them gripping and revelatory.
I’d add that films are not as ideal for this type of artistic communication. The moving image is intrinsically bossier than other mediums. (I’ve included another passage from David Foster Wallace’s essay on Lynch that perfectly describes this aspect of the film medium. It’s at the end of this review if you’re curious.) The written word does not affect the flight-or-fight-response parts of the brain in the way that images do. Also, you can put a book down and take a break, or just let your mind trail off on digressions. A painting is an image, sure, but it is a frozen one that you can walk around. Nothing has quite the same power to emotionally brutalize than the sound and motion picture. It’s no surprise to me that several film directors come under heavy attack in The Art of Cruelty.
Speaking of which, it was so satisfying to see Nelson call bullshit on filmmaker Michael Haneke for his supposedly high-minded art-film and anti-Hollywood satire Funny Games, along with its recent American remake. This Palme d’Or-nominated film was recommended to me years ago by a good friend. I regretted watching it. As a footnote to this review, I’ve included a long critique of this acclaimed film with some of Nelson’s thoughts on it too. Interestingly, the film features a John Zorn (his band Naked City) soundtrack. Zorn is a consummate businessman, as well as a great composer and sax player. Naked City’s music, per se, is amazing and original, but Zorn’s marketing and cover art seems like titillating gore and smut to me. He presents it as ‘Art’ and ‘Truth’, but mainly it’s just a sales tactic.
Nelson also calls bullshit on filmmaker Lars Von Trier, and many less famous authors and performance artists. As a counterpoint to all of the artists mentioned in this review hitherto, she discusses John Cage’s musical philosophy, and Bertolt Brecht’s theatre of activist, social engagement. Their art can be just as unsettling, enlivening and subversive, while seemingly free of cruelty. I’d add Marcel Duchamp and Jim Jarmusch, as glowing examples, to that unique list.
(the rest of this review is avail at https://wordpress.com/view/jakestakes...). Goodreads has a 15,000 character limit.
July 3, 2020
I read this almost two years ago and took so many notes and thought so highly of the book, I could never wrestle myself into attempting a review. One of the many joys of reading Nelson, is how she invites the reader along for her intellectual journey. With that in mind, or out of pure laziness (you can decide), I'll simply share my notes (things that stood out, thoughts I had, stuff I wanted to look up, etc.)...
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P5: “This book asks different questions. It asks whether there are certain aspects or instances of the so-called art of cruelty---as famously imagined by French dramatist and madman Antonin Artaud ---that are stil wild and worthwhile, ow that we purportedly inhabit a political and entertainment landscape increasingly glutted with images---and actualities---of torture, sadism, and endless warfare. It asks whether Artaud’s distinction between a coarse set of cruelty, based in sadism and bloodshed, and his notion of a “pure cruelty, without bodily laceration” can be productively made, and to what end. “From the point of view of the mind,” Artaud wrote, “cruelty signifies rigor, impacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.” / I am attracted to this precision, this sharpness, this rigor. Why Artaud and so many others have muddled it up with cruelty, I do not know. That is another of this book’s questions.”
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P9: “One of this book’s charges, then, is to figure out how one might differentiate between works of art whose employment of cruelty seems to me worthwhile (for lack of a better word), and those that strike me as redundant, in bad faith, or simply despicable.”
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- Nelson’s dedication to nuance, grey areas, inquiry, and honesty strike a chord with me.
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- Viewer/reader as spectator--is this a passive role? Is some art a form of cruelty to the spectator depending on what they expect or what they are given (in terms of either context, knowledge, or control)?
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P29: “For the mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity. And even if one were to get excited about leaving the contortions of mental effort behind, today’s anti-intellectualism makes no corollary call for us to return our fingers to blood and dirt, to discover orgiastic bliss, to become more autonomous in our ability to fulfill our basic, most primal needs, or to become one with the awe-inspiring forces of the cosmos.” The alternative to this would be a kind of hollow consumerism… or what? Simple short-term gratification based around distracting lowest-common-denominator entertainment? My take, not Nelson’s: Spectator as active couch-potato monitoring border in example of Texas Virtual Border Watch Program ala BlueServo
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P40: “But after nearly 200 years of photography, it may be that we are closer than ever to understanding that an image---be it circulated in a newspaper, on YouTube, or in an art gallery---is an exceptionally poor platform on which to place the unending, arduous, multifaceted, and circuitous process of “changing the world.” (Abu Ghraib photos; desensitizing, leading to false beliefs vs. masking knowledge)
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- Journalists to look up: Jane Mayer, Mark Danner, Scott Horton
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- Film: Ryan Trecartin’s I-Be Area | Background/Summary
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Commenting how the images that stay with you are rarely the ones that are good art or that cause effective displacement; quoting dramatist Richard Foreman on the “aesthetics-of-amnesia”: “The image of the Marlboro man riding his horse and smoking a cigarette has stuck with me for many years---and so what? It’s garbage. It’s kitsch. All it means is that the image seduced me, that it pushed a button that was ready to be pushed, and I responded. It didn’t widen my sensibilities, compassion, or intuition. Whereas an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. It offers images or ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do.””
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Stories:
- Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman
- Jane Bowles, Plain Pleasures
- Mary Gaitskill, The Agonized Face
Writers: Paul McCarthy, Brian Evenson, Chris Burden, Michael Haneke, Martin McDonagh, Otto Muehl
Renaissance text: Disputatio nova contra mulieres, qua probatur eas homines non ess “a new argument against women… “ double standard of not allowing women to be violent, cruel, sexual, etc.
Anne Carson poem, “The Glass Essay”
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Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 performance art letting audience have its way with her; contradictions of being human where beauty may compel us to appreciate or protect it or feel the urge to injure or destroy it
Aristotle’s theory of catharsis whereby art provides an outlet for the viewer to confront or release the “bloodlust” already inside; artists like Mike Kelley projecting their problems on to others vs. the polar opposite position of John Cage who tried to “wake” people up without violating their boundaries.
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(NSFW!) Santiago Sierra’ 10 People Paid to Masturbate where he humiliates people to show how humiliating their circumstances are: “It’s one thing to set up situations that aim to alert the world---even if just the art world---to the bad news of radical exploitation, even if one feels the lamentable need to exploit others to make one’s point. It’s quite another to decide in advance on the terms of human dignity (i.e., that a willingness to film oneself jerking off for money signifies that you have none), set up situations which prove (to you) that someone is utterly debased, the weep over the fulfillment of your puritanical prognostication.” Opposite artistic intent with Diane Arbus photos… ? (can't remember if this was my question or Nelson's... must have been Nelson's since I only know Arbus by name and wouldn't be able to question her work but she's described as "attempting to normalize maginalized groups" and issues of fair representation)
--------------------------------------------
P130: “Mostly I want to point to third things---unruly, inscrutable, multivalent, un-ownable third things---without knowing exactly what they have to say or teach. For when things are going well with art-making and art-viewing, art doesn’t really say or teach anything. The action is elsewhere.”
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P149: “In other words, the addict, much like the artist, finds himself using artifice to strip artifice of artifice. The whirlpool grabs another limb.” attempt to break through numbness, pain; to erase the barrier between reality and art
--------------------------------------------
Tennessee Williams quote: “All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.” When “brutal honesty”--often heralded in memoirs bleeds over into cruelty--Nelson’s friend refers to Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking as “widow porn”; reminds me of my reaction to Knausgard’s My Struggle; “While the two words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see “brutal honesty” not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn’t necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it---something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.”
--------------------------------------------
Book: Parents and Children by Ivy Compton-Burnett
--------------------------------------------
Yes Men satirizing government and those in power as posing as them--line between misleading victims and exposing graft/greed/neglect
--------------------------------------------
P171: …"[Adam] Phillips explains, psychoanalysis gets interesting when it shifts the focus from making us more intelligible to ourselves to helping us become more curious about how strange we really are. And so, I would argue, does art.”
--------------------------------------------
Meat-making of art/porn/literature/performance art/etc;
P183: "Using camera work that can have more in common with laparoscopic surgery than with cinema, hard-core porn knocks itself out to get supranaturally close to the body’s capacities for contact and concentration. The closer you go---that is, the more hard core it gets---the more abstract it becomes. And the more abstract it becomes, the deeper the mystery of why it works---why watching close-ups of throbbing pink body parts moving in and around each other instantly turns most of us on.”
--------------------------------------------
Pope L’s How Much is that Nigger in the Window
--------------------------------------------
P219: “As any ascetic can tell you, lucidity often arrives via subtraction, via impoverishment. But as any anorexic or self-cutter knows, it can be difficult to know when to stop chiseling.”
Yayoi kusama’s ‘67 Self-Obliteration video
Otto Muehl’s Kardinal film
- The impact of obliterating/distorting the face--Nelson mentions Bacon, Plath--mentally, I segue to HenryDavidJr and a recent Halloween makeup post on FB
--------------------------------------------
P250: “Bacon was one of those who insisted that humans will always suffer, no matter how just their circumstances, and that to argue otherwise is to deny a fundamental aspect of the human condition. He was right, of course, which is why any commitment to social justice that cannot acknowledge the existence of basic pain---that is, suffering that will exist for the human subject no matter how equitable or nourishing its circumstances---will end up haunted by bewilderment and disillusionment… But to obliterate, happily and eagerly, the distinctions between avoidable pain and basic pain is another story. It speaks of a different taste---that of wanting to amplify basic pain, valorize it, cour it, exalt it."
More Francis Bacon paintings: Jet of Water, Blood on Pavement
--------------------------------------------
P265: “The most interesting of [the unmentioned] work---past, present, or future---is or will be that which dismantles, boycotts, ignores, destroys, takes liberties with, or at least pokes fun at the avant-garde’s long commitment to the idea that the shocks produced by cruelty and violence---be it in art or in political action---might deliver us, through some never-proven miracle, to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative, and just way of inhabiting the earth, and of relating to our fellow human beings.”
--------------------------------------------
Definitions I Looked Up (2 years after reading the book!): marasmus | sublunary | splenetic | adumbrating
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[I should have just written a review. It would have taken a lot less time than looking up all these links. Learning the hard way is my favorite form of self-cruelty... ]
--------------------------------------------
P5: “This book asks different questions. It asks whether there are certain aspects or instances of the so-called art of cruelty---as famously imagined by French dramatist and madman Antonin Artaud ---that are stil wild and worthwhile, ow that we purportedly inhabit a political and entertainment landscape increasingly glutted with images---and actualities---of torture, sadism, and endless warfare. It asks whether Artaud’s distinction between a coarse set of cruelty, based in sadism and bloodshed, and his notion of a “pure cruelty, without bodily laceration” can be productively made, and to what end. “From the point of view of the mind,” Artaud wrote, “cruelty signifies rigor, impacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.” / I am attracted to this precision, this sharpness, this rigor. Why Artaud and so many others have muddled it up with cruelty, I do not know. That is another of this book’s questions.”
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P9: “One of this book’s charges, then, is to figure out how one might differentiate between works of art whose employment of cruelty seems to me worthwhile (for lack of a better word), and those that strike me as redundant, in bad faith, or simply despicable.”
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- Nelson’s dedication to nuance, grey areas, inquiry, and honesty strike a chord with me.
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- Viewer/reader as spectator--is this a passive role? Is some art a form of cruelty to the spectator depending on what they expect or what they are given (in terms of either context, knowledge, or control)?
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P29: “For the mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity. And even if one were to get excited about leaving the contortions of mental effort behind, today’s anti-intellectualism makes no corollary call for us to return our fingers to blood and dirt, to discover orgiastic bliss, to become more autonomous in our ability to fulfill our basic, most primal needs, or to become one with the awe-inspiring forces of the cosmos.” The alternative to this would be a kind of hollow consumerism… or what? Simple short-term gratification based around distracting lowest-common-denominator entertainment? My take, not Nelson’s: Spectator as active couch-potato monitoring border in example of Texas Virtual Border Watch Program ala BlueServo
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P40: “But after nearly 200 years of photography, it may be that we are closer than ever to understanding that an image---be it circulated in a newspaper, on YouTube, or in an art gallery---is an exceptionally poor platform on which to place the unending, arduous, multifaceted, and circuitous process of “changing the world.” (Abu Ghraib photos; desensitizing, leading to false beliefs vs. masking knowledge)
--------------------------------------------
- Journalists to look up: Jane Mayer, Mark Danner, Scott Horton
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- Film: Ryan Trecartin’s I-Be Area | Background/Summary
--------------------------------------------
Commenting how the images that stay with you are rarely the ones that are good art or that cause effective displacement; quoting dramatist Richard Foreman on the “aesthetics-of-amnesia”: “The image of the Marlboro man riding his horse and smoking a cigarette has stuck with me for many years---and so what? It’s garbage. It’s kitsch. All it means is that the image seduced me, that it pushed a button that was ready to be pushed, and I responded. It didn’t widen my sensibilities, compassion, or intuition. Whereas an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. It offers images or ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do.””
--------------------------------------------
Stories:
- Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman
- Jane Bowles, Plain Pleasures
- Mary Gaitskill, The Agonized Face
Writers: Paul McCarthy, Brian Evenson, Chris Burden, Michael Haneke, Martin McDonagh, Otto Muehl
Renaissance text: Disputatio nova contra mulieres, qua probatur eas homines non ess “a new argument against women… “ double standard of not allowing women to be violent, cruel, sexual, etc.
Anne Carson poem, “The Glass Essay”
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Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 performance art letting audience have its way with her; contradictions of being human where beauty may compel us to appreciate or protect it or feel the urge to injure or destroy it
Aristotle’s theory of catharsis whereby art provides an outlet for the viewer to confront or release the “bloodlust” already inside; artists like Mike Kelley projecting their problems on to others vs. the polar opposite position of John Cage who tried to “wake” people up without violating their boundaries.
--------------------------------------------
(NSFW!) Santiago Sierra’ 10 People Paid to Masturbate where he humiliates people to show how humiliating their circumstances are: “It’s one thing to set up situations that aim to alert the world---even if just the art world---to the bad news of radical exploitation, even if one feels the lamentable need to exploit others to make one’s point. It’s quite another to decide in advance on the terms of human dignity (i.e., that a willingness to film oneself jerking off for money signifies that you have none), set up situations which prove (to you) that someone is utterly debased, the weep over the fulfillment of your puritanical prognostication.” Opposite artistic intent with Diane Arbus photos… ? (can't remember if this was my question or Nelson's... must have been Nelson's since I only know Arbus by name and wouldn't be able to question her work but she's described as "attempting to normalize maginalized groups" and issues of fair representation)
--------------------------------------------
P130: “Mostly I want to point to third things---unruly, inscrutable, multivalent, un-ownable third things---without knowing exactly what they have to say or teach. For when things are going well with art-making and art-viewing, art doesn’t really say or teach anything. The action is elsewhere.”
--------------------------------------------
P149: “In other words, the addict, much like the artist, finds himself using artifice to strip artifice of artifice. The whirlpool grabs another limb.” attempt to break through numbness, pain; to erase the barrier between reality and art
--------------------------------------------
Tennessee Williams quote: “All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.” When “brutal honesty”--often heralded in memoirs bleeds over into cruelty--Nelson’s friend refers to Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking as “widow porn”; reminds me of my reaction to Knausgard’s My Struggle; “While the two words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see “brutal honesty” not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn’t necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it---something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.”
--------------------------------------------
Book: Parents and Children by Ivy Compton-Burnett
--------------------------------------------
Yes Men satirizing government and those in power as posing as them--line between misleading victims and exposing graft/greed/neglect
--------------------------------------------
P171: …"[Adam] Phillips explains, psychoanalysis gets interesting when it shifts the focus from making us more intelligible to ourselves to helping us become more curious about how strange we really are. And so, I would argue, does art.”
--------------------------------------------
Meat-making of art/porn/literature/performance art/etc;
P183: "Using camera work that can have more in common with laparoscopic surgery than with cinema, hard-core porn knocks itself out to get supranaturally close to the body’s capacities for contact and concentration. The closer you go---that is, the more hard core it gets---the more abstract it becomes. And the more abstract it becomes, the deeper the mystery of why it works---why watching close-ups of throbbing pink body parts moving in and around each other instantly turns most of us on.”
--------------------------------------------
Pope L’s How Much is that Nigger in the Window
--------------------------------------------
P219: “As any ascetic can tell you, lucidity often arrives via subtraction, via impoverishment. But as any anorexic or self-cutter knows, it can be difficult to know when to stop chiseling.”
Yayoi kusama’s ‘67 Self-Obliteration video
Otto Muehl’s Kardinal film
- The impact of obliterating/distorting the face--Nelson mentions Bacon, Plath--mentally, I segue to HenryDavidJr and a recent Halloween makeup post on FB
--------------------------------------------
P250: “Bacon was one of those who insisted that humans will always suffer, no matter how just their circumstances, and that to argue otherwise is to deny a fundamental aspect of the human condition. He was right, of course, which is why any commitment to social justice that cannot acknowledge the existence of basic pain---that is, suffering that will exist for the human subject no matter how equitable or nourishing its circumstances---will end up haunted by bewilderment and disillusionment… But to obliterate, happily and eagerly, the distinctions between avoidable pain and basic pain is another story. It speaks of a different taste---that of wanting to amplify basic pain, valorize it, cour it, exalt it."
More Francis Bacon paintings: Jet of Water, Blood on Pavement
--------------------------------------------
P265: “The most interesting of [the unmentioned] work---past, present, or future---is or will be that which dismantles, boycotts, ignores, destroys, takes liberties with, or at least pokes fun at the avant-garde’s long commitment to the idea that the shocks produced by cruelty and violence---be it in art or in political action---might deliver us, through some never-proven miracle, to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative, and just way of inhabiting the earth, and of relating to our fellow human beings.”
--------------------------------------------
Definitions I Looked Up (2 years after reading the book!): marasmus | sublunary | splenetic | adumbrating
--------------------------------------------
[I should have just written a review. It would have taken a lot less time than looking up all these links. Learning the hard way is my favorite form of self-cruelty... ]
June 22, 2024
Some of you may know that my feelings about Maggie Nelson have soured in recent years, especially with On Freedom, so I was pleasantly shocked to discover that this was both gorgeously written and that I mostly agreed with everything? I especially appreciated her contention that violence does not clarify or cleanse, as so many thinkers and artists might claim, but more likely confuses and repeats. Lots to think about and return to here! Not sure how she went from thinking through the ethics of “cruel” art in this book to “sticks and stones can break your bones, but art can’t actually hurt you” in her more recent writing though.
July 22, 2024
maggie nelson is the type of writer that i find viciously inspirational — this book invigorates the possibility of lifelong consumption, not in a capitalist sense but in the sense of being an observer, reader, watcher, viewer. such power there is in being a member of a willing & critical audience… bearing witness to life, art!
this book skits across a myriad of primary sources like a stone over water; each ripple could be its own deep exploratory essay, but the pleasure is in counting how many satisfying bounces there might be, and to marvel at its distance travelled
this book skits across a myriad of primary sources like a stone over water; each ripple could be its own deep exploratory essay, but the pleasure is in counting how many satisfying bounces there might be, and to marvel at its distance travelled
Displaying 1 - 30 of 393 reviews