Performance, Masculinity, and Self-Injury

Lucy Weir is Chancellor’s Fellow in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. She is the author of Pina Bausch’s Dance Theatre (2018), and co-editor of Performance in a Pandemic (Routledge, 2021).

• Introduction 1.Günter Brus 2. André Stitt 3. Ron Athey 4. Yang Zhichao 5. Wafaa Bilal 6. Pyotr Pavlensky Concluding Thoughts

'Performance, Masculinity, and Self-Injury offers a compelling, nuanced, sensitive, and provocative engagement with three topics that are rarely discussed together. Explored via a series of diverse case studies, including interviews with the artists, Weir’s analysis offers a vital intervention, unsettling more usual simplistic readings.'Amy Chandler, University of Edinburgh'Lucy Weir’s Performance, Masculinity, and Self-Injury charts a lineage from Viennese Actionism via the oeuvre of Günter Brus through the work of André Stitt, Ron Athey, Yang Zhichao, Wafaa Bilal, Pyotr Pavlensky, and Franko B. With care, Weir negotiates a critical re-evaluation of gendered narratives around self-injury, situating the performance practitioners as male hysterics and challenging mythologies of masculinity in crisis.'Laura Bissell, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland'Through rigorous critical accounts of maverick artists who have put to great use the compulsive and repulsive powers of violence, injury, and pain, Lucy Weir shows us the split intensity of such actions: how they captivate us, as well as force us to turn away. In this lucid, compelling, and intelligent book, Weir demonstrates that it is in self-directed activities of performed endurance that we may learn most about the politics of bodies, performance, and the self.'Dominic Johnson, Queen Mary University of London