Korine’s sense of humour,” Snow tells us, “sprang from an innate sense of being contradictory […] both hard and soft.” In an unfinished film, Fight Harm (1999), he recorded himself starting altercations with strangers; he was often left bloody and beaten in the process. Subjecting himself to the strength of others seems, Snow suggests, to serve as a means of exposing Korine’s narcissism and his vulnerability. Johnny,” Thompson had reportedly informed him, “we were just sitting here talking about you, and then we started talking about my needs, and what I need is a 40,000-candlepower illumination grenade. Big, bright bastards, that’s what I need. See if you can get them for me. I might be coming to Baton Rouge to interview [imprisoned former Louisiana governor] Edwin Edwards, and if I do I will call you, because I will be looking to have some fun, which as you know usually means violence.” Snow writes with such kinetic, sensory power here, alongside her characteristic, roving intelligence, that I felt I’d (somewhat queasily) witnessed, as well as read, this gripping exploration of pain and performance. Which As You Know Means Violence is as smart, fearless and funny as its many sensitively drawn subjects. Brilliant.”– Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road

Cis white women who make this kind of work, Marina Abramović or Gina Pane, for example, do so to exorcise “ the feminine itself, a self-lacerating admission of the same terrible feeling of inherent victimhood”. That is, these artists make a spectacle of female suffering through pain. Snow is evidently more than aware of the liberties she takes, broadly it is the ambitions and posed ‘stretches’ and ‘spirited interpretations’ that are the most engaging turns in the text. These passages not only provoke thought and add a certain lingering sheen of question to the art and entertainment she explores, but also, resonate further with a little more digging. Snow admits the line ‘this is for the birds’ is not present in the current edit of the clip now available on YouTube. Ultra-rigour is not what is on offer here, rather it is the energetic interpretations. When watching the scene, her comments around a ‘different kind of queering’ unfurl into ever more significance and relevance (as the digression to Agamben above is no doubt a register of). When watching ‘The Human Barbecue’ one cannot help but notice that Knoxville is so heavily clad in fire protection he cannot move, he must be dressed like a gilded cage princess, or a bizarre Kardashian fashion stunt. He can barely walk unaided and must be walked over to the fire pit, and, madly, also be helped up, lifted and pulled away by others. He is like a doll, except he can speak with an unsure voice, his eyes darting nervously, and, of course, he can feel and fear pain. Indeed, it is these rather ambitious flights (as Snow declares them to be) in Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment that are so rewarding and resonate. Snow is adept at historicising her cases in the context of their communities. Her final chapter on disability is crucial to the monograph. Any discussion of ‘freak power’, or freakery, that fails to attend to the disabled body in the wake of Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s landmark Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body is missing something. Discussing writer and artist Bob Flanagan, who lived with cystic fibrosis for decades, Snow reminds us that what we call the performance of self-injury, or body in crisis, passes as daily life for a good number of individuals. Flanagan’s ‘refusal to entirely condemn cystic fibrosis and its effect on his quality of life, choosing instead to see it as. . . “empowering” is not just defiant’, Snow writes, ‘but punk, turning affliction into enlightening material’. Valuations like ‘quality of life’ are suddenly thrown into question: how can one begin to criticise or define self-injury, if some bodies inhabit perpetually precarious states anyway? Works like Chris Burden’s Shoot, which is often considered as an exemplary work of 1970s body art, are habitually thought about in terms of “mania”, “oblivion”, “agony”, “ecstasy”, “physical discomfort” and “inner turmoil”. Much of Snow’s criticism is focused on the excessive aftereffects of this genre, but I would argue that what undergirds so much of painful and self-injurious body art is the precarious balance between excess and mania on the one hand, and control and restraint on the other.Holly Connolly: What I love about your work as a critic is that you’re able to find meaning and value in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, so that your criticism often adds a new depth or dimension to the work itself. What do you think the role of the critic is? For artists such as Burden, Marina Abramović, or even Knoxville, Snow suggests that “it takes youth” to conduct death-defying acts like getting shot in the arm or carving a pentagram into one’s stomach (as Abramović did in Lips of Thomas). Like my friend Sammy, Snow suggests that artists prone to self-injury are “motivated by a kind of restlessness”, that they exalt an almost puerile thanatological drive, that “they do not so much announce themselves as carve their identities, bloodily and publicly into their skin, the way a teenager might carve his or her crush’s name into a school desk or a tree-trunk”. It is a true pleasure to become immersed in writing that is capable of connecting so many dots with such dexterity and grace.”– Natasha Stagg, author of Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019. I also have to add that, because I wrote this manuscript in the period after contracting Covid when I was really quite seriously ill, I will be the first to admit that there is a formlessness to it because it emerged at a time when I was sort of a stranger to myself, physically and psychologically, and when I was experiencing quite severe brain fog intermittently. Reading it now, it often feels to me as if somebody else wrote it, but I have to say that the illness in some way loosened or destructured my thinking, so that a lot of the decisions I made were based on instinct rather than any preconceived ideas about what the finished book might look like.

A searing meditation on violence, pain and the nature of art under patriarchal, racialised capitalism. Snow’s essential empathy is at its most apparent; for all the withering one-liners & theoretical zeal that propel her writing, this is at base a book about pain, death & creativity, the basic fabric of life… This is the most nakedly, vividly human book I’ve read in some time.”— No one gets celebrity better than writer, critic and i-D contributor Philippa Snow. Her first book [is] a thrilling work of cultural criticism about the peculiar place aestheticised violence occupies in contemporary art and culture.” – iD MagazineIn Which as You Know Means Violence, writer and art critic Philippa Snow analyses the subject of pain, injury and sadomasochism in performance, from the more rarefied context of contemporary art to the more lowbrow realm of pranksters, stuntmen and stuntwomen, and uncategorisable, danger-loving YouTube freaks. In a world where violence - of the market, of climate change, of capitalism - is part of our everyday lives, Which as You Know Means Violence focuses on those who enact violence on themselves, for art or entertainment, and analyses the role that violence plays in twenty-first century culture. Svelte and smart analysis… Snow has a witty and sleek style, approaching the subjects of life, art and performance pushed to their extremes with sensitivity and care. This is a book about pain and hurt that, somehow, is both provocative and immensely pleasurable to read.”– Anna Cafolla, The Face Snow’s case studies all involve a level of self-consciousness and will to survival. They are ‘pleasure-spectacles’, by which I mean they necessarily involve the violation of form, by which I also mean the body. This book is less about Isabelle Huppert’s Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher, for instance, leaning over the tub to cut her genitals — although Snow did write on Michael Haneke’s film for Artforum — but more about Keaton’s death-defying stunts. It’s self-injury with an attention toward survival, or the performance of survival. It’s what Snow calls the ‘deathlessness’ of director Harmony Korine’s ‘commitment to the joke’. Yes, there is a risk of death there, but that itself might be deathlessness. If survived, it renders you eternal and awesome. (As when we see Keaton survive his famous stunt in Steamboat Bill, Jr.) These case studies, despite their violent nature, are distinctly unsuicidal. In Which As You Know Means Violence, Snow figures most of the theoretical work of the book through the lens of physical wounding. But what happens when these forms of self-injury intersect with other, perhaps less obvious, forms of self-harm, like exhaustion, hunger, confinement and endurance? With a focus on the spectacularisation of self-injury, there is a critical tendency to only read this sort of performance or body art as extreme or excessive, or through the lens of annihilation or aberration. Those who choose to make a hobby, a career or an art practice out of injury are wired differently - subject to unusual motivations, and quite often powered by an ardent death-drive.