Seeking Ancient Thrills

Seeking Ancient Thrills

As I was watching this evening’s programme about ‘shocking art’ I was struck by how much it seemed that some of the participants were clearly tuning into some ancient way of testing and challenging themselves. Especially those who were involved in the ‘suspension’ parts of the show.

Clearly there were those who were expressing a fetish for pain and this was really the way that Channel Four has been advertising the programme. A heavy focus on the more fetishistic aspects and the shock aspects in the advertising for the show clearly seem to be attempting to appeal to the prurient tastes of the audience.

Yet I was left thinking about those who were basically following ancient tribal rites about pain and self-testing, those rites of passage which seem barbaric and pointless to most of us seem to be stimulating a growing section of the modern, western populace. Are we so devoid of ways to challenge and confront ourselves that we are looking into our primitive past for ways to do so? In an increasingly nannying state we have seen the rise of so-called extreme sports and generally silly practices like bungee jumping. Base-jumping, free-running and so on all seem to me to be expressions of a need to challenge ourselves and our environment and that so many of these activities are at least frowned upon makes them all the more thrilling to their participants.

I’m doing some fight directing later in the week for a major TV series. The ‘fight’ is, as they are in many UK dramas, so brief and minor as to be a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it affair. In fact, I think my presence for it is almost entirely pointless and is costing the production money just to shut up insurers. Insurance and risk-assessment is making everyday life almost impossible. I have to do a risk assessment for pulling someone around and having them flinch back and pretend to hit their head on a wall and by the time I’ve worked out every possible – but extremely unlikely – eventuality and made the actors aware of them, I’ll have them so scared that they’ll likely be very awkward when it comes time to perform the action. In this state they’ll be more rather than less likely to have an accident and will respond to minor pain stimuli in a more extreme way than they would otherwise, because they’re anticipating it and will therefore subconsciously add to any minor impact they feel. All of which adds to the difficulty of my job, their job and all the crew’s jobs because it will be more difficult to get anything done quickly. And all because of insurance. Not that I should complain; if the insurers weren’t like this I’d get a lot less work, though what I would get would be more interesting.

Glasgow Libraries are introducing free wireless connection to the ‘net at all libraries. So far only three are capable of it and I tried to use one last week. I couldn’t because the council’s health & safety bods had been around and had covered up all the power sockets because they were worried about people plugging in untested electrical equipment. Seems we just might blow up the whole library or something. Now apart from the fact that the tests an item would be subjected to to be cleared by this body for use are the same ones that the manufacturers use before they leave the plant is one thing, but do they really think that there is any way on this earth that people will send off the power supplies for their computers to be tested by the council before they can be used? Of course they won’t, so a great initiative will be strangled at birth by a foolish interpretation of a regulation.

There are already ‘organisations’ in America pressuring for legislation to ‘protect’ people from using their own bodies in this way. For ‘protect’ read ‘prevent’ and you’ll get what’s really on their mind. It’s that whole thing of not understanding it, so it must be bad, so we’d better ban it. I don’t feel the need to hang myself from a meat hook to make myself feel alive. I think that the people cutting themselves in front of audiences and calling it ‘art’ are self-deluding, pretentious and essentially un-talented. But it’s their choice to do so and the choice of their audience to chose to view it and to take from it what they will. It is not the place of the government, the council or some right-wing prude hiding behind protecting children to impose their views on them.

Human beings need challenge. We need to find a way to make us feel alive and if regressing to some ritual from our tribal past does that for some of us then who are the rest of us to say it’s wrong?