The best book I’ve read on art and pain since Maggie Nelson’s Art of Cruelty, and a worthy successor to that work.”– Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online Snow’s ability to move from niche performance art to the messianic iconography of millennial Americana is one of the book’s greatest strengths.”– Bryony White , Elephant Magazine.

A brilliant, bracing and often funny debut, Philippa Snow’sWhich As You Know Means Violencecasts a compassionate but rigorous critical lens on self harm as art and art as accident. The smartest book I’ve read all year, and one I will return to for years to come.”– Allie Rowbottom, author o f Jell-O Girls and Aesthetica. In both of these performances, Arsenault did not express any signs of pain, though audiences can clearly discern her injuries. Relatedly, when discussing other now-canonical feminist performances, such as Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974) and Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), Snow notes how these artists seemingly only have to let down their boundaries to be exposed to the latent violence of misogyny. The state of vulnerability experienced by Abramović, Arsenault and Ono stands in stark contrast to Burden’s and Knoxville’s active pursuit of violent encounters with the world. 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.Zupančič’s chapter ‘Repetition’ in The Odd One In: On Comedy opens with the famous line of Marx from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ Lines later, she writes that repetition is ‘among the most prominent comic techniques.’ But not just comedy: Numerous studies examine empathy in terms of observation of physical pain and immediate pre-conscious responses, such as heart rate, dilation, cortisol, adrenalin, FMRI. This is not cognitive empathy, but an immediate pre-conscious autonomic response. It is not ruminated over, not a moral question, it is something one cannot help. Very much like laughter. Laughter is not language, humans without language (often as a result of damage to the part of the brain largely responsible for language) can still laugh. Empathic winces for the fallen and laughter operate in a space siloed from conscious thought and language. This is curious—and Snow does reference the nature of laughter briefly with some lurches to archaic references like Hobbes—but not as curious as one of the comments Snow provides from Korine regarding the uncompleted film Fight Harm. “I really wanted to make a perfect comedy, and I thought that pure violence, and the repetition of violence, would [achieve that]. I thought it would just build. I thought the repetition of the violence would just negate it, and it would just build and build into something humorous.”

Snow has somehow created an enjoyable—indelible- book-length meditation on pain. Most notable is its critical analysis of hurt in the culture industry at large.”– Stephanie La Cava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You. The glaring difference is that the Bumfights creators did not make a statement concerning the obvious inequalities the sordid production exploited. Although the matter of commentary, the ontological status of being ‘a commentary’, does not need to be formally declared or claimed (there is a greater message beyond the text), it does need to be apparent either by virtue of context or presentation or some diegetic symbolism, allusion, signifier or reference. If one struggles to find evidence of some effort towards commentary, at least some minimal aesthetic gesture or reference in the glyphs of language, beyond metaphorical equivalence, well, it probably is not commentary but rather declared as commentary by third party retrospective analysis. This isn’t to say a historiographical revision isn’t appropriate or erudite or urgent, but it is a difference between declaring something was and still is and is now seen as. This isn’t crystalline in Snow’s text, and it doesn’t have to be. In 2020 his first music book was published: Into The Never, a deep dive into the Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral album, was published by Rowman and Littlefield, his first novel, Politics Of The Asylum about a cleaner in a collapsing hospital was published in 2018. Review of Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment by Philippa Snow (Repeater Books, 2022)

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Crucial to all Snow’s artists is the use of pain as a conduit to authenticity, as a way to access the real. What feels striking is how staged and less-than-real these pursuits sometimes appear. Indeed, something that Snow only discusses towards the end of the book is what happens when things go wrong (she explores the tragic death of Pedro Ruiz at length). The ways in which the lure of pain, in its proclivity for accident, offers an epistemological break from what is knowable. Snow’s monograph is interested in how and why representations of self-injury and cruelty are productive parodies of a whole, self-contained, and fulfilled body. She particularly attends to trans representations of self-injury and cruelty, likening Arsenault’s performance of the feminine to queer artist Cajsa von Zeipel. ‘Her adoption of, and subsequent dismantling of, hyper-feminine attributes might be interpreted as a generous act of martyrdom for trans and cis women alike,’ Snow writes, ‘the former often unfairly yoked to a conventional image of femininity as a matter of life and death as well as of conformity, desirability, and professional advancement’. Snow’s monograph is not a theoretical account of biopolitics and violence in contexts of US empire — you can turn elsewhere for that — but more of an attempt to understand why individuals utilise self-violence to rebel against those contexts. For the most part, Snow focusses less on gruelling instances of self-injury but instead the comedic, pathetic, or humiliating. She elucidates how comedy, to quote Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, is ‘always a pleasure-spectacle of form’s self-violation’. 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. In 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. Which as You Know Means Violence, from Philippa Snow, is at once an interesting assessment while also being a bit frustrating.