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a flesh-eating animal. Towards the end of this first phase of the action, the process of ingestion became so unbearable, disturbing our familiar, passive relationship to food, that Gina Pane had to resort to rolling pieces of the meat into little balls between her fingers in order to finish. Gina Pane may have been inspired by the theories of Marshall McLuhan4 who, in Television in a New Light, observed that the true aim of televised images is nothing less than the reprogramming of the spectators’ sensibilities, and that the means of communication can upset the natural equilibrium of our senses. Holding herself fixed and motionless while watching images of a particularly alarming news story, Gina refused any attempt to escape from the social and political realities of her day. At the same time, she prompted her audience to see images from a new perspective, one that took the artist’s own body as the unit of measurement. Her position so close to the screen, her resistance to the pain provoked by the blinding light offered a critique, beyond any theoretical formulation, of the consumption of raw information. Gina’s uncomfortable posture, just behind the illuminated bulb, forced her to push the limits of physical endurance in order to assert her freedom as a spectator: to see and to understand in spite of all of society’s attempts to subjugate the body. No other artist of her generation exploited the language of the human body with such concision and symbolic power to express our being-in-the-world in all its phenomenological, social, and moral dimensions. The ritual, symbolism, and catharsis—consistent features of her corporeal language—transcend the merely private sphere to express a call to rebel against what one might call the “socio-alienation” of body and mind. From this perspective, the fire she extinguished with her hands and feet in 1971 not only offered an experience of physical resistance to pain, but also proclaimed a determination to oppose all forms of moral anesthesia. This body in motion, dancing before the tiny flames, became the very incarnation of energy, both physical and mental. As such, her body appeared simultaneously as both a flesh subject to suffering and a conscience transmitting signals meant to convey, in the artist’s words, “the infinite search of the other.”5 This gesture expressed as much the indiscipline of desire, its transgressive nature, as the struggle that human beings must wage against their own imprisonment. The fire, confronted and extinguished, echoes Novalis’s vision, according to which, “Poets are both insulators and conductors of energy.” Placing
4 In 1968, McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) was published by Éditions du Seuil, in the Points series, under the title Pour comprendre les médias. The work was very favorably received and had a real impact in artistic and philosophical circles in France. 5 Gina Pane, Lettre à un(e) inconnu(e) [Letter to a Stranger], texts collected by Blandine Chavanne and Anne Marchand (Paris: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2004).
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