The phenomenology of bloody pain. In: The Phenomenology of Blood in Performance Art.

This chapter introduces part 1 of The Phenomenology of Blood in Performance Art. It establishes how pain is conventionally understood as a symptom of violence, yet its phenomenological implications extend beyond this binary. It considers pain as both an ontological and aesthetic phenomenon, framing it as a perceptual rupture that operates within the cultural, political, and social constructs of violence. Engaging with Judith Butler’s critique of nonviolence, the analysis considers how pain is mediated through systemic power, nationalism, and security. Yet, pain—while often divisive—also functions as a universal connective force, revealing an intersubjective ontology of lived experience.
Drawing from Williams and Bendelow’s insights into pain as a fundamental human experience and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of phenomenological flesh, the chapter situates pain as an intermediary between perception and reality. When performed in aesthetic contexts, pain disrupts spectatorship, compelling an embodied response that oscillates between attraction and repulsion. This rupture, highlighted in examples from the work of artists such as Mike Parr, Andrei Molodkin, and Hermann Nitsch, becomes an intervention into cultural constructs of the body, agency, and suffering.
Through analysis of performance art practices, the chapter contends that pain functions as a site of aesthetic and political revelation. It foregrounds the tensions between bodily autonomy, societal control, and the subversion of normative aesthetics, arguing that pain—when uncoupled from its immediate association with trauma—becomes a catalyst for reconsidering subjectivity and embodiment. This phenomenological reading of pain thus proposes an expanded framework for understanding its role in performance, wherein the ruptured body serves as both an object of spectatorship and a site of radical perceptual transformation.