At the beginning of Future Crimes, the big return to body horror from filmmaker David Cronenberg, a man named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) has his chest cut out for delighted audiences. A machine with fast scalpels spreads her stomach apart and reveals her innards to the crowd. Meanwhile, his companion Caprice (Léa Seydoux) paces the room, manipulating a squishy gadget with flashing lights to control this operation, which has no medical purpose. All the while, Saul is moaning and writhing, maybe in pleasure, maybe in pain, maybe in a mix of both.

Could this makeshift surgery be considered art? At least in the world of film, yes. Caprice calls himself a performance artist, although Saul is not merely his subject – he is a collaborator in his own right and he considers his organs his creations.

Although this may all sound rather strange, Future Crimes is, in fact, formulated in recent art history. It draws on a kind of performance art in which artists use their bodies as material, subjecting themselves to particularly painful situations that have involved bloodshed and the modification of their skin.

“Twenty years ago when I wrote this screenplay, there were a lot of performance artists of all kinds,” Cronenberg told critic Amy Taubin in a art forum interview this week. “Once you have it in your mind that something exists, that the artists were compelled to do these performances, and there was an audience for them, it frees you up to invent what you’re going to invent.”

Surgery

Cronenberg’s latest film is set in the near future in which human bodies have changed so much that some people can barely feel pain. For this reason, knives are brandished in the alleyways of Athens by couples seeking semi-sexual thrills, and near-secret events such as Saul and Caprice have developed a loyal following. Throughout, the characters make a repeated pun: practicing surgery has become a kind of performance art.

Outside the film, in the real world, artists have undergone medical procedures in an attempt to propose new forms to the human body. Along the way, they challenged gender binaries and sexual norms.

French artist ORLAN, for example, underwent plastic surgery, memorably giving herself the curved bumps on her forehead that she still has today. (Mid Road Future CrimesCaprice gets a similar type of plastic surgery.) ORLAN made it clear that plastic surgery is usually used to make bodies look beautiful and that by modifying her own body, she wanted to become less conventionally attractive.

“Working with my body was a political gesture,” said ORLAN Artnet News in 2019. “It was an act for the woman that I was/I am/I will be, and for all women, to claim their freedom, which was denied to them.”

Cutting, perforating, sewing and wounding flesh were widely used by artists from the late 1960s, from Vito Acconci to Zhang Huan. But it’s the feminist art of the 70s that seems to exert the greatest influence on this film.

Even before Future Crimes Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the character Caprice had been compared to feminist artist Gina Pane, who eventually stopped using her body in her work because her performances became so physically taxing.

For his 1974 performance Action Psyche, for example, Pane repeatedly cut his eyelids and stomach, leaving the incisions open so that they leaked blood. Its aim was to “reach an anesthetized society” – a society with so much pain that there was no more discomfort among viewers, similar to the world seen in Future Crimes.

Creators and creations

At some point in Future Crimes, it becomes clear that there are subversives out there looking to create new bodies, and it’s unclear if the government supports this or not, given that there seem to be moles inside. A federal investigator visits the National Organ Registry in one scene. He lifts his shirt, points to a lump on his chest, and asks if this is art in the vein of Duchamp, who also didn’t create many of his objects. Everyone in the room seems stunned by the question.

What the scene implies is that bodies can be art, and the artists behind them are not only natural forces, but also people who come into contact with them. Indeed, Caprice and Saul’s artistic relationship is likely to recall that of another famous performance art duo: Marina Abramović and Ulay.

Prior to working with Ulay, in the early 1970s, Abramović gained international recognition for her “Rhythm” performance series in which she staged violent scenarios using her own body. In Rhythm 10 (1973), she played a hand game using 20 knives, stabbing herself repeatedly in the process. In Rhythm 2 (1974), she took medications usually used for patients with catatonia and began having violent seizures.

The series ended with Rhythm 0 (1974), in which viewers were asked to use objects on Abramović’s body, including a scalpel and a pair of scissors. At one point, a bystander raised a loaded gun at Abramović.

Ulay and Abramović never undertook anything so shocking together, but their performances blended aspects of their romantic and artistic collaborations in unpleasant ways. Their famous 1977 performance Inhale Exhale involved holding their nostrils and exhaling into each other’s mouths until they nearly passed out. By exchanging breaths, the two use the other’s body to transform, creating and using each other’s creations in a vicious circle.

Although he was never explicitly invoked in the film, Inhale Exhale, with its uncanny erotic qualities, seems to hover over the scenes in which Caprice and Saul participate in what they call “the new sex,” or relationships conducted primarily through surgery rather than intercourse. In one scene, the two undress and repeatedly get punctured by a machine.

The man with the ears

Perhaps the most haunting scene in Future Crimes, when Saul attends a performance by an artist presented only as the man with the ear. It’s an apt name: This artist sewed on his eyes and lips, and adorned his arms, chest, legs, and head with extra pairs of ears. He rocks his body to an unsettling score while wearing only a small set of underwear.

The performance of The Ear Man seems to be a direct reference to a work by Australian artist Stelarc titled ear on arm. The work involved placing a functional third ear on his arm and took Stelarc more than a decade to produce, partly because of the medical difficulties involved and partly because of the bureaucratic restrictions that prohibit surgeries of this type. in some countries. He said he aimed for viewers to be able to hear what that ear is doing by tuning in online and on their phone.

Stelarc said the performance is a reflection on bodies undergoing radical change in the digital age. “What certainly becomes important now is not just the identity of the body, but its connectivity – not its mobility or location, but its interface,” he wrote. “In these projects and performances, a prosthesis is not seen as a sign of lack but rather as a symptom of excess.

Although Cronenberg somewhat dodged Amy Taubin’s question when asking about Stelarc, Future Crimes seems to view the artist’s work with suspicion. In the middle of The Ear Man’s performance, Saul is approached by a businesswoman who presents the work as poor concept art. He’s a better dancer than he is an artist, she suggests.