Drowned Alive

Just added "Drowned Alive: Performance Art or Performance Stunt?" to my links. It's an article on the nature of performance art, in response to David Blaine's 2006 attempt to break the world record for holding breath underwater. I recently wrote an essay on the man for Experimental Performance, and in researching, discovered some very interesting insights. The majority of people (particularly here in the UK, not so much in his native America) think of him as nothing more than an attention-seeking weirdo. Yet his 2003 performance "Above The Below" attracted an audience of thousands over 44 days. And yes, I myself was among those thousands. Curiosity got the better of me and, living only a half-hour train journey away from London, I decided to go and see what all fuss was about. For those who are unaware of what the piece entailed, Blaine spent 44 days in a Plexiglas box, suspended 30 feet in the air above the south bank of the River Thames. During this time he didn't eat and only drank 4.5 litres of water per day. So what does a man in a box who is weak from not eating for weeks do all day? Answer: not so much. Mainly, he just sat. Sometimes, he lay down. Every once in a while, he stood up. If you were really lucky you might get to see him do a wee into a tube. And people were going, "This is brilliant. He's an inspiration to us all." Now, during my research for the essay I discovered that, as uneventful as it may have been to watch, Blaine's did in fact have deep personal meaning. It was more about what he would go through physically and emotionally than aesthetic value. But no one watching would have known that, unless they researched as extensively as I did, which I doubt. He did not, before or since the performance,
offer much in the way of a public explanation of the reasons behind this, or indeed any of his performance pieces. Which is a shame in a way, because when David Blaine does something, we are interested. We watch. Every time he performs he has a platform to make a statement about something, yet seemingly chooses not to. "Above The Below" mirrored some of the major problems in the world today: starvation, lack of drinking water, incarceration. But he never mentioned this in relation to the performance. And it seems no one was particularly bothered. Who needs meaning when you could be watching a man in a box?