Philippa Snow is a hot mess
I’ve long forgotten how I first discovered the paralysing talent of Philippa Snow. Every time I think I’ve cracked it, I come across something even older and remember that, no, I read this one first. It’s a never ending cycle of rediscovery. What I remember well is her review of Cat Marnell’s debut for i-D’s book club. This line in particular: “I am mixing, like pills or prescriptions,” she writes, “my metaphors.” It still stands out after all these years for two reasons: the book under review is one of my favourites published in the previous decade, but crucially, the review is an emblem of Snow’s power of comparing two, most of the time, utterly different cultural legacies (in this case, Frederick Seidel). I’m not suggesting that Snow’s the first to do this or that she’s the only one doing it right now. I’m just saying that no one else is doing it like her.
Since that Cat Marnell review, I have continued to be spellbound by Snow’s power of bringing together different books, or films, or art, or people. In 2019, for example, she wrote about early promise and adult disaster by pairing Lindsay Lohan and Elizabeth Wurtzel in The White Review. Two years later, she explored the dehumanisation of Britney Spears, comparing it to that of Bess McNeill in Breaking the Waves for LARB.
Philippa Snow is one of our most prolific writers. She’s also a hot mess. A self-proclaimed Lindsay Lohan scholar, she has spent thirteen years writing about virtually every aspect of culture. Dazed, AnOther, GARAGE and The Face are just some of the magazines she’s appear in to date (listing every single outlet she’s contributed her mind to would have taken a paragraph). Her i-D column, TMZ Theory, saw her take on cultural figures that most would have dismissed, giving them the most thoughtful interrogation, including Paris Hilton and Naomi Campbell. I had missed the memo on the supermodel’s brief(est) literary career and, more importantly, her side-splitting “I just did not have the time to sit down and write a book.” I still haven’t read Swan (I know, I should be booted off the island on charges of high treason), but that’s besides the point. I can get the copy if I’m ever feeling inclined, thanks to Snow. I’ve learned a lot through her. On The Baffler, for example, she introduced me to Ana Kavan. On Apollo to Cindy Sherman’s only film. A sometimes publisher, she brought forth Oliver Zarandi and his brilliant Soft Fruit in the Sun.
There are hundreds of versions of this introduction I could have written precisely because of how prolific she is and how easily she escapes categorisation, than say, someone with a Substack, who’s so transparent even his interview subjects can’t help but point out his fixation on a particular writer of Irish stock. Her film reviews appear in The New Statesman and ArtReview, while over at The New Republic she gets into TV. She’s the sort of writer you can count on to have impeccable taste but can always chat to about Gossip Girl (original only, soz), not least because of her incredible take on the series for The Point. The possibilities here were endless.
So, where did it all begin? Maybe it was with that Cat Marnell review. How To Murder Your Life is a funny book but also a violent book, two modes that Snow captures like no one else, especially given her terrain is criticism. “In cinema, the term for a foot fetishist,” she writes in an Artforum review of The Piano Teacher, “is Quentin Tarantino.” Violence is a constant thread throughout most of her writing. It might be violence on screen (she’s a Lynch fan), or the violence of life, or how even the love and attention of the public can go sour and ultimately turn into violence for those who suffer it, like Britney Spears or Anna Nicole Smith. It makes total sense then that she zeroed in on a particular kind of violence for her debut book.
The genesis of Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment is as obscure and impossible to define with certainty as Philippa herself (did she arrive in this world a fully-fledged super vixen ready to take readers on journeys they never imagined? Or was that a total accident, as she refers to the creation of art in the book?). A proposal for the book won her a spot on the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize shortlist in 2020, before being snapped up by Repeater Books. I would have read it regardless (she’s one of the VERY few writers I would follow anywhere, having not so much as missed a single article since Marnell), but my anticipation skyrocketed when I found out she’ll be including British lads hit each other with chair in it. Much like Marnell’s memoir, this video is one of my favourite artefacts from the previous decade. Plus I’m always gagging to get the Snow touch on things I like. I keep two notes on my iPhone baring her name, one for things she’s recently published that I haven’t read yet and one with ideas of topics I’d like her to cover. No. 1 on this list at the moment is an essay in her signature style on the lives and art of Anais Nin and Pam Anderson. Also on this list: “Philippa Snow + Tea Hacic-Vlahovic on coke, me in Margiela at Silencio” taken down on my last night in Paris. I’ve read so much of Snow’s work, I’ve even had access to an unpublished piece on Melancholia. If I ever make a career move into editing magazines, as has been recently suggested to me, let’s just say that Ms Snow will have even less free time. Her book has only been out for a few days but when I interviewed her, I found out her next project is already underway: a book of essays about the on and offscreen personas of famous women, including Pam Anderson, Marilyn More, Anna Nicole Smith, Pam Grier and Lindsay Lohan. LiLo is hardly a surprise when Snow is involved. The mere mention of her name however made me flash back to the aforementioned White Review essay: “not all great art is made on the back of others’ suffering,” Snow wrote. “For the artist, it is usually better to be diligent, self-sacrificing.” This line in and of itself could summarise Which As You Know Means Violence, a book looking at artists who are most definitely self-sacrificing and which dissects their methods of working with the most delicate attention.
In Which As You Know Means Violence, you suggest performance artists engage in self-annihilation as an expression of anger and dissatisfaction, but also out of restlessness. Is this attraction to pain and injury as performance immaturity? Where does the drive for self-inflicted violence as performance come from?
I think in writing the book, I certainly gravitated towards some of the more startling examples of bodily self-harm in art and in entertainment, and as such, there is often at least a faint suggestion of anger or perversion in the work I’m citing—it’s difficult to look at someone agreeing to be shot, as Chris Burden did, or agreeing to even risk being shot, as Marina Abramovic did, and not perceive some kind of very intense emotional drive at work, a desire to be seen doing something fundamentally antisocial or psychologically counterintuitive. I am an ageing millennial from the Rotten.com generation, and as such I suppose I was hard-wired to have an interest in extremity more or less from the first screech of my parents’ dial-up modem. (Your man Rob Doyle, lest we forget, wrote a very keenly observed novel about this generational tendency.) There are other motivations beside the more bombastic ones to do with anger, as I go into in the opening section: sometimes shamanic, sometimes for the purpose of exposing the oppressive qualities of another group, sometimes cathartic. Where the drive comes from is a complicated question, and I think it’s probably usually a combination of some innate tendency, and the pressure of external factors, whether those factors are historical, cultural, familial, religious, sexual, or whatever else.
What can audience participation in this kind of work tell us about society at large? Do we look on because we’re sadists, or to exorcise our own masochistic desires, or for some other reason?
It’s interesting, the critic Nikki Shaner-Bradford wrote a forensic and ultimately very kind review of the book in Bookforum, and one of the things she suggested she’d like to see more of, perhaps in a follow-up volume, was a discussion of the role the audience plays in this kind of work. As I’m finding is the case with people applying rigorous analysis to the book, this ended up clarifying something for me that I hadn’t yet realised for myself—that I think perhaps I’ve left the audience largely out of the equation because the audience, fundamentally, is me, and I am resistant to including myself directly in my writing, and to analysing my own interest in the things I am obsessed with. Being reviewed is sort of hell, incidentally, but it’s also like therapy, and it’s an honour to have people take you seriously enough that they want to reach into your brain at all, even if the sensation of them rooting around in there isn’t always pleasant. So the question about what is in it for the audience becomes really, doesn’t it, what was in it for me? What motivated me to choose this as a subject in the first place? And I’m not certain that I have an answer. I can’t stress enough that I am not an academic, and so my “specialisms,” such as they are, are all chosen in accordance with gut instinct rather than because of things like, say, “exhaustive library research,” “years of academic dedication,” or “intimate knowledge of the subject.” Admitting this might, in itself, be a form of self-harm, because it makes me sound like an uneducated chaos agent, but then again—if the shoe fits.
You describe a performance art event that saw the audience become violent themselves. Why do you think it happened in that particular instance?
This would be Marina Abramovic’s performance of Rhythm 0 in 1974, I’m guessing, where the audience started fighting with each other. It’s difficult to know, but I think it has something to do with the fact that Marina Abramovic was a beautiful woman who was offering herself up to potential harm without any obvious defence, and that vulnerability had a kind of deranging effect on some of the attendees. Interestingly, the critic who recorded this said that some of the audience seemed to mean harm, and some of them had a sort of paternalistic interest in protecting her, so this is what led them into combat with each other. You see two opposing reactions to the presentation of an unprotected woman, there, and each of them is equally fascinating. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Abramovic has quite an effect on her public—and on men especially—in general, although having only seen her from a distance, I can neither confirm nor deny.
Why did you include the British lads hit each other with chair video?
I think for the same reason everyone else on the internet was so bewitched by it, which is its unusual combination of machismo and extremely tender, shirtless kissing. It’s a curious artefact because you struggle to understand where it’s come from, exactly, but then the disbelief surrounding it is the thing that makes it interesting—it reveals a certain inbuilt prejudice, an unwillingness to believe that manly men can be platonically loving with each other. That same tension is one of the most compelling things about Jackass, as well. Sex and violence never fail to be a winning combination vis-à-vis grabbing attention, as a great deal of art and popular culture demonstrates, and because here the sexual element is somewhat undefined—is it queer, or is it not?—there is an added frisson, another layer of mystery.
Is this video taking this particular brand of performance art—although I can’t imagine these guys seeing themselves as such—in a different direction? Is the almost porn-like aesthetic inherent to such a performance?
I’m sensing a special interest in British lads hit each other with chair, on your part, Paul—presumably because of its artistic merit, which of course is why we all love it and why we have all watched it at least twenty times. I think the porniness of its visual style—and it does have the air of an amateur porn clip, at least at the beginning—is definitely part of what makes it so striking. To be honest, I thought I’d already overanalysed it to the point of insanity, and here I am thinking about it again. As a found object it has the vibe of something that Jon Rafman would have used for a video artwork about incel masculinity in about 2014, and in that sense it feels entirely plausible that you could see it in a gallery setting. Whether stuff like this is taking performance art as a medium in a new direction in and of itself, though, presumably hinges on whether or not you think something made for YouTube can be art, which again turns on whether you think intent is what makes something an artwork, or whether art is something that can be arrived at accidentally.
How would you react if the lads of said video turned up to your book launch at Claire de Rouen?
I would absolutely welcome it, as it would give the audience something more dynamic and compelling than me to look at—aside, of course, from the lovely Stephanie LaCava. I presume a lot of the people attending will know me, and as such will already be aware that I am a terrible public speaker; the rest can look forward to being thoroughly disappointed on the night. That’s my sales pitch, which goes some way to explaining why—unlike many of the writers I know—I have never succeeded in making additional money doing copywriting or working in advertising.
Do you agree with Johnny Knoxville’s assertion that performance artists are intellectualising everything they do? Can his performances be seen as a reaction to the status quo?
As I suggest in the book, I think Johnny Knoxville is an obviously intelligent man, and I suspect that some of his resistance to performance artists as a group is to do with a resistance to pretension—if I remember correctly, in the full quotation he says he has no problem with performance art itself as a medium. This is, after all, a guy who went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on a full scholarship, who at one point wanted to be a novelist, who is friends with John Waters, etc. etc. You could make a case, as I suppose I have, for his being one of the most significant practitioners of extreme body art of the last few decades. Honestly, I hope that if he ever reads the book, he sees it as the tribute it was intended to be—I’m not all that kind about the narrative films he’s appeared in, but I don’t think you can fault his work as a stunt artist or as a performer, and I think if he had been less charismatic as a screen presence Jackass might have been confined to the fringes of alternative culture rather than becoming a mainstream hit. In the same way Dolly Parton said it took a lot of money to look that cheap, I think it takes a lot of smarts for Johnny Knoxville to play that dumb. I think whether he’s meant to or not, he has contradicted the status quo in a lot of ways. The Jackass boys were every bit as unafraid of a little homoeroticism as those British lads with their chair.
Is great art only possible through suffering?
Absolutely not! Can suffering help to produce great art? Undoubtedly, but I also think that the origin of this idea has something to do with the convenience, on the part of the establishment, of continuing to peddle the idea that artists work better when they are poor, or oppressed, or miserable, or operating as outsiders. Look at someone like Ron Athey: yes, his work involves self-injury, and yes, he’s using it to exorcise his demons, but there’s a joy there, too, a confidence and an assertiveness that makes it clear he’s taking up space as exactly the person he is meant to be. Ditto Bob Flanagan, who used S&M to extend his life, or Nina Arsenault, whose pain was bound up in her transition, and thus was a positive force. A lot of the practitioners included in the book are—to use a horrible bit of self-help jargon—self-actualising at the same time as self-harming. There is a lot of violence in it, a lot of gore, a lot of genital torture and S&M and so on, admittedly, but fundamentally, I think of it as quite a positive book—a book about the beauty and resilience of, as Hunter S. might say, freak power.
Which As You Know Means Violence is out now from Repeater Books
Philippa Snow will be reading from Violence along with guest Stephanie LaCava at Claire de Rouen in Bethnal Green this Saturday, 17 September. I’m told the event is sold out, but turn up anyway, book launches should always come with an element of chaos).