Cintra
It is so good to see Cintra Wilson back in Salon. In Men who hurt themselves for a living she sounds like she’s been doing scoobs with George Saunders.
If this were the ’70s, both Knoxville and Blaine would be important conceptual artists (that is, if Blaine didn’t end up a cult leader instead). Many “Jackass” installations closely resemble the ’70s offerings of artist Paul McCarthy, who would sit in a bathtub wearing a wig, drinking ketchup, and stuffing raw sausages in his mouth and up his ass (the latter with the assistance of handfuls of Pond’s cold cream) to the point of illness. Both Knoxville and Blaine are the intellectual godchildren of masochistic artist Chris Burden, who for his MFA thesis in 1971 locked himself in a 2-by-3-foot locker for five days at the University of California at Irvine – the first of many such endurance pieces in his career. Later in ‘71, Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22, and in 1974 he crucified himself on top of a Volkswagen.
A great eye for bon mot researchlets:
Knoxville commented in one interview that when he’s enduring painful acts, they “get me so hot I feel just like Audrey Hepburn in ‘My Fair Lady.’”
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Posted to The Good • 2002.05.22 (Wed) • 12:00
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