Skip to main content

The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

Notes

Questions whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture, the visual to the verbal, and the apolitical to the political, Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo and permissibility.

Artist / Author Maggie Nelson
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 978-0393343144
Reference P3523
Date 2012
Type Publication

Keywords

Similar items

Malik Nashad Sharpe – Horror for the Live Context

Artist/Author: Malik Nashad Sharpe | Digital Reference: EF5392 | Type: Digital File

Audio documentation of a lecture given by Malik Nashad Sharpe, on the subject ‘Horror for the Live Context’ on 8th March 2025 at The Garrett Centre.

Culminating his Study Room residency, this talk highlighted some of the utility of making horror as a performance practice, and explored the genre’s potential as a framework for seeing, reading and working with contemporary live performance. During his residency he approached horror as a research tool to tease out an alternative tradition of choreographic practice that contains social resonance and fantastical outcomes, and constitutes a suggestive and speculative lens through which performance can be contextualised.

Artworks referenced and shared in this talk:

‘Shoot’, Chris Burden, 1971, ‘Carcasse’, Piotr Pavlensky, 2013, ‘Rhythm 0’, Marina Abramovic, 1974, ‘American Psycho’, directed by Mary Harron, 2000, ‘Nope’, Directed by Jordan Peele, 2022, ’10 Cloverfield Lane’, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, 2016,  ‘Saw’, directed by James Wan, 2004, ‘Le Manoir de Diable’, directed by George Meillies, 1890, ‘All of us are Dead’, directed by Lee Jae-kyoo; Kim Nam-su, 2022, ‘Untitled Nostalgia 3’, Tiraan Willemse, 2025, ‘Presage’, Elie Autins, 2022, ‘Goner’, Malik Nashad Sharpe, 2024

This is an audio file. For a version with closed captions, please visit our vimeo channel

Stages of Evil: Occultism in Western Theater and Drama

Artist/Author: Robert Lima | Reference: P4229 | ISBN: 978-0813123622 | Type: Publication

In Stages of Evil, Robert Lima explores the sociohistorical implications of Christian and pagan representations of evil and the theatrical creativity that occultism has engendered. By examining examples of alchemy, astronomy, demonology, exorcism, fairies, vampires, witchcraft, hauntings, and voodoo in prominent plays, Stages of Evil explores American and European perceptions of occultism from medieval times to the modern age.

Stop. Rewind. Replay. - Performance, police training and mental health crisis response

Artist/Author: Natalie Alvarez | Editor: felipe Cervera, Elizabeth De Roza, Michael Earley, Richard Gough | Reference: A918 | Type: Article

Training Utopias

Performance Research Volume 25 Issue No. 8 December 2020

Pg69-75

 

Plantain

Artist/Author: VestAndPage | Digital Reference: EF5366 | Type: Digital File

A performance-based feature film produced and filmed on location during the month-long performance walk from Northern Germany through Poland to the Russian region of Kaliningrad, in May/June 2015.

Includes feature film, trailer, poster, stills from the movie, and film description.

Kira O’Reilly: Untitled (Bodies)

Editor: Harriet Curtis and Martin Hargreaves | Reference: P3415 | ISBN: 978-1-78320-832-6 | Type: Publication

The first major survey of the artist’s interdisciplinary practices. Bringing together newly commissioned and other writings by major thinkers in and beyond visual and performance studies, and extensive documentation of the artist’s work from two decades of practice, it navigates through and between performance, biotechnical practices, image-making, and writing.

Love on Me

Artist/Author: Jon John | Digital Reference: EF5347 | Type: Digital File

Draws strength from conversations with the performance artist Ron Athey and readings from Illness as Metaphor, by Susan Sontag.

Please note that Queen Mary University of London holds the entire archive of the late artist.

Gothic Queer Culture

Artist/Author: Laura Westengard | Reference: P4053 | ISBN: 978-1-4962-1702-8 | Type: Publication

Using interdisciplinary cultural studies to examine the gothicism in queer art, literature, and thought the author argues that during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a queer culture has emerged that challenges and responds to traumatic marginalization by creating a distinctly gothic aesthetic.

Part of the Library of Performing Rights (P3041).

Mal No 4: Real Girls

Editor: Maria Dimitrova | Reference: P4060 | ISBN: 9781916089235 | Type: Publication

Fourth edition of the journal of sexuality and erotics.

Birthmark

Artist/Author: Liberate Tate | Digital Reference: EF5333 | Type: Digital File

A film documenting the unsanctioned live performance in Tate Britain: in the run up to the international climate talks in Paris as the artists invited Tate to reconsider their sponsorship deal with BP, and to begin to erase this scar from their skin.

Part of LADA Screens 9. The film was availble online between 30 April ­and 13 May 2016 on the LADA Screens Channel.

The Crossing of Innumerable Paths

Artist/Author: Guy Brett | Reference: P4049 | ISBN: 978-1-909932-531 | Type: Publication

The fourteen essays bringing together a unique gathering of artists, many of whome make works which arise out of responses to the situation or the environment in which they find themselves.

Donation

£