‘A Kind of Love-as-Violence, and Violence-as-Love’: Jenkin Van Zyl’s Looners (2019), gendered violence and pleasure in performance art

Featured in the Hayward Gallery exhibition Kiss My Genders, British artist Jenkin Van Zyl’s epic film Looners (2019) depicts a fantastical ritual of violence and abandonment in a complex of decaying film sets in the Atlas Mountains. Described in part as ‘a deliberate queering of the macho history of violence’, the film address ‘the violence that is regularly committed against non-conforming bodies’, and seeks to reinstate pleasure and bodily excess firmly within the celebratory, bacchanalian realm (Hayward 2019). However, the film also speaks to the work of male performance artists in the 1970s and 1980s – such as Paul McCarthy and John Duncan – who explored gender fluidity, (usually heterosexual) sex, and bodily excess, in messy (physically and politically), violent, and sometimes problematic, troubling, and unethical ways. In Duncan’s piece For Women Only (1979), an audience of women are shown pornographic films and then invited into a back room abuse the artist; in Blind Date (1980), Duncan made a sound recording of a sexual encounter with a female corpse, a piece which he describes as an act of ‘self-torture’ (Duncan 1997). This paper will expand on points of connection and contention between representations of violence and pleasure in Duncan and Van Zyl’s work, and ask how Looners might rehearse or revise a history of gendered or ‘masculinised’ violence whilst seeking to reclaim the agency and autonomy of the body in ways that are ultimately hopeful.