2 - Performances

Summary

“Performances” describes some of the most famous fasting practices, places and institutions that welcomed hunger artists, from sealed cages to open-air shows, from Succi’s impressive public fasting at the freak atmosphere of the Royal Aquarium London to his parade across Brooklyn bridge in New York in 1890. Based on Kafka’s Hungerkunstler, to reflect on the influence of the audience in the success or failure of fasting performances, the chapter describes a general typology of performances of public fasting and their implications in the epistemology of the art. It depicts hunger artists’ fencing, riding, climbing, ballooning, in specific urban contexts and their influence on contemporary knowledge on fasting, inanition and starvation. The chapter also analyses how the varied audiences appropriated hunger artists, and created a commotion, in which different and opposing interpretations of the facts coexisted in the public sphere, for example, concerning the risk of exceeding thirty days of fasting, and the ideal method to tackle fraud and provide ‘objectivity’. It also points out the controversial views on the scientific value of public fasting performances in medical journals and in the daily press.