Coach House Books, 2006
Read by Michael Davidge
A scansion of the subtitle anticipates the tonal shifts that make O’Donnell’s book not a screed but a compelling read: call it a manic-depressive manifesto, ranging from the suicidal to the utopian. Actually, the book is light on suicide; at the moment, the author is feeling up. Diagnosing a moribund theatre, O’Donnell finds a possible cure in the art world’s recent turn to the social, which prompts him to form an aesthetic of civic engagement, or social acupuncture. Recognizing that real political engagement requires boredom, intensive labour, and too much fluorescent lighting, O’Donnell proposes social acupuncture as a means to reinvigorate a commitment to activist art in the dispiriting war between commerce and culture, where wave after wave of engaged artists are neutralized by the frontline (or is it bottom line?) of capitalism.
Using acupuncture as a metaphor for the imbalance of power and resources (”chi” or energy) in the social body, O’Donnell calls for an art that pinpoints problems in the civic sphere and actively intervenes. Like a lefty Adam Smith arguing that self-interest generates the collective good, O’Donnell also sees social acupuncture as an opportunity for artists to find funding and fame, while benefiting the disenfranchised. He cautions, however, that the rigourous participatory theatre envisioned by social acupuncture (as an alternative medicine for the irrelevancy of theatre in a public sphere with a democratic discourse deficiency) will entail a lot of sick-making “dorkiness, earnestness, and amateurism.” Like real acupuncture, it will not always be pleasant.
Describing himself as “an angry, stupid, white idiot pervert asshole jerkoff,” too wimpy for winter demonstrations, O’Donnell exhibits a frank ambivalence that allows his brand of art activism to avoid the charge of self-righteousness. Unfortunately, the dozen-odd examples of his practice as a social acupuncturist provided by the book, such as a spin-the-bottle game for grown-ups, are not wholly convincing as politically engaged art. Moreover, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City (his most theatrically conventional example, for which the complete script is provided) is not wholly convincing as theatre. Altogether, however, the text is essential reading to all concerned. By arguing for a Neo-Philistinism that emphasizes the accumulation of social capital, O’Donnell places ethics before aesthetics, fundamentally (and ironically to his disadvantage) shifting questions regarding criteria for art from the political to the moral. People may talk, but in the meantime, real political work advances under fluorescent lights, not footlights.
