Long Suffering productively links avant-garde performance practices
with religious histories in the United States, setting contemporary
performances of endurance art within a broader context of prophetic
religious discourse in the United States. Its focus is on the work of
Ron Athey, Linda Montano, and John Duncan, American artists whose
performances involve extended periods of suffering. These unsettling
performances can disturb, shock, or frighten audiences, leaving them
unsure how to respond. The book examines how these artists work at the
limits of the personal and the interpersonal, inflicting suffering on
themselves and others, transforming audiences into witnesses, straining
social relations, and challenging definitions of art and of ethics. By
performing the death of self at the heart of trauma, strategies of
endurance signal artists' attempts to visualize, legitimize, and testify
to the persistent experience of being wounded. The artworks discussed
find their foundations in artists' early experiences of religion and
connections with the work of reformers from Angelina Grimké to Rev.
Martin Luther King, Jr., who also used suffering as a strategy to
highlight social injustice and call for ethical, social, and political
renewal.