“A Hunger Artist”: As An Art Performance

Abstract

When Gilles Deleuze focused on Kafka’s writings, he had few words to talk about Kafka’s well-known short story, “A Hunger Artist”. Deleuze just referred to ‘fasting’ as a frequent theme repeated throughout Kafka’s works (Kafka, 20). Recently, Zack Horton in an article– “Can you Starve a Body without Organs?– The Hunger Artists of Franz Kafka and Steve McQueen,” presents a different reading of the work. Horton focuses on a Deleuzian concept of “body without organs” and elaborates on the ways Kafka’s artist represents an “anti-producing body in its limit case of public self-induced starvation” to portray a “resistance to capitalist spectators” (117). Later, Horton describes the fasting of Kafka’s artist “as an oscillation between spectacle and art” (119). He uses this description largely to elaborate how Kafka’s artist “never exists as a fully autonomous body” and how “he is only an artist by virtue of his spectators” (119). However, little attention has been paid to the ways in which “fasting as a spectacle” can challenge the established perception of ‘time’ of the “capitalist spectator” and can, thus, alter the way one perceives this world. To this end, this study approaches the fasting of Kafka’s artist more as a “spectacle” so as to discuss how Kafka’s work is similar to performance art and, accordingly, foregrounds Bergson’s conception of time. Furthermore, it discusses how Kafka’s artist like an art performer fails in his task, despite all sacrifices he makes in this consumerist era. Fasting as a spectacle in Kafka’s work has much in common with performance art popularized in the early 70s. Amanda Coogan describes performance art as “the action of the body, the authenticity of an activity” (10). Kafka’s artist has no other art but hollowing out his body. For days, Kafka’s artist like a performance artist sits