ABSTRACT
André Stitt’s work as a performance artist usually tends to draw a reaction rom an audience. Some leave elated, believing that they have seen a transformative event which reinforces the medium’s potential for examining intensities in time and space; others leave disgusted, feeling that they have witnessed a spectacle of almost unbearable degradation. Neither remains untouched by the conf rontation. Stitt’s performances (which now number in the hundreds), first made in 1976 in his native Belfast, have spanned the last nineteen years and been presented throughout the world. His ‘akshuns’ involve self-abuse, aggression, tantrums and exorcisms, arrived at through pain or elation, iltered through the urges of the masculine and the dispossessed. Yet beyond a surface anger which some f ind so intense that it merely overloads, there lies a sophisticated meditation on the nature of social responsibility. Simply put, Stitt’s ‘akshuns’ implicate the audience in condoning another’s actions, either by default or encouragement.
