Self-sabotage is a lecture-performance held at the Jeu de Paume in Paris as part of the series "Culture as a Strategy to Survive" on March 6, 2009 and again, that same year, at the Emergency Pavilion in the 53rd Venice Biennial. The piece is a lecture where artist Tania Bruguera sits at a table reading her reflections on political art and the function of artists in the context of art, institutions and society. To her right there is a box with a 38 caliber pistol and 9 mm bullets. During the first pause in her reading, the artist takes the gun, puts a bullet in it, makes the drum turn as in the Russian roulette, points at her temple and presses the trigger. She repeats this action twice, at each pause of her reading of the text. When the lecture is over, questions from the audience are answered.

The relationship between art and reality is an important concern in the development of Tania Bruguera's work. The spine-chilling gesture illustrating the function of artists in society and the truthfulness of their actions as transformers of reality. It is also the experience of total sacrifice, the sacrifice of oneself, as the possibility of maintaining a commitment with the ethical values established by artists with their work and context. This is an exercise in Behavior Art through self-aggression as a sort of call for a political art taken to its utmost consequences.

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53rd Venezia Biennale

Venice, Italy

photos: César Delgado Wixen

(by alphabetical order)

Bruguera, Tania "Culture as a strategy to survive," Delivered at La Culture comme strategie de survive. Jeu de Paume, March 2009, Paris, France, bc, Summer 2009, pp. 80-81.

_______________ Utopia of Exotic. Pavilion Magazine. Ed. PAVILION - journal of politics and culture. English/Rumanian, 80 pages. December 2010, (illust.) pp. 38 - 46.

_______________ "Culture as a strategy to survive," Delivered at La sociedad del miedo, Pabellón de la Urgencia, curated by Jota Castro, Junio 5, 2009, 53 Bienal de Venecia, Venecia, Italia. 

Civale, Cristina “Tania Bruguera: A Loyal Daughter of the Revolution”, Clarin, Buenos Aires, Argentina, September 9, 2009 (illust.)

Curia, Dolores "Tania Bruguera turns spectators into citizens." August, 2009. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Quiles, Daniel “The artist is absent: notes on Tania Bruguera,” Arte al Día International, no. 132, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2010 (illust.) pp.42-47

 “(…)A recent performance that was not included in the retrospective, Self-Sabotage (2009), staged at the Emergency Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, confronted a potential problem of this formula. Sitting at a table and speaking into a microphone, Bruguera alternated between a text about art and politics — “artists should self-sabotage their relationship with others, with the world of art, by provoking and not pleasing them, and especially not pleasing the institutions” — and three rounds of solitary Russian Roulette. Her speech was rushed and broken, as though the text was merely perfunctory. What sense can be made of such a disturbing act? Perhaps it is the image of provocation pointing at the provocateur. The personal appearance of the endemic performance artist is reintroduced into Behavior Art and subsequently faces the quandary of stimulating her own “behavior.” She resorts to extremes, to cheap self-shock, before which her call for political art pales in comparison, rendered a dead script that is repeatable but emptied of conviction. All that remains is the effect — the involuntary, almost imperceptible squirm — that Bruguera experiences as she squeezes the trigger. In this fleeting short-circuit, performance and participatory art find shared, dystopian limits”. 

Daniel Aquiles. “The artist is absent: notes on Tania Bruguera”, Arte al Día International, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2010.