Letter: Mass Shootings as Performance Art

Submitted by Aaron Arkin, Steilacoom.

“Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a public in a fine art context in an interdisciplinary mode. Also known as artistic action, it has been developed through the years as a genre of its own in which art is presented live. . . .

“It involves five basic elements: time, space, body, and presence of the artist, and the relation between the creator and the public. The actions, generally developed in art galleries and museums, can take place in the street, any kind of setting or space and during any time period. Its goal is to generate a reaction, sometimes with the support of improvisation and a sense of aesthetics. The themes are commonly linked to life experiences of the artist themselves, or the need of denunciation or social criticism and with a spirit of transformation.” (Wikipedia)

It should be evident from the preceding that mass shootings have a lot in common with Performance Art. They include most of its elements: an action, often with notes or a diary describing both the motivation and a plan as to how the act is to be played out; the attack is linked to the life-experience of the perpetrator, often expressed as a retribution against society or an institution for real or imagined slights; and it is performed in a public place, witnessed live, and intended to impress and get a reaction.

As with normative Performance Art, mass shootings take place in local settings, but they are reported out to a national audience. The play-script is so familiar one wonders why the public hasn’t tired of it. First, there’s the ad nauseam retelling of the horror and tragic loss. This saturates the news cycle in what is known in the business as, “if it bleeds, it leads,” followed by the inevitable speculation about the shooter’s motivation and back-story. Then there is the hand-wringing search for causes and prevention, often with a red herring focus on the need for more mental health support (but not necessarily for more mental healthcare funding). Predictably, there follows political tropes from gun advocates such as “guns don’t kill people; people kill people”. The coda for each of these events is a call for prayers and for keeping those affected by the tragedy in our collective hearts, as if somehow that will bring closure.

It should be abundantly clear by now however, that we have not done enough in the United States to prevent or discourage mass shootings**. Calls for more policing and incarceration or institutionalization of often marginalized groups, besides being discriminatory, simplistic and over-reaching, are unworkable. Even were it possible to incarcerate or institutionalize everyone who has ever shown a propensity for violent action, there would be untold numbers of unidentified and unidentifiable individuals who harbor distorted or immature reality constructs, hold deep resentments or have fantasies of destructive acts; people who may be prone to act out but have no criminal history or given any indication they would criminally act, but who have access to weapons and could be moved by who knows what to cast themselves on any given day as the protagonist in mass murder.

We do not have at present the political will to remove semi and fully automatic weapons from the public sphere. We can however, work to focus the spotlight away from the perpetrator and their narrative, removing at least some of the impetus from those who would consider such crimes. We can do more to limit the nationwide repetitive dissemination of lurid descriptions of the slaughter, the interminable interviews with spokespersons and newsroom personalities who offer, for popular consumption, their take on the shooter’s history, character and state-of-mind.

Doing so, we can change the news cycle to instead promote elements of the story that have value and eliminate many of the elements which encourage this perverted version of Performance Art: elements such as self-serving narratives of injustice, retribution, martyrdom, fantasies of personal agency and fame, or the twisted satisfaction of playing to an audience they believe are eager for the details of their story.

There are better examples for us to follow. After a 2019 mass shooting, New Zealand’s reaction was to disappear the gunman: ignore his life story, motivation, planning and implementation. They even stopped identifying him by name. He became a non-entity. In other words, they took away many if not most of the elements which encourage such acts. They concentrated instead on welcoming, supporting, and embracing the affected Muslim Community. And they followed up by legislating major gun-reform to remove assault weapons from society. According to Wikipedia, New Zealand hasn’t had a recorded mass shooting since.

While New Zealanders took actions which nipped mass shootings in the bud, nothing we’ve tried so far has stemmed their incidence. Perhaps nothing short of removing these weapons of war from the public sphere will. But if we can’t at present eliminate such weapons, we can still change the narrative we present of these acts to the nation.

Do we not owe it to ourselves to try and mitigate the motivations behind these horrendous crimes?

**Some measures currently on the books to deal with gun violence include: Funding for Gun Safety and Crisis Intervention Programs, Regulating Ghost Guns, Strengthening and Additional Background Checks, Red Flag Laws, Limiting Gun Sales to Minors.