Marianna Simnett’s “Circus”

On the Secession staircase, pre-recorded gasps and cackles can be heard spilling out from the basement gallery, momentarily disturbing those who plan to turn right for Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1902). Follow the laughter, and you’ll be led through a corridor, into darkness, until you reach Marianna Simnett’s “Circus.”

From the ceiling, under spotlights, hangs a blue fabric cloak reminiscent of a tent or skirt. Catherine Wheel (2026) spins gently, as if in the breeze created by that laughter. Expressing both pleasure and pain with impressive stamina and vocal range, the sound is the result of the artist having been tickled (by a “tickle artist”) for four hours. Many viewers laugh along, whether out of enjoyment at the absurdity of this gesture or discomfort at the artist’s presumed suffering. Simnett is staging a joke, but it’s not clear at whose expense. Four hours of tickling exposes something peculiar about the phenomenon. Tickling, unlike sexual narratives, has no climax; whilst one can self-pleasure one can’t self-tickle. Tickling requires an Other, it exists only through relation.

But no bodies are present. While tantalizingly indexical of a body, like a mischievous child giggling from under a tablecloth, there’s nothing under the skirt, only more darkness. Access to the object of desire is, like the climax, deferred. The surrealist André Breton was captivated by Alphonse Allais’s story of a striptease where a dancing woman removes successive layers until, flayed of her skin, she continues dancing.1 Simnett's skirt seems possessed by the spirit of this woman: the disembodied laughter, like the deathly dance, goes on in perpetuity.

In the following room (or entering the next attraction?), a flashing neon depicts a woman lifting her skirt to urinate. Its title, Fountain (2026), winks to Duchamp’s urinal and Bruce Nauman’s Self-portrait as Fountain (1966–67), a photograph in which his lips spurt liquid in a perfect crescent typical of the depiction of urinating men in art history, whereas that of female pissers streams to the ground hot and forcefully, or rolls down squatting legs. In some depictions of urinating women by male painters, a male voyeur is included to eroticize and mock her.2 Simnett’s figure is, instead, based on a character from folktales who, raising her skirt and exposing her genitalia, wards off evil spirits. Here, piss splashes at her feet in splinters of light like those emitted from a welding tool, a staking of agency, territory, power.

Onto the third act, and more vaudeville technics, disembodied voices, and flashing lights. A rectangular installation cuts the room at a slant: LED strips, their light rising and falling to sounds of increasingly frantic breathing. Simnett recorded herself hyperventilating until she fainted (under medical supervision) four times: rapid breath, a gag, a groan, slumped silence, panic upon reawakening, before it starts over. Her panting is not, as might be misinterpreted, the apotheosis of orgasm—that so-called “little-death”—but a pantomime of death. Simnett has said that Faint with Light (2016) was prompted by the story of her Jewish Croatian grandfather who, when being transported between concentration camps, fainted at gunpoint, and was left for dead. The work is both a tribute to him and a self-portrait, but as in the first room, the bodies (grandfather, artist, medical professional) are only implied. Distilled into light, they are fused and sustained by electric currents, as if on life support. It is a chimera suggestive of our digital economy where social media—the portable stage—merges performer and audience (or perpetrator and victim): an efficient and monetizable form of auto-exploitation. 

Simnett’s fainting, laughter, and urination all build a patient profile for the “hysteric,” the now-repudiated representational regime of the female who has “lost control.” In the nineteenth century, at Salpêtrière Hospital, Dr. Charcot studied (or constructed) the hysteric’s symptoms with “medical tests” including “tickling, pulling hair, punching, examining vision”; experimenting with electricity to cause muscle spasms, lighting packages of gun-cotton under patients’ noses, and dazzling them with magnesium flames and stage lights. In Faint with Light, the viewer can stand behind the installation and watch as others are, like Charcot’s cataleptic, “provoked by a bright light.” Charcot’s proclivity for pyrotechnics prompted Georges Didi-Huberman to note “the physicians of the aptly named Salpêtrière [powder factory] became fireworkers [artificiers].”3 The title of the first work, Catherine Wheel, recalls both a pinwheel firework and torture device.

Simnett performs an ambivalent ethics where humiliation and humor, pleasure and suffering, play out in one breath. The titles are puns, the theatrics tongue-in-cheek, yet as in Grimms’ fairytales, violence is everywhere. “Circus” points back to the bodies lurking offstage: the perpetrator—the ringmaster, the guard, the doctor—and the third party seeking entertainment. Performance art, assuming live performers, continues to prompt easy reads of “shock” value where exposed bodies perform risky stunts that appeal and distract by way of the performer’s evident transgression and virtuosity. Simnett’s disembodied performances short-circuit shock, to get inside you (Faint with Light quite literally remains on your retina after you leave the room). The most physically demanding of Simnett’s performances are pre-recorded. Freed of the flesh, the digital recording never tires; it can be looped (or resuscitated) indefinitely, its conclusion or “moral” deferred. In “Circus” yours is the only “live” body left to be held accountable.