Stelarc documentary Suspending Disbelief: He turned suffering into an art form

Richard Moore claims, half-jokingly, that his film about performance artist Stelarc has been more than 40 years in the making. But that doesn’t mean Suspending Disbelief – co-directed with John Doggett Williams – is the definitive work about the man, born Stelios Arcadiou in Cyprus 79 years ago, who became globally famous in the 1980s and ’90s for “suspensions” in which he dangled from ropes attached to metal hooks pierced through his skin.

“We’re not trying to do a piece that examines how important he is,” demurs Moore, a former director of the Melbourne International Film Festival. “We’re doing a homage to his career, to his spirit of exploration and curiosity, to his longevity in the Australian art scene – to the fact that here is a guy who’s grown up in the western suburbs of Melbourne and gone on to become one of the better-known performing artists on the international circuit. It’s a salute to him and his personality and his cultural output over a very long time.”

Moore first encountered a Stelarc performance in 1982, when the artist was suspended, naked (as was his wont) from the limbs of a massive gum tree in Canberra.

For Moore, who was then working in theatre, the sight of Stelarc’s body twitching as his limbs froze up was instantly fascinating. “It was the ritual element of it, the theatrical side of it. These are images that will burn into your retina and never, ever leave you – and I’m grateful to Stelarc for that.”

Decades later, Moore met Doggett Williams, whom he describes as “an inveterate collector of footage”, including of Stelarc’s performances over the years. There was an archive at ACMI, too. And Stelarc had “eight boxes [of footage] in his house, on all these formats known and unknown to man, stuff we’ve never seen before”. The seeds of a career-spanning filmic survey were in place.

Suspending Disbelief doesn’t offer much insight into Stelarc himself. It’s far more focused on the work than the man. And, says Moore, that’s a deliberate response to what has become standard practice in the endangered realm of the arts documentary.

“We seem to be drifting towards the hagiography mode,” says Moore. “I look in horror at a program like the ABC’s Creative Types … all those personalities are wonderful, they’re celebrities. But art is also dirty and painful, it hurts and it’s messy and it’s chaotic. And we wanted to make a counter to that style of reporting.”

Arguably, no film about Stelarc could ever do differently. His career – which dates back to the late 1960s – has always revolved around the body. There were early experiments in tracking its internal functions, the famous suspensions – embraced by a generation of younger fans today as pioneering efforts in body modification and self-mutilation – and the later (and ongoing) efforts to transcend the limits of the corporeal form through integration of technology, robotics and AI into the physical shell.

There’s not a lot of hand-holding in the film, but there are a few signposts that serve as pointers for further research for the curious – the briefly glimpsed reference to the Fluxus art movement, for instance, and the emergence of the body itself as a medium for art.

To that end, there’s footage of fellow Australian Mike Parr’s infamous performance at the Venice Biennale in 1977, in which he appeared to chop off his own arm (the severed limb was, in fact, a prosthesis packed with meat, and attached to the end of Parr’s actual foreshortened arm, with which he was born).

It is remarkable, and appalling, and arrives without warning – and Moore makes no apologies for its inclusion.

“It’s incredible footage, and it illustrates a point for us about the European body-art movement,” he says. “But how do you warn people about it? Do you warn people about it? Do you say, ‘oh, the sequence that’s going to happen now is actually artificial, it’s not a real arm’? But John and I agreed, we wanted the shock value.”

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Scenes like this are meant to be disturbing, both in the film and in the moments captured in it. “They hark back to images of crucifixion or public hangings,” Moore says of Stelarc’s suspensions, as well as the broader body-art movement. “There’s something deep down and slightly nasty and scary about them. It’s blood and pain, something subterranean.”

But, many people will ask, is it art?

“Of course it is,” he insists. “If he’d done it in his bedroom and just kept it there, it probably wouldn’t be. Because he’s made it so public, shoved it in our faces and made us look at it, it becomes art.

“Whether you like it or not,” he adds, “is a different question.”

Stelarc: Suspending Disbelief will screen at the Castlemaine Arts Festival on July 4, Revelations in Perth on July 9 and 11, Cinema Nova July 13, and the Dendy Newtown in September. Screening details.