All I want to do is scream

But I have performance anxiety. So I look at art instead

I can’t stop thinking about an advert that Instagram has been insisting on serving me on the daily to the point where it’s been in my shopping basket at least once (touché, Instagram, touché). The ad is for a rectangle of sound-absorbing fabric that you can scream into before rolling it up and going about your business. The makers of the Shoutlet, a crowd-funded product, describe it as a “portable voice suppression device [that] provides a safe, convenient, and powerful way to alchemize emotions and promote inner balance.” That a personal scream pillow exists is a profoundly depressing indictment of the world and of the capitalist society that produced it. And yet round it goes in my head, the thought of being able to bellow out some fear and rage. If a woman screams into a cushion and no-one hears it, does she make a sound? Is her emotion really “alchemised” or is it simply suffocated?

The Shoutlet. I feel very SEEN by the algorithm. (Image: my Instagram account)

I felt I might like a good scream, but when I tried a little one into a normal cushion (the shipping fee put me off getting an actual Shoutlet), I found I was reticent. What if the neighbours heard? I wanted to see if one of the cuddly toys I’ve been embroidering at college would work, but again, I had performance anxiety. I want to scream about the 5th November - the American scream - and what it says to me about baked-in racism and misogyny. I want to scream about bombed refugee camps and fascism 2.0. I want it out of my body, even briefly, wordlessly, noisily thrown up and out. Yet letting loose, even when muffled, seems somehow frightening. 

For many of the years that I worked on a newspaper, the formula for whether if an article was worth commissioning was whether there were at least three recent examples of the thing taking place and being talked about. Three was a trend. A quick bit of googling yielded a clutch of stories showing that intentional screaming is A Thing. There was Dazed’s story on “Ritual raging: why so many women are turning to therapeutic screaming” (surely because everything is awful and getting worse); “All the rage: the women who meet to scream into the night” from the Guardian and  Women’s Hour had done a bit on “Scream therapy: Five reasons we should (or shouldn’t) start screaming more”. The jury seems to be out on the efficacy of screaming as actual therapy, and I haven’t the strength to go into the ins and outs of 1970’s primal-scream treatment, but maybe what I need is a Scream Team of like-minded souls with whom to howl at the moon on the heath. Power in numbers, and less of a risk of someone hearing my shrieks and deciding to really give me something to scream about.

I’m currently reading Olivia Laing’s Everybody: A Book About Freedom and taking notes. Partly for college work and partly for me. This line about Andrea Dworkin - Laing gives her a very even-handed write-up and praise for her fortitude - leapt out. “Introducing yet another room of college students to the concept of rape, Dworkin fantasised about standing on a stage and screaming instead of speaking: a communal scream that contained within it the silence of all those women who had not been able to find language, or who had not survived long enough to tell their story.” 

We can scream in terror, fury, grief, pain, exhaustion, ecstasy or excitement. So versatile! A scream doesn’t have to be the sound a victim makes, it can be a weapon in its own right, and a symbol of fear hardened into rage. I enjoyed reading Ariela Gittlen’s Artsy.net essay, “A Brief History of Female Rage in Art”, which was inspired by, alas, more US political sexual violence a few years back. “​​In the wake of the Kavanaugh hearings,” she writes, “I’ve developed a new self-care routine: I put on a sheet mask, cue up some soothing music, and look at paintings of murderous women.” Once again, our friend art can provide us with, if not solace, then at least a sense that we’re not alone with big emotions and a need for inchoate bellowing.

Image: Wikipedia Commons

Gittlen mentions a favourite of mine, Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind, (1896) by Jean-Léon Gérôme. I don’t know if it’s strictly the case that Truth is screaming, but look at her mouth - she’s not softly calling out a friendly greeting. She is absolutely bloody furious, whatever she’s saying is in CAPSLOCK ('I CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVE TO GET OUT OF MY WELL TO TALK TO YOU BLOODY IDIOTS’ and she doesn’t give a rat’s arse what the neighbours think of her giving mankind what for at the top of her lungs. I want to be on her team. Her nakedness doesn’t mean she’s been stripped, rather it seems to be a symbol of her superhuman strength. She doesn’t need clothes when she’s wrapped up in her wrath.

I don’t know if it’s written down anywhere that you are legally obliged to mention Edvard Munch if you type the words “scream” and “art” in close proximity, but I’m going to stay safe by bringing him up. His scream, described as a composition rather than a painting, as it’s a visual theme in four of his works, is hysterically famous, worn so smooth and familiar by all of our eyes poring over it that it’s an emoji even while being an enigma. We don’t know what the figure is screaming about - imperialism? Modernity? Despair? - but it continues to resonate and have new relevance. This (“How The Scream became the ultimate image for our political age”) is very good on that - and depressing, because it was written five years ago and it holds ever more true. 

A still from Tracey Emin's Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children (1998) Image: White Cube, London. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2020

At one time, an artist could only capture the moment of a scream visually. A live performer could make it fleetingly audible. Now I can watch and hear Tracey Emin screaming in her 1998 film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children over and over again if I choose. Recording on flickering Super 8, we see Emin curled up, naked, on a jetty outside Munch’s home, water sparkling beyond her as the light explodes upon it. This scream, coming from this body, is gendered, specifically female as opposed to Munch’s androgynous keener. It feels poignant, full of grief and sadness. Watching a 1976 recording of Marina Abramović’s 1975 Freeing the Voice felt more punishing. 

In the original she screamed repeatedly for three hours until her voice gave out, trying to “achieve a mental cleaning through the exhaustion of the three main faculties of expression, voice, language and body”. The video version that I watched lasted 14 minutes and I couldn’t handle all of it. I already knew that Abramović was made of stern stuff, but this is yet more proof of her commitment to subjugating her physical form in the service of making art. Her retrospective at the Royal Academy was hard on the nerves because of this, the cacophony of similar works battling with equally upsetting stills, videos and a chilling display of props from Rhythm 0 that past audiences had used with increasing violence on her body. 

Gina Birch’s 3 Minute Scream

I felt similarly overwhelmed by the sound of screaming during the Women In Revolt! exhibition at Tate Britain, feeling unable to escape from Gina Birch’s 3 Minute Scream (1977). What power a scream can have, and - again - how bleak that more than 40 years on, a film of a woman screaming can feel so necessary. One of Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays, all 24 of which you can see posted in one of the stairwells of Tate Modern, SHRIEK WHEN THE PAIN HITS (1979/82) is violent, horrible and speaks to the scream I feel building. It feels like it could have been made yesterday. (Read more about the essays here).

Amid all this darkness, I was somewhat cheered by discovering the work of Iranian-Canadian artist Babak Golkar, in particular his Scream Pots, which he started making in 2011. They are terracotta vessels designed to be screamed into. The video below shows one particular large version that, he says, is only complete when it is used. It is “made for the audience to perform it… what they bring to it they take away from it.” This two-metre long pot, which went on display at The V&A in 2021, absorbs screams, but he has also made ones that amplify the sound. 

“When logic fails to explain, it becomes natural to scream,” he told Reuters. His website explains further: “Hand-thrown on wheel, each terracotta vessel is designed to absorb and muffle a scream—a gesture both intimate and symbolic, speaking to suppressed frustration and emotional distress…These vessels act as both functional objects and metaphoric containers for unvoiced emotion.” Ten years ago, some of Golkar’s scream pots were installed outside the Shangri-La hotel in Vancouver, commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery, set on sandbags and pointed at what was then the Trump International hotel nearby. It was one of the most popular pieces of public art ever at that site, Golkar has said, speaking to The Guardian. “I wish I had more projects like this one, that just keeps getting more and more relevant.”

Two screaming things I've made this week. Got to get my screams out somehow.

Alas, yes, screaming is absolutely bang on trend yet again. And I think I’ve seen and heard enough of other artists’ screams for the moment. Enough to prove that I need to go and voice some emotion myself in art, if not out loud. I won’t be screaming because I want to go faster, I’ll be screaming because I want to get off.