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Writer's pictureanushka nair

BODY ART / PERFORMING THE SUBJECT

Updated: Sep 1, 2019

A summary of the introduction to Amelia Jones' book that talks about what is Body Art and its potential and consequences of the subject in the social domain.



ABOUT


  • Body Art: challenging the cartesian self by offering intersubjectivity.

  • "Articulation of the subject within a social domain"

  • Modernist interpretation vs postmodernist

  • Body art as "passionate and convulsive" in order to radicalise culture and to de center the Cartesian subject.

  • Body as a material to break the myth of 'distance/disinterest' in modernist art history/criticism.

  • Inside-out, body unveiling and instantiating the conventions. The work of art /the environment.

  • Sexual revolution, human rights, anti-war

  • Postmodern subjectivity, intersubjectivity: "engagement and exchange"

  • Performative self-exposures

  • The Body of text: Author (body/self) of the Body Art engaging with "text" (performance live/personal and then documented,photographs etc)

  • "Technophenomological body" : rearticulations of gender-particularised bodies via technology

  • Self and otherness: particularised (female,gay,artist etc) and dispersed (engaging with audience thus "otherness" )

  • Artists examined: Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama, Jackson Pollock, Vito Acconci, Hannah Wilke,Laurie Anderson, Orlan and Bob Flanagan etc.



CASE STUDIES:



CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN

  • Visual-kinaesthetic dimensionality: the body is what the eye sees and perceives and therefore responds

  • Challenging the male gaze

  • Gendered subjectivity: dislocating the structures of conventional ideas of gender

  • Works: Interior scroll, Eye Body






YAYOI KUSAMA

  • Exaggerated self-display as a form of portraiture to represent the gendered and ethnic body in the social domain.

  • "Doubled Otherness": gendered and ethnic

  • Representation of the Body: celebrity or artist

  • Particularised bodies



JACKSON POLLOCK

  • Action paintings: perfomativity in visual art. "Pollockian Performative"







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