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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