“passionate and convulsive” : tracing a path from modernism to postmodernism
A summary: Jones, A. (1998). Body Art: performing the subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. pp. 1 – 20
Two cases
Amelia Jones views body art as a set of practices, “which enact subjects in ‘passonate and convulsive’ relationships” and thus manifest the “dislocation of the Cartesian subject of modernism. This disruption constitutes postmodernism.
The work Interior Scroll by Carolee Schneemann in 1975 is brought up to showcase the body as an “integral material”, the antiformalist nature of body art and its potential. In body-oriented works artists perform their own bodies/selves exaggerating their “nonnormative” features (e.g. gender, ethnicity). They establish a direct communication to the audience opening up a territory of desire, which challenges the formalist model of artistic production, reception and “disinterested” criticism.
Performance.
Schneemann ritualistically stood naked on a table, painted her body with mud until she slowly extracted a paper scroll from her vagina while reading from it. “I thought of the vagina in many ways– physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by it’s passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiraled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual power. This source of interior knowledge would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh in Goddess worship.” -CS
Judson Church, NYC. Group performance: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, plastic, rope, shredded scrap paper
“Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, rope brushes, paper scrap. It’s propulsion is toward the ecstatic– shifting and turning between tenderness, wilderness, precision, abandon: qualities which could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent.” –CS
The work of Yayoi Kusama is discussed next. “The otherness” is emphasized here as well. Gender, ethnicity, sexuality is overacted in the 1960’s American white and male dominated colonial world. An Asian naked woman in polka-dot mesh and high heels posing on a couch of phallic knobs in an environment of macaroni. The idea of the “reversibility of inside out” is also present: Kusama enacts her body and herself and at the same time the work of art and its environment are an enactment of Kusama. There is a constant relationship and feedback between the artist and the work of art.
1966
Installations like Kusama’s Peep Show – Endless Love Show implicate the viewer in this reversibility. The viewer peeps into a mirrored hexagonal room and sees his unlimited self-reflexion engaging in a narcissistic and erotic relationship with the self and the artwork. Thus the artist denies the conventional partition between viewer and work of art. Artist, artwork and viewer are intertwined. “Kusama’s artistic strategies were inextricable from her identity politics, social politics…. and the deep interrogation of subjectivity characterizing this period.”
The artworks of Schneemann and Kusama “are both enactments and effects of the sexual revolution and antiwar movements as well as the women’s movement.”
A fundamental dilemma
Amelia Jones argues that body-oriented artworks dislocate the models of modernist criticism and art history and reconceive the subject. At the same time she is bound to reframe them through her own perspective and relocate them. To distance herself from this dilemma she suggests a study of body art with the notion of engagement and exchange: “I engage with what I experience as these works in relation to contemporaneous theories of subjectivity and aesthetics; I consider my readings to be a dialogue with the bodies/selves articulated in these important practices.”
The approach of movements such as modernism, postmodernism, post-structuralism, and of social, political and cultural context is essential for the dialogue. These elements and body art are not discussed from a perspective of a causal relationship. “Body art – like these other elements – is examined as a instantiation (both a articulation and a reflection) of profound shifts in the notion and experience of subjectivity over the past thirty to forty years.”
Body art versus Performance
In her book Amelia Jones chooses the term body art over performance art to highlight the body as a site of a “dispersed self”, “as elusive marker of the subject’s place in the social.” The term foregrounds the “body’s/self’s” engagement with the work and accents the artistic and philosophical aspects of the author’s dialogue.
“Performance art” is viewed as a broader term that includes “any kind of theatricalized production” related to the visual arts and simultaneously as a narrower term that expects a performance to take place in front of an audience. It is also seen as a means to transform human life and society, a means to fuse life and art.
Body art on the other hand encompasses works that implicate the “body/self” and can possibly take place in front of the audience or be documented through various media in a kind of studio. It’s nature is not critical nor reactionary. Body art is an enactment of subjectivity, it activates intersubjectivity so that meaning takes place in relationship to others. Thus it “encourages us to rethink the very methods by which we fabricate histories of art and to rethink the ways in which we understand meaning to take place.”
The body of the text
In the chapters following the introduction the author, by rediscussing phenomenology, poststructuralism and feminist thought, creates a setting for a new understanding of body art and its potentials. She presents several cases of body-oriented artists during the period 1950’s to 1990’s.
Chapter 2: Jackson Pollock is investigated as “a pivot between the modernist genius and the performative subject of postmodernism” and it is argued that perfmormativity was already a part of modernism.
Chapter 3: Vito Acconci’s work is reviewed here.
Chapter 4: The aspect of “Jewish female” is highlighted in Hannah Wilke’s work.
Chapter 5: The works of several artists in the 1990’s and the return to the body is explored here. The terms “technophenomenological body”, “interobjective” and “cyborg” subject are part of the dialogue.
performance practices_divergent temporalities 