The body is at once the most solid, the most elusive, illusory, concrete, metaphorical, ever present and ever distant thing—a site, an instrument, an environment, a singularity and a multiplicity. The

body is the most proximate and immediate feature of my social self, a necessary feature of my social location and of my personal enselfment

and at the same time as aspect of my personal alienation in the natural environment

--- Bryan Turner, Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory

Feminist Performance Art/ Body Art

Body-centred performance traditions in pre-modern and popular cultures including dance, mime, acrobatics, martial arts, circuses, freak shows, medical displays, striptease etc.

Artaud- “passionate and convulsive” Examples of Modernist practices of interventionist voice, gesture

and movement of the body : “Dadaists were fascinated by primitivism in its indigenous & foreign

forms & made it a cornerstone of their performance aesthetic Constructivists analysed the anatomical laws of the human body,

combined with space, colour, form, sound etc Futurists extolled ‘body madness’ (fisicofollia) and chose circus,

music-hall, cabaret and Variety as models Expressionists employed the body as a seismograph for psychic

states & created extremely stylized, physically heightened renderings of mental processes that went beyond conventional acting”

- Gunter Berghaus

Body Art- An Introduction

Artist as facilitator, not genius. Under the greater concern of anti-establishment art,

gender concerns were submerged. Not a sizeable representation of women artists.

The uneasy relationship between women and male performance movements such as Fluxus had to do with women performers’ insistence on writing the forbidden female body ( as subject)

Activates intersubjectivity: where reception and production come together on one site: the body; as against static models of representation

Fluxus, Happenings & Female Body

Visual Art as performance Multimedia representations Pollock’s Action Paintings- physicalized emotional energy &

embodied his self in his work. Followed by Georges Mathieu who staged live paint actions

Kazuo Shiraga’s wrestling with clay in Challenging Mud Yves Klein using human brushes in his work

Anthropometries Piero Manzoni’s signing human bodies as works of art Shigeko Kubota’s Vagina Painting Performing subjectivity through the body

Appearance of the Artist’s Body/ Performance in Visual Art

Carolee Schneemann argues,” my work has to do with cutting through the idealized (mostly male) mythology of the ‘abstracted self’ or the ‘invented self’ i.e. work…(where the male artist) retains power and distancing over the situation.”

“Female body- not anymore simply a sexual object, but a body to be stripped off layers of cultural inscriptions, through deconstruction of the gendered sign “woman” in traditional representational framework”- Amelia Jones

Early 1960s- the feminist movement- nascent stage & the exploration of female performers of their visceral body in visual & performance art set the stage for other events to follow

“The Personal is Political” Embodiment of desire, subjectivity, “politics of visuality”,

“exchange of interpretation”- Performance includes artist, object, audience and their emotional, mental processes

Undermines the myth of masculinist rational, objective, distanced, “disinterested”, critical evaluation

The process is favoured over the product- Art Informel Is it inherently avant-garde?

Gendered Body in Body Art

Viennese Actionists Otto Muhl and Hermann Nitsch

“modern religious art”

Aggressive ritual displays involving

sacrifice, blood, acts of libidinal nature

“Aesthetics of Ugliness”

Perversion to be seen as pleasure

principle rebelling against reality

principle

Against denying of body in Western

Christian tradition

“Body art is specifically antiformalist in impulse, opening up the circuits of desire informing artistic production and reception. Works that involve the artist’s re-enactment of her or his body in all of its sexual, racial and other particularities & overtly solicit spectatorial desires unhinge the very deep structures and assumptions embedded in the formalist model of art evaluation.”- Amelia Jones

Study of ancient trance techniques, magic rites and healing ceremonies

Revival of a defunct shamanism/ rediscover the mystery cults of a by-gone era

Ancient goddess cults, matriarchal traditions Ritual practices applied in a new context, especially a

modern technological society- regenerative powers “Sexual revolution” of the 60s

Ritualism & Neo-Shamanic Performances

"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." -Carolee Schneemann

Marina Abramovic • Bojana Pejic, writing on Marina

Abramovic states, “The artists who

started to “unfold” their bodies in

public…aimed at peeling off the

sedimented layers of signification

with which the body, their body, was

historically and culturally coated.”

• Pain as taboo, risk-taking & illness

(madness) confined to periphery,

endurance-related activity

• Direct, confrontational relationship

with audience- “electric field

around”- project themselves back on

the artist

• Lips of Thomas/Thomas’ Lips (1975)

• “subsuming the ego”; “no rehearsal,

no pre-determined ends, no

repetition”;

Carolee Schneemann

“The body is in the eye; sensations

received visually take hold on the total

organism. That perception moves the total

personality in excitation…my visual

dramas provide for an intensification of

all faculties simultaneously–

apprehensions are called forth in wild

juxtaposition…such forms corresponding

to a visual-kinaesthetic dimensionality; a

visceral necessity drawn by the senses to

the fingers of the eye…a mobile, tactile

event into which the eye leads the body.”

She established her body as “visual

territory”

Schneemann in More Than Meat Joy

(1964) , “In some sense, I made a gift of

my body to other women: giving our

bodies back to ourselves.” The use of the

female body-in-movement as against the

static body in representation (where one

is not sure of agency) is highlighted.

Gina Pane • French artist born of Italian

parents.

• Escalade non Anaesthesiée (1971)

involved her walking up and down a

specially made ladder-like frame

with rungs made of sharp metal

that cut her hands and feet.

• The Conditioning (1973) in which

Pane lay on a metal frame with

eighteen lit candles beneath her,

exposing herself to intense heat.

• In Death Control (1977) live

maggots crawled over her face and

under her eyelids

• Main concern- anaesthetic/

apathetic nature of society

• Death drive- elemental connection

Hannah Wilke• Jewish, anti-semitic prejudices and

the Western world

• Objectifies her own body, but

through agency, inverts the power

dynamic: performs “her self”

• Jones calls it “radical narcissism

typical of feminist body art”

“naïve essentialism” It addresses a “particularization of subjectivity”; the artist’s

body clearly engages with notions of race, class, gender , sexuality and is mobilized through the body’s engagement with the act of production of art

i.e Body as “pure index” Mary Kelly says, “ (it is) an untheorized belief in the

ontology of presence and in anatomical basis for gender” Distance provokes the reader to question the “illusionary

and ideological world of representation”. However, embodiment of “femininity as a pre-given entity” is naturally assumed and performed.

“Re-iterates the structures of fetishism”- Griselda Pollock

Criticism