Body Art Performing The Subject

"With great originality and scholarship, Amelia Jones maps out an extraordinary history of body art over the last three decades and embeds it in the theoretical terrain of postmoderism. The result is a wonderful and permissive space in which the viewer...can wander"...-Moira Roth, Trefethen professor of art history, Mills College.

Amelia Jones maps out an extraordinary history of body art over the last three decades and embeds it in the theoretical terrain of postmoderism.

This book explores the new performativity in art theory and practice, examining ways of rethinking interpretive processes in visual culture. Since the 1960s, visual art practices - from body art to minimalism - have taken contemporary art outside the museum and gallery; by embracing theatricality and performance and exploding the boundaries set by traditional art criticism. The contributors argue that interpretation needs to be recognised as much more dynamic and contingent. Offering its own performance script, and embracing both canonical fine artists such as Manet, De Kooning and Jasper Johns, and performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Gunter Brus, this book offers radical re-readings of art works and points confidently towards new models for understanding art.

Because performance is by its very nature ephemeral, it elicits a desire for what is lost more than any other form of art making. But what is the nature of that desire, and on what models has it been structured? How has it affected the ways in which the history of performance art gets told? In What the Body Cost, Jane Blocker revisits key works in performance art by Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci, Hannah Wilke, Yves Klein, Ana Mendieta, and others to challenge earlier critiques that characterize performance, or body art, as a purely revolutionary art form and fail to recognize its reactionary-and sometimes damaging-effects. The scholarship to date on performance art has not, she finds, gone far enough in locating the body at the center of the performance, nor has it acknowledged the psychic, emotional, or social costs exacted on that body. Drawing on the work of critical theorists such as Roland Barthes and Catherine Belsey, as well as queer theory and feminism, What the Body Cost reads against patriarchal and heteronormative tendencies in art history while providing a corrective to the established view that performance art is necessarily transgressive. Instead, Blocker suggests that the historiography of performance art is a postmodern lovers' discourse in which practitioners, historians, and critics alike fervently seek the body while doubting it can ever be found. Jane Blocker is assistant professor of art history at the University of Minnesota and author of Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile (1999).

Containing Lea Vergine's insight on the 'golden age' of the Body Art movement and writings by the artists featured, this text focuses on the artistic endeavour that uses the body as expressive material.

A survey of the use of the artist's body in 20th-century art.

With Other Eyes demonstrates how feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist concerns can successfully be incorporated into the study of art.