Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject.
Introduction
Jones claims here that body art as an instant of the dislocation of the Western Cartesian subject of modernism into a “postmodern” intersubjectivity. Taking two body artists as examples—namely, Carolee Schneeman and Yayoi Kusama—she shows the complex relationship of the artist (body) to her work (her body). Body art challenged the Cartesian disengaged and “disinterested” point of view of both artist and art critic and, at the same time, challenged clear modernist dichotomies such as subject/object, male/female, reality/representation.
Chapter 1, Postmodernism, Subjectivity, and Body Art: a Trajectory
In this chapter Jones revisits the criticism against body art on the part of many postmodern feminist theorists. The original criticism stated that body art, by the mere use of women’s bodies, in fact reiterates the objectification of the female body by the male gaze. Jones analyses Ana Mendieta’s Silueta photographs series, showing that her art portrays a particularized body/self in its relationship to the observer and the cultures in which Mendieta creates (both former and current). Body art can “unveil the hidden assumption still embedded in critical discussion about postmodernism, its interweaving of the corporeal, the political, and the aesthetic: thus, Mendieta’s photographs of her body-as-trace both address the spectator’s own interpretive body and thwart its conventionally masculinist, colonizing “gaze” by ritualizing and in many cases erasing the “actual” body from their purview.” (31)
Jones cautions against claims that “the performed body/self is ever completely legible or fixed in its effects.” (34) The body/self becomes meaningful through its encounter with the interpreter or viewer; this shakes the traditional place of the artists’ authority and fully relies on intersubjectivity. Thus, body art “enacts or performs or instantiates the embodiment and intertwining of self and other. Body art is one of the many manifestations or articulations of this contingency or reciprocity of the subject that we now recognize as postmodern.” (38)
Chapter 2, The “Pollockian Performative” and the Revision of the Modern Subject.
In this chapter Jones proposes “to situate a particular genealogy of the performative subject through reading of Pollock’s body/self, Pollock’s “author function” (which is understood through images of his body in action), as performed within art discourse and as negotiated through the body art works of other artists.” (61) Pollock is seen as linking modernist concepts of the (masculine) artist who is a defined subject, with postmodernist concepts of the unfixed artist’s subject who is one with her or his art and who performs their subjectivity in interubjective contexts. Pollock, Jones claims, is by and large described by his contemporaries as the masculine genius artist, but his masculinity is a failed one insofar as his artistic identity is embodied, performed and fetishized.
Several body artists followed and commented on Pollock’s performative art in their work including Yves Klein, Georges Mathieau and the Japanese Gutai group. They emulated and complicated the coherency of Pollock’s performative subject by, for example, using women bodies to paint with (Klein). Other artist further complicated the Pollockian performative by feminizing and homosexualizing by performing vagina and anal painting.
Chapter 3, The Body in Action: Vito Acconci and the “Coherent” Male Artistic Subject
This chapter follows the work of Vito Acconci as an example of a male artist who attempts to perform his subjectivity as an ambiguous masculine body/self that is also feminized and intertwined with his audience. Through, for example, enacting both masochistic and sadistic relationships roles Acconci undermines conventional oppositions that equate sado/mazo to masculine/feminine, subject/object/ and self/other. He attempts to open us his subjectivity to the other by, among other things disrupting the gaze, thus destabilizing his own (masculine) narcissistic stance. While trying to feminize and destabilize his identity as masculine artist, he also recognizes that his body reenacts its masculinity thus blurring the clear distinctions and exposing the impossibility for the male body to be wholly transcendent.
Chapter 4, The Rhetoric of the Pose: Hanna Wilke and the Raidcal Narcissism of Feminist Body Art.
Jones explore the ways in which Hanna Wilke’s nude “posing” in her work exposes the hegemonic positioning of the female body as an object posed in front of the male gaze while complicating this position and implicating the viewer in a disrupted and subverted re-articulation of this relationship. (this relates to her earlier works from the 1970s)
“Wilke’s project is clearly not definitively or didactically deconstructive of the objectification of women (neither, for that matter, is Sherman’s or Simpson’s). Precisely because of its very seductiveness (its refusal to “distance” the viewer into a state of critical awareness), Wilke’s work operates within the frame of aesthetic judgment to highlight its internal contradictions (its claim of disinterestedness); unlike the project of Sherman or Simpson, Wilke operates within the codes of “ideal” female beauty and deportment. Extending Judith Butler’s model of reiteration of codes, I suggest that Wilke reiterates a narcissistic femininity in such a way as to unhuinge the conventional framing of the woman as object to be controlled through the disinterested judgment of art critical analysis (Wilke’s “feminine” narcissism exaggeratedly solicits the viewer’s “masculine” desires, clouding the picture of disinterested criticism).” (174)
In her last piece (Intra-Venus, 1992) she uses similar strategy, this time posing her sick body (with cancer). Buy continuing to pose as feminine even while her body ceases to be beautiful and seductive, Wilke further disrupts hegemonic “masculine” notions of the female subject.
Chapter 5, Dispersed Subjects and the Demise of the “Individual”: 1990s Bodies in/as Art
In this final chapter Jones looks at the return to body art in the 1990s in the work on various artists who used body and technology to interrogate their intersubjective being in postmodern urban environment. The work of Garry Hill and James Luna fragments and occludes the body, leaving video screens or technological artifacts to take its place. Maureen Connor and Laurie Anderson are exemplary of the use of technologies of representation as the flesh of the body/self (in Merleau Ponty’s sense), which connects it to the world and to intertwines it with the Other. Both also explore and subvert their femininity through technologies originally used by males.
The works of Lyle Ashton Haris and Laura Aguilar present images or movies of their bodies that are explicitly marked by queerness and racial otherness. In the case of Aguilar, added to this are her obesity and foreign-ness. “Through their heightened particularization of their bodies/selves in representation, both Harris and Aguilar exploit visibility (the very visibility the positions them as “other”) to produce ambivalent bodies/selves that engage the viewer in a complex, technophenomenological exchange.” (225) The works of Orlan and Bob Flanagan goes even farther to literally expose the flesh and draws the viewers/visitors into an intertwined, interactive relationship with the artists through technology. Their bodies/selves are, in fact, experienced by their audience through technological means.
The work of these artists “points to an expansion of the phenomenological relation to a technophenomenological relation that intertwines intersubjectivity with interobjectivity: we are enworlded via the envelopment of our bodies in space, the touch of the keyboard, the stroke of our gaze on the video screen. Seemingly paradoxical, given the conventional association of technology with disembodiment and disengagement from the world, recent body-oriented practices have increasingly mobilized and highlighted this reversibility, using the artists’ own body/self as both subject and object, as multiplicitous, particular, and unfixable, and engaging with audiences in increasingly interactive ways.” (239)
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