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. Such practices prompt us to reassess our ways of contructing meaning from art, making us receptive to the element of performance both in the processes of art production, and in the act of interpretation itself. Performing the Body/Performing the Text explores the new performativity in art theory and practice, examining ways of rethinking interpretive processes in visual culture. This collection undertakes two parallel projects: exploring art practices which perform the subject, and examining ways in which modes of performativity in contemporary art offers new models for interpreting artworks. Demonstrating how modernist art criticism attempts to fix the work with more stable sets of aesthetic meanings,
the contributors argue that interpretation needs to be recognised as much more dynamic and contingent. It does not come
naturally' at the moment of contact with the artwork, but is worked out as an ongoing, open performance between artists and spectators, with meaning circulating fluidly in
the complex web of connections between artists, patrons, collectors, and between both specialised and non-specialised viewers within the arena of encounter. 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, Gunter Brus and the Sacred Naked
Nature Girls, Performing the Body/Performing the Text offers radical re-readings of art works and points confidently towards new models for understanding art.
Edited by:
Amelia Jones,
Andrew Stephenson Nfa,
Andrew Stephenson
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 246mm,
Width: 174mm,
Spine: 20mm
Weight: 680g
ISBN: 9780415190602
ISBN 10: 0415190606
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 20 May 1999
Audience:
College/higher education
,
A / AS level
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction1. Kantian Performativity in Art History Karen Lang2. Performing Modernity: The Art of Art History Donald Preziosi3. Art History/Art Criticism: Performing Meaning Amelia Jones4. Cross Cultural Reiteration: Demetra Vaka Brown and the Performance of Racialized Female Beauty Reina Lewis5. Race, Ritual, and Responsibility: Performativity and the Southern Lynching ^Michael Hatt6. Shading Meaning Jennifer Brody7. The Greatest Homosexual? Camp Pleasure and the Performative Body of Larry Rivers Gavin Butt8.The Politics of Feminist Spectatorship and the Disruptive Body: De Kooning's Woman Reconsidered Fionna Barber9. Catholic Tastes: Hurting and Healing the Body in Vienese Actionism in the 1960's Philip Ursprung10. Contests for Meaning in Body politics and Feminist Conceptual Art Discourses: Revisioning the 1970's through the Work of Eleanor Antin Lisa Bloom11. Dismembership: Jasper Johns and the Body Politic Jonathan Katz12. Peforming the Clits and Other Lesbian Tricks: Speculations on an Aesthetics of Lack B.J. Wray13. Renaming Untitled Flesh / Marking the Politics of Marginality Meiling Cheng14. Andy Warhol: Performances of Death in America Peggy Phelan15. Stuff Nao Bustamante and Coco Fusco
Andrew Stephenson, Amelia Jones, Andrew Stephenson Nfa
Reviews for Performing the Body/Performing the Text
'Among the other contributions are six or so outstanding essays. Best of these have to be Gavin Butt's piece on Larry Rivers' enactment of camp sensibility and Phelan's unveiling of Warhol's accumulated American deaths. Butt and Phelan go a long way to indicating what a genuinely new art history might feel like, performing their subject from the inside in a generous identification that nevertheless resists predictable positions.' - Mark Harris, Art Monthly 'I found ... the articles included in Performing the Body/Performing theText compelling.' - Jennie Klein, A Journal of Performance and Art
