Authors: Rebec Schneider
ISBN-13: 9780415090261, ISBN-10: 0415090261
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Taylor & Francis, Inc.
Date Published: January 1997
Edition: (Non-applicable)
The Explicit Body in Performance interrogates the avant-garde precedents and theoretical terrain that combined to produce feminist performance art. Among the many artists discussed are:
• Carolle Schneemann
• Annie Sprinkle
• Karen Finley
• Robbie McCauley
• Ana Mendieta
• Ann Magnuson
• Sandra Bernhard
• Spiderwoman Rebecca Schneider tackles topics ranging across the 'post-porn modernist movement', New Right censorship, commodity fetishism, perspectival vision, and primitivism. Employing diverse critical theories from Benjamin to Lacan to postcolonial and queer theory, Schneider analyses artistic and pop cultural depictions of the explicit body in late commodity capitalism.
The Explicit Body in Performance is complemented by extensive photographic illustrations and artistic productions of postmodern feminist practitioners. The book is a fascinating exploration of how these artists have wrestled with the representational structures of desire.
When the artist presents the human body in an explicit manner, who has the right to explicate that body and determine what it means? Schneider (drama, Dartmouth College) uses the phrase "explicit body" to address the ways in which recent feminist performance art and actions explicate bodies in social relation. After discussing historical precedents, she covers works ranging from Carolee Schneemann's of 1963 to the early 1990s works of Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, Ann Magnuson, Sandra Bernhard, and others. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
List of plates | ||
Acknowledgments | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
1 | Binary terror and the body made explicit | 12 |
Re-vamping the ghosts of modernism | 21 | |
Beside herself: postmodern artists and modern whores | 28 | |
Eye/Body: Carolee Schneemann beside herself | 32 | |
2 | Logic of the twister, eye of the storm | 43 |
Impasse: unnatural acts | 46 | |
Twister: looking into looking out | 52 | |
3 | Permission to see | 66 |
Gender in perspective: have we really gone beyond? | 67 | |
Refusal to vanish | 71 | |
Castration anxiety in perspective | 77 | |
Ghostly horrors: looking at the past, seeing through the body | 83 | |
4 | The secret's eye | 88 |
No accident: commodity bodies | 92 | |
Embodying disembodiment | 97 | |
Radical sex activism, satiability, and the commodity | 104 | |
Two-way streetwalkers | 107 | |
Explosive literality | 114 | |
Literal shrouds and dreamscape re-interments | 117 | |
5 | After us the savage goddess | 126 |
Seeing back through | 126 | |
Primitive techniques | 130 | |
Dark continence: reading the thrall and the threat | 134 | |
Dark incontinence: Ubu Roi and savage primitivism | 138 | |
Dada's big drum: primitivism and the performative | 141 | |
Hard primitivism, base matter, and the blindspot | 145 | |
Literal primitives | 149 | |
6 | Seeing the big show | 153 |
First, a story about doubt that includes a reverberation | 153 | |
White nostalgia, authenticity, and the split subject | 159 | |
Spiderwoman: the early days | 163 | |
Vigilant repetitions, the comic turn, and counter-mimicry | 168 | |
The irruption of "real stuff" and the politic of sacrality | 172 | |
The irruption of grandmothers and the reality of dreams | 173 | |
Epilog: returning from the dead | 176 | |
Notes | 185 | |
Works cited | 213 | |
Index | 225 |