Performing the body/performing the text

Contributor(s):

Publication details: London ; New York : Routledge, 1999.Description: xii, 306 p. : illustrations ; 26 cmISBN:

9780415190602
0415190592
0415190606 (pbk)

Subject(s):

LOC classification:

NX456.5.P38 P468 1999

Contents:

Reason and remainders : Kantian performativity in the history of art / Karen Lang -- Performing modernity : the art of art history / Donald Preziosi -- Art history/art criticism : performing meaning / Amelia Jones -- Cross-cultural reiterations : Demetra Vaka Brown and the performance of racialized female beauty / Reina Lewis -- Race, ritual, and responsibility : performativity and the southern lynching / Michael Hatt -- Shading meaning / Jennifer Devere Brody -- Greatest homosexual? Camp pleasure and the performative body of Larry Rivers / Gavin Butt -- Politics of feminist spectatorship and the disruptive body : de Kooning's Woman I reconsidered / Fionna Barber -- 'Catholic tastes' : hurting and healing the body in Viennese Actionism in the 1960s / Philip Ursprung -- Contests for meaning in body politics and feminist conceptual art : revisioning the 1970s through the work of Eleanor Antin / Lisa Bloom -- Dismembership : Jasper Johns and the body politic / Jonathan Katz -- Performing clits and other lesbian tricks : speculations on an aesthetics of lack / B.J. Wray -- Renaming Untitled flesh : marking the politics of marginality / Meiling Cheng -- Andy Warhol : performances of Death in America / Peggy Phelan -- STUFF : a performance / Nao Bustamante and Coco Fusco -- Following Acconci/targeting vision / Christine Poggi -- Performing vision in the theatre of the gaze : the work of Douglas Gordon / Joanna Lowry -- What sense do the senses make? Aspects of corporeality in the works of Miriam Cahn and Maureen Connor / Barbara U. Schmidt.

Summary: 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. -- Publisher description

Holdings ( 1 )
Title notes ( 3 )

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Book	Whitecliffe Library General Shelves	General	NX 456 PER (Browse shelf(Opens below))	1	Available		0005726

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

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. -- Publisher description