'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 characterise performance, or body art, as a purely revolutionary art form and fail to recognise 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’s discourse in which practitioners, historians, and critics alike fervently seek the body while doubting it can ever be found.' - from publisher's website

Includes bibliography.
Access level

Onsite

author
Location code
REF.BLJ2
Language

English

Publication/Creation date

2004

No of pages

162

ISBN / ISSN

9780816643199

No of copies

1

Content type

monograph

Chapter headings

Introduction: Bodies Sought and Doubted

Mouths

Lovers

Captivating Delights

Blood's Work

Afterword

What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance
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What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance

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