The Body & The Body Without Organs

Janus Head, 2007

The aim of this article is to focus on the body as instrument or means in performance-art. Since the body is no monolithic given, the body is approached in terms of its constitutive layers, and this may enable us to conceive of the mechanisms that make performances possible and operational, i.e. those bodily mechanisms that are implicitly or explicitly controlled or manipulated in performance. Of course, the exploitation of these bodily layers is not solely responsible for the generation of meaning in performance. Yet, it is that what fundamentally enables the generation of sense and signification in performance-art. To approach the body in terms of its layers, from body image and body schema to in-depth body, may partly answer the complexity at work in art performances, since these concepts enable us to consider, on a theoretical level, the body as represented object, as subject, as motor means for being-in-the-world, as origin of subjectivity and emotions, as hidden but most intimate place of impersonal life processes, as possibly distant image, as sensitive, fragile and plastic entity, as something we own and are owned by, as our most personal and yet extremely strange body.

EAI Endorsed Transactions on Creative Technologies, 2016

This paper discusses the role and significance of a body in Performance Art. Considering that Art reflects social, cultural and sometimes political realities, we identify types of messages that an artwork using advanced technological might transmit to us, spectators or artists. This paper focusses on the Cyborg Theatre, whereby the technology is its inherent element without which the performance could not happen. Such a technological performance cannot occur without a body. We refer here to a cyborg body as a human organism extended with mechanical parts, which integrate non organic components in order to gain meaning within the artwork. By focusing on such a theatrical performance, we observe a relationship developing between the performer and the spectator. This is an unusual interaction, which deserves our attention. We claim that both the performer and the spectator take part in a social event that does not only represent societal realities, but also indicates future ones.

A Peer-Reviewed Journal About

In this paper I want to connect different kinds of knowledge: some ideas of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, phenomenology, interactive technology, performance, music and ritual. The central idea is the concept of difference as a generative tool of thinking, doing, performing and understanding technology. This is realized through a constant exchange, a movement between these different activities: this communication is the practice of generating difference. Connector of this idea of movement is the concept of body, considered in his variety of meanings: a physical body, flesh, an object or a concept – important is to be open to interaction. The resulting exchange can be deeply understood just with practice: for this reason this written work has to be accompanied and intertwined by a practical work and a first-person approach research. The process of learning something becomes then one opportunity to show the importance of practice and the role of the body as a decoder of technology: t...

An examination of Viennese Actionist performance art, and particularly the work of founder-member Günter Brus, in the 1960s. Taking account of the historical conditions of post-War Vienna, the incipient counter-culture, the Cold War, and an existential crisis in our relationship with our own bodies are sites of meaning and repression of meaning, I examine ways in which abjection and self-destruction in performance art can provide a basis for subversion of a hegemonic, commodified, 'clean' capitalist body.

2012

This study examines the provocative claim by Performance Studies theorist Philip Auslander (1999) that there is no ontological distinction between live and mediatised forms because they participate in the same cultural economy. This claim has led to something of a stagnation of debate between, on the one hand, scholars who privilege the live over the mediatised and on the other those who extinguish the live in favour of mediatisation. Moving beyond the limitations of ontology, this project proposes and develops a phenomenological aesthetics in order to investigate the essential structures and modes of experienced phenomena from within audience. The phenomenological approach understands the complexity and dynamism of the relationship between bodies and technologies in performance, reorienting the investigation away from a rehearsal of established and unhelpful ontological positions. The methodology for the project draws primarily upon methods from the North-American tradition of practical phenomenology (Herbert Spiegelberg, Edward S. Casey, Don Ihde, and Anthony Steinbock), and the transcendental philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Through a series of specially designed workshops, in which audience participants are trained in phenomenological techniques of bracketing and attention, A Poetics of Reception tests the potential of practical phenomenology to break the ontological impasse set up by Auslander. The method elicits the grasping of experiences of embodiment, kinesthetic empathy, temporality, orientation, imagination and poetic language. Participants were trained and required to write their experiences of the interaction between bodies and performance technologies, creating texts that then underwent hermeneutic analysis. The results of this interpretation yielded six interactive encounters, and revealed the constituted structures and modes of the relational phenomena experienced in performance by the participants. This study's methodology has both practical and philosophical implications, including its proposed use as an audience-based dramaturgy for digital performance, and a method of inquiry into the kinesthetic dimensions of aesthetic experiences.

M/C Journal, 2016

Interactive improvisational musical spaces (which is to say, nearly all musical spaces) involve affective relations among bodies: between the bodies of human performers, between performers and active listeners, between the sonic "bodies" that comprise the multiple overlapping events that constitute a musical performance's unfolding. Music scholarship tends to focus on either music's sonic materialities (the sensible; what can be heard) or the cultural resonances that locate in and through music (the political or hermeneutic; how meaning is inscribed in and for a listening subject).

2012

On the last pages of The Visible and the Invisible, MerleauPonty investigates “the bond between flesh and idea, and the internal armature which [it] manifests and which it conceals.” Flesh and idea are intertwined in that the body reflects on itself in the act of perception and, one could add, action. A correlative bond lies in communication theory as the operational difference between ego and alter-ego. This article investigates the non-semiotic intertwinement of ‘flesh’ in art perception and theory based on communication theory in performance art (body art). The thesis is that ‘flesh’ in performance art is presented as absolute presence, but flesh can only be perceived through a reflective bearing.

In his prophetic Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino enhances Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity and Consistency as indispensable qualities to cherish literature. It can be considered a definition or, better, a six-faced metaphor that can also be easily applied to economy, Internet and media communication and, specifically, to Art, interactive Performances and Art Action. Hence also the performer’s role is changing: by becoming increasingly less an ‘actionist of reputed and supposable nonsense’, and increasingly more a ‘communicator’ of things once considered impossible, the performer's work helps to accomplish these things in a better and clearer way.

Performance Research, 2010

Professor Gunther von Hagens' controversial anatomy exhibition, Kőrperwelten, or Bodyworlds, has toured internationally since 1997 and returned to London in 2009. The exhibition comprises whole body plastinates, amongst other preserved specimens, ranging from individual organs to complete physiological systems and multiple cryosections of bodies. Von Hagens has stepped outside of the specific, closed economies of medical specimen collection and circulation to present cadavers to the general public in an uncensored and aesthetic exhibition of his work. The exhibition has provoked strong moral and ethical reactions to his apparent blurring of the boundaries between art and science. In his display of the dead he has been likened to both fictional characters, such as Frankenstein, and the historical figure of the Nazi 'doctor of death', Josef Mengele. While von Hagens has been described as a 'maverick', operating outside of the ethical boundaries of medicine, his exhibition has variously been condemned as sensationalist, grotesque, voyeuristic, tasteless and macabre, and likened to a horror show, a Victorian freak show and a circus of dead bodies.