Performance art is difficult to define, partly because the manifest intention behind it is to avoid definitions and categorisation. It has a two-fold influence, from theatre and the visual arts. This lack of singular origin already positions performance art in the interstices of canonical structures and explains why it is a form that has been produced and appropriated by marginalised groups, including women, as an effective political tool. Performance art has an experimental genealogy leading most recognisably from the initial abstractions in the visual arts of the early 1900s but also drawing upon western interpretations of
'primitive' ritual and the forms of carnival, street performance and burlesque. In the 1900s.
in European visual arts circles, the cubists and then the futurists rejected the realist image and rendered the surface of the canvas fractured and multiperspectival. Dada and
surrealism interrogated the absolute categories of life and art and attacked classical harmonies by juxtaposing 'irrational' objects, producing nonsensical texts and including found objects and live performance or actions as art. Abstract expressionists exploited the effects of gestural and action painting whilst land artists in the latter half of the twentieth century left the gallery and studio space altogether in order to reconsider the relationship of the body, art object and landscape. The rise of realism in theatre and a subsequent backlash against the theatre-as-mirror in the forms of expressionist and absurdist experimentation resulted in the distinctions between the plastic arts and live theatre being softened. Hence conceptual art entered the discourse of art history. 'Conceptual art' did not 'arrive' as a term but was coined within the framework of massive geographical and historical shifts. In a sense, conceptual art would be unimaginable without the upheavals of modern technology and industry and resultant conquest, wars and diasporas that have marked the crisis in, if not the end to, mimetic representation. Amidst these upheavals, the body as a moving image has become a site for questioning and reorganising visibility. Butt (2005:8) describes the 1950s and 1960s as "[decades] responsible for ushering in what I want to call a 'theatrical turn' in post-war art production, one which drew the object-based practices of modernist painting and sculpture into the spatio-temporal co-ordinates of the event". It is the 'spatio-temporal co-ordinates of the event' that were problematised in performance art that attempted to lend a temporality to the theatrical event/aesthetic object.
The 'Happenings' of the 1970s especially set a precedent for performance art as distinct from art or theatre. Sandford (1995) explains that Happenings differed from traditional theatre in its abandonment of the time-place-character matrices of the play. Traditional theatre makes use of what Sandford (1995:5) refers to as an "information structure", that is, an audience relies upon the cumulation of information to follow the play. The structure of the Happening is often indeterminate and actions compartmentalised. Discrete theatrical units are arranged sequentially or simultaneously. During the 1960s, performance artists deliberately distanced themselves from the conceits of traditional theatre and 'bourgeois' visual arts in the name of the conceptual, which in effect meant removing the art-object from a position of transcendent, timeless value and instating the transient-corporeal performance as art-event. Notably, the viewing public are no longer positioned to make aesthetic judgements but become complicit in the re-interpretation of the live event: "[the audience] are kinetic collaborators in the construction of ideas" (Goldberg 1998:10).
During the 1970s in the United States, Happenings and Body Art witnessed artists experimenting with their bodies in public and gallery spaces: the conceptual framing of any action by the artists could constitute an act as 'performance', such as when Chris Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm (Shoot, Los Angeles: 1971). Actions such as Burden's set a precedent in performance art for the exposure of an explicit bodily reality, removed from the pseudo-gore of Hollywood movies or the illusion and symbolism of theatre (although I might add that the injurious escapades of male performance artists also set a precedent of macho-antics in avant garde circles).
Contemporaneous with developments in the United States, performance artists in Europe were focussed upon developing a theatre of images, rather than explicit body performance.
Groups that used mixed media entertainment along with comedy and vaudeville acts emerged, such as the feminist collectives, Beryl and the Perils and Cunning Stunts.
Performance art, Body Art, Aktions and Happenings (all related and hardly distinguishable terms) shared a concern for disrupting expectations imposed upon theatrical productions and art-objects, whether by experimenting with 'formal' media such as light, space, sound, time and image or turning to consider a visceral corporeality, or combining these elements.
3.4.i Feminist performance art
'Performance art' as a term was first used in the 1970s, and it was during this time that feminist performance artists were particularly active. Herbert (1994:27) states that:
"performance art is a medium unsullied by centuries of male control". There was ultimately no framework anticipated for reading feminist performance art, which is precisely what feminist analysts have seized upon in the reinscription of the performance- event in which the scene of writing is used to "remark again the performative possibilities of writing itself (Butt 2005:10). Like performance art, feminist performance art is a broad category, but shifted from a formal relation to art world languages in order to stage cultural interventions. The formative decade of feminist performance is marked by a radical turn, one of the most notable examples being American Carolee Schneemann's Interior Scroll (1975) in which she read out male criticisms of her work's "personal clutter" and
"persistence of feelings" from a scroll pulled from her vagina (Goldberg 1998:132).
Schneemann's Interior Scroll is a watershed performance for feminist performance art because Schneemann uses her explicit, female body as a tool for deconstructing masculinist value judgements about her feminist art practice. Schneemann's solo work also
exemplifies the tendency of feminist performance artists to perform alone. These solo performances emphasise the activities of the body in space and time, sometimes by the 'framing' of everyday behaviour and sometimes by the display of virtuosic skills; the content is often autobiographical and tends to be performed in 'art venues' like galleries or in public spaces. In this thesis I have written about solo performance artists exclusively, partly because as I have said, these performers tend to be soloists and partly because the use of one specific female body in performance perhaps avoids some of the problems of a generic, collective 'women'.
After the initial eruption of radical, feminist performance art in the 1970s, the 1980s was a decade of prohibitive backlash against feminists and liberalism of any sort: the English Thatcherite government and American conservative backlash, particularly homophobic and anti-feminist in tone, resulted in the liberal arts suffering funding cuts and censorship (Kauffman 1998). In South Africa, apartheid was in its violent death throes and needless to say, 'performance art' was an anomaly. However, in the 1990s and up to the present, performance artists have co-opted new social spaces and technologies in order to interrogate identity and the power relations that determine and restrict the body. In performance practice, the body remains a central concern and, for feminists who use the body as a premise of performance, flesh is an unresolved and loaded medium.
It is difficult to provide one definition for feminist performance art. As a genre, it has modernist sensibilities in that it often privileges the sublime and a grotesque or abject aesthetic (which could be viewed as an anti- aesthetic) and, like the avant-garde movements of the 1920s (for example, dada and surrealism) it "[attacks] the institution of art for [its] insularity and [tries] to reconnect art and praxis" (Doane 2004:1232). That is, feminist performance art is an expressly political art and the body, specifically, is never viewed as a neutral sign. However, feminist performance art is not categorised easily within a modernist framework, for postmodern historicism pervades in much of the autobiographical content of feminist performance art:
the body in the present becomes a signpost in a constant reworking of the past, of the historical conditions that produced the sign 'woman'. I argue that there is at least one necessary condition for feminist performance art, and that is the exposure of dialectical structures or doublespeak. In order to show up the structures of patriarchal culture that condition femininity, it is necessary to 'show the show' as it were so that signifier
('woman') and the referent (the 'real' woman) are at odds. Under these conditions, differance is shown in operation. The process of becoming a subject is shown to be contingent upon psychic, social and material conditions. The dialectical structure of 'showing the show' is formulated in other ways by theorists such as Irigaray (1991), who uses the term "critical mimesis' for the process of miming the mimes of patriarchy back upon itself which in effect undermines its hegemonic hold over women. Butler's (1994) use of the term 'queer' also assumes the dialectical structure whereby shifting expected markers of sex and gender identification (as exemplified in drag) shows up the arbitrariness of conventional gender distinctions to the point that these become ridiculous or ineffective. As a forerunner of contemporary feminist performance, Schneemann's Interior Scroll exemplifies the use of the dialectical structure by feminist performance artists: her 'interior scroll' literally showed up the (masculine) conditions for being considered an artist that negates the female sex on a material and symbolic level.
Schneider (1997) makes an important point about feminist performance art's incursions in modernist art-politics when she argues that the dialectical is fundamental to feminist performance artists' appropriations of primitivism. Early twenty-first century avant garde artists adopted notions of the primitive, and the uncivilised, as a means of investigating the 'other' side of the (western) psyche, supposedly untainted by social restrictions. This adoption of the 'primitive', it should be mentioned, resulted in part from the appropriation of cultural artefacts from Europe's colonies and the skewed interpretations of Aids anthropology of non-Aryan cultures. The move towards abstraction, on the one hand, and the graphic or explicit body on the other in the visual arts and expressionist dramatic forms in the early twentieth century that, as I have said, influenced performance art, resulted largely from the assimilation of 'the savage' as a trope for otherness (see, for instance, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) in Madeline and Martin 2006). However, this assimilation merely fixes the 'other' side of the civilised/savage binary and did not serve to loosen up the associations of women (and female bodies and sexuality) with excess, danger and moral duplicity. Sex and race have been imbricated with the modernist formulation of the 'primitive' and as Schneider (1997:5) explains, it is the critical re-performance of the primitivised subject herself that enables the dialectical image to function in feminist performance art:
...unlike the use of primitivism and shock in the modernist avant garde, in contemporary feminist work it is the primitivised, or sexualised herself who (re)performs her primitivisation. Thus feminist "savagery" is linked with, but distinct from, modernist bad-boy avant-gardes who sought to employ primitivity, to rediscover or cite savagery in their transgressive acts. It is possible to argue that a feminist explicit body artist cannot employ primitivism, as her body itself has been linked to the lure/threat of primitivity. She is already primitive, already transgressive. Given this, the primitivised herself deploys or re-plays her primitivisation back across her body in a kind of double take, an effort to expose the cultural foundations of shock, (emphasis in original).
Schneider contends that 'women', like 'natives' and animals, are always already other, or off-centre in power structures. Thus, following Schneider's logic, the display of explicit female bodies in performance art throws the construction of the primitive body into question. Like the black body, the female body within western discourse is insatiable and excessive. Thus, a female performer who performs/plays across the site of excess and lack, the site of her own body, renders the symbolic foundations that construct bodies quite literal: "...the thrall of insatiability and excess is exhibited in the space of the particular- across particular bodies engendered in social relation" (Schneider 1997:6). The site of contradiction, in other words the dialectical image shown up by the explicit female body in performance, thus forms a potent space for feminist analysis and cultural production, which I will assume in the analyses in the following three chapters.
3.4.ii Theorising feminist performance art
In closing off this chapter and as a lead-in to the analysis of actual feminist performance artists' work in Section Two, I open a brief discussion of performance theory.
Performance theory developed from a reappraisal of the edifice of the dramatic canon, a critical shift that is contingent with the development of performance art. In order to interpret the live event without relying upon an Aristotelian blueprint or the distancing effect of aesthetic judgement, whereby artists and cultural critic are disinvested from the aesthetic object, it is necessary to rethink the margins between theatre/life and produce a discourse that takes into account the context within which images, performance and identity are produced. Performance quite clearly differs from traditional theatre in its
orientation of pleasures and identifications of both performer and audience whereby pleasure and knowledge are perspectival and situated temporarily. Performance theory works with the assumption that nowhere can a singular self or identity be present or guaranteed by the speaking, performing subject but that the subject and culture develop in dialectical tension between being and becoming. The presence of the speaking subject, then, is no longer guaranteed by the structures of narrative cohesion that have characterised western theatre since classical civilisation and that, from a feminist perspective, have been centred around the suppression of sexual difference. Performance theory draws upon theatre terminology for describing "...the social dimensions of cultural production" (Roach
1995:46) whereby 'performance' can refer to numerous activities from everyday rituals to protest marches. The performance event is thus not measured or valued against a theatrical canon. The canon becomes one discursive structure that contributes to "...[producing] the effects that it names" (Solomon 1997:2). The body in performance theory is viewed as
"...an event situated in time and continuously subject to the co-constitutive dialectic of the organic and the social" (Wilton 1999:59).
Performance theory is broad and is being produced by my rewriting of actual performances in the following three chapters, in which I draw upon the theoretical arguments and positions that have been covered in the first three chapters. These theories are used to support my contention that the feminist rearticulation of flesh in performance art serves to expose that which the dominant phallocentric imaginary withholds and to produce discourses of difference. By literally showing the abject female body that is withheld from the symbolic, these flesh artists manifestly and strategically rewrite flesh against the dominant symbolic via a performative process.The immanence of the body in performance brings with it the potential of being positioned and viewed not as a guarantee of the presence of a transcendent self, but as a site of multiple meanings, desire and instability.
Conclusion
Feminist performance artists have seized upon the theatrical metaphor in order to deconstruct gender as a manifestation of visible markings and unmarkings, that is, as something that is artificial in its standardisations, yet highly contentious and fraught with power struggles. My argument is that feminist performance art that uses the body as the
locus of performance pushes that performance beyond canonical definitions in order to enact transgressions of the body politic.
Chapters One to Three have been used to construct a theoretical framework for analysing feminist performance art. In the following three chapters, I will describe and analyse the performances of four artists. Although I do not always refer back explicitly to the content of the first half of the thesis, the critical discourse covered in these shapes my analyses of the body in performance.
Chapter Four
Flesh made word: the Incarnation of St Orlan
Introduction
We have established in Section One that the subject is in process. Orlan, a multimedia performance artist who lives and works in France, views the body as the site of subjectivity and thus treats her body as a form of radically alterable intelligence. The alteration of the body, for Orlan, is produced as performance in which she initially used costume, drapery and make up. She has now moved on to use surgery and digital technology to morph her appearance. What I want to draw out in this chapter is the idea that the cut in Orlan's flesh acts as a cut in the skin of language, so to speak, and thus destabilises the centrality of logos in constructing the subject, language and representation. I view Orlan's performing body as a feminist tool for refiguring the power structures that underpin phallomorphic constructions of the female body in particular.
Orlan's career as a performance artist has spanned over three decades during which time she has developed the practice of Carnal Art, a definition that she uses to distinguish
1 k
her performance art practice from Body Art. Orlan uses the soft material of her flesh to sculpt her own body and persona in order to struggle against: "...the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as artists of representation), and God"(Orlan 1998:325). Orlan's work is explicitly anti-canonical. Indeed the artist inverts performatively the aesthetic rules and boundaries of established western dramatic and art- canons. This strategic intervention in dominant modes of representation is not purgative nor confessional for the artist but is productive in the sense that, by disrupting and remaking the boundaries of her specifically female body, Orlan is able to cut into the dominant, phallocratic discourse that formerly fixed her as identity as 'woman'.
1 The work of the Viennese Aktionists and contemporary performers. Franko B and Ron Athey, all of whom use blood as a primary motif in performance are examples of prominent Body Art performers. Orlan is not interested in the substance of blood so much as in the movement between the body's exterior and interior.