"Presence"in absentia ExperiencingPerformance as Documentation

Amelia Jones

I was not yet three years old, living in central North Carolina, when performed Meat Joy at the Festival of Free Expression in Paris in 1964; three when performed Cut Piece in Kyoto; eight when Vito Acconci did his Push Ups in the sand at 11 Jones Beach and Barbara T. Smith began her exploration of bodily experiences with her Ritual Meal performance in ; nine when Adrian Piper paraded through the streets of New York making herself repulsive in the Catal- ysis series; ten when Valie Export rolled over glass in Eros/Ion in Frankfurt; twelve in 1973 when, in Milan, Gina Pane cut her arm to make blood roses flow (Sentimental Action); fifteen (still in North Carolina, completely unaware of any art world doings) when Marina Abramovic and Ulay collided against each other in Relation in Space at the Venice Biennale in 1976 (fig. 1). I was thirty years old-then 1991-when I began to study performance or body art1 from this explosive and important period, entire- ly through its documentation. I am in the slightly uncomfortable but also enviable position of having been generously included in this special issue. Presented, in the words of the editor, as a sort of oral history, the issue is based on the premise that one had to be FIG. 1 Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Relation in Space. Performed at Venice there-in the flesh, as it were-to get the story right. I was Biennale, 1976. asked to provide a counternarrative by writing about the "problematic of a person my age doing work on perfor- intentionality (why didn't I "get to know" Acconci before mances you have not seen [in person]." This agenda forces writing about his work so I could have a "privileged" me to put it up front: not having been there, I approach access to his intentions) and on the other (by artists) of not body artworks through their photographic, textual, oral, placing their needs or perceived intentions above my own video, and/or film traces. I would like to argue, however, intuitions and responses. At least for me personally I find it that the problems raised by my absence (my not having impossible, once I get to know someone, to have any sense been there) are largely logistical rather than ethical or of clarity about her or his work historically speaking (that hermeneutic. That is, while the experience of viewing a is, as it may have come to mean in its original and subse- photograph and reading a text is clearly different from that quent contexts). Once I know the artist well, I can write of sitting in a small room watching an artist perform, nei- about her or his work in (I hope) revealing ways, but ones ther has a privileged relationship to the historical "truth" that are (perhaps usefully, perhaps not) laden with person- of the performance (more on this below). al feelings and conflicts involving the artist as a friend (or I have been accused on the one hand (by art histori- not, as the case may be). Furthermore, as noted, such rela- ans) of not caring enough about "the archive" and artistic tionships-especially if they are not positive-increase

ART JOURNAL the logistical difficulties of writing and publishing on the cific subjectivities of the late capitalist, postcolonial, post- work. The logistical problems are many:obtaining the doc- modern era: subjectivities that are acknowledged to exist umentation that is available; getting photographsto study always already in relation to the world of other objects and and reproduce without blowing one's tiny bank account; subjects; subjectivities that are always already intersub- writing about the work without becoming entrapped in the jective as well as interobjective.2To the point, I insist that artists' usually fascinating but sometimes intellectually it is precisely the relationship of these bodies/subjects to and emotionally diversionaryideas about what the work is documentation (or, more specifically, to re-presentation) (or was) about, and so forth. that most profoundlypoints to the dislocation of the fanta- It is my premise here, as it has been elsewhere, that sy of the fixed, normative,centered modernist subject and there is no possibility of an unmediatedrelationship to any thus most dramaticallyprovides a radical challenge to the kind of cultural product,including body art. Although I am masculinism, racism, colonialism, classism, and hetero- respectful of the specificity of knowledges gained from par- sexism built into this fantasy. ticipating in a live performancesituation, I will argue here that this specificity should not be privileged over the speci- ficity of knowledges that develop in relation to the docu- Case Study1: CaroleeSchneemann's Interior Scroll, 1975 mentary traces of such an event. While the live situation may enable the phenomenological relations of flesh-to- In InteriorScroll,first performed in 1975, Schneemannper- flesh engagement,the documentaryexchange (viewer/reader formed herselfin an erotically charged narrativeof pleasure <->document) is equally intersubjective. Either way, the that works against the grain of the fetishistic and 12 audience for the work may know a great deal or practically scopophilic"male gaze" (fig. 2). Coveringherface and body nothing at all about who the performeris, why she is per- in strokesof paint, Schneemannthen pulled a long, thin coil forming,and what, consequently, she "intends"this perfor- of paperfrom her vagina ("like a tickertape ... plumb line mance to mean. Either way, the audience may have a deep ... the umbilicus and tongue"),3 unrolling it to read a nar- grasp of the historical, political, social, and personal con- rative text to the audience. Part of this text read as follows: texts for a particular performance. While the viewer of a "I met a happy man, / a structuralistfilmmaker . .. he said live performancemay seem to have certain advantages in we arefond of you / you are charming / but don't ask us / to understandingsuch a context, on a certain level she may look at yourfilms /... we cannot look at / the personal clut- find it more difficult to comprehend the histories/narra- ter / the persistence of feelings / the hand-touch sensibili- tives/processes she is experiencing until later, when she ty."4 Through this action, which extends "exquisite too can look back and evaluate them with hindsight (the sensation in motion" and "originates with ... the fragile same might be said of the performerherself). As I know persistence of line moving into space," Schneemann inte- from my own experience of "the real" in general and, in grated the occluded interior of the female body (with the particular, live performances in recent years, these often vagina as "a translucentchamber") with its mobile exterior, become more meaningful when reappraised in later years; refusing the fetishizing process, which requires that the it is hard to identify the patterns of history while one is woman not expose the fact that she is not lacking but pos- embedded in them. We "invent"these patterns,pulling the sesses genitals, and they are nonmale.5 past together into a manageable picture, retrospectively. Movementsecures Schneemann'smomentary attain- I will sketch out the problematicof experiencing per- ment of subjectivity(which coexists uneasily with her simul- formance or body art from a historical distance through a taneous situation as a picture of desire). The performative series of case studies, which will be interwovenwith a dis- body,as Schneemannargues, "has a value that static depic- cussion of the ontology of performanceor body art. All of tion . . . representation won't carry"; she is concerned, she this material forms the backbone of my book Body Art/ has said, with breakingdown the distancing effect of mod- Performingthe Subject(forthcoming from the University of ernist practice.6 And yet, how can I, who experiencedthis Minnesota Press), which argues that body art instantiates workfirst through a series of black-and-whitephotographs the radical shift in subjectivity from a modernistto a post- published in Schneemann's More Than Meat Joy, then modernist mode. Making use of a feminist poststructural- througha dissatisfyinglyshort clip in a video compilationof ism informed by phenomenology, I argue this by reading her work7-how can I speak of its disruptionof thefetishiz- this transfiguredsubjectivity throughthe works themselves ing effects of "static depiction"? I "know"this movement (specifically: the works as documentary traces, and this through the stutteredsequence of pictures, through the tiny goes even for those events I also experienced "in the fragment of performance on the videotape. I sit, still and flesh"; I view these, throughthe memory screen, and they quiet, and feel the movementpulse from picture to picture, become documentary in their own right). I read body art along the slick surface of the magnetic tape. performances as enacting the dispersed, multiplied, spe- Thefemale subjectis not simply a "picture"in Schnee-

WINTER 1997 mann's scenario, but a deeply constituted (and neverfully coherent) subjectivity in the phenomenological sense, dynamically articulated in relation to others (including me, here and now in my chair), in a continually negotiated exchange of desire and identification. Schneemann plays out the oscillatory exchange between subject- and object- ivity, betweenthe masculine position of speaking discourse and the feminine position of being spoken. By "speaking" her "spokenness"already and integrating the image of her body (as object) with the action of making itself, Schnee- mann plays out the ambivalence of gendered identity-the fluidity of the positions of "male"and 'female," subjectand objectas we live gender in post-Freudian culture. Was(or, for that matter,is) there anything more "pre- sent" than Schneemann,in her seeminglyfully revealedsex- ual subjectivity,in InteriorScroll? WouldI have been able to experience her sexed subjectivity more "truthfully"had I been there (to smell andfeel the heat of her body)?

13 One of the major conceptual and theoretical issues highlighted by body art as performance(which in this way, among others, is closely linked to the contemporaneous movements of Minimalism and Conceptualism), is that of the ontology of the art "object." Most early accounts of these practices made heroic claims for the status of perfor- mance as the only art form to guaranteethe presence of the artist. Thus, in 1975 Ira Licht triumphantly proclaimed that bodyworksdo away with the "intermediary"mediums of painting and sculpture to "deliver . . . information directly throughtransformation."8 And, in the early 1970s, Rosemary Mayer claimed body art to be a direct reflection FIG. 2 Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975. of the artist's life experiences, while Cindy Nemser described the "primarygoal of body art" as "bring[ing]the through bodily proximity.Body art, finally, shows that the subjective and objective self together as an integratedenti- body can never "be known 'purely' as a totalizable, fleshy ty," which is then presumably experienced directly by the whole that rests outside of the arena of the symbolic."" audience.9 More recently, Catherine Elwes argued that Having direct physical contact with an artist who pulls a performanceart "offers women a unique vehicle for mak- scroll from her vaginal canal does not ensure "knowledge" ing that direct unmediated access [to the audience]. Per- of her subjectivity or intentionality any more than does formance is about the 'real-life' presence of the artist... looking at a film or picture of this activity, or looking at a She is both signifier and that which is signified. Nothing painting that was made as the result of such an action. stands between spectator and performer."1? Body art, through its very performativity and its I have already made clear that I specifically reject unveiling of the body of the artist, surfaces the insufficiency such conceptions of body art or performanceas delivering and incoherence of the body-as-subject and its inability to in an unmediated fashion the body (and implicitly the self) deliver itself fully (whether to the subject-in-performance of the artist to the viewer. The art historian Kathy O'Dell her/himself or to the one who engages with this body). Per- has trenchantlyargued that, precisely by using their bodies haps even more to the point than O'Dell's suggestive obser- as primarymaterial, body or performanceartists highlight vations is Peggy Phelan'sinsistence on the way in which the the "representationalstatus" of such work ratherthan con- body-in-performanceputs forwardits own lack: firmingits ontological priority.The representationalaspects of this work-its "play within the arena of the symbolic" Performance uses the performer'sbody to pose a question and, I would add, its dependence on documentation to about the inability to securethe relation betweensubjectivity attain symbolic status within the realm of culture-expose and the body per se; performanceuses the body toframe the the impossibility of attaining full knowledge of the self lack of Being promised by and through the body-that

ART JOURNAL which cannot appearwithout a supplement ... performance artist and of the interpreter-in its impurity-must be marksthe body itself as loss. .. .for the spectatorthe perfor- veiled, its supplementarityhidden fromview. The formalist mance spectacleis itself a projectionof the scenario in which insists upon the "disinterestedness"of his interpretations her own desire takesplace. 12 and such disinterestedness requires a pure relation between the art object and its supposedly inherent mean- Body art can thus be said to dislocate the modernist ing (embedded in its "form,"to be excavated by the dis- assumptionof authorialplenitude (wherethe author,whose cerning interpreter). The supplementarity of the body body is veiled but nonetheless implicitly male, is thought corruptsthis logic. For the nascent postmodernistssuch as to be instantiatedby the work of art and vice versa).13Body Nemser and Elwes who wish to privilege performance or art flaunts the body itself as loss or lack: that is, as funda- body art as antiformalistin its merging of art and life, its mentally lacking in the self-sufficiency (claimed by Elwes delivery of the body/subject of the artist directly to the et al.) that would guaranteeits plenitude as an unmediated viewer, the body must be seen as an unmediated reflection repository of selfhood. The "unique" body of the artist in of the self whose presence guarantees the "redemptive" the body artworkonly has meaning by virtue of its contex- quality of art as activism. I argue in my book on body art, tualization within the codes of identity that accrue to the however, that body art practices are never unequivocally artist's body and name. Thus, this body is not self-suffi- anti- or postmodernistand certainly not guarantorsof pres- cient in its meaningfulness but relies not only on an autho- ence. Unlike formalist modernism, which veils the body rial context of "signature" but on a receptive context in of the artist to occlude its supplementarity (such that its which the interpreteror viewer may interact with this body. transcendence-its masculinity-seems obvious and nat- 14 When understood in its full open-endedness, live perfor- ural),16body art performancesexacerbate the body's sup- mance makes this contingency, the intersubjectivityof the plementarityand the role of representationin momentarily interpretive exchange, highly pronounced and obvious securing its meanings throughvisible codes signaling gen- since the body's actions can be interfered with and der, race, and other social markers. realigned according to spectatorial bodies/subjects on the register of the action itself; documents of the body-in- Case Study 2: Yayoi Kusama'sSelf-Portrait Photographs, c. 1960 performanceare just as clearly contingent, however,in that the meaning that accrues to this action, and the body-in- Thereshe is, enacting herselfas pinup on one of her vertigi- performance,is fully dependent on the ways in which the nous landscapes of phallic knobs (woman-as-phallusmeets image is contextualized and interpreted. phallus-as-sign-of-male-privilege):naked, heavily made-up Seemingly acting as a "supplement"to the "actual" in the style of the 1960s, she sports high heels, long black body of the artist-in-performance, the photograph of the hair, and polka dots covering her bareflesh (fig. 3). As Kris body art event or performance could, in fact, be said to Kuramitsu has argued, this photograph "is only one of expose the body itself as supplementary,as both the visible many that highlight [Kusama's]naked, Asianfemale body. "proof' of the self and its endless deferral.The supplement, These photographs, and the persona that cultivated/was Jacques Derrida has provocativelyargued, is a "terrifying cultivated by them is what engendersthe usual terse assess- menace" in its indication of absence and lack but also "the ment[in art discourse]of Kusama as 'problematic.''17 first and surest protection... against that very menace. This Kusama plays on her "doubledotherness"18 vis-a-vis is why it cannot be given up."14The sequence of supple- Americanculture: She is racially and sexually at odds with ments initiated by the body art project-the body "itself," the normative conception of the artist as Euro-American the spoken narrative,the video and other visuals within the (white) male. Ratherthan veil the 'fact" of her difference(s) piece, the video, film, photograph,and text documentingit (seemingly irrefutablyconfirmed by the visible evidencereg- for posterity-announces the necessity of "an infinitechain, isteredby her body), Kusamaexacerbated it. (Intentionally? ineluctably multiplyingthe supplementarymediations that WouldI have "known"had I been therefor her public "per- producethe sense of the very thing they defer:the mirageof formances" of self?) In a portraitof artists who participated the thing itself, of immediatepresence, or originarypercep- in the 1965 Nul exhibitionat the StedelijkMuseum, Amster- tion. Immediacyis derived.... The play of substitutionfills dam, Kusama sticks out like a sore thumb:there she stands, and marks a determined lack." Derrida notes that "the front and center- among a predictablybourgeois group of indefinite process of supplementarity has always already white, almost all male Euro-Americans(dressed in suits)- infiltrated presence, always already inscribed there the her tiny body swathed in a glowing white silk kimono.19 space of repetitionand the splitting of the self."'5 Am I an object?Am I a subject?Kusama continuesto Derrida's insight explains the equivocal position of perform these questions in the most disturbingly direct of the body in modernist and postmodernist art discourse. ways, posing herself in 1993, dressedin polka-dottedfabric Within the modernist logic of formalism, the body of the on a polka-dotted floor in front of a mirror reflecting a

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15

FIG. 3 Yayoi Kusama, Self-Portrait, 1962. polka-dottedwall (her installation MirrorRoom and Self- confirming-even exacerbating-the supplementarity of Obliteration).Now, her pose and garb removeher from us, the body itself. Predictably, although many have relied on camouflageshifting her into the realm of potential invisibil- the photograph,in particular, as "proof' of the fact that a ity ("self-obliteration"). She still can't decide whether she specific action took place or as a marketable object to be wants to proclaim herselfas celebrityor pin-up (objectof our raised to the formalistheight of an "art"photograph, in fact desires) or artist (master of intentionality). Either way, her such a dependence is founded on belief systems similar to "'performance"takes place as representation(pace Warhol, those underlying the belief in the "presence" of the body- she's on to the role of documentationin securing the position in-performance.Kristine Stiles has brilliantly exposed the of the artist as belovedobject of the art world'sdesires); she dangers of using the photographof a performativeevent as comprehendsthe "rhetoricof the pose" and its specific reso- "proof' in her critique of Henry Sayre'sbook The Objectof nance for women and people of color. The pictures of Performance. Sayre opens his first chapter with the now- Kusama are deeply embeddedin the discursivestructure of mythical tale of Rudolf Schwarzkogler'ssuicidal self-muti- "20 ideas informingher workthat is her "author-function. lation of his penis in 1966, a story founded on the circulation of a number of "documents" showing a male Rather than confirmingthe ontological coherence of torso with bandaged penis (a razor blade lying nearby). the body-as-presence, body art depends on documentation, Stiles, who has done primaryresearch on the artist, points

ART JOURNAL out that the photograph, in fact, is not even of She has also transformedher pornographic film career,mov- Schwarzkoglerbut, rather, of another artist (Heinz Cibul- ing into the production of self-help/"art"videos on female ka) who posed for Schwarzkogler'sentirely fabricated ritu- and transsexualpleasure.27 Sprinkle's work is nothing if not al castration.21 about mediation. (Perhapsthis is to be expectedfromsome- Sayre'sdesire for this photographto entail some pre- one who proffersher body regularly on the art and pornog- vious "real" event (in Barthesian terms, the having been raphy markets;the body/self is most directly "given" and thereof a particularsubject and a particularaction)22 leads yet neverreally "there.") him to ignore what Stiles describes as "the contingency of Sprinkle'smost incendiaryperformative act is part of the documentnot only to a formeraction but also to the con- her Post Post Porn Modernistperformance; developed and structionof a wholly fictive space."23It is this very contin- performedover the last severalyears, thepiece includessever- gency that Sayre's book attempts to address through his al differentnarrative segments. The most explosivemoment argumentthat the shift marked by performanceand body occurs when Sprinkledisplays her to audience mem- art is that of the "site of presence" from "art'sobject to art's bers:she opensher vaginal canal with a speculumand beck- audience, from the textual or plastic to the experiential."24 ons audience membersto file by and take a look, welcoming Sayre'sfixation on "presence,"even while he acknowledges photography and videotaping. (It is, one senses, precisely its new destabilized siting in reception, informshis unques- through such acts of techno-voyeurismthat Sprinkle can tioning belief in the photographof performanceas "truth." experienceher own self-display.) Handing each spectatora Rosalind Krauss has recognized the philosophical flashlight to highlight the dark continentof thefemale sex, reciprocity of photographyand performance,situating the Sprinkleinteracts with them as theyfile by (fig. 4). 16 two as different kinds of indexicality. As indexes, both Looping back to Schneemann's self-exposure of the labor to "substitute the registrationof sheer physical pres- female sex, this momentof display explodesthe convention- ence for the more highly articulated language of aesthetic al voyeuristicrelation that informsthe aesthetic (wherethe conventions."25And yet, I would stress, in their failure to female body is representedas "lacking"object of male view- "go beyond" the contingency of aesthetic codes, both per- ing desire). Not only is thefemale sex in a general sense dis- formance and photographyannounce the supplementarity played-its "lack"refused; also put on view are the internal of the index itself. The presentationof the self-in perfor- female genitalia, including the paradoxically invisible, mance, in the photograph, film, or video-calls out the unlocatable G-spot(a primary site offemale pleasure). The mutual supplementarity of the body and the subject (the cervix-viewing portion of Sprinkle'sperformance also, in body, as material "object" in the world, seems to confirm LyndaNead's terms,destroys the containing mechanismsof the "presence" of the subject; the subject gives the body the aesthetic: as obscenity, Sprinkle'spresentation "moves its significance as "human"),as well as of performanceor and arouses the viewer rather than bringing about stillness body art and the photographic document. (The body art and wholeness."28 event needs the photograph to confirm its having hap- Or does it "arouse"?Sprinkle certainly knows how to pened; the photographneeds the body art event as an onto- give pleasure to her audience/clientele. She has beenprofes- logical "anchor"of its indexicality.) sionally trained to do so. It is difficult,infact, to view Sprin- kle's cervix in an unequivocally self-empowering way (to to an of Case 3: Annie Post Post PornModernist, pretend possess unmediated, dominating gaze Study Sprinkle, sex looks back: the is 1990-93 desire). Sprinkle's subject of viewing confrontedby the "eye"/"I"of thefemale sex. Here's a performance I have seen in the flesh. Do I have This "eye"/"I"is fully contingentwhether I view it "in some special access to its meaning or am I alternately dis- theflesh" or "on the page." It operatesas/through represen- tancedfrom/seduced by its embodiedeffects just as I would tation. For Sprinkle'sbody, in this particularscene distilled be through its documentation? (Note: I've also ingrained to the organs of her sex, is the image of Sprinkleas acting this piece, in other versions, into my memory by viewing subject.I am no closer to "knowing"the "truth"of Sprinkle photographs,slides, videotapes,and by talking to the artist.) having seen and spokento her than I would have been other- A sex worker,Annie Sprinklemoved into the art world wise: She (re)presentsherself to me as I sustain myself in a with her 1985 participation in Deep Inside Porn Stars, a function of desire.29While Sprinkle can't illustrateherself as performanceat Franklin Furnace in New York.26Since then, afull subjectof pleasureand desire,she can situate herselfin she has performed in art venues as a whore/performer relationto us in such a way as to reclaimher own "look"(the turnedart/performer, still with "clients"to seduce and plea- gaze of her cunt), if only momentarily,from the voyeuristic sure; one of the effects of Sprinkle'smerging of "sex work" relation. Sprinkle'sperformance of self points to the always with "artwork" is the collapsing of class distinctions (from already mediated nature of embodiedsubjectivity as well as lower-classwhore/porn star to the cultural cachet of artist). the sexual pleasurethat gives this subjectivity"life."

WINTER 1997 FIG. 4 Annie Sprinkle, "The Public Cervix Announcement," from Post Post Porn Modernist, 1990-93.

In the final segment of Post Post Porn Modernist, Weabolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them Sprinkletakes on the archaic-goddesspersona of "Anya"to by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, bring herself to a twenty-minute long spiritual/sexual which will becomethe theaterof the action. A directcommu- orgasm on stage. Myfirst reactionon seeing this elaborately nication will be re-establishedbetween the spectatorand the orchestratedperformance of jouissance was to assert to my spectacle, betweenthe actor and the spectator,from thefact partnerthat she wasfaking it. My secondaryresponse was to that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action is wonder why I needed to think that she was faking it. As engulfed and physically affected by it.32 Chris Straayer puts it, "WhetherAnnie Sprinkle is acting I return in closing to Artaud'svibrant text, radical in (and/)or experiencingorgasms in her performancescannot its own time, to stress the point that such a desire for be determined by us"-and, I would add, this is the case immediacy is, precisely, a modernist (if in this case also whether we view the performancelive or not.30 clearly avant-garde)dream. In this fin-de-millennium age In 1938 the Surrealist film actor, director, and play- of multinational capitalism, virtual realities, postcolonial- wrightAntonin Artaudpublished his astounding collection ism, and cyborg identity politics (an age presciently of essays on performancecalled The Theaterand Its Dou- acknowledged and in some ways propelled by the radical ble. In his manifesto "The Theater of Cruelty,"published body artworksnoted here), such a dream must be viewed as in this collection, he articulates a passionate critique of historically specific rather than epistemologically secure. realist theater, with its reliance on written texts and its Body and performance art expose, precisely, the contin- "servitudeto psychology and 'human interest.'"31The the- gency of the body/self not only on the other of the commu- ater, rather, must draw on its own "concrete language" to nicative exchange (the audience, the art historian) but on "make space speak": the very modes of its own (re)presentation. _

ART JOURNAL Notes the subject has the capacity to projecthimself into transcendence(the pour-soi)out of 1. I use the term body art rather than performanceart for several reasons. My the fundamental immanence of the en-soi, arguing that the pour-soi is a privileged interest in this work is informed by an embodied, phenomenological model of potentialityopen only to male subjects in patriarchy.Beauvoir, The SecondSex (1949), intersubjectivity; furthermore, the work that emerged during the period of the trans.and ed. H. M. Parshley(New York:Alfred A. Knopf,1970); see especially xxviii. 1960s to the mid-1970s (before performance became theatricalized and moved to 17. Kris Kuramitsu,"Yayoi Kusama: Exotic Bodies in the Avant-Garde,"unpub- the large stage) was labeled "body art" or "bodyworks"by several contemporane- lished paper submittedfor Amelia Jones and Donald Preziosi'sEssentialism and Rep- ous writers who wished to differentiate it from a conception of "performanceart" resentation graduate seminar, University of California, Riverside/University of that was at once broader (in that it reached back to Dada and encompassed any California, Los Angeles, spring 1996, 1. Kuramitsu discusses this photograph of kind of theatricalized productionon the part of a visual artist) and narrower(in that Kusamaat some length. I am indebted to Kuramitsufor introducingme to this aspect it implied that a performance must actually take place in front of an audience). I of Kusama'soeuvre and for leading me to the best sources on the artist(see also Bhu- am interested in work that may or may not initially have taken place in front of an pendra Karia, ed., YayoiKusama: A Retrospective,exh. cat. [New York:Center for audience: in work-such as that by Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Vito InternationalContemporary Arts, 1989]). I should note here too that it was the large Acconci, Yves Klein, or Hannah Wilke-that took place through an enactment of numberof photographssuch as these published as advertisementsin magazineslike the artist's body, whether it be in a "performance"setting or in the relative privacy Artforumfrom the mid-1960s onwardthat initially sparked my interest in body art. I of the studio, that was then documented such that it could subsequently be experi- am especially interested in the role these images play in enacting the artist as a pub- enced through photography,film, video, and/or text. lic figure:they are performativedocuments. The only audience for the "original"per- 2. Mark Poster discusses the multiplicity of the subject in the age of multina- formancewould have been the camerapersonand whoeverelse was in the room. tionalism and cyborg identity politics in The Mode of Information:Poststructural- 18. Kuramitsu, "YayoiKusama," 2. ism and Social Context (Cambridge: Polity Press and Chicago: University of 19. The other artists in the portrait include Jiro Yoshihara, founder of Gutai, Chicago Press, 1990), and The Second Media Age (Cambridge:Polity Press, 1995). Hans Haacke, Lucio Fontana, and Giinther Uecker. See the labeled photographin On the body/self as simultaneously subject and object, see Vivian Sobchack, "The Nul negentienhonderdviff en zestig, deel 2fotos (Nul 1965, Part 2, Photographs), Passion of the Material: Prolegomena to a Phenomenology of Interobjectivity," exh. cat. (Amsterdam:Stedelijk Museum, 1965), n.p. manuscriptof an article forthcomingin Sobchack's Carnal Thoughts:Bodies, Texts, 20. On the rhetoric of the pose, see Craig Owens, "The Medusa Effect, or, the Scenes, and Screens (Berkeley: University of California Press); published in Ger- Specular Ruse," in Beyond Recognition: Representation,Power, and Culture, ed. man in Ethik der Asthetik,ed. Christoph Wulf, Dietmar Kamper, and Hans Ulrich Scott Bryson, BarbaraKruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: Uni- Gumbrecht (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 195-205. versity of California Press, 1992), 191-200. The term author-function is, of 3. Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works course, derived from Michel Foucault's "What Is an Author?" (1969), in Lan- 18 and Selected Writings, ed. Bruce McPherson (New Paltz, N.Y.: Documentext, guage, Counter-Memory,Practice, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon 1979), 234. Schneemann has performed Interior Scroll three times: in 1975 at (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113-38. Women Here and Now in East Hampton, Long Island; in 1977 at the Telluride 21. Kristine Stiles, "Performance and Its Objects," Arts Magazine 65, no. 3 Film Festival in Colorado;and in 1995 inside a cave as InteriorScroll-the Cave (November 1990): 35; Henry Sayre's reading of Schwarzkogler'swork can be found (with six other women). This reading of Schneemann's piece is modified from my in The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Gardesince 1970 (Chicago: essay "Postfeminism, Feminist Pleasures, and Embodied Theories of Art," in New University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2. Feminist Criticism:Art, Identity, Action, ed. Joanna Frueh, Cassandra Langer, and 22. See Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image," in Image-Music-Text,trans. Arlene Raven (New York:HarperCollins, 1994), 30-32. Stephen Heath (New York:Hill and Wang, 1977), 44. 4. Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, 238. The audience for its original per- 23. Stiles, "Performanceand Its Objects," 37. formance was almost all female; see Moira Roth, "The Amazing Decade," in The 24. Sayre, The Objectof Performance,5 Amazing Decade: Womenand PerformanceArt in America, 1970-1980 (Los Ange- 25. Krauss, "Notes on the Index," in The Originality of the Avant-Gardeand les: Astro Artz, 1983), 14. OtherModernist Myths (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 209. 5. The first poetic descriptions in this sentence are from a letter sent to me by 26. See Elinor Fuchs, "Staging the Obscene Body," TDR (The Drama Review) Schneemann (dated November 22, 1992), who encouraged me to revise my earlier, 33, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 38-39. Chris Straayer stresses Sprinkle's links to 1970s blunter readings of her work. Here is an example of my susceptibility to personal feminist performance works by Schneemann and , Sprinkle's per- contact: I have been swayed by her powerfulself-readings, changing my perceptions formance mentor, rather than her background as a sex worker. See Straayer,"The of the work.The term translucentchamber appears in More Than Meat Joy, 234. Seduction of Boundaries: Feminist Fluidity in Annie Sprinkle's 6. Schneemannstates, "mywork has to do with cuttingthrough the idealized (most- Art/Education/Sex," in Dirty Looks: Women, , Power, ed. Pamela ly male) mythologyof the 'abstractedself' or the 'inventedself'-i.e., work ... [where Church Gibson and Roma Gibson (London:British Film Institute, 1993), 157. the male artist]retain[s] power and distancingover the situation";in AngryWomen, ed. 27. Her films include Linda/Les and Annie-the First Female to Male Trans- Andrea Juno and V. Vale (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1991), 72, 69. sexual Love Story (1990), made in collaboration with Albert Jaccoma and John 7. The video, Imaging Her Erotics, was produced by Schneemann and Maria Armstrong,and The Sluts and GoddessesVideo Workshop,or How to Be a Sex God- Beatty in 1995-96; the clip shown here is fromthe 1995 version of the performance. dess in 101 Easy Steps (1992), made by Sprinkle and Maria Beatty. See Linda Schneemann informsme that all of the original footage of the earlier performancesis Williams's discussion of how Sprinkle maintains in her pornographicvideos (and, in the possession of the documenter,who will not relinquish it for publicationor study. I would add, her "art"videos) the "intimate address" to the "client" characteristic 8. Ira Licht, Bodyworks, exh. cat. (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, of the whore's "performance."Williams, "A Provoking Agent: The Pornography 1975), n.p. and PerformanceArt of Annie Sprinkle," in Dirty Looks, 181. 9. Rosemary Mayer, "Performanceand Experience," Arts Magazine 47, no. 3 28. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London: (December 1972-January 1973): 33-36; Nemser, "Subject-Object Body Art," Routledge Press, 1992), 2. Arts Magazine 46, no. 1 (September-October 1971): 42. 29. This paraphrases Jacques Lacan, who writes of the subject "sustaining 10. Catherine Elwes, "Floating Femininity: A Look at Performance Art by himself in a function of desire" in "Anamorphosis," in The Four Fundamental Women,"in Women'sImages of Men, ed. Sarah Kent and Jacqueline Moreau (Lon- Conceptsof Psycho-Analysis (New York:W. W. Norton and Co., 1978), 85. don: Writersand Readers Publishing, 1985), 165. 30. Straayer,"The Seduction of Boundaries," 174. See also Alexandra Juhasz's 11. Kathy O'Dell, "Towarda Theory of Performance Art: An Investigation of discussion of Sprinkle's extended performance of orgasm in her essay "Our Auto- Its Sites" (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1992), 43-44. Bodies, Ourselves: Representing Real Women in Video," Afterimage 21, no. 7 12. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked:The Politics of Performance (New York:Rout- (February 1994): 11. ledge, 1993), 151-52. 31. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline 13. This marking of the body as absence is also exemplified in the photo- Richards (New York:Grove Weidenfeld, 1958), 90. graphic documents of Ana Mendieta'slater Silueta series works, in which her body 32. Ibid., 96. is enacted as trace (gash wounding the surface of the earth). 14. Jacques Derrida,"That Dangerous Supplement," in Of Grammatology,trans. AMELIA JONES teaches art at GayatriChakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1976), 154. history University of Califor- 15. Ibid., 157, 163. nia, Riverside. Her recent publications include the catalogue in her monumental1949 The Second who 16. It is Simone de Beauvoir, book, Sex, her exhibition at Sexual Politics: links the dreamof "transcendence"in Westernaesthetics and philosophyto masculine for UCLA, 's subjectivity.Here, she reworksthe dialectic between the self and otheroutlined by her Dinner Party in History (1996); her book Body Sartre more transformed MauriceMerleau-Ponty and partner,Jean-Paul (and subtly by Art/Performing the Subject isforthcomingfrom University of Jacques Lacan),with an awareness of the mappingof power throughgender in patri- archy.Beauvoir rereads Sartre's existentialist argument (in Being and Nothingness)that Minnesota Press.

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