11 Bk Reviews 150-162

Books References Paz, Octavio Labyrinth of Solitude. Translated by Lysander Kemp. New York: Grove Press. Ybarra Frausto, Tomas “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility.” In CARA: Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, edited by Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, –. Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery and the University of California, Los Angeles. Diana Taylor is Professor and Chair of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (University Press of Kentucky, ), which won the Best Book Award given by the New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Men- tion in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, and of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Duke University Press, ). She has edited three volumes of critical essays on Latin Ameri- can, Latino, and Spanish playwrights. Her articles on Latin American and Latino performance have appeared in TDR, Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, Estreno, Gestos, and other scholarly journals. She has directed and participated in staging Latin American and Latino theatre in Mexico and the United States. Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the s. By Kathy O’Dell. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, ; pp.; illustrations. $. paper. During the s, Chris Burden was often lampooned the “Evel Kneivel” of performance art, his daredevil “acts”—hiring a marksman to shoot him in the arm (Shoot, ), lying in the street within inches of traffic (Deadman, ), crucifying himself across the back of a Volkswagon ()—were dis- paraged as opportunistic spectacle. Considered antithetical to substantive art practice, Burden’s seeming desire for notoriety meant his masochist performances were rarely taken seriously. Moreover, though clearly engaged in the evolving aesthetic discourses of their time (including body and time-based art), his performances were generally seen as anomalous. In her book Contract with the Skin, Kathy O’Dell challenges the singularity of Burden’s work by placing it alongside that of Vito Acconci, Gina Pane, and the collaborative duo, Ulay/Abramovic—a group of artists who, she argues, formed a distinct strain of s performance art. Focused exclusively on the masochistic practices of these five performance artists, O’Dell links their work through a shared set of concerns: “the mechanics of alienation in art and everyday life; the psychological influences of the domestic site; the sensation of being both a subject and object; the function of metaphor in art; and the rela- tionship between art and audience” (). The book is divided into five loosely corresponding chapters, each of which is conceptually framed by an introduc- tory description of one of the above artists’ performances. Through a deconstruction of these and other performances, O’Dell attempts to reveal their political import and therein establish what she deems “the social relevance of masochism”: Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.1999.43.2.157 by guest on 25 September 2021 Books I have been arguing that masochistic performance artists of the s took suffering upon themselves in order to point to trouble in two intercon- nected social institutions: the law and the home. Quite specifically, these artists directed their attention to a mechanism upon which both of these institutions were founded: the contract. In part because masochism always relies on a contract between partners, it became a key metaphor through which these artists could address the volatile social and political issues that affected the everyday lives of individuals in the early s. () If viewers could see themselves as complicitous “partners” in the masochistic act, the logic follows, they could then understand their greater role in the construction of society’s “contract”; the implication being that such an under- standing would illuminate the need for change. Of course to arrive at this trans- formation assumed a lot on the part of the audience, especially given the fact that many of the performances were marked by a high degree of obliquity. Indeed, O’Dell’s thesis, dependent largely on Lacanian strategies, unfolds around the sup- position that said performances consciously reenacted stages of psychic development. They were, she explains, symbolic and mnemonic devices meant to awaken in an audience the repressed identificatory conflicts inherent in these stages. Accordingly, by activating the “common skin” ambivalence characteristic of the late oral stage (with its increasing alternation of attachment and separa- tion), or the indeterminancy of subject/objecthood characteristic of the mirror stage (in its recognition of the split self)—to cite two recurring examples—performance artists believed they could destabilize the notion of a unified identity. Doing so—and it is here that O’Dell forges connections between the stages of psychic development (“home”) and those of contractual agreement (“law”)— these artists apparently made evident within such an experience a process of ne- gotiation whereby “the possibility of establishing new conventions, [and] of revamping institutionalized structures” crystallized (). If the likelihood of a viewer reaching the above epiphany seems question- able, O’Dell’s references to the observable effect of actual events make it more so. Consider, for example, O’Dell’s discussion of Gina Pane’s Nourriture, actualites televisees, feu (), a performance in which the artist ingested and spit out raw ground beef; watched the nightly news on television (under the glare of a bright, bare lightbulb); and put out fire flaming from small mounds of sand. Ostensibly, Pane’s consecutive segments referred to the stages of psychic development: the first, the regurgitation of dead flesh, is a rejection of the nostalgia associated with the oral stage; the second, with its emphasis on reflection and glare, signals the fragmentation of the mirror stage; and the third, a masochistic interaction with fire, enacts a destruction of the symbolic order of “home.” According to O’Dell: [I]t is only what lies in between that is worthy of not being rejected. In between are the mirror stage and its contractual corollary, acceptance. Pane then, challenged her audience to accept (which entails examining, ques- tioning, and negotiating) what was transpiring before their eyes. But this challenge was aimed less at the masochistic actions themselves than at larger issues for which the burned flesh served as a powerful metaphor. () That O’Dell does not define these “larger issues” makes murkier still her interpretive leap between masochistic performance and its political import. Pane’s own assessment serves only to further obfuscate the matter: “‘Nobody said anything. […] I don’t think they received what I call the ‘perturbing’ or ‘disturbing’ element. That came much later […].’” (). In all fairness, Pane Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.1999.43.2.157 by guest on 25 September 2021 Books also observed (somewhat contrarily), “‘at the end of twenty minutes, everyone there remarked: ‘It’s strange, we never felt or heard the news before. There’s actually a war going on in Vietnam, unemployment everywhere.’ […] Until this moment, they were anesthetized in the face of world news’” (). The idea of masochism as a viable form of institutional critique isn’t exactly an easy sell, particularly given its popular connotations (even the artists themselves recoiled from the term). And though proving it so may be all the more difficult, the proof is in the pudding. Hence while O’Dell successfully deconstructs masochistic performance for its metaphoric and structural value, she doesn’t convince me of its social relevance. In this regard her thesis fails. To a great extent, this failure is owed to the performances themselves, which were often cryptically high-minded. Burdened by a need to theorize theory, O’Dell’s analysis forcibly takes a discursive turn; in many cases, one interpretation necessitating the next in an endless chain reaction. Within such a stricture, psychoanalysis becomes more of a descriptive model and less of a critical tool or methodology, the result being that O’Dell moves further and further away from an exegesis of the work’s political implications—those “larger issues” she writes of, but alludes to summarily. Despite the above shortcomings, Contract with the Skin weaves a thorough and compelling narrative, laudable for its synthesis of contractual and psychoanalytic theories, its redemption of masochistic art practice, and its commitment to a much misunderstood group of artists. O’Dell might not have achieved all she set out to, but her efforts to map new terrain deserve nothing short of praise. —Jane Harris Jane Harris is a New York–based critic and curator. She has contributed to various art publications including Art in America, Art/Text, New Art Examiner, Perform- ing Arts Journal, and Sculpture Magazine. Choreography & Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire. By Susan Leigh Foster. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ; pp.; illustrations. $. cloth. Susan Leigh Foster’s latest history is a welcome addition to dance scholar- ship, adding to the under-researched yet fascinating gap between the Baroque and Romantic periods. Choreography & Narrative explains how ballets came to tell stories. Foster’s purpose in telling this story is to contextualize the narra- tives she has danced and to account for the rift between pure dance and mimed gestures that haunts experimental choreographers today. Foster limits her study to explaining how dancing bodies began to tell stories in Paris between the s and the s. She begins with one of the first narrative ballets, Marie Sallé’s Pygmalian, and ends with the pinnacle of narrative ballet, Giselle (). In her introduction, Foster compares three ver- sions of the Pygmalion myth to demonstrate the growing sophistication and complexity of the story.

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