AHIS10003 Chap.11 The Body in Contemporary Art
The Body in Contemporary Art
Every work so far in the subject has had a size. The two works in week 10 do not, and the reason is the same in both cases: the body has taken the place the object usually occupies. One is a performance, identified in the record by its programme, venue and date rather than by dimensions.
The other is specified as candies in variously coloured wrappers, with dimensions that vary with installation and an ideal weight of 175 pounds or 79.4 kilograms, which is the weight of a person and which the audience consumes away.
The week traces a lineage of embodied and participatory practice from Fluxus through to Australian feminist performance of the 1980s and 1990s, and its structural claim is that the audience is not a spectator but a participant, and therefore implicated in what the work turns out to mean.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Two works with no fixed dimensions, and what replaces them
- 02
Presence and absence as the week's paired analytic
- 03
Reading a catalogue line that has a composition date and separate performance dates
- 04
The participatory structure: a condition, a decision, a consequence, a record
- 05
Why refusing to participate is also a decision, and is legible
- 06
Fluxus, and why naming a lineage helps an argument
- 07
An ideal weight as a target rather than as a measurement
- 08
Dimensions variable, and the institution as co-author of each showing
- 09
Depletion: being looked at and being reduced as the same event
- 10
Loss, memory and the AIDS crisis, and why the biography comes second
- 11
Remembering a performance: documentation, interview and memory as the evidence class
- 12
Medium as message, and citing a photograph of an event rather than the event
Handling a work that survives only as documentation
- 2Open by naming what is being analysed: not the performance, but documentation, an artist's interview and other people's memories.
- 1Show where the record is precise: a composition date of 1964 and a performance recorded at a named hall on 21 March 1965 within a programme of the artist's own works.
- 1Show where it must be imprecise: a performance has a duration rather than dimensions and a different audience each time.
- 1State what your argument is therefore about.
Key terms
- Presence and absence
- The week's paired analytic: the body physically present in a work, and a body signified by what is missing.
- Fluxus
- The international movement of event- and instruction-based art from which the week traces its participatory lineage.
- Participatory practice
- Art that requires audience action to exist, so that the viewer's decision is a component of the work rather than a response to it.
- Ideal weight
- A specified target weight, here 175 pounds or 79.4 kilograms, standing in for a body and functioning as the level the installation is replenished to.
- Dimensions variable
- A catalogue convention in which size is determined per installation, which makes each showing a version rather than the work.
- Audience implication
- The condition in which an audience becomes responsible for something rather than merely present at it.
The Body in Contemporary Art FAQ
Why do these works have no dimensions?
Because the body has taken the place the object usually occupies. A performance has a duration rather than dimensions; an installation of sweets is specified by an ideal weight and varies with each installation. That is the chapter's subject rather than a gap in the record, and treating it as an absence of information misses the point.
What does it mean to say the audience is implicated?
That the audience's action is a component of the work rather than a reaction to it. You can evidence the claim from the works' own specifications: a condition permitting an action, a consequence that is irreversible for that showing, and a state that records what the audience did, so that abstention is legible too.
How much weight should the historical context carry?
It is essential and it should come second. The week attaches the second work to loss, memory and the AIDS crisis, and a strong paragraph reaches that context through the mechanism: the sweets are taken, the pile falls, the stated ideal weight allows it to be restored, and the cycle can repeat. An essay that opens with the biography and never returns to the candies has written a caption.
Is 1964 or 1965 the right date?
Both, for different things. The work is dated 1964 and the record names a performance of 21 March 1965. A work of this kind has a date of composition and separate dates of performance, and keeping the two apart is part of describing it accurately.
Exam move
Practise naming the evidence class before you make a claim, because that single habit separates a competent essay on performance art from a confident one that is quietly inventing. Then learn the participatory structure as a four-step chain you can apply to any work in this mode: a condition set by the artist, a decision made by a viewer, an irreversible consequence, and a record that is not the work.
For the second work, memorise the specification rather than the biography: candies in variously coloured wrappers, dimensions variable, ideal weight 175 pounds or 79.4 kilograms.
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