Performance: Flesh and Form
Michaelmas Term 2009
Dr Martin Crowley (French)
Dr Alyce Mahon (History of Art)
Description: This pilot course will consider intellectual and artistic currents alongside real-life events, focusing on the human body as both a discursive element and as a site of representation. In bringing Art History and French Studies together, it will seek to interweave art practice, modern thought, and critical theory in a historically specific way, teasing out the extent to which new means of visual representation have demanded new aesthetic discourses as well as the influence of new aesthetic theories on artists’ work. The interdisciplinary strength of the course will lie in this cross-fertilization and in the particular focus of the course on debates about the specific intersection which defines the phenomenon of performance – between flesh and form, embodied existence and symbolic structure. In art we shall study the body as a thing in itself, especially in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s: the body as functional, natural element, or machine, from John Cage’s use of chance in his Dada-like sound performances, to the Living Theater’s promotion of the ‘authenticity of the body’, to the culture of spontaneity and the body as ecological element in New York Happenings and in Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono’s radical use of their own bodies to test political and gender boundaries. These artists brought the element of play, movement, dance, spontaneity and improvisation to art, prioritizing collective action and freeing representation from convention. Their art and frequent resort to ‘anti-art’ aesthetics demand that we reconsider their practice alongside close scrutiny of influential aesthetic theoreticians whose ideas also tested aesthetic boundaries, at times feeding into these artistic practices. Accordingly, interwoven with these artistic case studies, students will study the texts of writers and philosophers who consider the body as a site of the Self, of being in the world, of communication and of spectatorial subjectivity; or the body as victim (of war, persecution, oppression). The conceptual apparatus provided by these writings will allow students to analyze critically and in detail the stakes of the artistic presentation of the human body: its frequent challenge to aesthetic and moral continence, for example; alternative aesthetics of affect, contact or immediacy; or the ontological, anthropological, and aesthetic implications of embodied existence. Equally, close, historically-contextualized study of specific performances will test and develop the thinking of embodiment and representation found in these theoretical texts. Finally, in considering the cross-fertilization of ideas between American art and French theory, the course will go beyond the typical geographical/ language parameters of both Art History and Modern Language courses, insisting on, and enjoying, the conceptual challenges of a Paris-New York axis within which artists and thinkers celebrated the cross-fertilization and political potential of visual culture and ideas.
Format: The course will take the format of eight weekly 2 hour seminars in term, held in Michaelmas 2009. Each seminar will open with presentations focusing on a historical case-study or specific philosophical approach and will then be followed by an in-depth discussion based on set readings. Students will be encouraged to pursue their own research interests within the context of the seminar series’ defining concerns (i.e. its historical frame, set of conceptual problems, and emphasis on performance).
