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What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance

by Jane Blocker
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004
184 pp., illus. 36 b/w. Trade, $68.95; paper, $22.95
ISBN: 0-8166-4318-0; ISBN: 0-8166-4319-9.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium


stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Jane Blocker is assistant professor of art history at the University of Minnesota and has published before on the art of Ana Mendiata. Starting from and using the categories of Roland Barthes' intriguing analysis of the lover's discourse, she reconsiders the early history and historiography of the art of performance. Her historiographic criticism centers on the concepts of 'doubt' and 'desire' as two sides of the same medal. Surely enough, contemporary critics of early performance art were trying to understand and to love at the same time and were, therefore, entangled in an unresolvable struggle between the intellectual and the physical, the cognitive and the emotional, which put them in a position similar to a lover’s.

In Blocker’s analysis, performance itself——or at least an important number of early performances——can be understood as explorations of or expressions in what she calls the 'somatic language'. In the first chapter, 'Mouths', she uses the work of Vito Acconci, Ann Hamilton, Hannah Wilke, and Gary Hill to illustrate what she understands to be the fabric of performances: a language of the body or the body as language. Her thesis seems to be that most critics have missed this point entirely or are, because they are writing in a patriarchal and heteronormal intellectual tradition, blind to the body as artistic means of expression, as signifier and unmediated signified at the same time.

In the following chapters, 'Lovers' and 'Captivating Delights', she continues to develop this thesis, switching between her description and interpretation of individual performances by Yves Klein, Carolee Schneemann, Paul Cotton and many others on the one hand and the critical response to them on the other. Again she lets herself be guided by elements from Barthes' writings. 'I learn to linger in these areas by reading blissfully and watching for the performance of what Barthes calls "scenes of waiting" within the body as signifying act. In general I will be thinking about the costs of the body——how, as we have already seen, in order to utilize the body for avant-garde praxis, one must labor to manage the taint of the feminine. But there are other costs: the expenditure of desire invested in the body and the time spent anticipating the endlessly deferred revolution that it symbolizes and comes to promise' (p. 55).

The final chapter, 'Blood's Work' draws heavily on Blocker’s previous interpretation of Ana Mendieta's performances as it concentrates on blood, both menstrual or intentionally spilt, as an important part of the somatic language and how historiography came to grips with the mortality it signifies.

It is doubtful that this book will appeal to many readers outside feminist academic circles. Its purpose remains hidden in an overload of quotations, side-thoughts and meanderings and its reasoning is too often based on extensions of metaphors, literal readings of analogies and rhetoric tricks like the reading of the absent as proof of an unwanted presence, and vice versa. It certainly is a pity that many lucid points and brilliant observations get lost in the stylistic morass and the desire to illustrate too much and to prove too little.

 

 




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