Amelia Jones

The feminism and visual culture reader

List of Figures. Notes on Contributors. Acknowledgements. Permissions. 1. Provocations 2. Representation 3. Differences 4. Histories 5. Readings / Interventions 6. Bodies 7. Technologies. Index

“Presence”in Absentia

I was not yet three years old, living in central North Carolina, when Carolee Schneemann performed Meat Joy at the Festival of Free Expression in Paris in 1964; three when Yoko Ono performed Cut Piece in Kyoto; eight when Vito Acconci did his Push Ups in the sand at Jones Beach and Barbara T. Smith began her exploration of bodily experiences with her Ritual Meal performance in Los Angeles; nine when Adrian Piper paraded through the streets of New York making herself repulsive in the Catalysis 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, entirely through its docume...

The Artist is Present: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence

Springing off from the recent obsession over performance histories in the performance and art domains, The Artist is Present takes on claims for authenticity and presence by examining the series of recent re-enactments and events featuring Marina Abramovi.

The “Eternal Return”: Self‐Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment

A woman, fleshy, middle-aged, is luxuriating in a bed of animal fur and lush tropical plants. Moist, lipsticked lips barely parted, eyelids softly closed, the naked flesh of her chest (cut off by the edge of the frame) is covered with an odd talisman (animal bone or shell?) and perhaps a cat, who seems to be stretching its paw up across her chest to her neck. She is vibrantly alive, though somnolent, dreamy, erotically quiet. . . . She is dead to the world. Claude Cahun, in this remarkable self-portrait (Autoportrait, c. 1939) (fig. 1), presents herself to us in a manner that transforms, at once, the conception of the self-portrait and the very notion of the subject. It is such moments of photographic self-performance, emerging sporadically in Victorian and modernist photography (think of the Countess de Castiglione, Adolph de Meyer, Florence Henri, and Cahun) and then, in

Material Traces: Performativity, Artistic "Work," and New Concepts of Agency

A new genre of hybrid artworks involving elements of performance, conceptualism, sculpture, and installation practices evokes complex art experiences that are performative yet exist in various material forms—including, implicitly or explicitly, that of the artist’s laboring body. These works call for new ways of engaging that do not dwell on final objects or celebrate “authentic” presence but understand the relational tensions and seductions between human and nonhuman.

Performing the Wounded Body: Pain, Affect and the Radical Relationality of Meaning

In Derek Jarman’s 1986 movie Caravaggio the artist says to his friend, ‘[i]n the wound, the question is answered. All art is against lived experience. How can you compare flesh and blood with oil and ground pigment?’ In a telescoping set of identifications, Jarman, via an actor playing the artist Caravaggio, begs the question of the effect of the wound as felt, enacted and represented visually: is a ‘live’ wound inherently more authentic than one made ‘with oil and ground pigment’ or, for that matter, with photographic media?(Figure 1) And, in relation to these registers of mediation, what does the wound mean as a cultural signifier: one presented to an-other in a moment of communicative exchange?

Equivocal Masculinity: New York Dada in the context of World War I

This essay explores a cluster of works by the group of artists retroactively labelled `New York Dada’ in light of the pressures exerted on masculine subjectivity during the WWI period. While the war has, for obvious reasons, been a key reference point for studies of European Dada, it has never been acknowledged (beyond passing references) as a context for the New York group (in particular, for the work of the key figures Man Ray, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp). Failing to attend to the Great War as a crucial historical pressure on the group simply accepts at face value these artists’ own desire to escape the war (in the case of Picabia, Duchamp, Jean Crotti and others, by leaving Europe and coming to New York). This essay, in contrast, insists upon attending to the effects of the war environment – with its heated discourses of heroism and patriotic nationalism – on the New York Dada group (which, after all, would not have existed had these artists not left Europe for New York because of the war). Examining the relationship of each of the key NewYork Dada figures to the war, it explores a selection of their works in relation to these experiences. Ultimately, I argue that the artists’ non-combatant masculinity, compromised in the face of dominant discourses of militarized masculinity, is eerily and disconcertingly echoed by the predominance of shadows, gaps and absences in their visual art works.

Contemporary Feminism: Art Practice, Theory, and Activism—An Intergenerational Perspective

Although in our time a generation seems to be the measure of the life span of a mosquito, it was—a generation ago—agreed upon as the thirty-year span of time during which a person could grow from birth to parenthood. So perhaps it is fitting that, thirty years after the inception of the Womens Liberation Movement and the Feminist Art Movement, a number of panels, forums, and symposia have focused on the history, relevance, and fate of feminism.

Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper's Judas Cradle

(even those that are stigmatized and shameful) may be incoherent (although I am not completely convinced of this), but what of an ethics without verifiable identities and acts? Such an ethics would not be a complete denial of identities and acts (how would such a denial ever be possible?), but would be an interruption in the discursive protocols that make identities and acts verifiable. This, then, would be an ethics without sexual content, what I am calling an erotic ethics: without a positive, epistemological ground, and therefore without a struggle for recognition (even a shameful recognition).

Performative Afterlife: an interview with Amelia Jones

Swen Steinhäuser and Neil Macdonald:We identified in our call for contributions to this issue on ‘Performative Afterlife’ the possibility of distinguishing between two broad approaches to problematizing the conventional relations between an event and its archive: either by considering the archive to itself be active, inventive, performative, or by questioning the pure presence of the performative event, seeing it as already putting into play its future remains. How would you position yourself in relation to the two approaches thus delineated? More specifically, how does your position seek to problematize the conventions of the disciplines you primarily work within and across, namely, art history and performance studies? It seems to us that you have a strong investment in the critical, as well as self-critical commentary on certain disciplinary histories and obsessions. Finally, what for you are the stakes of such an explicit critical engagement with inherited and on-going preoccupations of the disciplines?