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Title: Body Art/Performing the Subject by Amelia Jones ISBN: 0-8166-2773-8 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: March, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.58 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: excellent book
Comment: excellent book, well written; the author is a brilliant and well respected art historian
Rating: 5
Summary: an artist responds
Comment: The body we inhabit is a contested space, one which artists have beenspeaking of and from for a long time. My own hyper recognition of theproblematics of speaking from the body came in the early 70's whenconfronted by the naked body of Vito Acconci in a hallway at the artschool I was attending. I did not know who he was, only that he was infront of me pulling hairs from his chest... This confrontation wasanything but academic. I was freaked and equally intrigued. Far fromrunning away from or theorizing on what was happening, I entered intoa space of what Roland Barthes calls "twice fascinated", onebody in visceral relationship feeling attraction, repulsion, slips ofidentification etc., another body in simultaneous psychologicalassessment and witnessing of the event. Both bodies were mine...notsplit, rather simultaneous. As I look back at my own production of thepast 30 years I see myself consistently in struggle to express thissimultaneity. The pitfalls have not only been the Cartesianimperatives imbedded within culture, but my own, historically seatedwithin my body.Reading Amelia Jones' book reminds me of the stressesand tensions which are inevitable when re-aligning our ideationalcritiques to mirror our corporeal experiences. It is not an easyposition given that definitions of body, self, other are not fixed. Ihighly recommend this book to all who are committed to reshaping ourtired dualism of nature/culture while aware of our inherentcollusions. It is refreshing to read a writing which is not afraid toslip as it intends to slide.
Rating: 2
Summary: Very Problematic
Comment: The main problem with this book is the confusion attending Jones' inadequate construction/theorization of her basic concepts, such as, "the self" "the other" "the subject" "sexuality," "narcissism." Among many glaring problems is the total absence of any engagement or theorization of the unconscious, any true dialogue or understanding of psychoanalysis, particularly Lacanian, even though she depends so heavily on concepts derived from psychoanalysis. What is the subject? Is it the ego? The ego + body? The "social self?" The "subject" has in fact a very precise meaning in Lacanian theory--the subject of the signifier, which also, is utterly absent from this book. There is no conception of the signifier--because she tends to lump anything to do with "form" into the straw man of "Greenbergian Mondernist formalism." The result is that Jones is often trapped in a binary--there is no third term, no theory of desire and no Other--except that which was theorized at one time by Merleau-Ponty, evidently, though, it is nowhere in THIS text. There is a valiant attempt to get out of the spheric binary, but there is nothing there to help construct it, besides the incessant footnoting and referencing of "French philosophy" and "French poststructuralist theory," which is just a way of deferring the process, not entering into it. The "radical" structure she talks about so much is just not part of the production of her text, her process, her methodology. She remains totally at the level of the University Professor talking about people who somewhere else have broken down the borders she seems to want to cross, butdoesn't seem to know how herself.
What is sexuality? How can you speak about sexuality without a concept of the unconscious? In a footnote, Jones disregards Lacan's formulas of sexual difference--allegedly because of his "misogyny," though one could also argue that any true "engagement" and understanding of Lacanian theory would be both too disruptive and too complex and problematic for her book, for the models she wants to work with. But her superficial and clumsy reading of Lacan is the same as every other "philosopher" she quotes.
My quesion is: is "Lacan" and "psychoanalysis," perhaps even "the phallus", the truly repressed and excluded middle of Jones's own form of postmodernism? As Modernism represses the potential for its own disruption and dispersal--where is it in Jones work? I think its in the highly UNtheorized relation to analysis and anaytic concepts. Perhaps she does not wish to deal with the "phallus" precisely because she is so identified with it?
The simultaneous "visible and invisible" quality of her problematic relation to psychoanalytic concepts (particularly, but not only those of Lacan), is epitomized right at the beginning by her choice of Schneeman pulling a scroll out of her vagina. It doesn't take a genius (or Merleau-Ponty, or any "French poststructuralist philosopher") to understand she's constructing not a penis, but a phallus, veiled in the form of a text (a book on Body Art?)(or vice versa? What is the relationship between the phallus, writing, and a hole?). The iconic power of this image speaks to the "subject position" of Jones herself, I believe, and it is precisely this position which goes unacknowledged and unrecognized in all her conscious representations of herself. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, given the ironic (or is it?) work of Schneeman. Whatever the case, Jones misses an opportunity to TRULY implicate herself in her writing.
This is just a very tedious and tiresome book-typical for academe, and typical that Jones herself is utterly blind to HER positioning in the University, of which she is so obviously a product.
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Title: The Explicit Body in Performance by Rebecca Schneider ISBN: 0415090261 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: March, 1997 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: Performing the Body/Performing the Text by Amelia Jones, Andrew Stephenson ISBN: 0415190606 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: July, 1999 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: The Ends of Performance by Peggy Phelan, Jill Lane ISBN: 0814766471 Publisher: New York University Press Pub. Date: March, 1998 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (World of Art) by Roselee Goldberg ISBN: 0500203393 Publisher: Thames & Hudson Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (Sight: Visual Culture) by Amelia Jones ISBN: 0415267064 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $32.95 |
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