Body Art/Performing the Subject [Paperback]

Amelia Jones (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 1998

"With great originality and scholarship, Amelia Jones maps out an extraordinary history of body art over the last three decades and embeds it in the theoretical terrain of postmoderism. The result is a wonderful and permissive space in which the viewer...can wander"...-Moira Roth, Trefethen professor of art history, Mills College.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (February 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816627738
• ISBN-13: 978-0816627738
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #542,135 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A tough slog, September 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Body Art/Performing the Subject (Paperback)

I really wanted to love this book, because I like a lot of the art she writes about. But the prose is awful!! And it's actually not that Jones is "too" theoretical -- if anything, she might not be "theoretical" enough. Instead, she constantly uses current crit theory buzzwords -- "performative," "embodied," "subject" etc -- without ever really defining or locating them. And the readings of individual art works get buried under her heavy-handed "thesis."

This is one of those academic texts that feels like it started with an "idea," and found work to fit it. Not that her engagements with Hannah Wilke, Bob Flanagan, et al, aren't sincere, because they are. But they still seem without real awareness, and some of the author's "personal" observations are just dopey.

Somehow she seems new to the territory and wierdly conventional.

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thinking bodies, May 27, 2000

By 

M. Cheng <[e-mail]> (Los Angeles, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Body Art/Performing the Subject (Paperback)

BODY ART/PERFORMING THE SUBJECT offers an excellent critique of a fascinating phenomenon in contemporary art: the artist's voluntary use of her/his body in art. In this superb and much-needed book, Amelia Jones defines body art "as a set of performative practices that, through such intersubjective engagement, instantiate the dislocation or decentering of the Cartesian subject of modernism." Anti-formalist intersubjectivity and poststructuralist criticism against the Cartesian mind/body split are the two theoretical angles from which Jones examines body art pieces from the 1960s to the 1990s. She argues that body art performances, enacted against the grain of normative subject, exposes the logic of exclusion assumed by the modernist art history and criticism.

With this rigorous, incisive, and politically informed thesis, Jones develops a stunning series of analytical re-readings: from the action painting of Jackson Pollock--filmed by Hans Namuth; the erotic/violent/contemplative body sculpture of Vito Acconci; the feminist performances of Hannah Wilke, who marks sexuality, vitality, and mortality with equal measure of intelligence, humor, and courage; to the intersection of body and technology as exemplified by the works of Gary Hill, James Luna, Orlan, Bob Flanagan/Sheree Rose, Maureen Connor, Laurie Anderson, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Laura Aguilar. Other artists covered extensively in Body Art include Chris Burden, Yves Klein, Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama, Lynda Benglis, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Adrian Piper, and Niki de Saint Phalle. The depth and breadth of Jones's theoretical references that particularize her portraits of these artists makes for the reading of this book a difficult but stimulating pleasure.

Provocatively argued and elegantly expressed, Body Art/Performing the Subject is a must-read for those interested in the debates over embodiment, subjectivity, performance, feminism, and theories of identity. The intensity of Jones's writing is the heat--and the cool--of a philosophical motion.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Off-mark performing?, April 22, 2000

By 

Kahlil Chaar "kahlil" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Body Art/Performing the Subject (Paperback)

I bought Body Art: Peforming the Subject while doing a research paper for an undergrad course on Contemporary Art History. Amelia Jones' book brings a series of critically incisive contributions to current performance art and body art theoretical debates. Her use of phenomenologigal theory (Merleau-Ponty)is admirable amidst an American academia with a tendency to be over-run by fashionable perspectivisms oblivious to their own roots and histories. Yet, Jones' ambitious work is under-cut by a jargon-ridden prose that sometimes appears to go nowhere, especially when discussing Lacanian psychoanalysis and concepts such as the body, the self, the subject and the other. For example, while trying to argue for an anti-Cartesian view of the subject, Jones insists in mantaining the grammatical dichotomy of "body/self". Instead of pushing Derrida's supplement theory to its limits, Jones seems to have a step in and a step out of the normative and dangerous dichotomies that have plagued Western thought since Descartes.

Still, Amelia Jones' Body Art is a necessary book if one is interested in taking a peek at body and performance art debates. While it does not compare favorably to Schneider's rigourous and well-written dialogue with postmodern and performance theories nor to Goldberg's more traditional yet fascinating take on performance art, Body Art: Performing the Subject remains as an intelligent contribution to the history of performance and body art.