Customer Reviews

Body Art/Performing the Subject

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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.

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.

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.

Other reviewers here have already noted how graceless, jargon-laden, and bloated Jones's prose is. I would just like to add that her tone of lofty superiority to the non-specialist audience for art and -- worse, much worse -- to many of the "masculinist" [sic] artists she writes about is maddening. I couldn't help thinking, as I read her disdainful analyses of Pollock in particular, and became increasingly disgusted by the scorn she heaps on those dumb middle-American clucks who insist on seeing him as heroic, that unlike Jones, who has had one cushy academic post after another, Pollock, if I can be forgiven an old-fashioned cliche (the only kind Jones favors is of the academic variety), actually starved for his art. Reading Jones could almost turn one into a cultural conservative...

Amelia Jones writes with intelligence and outstanding flair on a subject that is by no means unproblematic. Her text focuses on body art practices (NOT to be confused with the blanket term "performance art") and how they reflect both artistic and social aspects of (specifically American) culture from the 1960s to today. Jones offers theory-based analysis of such artists as Vito Acconci and Hannah Wilke, and gives extensive notes. Although her viewpoint is that of a feminist, the reader should by no means view Jones' work as "essentialist"; she cites many sources and deals with complicated art-historical issues very ably. Simply a must-read for students of art, art history, feminist theory, women's studies, etc., etc.!

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.

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.

An original, provocative, insightful exploration of "body Art". In "Body Art/Performing the Subject Amelia Jones ranges the bedding of postmodern art quick to excavate the surplus that lies buried when looked from the vantage of the common public. The critic is far too sensibile and intuitive to ever come across as condescending, and her intellectual milieu, however teeming with extraordinary subtlety, never subverts the innocent eye which comes to these artistic endeavors. This is one of the best book in any area of the artistic domain: critical, performative, engaging, engendered. Theoretically Amelia Jones argues in keeping with a dialectic of intersubjective claims informed by a witnessing rather than the Hegelian moment of recognition; Consequently the author steadily demonstartes how art is an event, a moment of suspension and reevaluation, that invites an insurrectionary violence toward the preconceived and assimilated notions of a rational web we lie dormant within. Psychoanalytic rhetoric is intermittantly strewn about the essays (a minimum of Lacan is required here), but only when pertinent to exposing the internal dynamics of an artist's work.

The vigor of the essays is enthusiastic, full of joy, teeming with emotional investment. This is a careful perceptive critique that stands free of the inevitable political underpinnings contemporary art deploys, yet it never embraces the overt liberal, if anarchic tendencies of the work she discusses.
Speaking of Performance Art can be a terrifying experience, for we have a fading record and still shots of a narrative experience that is frozen in its vanishing: It is much like taking a snapshot of a dream, or an acid trip, describing wjat took place and the life it gave birth to through its fading. Amelia Jones is outstanding in her capacity to do so.

There is hardly a better exploration in art criticism today on Jackson Pollack, Ashton Harris, Laura Augilar, Hannah Wilke and Vito Acconci. Anyone fascinated by the abject nature of such artistic endeavors will find in these essays, especially those on Vito Acconci and Hannah Wilke, a compelling, forward, well-written, easily understood and intellectually astute critic that ushers and guides to an enlightening understanding.
This is the best art critic writing to day since Rosalind Krauss, Lucy Lippard, Donald Kuspit and TJ Clark, Arthur Danto and Barbara Stafford.
Not to be missed given its intelligence, eloquence, clarity and an invigorating aesthetic ductility rarely encountered today.

excellent book, well written; the author is a brilliant and well respected art historian

I found this book poorly written. Jones often uses a whole paragraph to say something which can be summed in a sentence. She often uses "post modern words" when her idea could more easily be communicated simply - in english. Some of her [good!] ideas fit the works she writes about but she doesn't seem to notice when they don't. Her aproach tends to flatten the works she writes about to the relm of sexual politics without allowing for their other, often contradictory meanings.