Performing the Body/Performing the Text

Since the 1960s, visual art practices--from body art to minimalism--have taken contemporary art outside the museum and gallery by embracing theatricality and performance and exploding the boundaries set by traditional art criticism. Such practices prompt us to reassess our ways of contructing meaning from art, making us receptive to the element of performance both in the processes of art production, and in the act of interpretation itself. Performing the Body/Performing the Text explores the new performativity in art theory and practice, examining ways of rethinking interpretive processes in visual culture. This collection undertakes two parallel projects: exploring art practices which perform the subject, and examining ways in which modes of performativity in contemporary art offers new models for interpreting artworks. Demonstrating how modernist art criticism attempts to fix the work with more stable sets of aesthetic meanings, the contributors argue that interpretation needs to be recognised asmuch more dynamic and contingent. It does not come 'naturally' at the moment of contact with the artwork, but is worked out as an ongoing, open performance between artists and spectators, with meaning circulating fluidly in the complex web of connections between artists, patrons, collectors, and between both specialised and non-specialised viewers within the arena of encounter. Offering its own performance script, and embracing both canonical 'fine' artists such as Manet, De Kooning and Jasper Johns, and performance artists such as Vito Acconci, Gunter Brus and the Sacred Naked Nature Girls, Performing the Body/Performing the Text offers radical re-readings of art works and points confidently towards new models for understanding art.

Fionna Barber is Senior Lecturer in Art History at Manchester Metropolitan University Lisa Bloom teaches at Josai International University in the Chiba Prefecture of Japan Jennifer DeVere Brody teaches in the English Department at the George Washington University Nao Bustamante is a performance artist based in San Francisco. Gavin Butt teaches modern and contemporary art and theory at Goldsmiths' College, University of London Meiling Cheng teaches in the Theatre Department at the University of Southern California Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York Michael Hatt teaches history of art at the University of Warwick Amelia Jones teaches twentieth-century art and theory at the University of California, Riverside Jonathan Katz is chair of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Studies at the City College of San Francisco Karen Lang teaches at California Institute of Technology Reina Lewis is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of East London Joanna Lowry teaches at the Kent Institute of Art and Design Peggy Phelan teaches performance studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University Christine Poggi teaches art history at the University of Pennsylvania Donald Preziosi teaches courses on contemporary critical theory, modern visual culture, and museum studies in the Department of Art History at UCLA Barbara U. Schmidt works as an independent scholar and curator in Munich, where she is presently teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts Andrew Stephenson is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Theory in the Art, Design and Film History department at the University of East London Philip Ursprung teaches art history at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich B. J. Wray is a doctoral candidate at the University of Calgary, Canada