Introduction
This research explores how the performing woman’s body oscillates between control and vulnerability, subject and object, agency and submission. The project reconsiders the body as a tool of both artistic and political expression, asking who holds the right to “play” it and at what cost. Drawing on feminist performance practices, the research reflects on the tension between using one’s body as a medium and being used through it.
Instrumentality
You can have an instrument, but you might never know how to use it. The act of possession becomes a gesture of failure.
Body politics and performance
The desire to possess the woman's body clashes with the inherent impossibility of possessing performance, which exists only in the ephemeral moment.
Photography and performance
The equality of photography and performance, based on their indexical nature. However, these two media inevitably come into conflict: performance, as an ephemeral and physical action, resists reduction to a static image, while photography emphasizes the absence of action, transforming it into a trace.
Body politics and photography
Photography creates a form of possession over the woman's body, offering a sense of control through its material representation. On a psychological level, this visual capture enables a sense of mastery or appropriation, reinforcing the complex power dynamics inherent in the gaze and in the politics of representation. At the same time, the photograph’s stillness paradoxically emphasizes the absence of lived experience, revealing both the limitations and the seductive power of visual possession.
Texts
Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (1998)
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993)
Jane Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile (1999)
What is the difference between the body of a performer and the body of a non-artist?
Historically, the female artist’s body in theoretical discourse has been considered almost exclusively within the framework of a patriarchal system, but not as an autonomous means of expression, but as an object of representation or protest.
Based on the selectes materials, 3 dominant directions of this discourse can be identified:
- The naked male performer is seen as a hero who uses the body as a tool, while the naked female performer is seen as an exhibitionist who uses the body as the body.
(Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, 1993)
- The political gesture of the female artist is often privatized: the audience and critics place the artist’s body back into the realm of the “personal,” turning it into simply the body of a woman rather than a medium of expression.
(Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile, Duke University Press, 1999)
- Female performance has often been interpreted primarily by male theorists, through the lens of the male gaze, reinforcing dependence even within a field that sought to use the body as a tool of liberation.
“Kuspit pathologizes Mendieta’s sexuality as narcissistic and geophilic... His diagnostic procedure allows him to ignore the political critique that underpins a great deal of Mendieta’s work.”
(Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile, Duke University Press, 1999)
What is the difference between the female body and the body of the artist?
In female performance, the body can never be a neutral instrument (especially the naked body); it is always already sexualized, emotional, and politically charged.
“The explicit body ... explicates bodies in social relation.”
(Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, 1997)
Male theorists could speak of the body as material because their corporeality was not projected upon by social norms (at least not to the same extent as it was onto women).
The female body could not escape the symbolic loop in which every action was read as about woman, never about concept.
Where does the line between the body and the instrument lie?
Gradually, my question began to take shape:
Amelia Jones, in Body Art: Performing the Subject (1998), writes about the performer’s body as existing “between subject and object.”
A living body can never become pure material, because it is always implicated in perception, vulnerability, and affect.
Peggy Phelan, in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), argues that the body cannot be represented without the loss of the subject, because the moment it becomes an image, its “I” disappears.
This unstable position creates an internal rupture: the performer wants to make the body a tool of expression, but society perceives it as the embodiment of corporeality, something that, by definition, cannot be a tool.
