Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
muse does not really come as a surprise insofar as it merely
continues art history's traditional distribution of roles.
More generally speaking, early body art - where it engages
with male-female relations - mirrors the conditions of Western
culture at large, which has always linked femininity with
corporeality and conceived of Woman (in the sense of a generic
category) as the undifferentiated object of male imagination
(Almhofer 37).
7 Within the history of body and performance art, a major
shift occurred in the 1970s, when an exclusively male domain
of artistic practice was gradually entered by female
performers. Valie Export, who had been affiliated with members
of Viennese actionism, was one of the earliest woman artists
to explore the female (i.e. her own) body as an active part in
live performances. Export and other female artists took
advantage of the fact that performers operate from subjective
or even narcissistic stances. They act as first-person
"narrators", offer individual, corporeal interpretations and
perceptions of the world (Georg F. Schwarzbauer cited in
Almhofer 34) and have a tendency to monologize (Voigt 21)
which can appear almost self-therapeutic. From a gender-based
viewpoint this opens up an important but never uncontroversial
potential for self-stylization and self-expression. Female
body artists have to face the gender-specific problem of
moving inside an affirmative tradition of bodily adornment
meant to foreground typical characteristics of femininity,
while aiming in their performances at a negation and
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (6 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57