Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
which lends credibility to what happens. Chris Burden chose to
perform in front of spectators for exactly these reasons
(Schimmel 94, Schröder 114, Zell 71), and Marina Abramovic
concluded a pact with herself but depended on the energy the
audience chose to invest:
[...] I made the restrictions for myself, I kept to them, and
I overcame the pain and got through to the other side. I've
experienced that this is possible. That's why the transitory
objects and the instructions are an important structure for
the audience. They give them the possibility to invest their
own energy so that the experience can take place. It works
like a bank, the more money you put in, the higher the
interest. (Celant/Abramovic 28-29)
12 While body artists typically foreground the
intersubjective aspect of their work and thereby revolutionize
the traditionally disembodied, narcissistic stance in art and
art history, their dominant body/mind conception tends to
perpetuate the Cartesian hierarchy of mind over body. At least
in earlier instances of performance descriptions, overcoming
and resisting bodily pain, with the connotation of conquering
the body (sometimes as part of a politically charged
emancipation process), are recurrent key terms in the
rhetoric. Stelarc's statement "To me it [stretched skin] is
part of the manifestation of the gravitational pull, of
overcoming it, or of at least resisting it" (16) is a case in
point, as is Marina Abramovic's outrage at her failure to
remain in control in Rhythm 5 (1974): When her feet started to
burn after she had set a huge sawdust star aflame, she fainted
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (11 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57