Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
of pain, of body discipline and the right to decide over life
or death. Artists like Brus thus "assume the function of the
aggressor; they both imitate his function and assume his
symbols" (Vergine 19). Brus's colleague Peter Weibel explains:
Wenn nun die Kunst beginnt, dem Staat das Tötungsmonopol
streitig zu machen, auch in der Selbsttötung und der
"unendlich ausgekosteten Selbstentleibung", dieser unendlich
verzögerten Selbsttötung, dann geht es einzig und allein
darum, die Todesproduktion selbst zu brechen. (45)
[When art starts to dispute the state's exclusive right to
kill, even by suicide and a "disembodiment enjoyed to the
full", this infinitely retarded suicide, it is solely
concerned with overcoming the logic of death itself.]
Durch die reale Verstümmelung des Körpers wurde die Realität
der sozialen Codierung des Körpers und die verstümmelnde
Funktion der sozialen Codierung angegriffen. (48)
[The realised mutilation of the body was an attack on the
realness of social codes concerning the body and on the
mutilating function of social encoding.]
That pain also originates in mutilating processes of
genderization due to an inflexible heterosexual matrix, which
excludes and prohibits all deviant forms of desire, as Judith
Butler argues (65), is an insight still unavailable and
possibly irrelevant to Brus and most other male artists of the
time.
17 This is completely different for artists such as
Carolee Schneemann or Valie Export, who were aware of gender
constraints well before the second women's movement started to
make itself felt in continental Europe. In her 1968
performance Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit Valie Export led her
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (16 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57