Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
Sprache ist total vom Staat eingenommen, man kann eigentlich
kein vernünftiges Wort mehr sagen. Und der Aktionismus hat es
zum Ausdruck gebracht" (Roussel 118-119). [A new language is
introduced into actionism: the language of the body. It is far
more real. Belching, shitting, grunting, breathing, groaning.
The other language is suspect. [...] Language has been
completely appropriated by the state so that it is practically
impossible to utter a single sensible word. And actionism has
given expression to this.] Vito Acconci's photo action
Trademarks (1970) appears to be a concretization of this
linguistic scepticism among performance artists. Acconci
assumed various painfully contorted postures in order to bite
into various parts of his body and thus to refunctionalize the
mouth as an instrument of aggression: "Mich beißen: Meinen
Körper überall beißen, wo ich hinkomme. Tinte auf die Bisse
auftragen; den Bißabdruck auf verschiedene Oberflächen
stempeln" (Acconci cited in Schimmel 91). [To bite myself. To
bite my body in all the places I can reach. To apply ink on
the bites; to stamp the bite's impression on different
surfaces.] A sceptical attitude towards conventional language
as a medium of the symbolic order and the valorization of non-
symbolic communicative modes such as the semiotic (in Julia
Kristeva's terms) seems to have been a widely shared position
among artists of all orders since the 1960s, but body artists
probably had the most immediate and effective (because
multisensory) access to such alternative languages. One of
those was and is the language of blood and of skin colour.
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (33 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57