Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
29 Jochen Gerz took a specific way of speaking literally
in his painful performance Schreiben mit der Hand (1972), when
he grazed his hand against the wall of a house in order to
write the sentence "Diese Worte sind mein Fleisch und mein
Blut" [These words are my flesh and my blood] in blood onto it
(Schneede 142-144). Gerz poses as a messianic figure in that
he takes the Christian motif of the Eucharist out of its
religious context and plays with its underlying concepts of
physical pain as a gift to believers. Dennis Oppenheim's
Reading Position for a Second Degree Burn (1970) could be
regarded as another, though probably less painful and more
passive, performative act of achieving colour change, "a
traditional painter's concern" (Oppenheim cited in Goldberg
158), via body language. Oppenheim exposed himself naked to
the sun, with a large book placed on his chest, until the sun
had burnt the uncovered area and produced a body-specific form
of pigment. He relegated artistic authorship to the forces of
nature in this piece and thereby implicitly questioned the
role of the performer: "I allow myself to be painted - my skin
becomes pigment"; "I feel the act of becoming red" (Oppenheim
cited in Schneede 62).
30 Feminist theory, which revealed the symbolic to be
male- or phallus-dominated and searched for alternative,
"feminine" modes of expression, was taken up in the work of
body artists such as Gina Pane. Pane, who wanted to draw
attention to everyday violence against women by her facial
self-mutilations, is very explicit about pain as a (feminine)
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (34 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57