Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
who has specialized in tattooing female top models, using the
emblems of famous fashion brands such as Dior, Gaultier or
Chanel - albeit only on paper (140). What she leaves
unmentioned is the political impact behind this, namely the
criticism of an unscrupulous marketing of bodies and their
visual appropriation by the media. Knöfel's view that nowadays
pain in art figures in ways ever more glamorous and sterile
and thereby distinguishes itself from the 1960s, "der Zeit der
schmuddeligen Körper-Aktionisten" (142) [the decade of messy
body artists], proves to be right with respect to the highly
stylish performances by artists such as Orlan. The risks taken
in body art are no longer as extreme as they used to be in the
beginning and live performances have ceased to dominate the
scene. Instead, the medial shift of the 1990s has led to the
current predominance of multimedia installations and
photographic works, which, because of their lack of immediacy,
allow the viewers to distance themselves from any painful
experiences they witness.
44 The political impact of performance work revolving
around painful experiences, however, remains crucial. Compared
to performances of the 1960s and 1970s, recent body art is
less an artistic innovation - since it continues a by now more
or less established tradition - than a form of social and,
more often than not, gender-related critique. This seems to be
especially true for female-authored body art, which has always
been more openly political, and it distinguishes performance
art from the currently existing multitude of cultural
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (51 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57