Touching the Body: The Living and the Dead in Osteoarchaeology and the Performance Art of Marina Abramović

2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Sofaer
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Marina Abramovic ◽  
The Dead

scholarly journals Will Marina Abramović die?

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-170
Author(s):  
Svetlana Racanović
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Marina Abramovic ◽  
Time’S Arrow

The gradual and then ecstatic acceleration and diversification of Marina Abramović's choices in life and art are the result of her commitment to install and introduce into her performance-machine the power of perpetual mobility. That final line of end/ ings of the horizon disappearing into Nothingness, the line of Death which she touched and invoked in her life and work on many occasions, is neither to be melancholically accepted, nor desperately tamed or fiercely denied. Abramović activates this line of the last horizon, turning it around so that it becomes vital rather than fatal, cyclic rather than liminal, (re)turning - aspace that gives birth to (hyper)productivity. There is a relentless striving to disturb, slow down, curb, disable the work of Time, to change the path of Time's arrow. She endeavours to reconstruct, revitalise, rejuvenate, to extend the duration of the body of her art, the body of performance art and, consequently, of her biological body. A number of methods and mechanisms are used for this purpose - starting from documentation, technical multiplication, substitution, extension and virtualisation and even spectacularisation of her body and the body of her art.

Samuel Beckett and Performance Art

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derval Tubridy
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
The Body ◽  
Marina Abramovic ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Bruce Nauman

‘Samuel Beckett and Performance Art’ explores the interconnections between Performance Art and Samuel Beckett's prose and drama. It analyses the relations between Beckett's work and that of Franz Erhard Walther, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, Alastair MacLennan and Amanda Coogan. It concludes that examining Beckett in the context of Performance Art enables us to reconsider elements vital to his theatre: the experience of the body in space in terms of duration and endurance; the role of repetition, reiteration and rehearsal; and the visceral interplay between language and the body.

scholarly journals Invoking The Spectral Body: A Study of Potential Corporealities in the Work of Marina Abramovic and Francesca Woodman

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-101
Author(s):  
Prema Purigali Prabhakar
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Visual Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Living Body ◽  
Marina Abramovic ◽  
Theory Of History ◽  
Francesca Woodman

At the beginning of his much written about Specters of Marx Derrida writes, “For there is no ghost, there is never any becoming specter of the spirit without at least the appearance of flesh, in a space of invisible visibility like the disappearing of an apparition.  For the ghost, there must be a return to the body, but to a body that is more abstract than ever,”  In Specters, Derrida is not only proposing a theory of history, a theory of hauntology, but in describing and redescribing the very substantive nature of the specter, he is also proposing a theory of corporeality, a theory of what the flesh is and can be.  By using Derrida’s theory of, what I will call, “spectral corporeality” in conjunction with the photographs of Francesca Woodman and the performance art of Marina Abramovic, my paper will ask such questions as: How can the specter return to the body, but not be of the flesh? How can a living fleshly body extend into a spectral body? And, what does it mean to have a theory of the body that is not of the flesh, blood, bone and sinew of the living body?Abramovic’s grappling with bones (in “Cleaning The House” and “Balkan Baroque”) and Woodman’s faceless figure simultaneously going into and escaping from a grave stone , not only  contend with the spectrality of objects (relics), spectral histories inhabiting fleshly bodies and the spectral presence between audience and performer, viewer and artist, but with the gender of the spectral body.  To invoke “a body that is more abstract than ever”, Derrida wrestles with Marx, conjures the ghost of Hamlet’s father and summons Hamlet himself—an all male cast of spectral bodies; by examining Abramovic and Woodman’s art, I hope to understand how a female spectral body might make itself present, inhabit a  visual space of both flesh and ether.

‘Man Is Ill Because He Is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Performance

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.

Writing and the Tomb

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Suriano
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Funerary Inscriptions

Hebrew funerary inscriptions began to appear in Judah during late Iron IIB. These inscriptions are relatively unique in that they are written on, or inside, tombs. But they also include amulets that adorned the body during burial. The funerary inscriptions emerged at a stage when the bench tomb had fully developed, and their writings reveal multiple concerns regarding the dead. The Hebrew inscriptions stress the imperative of safeguarding the dead inside the tomb on multiple levels. The interred are identified by name, and their place inside the tomb is described. All of these concerns relate to the existence of the dead and the preservation of their memory. These concerns are also consistent with blessings and curses that are often inscribed on the tomb, which indicate that Yahweh’s power could extend over the dead as well as the living.

Unqualified Pleasure

2018 ◽  
pp. 791-808
Author(s):  
Branka Arsić
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Dead

Everything that Poe wrote is touched by the question of life. Most notably, dead women come back to life, the living switch personhoods with the dead, and hearts dismembered from the body keep on beating. Such existential shifts were typically interpreted as Poe’s take on the Gothic, his engagement with the supernatural, or, as political allegories. Declining to follow any of those directions, this chapter will take Poe’s ideas about life literally and nontrivially. Closely discussing such texts as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Mesmeric Revelation,” and Eureka, the essay will investigate Poe’s continuous insistence that nothing is inanimate and immaterial, as well as his claim that life can’t be understood according to an anthropomorphic model. Reading his literature against the backdrop of the scientific treatises on life and vitalism that influenced him, this chapter will seek to explain what is at stake in Poe’s statement that even “unorganized matter” is alive and sensuous, endowed with capacity for pain and joy.

Specific Susceptibility to HCN and the amount of HCN recovered from Fumigated Insects

1951 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Pradhan ◽  
S. C. Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Body Weight ◽  
Water Content ◽  
Relative Position ◽  
Surface Resistance ◽  
Internal Resistance ◽  
Effective Resistance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Effective Dosage ◽  
Adult Females ◽  
The Dead

The relationship was studied between susceptibility of a number of different species of insects to HCN fumigation and the recovery of HCN from them immediately after fumigation.The test insects used were Tribolium castaneum, seventh stage caterpillars of Corcyra cephalonica, first-and second-instar nymphs of Drosicha sp., third-and fourthinstar nymphs of Drosicha sp. and adult females of Drosicha sp.The apparatus and methods used in the fumigation and in the recovery of HCN from the fumigated insects are fully described.Preliminary expsriments showed that the processes of distillation and redistillation did not affect the recovery of HCN but that the result obtained for recovery from distillation could be affected if some volatile reducing substance were produced and carried over to the distillate. It was found that this did actually take place in the case of one of the test insects—T. castaneum—but that redistillation got rid of the impurity.In the main experiments it was shown that, on the assumption that the concentration of HCN to which insects are exposed is the effective dosage, the susceptibility of the test insects varied in the following descending order : firstand second-stage nymphs of Drosicha sp. > third- and fourth-stage nymphs of Drosicha sp.>C. cephalonica> T. castaneum>the adult females of Drosicha sp.When the same insects were arranged in descending order of the quantities of HCN recovered per 100 gm. of body weight, the order was identical except for the nymphs of Drosicha sp. which occupied a different relative position. The two categories of nymphs of Drosicha sp. were found to occupy a different relative position again with regard to the other three test insects when exposed to a superlethal concentration and assessed for recovery of HCN per 100 gr. body weight.Parallel batches of T. castaneum and C. cephalonica were fumigated and the HCN was recovered from the dead and survivors. More HCN was recovered from the dead insects than from those that survived.Both recovery and sorption of HCN were estimated separately in parallel batches of insects (adult females of Drosicha sp. and C. cephalonica). Recovery was found to be less than sorption showing that a part of the HCN absorbed is converted into a non-recoverable state. Further, that the weight of HCN sorbed per gram body weight of adult females of Drosicha sp. is much less than in the case of C. cephalonica under similar conditions of fumigation and that the amount of HCN converted into non-recoverable products is less in Drosicha adults than in C. cephalonica.A comparison of the water content of T. castaneum, C. cephalonica and Drosicha sp. (adults) showed that there was a positive correlation between water content and higher susceptibility to HCN and greater recovery of HCN was also indicated. It is suggested that this may be a factor in the “ Surface Resistance ” of an insec to a fumigant.The observations of previous workers that larger amounts are sorbed by or recovered (after fumigation) from more susceptible species than for those less susceptible was corroborated by the results obtained with C. cephalonica, T. castaneum and adult females of Drosicha sp. but not with those from nymphs of Drosicha sp.When dosage-mortality graphs were prepared by taking the amount of HCN recovered per gram body weight as an index of internal dose, the order of resistance of different test insects based on this new criterion was found to be entirely different from that based on the usual criterion of the concentration of HCN in the fumatorium being the index of effective dosage.These apparently anomalous observations may be explained by assuming that the resistance shown by an insect in an actual fumigation operation, i.e., to the concentration of HCN to which it is exposed (external dose) is what may be called the total “ Effective Resistance ” and that this “ Effective Resistance ” is the resultant of (a) “ Surface Resistance ” to the entry of fumigant and (b) “ Internal Resistance ” to the amount of HCN which actually gains entry into the body in some way or other. Thus the “Effective Resistance ” of an insect may be due to a combination either of low “ Surface Resistance ” and high “ Internal Resistance ”, giving a very low “ Effective Resistance ” as in the case of C. cephalonica, or vice versa giving the maximum “ Effective Resistance ” as in adult females of Drosicha sp. The lower recovery of HCN from the nymphs of Drosicha sp., although they were more susceptible to fumigation than C. cephalonica, is explained by their higher “ Surface Resistance ” combined with a very much lower “ Internal Resistance ”, leading to a lower “ Effective Resistance ”.

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