The Oceanic Silence of Rebecca Horn

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-59
Author(s):  
India Halstead
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Body Art ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
Sexual Liberation ◽  
Liberation Movements ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Social Upheaval

AbstractIn this article, I reconsider the early work of artist Rebecca Horn as situated at the threshold of complex new theoretical, political, and artistic movements. Horn's performance pieces of the late 1960s and early 1970s formally echo this social upheaval, vibrating with tension between intimacy and isolation, pleasure and pain, human and machine. Horn's prosthetic sculptures gesture toward a continuity between body and world reminiscent of the Radical Freudian concept of Eros, echoed in the body art and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s, in which the body becomes a fluid expression of polymorphous, nonbinary desire. The sinister backdrop of postwar Germany, however, haunts the artist's work to the extent that silence becomes a motif of its own. Through her work, I ask the question: can the oceanic vision of a genderless Eros be realized, while the wounds of atrocity and of patriarchy are still inscribed on the body, or must polymorphous fluidity remain a fantasy, a utopia deferred?

Peepshow, Death Camp, Art Gallery: The Spaces of Pasolini’s Salò and Mauri’s Intellettuale

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-82
Author(s):  
Olga V. Solovieva
Keyword(s):  
Modern Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Pier Paolo Pasolini ◽  
Art Gallery ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Death Camp ◽  
The 1960S

Fabio Mauri’s performance Intellettuale, set in the context of the opening of Leone Pancaldi’s new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, summed up a life-long collaboration and controversy between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Mauri about the fate of Western art after WWII. In the context of Pancaldi’s building, Intellettuale throws into relief the cultural and ideological project of Pasolini’s filmmaking and its relation to the body art of the 1960s–’70s.

scholarly journals The thymus and the science of self

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Geenen
Keyword(s):  
T Cells ◽  
Adaptive Immune System ◽  
Lymphoid Organ ◽  
The Body ◽  
Effector Cells ◽  
Major Organ ◽  
Organ Specific ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
Essential State ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThe conventional perception asserts that immunology is the science of ‘discrimination’ between self and non-self. This concept is however no longer tenable as effector cells of the adaptive immune system are first conditioned to be tolerant to the body’s own antigens, collectively known as self until now. Only then attain these effectors the responsiveness to non-self. The acquisition of this essential state of tolerance to self occurs for T cells in the thymus, the last major organ of our body that revealed its intricate function in health and disease. The ‘thymus’ as an anatomical notion was first notably documented in Ancient Greece although our present understanding of the organ’s functions was only deciphered commencing in the 1960s. In the late 1980s, the thymus was identified as the site where clones of cells reactive to self, termed ‘forbidden’ thymocytes, are physically depleted as the result of a process now known as negative selection. The recognition of this mechanism further contributed to the belief that the central rationale of immunology as a science lies in the distinction between self and non-self. This review will discuss the evidence that the thymus serves as a unique lymphoid organ able to instruct T cells to recognize and be tolerant to harmless self before adopting the capacity to defend the body against potentially injurious non-self-antigens presented in the context of different challenges from infections to exposure to malignant cells. The emerging insight into the thymus’ cardinal functions now also provides an opportunity to exploit this knowledge to develop novel strategies that specifically prevent or even treat organ-specific autoimmune diseases.

“Naked flesh”—A somatic calling of the “mind”?

Human Affairs ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-239
Author(s):  
Robert Švarc
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Art ◽  
System Research ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Ritual Practices

Abstract Actionism, Performance and Body Art have produced forms that still provoke in their radicalism and brutality and raise many questions. Regardless of the theme—love, violence, gender, death, sexuality, killing of animals, ritual practices and myths, ecology, criticism of the ideology and so on—they are almost always characterized by an explicit and demonstrative exposure of flesh. The topic of my research is the body as a medium of the human act. Does the body elicit different “corporations of the mind” or does it draw attention to its own complex naked presence and extensionality in every elementary social interaction? Is the body unquantifiable—imponderabilia, unpredictable, and is it spinning out of the generated statistics of the system research?

Dal corpo gogna al corpo campione Saggio sul contributo dell'analisi bioenergetica alle questioni amorose in generale e alle specifiche problematiche di oggi

GROUNDING ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 15-45
Author(s):  
Violaine De Clerck
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Problems ◽  
Oedipus Complex ◽  
Sexual Liberation ◽  
Wilhelm Reich

- The author examines the actual tendency of the body "sample" or "model" as a variation of the "sexual sophistication" as it has been described by Alexander Lowen in Love and Orgasm. The modern "sexual liberation" hides only the persisting problems of the Oedipus complex in our culture, the same problems as already analyzed by Sigmund Freud. The author describes the contribution of Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Lowen to these main themes, mainly their deepening of the sexual problems from a body perspective. Finally, she criticizes the widespread "false intimacy" of parents with their children.

Margaret A. Simons, Rebel at Heart

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-335
Author(s):  
Margaret A. Simons ◽  
Erika Ruonakoski
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Liberation Movements ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Radical Ideas

Abstract In this interview, Margaret A. Simons describes her path to philosophy and existentialism, her struggles in the male-dominated field in the 1960s and 1970s, and her political activism in the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. She also discusses her encounters with Simone de Beauvoir and Beauvoir’s refusal to own her philosophical originality, suggesting that Beauvoir may have adopted a more conventional narrative of a female intellectual to circumvent the public’s resistance to her radical ideas in the 1950s.

Neither Russia nor the United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Manley
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equity ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Foreign Intervention ◽  
The Face ◽  
Dominican Women ◽  
Social Upheaval

Chapter 4 addresses three inter-related strategies employed by women following the demise of the Trujillato to reconstruct the body politic in the face of drastic political transition, a second U.S. occupation, and general social upheaval. First, Dominican women again called on the rhetoric of motherhood and maternalism in support of a return to domestic tranquility and for a nation free of dictatorial politics and foreign meddling. Second, political participation by women served to demonstrate a re-envisioning of the nature of Dominican politics through their burgeoning support of full gendered equality. Third, as now long-term members of a number of inter-American organizations, women called for continental solidarity to return sovereignty to Latin American nations plagued by foreign intervention, particularly their own. These strategies demonstrate both the potential for maternal politics as a form of national healing as well is its limitations for creating true gender equity.

Louise Bourgeois’s Melancholy Objects to be Used

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-164
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Object Relations ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenal Experience ◽  
Mental Process ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Louise Bourgeois ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

Over a decade before the French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois underwent psychoanalysis in New York (1952–1985), her work mined territories of psyche, body, home, and exile. Bourgeois’s papers from 1940 onward reveal that she shared Freud’s description of neurotics, hysterics, and artists as suffering from reminiscences. Scottish psychoanalyst W. R. D. Fairbairn identified the last of these in 1943 as “war neuroses,” just six years before Bourgeois debuted her first mature sculptures. These abstract “personages” served as melancholy surrogates for lost objects, the friends and family Bourgeois left in 1938 in Occupied France. In the 1960s, she further reduced the body to ambivalent amalgams of part-objects made from plaster and latex, suggesting swollen nodes, skin, and sex organs. Of particular interest are two papers published by Fairbairn in 1938 that extend the inner world of the individual to the field of object relations via the transposition of the symbolically “restored object.” Fairbairn conceived the radical notion of restitution, the mental process of repairing damage in the artist’s inner object world. These principles resonate with Bourgeois’s métier and a postwar sculptural aesthetic that probed the phenomenal experience of anxiety, exile, and psychoanalysis on the Self and others.

Performance: Listening Bodies

2020 ◽  
pp. 134-158
Author(s):  
Zoë Skoulding
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sound Poetry ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The 1960S

Discussion of Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie and artist Christine Sun Kim draws attention to the embodiment of sound performance, which is considered in this chapter in relation to technology, race, gender, bilingualism and, though the parallel performances of humans and birds, ecology. The work of poets such as Bob Cobbing and Henri Chopin offers examples of how sound poetry of the 1960s explored a liberated listening through recording. Yet such a listening, enabled by machines, draws attention back to the capacities of the human body. Serres’ simultaneous emphasis on the centrality of the senses and the space of codes and messages in which the body moves frames a discussion of various boundaries between language, sound and noise in the work of Emma Bennett, Jonathan Skinner, Holly Pester, Tracie Morris, Hannah Silva and Rhys Trimble.

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