What
the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance
by Jane Blocker
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
2004
184 pp., illus. 36 b/w. Trade, $68.95;
paper, $22.95
ISBN: 0-8166-4318-0; ISBN: 0-8166-4319-9.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be
Jane Blocker
is assistant professor of art history
at the University of Minnesota and has
published before on the art of Ana Mendiata.
Starting from and using the categories
of Roland Barthes' intriguing analysis
of the lover's discourse, she reconsiders
the early history and historiography of
the art of performance. Her historiographic
criticism centers on the concepts of 'doubt'
and 'desire' as two sides of the same
medal. Surely enough, contemporary critics
of early performance art were trying to
understand and to love at the same time
and were, therefore, entangled in an unresolvable
struggle between the intellectual and
the physical, the cognitive and the emotional,
which put them in a position similar to
a lovers.
In Blockers analysis, performance
itselfor at least an important
number of early performancescan
be understood as explorations of or expressions
in what she calls the 'somatic language'.
In the first chapter, 'Mouths', she uses
the work of Vito Acconci, Ann Hamilton,
Hannah Wilke, and Gary Hill to illustrate
what she understands to be the fabric
of performances: a language of the body
or the body as language. Her thesis seems
to be that most critics have missed this
point entirely or are, because they are
writing in a patriarchal and heteronormal
intellectual tradition, blind to the body
as artistic means of expression, as signifier
and unmediated signified at the same time.
In the following chapters, 'Lovers' and
'Captivating Delights', she continues
to develop this thesis, switching between
her description and interpretation of
individual performances by Yves Klein,
Carolee Schneemann, Paul Cotton and many
others on the one hand and the critical
response to them on the other. Again she
lets herself be guided by elements from
Barthes' writings. 'I learn to linger
in these areas by reading blissfully and
watching for the performance of what Barthes
calls "scenes of waiting" within the body
as signifying act. In general I will be
thinking about the costs of the bodyhow,
as we have already seen, in order to utilize
the body for avant-garde praxis, one must
labor to manage the taint of the feminine.
But there are other costs: the expenditure
of desire invested in the body and the
time spent anticipating the endlessly
deferred revolution that it symbolizes
and comes to promise' (p. 55).
The final chapter, 'Blood's Work' draws
heavily on Blockers previous interpretation
of Ana Mendieta's performances as it concentrates
on blood, both menstrual or intentionally
spilt, as an important part of the somatic
language and how historiography came to
grips with the mortality it signifies.
It is doubtful that this book will appeal
to many readers outside feminist academic
circles. Its purpose remains hidden in
an overload of quotations, side-thoughts
and meanderings and its reasoning is too
often based on extensions of metaphors,
literal readings of analogies and rhetoric
tricks like the reading of the absent
as proof of an unwanted presence, and
vice versa. It certainly is a pity that
many lucid points and brilliant observations
get lost in the stylistic morass and the
desire to illustrate too much and to prove
too little.