Vision, and the practice of making sense of sight in specific sites of re-view, have come under siege in light of a performative turn in the analysis of contemporary everyday life. As the locus of critique has shifted from the linguistic to the visual and now to performance, the episteme of art criticism has finally come to terms with that which made it possible in the first instance. As Martin Jay puts it: "The figural is resisting the subsumption under the rubric of discursivity; the image is demanding its own unique mode of analysis." [1]
The place of the aesthetic has never been this secure, most especially in the face of assiduous attempts by people in the art world to transact 'art' not only as artifice, or as signifying system, or as political economy, but as mode of transformation, as gestus and habitus by which the body politic wrests history from the realm of nature. Robert Desjarlais, in intuiting the culture of healing in the Himalayas, attunes his keen sensibility to body and emotion, and most resonantly to the aesthetics of illness: "Anything embodied in accordance with an aesthetic is not neutral, but automatically entails a posture toward it, a 'gut feeling', and so engages not just an intellectual approach to moments of pain or comfort, but a visceral, emotional, and moral stance." [2]
We discern the traces of this movement, which at once secures and renders intractable the mode of performance, in many works represented at the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery. And the question that begs to be asked is: What theoretical net do we cast to catch performance as it is... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline