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Ritual in performance art

Another Modern Myth or a Post-Modern Shift?

Anne Marsh
Eyeline 08
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Ever since Descartes' cognito, modern philosophy has been conceived as a philosophy of the subject; when God died he was resurrected as the creative subject, defined by its constructive activity.1 In this scheme the creative artist plays a significant role. The paradigm of the avant­-garde artist as the mad, creative genius slips into the divine manifesta­tion of man-god: the shaman who will invest his every action with truth. 

The central position of the subject in ritual and body art is problematic. Body art, claimed by Daniel Thomas, in 1976, to be the “…most interest­ing of international movements",2 repositions the individualism of the past. It is an attempt to find the self-knowing subject of humanism, capa­ble of “…'expressing' itself, and/or its world…via a transparent language".3 Victor Burgin describes the post-modern subject as an “…effect of language, a precipitate of the very symbolic order of which the humanist subject supposed itself to be master".4 

The dominant reading of performance art in the 1970s is one which insists that the concern to merge art and life was primarily a personal quest.5 The presence of the artist as corporeal body prioritizes the indi­vidual subject. The inscription of pain upon the body acts like a signa­ture, an authenticating mark defining the experience of the artist. Lea Vergine, in her much cited book Body Art,6 argues that “…the experi­ences we are dealing with are authentic, and they are consequently cruel and painful. Those who are in pain will tell you that they have the right to be taken seriously".7 

The emphasis on the private sphere is convoluted: a (mis)reading is compounded by the way... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Ray Woolard, Art for Christ's Sake: Is Religion an Art or is Art a Religion? La Trobe University, 1978. 

Ray Woolard, Art for Christ's Sake: Is Religion an Art or is Art a Religion? La Trobe University, 1978. 

Kevin Mortensen, The Rowing, National Gallery of Victoria, 1980. (with Steve Turpie, Bruce Lamrock and Peter Hopcratt). Photo: courtesy the artist. 

Kevin Mortensen, The Rowing, National Gallery of Victoria, 1980. (with Steve Turpie, Bruce Lamrock and Peter Hopcratt). Photo: courtesy the artist.