Live performance with two Super 8 film loops
Since the 1970s the relationship of women to their bodies in art has mostly been understood as operating on two levels: the exhibition and documentation of previously unmentionable physical aspects of the female body and experience – fertility, menstruation, childbirth, sexuality, rape, incest – has been one challenge to the accepted discourse. The other means of asserting a female identity has been the recuperation of matriarchal myths and mysteries, particularly those associated with pregnancy, birth and childrearing 1. Nevertheless, these interventions, however well intentioned, remain problematic for those women whose sense of self is neither tied to a notion of the body as a 'natural ', organic subject beyond culture, and/or those whose experience and desires are not bound up with the maternal body.
The propensity of some feminists to associate 'feminine' creativity with female corporeality posits the mind and the body as mutually exclusive terms. Historically of course, masculine ideology has insisted on the designation of woman as lesser or partial man, reinforcing the analogous valuation of the body as inferior to the mind. Typically, reason has been understood as a masculine characteristic and within the Cartesian tradition, unaffected by the corporeal nature of the knower. Conversely, western cultural codes associate women and nature, identifying women with the body.
Thus the problem for women who still choose to work with performance is complicated by a number of historical factors which insist that performance is an art of mediation rather than creation – the woman who could not become an artist, could nevertheless turn herself into an artistic object, paint her face, shape her body, modulate her vocal tones – the body being the only accessible medium for self expression