Amelia Jones is well respected for her writing on the presence, use, and meaning of the body in modern and contemporary art. Her books and essays have combined feminist, phenomenological, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic frameworks, rigorously arguing that “the majority of supposedly ‘anti-‘ or ‘post-‘ modernist analyses continue to veil the investments at work in posing particular values and meanings for works of art” (Jones and Stephenson 1999, p. 4).
In suggesting that the social, sexual and political (as well as linguistic, theoretical, embodied) contexts in which art works are created and received need to be acknowledged and analysed, Jones states that both the processes of making and receiving or interpreting art are performative. That is, they are ongoing and interwoven processes that respond to and engage with each other and the aforementioned contexts, rather than separate acts with a final, determinable message or goal. The art work, Jones (1999, p. 1) is no longer a “static object” with a single, prescribed signification” that is communicated unproblematically from maker to universalised viewer. Jones sees this notion of the ‘performative’ as being particularly evident in performance and body art. She is especially well known for her writing on the reemergance of the artist’s body in late 1960s – 1970s performance art, and contemporary art practice that creates or performs subjectivity and meaning with or through the body; the body as the means through which art is being produced and received. She has also written about artists using new technologies to articulate embodiment, subjectivity, and meaning in different ways, thereby challenging the organisation and study of culture.
Throughout her work there is an acknowledgement and interrogation of how subjectivity is formed and performed in acts of art making and interpreting that is integral to the understanding of performativity. As Jones (1999, p. 2) explains, adopting the notion of performativity as a critical strategy in the study of visual culture, “enables a recognition of interpretation as fragile, partial and precarious affair and, ultimately, affords a critique of art criticism and art history as they have been traditionally practiced”. In this way her writing implicates the individuals and institutions that have a stake in art criticism/history, and calls for a “cautious and critical self-reflexivity” to become part of the process of art interpretation (Jones and Stephenson 1999, p. 3). Moreover, her writing demonstrates that the insights provided by art works that encourage a recognition of this performative dimension of meaning production, “enable a radical rereading of potentially any artistic practice” past or present, that enables a new way of thinking through visual culture and opening it out to new, uncertain and evolving critical perspectives (Jones and Stephenson 1999, p. 4).
Jones is particularly relevant to my practice as I am interested in producing art works and art criticism that explores the overlapping and intertwined processes in/by which meaning is produced. In my own arts practice I am particularly concerned with how language informs the creation of shifting subjectivities and meanings, as well as our understanding of bodies. I am also interested in how meaning is conveyed or creating through the presence, or the explicit absence, of the artist’s body. For example, the reconfiguration of the body into non-abject information by medical imaging technologies, the physicality or action communicated by brush strokes, or the trace of live events created through photography.
Jones, A and Stephenson, A (eds.) 1999, Performing the Body/Performing the Text, Routledge, New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment