Petra Kuppers: The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (2007)

“Contemporary visual and performance artists have adopted modern medical technologies such as MRIs and computer imaging—and the bodily access they imply—to reveal their limitations. In doing so they emphasize the unknowability of another’s bodily experience and the effects—physical, emotional, and social—of medical procedures.

In The Scar of Visibility, Petra Kuppers examines the use of medical imagery practices in contemporary art, as well as different arts of everyday life (self-help groups, community events, Internet sites), focusing on fantasies and “knowledge projects” surrounding the human body. Among the works she investigates are the controversial Body Worlds exhibition of plastinized corpses; video projects by Shimon Attie on diabetes and Douglas Gordon on mental health and war trauma; performance pieces by Angela Ellsworth, Bob Flanagan, and Kira O’Reilly; films like David Cronenberg’s Crash and Marina de Van’s In My Skin that fetishize body wounds; representations of the AIDS virus in the National Museum of Health and on CSI: Crime Scene Investigations; and the paintings of outsider artist Martin Ramírez.

At the heart of this work is the scar—a place of production, of repetition and difference, of multiple nerve sensations, fragile skin, outer sign, and bodily depth. Through the embodied sign of the scar, Kuppers articulates connections between subjective experience, history, and personal politics. Illustrated throughout, The Scar of Invisibility broadens our understanding of the significance of medical images in visual culture.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816646538, 9780816646531
259 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-8-12)

Nick Kaye: Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (2000)

“Site Specific Art traces the historical antecedents of today’s installation and performance art, while also assembling a documentation of contemporary practice around the world.

The book is divided into individual analyses of the themes of space, materials, site, and frames. These are interspersed by specially commissioned documentary artworks from practitioners and artists working today. The artistic processes involved are demonstrated through new articles from Meredith Monk, Station House Opera, Brith Gof, Forced Entertainment, and Michelangelo Pistoletto.”

Publisher Routledge, 2000
ISBN 0415185599, 9780415185592
238 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated 2011-9-3)

Mariellen R. Sandford (ed.): Happenings and Other Acts (1995)

“The works of art and performance known as Happenings have often been considered to be the key to an understanding of the late twentieth-century avant-garde. Happenings and Other Acts discusses what ‘Happenings’ were, who made them and why, and the relationship they have to their origins in Dadaism and their antecedents in performance art. Articles, statements, interviews and essays by and about some of the most influential avant-garde artists and performers–Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Claes Oldenburg, Ann Halprin and George Maciunas–are presented here for the first time since they were originally published. The volume concludes with a commissioned essay by Gunter Berghaus on European Happenings.”

Publisher Routledge, 1995
ISBN 0415099366, 9780415099363
xxv+397 pages

Reviews: Marla Carlson (Theatre J, 1996), Ágnes Ivacs (Artpool, n.d.).

PDF (6 MB, updated on 2016-12-23)