What is it about?
This essay crosses over performance studies and art history to explore art from the 1960s and 1970s in the Euro-American context that is both conceptual and embodied, staging an "encounter" with viewers. I argue that understanding this work as relational and as mobilizing both concept and embodiment affords a better model for grasping the political and social value of art since 1960.
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Why is it important?
By drawing on performance theory and art theory, the article shifts the frame through which we think about how art "works" in relation to viewers. This provides a new way of thinking about how art has meaning and how it can produce political effects.
Perspectives
This work expands my career-long project of complicating simplistic models of determining the meaning and value of art works, models that tend to reinforce predictable "canons" of art and performance. It allows me to expand upon my project of inserting the body into discussions of contemporary art and, in turn, with specific bodies at issue, politicizing discourses around art and performance by including works by artists formerly marginalized or excluded.
Amelia Jones
University of Southern California
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Encountering: The Conceptual Body, or a Theory of When, Where, and How Art “Means”, TDR/The Drama Review, September 2018, The MIT Press,
DOI: 10.1162/dram_a_00770.
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