Performing the Body/Performing the Text

much more dynamic and contingent. It does not come naturally' at the moment of contact with the artwork, but is worked out as an ongoing, open performance between artists and spectators, with meaning circulating fluidly in the complex web of connections between artists, patrons, collectors, and between both specialised and non-specialised viewers within the arena of encounter. Offering its own performance script, and embracing both canonical fine' artists such as Manet, De Kooning and Jasper Johns, and performance artists such as Vito Acconci, Gunter Brus and the Sacred Naked Nature Girls, "Performing the Body/Performing the Text" offers radical re-readings of art works and points confidently towards new models for understanding art.

This book explores the new performativity in art theory and practice, examining ways of rethinking interpretive processes in visual culture. Since the 1960s, visual art practices - from body art to minimalism - have taken contemporary art outside the museum and gallery; by embracing theatricality and performance and exploding the boundaries set by traditional art criticism. The contributors argue that interpretation needs to be recognised as much more dynamic and contingent. Offering its own performance script, and embracing both canonical fine artists such as Manet, De Kooning and Jasper Johns, and performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Gunter Brus, this book offers radical re-readings of art works and points confidently towards new models for understanding art.

Introduction1. Kantian Performativity in Art History Karen Lang2. Performing Modernity: The Art of Art History Donald Preziosi3. Art History/Art Criticism: Performing Meaning Amelia Jones4. Cross Cultural Reiteration: Demetra Vaka Brown and the Performance of Racialized Female Beauty Reina Lewis5. Race, Ritual, and Responsibility: Performativity and the Southern Lynching ^Michael Hatt6. Shading Meaning Jennifer Brody7. The Greatest Homosexual? Camp Pleasure and the Performative Body of Larry Rivers Gavin Butt8.The Politics of Feminist Spectatorship and the Disruptive Body: De Kooning's Woman Reconsidered Fionna Barber9. Catholic Tastes: Hurting and Healing the Body in Vienese Actionism in the 1960's Philip Ursprung10. Contests for Meaning in Body politics and Feminist Conceptual Art Discourses: Revisioning the 1970's through the Work of Eleanor Antin Lisa Bloom11. Dismembership: Jasper Johns and the Body Politic Jonathan Katz12. Peforming the Clits and Other Lesbian Tricks: Speculations on an Aesthetics of Lack B.J. Wray13. Renaming Untitled Flesh / Marking the Politics of Marginality Meiling Cheng14. Andy Warhol: Performances of Death in America Peggy Phelan15. Stuff Nao Bustamante and Coco Fusco

Andrew Stephenson, Amelia Jones, Andrew Stephenson Nfa