Jones Introduction to Body Art

What I enjoyed most about the Introduction to Body Art is how it highlights women, beginning in the 1960’s, conquering a ‘new’ position in the mainstream art world. Jones describes this movement as art that “specifically anitformalist in impulse, opening up the circuits of desire informing artistic production of reception” (p.5). The works of Carolee Schneemann and Yahoi Kusama challenged the viewer/audience to look at the body in which the woman decides how to present herself and allowing what she wants to convey.

Considering the dates of which Schneemann and Kusama, I can not help but think of the Yves Kline performance, Anthropometries of the Blue Epoch, which occurred only a few short years earlier in 1960. As described in lecture, Kline never touched the paint during this performance. He controlled nude women by directing them where to place their bodies, how much paint, etc. to in order to create his piece. Why I think of this Kline in comparison to Schneemann and Kusama is to emphasize the way these two particular (female) artists changed the perception of the female nude.

Kusama used her ‘otherness’ of her race and gender while she makes a production of sexuality in her piece, Sex Obsession Food Obsession Macaroni Infinity Nets and Kusama, 1962. Having to remind myself that this is a piece way beyond it’s time, a woman directing herself rather than being directed by the hetero normative male artist really puts a twist on performance. Kusama is not an object, but is she objectifying the former role of women in art? Schneedmann uses the body’s exterior as a shell that magnifies the interior body’s intelligence and most importantly, a magnificent voice that had not been taken seriously in the art world.

In the mid-twentieth century, it seems very provocative for a woman to ‘allow’ or deem herself as silly, playful, yet serious, at the same time in control of herself and her surroundings.