Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American Art
Shortlisted for the 2020 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize​
Winner of the 2019 Art Journal Prize from the College Art Association

What is the role of pleasure and pain in the politics of art? In Touched Bodies, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra approaches this question as she examines the flourishing of live and intermedial performance in Latin America during times of authoritarianism and its significance during transitions to democracy. Based on original documents and innovative readings, her book brings politics and ethics to the discussion of artistic developments during the “long 1980s”. She describes the rise of performance art in the context of feminism, HIV-activism, and human right movements, taking a close look at the work of Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita from Chile, León Ferrari and Liliana Maresca from Argentina, and Marcos Kurtycz, the No Grupo art collective, and Proceso Pentágono from Mexico. The comparative study of the work of these artists attests to a performative turn in Latin American art during the 1980s that, like photography and film before, recast the artistic field as a whole, changing the ways in which we perceive art and understand its role in society.
1141872282
Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American Art
Shortlisted for the 2020 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize​
Winner of the 2019 Art Journal Prize from the College Art Association

What is the role of pleasure and pain in the politics of art? In Touched Bodies, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra approaches this question as she examines the flourishing of live and intermedial performance in Latin America during times of authoritarianism and its significance during transitions to democracy. Based on original documents and innovative readings, her book brings politics and ethics to the discussion of artistic developments during the “long 1980s”. She describes the rise of performance art in the context of feminism, HIV-activism, and human right movements, taking a close look at the work of Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita from Chile, León Ferrari and Liliana Maresca from Argentina, and Marcos Kurtycz, the No Grupo art collective, and Proceso Pentágono from Mexico. The comparative study of the work of these artists attests to a performative turn in Latin American art during the 1980s that, like photography and film before, recast the artistic field as a whole, changing the ways in which we perceive art and understand its role in society.
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Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American Art

Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American Art

by Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American Art

Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American Art

by Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra

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$41.95 
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Overview

Shortlisted for the 2020 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize​
Winner of the 2019 Art Journal Prize from the College Art Association

What is the role of pleasure and pain in the politics of art? In Touched Bodies, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra approaches this question as she examines the flourishing of live and intermedial performance in Latin America during times of authoritarianism and its significance during transitions to democracy. Based on original documents and innovative readings, her book brings politics and ethics to the discussion of artistic developments during the “long 1980s”. She describes the rise of performance art in the context of feminism, HIV-activism, and human right movements, taking a close look at the work of Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita from Chile, León Ferrari and Liliana Maresca from Argentina, and Marcos Kurtycz, the No Grupo art collective, and Proceso Pentágono from Mexico. The comparative study of the work of these artists attests to a performative turn in Latin American art during the 1980s that, like photography and film before, recast the artistic field as a whole, changing the ways in which we perceive art and understand its role in society.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781978802025
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publication date: 06/21/2019
Pages: 276
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra is a lecturer in contemporary art at Birkbeck, University of London in the United Kingdom. She is coeditor of Sabotage Art: Politics and Iconoclasm in Contemporary Latin America.

Table of Contents

List of Figures ix

Introduction 1

Corporeal Calligraphies 7

The Long 1980s 9

Re-decentering Conceptualism 10

From Curatorial to Historical Revisionism 11

Beyond the Art of Dictatorship and Post-Dictatorship 15

The (Feminist) Art of Border Crossing 15

Performativity and the Performative Archive 16

The Performative Turn 17

The Aesthetics of Dissensus 21

The Ethics of Performance 23

Overview of Chapters 25

1 Writing the Body 30

A Precarious Aesthetic 35

A Monstrous Scene 38

Territories of Excess 43

Sacrificial Bodies 45

Neonic Obscenity 48

A Mystical Occasion 50

Sor Teresa, la lumpérica 51

A Corporeal Rhetoric 55

The Implicated Self 56

2 Lamentations 58

Prayerful Acts 60

Sky Writing and the Poetics of Ambiguity 62

The New Life 67

Song for His/Her Disappeared Love 69

The Politics of Lamentation 74

Purgatory 77

Neither Sorrow nor Fear 81

(Un)godly Fragments 83

3 Touch, Ethics, and History 86

Waiting for Ariel 86

A Political Medium? 90

A Tortured Era 91

A Glimpse into 1960s Collage 93

Noli me tangere 99

Brailles 102

The Haptic Gaze 108

Never Again 110

Scenes from Inferno 121

Pacem in terris 124

4 Nudities 127

Leféminin 132

Christs and Mannequins 136

Divine Phobia 143

Intimacy Reawakened 147

A Scourge from God? 157

5 Ritual and/of Violence 160

The Dirty War 162

Potlatch 165

The Scene of Destruction 168

The Scene of War 171

Mexico's Parodic Guerrilla Art 173

The Scene of Ritual 177

Liminal personae 179

The Scene of Terror 181

Letter Bombing 183

The Scene of the Self 186

Exploding Time 188

6 Cybernetics and Face-off Play 190

The Hybrid Face 197

The Interface 203

Facial Traces 212

The (Post-) facial Matrix 219

Conclusion 222

Touched Bodies 224

The Trace 226

Acknowledgments 229

Notes 233

References 249

Index 267

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