Embodiment and Disembodiment in Live Art

From Grotowski to Hologram

Ke Shi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000764703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

Liveness is a pivotal issue for performance theorists and artists. As live art covers both embodiment and disembodiment, many scholars have emphasized the former and interpreted the latter as the opposite side of liveness. In this book, the author demonstrates that disembodiment is also an inextricable part of liveness and presence in performance from both practical and theoretical perspectives.

By applying phenomenological theory to live performance, the author investigates the possible realisation of aesthetic dynamics in live art via re-engagement with the notions of embodiment, especially in the sense provided by philosophers such as Gabriel Marcel and Morris Merleau-Ponty. Creative practices from leading performance artists such as Franko B, Ron Athey, Manuel Vason and others, as well as experimental ensembles such as Goat Island, La Pocha Nostra, Forced Entertainment and the New Youth are discussed, offering a new perspective to re-frame human-human relationships such as the one between actor and spectator and collaborations in live genres

In addition, the author presents a new interpretation model for the human-material in live genres, helping to bridge the aesthetic gaps between performance art and experimental theatre and providing an ecological paradigm for performance art, experimental theatre and live art.

1
Embodiment

Self and subjectivity

1.1 Embodiment

1.1.1 The concept

In ordinary language, the meaning of embodiment is ‘a tangible or visible form of an idea, quality, or feeling,’ or ‘the representation or expression of something in such a form’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2001). As defined by Tim Rohrer (2007, pp. 347–354) from the stance of ‘embodied realism’ in cognitive science, the term ‘embodiment’ has at least 12 aspects: philosophy, the socio-cultural situation, phenomenology, perspective, development, evolution, the cognitive unconscious, neurophysiology, neurocomputational modelling, morphology, directionality of metaphor and grounding. In this book, philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Marcel provide the basic sense of embodiment and its extended social, cultural and political sense. I will unfold it in detail in the following texts.

It is neither possible nor necessary to cover all areas here.¹ Two threads of philosophical thinking are most relevant to my argument in terms of the notion embodiment. The first is what in philosophy of mind is called psychophysical parallelism. This traces psychological phenomenon to specific observable physical evidence of brain activity, considered as the cause for different mental states, and is thus used to interpret aesthetic judgement. Both Merleau-Ponty and Marcel criticise such simplifications of cognitive interpretation. Garner expresses similar doubt regarding such an interpretation (2018, pp. 1–5) yet utilises certain recent discoveries in neuro-science – such as mirror neurons, which physically make our imitation behaviour possible – in his studies on kinaesthetic spectatorship. The second is the phenomenological theory of embodiment, which treats embodiment as the most fundamental modality of subjectivity’s ontological status and hence bypasses both idealism and the previously fashioned materialism.

As a phenomenological notion established to engage with the ancient ontological problem of mind-body, generally speaking, embodiment deals with the relationship between substance (matter) and spirit (ideal, concept, non-materiality), namely what Merleau-Ponty distinguishes as visible and invisible (Hass, 2008, p. 193). In my argument, this linguistic opposition is engendered in performance in the relationship between reality, namely realised performance text,² and the intention/motivation/drive. Thus, the phenomenological approach to embodiment helps to unravel the most difficult issues in performance – those of purpose and intention – especially when dealing with two of the most important issues in both theatrical acting and contemporary performance art – the aesthetic purpose of performance and performative intuition as pre-expressivity (cf. Barba in Meyer-Dinkgrafe, 1997) or pre-articulation.

Contrary to Cartesian dualism, theories of embodiment tend to view the physical/biological body as being itself instead of being a vehicle for mind or soul (Rohrer, 2007). Different philosophical prepositions lead to different stances in performance practice. For example, conventional psychological theatre in the West after naturalism focuses on the aesthetic efficiency of how the outside represents the inside, namely a shift from the representation of reality to the expressive effort to make the ‘content’ of the subject’s mind visible, from the mimesis of an action to the impressionist rendering. Meanwhile, some epistemological traditions ask the reverse question of how inside represents outside (ibid.).

The validity of both enquiries is based on the assumptions that mind and body are two different ontological entities. The embodiment view takes the opposite perspective: that the mind is not a sublimation or transcendence of biology, but a method of its workings, and that body and mind are de facto one entity. The body can no longer be taken as an exclusively physical thing; rather, it must be seen as the embodiment of mind or consciousness.

1.1.2 A phenomenological perspective: a theory of embodiment is already a theory of body

The phenomenological meaning of embodiment, according to Brandt is predis-posed to:

refer to the things we notice consciously about the role of our bodies in shaping our self-identities and our culture through acts of conscious and deliberate reflection on the lived structure of our experience.

(cited by Rohrer, 2007, p. 358)

This is to say, with a phenomenological concern, the problem of embodiment is the problem of phenomenology itself precisely because of its interest in the ontological theorisation of the consciousness and the body. Nietzsche, and later Bergson, first recognised the necessity of posing the problem of the relations between mind and matter in terms of the body (Henry, 1975, pp. 9–10). Marcel then went a step further: it is not simply a question of the body but also of embodiment, expressed in his notion of mystery. Further, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Marcel and Sartre all put great emphasis on the problem of the animate organism, namely embodiment. Regarding Heidegger, although he did not mention Dasein’s embodiment in Being and Time, according to Wheeler (2018), Dasein’s ‘existential spatiality somehow depends on its embodiment.’ The philosophical importance of embodiment, as philosopher Richard Zaner put it, is that ‘the problem of the experience of the body is the problem of embodiment, and this problem, as Stephan Strasser emphasizes, is fundamental’ (Zaner, 1964, p. 260, italics are original).

In fact, Zaner’s work provides the overarching theoretical framework for my argument. In his work, the three major recourses utilised here, Merleau-Ponty, Marcel and Sartre, are not randomly arranged together. For these writers, what is important is not simply a question of the body, but of embodiment: the body as lived and experienced is the body as embodying me, which is the one whose body it is. Such a body can be defined as the phenomenal body. Through the rejection of conventional ‘message theory’ of sense-perception and sense-data in both empiricism and idealism, the three philosophers established the phenomenal experience of the embodied body Others also have as a pivotal issue (Zaner, 1964, p. 239). By viewing the body-proper (Merleau-Ponty), or body as pour-soi (Sartre), or my body qua mine (Marcel) as an ontological phenomenon, they provide the possibility of dealing with the mind-body problem with new terms and a new framework of embodiment theory. As Merleau-Ponty contends, every aspect of humanity’s activities should be conceived as moments of this being of embodiment:

the union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought about by arbitrary decree. It is enacted at every instant in the moment of existence.

(1962, p. 89)

Further, these three philosophers also shared an interest in issues such as the effectuation of the sense organ and the sensuous action, or the relationship between embodied subjectivity and the world as milieu in which it posits. A subject, through reflexive self-cognition, is aware of his or her being both as a subject and an object in the world with other beings in generally the same situation. This issue of embodied intersubjectivity, in Husserl’s words, is manifested in the way that:

if I reduce myself as a man, I get my ‘animate organism’ and ‘my psyche’, or myself as a psychophysical unity – in the latter, my personal Ego, who operates in this animate organism and, ‘by means of’ it, in the ‘external world’, who is affected by this world, and who thus… is constituted as psychophysically with the animate corporeal organism.

(1960, p. 97, italics are original)

The radical challenge of the animate organism as the core phenomenon provides a new perspective on the fundamental human condition of subjectivity (Zaner, 1964, p. 241). Similar stances can be found in other disciplines such as media and art theory, for example, Vivian Sobchack (2004, p. 21) suggested that there is a need to turn our attention from the body to embodiment so we can achieve a better understanding about visual art in general.

Later, I shall engage in detailed analysis of Live Art examples with these arguments, in particular, how writing on embodiment responds to the basic problem of the mind-body relationship manifested in (artistic) performance practice. To some extent there is much conformity between the phenomenologists’ writing on body and the artists’ ‘writing’ with body. This ‘writing’ with body is not only the narrow sense confined to the works of body art in its early stage, for example, in the practices of Vito Acconci, Carolee Schneemann, Shigeko Kubota, Keith Boadwee and so on, but also in the different directions taken in the later development of live performance. What is manifested by the artist’s bodily activity with the blurred boundary between unmarked quotidian behaviour and the intentional and framed art event can be revealed by detailed investigation into what is ‘content’ and what is ‘expression’ of embodiment as both the basic mode of being and an ongoing artistic procedure.

1.2 Self

A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men, the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!

Arthur Rimbaud (1957, p. xxx)

This widely quoted paragraph is Rimbaud’s definition of a poet. This nineteenth-century manifesto of symbolism, with its romance, bold tone of the immoral and military tropes of the early avant-garde, covers many critical interests related to the discussion of Live Art. One can discern the strategy of bodily ‘disorganization’ and all the abstract machines of ‘love,’ ‘suffering’ and ‘madness,’ in terms of phenomenological investigation, synonyms for an embodied subject’s performative negotiation with itself, Other and the world. One can also recognise the urge to make the ‘unspeakable,’ ‘unknown,’ ‘unnameable’ or ‘untamable futurists’ (Goldberg, 1979, p. 9) with our own bodily ‘torment’ and ‘strength’ prevailing in that very period of history. It also touches upon ethical and political engagement, the performative actions of the ‘great criminal’ or the ‘supreme scientist’ as well as the martyrdom in ‘fallen,’ recalling Artaud.

In performance studies, the self is unsurprisingly always one of the pivotal concepts. In theatre and related areas, the most celebrated idea in the acting theory of Stanislavski and Brecht is, in a way, based on certain techniques to deal with self in the task of representation. Also, from the theatrical exploration of ‘Not I/Not Not I’ (Kirby, 1972) of a variety of performative explorations of the limits of agency and identity in other genres of live performance, all are more or less involved with certain concerns of the self. Marvin Carlson (1996, pp. 13–15) has touched upon theories related to this issue from the perspective of anthropology and ethno-linguistics. Richard Schechner coined the term ‘restored behaviour’ (1985, pp. 35–37), a title under which he groups actions consciously separated from the person doing them – theatre and other role-playing, trances, shamanism and rituals. ‘Restored behaviour’ emphasises a quality of performance not involved with the display of skills, but rather with a certain ‘distance’ between the ‘self’ and the behaviour, analogous to that between an actor and the role the actor plays on stage (Carlson, 1996, p. 4). Here, the ‘restored behaviour,’ as the concrete realisation of the embodied consciousness, is the very centre of the action being a matrix of concrete existence that places me as a performing self in the midst of things.

The other reason for the importance of the self in Live Art is self-reference, ‘reflectiveness’ or self-awareness as a basic psycho-physical technique. In performance art in particular, the importance of self-awareness root can be traced back to its visual art origins. Self-awareness, regardless of whether it is a negotiation with the ego or an urge to protect and perform social identity, is always a thematic concern for the historical avant-garde, which is inherited from Romanticism as ‘self-expression.’ Also, reflectiveness and the revealing of this self-awareness marks the departure point of modernist painting, as in Manet’s work (Fried, 1965, p. 792, note 2). Such ‘reflective’ and ‘self-consciousness’ in terms of social awareness in fine art (Carlson, 1996, p. 6) influenced the later Pollockian performative and beyond the social mentality of many live artists for the reason of their social existence. Although this ‘self-awareness’ is more about general interest in the form or genre rather than the focus on the artist’s embodied subjectivity as the site of investigation, the concerns of the reflective shift of the genre-identity are naturally manifested in the performative negotiation with subjectivity.

On most occasions, the concern of performers’ selves (as distinguished from the audience) is reduced to consideration of the complication of embodied subjectivity in a performative space. One easily observes that the concern for a self in a genre is always rhetorically transgressed into that of individual exploration for subjectivity, since individual identity as an artist is always intimately connected to and partly formed by the discipline he or she is working with. For example, Lin Hixson described how her teacher taught her to begin with clarification regarding her sense of being an artist and marked this as the aesthetic inception of her artistic exploration (in Bottoms and Goulish, 2007, p. 115).

Thus to talk about the way subjectivity being constituted is to talk about embodiment. Back to the quotation from Rimbaud, all his agenda were proposed around the enquiry into subjectivity, a ‘search for the self.’ This demands one to dig deeper for the subtlety of the aesthetic dynamic around a negotiated self that is not merely confined within the scope of the self-expression of late Romanticism and Modernism.

And, to deal with the problem of embodiment in contemporary performance, starting with a discussion of this search and exhaustion of self, in a phenomenological context is almost synonymous with subjectivity. Given the invention of modern individuality in Western society at the time, it is unsurprising that Rimbaud conveys his own historical problematic. Taking this as my critical departure point, I attempt to extract these ‘searches’ from the context of nineteenth-century literature and replace them in the context of contemporary Live Art.

1.2.1 Two reflections

Why do we have to know ourselves, and why does this concern the performer? Can’t a good performer create a piece of good art just out of spontaneous intuition? The problematic that arises here is the instrumentality of the body when it is performing. In a theatrical sense, how does it function as a representational tool for mimesis and for the simulation of emotion that is simultaneously both ‘real’ and ‘fake.’ In a performance art sense, how does an embodied consciousness deal with the aesthetic situation it invented for itself and finish the task as aesthetic actions not being an intentional representation?

So when unfolding my argument on embodiment in Live Art, the importance of the enquiry into subjectivity in the first instance is itself a primary phenomenological experience, rather than because the self is ‘naturally’ a spatial centre and thus an inception of a theor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction
• 1 Embodiment: self and subjectivity
• 2 Actualisation, contingency and journey to the unknown
• 3 Landscape as the Lifeworld
• 4 Disembodiment in materiality
• 5 Disembodiment in its semiotic sense
• 6 Two extremes of disembodiment: cyborgs and holograms
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Index