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 Raul Zurita from Chile, Leon Ferrari and Liliana Maresca from Argentina, and Marcos Kurtycz, the No Grupo art collective, and Proceso Pentagono 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
Publisher:   Rutgers University Press
Imprint:   Rutgers University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.399kg
ISBN:  

9781978802025

ISBN 10:   1978802021
Pages:   276
Publication Date:   21 June 2019
Recommended Age:   From 18 to 99 years
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Introduction             Corporeal calligraphies in times of change             The long 1980s: redefining the temporality of art             From curatorial to historical revisionism             Beyond the art of post-dictatorship             From memory studies to the aesthetics of dissensus             The performative turn             The ethics of performance             Overview of chapters Chapter 1 – Writing the Body             A precarious aesthetic             A monstrous scene             Territories of excess             Sacrificial bodies             Neonic Obscenity             A mystical occasion             Sor Teresa, la Lumpérica             A corporeal rhetoric             The implicated self Chapter 2 – Lamentations             Prayerful acts             Sky writing and the poetics of ambiguity             The new life             Song for his/her disappeared love             The politics of lamentation             Purgatory             Neither sorrow nor fear             (Un)godly fragments Chapter 3 – Mē mou haptou: Touch, Ethics, and History             Waiting for Ariel             A political medium?             A tortured era             A glimpse into 1960s collage             Noli me tangere             Brailles             The haptic gaze             Never Again             Scenes from inferno             Pacem in terris Chapter 4 – Nudities             Le féminin             Christs and mannequins             Divine phobia             Intimacy reawakened             A scourge from God? Chapter 5 – Ritual and/of Violence             Potlatch             The scene of destruction             The scene of war             Mexico’s parodic guerrilla art             The scene of ritual             Liminal personae             The scene of terror             Letter bombing             The scene of the self             Exploding time Chapter 6 – Cybernetics and Face-off Play             The hybrid face             The interface             Facial traces             The (post-)facial matrix Conclusion Touched bodies The trace Acknowledgments List of References List of Figures Index  

Reviews

An astute and moving book, Touched Bodies gives account of the transition from an aesthetics of representation to an aesthetics of embodiment and bodily vulnerability in Latin American art of the 1980s. A contribution to aesthetic theory as much as to the history of art, Touched Bodies extends our understanding of performance-based art in relationship to practices of vulnerability, dissensus, and cross-temporal performativity. --Rebecca Scheider author of Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment

Author Information

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.

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