Page 130 - Cyberculture and New Media

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In the work of performance and visual artist Karen Finely, for
example, the explicit body is wielded to intervene in the spectacle of
engenderment. According to Jill Dolan, in her performances Finely does not
offer herself as an object of desire but rather desecrates herself as an object of
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male desire, as commodity to be consumed. Confounding the expectations
of conventional theatrical spectatorship, Finley de-idealises and de-sacralises
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the body and draws attention to female bodies as site of prohibitions. By
taking the signifier for the body, the performances reveal the markings of
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embodiment and draw us to the place where meaning collapses. Here the
explicit body literalizes the legislative frontier, that aspect of power, which
both authorises and invalidates representations, and gestures to that which is
un-representable.
Within the framework of the performance art, body art and
Happenings movements that Schneider writes about, this notion of the
explicit body is extremely productive. It “unfolds” and reveals to us our
stories, preconceptions and, perhaps most importantly to Schneider, social
relations.
Under the conditions of digitality, there’s potential for another shift
in subject / object and performer / audience hierarchies, and thus a shift in
how we might read such explicit inscriptions and/or come to perceive our
embodiment. We propose that the “flesh” can perhaps be thought of as more
of a palimpsest, where we inscribe and scratch away, and enfold, alongside
our continuous unfolding, in order to not uncover or discover our bodies, but
to emerge as bodies (both legible and illegible), as not-yet-bodies, as bodies
in process - implied bodies, in relation and drawn out. Like a moebius strip,
where the root of explicit is to unfold, to imply is to enfold. And, like a
moeibus strip again, the relationship between them is neither dichotomous
nor dialectical. We ponder this continuum not as a binary between emergence
and positioning, between regulatory operations and becomings, or between
implicit and explicit. It is rather a both/and, a co-telling - in, of and by the
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flesh.
Interactive body art allows us to live through that out of which the
explicit experience of embodiment emerges. In allowing us to touch/be
touched by what Hansen calls the “nonlived” (the affective excess out of
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which perception comes) and Massumi calls the “virtual” (the reserve of
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differentiation or qualitative transformation in every event), the implicit
body, like passage, precedes construction. As Massumi avers, “process
always has ontological priority” in that “it constitutes the field of
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emergence.”
Interactive art, with its potential to be process rather than
construction, may allow, as Margaret Morse argues, the visitor to perform the
piece: she “is the piece as its experiential subject, not by identification, but in
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body.” Interactive work is, at its best, “unfinished” work that requires a