previous |

next

conceiving body

Monika Weiss' Elytron (spirit and body are only two wings)

To treat the body as concept is to turn both body and concept into objects, things thrown before the mind. It happens often in art, sometimes intentionally. It happens in life, mostly unconsciously. In one of its extremes, the people who seem most “body centered” - people who commit seemingly heroic body acts (sports, for instance, like mountain climbing), especially the most challenging, even life-endangering acts, those acts that take “drive” to accomplish, and real endurance - in fact may be treating their bodies as things, tools, instruments. Some appear willing to “beat it into shape.” Others train the body like a wild animal, with uncompromising discipline, as if to civilize it, or perhaps redeem it (“Christianize” it) by snatching it out of the hands of the Devil, lest it be left to mere pleasuring ways. It can be a matter of morality, something like moralized flesh. The body as site of a massive struggle, a “war in heaven.” And one might be tempted here to speak of degrees of incarnation, metaphorically of course, and risking popular clichés like “she's not really in her body” - and yet, even clichés can have real meaning just as paranoids have enemies. Accordingly one might wonder how embodied the Olympian body really is - whether there's anyone at home in those godlike constructs, or maybe we're witnessing there a reverse Galatea phenomenon. (Perhaps deified athletes who mysteriously disappear have secretly been sold off to museums.)

A contrary possibility to treating the body as concept might be to treat the concept as body. This notion came to mind when I went to see Monika Weiss' work Elytron at the Chelsea Art Museum in NYC; I was trying to understand how, despite the “stress and endurance” aspect, this work is not an instance of body as concept. (This, obviously, is not new in itself: we have instruction in depth for this performative questioning in the work of Marina Abramovi