Durational performance : temporalities of the untimely body
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This project establishes durational performance as a cogent artistic medium by unearthing the work of under-researched female artists. Following Marina Abramović's 2010 performance "The Artist is Present" at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, a trend toward "durational performance" erupted in the art world and the dance world. Its ripples were heard in mainstream music ventures and registered by Abramović's rapidly skyrocketing celebrity status. More than an emergent fad however, the aesthetic turn to duration has a robust history and politics. By tracing the historical development of standardized time, I anchor durational performance to the specific way clock-time is used to discipline the body. Extending this history to the present, I focus on the ways everyday untimely behaviors develop into a relevant artistic medium. This scholarship complicates dominant Western narratives about the development of performance art and contemporary dance. By the very nature of cultivating untimeliness, the untimely body revealed by durational performance is a body that resists being colonized by structures of time that make human activity predictable, profitable, and efficient. My intimate focus on the untimely body attends to the physical toll of mastering and deploying silence, repetition, and suspension as artistic mechanisms and political strategies. It also compels an intimate look at durational performance as doing more than staging a body that endures toward its limit of exhaustion. The shift from endurance to sustained discomfort and from exhaustion to fatigue on which this dissertation focuses considers the body as a site of creative resistance that is able to wrest itself from neoliberal structures of control that permeate aesthetic consciousness and artistic production.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Truax, Raegan |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Theater and Performance Studies. |
| Primary advisor | Ross, Janice |
| Thesis advisor | Ross, Janice |
| Thesis advisor | Menon, Jisha, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Paris, Helen, 1968- |
| Advisor | Menon, Jisha, 1972- |
| Advisor | Paris, Helen, 1968- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Raegan Truax. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Theater and Performance Studies. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Raegan Leann Truax-O'Gorman
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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