Jane Blocker, in What the Body Costs, points out the particular way that feminist and queer artists who work with the body (with the artist's body) often find their work read literally - in ways that violently reduce the meaning of the work, if not actively misrepresent the nature of the work itself. This sort of phenomenon is particularly intense when it comes to work that is sexually explicit. Ironically, in a culture which sets up sex as the ultimate destination of the story - as a singular truth, the big "secret" that explains everything about us - when the sexual act or sexual body appear before us, we shut down. We see "sex" - and little else. And so, works with sex at their center are often handled as if they were the same - when, in fact, such work can have as little in common with each other as, say, two paintings which take city life, or "nature", or portraiture as their subject. This has come up a few times in our discussions in the past few days - and is raised, too, by many of the performance videos and experimental works we've been looking at.
More later - the above is actually leftover from yesterday. Today students presented performance pieces - a really wide range of types of work, and all very interesting. The day flew by!
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