This book explores the new performativity in art theory and practice, examining ways of rethinking interpretive processes in visual culture. Since the 1960s, visual art practices - from body art to minimalism - have taken contemporary art outside the museum and gallery; by embracing theatricality and performance and exploding the boundaries set by traditional art criticism. The contributors argue that interpretation needs to be recognised as much more dynamic and contingent. Offering its own performance script, and embracing both canonical fine artists such as Manet, De Kooning and Jasper Johns, and performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Gunter Brus, this book offers radical re-readings of art works and points confidently towards new models for understanding art.

"With great originality and scholarship, Amelia Jones maps out an extraordinary history of body art over the last three decades and embeds it in the theoretical terrain of postmoderism. The result is a wonderful and permissive space in which the viewer...can wander"...-Moira Roth, Trefethen professor of art history, Mills College.

Awakening the Performing Body is an exemplary work of practice-based research presented in a pedagogical format. This text is clearly laid out for any acting teacher who wishes to pursue a more spiritual approach to acting and participate in the goal of reclaiming the sacred in theatre ¿ or indeed for any acting teacher who seeks a more body centered and imaginative approach to character and actor-audience connections. This book is a crucial contribution to acting pedagogy. Per K. Brask, University of Winnipeg, Canada Here at last, is a deep, probing and totally fascinating inquiry into the palpable yet unseen forces at work and at play in the theatre. McCutcheon, flaming torch in hand, has entered the mysterious dark cavern where one knows there's a magic exchange. AWAKENING is an awakening - to link mind, body and spirit ¿ to holistically mine acting education where the WHOLE person is engaged, so that magic we long for and crave, becomes something you can actually set out to entice into the light ¿ not something one hopes might appear if we are lucky. An extraordinary work. Dean Carey, Artistic Director/Founder, Actors Centre Australia Australian director and scholar Jade Rosina McCutcheon, co-convenor of the International Federation of Theatre Research working group Performance and Consciousness, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance, UC Davis. Her research revolves around actor training, the relationship between the actor and the audience and consciousness studies.

This text analyzes the cultural work of spectacular suffering in contemporary discourse and late-medieval France, reading recent dramatizations of torture and performances of self-mutilating conceptual art against late-medieval saint plays.

Considering issues such as pain and fertility, and exploring both the language of medical discourse and the silence of personal mystery, she reveals the numerous ways in which giving birth is narrated in the contemporary U.S. Pollock draws on cultural criticism, performance studies, and narrative theory to unpack this long-ignored genre.

This open access book discusses how citizenship is performed today, mostly through the optic of the arts, in particular the performing arts, but also from the perspective of a wide range of academic disciplines such as urbanism and media studies, cultural education and postcolonial theory. It is a compendium that includes insights from artistic and activist experimentation. Each chapter investigates a different aspect of citizenship, such as identity and belonging, rights and responsibilities, bodies and materials, agencies and spaces, and limitations and interventions. It rewrites and rethinks the many-layered concept of citizenship by emphasising the performative tensions produced by various uses, occupations, interpretations and framings.

Current philosophies of art remain sadly dominated by visions of its end and lamentations of decline. Defining the very notions of art and the aesthetic as special products of Western modernity, they suggest that postmodern challenges to traditional high culture pose a devastating danger to art's future. Richard Shusterman's new book cuts through the seductive confusions of these views by tracing the earthy roots of aesthetic experience and showing how the recent flourishing of aesthetic forms outside modernity's sacralized realm of fine art evince the persistent presence of an artistic impulse far deeper and more durable than the modernist moment. Performing Live defends the abiding power of aesthetic experience by exploring its diverse roles, methods, and meanings, especially in fields marginal to traditional aesthetics but now most vibrantly alive in today's culture and new media. Ranging from rap, techno, and country music to cinema, cyberspace and urban design, Shusterman develops his radical theory of "somaesthetics," charting the complex network of bodily arts so prominent in contemporary life and self-styling. By blending concrete aesthetic analysis with insightful social critique, Shusterman, a well-known pragmatist philosopher, provides a rich menu and critical guide for today's pursuit of the art of living.