ABOUT THIS BOOK

Shortlisted for the 2020 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize
Winner of the 2019 Art Journal Prize from the College Art Association

What is the role of pleasure and pain in the politics of art? In Touched Bodies, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra approaches this question as she examines the flourishing of live and intermedial performance in Latin America during times of authoritarianism and its significance during transitions to democracy. Based on original documents and innovative readings, her book brings politics and ethics to the discussion of artistic developments during the “long 1980s”. She describes the rise of performance art in the context of feminism, HIV-activism, and human right movements, taking a close look at the work of Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita from Chile, León Ferrari and Liliana Maresca from Argentina, and Marcos Kurtycz, the No Grupo art collective, and Proceso Pentágono from Mexico. The comparative study of the work of these artists attests to a performative turn in Latin American art during the 1980s that, like photography and film before, recast the artistic field as a whole, changing the ways in which we perceive art and understand its role in society.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra is a lecturer in contemporary art at Birkbeck, University of London in the United Kingdom. She is coeditor of Sabotage Art: Politics and Iconoclasm in Contemporary Latin America.

REVIEWS

"Mara Polgovsky makes an outstanding contribution to the re-evaluation of the performative turn in adversarial art from 1970s and 1980s Latin America, expanding the genealogy of conceptualism and recalibrating the spectrum of body-centered practice. The originality of her approach provides unparalleled insights into the complex interaction between corporeality, political activism and the body as site of desire and vulnerability."

— Erica Segre, author of Intersected Identities

“An astute and moving book, Touched Bodies gives account of the transition from an aesthetics of representation to an aesthetics of embodiment and bodily vulnerability in Latin American art of the 1980s. A contribution to aesthetic theory as much as to the history of art, Touched Bodies extends our understanding of performance-based art in relationship to practices of vulnerability, dissensus, and cross-temporal performativity.”

— Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment

"Polgovsky’s book, which has already been shortlisted by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present for its 2020 Book Prize, brings to an international audience a series of artists who have broken the mould of Latin America’s default posture of political protest and produced works which sometimes condense the cry of despair in its barest expression by breaking down the gulf between their bodies and their work. She has brought to the project a remarkable combination of philosophical erudition and descriptive skill, plus the unstoppable curiosity of the best researchers. The book marks a turning point."

— Journal of Latin American Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
            Corporeal calligraphies in times of change
            The long 1980s: redefining the temporality of art
            From curatorial to historical revisionism
            Beyond the art of post-dictatorship
            From memory studies to the aesthetics of dissensus
            The performative turn
            The ethics of performance
            Overview of chapters
Chapter 1 – Writing the Body
            A precarious aesthetic
            A monstrous scene
            Territories of excess
            Sacrificial bodies
            Neonic Obscenity
            A mystical occasion
            Sor Teresa, la Lumpérica
            A corporeal rhetoric
            The implicated self
Chapter 2 – Lamentations
            Prayerful acts
            Sky writing and the poetics of ambiguity
            The new life
            Song for his/her disappeared love
            The politics of lamentation
            Purgatory
            Neither sorrow nor fear
            (Un)godly fragments
Chapter 3 – Mē mou haptou: Touch, Ethics, and History
            Waiting for Ariel
            A political medium?
            A tortured era
            A glimpse into 1960s collage
            Noli me tangere
            Brailles
            The haptic gaze
            Never Again
            Scenes from inferno
            Pacem in terris
Chapter 4 – Nudities
            Le féminin
            Christs and mannequins
            Divine phobia
            Intimacy reawakened
            A scourge from God?
Chapter 5 – Ritual and/of Violence
            Potlatch
            The scene of destruction
            The scene of war
            Mexico’s parodic guerrilla art
            The scene of ritual
            Liminal personae
            The scene of terror
            Letter bombing
            The scene of the self
            Exploding time
Chapter 6 – Cybernetics and Face-off Play
            The hybrid face
            The interface
            Facial traces
            The (post-)facial matrix
Conclusion
Touched bodies
The trace
Acknowledgments
List of References
List of Figures
Index