Subjectivity and Performance Art | Doctoral Dissertation | (2013)

Doctoral Dissertation (summary)
Jagiellonian University, 2013

pim-chu-245596
Pim-Chu CC0 1.0

The Embodiment of the Subject:
Philosophy and Performance in Contemporary Cultural Criticism

Introduction
The Body as Representation, Sign, and Sense

Chapter I
Anthropologies of the History of Art
(A Problem of Image and Visuality; Cultural Textology)

Chapter II
Performance and the Everyday: Authenticity, Scandal, and Subversion
(Preliminary Remarks; The Cynics and the Doctrine of Existence; The Holy Fools)

Chapter III
Rewriting History and the Blurring of Boundaries: Body and Performance in the Twentieth Century (Notes on the Avant-Garde and Cultural Criticism)

  1. The Margins of Theatricality and Language
  2. Sound, Movement, Gesture: Music and Dance
  3. Beyond the Picture Plane: Painting and Sculpture
    (Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock; Niki de Saint Phalle; Eva Hesse; Joseph Beuys)
  4. Towards Meaning

Chapter IV
S(he) – Carolee Schneemann
(Istory; Dichotomies, Binary Oppositions, and “Not-Me”; Carolee Schneemann’s Performance)

Chapter V
Towards the Embodiment of the Subject: Michel Foucault
(Empty Space; The History of Discontinuity; Between Archaeology and Genealogy; Body and Power; The Hermeneutics of the Subject; The “Rule of Care” and the Contemporary Subject)

Chapter VI
The Embodiment of the Subject: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(Philosophy of Ambiguity and Openness; The Spirit of Descartes; A New Meaning of Consciousness and Perception; The Phenomenology of the Body; Towards the Body; Contemporary Readings; The Body as Meaning – The Embodiment of the Subject)

Chapter VII
The Body as Meaning – Embodied Subjectivity

Summary

This dissertation explores the concept of the embodiment of the subject in philosophy and culture, focusing on three central areas.

First, it examines performance art as a distinctive artistic practice characterized by authenticity, scandal, and subversion — distancing itself from the narrower sense of “performance” found in performance studies. It analyses the affinities and tensions between performance and other artistic disciplines.

Second, it investigates the notion of corporeality, tracing its diverse philosophical and cultural meanings — as representation, sign, and sense.

Third, it considers the question of subjectivity. The argument linking these three domains is that performance, as an artistic form, merges the roles of subject and object, thereby exposing the rupture within the modernist paradigm — a paradigm premised on the transparency of the subject-object relation, a restricted and often one-dimensional concept of corporeality, and the historical frameworks of art and its criticism.

Performance art thus becomes a lens through which to interrogate the subject and its participation in broader cultural and social discourses. It reveals what might be called an embodied subject: a mode of subjectivity grounded in corporeal experience rather than detached cognition. Embodiment, understood in existential and phenomenological terms, unsettles the stable “I” and opens a space for the encounter with alterity — with what is different, other, and marginalized. By making the body both medium and meaning, performance art exposes hidden discourses, ideological structures, and forms of oppression.

Chapter I – Anthropologies of the History of Art

This chapter introduces the problem of representation, highlighting the mutual influence between art history and anthropological perspectives — social, cultural, and visual. It argues that no representation is ever neutral (as exemplified by colonial postcards), since every image presupposes a norm shaped by its socio-cultural context. What changes is not the existence of bias but the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable. In this light, Barbara Stafford’s question — “How can we avoid cultural textology?” — remains crucial.

Chapter II – Performance and the Everyday: Authenticity, Scandal, and Subversion

While the first chapter lays the theoretical foundation, the second turns to the everyday practices of the Cynics and the Holy Fools. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s Collège de France lectures (1984) and Marla Carlson’s Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists, it explores three key concepts — authenticity, scandal, and subversion — as critical tools for understanding performance’s challenge to dominant social and aesthetic norms.

Chapter III – Rewriting History and the Blurring of Boundaries: Body and Performance Art in the Twentieth Century

This chapter revisits the history of embodiment and performance, focusing on twentieth-century art as a field in which traditional boundaries between disciplines — theatre, visual art, dance, and music — become increasingly porous.

The first section, The Margins of Theatricality and Language, considers figures such as Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, and The Living Theatre, showing how their work redefined theatrical presence and the body’s function on stage. Although performance shares formal features with theatre, its meaning within the visual arts differs profoundly. Movements like Futurism, Dada, Bauhaus, and Fluxus are analysed as sites where theatricality, visuality, and language intersect.

The second section, Sound, Movement, Gesture: Music and Dance, examines the work of Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Anna Halprin, and the Judson Dance Theater. It explores how performance art drew inspiration from dance and music, particularly in its embrace of everyday movement, the body as subject, and improvisation. This section also touches on happenings as transitional forms between art and life.

The third section, Beyond the Picture Plane: Painting and Sculpture, discusses artists such as Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jackson Pollock, showing how performance enabled art to move beyond the material limits of painting and sculpture. Importantly, this section repositions Niki de Saint Phalle as a key figure in place of Pollock, emphasizing a feminist reconfiguration of performance’s origins and linking directly to the following chapter.

Chapter IV – S(he): Carolee Schneemann

Chapter IV focuses on Carolee Schneemann’s work as a central example of feminist performance art. Through Schneemann’s practice, the chapter engages with key feminist concepts — Istory, the critique of binary oppositions in Western thought, and the question of identity. The analysis demonstrates how the body, within this context, becomes both medium and meaning, redefining authenticity, scandal, and subversion from a feminist perspective. The subsequent chapters offer a philosophical commentary on the theoretical implications of this embodied practice.

Chapter V – Towards the Embodiment of the Subject: Michel Foucault

This chapter outlines Michel Foucault’s later thought, focusing on The Hermeneutics of the Subject and its implications for embodiment and performance. Why invoke a text on the care of the self in a discussion of performance? Because Foucault’s late philosophy marks a shift from the classical understanding of subjectivity — as the unity of thought and action — to a modern conception in which self-knowledge becomes the condition for ethical agency.

In this transformation, the self’s formation is mediated by knowledge and power. The modern subject acts only through a reflective awareness of itself; action is displaced by cognition. Thus, the Foucauldian subject is both discursively produced and self-constituted through techniques of self-governance. Foucault’s notion of the “forgetting of the care of the self” can be read alongside the “forgetting of the body” in Western thought — a forgetting that performance art seeks to undo.

Chapter VI – The Embodiment of the Subject: Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The final chapter explores Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s key concepts: the redefinition of consciousness and perception, the phenomenology of the body, and the idea of the body as meaning — as the embodied subject.

Merleau-Ponty’s relevance is both evident (as the philosopher of embodiment) and complex (in relation to performance). Performance art does not illustrate his philosophy directly; rather, both share a deep concern with the intertwining of self and world. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy places embodiment at the centre of experience, while performance uses the body to expose the discourses that shape it. In both, the relation between “I” and “Other” shifts from fixed hierarchy to reciprocal openness.

Embodiment, understood in existential and phenomenological terms, destabilizes the self-identical subject and enables an encounter with difference — whether in art, in history, or within the structures of marginalization.

Conclusion

The Body as Meaning – Embodied Subjectivity

Performance conceives the body as meaning and situates it at the centre of artistic and philosophical inquiry. In doing so, it exposes the hidden assumptions, hierarchies, and exclusions that shape both culture and subjectivity. The ongoing task is to keep questioning — at the levels of self, philosophy, and art — how the body responds to these meanings, tools, interpretations, and uncertainties, and how it might point toward new, still-unacknowledged forms of oppression and resistance.

Bibliography

The Body as Representation, Sign, and Meaning

  • Franko, Mark, and Annete Richards, eds.Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines.Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
  • Dziamski, Grzegorz.Awangarda po awangardzie: Od neoawangardy do postmodernizmu. Poznań: Fundacja Humaniora, 1995.
  • Goldberg, Roslee.Performance Art: From Futurism to Present. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001.
  • Jones, Amelia.Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
  • Jones, Amelia.Performing the Body/Performing the Text. New York: Routledge, 1999.
  • Elkins, James.Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
  • Edited by Grzegorz Dziamski, Henryk Gajewski, and Jan St. Wojciechowski. Warszawa: Młodzieżowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1984.
  • Phelan, Peggy.Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Journals:

Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4, Winter, 1997.

Chapter I — Anthropologies of Art History

  • Alpers, Svetlana.The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
  • Westermann, Mariët, ed.Anthropologies of Art. Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005.
  • Barth, Fredrik, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman. Jedna dyscyplina, cztery tradycje: brytyjska, niemiecka, francuska, i amerykańska. Kraków: WUJ, 2007.
  • Barnard, Alan. Warszawa: PIW, 2006.
  • Baxandall, Michael.Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972.
  • A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.Cambridge: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1952.
  • Elkins, James.Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2003.
  • Eriksen, Thomas Hylland.Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology.London: Pluto Press, 2001.
  • Geertz, Clifford.Zastane światło. Antropologiczne refleksje na tematy filozoficzne. Kraków: Universitas, 2003.
  • Smith, David Anthony, and Philip John Smith.Picture Postcard Values 2003. London: IPM Promotions, 2003.
  • Barnard, Alan, and Jonathan Spencer, eds.The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. New York: Routledge, 2010.
  • Banks, Marcus, and Howard Morphy, eds.Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
  • Grimshaw, Anna, and Amanda Ravetz, eds.Visualizing Anthropology. Portland: New Media Intelect, 2005.

Journals:

History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1, Spring, 1994.
October, Vol. 77, Summer, 1996.

Chapter II — Everyday Performance: Authenticity, Scandal, and Subversion: Cynics and Saints

  • Postlewate, Laurie, and Wim Hüsken, eds.Acts and Texts: Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Amsterdam–New York: 2007.
  • Carlson, Marla.Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
  • Cunningham, Lawrence.A Brief History of Saints. Blackwell, 2005.
  • Foucault, Michel.Le Courage de la vérité: Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France, 1984. Paris: Gallimard, 2008.
  • Riches, Samantha J.E., and Sarah Salih, eds.Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe. London: Routledge, 2002.
  • Talbot, Alice-Mary, ed.Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1996.
  • Ivanov, Sergey A.Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
  • Krueger, Derek.Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
  • Laertios, Diogenes.Żywoty i poglądy sławnych filozofów. Warszawa: PWN, 1982.
  • Starowieyski, M., ed.Męczennicy. Kraków: 1995.
  • Navia, Luis E.Classical Cynicism: A Critical Study. London: Greenwood Press, 1996.
  • Salisbury, Joyce E.The Blood of Martyrs: Unintended Consequences of Ancient Violence. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Journals:
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 20, 1899.
Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 44, No. 2, June, 1990.

Online sources:
Krueger, Derek.Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City. University of California Press, UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982-2004: http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6k4007sx&brand=ucpress
The Canons of the Eastern Orthodox:https://sites.google.com/site/canonsoc/home/-canons-of-the-particular-councils/gangra-council-340

Chapter III — Rewriting History and Blurring Boundaries: Body and Performance in 20th-Century Art

  • Danchev, Alex.100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists. London: Penguin Classics, 2011.
  • Franko, Mark, and Annete Richards, eds.Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines.Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
  • Archer, Michael.Art Since 1960. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997.
  • Artaud, Antonin.Teatr i jego sobowtór: Teorie współczesnego teatru. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1966.
  • Banes, Sally.Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.
  • Braun, Kazimierz.Druga Reforma Teatru? Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1979.
  • Braun, Kazimierz.Wielka reforma teatru w Europie: Ludzie — idee — zdarzenia. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1984.
  • Butler, Judith.Uwikłani w płeć. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2008.
  • Carrier, David.Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism. Westport: Praeger, 2002.
  • Dziamski, Grzegorz.Awangarda po awangardzie: Od neoawangardy do postmodernizmu. Poznań: Fundacja Humaniora, 1995.
  • Fischer-Lichte, Erica.History of European Drama and Theatre. London: Routledge, 2002.
  • Goldberg, Roslee.Performance Art: From Futurism to Present. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001.
  • Hopkins, David.After Modern Art 1945–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
  • Jones, Amelia.Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
  • Jones, Amelia.Performing the Body/Performing the Text. New York: Routledge, 1999.
  • Kaprow, Allan. Essays edited by Jeff Kelley.Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
  • Kantor, Tadeusz. Edited by Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz. Wrocław–Kraków: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich – Ośrodek Dokumentacji Sztuki Tadeusza Kantora Cricoteka, 2005.
  • Krauss, Rosalind.Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.
  • Lippard, Lucy.Eva Hesse. New York: New York University Press, 1976.
  • Phelan, Peggy.Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993.
  • Sell, Mike.Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.

Journals:
Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4, Winter, 1997.
Artforum, VI, April 1970; VII, May 1970.
The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 12, No. 3, Spring, 1968; Vol. 14, No. 1, Autumn, 1969; Vol. 41, No. 3, Autumn, 1997; Vol. 48, No. 1, Spring, 2004.

Online sources:
Breton, André.Manifest Surrealizmu.  Nowa Krytyka
Kencki, Patryk.Apologia Jacka Wachowskiego. Teatr (online): http://www.teatr-pismo.pl/archiwalna/index.php?sub=archiwum&f=pokaz&nr=1786&pnr=74

Chapter IV — (On) Carolee Schneemann

  • Butler, Judith.Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limit of “Sex.” New York–London: Routledge, 1993.
  • Butler, Judith.Uwikłani w płeć. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2008.
  • Stiles, Kristine, ed.Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle.Durham–London: Duke University Press, 2010.
  • Judovitz, Dalia.The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
  • Lippard, Lucy.The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women’s Body Art. From From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976.
  • MacCormack, C.P., and M. Strathern, eds.Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
  • Phelan, Peggy.Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993.
  • Schneemann, Carolee.Cezanne She Was a Great Painter: The Second Book January 1975, Unbroken Words to Women, Sexuality, Creativity, Language, Art History Cezanne. New Paltz: Tresspuss Press, 1975.
  • Schneemann, Carolee.Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
  • Schneider, Rebecca.The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Journals:

Furia Pierwsza, No. 7, 2000.

Chapter V — Towards the Embodied Subject (Michel Foucault)

  • Foucault, Michel.Archeologia wiedzy. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1977.
  • Foucault, Michel.Hermeneutyka podmiotu: Wykłady w Collège de France, 1981–1982. Warszawa: Michał Herer, 2012.
  • Foucault, Michel.Historia seksualności. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1995.
  • Foucault, Michel.Ja, Piotr Riviere: skorom już zaszlachtował moją matkę, moją siostrę i brata mojego… Przypadek matkobójcy z XIX wieku. Gdańsk: Słowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2002.
  • Foucault, Michel.Le Courage de la vérité: Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France, 1984. Paris–Seuil, 2008.
  • Foucault, Michel.Nadzorować i karać. Warszawa: Aletheia, 1993.
  • Foucault, Michel.Narodziny kliniki. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo KR, 1999.
  • Foucault, Michel.Powiedziane, napisane: Szaleństwo i literatura. Warszawa: Aletheia, 1999.
  • Foucault, Michel.Słowa i rzeczy: Archeologia nauk humanistycznych. Warszawa: Słowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2007.
  • Kapusta, Andrzej.Filozofia ekstremalna: Wokół myśli krytycznej Michela Foucaulta. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2002.
  • Mills, Sara.Michel Foucault. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Chapter VI — Embodiment of the Subject (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

  • Alquie, Ferdinand. Warszawa: PAX, 1989.
  • Bergson, Henry.Materia i pamięć. Kraków: Zielona Sowa, 2006.
  • Butler, Judith.The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Chicago: Stanford University Press, 1997.
  • Evans, Fred, and Leonard Lawlor, eds.Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh. New York: SUNY Press, 2000.
  • Weiss, Gail, and Honi Fern Haber, eds.Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture.London: Routledge, 1999.
  • Czarkowski, Józef.Filozofia czystej świadomości: Redukcja, refleksja, czysta świadomość w fenomenologii transcendentalnej Edmunda Husserla. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 1994.
  • Descartes, Rene.Świat albo traktat o świetle. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Aureus, 2005.
  • Drwięga, Marek.Ciało człowieka: Studium z antropologii filozoficznej. Kraków, 2005.
  • Fenomenologia francuska: Rozpoznania / interpretacje / rozwinięcia. Red. Jacek Migasiński, Iwona Lorenc. Warszawa, 2006.
  • Geraets, Theodore F.Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendentale: La génèse de la philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty jusqu’à la Phénoménologie de la perception. Le physique et le corporel. La Haye: Springer, 1971.
  • Husserl, Edmund.Idee czystej fenomenologii i fenomenologicznej filozofii. Warszawa: PWN, 1974.
  • Husserl, Edmund.Kryzys nauk europejskich i transcendentalna fenomenologia. Toruń: Rolewski, 1999.
  • Krokos, Jan.Fenomenologia Edmunda Husserla, Aleksandra Pfandera, Maxa Schelera. Lublin: AWK, 1991.
  • Luijpen, William A.Fenomenologia egzystencjalna. Warszawa: Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, 1972.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.Eloge de la philosophie et autres essais. Paris: Gallimard, 1953.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.Fenomenologia percepcji. Warszawa: Aletheia, 2001.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.La structure du comportement. Paris: Gallimard, 1953.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.Les aventures de la dialectique. Paris: Gallimard, 1955.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.Oko i umysł: Szkice o malarstwie. Gdańsk: Słowo/Obraz Terytoria, 1996.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.Sens et non-sens. Paris: Gallimard, 1948.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul.New York: Humanity Books, 2001.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.The Structure of Behavior. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.Widzialne i niewidzialne. Warszawa: Aletheia, 1996.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.Proza świata: Eseje o mowie. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1996.
  • Migaśiński, Jacek.W stronę metafizyki: Nowe tendencje metafizyczne w filozofii francuskiej połowy XX wieku.Wrocław: Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, 1997.
  • O’Neill, John.Perception, Expression and History. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
  • Patočka, Jan.Świat naturalny i fenomenologia. Kraków: Wyd. PAT, 1982.
  • Schmidt, James. Merleau-Ponty between Phenomenology and Structuralism. Boston, 1985.
  • Steward, Jon.The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

Journals:

Village Voice, 28.04.1966.
Przegląd Filozoficzny – Nowa Seria, 2, 1993.