INDIGESTIBLE BODIES – TOWARDS A THEORY OF POST-SOCIALIST PERFORMANCE

Abstract

The dissertation, titled “Indigestible Bodies – Towards a Theory of Post-Socialist Performance,” examines global political performance practices with a focus on post-socialist contexts. The dissertation begins with a 1991 performance on the Red Square in Moscow by the Actionist collective Dvizhenie ETI. I analyze the performance, made at the cusp of the USSR, as a form of reenactment of the 1917 Revolution. The dissertation moves on to consider the work of repulsion as a negative aesthetic strategy in a 2000 performance by the Chinese artist Zhu Yu, who documented himself eating a human fetus during the height of appreciation of Chinese art in the global art market. The last chapter considers the 1994 performance in a morgue by the artists collective Sekta Absolutnoi Lubvi to articulate a post-human concept of death as a return to collective life and realization of communism. Apart from the primary case studies, the dissertation includes three “loop” chapters where “post-socialist performance” is considered more globally: through the relationship with decoloniality in the work of Dagestani artist Taus Makhacheva, with Brazilian Modernism and antropofagia (“cultural cannibalism”) in the artwork of Lygia Clark, and with “critical utopianism” in the artwork of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. I argue that these post-socialist artists’ work requires a re-thinking of the categories “political” and “resistance,” proposing the very means of incorporation into the post-Cold War “global” art world as an object of critique. This comparativist and interdisciplinary dissertation is theoretically grounded in feminist deconstruction, and brings together scholarship from East Asian Studies, Slavic Studies, Art History and Visual Studies, and Performance Studies. In thinking post-socialism through the frame of Performance Studies, this dissertation adds a new perspective to the critical and theoretical understanding of performance, expanding the archive and the repertoire of how resistance, politics, action, writing, temporality and the body can be thought and enacted in present-day scholarship.