The work by Bob Flanagan, Jana Leo and Hannah Wilke presented here was produced under a storm of duress — the shadow of trauma, the immanence of despair. Each was produced in a reflective period, heralding for each artist an ideological responsibility—about the body, its limits and its idiosyncra... Read more
The work by Bob Flanagan, Jana Leo and Hannah Wilke presented here was produced under a storm of duress — the shadow of trauma, the immanence of despair. Each was produced in a reflective period, heralding for each artist an ideological responsibility—about the body, its limits and its idiosyncrasies, and about performance. The three bodies of work, each of which documents protracted struggles with pain and suffering, represent a challenge to an orthodoxy that says that much of performance art should offer global and social-criticism, that it should be impersonal and abstracted. Rather than staging transgression as a form of extravagant melodrama, these works reveal real unwilled experience—intimate and personal, unscripted and undesired. To the extent that the three artists have rendered theatrically their traumatic experiences — two with terminal illness, one with sexual assault — they retain their authorial powers as a declaration of enduring creative autonomy even in the face of great obliterating terror. Gathered together here, the three artists offer potent testimony that the power of work staged in and on the body can outgrow the life and the boundaries of that body, and that work dedicated to the focused examination of self can transcend even that self. The body is a piece of work.
