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The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art
Author(s) -
Goolsby Julie
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
the journal of popular culture
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.238
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1540-5931
pISSN - 0022-3840
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-5931.2008.00511.x
Subject(s) - visibility , citation , visual arts , library science , computer science , art , physics , optics
Petra Kuppers’s first book, Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (2004) explores how disabled performers use creative practices of embodiment to disrupt and reframe discourses of difference, locating disability in the dynamics of relationship and structures of signification rather than in the body. The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performance and Contemporary Art (2007) accompanies and extends this project, focusing on the fundamentally unknowable, open-ended, and yet intersubjective qualities of bodies in order to develop an analysis of representational strategies speaking to experiences of pain and medical intervention. Kuppers asks how the subject may be made visible through artistic practice while simultaneously retaining its inherently enigmatic nature, and how a connection between artists and audience may be established without a presumption of identification. These concerns become most urgent in a biomedical context, which mandates often quite intrusive methods of gathering bodily knowledge, and seeks to visualize the body in order to “fix” it.