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Book Cover
Book
Author Kuppers, Petra.

Title The scar of visibility : medical performances and contemporary art / Petra Kuppers
Published Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2007

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Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 MELB  709.05 Kup/Sov  AVAILABLE
Description ix, 259 pages ; 25 cm
Contents Introduction: bodily fantasies -- Visions of anatomy: space, exhibitions, and dense bodies -- Living bodies: staging knowledge, fantasy, and temporality -- The collaborative arts: pain and performance -- Intersections: blood, laughter, and the space-off -- Monsters, cyborgs, animals: crashes, cuttings, and migraines -- Medical museums and art display: the discourses of AIDS -- Reaching out: outsider art, specialists, and positions in between -- Epilogue: fantasies in the sand
Summary Contemporary visual and performance artists have adopted modern medical technologies such as MRIs and computer imaging, and the bodily access they imply, to reveal their limitations. In doing so they emphasize the unknowability of another's bodily experience and the effects, physical, emotional, and social, of medical procedures. In The Scar of Visibility, Petra Kuppers examines the use of medical imagery practices in contemporary art, as well as different arts of everyday life (self-help groups, community events, Internet sites), focusing on fantasies and "knowledge projects" surrounding the human body. Among the works she investigates are the controversial Body Worlds exhibition of plastinized corpses; video projects by Shimon Attie on diabetes and Douglas Gordon on mental health and war trauma; performance pieces by Angela Ellsworth, Bob Flanagan, and Kira O'Reilly; films like David Cronenberg's Crash and Marina de Van's In My Skin that fetishize body wounds; representations of the AIDS virus in the National Museum of Health and on CSI: Crime Scene Investigations; and the paintings of outsider artist Martin Ramirez. At the heart of this work is the scar, a place of production, of repetition and difference, of multiple nerve sensations, fragile skin, outer sign, and bodily depth. Through the embodied sign of the scar, Kuppers articulates connections between subjective experience, history, and personal politics. Illustrated throughout, The Scar of Invisibility broadens our understanding of the significance of medical images in visual culture
Notes Formerly CIP. Uk
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Subject Art -- Psychological aspects.
Art -- Psychology.
Body art.
Medicine and art.
Performance art.
Medicine in the Arts.
Art.
Drama.
Museums.
LC no. 2006028165
ISBN 081664652X (pb : alk. paper)
0816646538 (hc : alk. paper)
9780816646524 (pb : alk. paper)
9780816646531 (hc : alk. paper)