Publications

The Body

"If we knew how our body is made, we wouldn't dare move." -Gustave Flaubert

When this show was held at the Society in 1991, the corporeal body was receiving newly intensified theoretical and artistic attention. Between abjection theories, identity politics, remnants of neo-expressionist tendencies, the reemergence of performance art and the debates over sacrilege in contemporary art, the body was battleground for a variety of heated political and cultural skirmishes. Not your average catalogue, this publication builds upon the theme of the exhibition by accompanying reproductions from the exhibition with a collection of twenty-one pieces of fiction relating to the notion of the body, some published here for the first time.
Artists in the exhibition: Lawrence Andrews, M.W. Burns, Orshi Drozdik, Ken Feingold, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Barbara Hammer, Doug Hammett, Gary Hill, Wendy Jacob, Hilja Keading, Liz Larner, Patty Martori, Paul McCarthy, NASA Ames Research Center, Laurie Palmer, Aimee Rankin, Sarah Seager, David Sedaris, Shelly Silver, Kiki Smith, and Sean Smith, Erika Suderburg, Therese Svoboda, Marianne Trench, and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

Authors include: Richard Brautigan, Malcom Bennett and Aidan Hughes, Anne Calcagno, Dennis Cooper, Nancy Davidson, Richard Hawkins, Patricia Highsmith, Richard House, Mark Leyner, Clarice Lispector, Patrick McGrath, Virgilio Pifiera, Anne Rice, David Sedaris, Victoria Tokareva, and David Wojnarowicz.