Diane Borsato, Three Performances (after Joseph Beuys,

Marina Abramovi c, and Bonnie Sherk) (:ooS),

three- channel digital video installation. Details
of Joseph Beuys reenactment. Diane Borsato.
Image courtesy of Diane Borsato
When I think about you, I touch myself.
The Divinyls
In its photography- based forms, pornography might be provision-
ally dehned as the documentation of a performance coded as sex-
ually explicit. Pornography, like performance art documentation
images, is dehned by the specihc way it positions itself in relation
to its prohlmic event, which it codes in retrospect as real. Porn is
a form of performance documentation that is designed to create
a new performance of a sexual sensation, and often of mastur-
bation, accompanied by orgasm in the viewer. In this article I
will argue that in its relationship to affect, there is no essential
difference between pornography as document and the documen-
tation of performance art. Moreover, I suggest that considering
porns production of affect can shed light on the turn toward per-
formance reenactment that has taken place in performance art
of the past decade. Thinking about porn from this perspective
From This Body to Yours:
Porn, Affect, and Performance
Art Documentation
Adair Rounthwaite
Camera Obscura S, Volume :6, Number
roi +o.+:+/o:oq6- +q+qq :o++ by Camera Obscura
Published by Duke University Press
6
can remap its place in feminist academic discourse, shifting away
from questions of censorship, freedom of expression, and identity
that were debated extensively during the sex wars of the +gSos,
toward a consideration of how porn records and produces affect.
Many of the questions that have been asked of porn deal with its
character as sexually explicit, and thus its difference from other
forms of cultural production, instead of with the structures of
reception germane to it or, in other words, how it makes people
feel which might bring out its connections with other forms.
Pornography as a performance document not only records
a past performance but also projects forward toward a future per-
formance in the form of the new bodily pleasure it will generate.
Porn needs a certain kind of affect: without the ability to generate
erotic pleasure, it is fundamentally unsuccessful. Porn shows imag-
ery coded as erotic, often including images of orgasm happening
to a body, with the goal of making erotic sensation happen again,
elsewhere, to another body. This has long been the goal of porn,
but it was not originally the goal of performance art documenta-
tion, which from the period of the +g6os to the +ggos was largely
understood as a record of a unique event and not as an invitation
to imitate the performers actions. This has changed in the past
decade, with a wave of artists reenactments of past performances,
including Marina Abramovi cs now- iconic Seven Easy Pieces of :oo.
These reenacted performances are accompanied by a growing
scholarly interest within art history and performance studies in
the question of performance repetition and reenactment and in
the ways in which each affects understandings of the ontology of
performance.
1
Images originally understood as performance docu-
ments or records have become performance scripts or scores,
inviting new kinds of engagement from artists and calling into
question the function of performance documentation as a cat-
egory. The way that porn as document gives rise to new affect is
thus relevant to the analysis of other practices and pleasures that
are not explicitly erotic.
The masturbatory mode of reception germane to porn has
wider relevance for contemporary cultural production and viewing.
6q Camera Obscura
From This Body to Yours 6
Through readings of the work of porn- star- turned- performance-
artist Annie Sprinkle (b. Ellen Steinberg) and the younger Cana-
dian artist Diane Borsato, I will explore how looking with pleasure
at porn can help us understand the peculiar mechanics of the
performance documentation image, as well as the desire on the
part of contemporary artists to make these images live again. What
is the relationship between the performance reenactment and the
document of a past performance artwork? And what is the specihc
cartography of pleasure associated with reenactment from docu-
mentation? In Sprinkles +gS+ hlm Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle (US),
masturbation appears as an activity in which the phenomenon of
spectatorship and the performance of pleasure become blurred.
Similarly, in performance reenactment, viewers of the documenta-
tion of past performance become performers themselves, creating
a constellation between document and body in which the docu-
ment, originally a recording of a past event, incites the production
of new, live affects.
Sprinkle and Borsato are feminist practitioners whose per-
formances may superhcially seem to have little in common. Sprin-
kle began her career in the mainstream porn industry in the mid-
+gos, gradually transitioning to directing her own hlms, such as
Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle. In the +ggos, Sprinkle moved increasingly
toward creating hlms, performances, and publications that were
explicitly feminist and that engaged in a playful and experimental
way with womens, queer, and transgender sexuality. These works
include various self- help- style videos, such as Annie Sprinkles Amaz-
ing World of Orgasm (US, :ooq) and The Sluts and Goddesses Video
Workshop (US, +gg:), in which Sprinkle appears as an experienced
sexpert, encouraging viewers to explore various elements of their
own fantasies.
Toronto- based artist Borsato, who has shown in Canada
and internationally since the late +ggos, produces work primarily
in the form of social process interventions involving herself and
delegated performers. I will focus here on Borsatos three- channel
video installation from :ooS titled Three Performances (after Joseph
Beuys, Marina Abramovi c, and Bonnie Sherk) in which the artist is
66 Camera Obscura
hlmed reenacting three iconic performance artworks in her home,
with her cat. Although Borsatos video, unlike Sprinkles perfor-
mance, is not explicitly sexual, I will argue that both produce or
respond to the performance documentation image as something
that provokes a certain masturbatory logic. This logic revolves
around self- pleasure and the plenitude of affect and performs
a disintegration of the oppositions unique/repeated, present/
absent, and staged/real. Performance theorist Rebecca Schneider
is interested in body- to- body transmission and other types of cor-
poreal knowledge communication that let performance remain
differently in the body.
2
Through reading Sprinkles and Borsatos
masturbatory performances, I will explore not only body- to- body
transmission of affect but the specihc corporeal effects born of
image- to- body transmission.
3
These forms of transmission are key
to the reception of pornography. The transmission of performance
from one body to another also carries a political charge, which I
will investigate through a discussion of the role of bodily normativ-
ity in the performances of Borsato and Sprinkle as well as those of
Abramovi c.
Drawing on Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, I use the
term affect here in the sense of a change in a bodys power of act-
ing, the ways in which it can act on or be acted on by another
body.
4
Affective changes involve alterations to the bodys capacity
to experience certain states or sensations. In What Is Philosophy?
Deleuze and Flix Guattari write that affects are no longer feelings
or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo
them.
5
My focus, therefore, is not only on individual experience
or sensation but also on how sensation is created by the movement
of transformative currents among bodies across the medium of
the photographic documentation image. In this exploration, the
document will abandon its role as a trace of a past moment that
preserves, communicates, or deconstructs that moment, and will
instead become an affective vector between bodies that gives rise
to new connections and pleasures.
From This Body to Yours 6
Experiencing the (Erotic) Document
It was not until the early +ggos that Annie Sprinkle became widely
recognized as having transitioned from the mainstream porn
industry to a feminist performance practice that combined live
shows, writings on sexuality, and instructional videos. However,
Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, the hrst hlm that Sprinkle both starred
in and directed, already contains many of the elements that were
to become hallmarks of her later performance practice. These
elements include an autobiographical emphasis she shows the
viewer real photographs of her childhood at the beginning of the
hlm, for example and the importance of womens self- pleasure.
Deep Inside, in contrast to Sprinkles videos from the +ggos onward,
was still marketed to a mainstream porn audience, and very suc-
cessfully so: it became the second- largest- grossing porn hlm of
+gS+. The masturbatory logic cultivated in Sprinkles practice,
which I argue characterizes performance documentation more
widely, can be seen in a masturbation scene in Deep Inside that is
over six minutes long. In this scene, Sprinkle lies on a bed with a
royal blue bedspread, wearing silver heels, thigh- highs, black pant-
Still from Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle (dir. Annie Sprinkle,
US, +gS+). Distribpix/Video X Pix. Image courtesy of
Annie Sprinkle and Distribpix/Video X Pix
6S Camera Obscura
ies, and a silver corset. Reclined with her head on a pillow and her
exposed vagina facing the viewer, she brings herself to multiple
orgasms using an electric vibrator.
In her later autobiographical hlm Herstory of Porn: Reel to
Real (US, +ggg), Sprinkle focuses extensively on Deep Inside and
specihes the importance of the masturbation scene: Now in this
scene, I wanted to show a REAL womans orgasm. You know, a lot
of people, including most porn directors, they didnt believe that
women really had real orgasms. And if they did, well, they werent
important anyway. But now I was directing, I wanted to show a real
orgasm. In Sprinkles comments, the idea of realness is positioned
as a challenge to masculinist porn production practices that negate
womens pleasure. Throughout the scene, Sprinkle constantly
addresses the viewer, inciting her or him to pleasure in a way that
explicitly eroticizes the technological mediation of the hlm that
connects her orgasm to the viewers projected orgasm:
I like to spread my legs for you . . . Do you like to look at my thighs and
my pussy? . . . Would you like to see it? Ill show it to you . . . I can feel
your eyes all over it. I can feel your eyes on it, and it feels so good having
you watch me like this . . . Why dont you just tingle yourself like this with
me. I want you to become very very clooose. I want you with me. I want
you getting hot with me . . . Tickle my asshole. Tickle my asshole and
stick my hnger in it. Oh, I love doing this for you . . . I want you to get off
with me . . . Oh, I wish you were going to fuck me. But nooooo, I just like
having you watch.
In this monologue, Sprinkle gets off noisily to the idea of you,
the projected viewer. It is not the specihc characteristics of you
that Sprinkle says she hnds erotic but the negation of the view-
ers specihcity into an empty and general viewing position, made
possible by the fact that this is an image document and not a live
event. You, the desired affective receiver of Sprinkles perfor-
mance, are structurally unknown to her, and the other bodily
sites in which her performance has been received are unknown
to you. Working with the specihcity of the hlmic medium in her
mode of addressing the viewer, Sprinkle positions her approach in
From This Body to Yours 6g
opposition to mainstream discourses that see the activity of view-
ing porn as inferior or secondary to having real sex. As Eugenie
Brinkema notes about John Staglianos The Adventures of Buttman
(US, +gSg), a hlm in which a man masturbates to televised foot-
age of a scene to which he appeared indifferent when viewing it
live, porn involves the eroticization of the process of framing and
mediation itself.
6

In the masturbation scene from Deep Inside, Sprinkle
appears to take pleasure in the disintegration of the boundary
between what she does to herself, and what the gaze of the camera
does to her. This can be seen in the line tickle my asshole and stick
my hnger in it, where there is a slide between what sounds like an
order to the viewer, and an action that we see Sprinkle undertake
herself. Annie wants you as the viewer to get off with her: she wants
to create a performance in which the document will allow a trans-
fer of pleasurable affect between her body and yours. She wants
your activity of looking to be a masturbatory one, one not only
accompanied by literal masturbation but also taking pleasure in
the document in and of itself, making the document live again by
creating affect in your body. Your body becomes an affected pros-
thesis of the document, a document that aims to recreate affect in
multiple, temporally and spatially scattered bodily sites. The per-
formance becomes history, but the document, which preserves a
trace of that history, keeps producing affects in which another body
undergoes a similar performance. In Deep Inside, masturbation is
something that unites looking and experiencing and draws closer
together the roles of the performer and the viewer.
The ways in which Deep Inside as document can create new
clusters of affect are indissociable from the different modes of pro-
duction and distribution of the moving image the hlm has gone
through since its creation. In one scene, Sprinkle enters a movie
theater in which a hlm of hers is playing and proceeds to have sex
with a number of the men watching the hlm. Notably, there are no
women in the theater. This scene stages the locale of reception as a
crossover between document and live erotic experience on the part
of the viewer. That crossover is one I achieve differently, less pub-
licly, by downloading Deep Inside and watching it on my MacBook.
o Camera Obscura
It is changes in the dissemination of porn, not just changes in social
attitudes and production styles, that have made porn more acces-
sible to women. Deep Insides travel between various technologies
of the moving image from +gS+ to :o++ opens it to new affective
potential that could not have been anticipated by Sprinkle at the
time of its creation.
Sprinkles model of the performance document as a vector
of affective transfer between bodies, which enables a plentitude of
pleasure instead of being located on the side of distancing or loss,
differs in emphasis from a number of current theoretical models
of performance documentation. One of the best articulated theo-
rizations of the performance documents status is developed by
Amelia Jones in her article Presence in Absentia: Experiencing
Performance as Documentation, in which she writes that perfor-
mance, whether live or documented, cannot provide the viewer
with unproblematized access to the artists experience or subjectiv-
ity. Jones argues, and Sprinkle might agree, that documentation
is fundamentally intersubjective, instead of being a transparent
record that furnishes proof of the event. For Jones, it is specih-
cally the uneasy relationship of the performative body/subject to
documentation that most strongly challenges the hxed modernist
subject and the masculinism, racism, colonialism, classism, and
heterosexism built into this fantasy.
7
In other words, body arts
subversive potential lies in its relationship to documentation, not
in the supposedly raw live event. Jones stresses the bodys supple-
mentarity, its lack of plentitude and dependence on context and
various types of authority. For Jones, that supplementarity and the
documentary traces that record performance but fail to make it
present again are the condition of possibility of performance.
8
In Joness largely celebratory readings of feminist perfor-
mance in Presence in Absentia, her description of watching
Sprinkle bring herself to a twenty- minute orgasm on stage during
Sex Magic Masturbation Ritual, part of the performance Post-
Post- Porn Modernist (performed +ggo g), emerges as an impor-
tant moment. This is the only performance Jones has seen live of
all those that she addresses in her article.
From This Body to Yours +
My hrst reaction on seeing this elaborately orchestrated
performance of jouissance, Jones writes, was to assert to my part-
ner that she was faking it. My secondary response was to wonder
why I needed to think that she was faking it. As Chris Straayer
puts it, Whether Annie Sprinkle is acting (and/) or experiencing
orgasms in her performances cannot be determined by us and, I
would add, this is the case whether we view the performance live or
not.
9
Jones is quick to reassert her point that seeing a performance
live is not better than viewing its documentation. However, this
description of a live performance is the only place in the article
where the fragile, fertile gap between what Jones depicts as her
own culturally made subjectivity, evidenced by her initial reaction
to the orgasm, and the rational feminist subject she performs in
the rest of the essay, one who reserves judgment about Sprinkles
subjectivity, is opened up and put on display to her readers. Jones
writes herself here as asking historiographic questions of Sprinkles
performance and the evidence it provides to the performance his-
torian: Is it real? Is it true? Does the exterior evidence match the
depth of interior experience?
These questions are raised through a process of Jones
reuecting on an embodied situation from the past: she was sitting
in the theater, seeing the performance, and she turned or leaned
in toward her partner and said, Shes faking it. Such reuexivity
about ones own embodied process of gaining knowledge is not by
any means limited to viewing performance live, but the process
has substantial, though not essential, differences from viewing per-
formance documentary. Viewing live performance is something
usually done in a group, in a social situation in which the subject
is aware of the presence of others, at least to some degree. I say to
some degree here because I do not want to suggest that viewing
live performance is a situation of total immersion, but rather to
note its difference in terms of social intensity from many experi-
ences of viewing performance documentation. For me there is a
degree of tension, of slight expectation, in such situations that is
not present when I am at home, alone, looking at images in a book
or on my computer. In a social situation, I am immersed in the ten-
: Camera Obscura
sion or excitement of the group dynamic, and I think differently,
less reuectively, than I am able to do after that moment and con-
hguration of bodies have passed and I have had time and physical
space to think things over.
In the reuective time- space of writing after viewing Sprin-
kles performance, Jones is productively able to problematize her
role as a historian, one who falls into and then climbs out of norma-
tive modes of judging womens bodily experience, and who makes a
problematic evidentiary statement and then turns it into a question
that bounces back on herself. That space is one that can be opened
to accommodate a greater attention to all embodied practices of
experiencing performance, both live and through documentation,
on the part of both artists and other spectators.
10
Sprinkles work
itself provides my model for creating that opening, performing
like the speculum she uses to open her vaginal canal to viewers
during The Public Cervix Announcement, another segment of
Post- Post- Porn Modernist.
Much existing scholarship on Sprinkle focuses on issues
of (dis)identihcation, specihcally that of the female, feminist aca-
demic with Sprinkles identity- in- performance, and on the way in
which she performs the category of woman. Geraldine Harris,
writing on Post- Post- Porn Modernist, foregrounds her own viewing
experience of the live event and, interestingly, discusses an experi-
ence very similar to Joness of the hnal orgasm. Harris also debates
whether the orgasm is real, and also writes about that moment of
debate self- reuexively to question her own relation to the perfor-
mance.
11
Linda Williams argues that in accepting but not totally
identifying with her cultural hailing as whore, Sprinkle creates
a space for her own agency. For Williams, Sprinkles subversive
repetitions consist in an ever- widening range of sexual acts that
expand ideas of sexual performance and allow her to expand her
own desire, often by reworking male porn conventions, namely
the cum shot.
12

Rebecca Schneider argues that Sprinkle presents her body
as a dialectical image. Sprinkles work became, for me, Sch-
neider writes, problematically emblematic of the tense stand- off
between the literal, material body and her complex ghosting, the
From This Body to Yours
symbolic body of woman.
13
Through coming to know Sprinkle
personally and discussing Sprinkles performance with the artist
herself, Schneiders initial anxiety about objectifying Sprinkle by
speaking for her came to be replaced by a more implicated viewing
position, in which she realized the extent of her own seduction by
desires she had cast as other. Schneider comes to view the distinc-
tion between privileged academic and othered whore as in itself
symptomatic of a patriarchal order that both denies the commodi-
hcation of academic thought and negates the creative import of
performance such as Sprinkles.
The analyses of Harris, Williams, and Schneider all focus
on how Sprinkles performance agentivally reworks the relationship
between woman as image and whore as role, in a way that produc-
tively unsettles the viewers typical modes of (dis)identihcation. In
contrast, I argue that Sprinkles biggest contribution to contempo-
rary discourses on womens sexuality lies in formulating a practice
in which images and subject- positions formed in the violence of
patriarchal culture can be worked through in a sex- positive way.
The violence and danger of the porn industry, which are clearly
acknowledged by Sprinkle in a number of her videos and writings,
are portrayed by her as the impetus to produce more images and
more affects, instead of as motives to restrict, purify, or erase ones
experiences, sexual practices, or discourses on sexuality.
14
This is
a possibility that Sprinkle, through her emphasis on varied bodies
and sexualities, explicitly opens to as wide an audience as possible,
one that is not restricted by divisions of identihcation and disiden-
tihcation. Key to this is the position implicit in Sprinkles work that
discourses on pleasure should not be structured around a real/
unreal binary standard for judging affective experiences both
those of ourselves and those of others because what matters is
how something is subjectively experienced and what kind of subject
those cumulative experiences produce. Sprinkles afhrmative, non-
binary discourse is one enabled by the proliferation of pleasurable
affect, and its spreading out between bodies.
q Camera Obscura
Realness, Repetition, and Live Performance
Because Sprinkle initially developed her practice in the area of
porn hlms, her performance since the +gos has been concerned
with generating future pleasurable affects in a way that compli-
cates the relationship between reality, liveness, and staging. In the
art of Marina Abramovi c and other feminist performance artists
working in the +gos, the live participation of the artists body in a
given action, and the attendant affective change the body under-
went, acted as a guarantee that something had occurred.
15
I hnd
that viewing documentation images of Abramovi cs early works,
particularly those in which she did physical harm to herself as
in the +g art action Lips of Thomas, where she etched a star on
her stomach with a razor is indissociable from a cringe; the
imagination recoils from the idea of the real, having- been- there
pain. The pain does not produce a mimetic affect in the body of
the contemporary documentation viewer, but rather is performed
as past in the act of viewing, appearing as acute yet distant. The
chaining together of authenticity, temporal singularity, and bodily
affect was accomplished by Abramovi c in the rules she established
for herself early in her performance career: no rehearsal, no rep-
etition, and no predicated end.
16
These rules summarize a fairly
orthodox feminist position on the ontology of performance, which
differentiates performance from theater on the basis that perfor-
mance is not repeated and cannot be saved or reperformed.
17
Abramovi c broke her own rules in :oo with her Seven Easy
Pieces performance series at the Guggenheim museum in New
York, in which she reperformed six famous performance works,
including Lips of Thomas, on six consecutive days, followed by a
new performance of her own on the seventh day.
18
In an interview
about the performance, Abramovi c stated,
The big problem with performance is that it only makes sense live. . . .
We dont really know what happened in the +gos. My proposal was to
gather material from living artists and see if I could re- feel certain
performances, repeating them. . . . Nobody actually knows how to deal
with performance if someone wants to buy it, and today there is a lot of
appropriation of performances and the artists are not even notihed. My
<fg. cap.>Streets of London, Children of
Men (:oo6)
<fg. cap.>Simulacrum of Pink Floyds
album cover Animals, Children of Men
(:oo6)
<fg. cap.>Michelangelos David,
Children of Men (:oo6)
<fg. cap.>Pablo Picassos Guernica,
Children of Men (:oo6)
From This Body to Yours
idea was to establish certain moral rules. If someone wants to remake a
performance, they must ask the artist for the rights and pay for it. . . .
Thats why the focus wasnt to remake performances, since I only
performed Seven Easy Pieces once, but it was an example of how things
should be done.
19

Even in the act of reenacting performances, the connection between
the unique affect of the performers body and the moral imperative
of performance remains. Abramovi c doesnt redo, she refeels,
20
and
for her it is the act of creating anew in her own body the affect of
the original performance that allows an intervention into the way
that performance documentation is understood today.
For Abramovi c, the authenticity of refeeling is linked to a
strange copyright structure in which she attempts to singlehand-
edly alter the way that performance memory and performance
documentation are circulated and appropriated. This seems, in
a certain respect, like a performance art parallel of the assertion
that the problems raised by digital music sharing could be solved
if a moral imperative to return to buying CDs were instilled in mil-
lions of consumers worldwide. In Seven Easy Pieces, the body aims
to be not just a document but the document, the one that reverses
the pattern of performance consumption and dissemination by
providing a superior kind of access to the past.
Though, as noted above, seeing a live performance is dif-
ferent from viewing its documentation, I disagree with Abramovi c
that reperforming the past provides any kind of privileged access
to the original. Diachronic time continually unfolds and each
new moment is unique, and though synchronic time or temporal
return may be mimicked, invoked, or even experienced, they can-
not be achieved ontologically outside of diachronic progression.
Seven Easy Pieces was a new performance created on the basis of
existing performance documentation, not a present- making of the
original performances. Under the current regime of technological
reproducibility, images can survive through time, but bodily affects
created by performance cannot, even though the original affects
may have been incredibly intense (Abramovi c, for example, bears
a scar on her stomach from the original Lips of Thomas, which she
6 Camera Obscura
recut for Seven Easy Pieces, but the affect and sensation of a scar are
different from that of a bleeding wound). As such, performance
affects must be repeatedly recreated in the present, generating new
events that may be connected conceptually through documenta-
tion from the perspective of performers or witnesses, but that are
nevertheless ontologically unique.
In contrast to Seven Easy Pieces, the mainstream porn hlms
in which Sprinkle starred during the +gos were documented
performances designed to create a repetitive affect in viewers
that was mimetic to that experienced by the actors/participants.
21

That mimetic affective relationship has formed the basis of the
expansion of Sprinkles practice into forms frequently involving sex
education and sexual modeling, a practice at the heart of which
lies masturbation. As stated above, masturbation breaks down the
distinction between staging and reality, in that one can decide
how and when to stage an act of masturbation and really have an
orgasm, though its moment of arrival remains at least somewhat
spontaneous. Sprinkles later work in particular encourages people
to see that staging/reality as empowering and to use it to explore
their subjectivities. Additionally, her works since Deep Inside have
been engaged in refuting the idea that the porn star is simply an
actor, by ueshing out her own public persona as a porn star into a
performance of complex, reuective, desiring subjectivity. In Sprin-
kles work, the relationship between exteriorly manifested behavior
or action and individual experience is not hxed but kept in an
irresolvable tension. That tension both presents the porn hlm as a
document of experience, instead of only a theatrical performance,
and leaves room for an indeterminacy in terms of what the viewer
understands the performer to be experiencing. In this respect, the
experience of viewing Sprinkles porn becomes increasingly one
in which viewers are forced to engage deeply with this particular-
ized subject who so dramatically stages her work and/as herself,
as Jones writes of Yayoi Kusamas art.
22
Since Deep Inside, orgasm has occupied an oppositional
position in Sprinkles work, in that she presents it as challenging
the dichotomy between real and not- real that characterizes various
discourses on womens sexuality.
23
In her book Post- Porn Modern-
From This Body to Yours
ist, she directly addresses the incredulity of viewers who question
the reality of the orgasm she achieves on stage during Sex Magic
Masturbation Ritual:
The intensity of masturbating on stage in front of hundreds of people
brings up a kaleidoscope of feelings that get magnihed onstage.
Oftentimes, I feel strong, happy, compassionate, and powerful.
Sometimes I feel sad, tired, angry, and vulnerable. . . .
The key is to always try to practice acceptance of whats there, or
not there, and to have no expectations.
So, do I have a REAL orgasm? This seems to be the foremost thing
on many peoples minds. . . . Why people are so hung up on this point
is rather odd and amusing to me. Having an orgasm was never the
primary goal of this ritual. The ritual is about learning and teaching,
about provoking thoughts and feelings, and about entering a state of
ecstasy in order to bring prayers and wishes to the Divine.
24
Sprinkle asserts the irreducibility of the orgasm to real/not- real by
underscoring its variability with each performance, and describ-
ing an ethico- erotic practice of staying true to that variation.
The kaleidoscope of feelings that gets brought up for
Sprinkle is both emotional and affective, and it is modihed, magni-
hed, by being on stage. The goal of this act of masturbation is not
a clitoral or vaginal orgasm, but a room orgasm, an event in which
Sprinkle renders herself a vector for connecting the audience to
the Divine.
25
She aims to use the bodies present, including hers,
and their capacities to be affected, to create something that was not
there before. Sprinkle resists the localization of the orgasm in her
body, thereby reworking the connection between authenticity and
bodily manifestations of affect present in both mainstream porn
and in +gos performance art such as Abramovi cs. A sureness on
the viewers part about the capacity of exterior signs of transforma-
tion to indicate an authentic affective change in the body gives way
to a questioning of what is happening to the performers body.
That body is thus given a depth, complexity, and opacity for the
viewer, who can no longer maintain the illusion that the relation-
ship between affective change and the performers experience can
be rendered transparent.
S Camera Obscura
As can be seen in the differences between Sprinkles per-
formances in Deep Inside and in Sex Magic Masturbation Ritual,
and also in her comments about these performances quoted above,
the way in which she deploys the notion of realness in order to cre-
ate this opacity varies depending on the audience and discursive
context. Brinkema provisionally dehnes pornography as a series
of formal codes that highlight unsimulated sexual intercourse
as the prohlmic event of the work with the intention of produc-
ing a sexual affect in the spectator.
26
This is a useful dehnition,
but I want to stress how Sprinkle reveals the separation of those
codes from any reality of the prohlmic, and foregrounds the
way in which the codes can be tactically manipulated. Sprinkles
practice, throughout its trajectory from mainstream porn to art
performance, emphasizes how porns production of self- pleasure
has always involved layered and contradictory assumptions on the
part of different producers and audiences about what constitutes
the real of a certain body. In Deep Inside, a womans real pleasure
becomes the basis for challenging the masculinism of male porn
directors, whereas in Sex Magic Masturbation Ritual, an asser-
tion that a real orgasm is not the point pushes back against the
performance art audiences demand to know the real from the
fake and to draw conclusions about Sprinkles subjective experi-
ence based on that distinction.
Self- Pleasuring Performance
In both Sprinkles and Borsatos performances, the notion of a
similar performance occurring elsewhere, whether in the future
(for viewers of Sprinkles porn) or in the past (with the older per-
formance works Borsato reenacts), acts as a structuring fantasy
that shapes the present production of affect in performance. Mas-
turbatory spectatorship, in which looking easily slides into reenact-
ing, may start with a fantasy of another performance occurring
elsewhere or in another time, but it does not end there: it is about
creating a different form of pleasure in the present instead of per-
fectly replicating another scene.
From This Body to Yours g
Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me (+gq),
performance, Ren Block Gallery. Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/VG Bild- Kunst, Bonn
Marina Abramovi c,
Dragon Heads (+gg:),
performance, S
minutes, Caixa de
Pensiones, Barcelona.
Marina Abramovi c.
Image courtesy of
Sean Kelly Gallery,
New York
So Camera Obscura
In her three- channel video installation Three Performances
(after Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovi c, and Bonnie Sherk) (:ooS), Bor-
sato reperforms three performances from earlier moments in
history. These are I Like America and America Likes Me (+gq), in
which Joseph Beuys wrapped himself in felt and stayed in a room
with a coyote for hve days; Dragon Heads (+gg:), in which Marina
Abramovi c sat naked in a chair on slabs of ice, with snakes curling
around her; and Public Lunch (+g+), in which Bonnie Sherk was
served an elegant catered lunch in a cage at the San Francisco
public zoo, while tigers in the neighboring cage ate their lunch of
raw meat. Borsato reperforms these performances in her home, a
sphere traditionally associated with the private. But she uses digital
video technology to make the activity she engages in public, mak-
ing her home a stage for a performance.
Borsato chose to create a video installation, that is, to show
her reenactment of performances originally presented live to audi-
ences only in the form of video documentation. Three Performances
cites the static, frontal shot of early video art as a documentation of
performance in the work of artists such as Bruce Nauman, or that
of Borsatos fellow Torontonian Lisa Steele (in Birthday Suit with
Scars and Defects, +gq). The play between the title of Borsatos work,
the original subject matter it quotes, and the hnal product of the
video installation projection creates a shift in emphasis from the
live performance as artwork, as it was for Beuys, Abramovi c, and
Sherk, to performance documentation as artwork that acknowl-
edges its connection to an earlier historical moment in which the
live, not- yet- mediated performance was of primary importance.
At the point of the videos creation, a few years after
Abramovi cs extremely high- prohle Seven Easy Pieces, reenacting per-
formance had itself already become a reenactment of Abramovi cs
work. Compared to Abramovi cs hard-core, true- to- the- original-
affect approach to reenactment discussed above, Borsatos video
installation is lighthearted and goofy. Borsatos reenactment takes
place explicitly at home, in the artists wooden- uoored apartment.
I Like America is performed in a slant- ceilinged bedroom with a
mattress on the uoor covered in a sky- blue sheet. Newspapers litter
From This Body to Yours S+
the uoor, there is a bicycle in the back left, and the performance
is framed by a clothes rack on one side and a dresser on the other.
Abramovi cs Dragon Heads is reenacted in front of a somewhat dis-
orderly bookcase, with sketchbook drawings and a picture of a cat
tacked up on one wall. Borsato sits in a cushioned, +gos living
room chair, wearing white uip- uops that match the icy snow sur-
rounding her seat. Public Lunch is reenacted in a kitchen, not in a
cage, with a fridge on the artists left and a shelf to her right holding
dry goods.
In all three segments, Borsatos small, plump cat plays the
role of the wild animal used in the original performance. The artist
states that one of her goals was to propose a critical complica-
tion to the artists ideas about nature and our relationships to (or
distinctions from) animals. The cat as domestic animal literally
domesticates the risk implied by the animals used in the original
performance: Beuyss and Abramovi cs works carried a degree of
real danger for the performers, a danger spoofed and rendered
comical in Borsatos video. This, in combination with the cats total
lack of awareness of its participation in the video, is the pieces
major source of humor. Simultaneously, the cats demonstrable
affection for Borsato gives the work a subtly moving quality. In the
Beuys- inspired piece, it refuses to be herded with the cane, prefer-
ring instead to snuggle, a desire to which the artist ultimately gives
in. In the Sherk work, it is totally uninterested in the steak presented
for its consumption and instead jumps on the table from which
Borsato is eating her genteel lunch. In the Abramovi c reenact ment,
the pussy lies on its back on Borsatos naked thighs right in front
of the artists pussy licking itself contentedly.
Abramovi c has recently started calling herself the grand-
mother of performance art, and indeed, Borsatos performance,
one that redoes vintage Abramovi c and also emulates the older
artists own turn toward reperformance, would seem to give cre-
dence to this claim. However, Abramovi cs claim to occupy this
role in performance history is a complex and power- loaded one. I
would argue that Borsatos Three Performances inherits as much from
Sprinkle, the (still sexy) grandmother of feminist porn, as it does
S: Camera Obscura
from Abramovi c. Instead of restoring a legitimate lineage of proper
accreditation to performance art practice, Borsato performs a series
of transfers from documentation image, to live performance, to a
new documentation image. This newly created image is character-
ized by a tone of playful silliness that is much more reminiscent of
the practice of Sprinkle who has had herself photographed pop-
ping topless out of a giant foam- rubber vagina, for example than
it is of Abramovi cs dead serious, almost priestess- like guardianship
of the history of performance art.
Moreover, when Sprinkles work is brought into dialogue
with that of Borsato and Abramovi c, the way in which Sprinkles
hlms emphasize the specihcity of her body, and its pleasurable
relationship to different bodies, can usefully draw attention to the
covert corporeal politics of performance reenactment. Is it just a
coincidence that performance reenactment has been popularized
by performance arts grandmother and not one of its grandfathers?
What uniquely positions Abramovi c to promote the reenactment
paradigm, as opposed to a surviving +gos male performance
artist?
27
I would argue that in works such as Abramovi cs Seven
Easy Pieces and Borsatos Three Performances, the white female body
appears supposedly neutral, or unmarked, and thereby functions
as a privileged site for the reproduction of performance. Notably,
all of the performances that Abramovi c and Borsato reenact were
originally done by white performers, accentuating the unmarked
quality of the white body in both the original and the reenacted
performances. The white female body thus comes to serve as a
particularly fertile ground for the reembodiment of affect.
How would Borsatos and Abramovi cs performances reso-
nate differently with audiences were their works to be performed
by bodies that signihed as nonnormative, for example, hairy bod-
ies, transgendered bodies, disabled bodies, or overweight bodies?
28

Sprinkles presentation of her own, increasingly aging body, in
which she unapologetically uaunts her ueshy voluptuousness, is a
nonnormative form of performance. However, we might need to
turn to a different practice, by a nonwhite performer who fore-
grounds the difference between her performative and her ana-
From This Body to Yours S
tomical gender, in order to make more visible the effects that
the social coding of bodies has on reperformance. The potential
power of these shifts from performing bodies that go unmarked in
dominant culture to those that are labeled as Other is explored by
Vaginal Davis in her reenactments of international art star Vanessa
Beecrofts performances. Daviss reperformances of Beecroft derive
much of their pithiness and humor from Daviss own embodiment
as a tall, African- American drag queen, who in reperforming the
persona of the petite, white Beecroft is able critically to highlight
a number of the privileged assumptions that underlie Beecrofts
work. For example, Davis reenacted a photograph of Beecroft
clothed in a white gown holding two black babies by presenting
herself, in a similar outht and pose, holding two white babies.
29
Sprinkle, like Davis, creates performances that think
through the potential relationships between different forms of
embodiment. Specihcally, Sprinkle foregrounds her own desire for
bodies that are other than her own, including transgender bodies,
in her hlm Linda/Les and Annie (US, +gg:), and differently abled
bodies, in Annie Sprinkles Amazing World of Orgasm. In Sprinkles
exploration of these nonnormative bodies of others, it is ultimately
impossible to draw a dividing line between an objectifying exoti-
cism and an intersubjective engagement that works positively to
encourage everyone to engage in a sex- positive exploration of her
or his own desire. The idea that we, as sexual beings, are always in
some way objectihed simultaneous to undergoing subjective erotic
experience is a thread running throughout all of Sprinkles work.
She consistently foregrounds an awareness of how certain bodies
are coded in dominant culture, but, at the same time, she does not
let those codings proscribe the kinds of pleasurable arrangements
into which bodies are able to enter. The point here that is relevant
to performance reenactment is that it is always important to be
aware of the dominant cultural coding of the performers body,
and the meanings that that coding may enable, as with Daviss
skewering of Beecroft, or that it may reproduce silently, as occurs
in the reproduction of the whiteness of performance art history in
the works of Abramovi c and Borsato.
Sq Camera Obscura
In Borsatos Three Performances, the cat constitutes an impor-
tant nonhuman bodily presence whose performance forms almost
a greater point of interest in the video than does the artists own.
In the reenactment of Abramovi cs Dragon Heads, the video image
fuses the cat, which lies on Borsatos naked lap, into a sort of assem-
blage with the artists body. The video makes Borsato and the cat
seem less like individual actors interacting in an enclosed space, as
in the Beuys and Sherk reenactments, and more like a single body
that performs as one. Borsato has stated that in the Abramovi c
reenactment, the cat licks herself unconsciously in a perversely
erotic context.
30
This poses the question, what exactly is so erotic here? Is it
just that this reenactment involves nudity and the others do not?
Was the Abramovi c work inherently more erotic than the other two
to begin with? I argue that what is erotic in this performance is the
becoming- masturbatory of experiencing performance documen-
tation. As stated above, in this work Borsato reenacts Abramovi c
twice, both redoing Dragon Heads and employing a mode of reen-
actment similar to Seven Easy Pieces. But her performance might also
be read as a reenactment of Sprinkles Public Cervix Announcement,
in which Sprinkle uses a speculum to open her cervix to viewing by
audience members. I return to Jones and to her comments about
the importance of this performance for Sprinkles depiction of her
own subjectivity: While Sprinkle cant illustrate herself as a full
subject of pleasure and desire, she can situate herself in relation
to us in such a way as to reclaim her own look (the gaze of her
cunt), if only momentarily, from the voyeuristic relation. Sprinkles
performance of self points to the always already mediated nature
of embodied subjectivity as well as the sexual pleasure that gives
this subjectivity life.
31

Sprinkle explicitly eroticizes technological mediation of the
reception of erotic performance. Her momentary reclaiming of
the look of her cunt, a reclaiming in which she stages the voy-
euristic relation in which she is viewed, is the result of an embrace
of her bodys technologized relation to the generalized viewer as
an empowering relation. In Three Performances, the cat becomes
From This Body to Yours S
Borsatos vaginal prosthetic as the speculum was Sprinkles, but
the cat enables a very different form of desiring subjectivity, one
turned in on itself. Whereas the speculum enables viewers to look
at Sprinkles cervix, which, according to Jones, allows her to reclaim
her cervixs look, the cat embodies a type of pleasure that cannot
even be made aware that it is being looked at.
That pleasure gets off on itself and by itself, and does so in
the context of a fantasy about a performance that took place once,
somewhere else, in the past. Borsato takes the bare bones of these
iconic performances and reembodies them to create different
clusters of affects than those undergone by the bodies of the origi-
nal performers. It is as if Borsato is receiving these performances,
which she has only viewed through photographic documentation
(being too young to have viewed the original performances), as
Annie Sprinkle wants viewers to receive the masturbation scene in
Deep Inside. Borsato takes Beuyss, Abramovics, and Sherks perfor-
mance documentations as an invitation to engage in an approxi-
mately mimetic reperformance of their actions, in which some of
the changes in her body may be the same the Beuys- inspired
combining of body and wool blanket into a new, tent- like form, for
example and many will change.
It is in the changes the cat instead of the coyote, snakes,
and tigers that Borsatos desire is most strongly performed, and
that the gap between the fantasy of the performance and the pres-
ence of lived embodiment, which are joined by the document,
becomes visible. The cat instead of the coyote both shows Borsatos
distance from the original performance and marks the highly per-
sonal, intimate quality of her appropriation of that performance.
The documents that record the original performance thus become
both a means of recording performance history and vectors that
enable new events that consist of a new, ontologically unique set of
affects, arranged around the idea of the original performance as
a structuring fantasy.
Borsato presents this process to her audience in the form
of a video, another document, through which the transfer of
affect might possibly be reperformed again each time the video is
S6 Camera Obscura
watched. And the trendiness of reperformance testihes to the fact
that it seems to generate more of itself: a contagious chain reaction
of spectators becoming (re)performers. Borsatos performance
takes seriously the lyric with which I opened this essay When
I think about you, I touch myself but the you here is the his-
torical performance, addressed like an other around whom the
fantasy that fuels self- pleasuring is built. That you of history
enables a practice in which the Borsato/cat assemblage touches
itself and takes pleasure in the reconhgured self- relation permitted
by the document. The privacy of this act is stressed by the intimate
domestic setting. It is presented to us in the video only as secondary
viewers, but in its reinhabiting of performance documentation, it
structurally reworks the notion of the document and opens itself
to being imitated, and thereby reaffected.
Throughout this analysis, a goal has been to broaden under-
standings of the relevance of Sprinkles practice beyond sexually
explicit performance to consider what its treatment of affect and
subjectivity mean for the broader held of contemporary perfor-
mance art. Following Michel Foucaults discussion of the medical-
ization of masturbation in The History of Sexuality, volume +, attrib-
uting any necessarily empowering quality to masturbation would
be problematic.
32
However, I believe that it is important, particu-
larly for women, to think through self- pleasure as an autonomous
practice of self- care that is an important kind of sexual experience,
and not simply second- best to getting pleasure from others. In the
academic and artistic spheres, masturbatory has long been used
as a derogatory term for work that is irrevocably self- involved and
self- pleasuring. Sprinkles oeuvre, however, opens the possibility for
reconsidering the importance of masturbation in both these regis-
ters by positing self- pleasure as something that does not necessarily
come at the expense of others and that can in fact be an important
tool both for working through ones own history and for creating
intersubjective connection. I read Borsatos video as broadening
this masturbatory paradigm beyond personal history to suggest
that at stake in the new reenactment paradigm is a process of per-
formance art taking pleasure in its own history, across the work
From This Body to Yours S
of performance artists getting off on their connection to a history
that has preceded them. In different ways, Sprinkle and Borsato
suggest that both we as individual subjects and performance stud-
ies as a discipline should take some time to consider our intimate
relationships with ourselves.
Notes
Thank you to Jane Blocker, in whose seminar on writing history
I began work on this essay; to Jillian St. Jacques, for inviting me
to present a version of it on a College Art Association Feminist
Art Project panel in :o+o; and to Niels Niessen, for his insightful
feedback. This research was conducted with the support of a doctoral
fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada.
+. See, for example, Rebecca Schneider, Performance Remains: Art
and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge,
:o++).
:. See Rebecca Schneider, Archives: Performance Remains,
Performance Research 6, no. : (:oo+): +oo +oS.
. Depending on the type of image in question, this form of
affective transmission might include celluloid- to- body, pixel-
to- body, or photo- to- body transmission. Each would produce
different material and semantic conhgurations worthy of
analysis in their own right, but this article will focus on laying
the groundwork for image- to- body transmission of affect broadly
conceived.
q. In book of Ethics, Spinoza writes, By affect I understand
affections of the body by which the bodys power of acting is
increased or diminished, aided or restrained. Baruch Spinoza,
Ethics, trans. G. H. R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, :ooo), +6q. In Spinozas system, human bodies are just
one variety of the category of modes, which includes all existent
material bodies. These bodies constantly bump into each other,
causing some to gain or lose power, to change direction, or to
change form. Gilles Deleuze unpacks Spinozas dehnition of
affect, stating that the affect involves an increase or decrease
SS Camera Obscura
of the power of acting, for the body and the mind alike. Gilles
Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, +gSS), qg. For Deleuzes more
extensive analysis of affect in Spinoza, see Deleuze, Expressionism
in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (Brooklyn, NY: Zone
Books, +ggo), particularly chap. +q, What Can a Body Do?
. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia
University Press, +ggq), +6q.
6. Eugenie Brinkema, The Title Does Not Ask, but Demands That
You Make a Choice: On the Otherwise Films of Bruce Labruce,
Criticism qS, no. + (:oo6): gg.
. Amelia Jones, Presence in Absentia: Experiencing
Performance as Documentation, Art Journal 6, no. q (+gg): +:.
S. Joness arguments have been critiqued by Catherine Elwes in
On Performance and Performativity: Women Artists and Their
Critics, Third Text +S, no. : (:ooq): +g g. Elwes argues that
Jones negates the specihcity of the live event, and particularly
the factors of scale, motion, social interactivity, and duration that
distinguish the live event from its documentation. Elwes accuses
Jones of securing her own authority by asserting an intellectual
response over a gut reaction, and goes on to claim that as with
so many things in life, when it comes to a live event, in order
to properly understand what it was that happened, you had to
be there (+g). I want to note here that in trying to emphasize
the live affects created by performance documentation, I am
not siding with Elwes in this debate, because her argument
is essentialist in that it seeks to restore authority to a real,
unproblematized kernel, and concomitantly to those who were
there to experience it (which obviously carries various levels of
privilege). Jones has continued to explore issues of performance,
subjectivity, and mediation in her book Self/Image: Technology,
Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (London: Routledge,
:oo6).
g. Jones, Presence in Absentia, +. Jones quotes Chris Straayer
from The Seduction of Boundaries: Feminist Fluidity in
Annie Sprinkles Art/Education/Sex, in Dirty Looks: Women,
Pornography, Power, ed. Pamela Church and Roma Gibson
(London: British Film Institute, +gg).
From This Body to Yours Sg
+o. Laura Culls recent edited volume Deleuze and Performance
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, :oog) attempts to
make an intervention in performance studies in this respect,
appealing to Deleuzes work to think through performance in a
way that breaks out of the logic of representation and of identity-
based models emphasizing hxed subjectivity. Cull, in a :oo
dialogue with performer Matthew Goulish, argues that Derridas
work has been privileged in performance studies, but that
Deleuzes oeuvre offers a way of reconceiving performance as
the challenge of hnding ways for both performer and audience
to access presence conceived as . . . universal becoming. Laura
Cull and Matthew Goulish, The Presence Project: Laura
Cull and Matthew Goulish, A Dialogue on Becoming, The
Presence Project, + March :oo, presence.stanford.edu:q/
collaboratory/+o:g.
++. Geraldine Harris, Staging Femininities: Performance and
Performativity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, +ggg),
+6.
+:. Linda Williams, A Provoking Agent: The Pornography and
Performance of Annie Sprinkle, Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography,
Power, ed. Pamela Church and Roma Gibson (London: British
Film Institute, +gg), 6 :.
+. Rebecca Schneider, foreword to Annie Sprinkle and Gabrielle
Cody, Hardcore from the Heart: Annie Sprinkle Solo (London:
Continuum, :oo+), viii.
+q. See, for example, Sprinkles description in the directors
comments for Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real (+ggg) of a scene that
got too heavy in a hlm early in her career. In the voice-over
commentary available on the DVD, Sprinkle states that she
reconstructs this scene specihcally to represent the risks involved
in porn acting. There is a hctive aspect to that reconstruction, as
with all autonarration, but this does not decrease its importance
or its relevance to Sprinkles larger experience of the porn
industry.
+. In her catalog essay for Seven Easy Pieces, Erika Fischer- Lichte
argues that during the original performance of Lips of Thomas
(+g), Abramovi c did not emit the slightest sign of pain. She
restricted herself to performing actions that perceivably changed
her body; she transgressed its limits without ever showing any
go Camera Obscura
external signs of the inner states triggered by it. Erika Fischer-
Lichte, Performance Art: Experiencing Liminality, in Marina
Abramovi c, Seven Easy Pieces (Milan: Edizioni Charta, :oo),
q. For Fischer- Lichte, Abramovi cs performance of the +gos
explicitly severed affect from emotion or experience, categories
that are often conuated. The goal was to produce an affective
change in the body and display that body in its altered state, not
to probe the artists subjective experience.
+6. Marina Abramovi c, Seven Easy Pieces, +.
+. See feminist performance theorist Peggy Phelans classic
articulation of performances ontology of disappearance
in The Ontology of Performance: Representation without
Reproduction, in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London:
Routledge, +gg), +q6 66. Various later theorists, including
Schneider (Archives), have contested Phelans idea that
performances identity consists in a tendency to disappear.
+S. The works reperformed were: Body Pressure by Bruce Nauman
(Dsseldorf, +gq); Seedbed by Vito Acconci (New York, +g:);
Action Pants: Genital Panic by Valie Export (Munich, +g6g); The
Conditioning, First Action of Self- Portrait(s) by Gina Pane (+g); How
to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare by Joseph Beuys (Dsseldorf,
+g6); Lips of Thomas by Marina Abramovi c (Innsbruck, +g);
and Entering the Other Side, Abramovi cs new performance.
+g. As quoted in Fabio Cypriano, Performance and Reenactment:
Analyzing Marina Abramovi cs Seven Easy Pieces, idanca.net,
: September :oog, idanca.net/lang/en- us/:oog/og/o:/
performance- e- reencenacao- uma- analise- de- seven- eeasy- pieces
- de- marina- abramovic/+:+6/.
:o. In this sense, Abramovi cs understanding of her performance is
similar to the performances of Civil War reenactment dealt with
by Rebecca Schneider in her current work (:o++). Many Civil
War reenactors believe that through refeeling the battle, they
are able to gain access to a dimension of history that is lost in
dominant, written historical narratives.
:+. These include Slippery When Wet (dir. Joseph Sarno, US, +g6),
Teenage Deviate (dir. Ralph Ell, US, +g6), Blow Some My Way
(dir. Joe Davian, US, +g), and numerous others.
From This Body to Yours g+
::. Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, +ggS), .
:. I see this strategy as opposed to both some feminist positions
that take an unproblematized real experience as their ground
and masculinist positions embodied in much mainstream porn,
in which womens over- the- top performance of the reality of
orgasm is simply a prop to shore up a virile masculine identity.
:q. Annie Sprinkle, Post- Porn Modernist: My Twenty- Five Years as a
Multimedia Whore (San Francisco: Cleis, +ggS), +o +.
:. It is not totally clear to me how Sprinkle understands the divine,
and I would like to refrain from speculating too much on that
here. A number of her later works contain references to yoga and
to tantric sex, or other traditional spiritual sexual practices. An
exploration of the role that these inuuences play in Sprinkles
later practice, and of the relationship between staging and
experience that her use of them sets up, could be a departure
point for considering what divinity means to her.
:6. Brinkema, The Title Does Not Ask, +oo.
:. It is notable that a number of the male performance artists from
the +gos who are still making art including Vito Acconci,
Paul McCarthy, and Bruce Nauman have turned away from
performance to the creation of objects, whereas Abramovi c, the
most prominent female performance artist of that generation,
has pursued reperformance. Whereas for this generation of male
artists the performative use of their own bodies was something
that they eventually abandoned, both Abramovi c and Sprinkle
continue exploring the vicissitudes of performance as a life
project.
:S. In her recent book, Shannon Jackson makes a similar point
in relation to the different positioning of female and male
performance artists in the +gos: activities such as sweeping
or vacuuming performed as art by male artists including Allan
Kaprow, Steve Paxton, and Robert Dunn took on a distinctly
different meaning when performed by Jill Johnston, Lucinda
Childs, or Mierle Laderman Ukeles. See Jackson, Social Works:
Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, :o++), Sg.
g: Camera Obscura
:g. For detailed discussions of Daviss work, and the way in which
it intervenes in politics of embodiment and identity, see
Jos Esteban Muoz, Disidentifcations: Queers of Color and the
Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, +ggg), and Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics
of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, :oo6).
o. Diane Borsato, Three Performances (after Joseph Beuys,
Marina Abramovi c, and Bonnie Sherk), dianeborsato.net/
projects/three- performances- after- joseph- beuys- marina
- abramovic- and- bonnie- sherk/ (accessed April :o++).
+. Jones, Presence in Absentia, +6.
:. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley, vol. + (New York: Vintage, +ggo).
Adair Rounthwaite is a PhD candidate in art history at the
University of Minnesota, specializing in contemporary art. Her
articles have previously appeared in Representations (:o+o) and in the
Journal of Visual Culture (:ooS).
From This Body to Yours g
Diane Borsato, Three Performances (after Joseph Beuys,
Marina Abramovi c, and Bonnie Sherk) (:ooS), detail of
Bonnie Sherk reenactment. Diane Borsato.
Image courtesy of Diane Borsato