Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The problem of the archive is a problem of lost gestures. The idea of the ephemeral body has shaped the development of performance and archival studies since the 1960s, when Richard Schechner described the theater as a transient medium that has "no original artwork at all" [2] and Marcia B. Siegel wrote that dance "exists at a perpetual vanishing point [. . .] it is an event that disappears in the very act of materializing" [3]. Even as archivists constantly innovate methods for preserving the gestures of performance art and embodied experience, the shift toward digitization means that, as well as the gestures of the dancer or actor, the very process of accessing the archive loses something of its tactile, gestural quality. Now, gloved hands carefully turn manuscript pages far less often than arrow-key-clicks move digitized pages across screens. Although gesture is not removed entirely from the process of reading or archival research, the movements have become smaller and less tactile, reduced by the screen's separating presence, and the intimacy and embodiment with which we interact with texts is mitigated. Gesture, broadly defined here as any real or imagined representation of the moving body, provides a unique point of access for renewing the intimacy between reader and text. It facilitates unique incarnations of intersubjective experience, embodied memory, and performative interactions with artworks. Detailed attention to movement provides a point of critical focus not only for considering ephemerality in performance arts and archives, but also for reclaiming the gestural intimacy with which we relate to diverse pieces of art as readers and critics. This focus on expressive body movement extends out of and around art works—we might consider gesture as represented in literary, performance, and visual art forms, but equally or perhaps more important are the gestures of creating that preceded the work, ways that gesture operates as a theoretical axiom underlying a piece of art, and the gestures required for accessing, reading, or archiving a finished work. Gestures are expressive body movements that tangibly represent the body's way of being in space, in the world, and in relation to other beings. They are involved in every aspect of human intimacy—from interactions between infant and caretaker, to sexual rhythms, to gestures of the deathbed—as well as being integral to ceremonial rites and rituals across cultures. Yet, as well as existing in the present moment, gestures are cross-temporal sites of bodily memory—as in Richard Schechner's canonical performance studies postulation that performance is "twice-behaved" behavior—and thus construct within the moving body an archive of past events and a space for somatic reenactment [4].
Repository Citation
Benke, Lauren. "Gesture, Intimacy, and Violence in Contemporary Artists’ Books." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–19. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol16/iss1/10