Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
David Nebreda's work presents current thinking on body/performance art with a dilemma. In stretching social prescriptions of the (re)presentable body, it exemplifies a pervasive anxiety concerning bodily modification and the politics of looking, and demands a new theorisation of the body in photographic representation. Autoportraits (2000) depicts a series of visibly emaciated bodies on which wounds are inflicted by knives, cords and flames [1]. The photographs document the strict schedules of "discipline" to which the bodies are subjected, and sometimes represent the very moment at which practices of bodily modification are executed. It is this subject-matter which threatens the domain of artistic representation with the "unspeakable": once-unthinkable images are afforded the lavish production values of art publisher Léo Scheer, and Nebreda's work is exhibited repeatedly in Paris in 1999 and 2000 [2]. Nebreda, then, joins that very small group of practitioners who have chosen to make their own physical suffering a key element of a project of visual representation, and the even smaller contingent for whom self-mutilation takes place in the course of that representation [3].
Repository Citation
Jones, David H.. "The Body Eclectic: Viewing Bodily Modification in David Nebreda." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 5, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1–17. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss1/3
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