Body Art: The Body as Language

by Lea Vergine

The re-issue of Lea Vergine's groundbreaking text on Body Art, with a new introduction. When it appeared in 1974, it was the first book to witness the birth and growth of one of the most singular and controversial artistic manifestations of our century, Body Art. The book contains Lea Vergine's thoughtful insight on the "golden age" of the Body Art movement, the magic Seventies, and several writings by the artists themselves. Arisen and developed between the Sixties and the Seventies, Body Art embraces the artistic research that uses the body as "expressive material": the body is no longer interpreted and represented by art materials, but becomes itself actor and "material" of the work of art, subject and expressive instrument. Featuring a large documentation of films, videotapes, happenings, actions, performances, the book by Lea Vergine (an acclaimed contemporary art critic) analyses in clear, compelling terms, the evolution of this artistic phenomenon through the works of sixty artists, including Gina Pane, Gilbert & George, Ben Vautier, Giovanni Anselmo, Richard Serra, Franco Vaccari, expounders of Body Art who have worked for years with and on the body, as well as artists for whom the use of the body has been a key moment, but only sporadic of their career. 250 illustrations

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Lea Vergine (born Lea Buoncristiano) is an italian art critic and curator. She collaborates with some of the most influential newspapers like Il Manifesto and Il Corriere della Sera.
She wrote different essays on contemporary art and organised various exhibitions.

Reviews

[Ana Simona · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Emile Cioran reminds us, we can think of the mystic as a rebel-as a rebel by vocation--or as a daring combatant who is often heretical and paradoxical with respect to questions of faith, but forever unrivaled in the passion for self-inflicted torture.

Virtuosos of disorder and hungry for afflictions of any and every kind, mystic-like persons who display the subjection of their bodies to cruel and invasive devices, or who revel in virtual fantasies of such self-inflicted pains, destroy themselves in order newly to find themselves.

But mysticism has always found the body to lie at its point of origin. It is, first of all, a physical experience: a source of fluids, of blood, of humors, of various waters that flow, coagulate, and again grow liquid. The relationship with God-Christian, Hebrew, or Muslim-burns with fire and liquefies like wax. The soul cannibalizes the body in which it lives, sucks it in like breath, swallows it into its stomach, sates itself on its substance. Nothing is more physical than the practice of mysticism.

Lea Vergine