Dressaged Animality (e-book) (used book) | Lisa Moravec | bookbook.eu

Description

The book applies a productive interdisciplinary lens of art history, performance and animal studies for approaching political economy issues, critiquing anthropomorphic worldviews, and provoking thoughts around animal and human nature that spark impulses for an innovative performance aesthetics and ethics.

It combines Marxist analysis and posthumanist methodology to analyse the relation between "societal dressage" and "bodily animality" that humans and animals share, and develops the concept of "dressaged animality" as a mode of artistic critique to analyse the social and political function as well as interdisciplinary forms of "contemporary performances". Drawing on archival and primary research, the book theorizes and historicizes twelve underexplored contemporary performances in which animality is allegorically staged through by humans danced, real, or filmically mediated animals. It focuses on Rose English's experimental approach to performance-making as well as on performances by other renown and largely unknown American (Mike Kelley/Kate Foley, Robert Morris, Bruce Naumann, Yvonne Rainer, Diana Thater), British (Mark Wallinger, Rose English), and European artists (Tamara Grcic, Judith Hopf, Joseph Beuys, Bartabas) from the late 1960s until the late 2010s. While various types of artistic practice are framed as forms of critique (for example protest art, interventionist strategies, institutional critique), the book maps an original performance theory which shows that contemporary artistic performances can also take up a critique of societal dressage.

This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies and ecology.