Sacrificial Bodies: Body Art, Ritual and the Problem of Alienation

Abstract

Ritual has been an important influence on the development of performance art, such as the primitivism in the avant-garde performative practices of Dada and Surrealism, the Zen- influenced performances of Fluxus, and the transgressive performances of the Viennese Actionists and the 1970s body artists informed by psychoanalytic theory. However, more recent scholarship, such as that by Australian art historian Anne Marsh, has highlighted important differences between traditional ritual and performance art, as well as the problems of appropriating so-called "primitive" cultural practices. Nonetheless, comparisons with and allusions to ritual remain popular for artists and art critics. To what can we attribute the continued interest in ritual despite these criticisms? I propose that the problem of alienation has been the primary driver of the use of ritual in performance art and avant-garde performative practices, from Dada to the body art of the 1960s and ‘70s. In his seminal work Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999), US anthropologist Roy Rappaport attributed the problem of alienation to the development of consciousness and the acquisition of language, but argued that the experience of alienation could be ameliorated through participation in ritual. Rappaport’s understanding of alienation bears remarkable similarities to psychoanalytic theories of alienation, particularly those presented by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Although body art does not function as ritual, Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva has suggested that it may perform a similar alleviating function. By analysing contemporary body art works through anthropological perspectives on ritual and through the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan and Kristeva, I aim to clarify the relationship of body art to ritual and alienation, and to explore a number of ways that body art might address the problem of alienation.