The body as art / taking the body with you by Nitza Eshed
Dive In… The Outdoor Performance, 2017
Images from video Spacing in the womb, 2014
Before the emerging of body art as a practice or genre in the 1960’s, Its roots can be traced in phenomenology and practically to Maurice Merleau-Ponty last essay ‘ Eye and mind’, written before his premature demise in 1961. Merleau Ponty emphasised the importance of a conscious subjective experience while giving the example of visual art, mostly referencing painting showing an internalization and expression in art that surpass any other form of cultural products. Ponty demonstrates how the viewing and producing of an art work are far from static. There is no painting made solely from the mind or directed towards the mind but it is a physical process, involving the incorporation of the body as a source of perception, the body and consciousness intertwined in what he calls ‘the flesh of the world’.
In one of her powerful video works, Tal Eshed appears to be positioned in an embryo like posture. Her nody concaved as if it were amid a struggle or gathering within itself in a slow harmonious movement. The picture is flooded in a blueish saturated tint as the video is accompanied by rhythmic meditative music. In this work one can sense the essence of Eshed’s work, the use of her private body as a reoccurring motif, moving in flashes, sometimes alongside others, sometimes solitary, at times captured in movements and in other instances still and motionless.
It is the artist’s body Holding the fabric of the world or as Merleau writes ‘ It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into pictures… The body which is an intertwining of vision and movement’. Like in other works of Eshed, the body, her body is at the the centre of the frame. It is not facing us. In many of her works her face is concealed, shutting the possibility to identify herself as an ‘other’ and creating a presence which is both anonymous and highly intimate. The movement of the body, our participation and observance are engulfed and inseparable, connected by the same materials, by the understanding and experience of the body itself.
This self which is expressed in her performance pieces is the essence of her body of work. In her upcoming performance her body is motionless in a meditative state, appearing to be almost motionless, screaming its stillness, its precocious inner self. It meets the world through this state, particularly silent and courageously announcing its existence within the public sphere.
The vibrations and energy coming out of these performance pieces inevitably touch others. Creating a communal effect and directing it towards a higher consciousness while formulating a social understanding that this companionship through the perception of body invokes empathy and kindles an understanding of a wider moral obligation through the perception of self.
Empathy and solidarity derive from this understanding, rather then trying to strip the body down to a mechanism it is elevated and returns to its place as an inseparable part of its perception, of its being present in its materialised state, in the process of breathing and being, in its constant movement.
Ponty asserts ‘ In principle all my changes of place figure in a corner of my landscape, they are recorded in the map of the visible. Everything I see is in principle within my reach, or at least within the reach of my sight, and is marked upon the map of the’ I can’ .
In this statement the place of the artist is emphasised, being able to facilitate an encounter. Claiming that through the artwork there is a dual expression, a preceptory and a congenital intellectual aspect coexisting within the work. Moving and directing itself inwards and outwards. It is the most profound expression of the individual’s subjectivity and as a from of communication with the world through the eye – vision and through spirit.
The perceived reality through a collective of subjective individuals is intertwined within this process and the revealing of these dimensions. The body has an essential role in this process, being able to perceive, grasp and experience the world within the activity of perception, within its approach. Sharing this experience, through the body of the artist enables us to feel our own body in process and sparks empathy through the recognition of the other and the self. This process engulfs a moral imperative.
Eshed’s work resonates through her performances by using meditation, sound, and rituals. The participants, and bystanders all experience a form of collectiveness and unity, channelled in various changing ways in accordance to their specific encounter. She brings forth a form on ‘enlightenment’ through the realization and awareness of the spectators to their own body as a whole, both sensing and reacting. A part of a larger whole, a collective formed of bodies. Eshed performs a series of gestures, making her body and her existence plural. Art and morality are both a priori decisions, inventions that require participation and to a degree acceptance.
The artist is required to invent the terms of engagement, since there are no a priori aesthetic values, that is the sort of aesthetic Eshed proposes in her work, a creation that is inevitably subjected to change and metamorphosis as the surrounding and participants are unpredictable variables. She leads the spectators and participants through their doubt, incoherence and uncertainty towards what is hidden inside them, pointing out the expressions and revelations of stillness, of inhabiting a body and directing or suggesting a higher consciousness and understanding. She uses something a kin to the naturalistic constitutive phenomenology forming an ideal content ( noema ) or suggestion of a shared experience made possible by perception and awareness.
Sources :
Maurice Merleau-Ponty – ‘ Mind and Eye’
Ken Wilber – ‘A brief history of everything’
Jean Paul Sartre – ‘existentialism is a humanism’
Thomas H. Ogden – ‘ On not being able to dream’
© Artwork by Tal Eshed all rights reserved