Convener:
Andrew Stephenson (University of East London)

Critical writing since the 1960s has acknowledged a shift towards a performative conception of artistic subjectivity as well as asking how issues related to performance and the performative have revised any understanding of the dynamics of artistic production and consumption.

In broad terms, the subject of performance has engaged with those contextualised rituals, pageants and tableaux vivants that provide the theatricalised space within which the art work was sited. Papers will investigate the ways in which these stagings and environments informed the spectacular nature of this encounter and provided varied viewing practices and sites for the activity of looking. They will also examine the roles that social rituals and institutional framings played in endorsing the cultural prestige of the art work and in validating certain modes of viewing.

On another level, the session offers historical and theoretical reassessments of body-orientated art practices (including performance art, video and photography) that questioned formalist frameworks and challenged modernism's exclusions and phallocentrism. The sexual politics of embodiment and body art as part of a wider feminist enquiry, and how performance art offered a means of interrogating body codings, will also be considered. Beyond this, speakers also explore the theoretical issues that underpin the notion of 'performativity' in contemporary critical writing, and investigate its potential to question the operations and constraints of discourse and its effects in the artistic field.

• Fionna Barber (Manchester Metropolitan University): De Kooning's Women and the Performance of Femininity
• Gavin Butt (Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design): Larry Rivers: The Greatest Homosexual?
• Gabriele Griffin (Leeds Metropolitan University): Mind and Matter: The Body in Women's Performance
• Michael Hatt (Birkbeck College): 'We Will Burn Him': Race, Ritual and Responsibility in the New South
• Peter Horne (University of East London): Fops, Favourites and Faggots: Homosociality and Homosexuality in Representations of Edward II
• Amelia Jones (University of California, Riverside): Dispersed Subjects and the Demise of the 'Individual': 1990s Bodies in/as Art
• Karen Lang (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena): Kantian Performativity in Art History
• Reina Lewis (University of East London): 'Looking Good': The Lesbian Gaze and Fashion Imagery
• Joanna Lowry (Kent Institute of Art and Design): Performing Vision in the Theatre of the Gaze: the Work of Douglas Gordon
• Melissa McQuillan (Wimbledon School of Art, London): Pablo goes to the Ball: Performance, Play and Diversion in the early 1920s
• Brandon Taylor (Winchester School of Art): Walking a Line in England
• Philip Ursprung (Zurich): 'Catholic Tastes': Hurting and Healing the Body in Viennese Actionism in the 1960s

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