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Minding the matter of representation: Staging the body (politic)

During the autumn of 1995 and the spring of 1996, the London Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) programmed three seasons of radical performance, all of which shared a common emphasis on the role and representation of the human body in contemporary culture. The first of these seasons, Jezebel (9 September-7 October, 1995) consisted of a series of performances by international women artists and reflected the persistent emphasis within feminist critical practice on body politics, and in particular, issues relating to the (mis-) representation of sexual difference, gender and sexuality. The second season, Rapture: the body, ritual and sacred practice, (7 November-10 December, 1995) turned into what V. Vale and Andrea Juno (1989) have described as the subculture of Modern Primitivism the now widespread fashion of body ornamentation in the form of tattoos, piercing and scarring. Previously associated with so-called "primitive" rituals of endurance and a Foucauldian sado-masochistic gay underworld, such body art has become commonplace in the no longer so-distant, urban "tribal gatherings" of the 1990's Club and rave circuit. Focusing on the esoteric significance of the re-emergence of body art in a post-industrial, high-tec world, Rapture programmed a range of ritualistic and idiosyncratic performances, many of which foregrounded the relationship between pain and consciousness. Completing the trilogy, Totally Wired: Science, technology and the human form (16 April-13 May, 1996), considered the potential transmogrification of the human body and its functioning in the wake of recent developments in the technology of medical science and cybernetics, by exploring the transformative and performative possibilities such developments offer, and simultaneously raising ethical, political and social issues related to the interface between technological advance and the representation of the human body.