Description

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Shortlisted for the 2020 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize​
Winner of the 2019 Art Journal Prize from the College Art Association

What is the role of pleasure and pain in the politics of art? In Touched Bodies, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra approaches this question as she examines the flourishing of live and intermedial performance in Latin America during times of authoritarianism and its significance during transitions to democracy. Based on original documents and innovative readings, her book brings politics and ethics to the discussion of artistic developments during the “long 1980s”. She describes the rise of performance art in the context of feminism, HIV-activism, and human right movements, taking a close look at the work of Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita from Chile, León Ferrari and Liliana Maresca from Argentina, and Marcos Kurtycz, the No Grupo art collective, and Proceso Pentágono from Mexico. The comparative study of the work of these artists attests to a performative turn in Latin American art during the 1980s that, like photography and film before, recast the artistic field as a whole, changing the ways in which we perceive art and understand its role in society.

About the Author

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Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra is a lecturer in contemporary art at Birkbeck, University of London in the United Kingdom. She is coeditor of Sabotage Art: Politics and Iconoclasm in Contemporary Latin America.

Praise For…

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“An astute and moving book, Touched Bodies gives account of the transition from an aesthetics of representation to an aesthetics of embodiment and bodily vulnerability in Latin American art of the 1980s. A contribution to aesthetic theory as much as to the history of art, Touched Bodies extends our understanding of performance-based art in relationship to practices of vulnerability, dissensus, and cross-temporal performativity.”
— Rebecca Schneider

"Mara Polgovsky makes an outstanding contribution to the re-evaluation of the performative turn in adversarial art from 1970s and 1980s Latin America, expanding the genealogy of conceptualism and recalibrating the spectrum of body-centered practice. The originality of her approach provides unparalleled insights into the complex interaction between corporeality, political activism and the body as site of desire and vulnerability."
 
— Erica Segre

"Polgovsky’s book, which has already been shortlisted by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present for its 2020 Book Prize, brings to an international audience a series of artists who have broken the mould of Latin America’s default posture of political protest and produced works which sometimes condense the cry of despair in its barest expression by breaking down the gulf between their bodies and their work. She has brought to the project a remarkable combination of philosophical erudition and descriptive skill, plus the unstoppable curiosity of the best researchers. The book marks a turning point."
— Journal of Latin American Studies

“An astute and moving book, Touched Bodies gives account of the transition from an aesthetics of representation to an aesthetics of embodiment and bodily vulnerability in Latin American art of the 1980s. A contribution to aesthetic theory as much as to the history of art, Touched Bodies extends our understanding of performance-based art in relationship to practices of vulnerability, dissensus, and cross-temporal performativity.”
— Rebecca Schneider

"Mara Polgovsky makes an outstanding contribution to the re-evaluation of the performative turn in adversarial art from 1970s and 1980s Latin America, expanding the genealogy of conceptualism and recalibrating the spectrum of body-centered practice. The originality of her approach provides unparalleled insights into the complex interaction between corporeality, political activism and the body as site of desire and vulnerability."
 
— Erica Segre

"Polgovsky’s book, which has already been shortlisted by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present for its 2020 Book Prize, brings to an international audience a series of artists who have broken the mould of Latin America’s default posture of political protest and produced works which sometimes condense the cry of despair in its barest expression by breaking down the gulf between their bodies and their work. She has brought to the project a remarkable combination of philosophical erudition and descriptive skill, plus the unstoppable curiosity of the best researchers. The book marks a turning point."
— Journal of Latin American Studies