Body and auto-communication in contemporary performance and participation art

Abstract

The article focuses on the social and physical body and communication in art and, more specifically, on the issue of auto-communication. The authors consider the body primarily from the standpoint of the performance art practice, where the body plays a central role as a material, object and means of expression. The article is also focused on the problem of boundaries, since analysis of this problem is a prerequisite for revealing the role of the body and determining the specifics of communication as such. Performance deals with both the physical and the social body, which makes performance auto-communication a vivid example of an intellectual game with the mechanism of constructing not only the physical body, but also the social one. We indicate in the course of our analysis that entering the information era chronologically coincides with the growth of the third-wave feminism which created a new semiotic system in performative communication. This fact, in turn, influenced the manifestation nature of such kind of narratives. It is obvious that the transparency of borders in the information era coupled with total control and self-control (which is quite natural for the same situation of “information transparency”) makes a person try to develop more and more new mechanisms of “escaping” and building clearly visible boundaries between himself and the environment — which is a natural form of the survival instinct realization. The protest nature of new art forms, especially those associated with the phenomenon of corporeality, also becomes quite natural. The authors come to the conclusion that translation of meaning in the communicative model of “I”—“I” inevitably transforms the speaker and makes him unequal to himself. Today the affective, bodily and psychological dimension