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The performer functions as an activator/ manipulator of the space and its objects, almost machine-like and as a completing particle of the installation metaphor. The changes in the space and the traces left are what describes the essence of life.
(Penelope Wehrli, New York 1986)
In medical terms, the alterability of the human body has never been easier to achieve than today, and in postmodern societies we have long since cast aside the religious taboo against altering the body. Thus we have lost the anthropological and anthropocentric signifier that the body used to be, and the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, among others, has seen the human body "disappear." Therefore, if we neither own our body nor control it, if our cultural identities, as humans, as ethnic groups, as gendered beings, are constantly in flux, the movement of the body in social spaces then becomes a central category, not only in the sciences, but also in the humanities, and especially in gender, performance, theatre, dance and literary studies.
At the same time, while the (living) human body has finally lost its integrity, the artist's body has become part of the artwork and thus part of public space. After the invention of the X-ray the Futurists no longer believed in the "opacity of bodies" (Boccioni et al. 150). In their first manifesto, they consequently put the "spectator in the centre of the picture" (151) by withdrawing the opaque line between their own bodies, the artwork and the viewer's perspective; and when the first human made it safely back from orbit, the French avant-gardist Yves Klein staged his body as a living sculpture (Un homme dans l'espace! Le peintre de l'espace se jette dans le vide!). More recent post-avant-garde body artists, such as the Australian body artist Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou), who extends his body as a cyborg-like media tool, have taken up the idea of performing the human body in and as political space, as in Stelarc's City Suspension performance in Copenhagen on 28 June 1985 when he connected hooks to his skin and was suspended over the Royal Theatre. Later Stelarc went even further and declared the human body (Leib, zoë) "obsolete." In the meantime transcultural and interdisciplinary figurations of the imagined body (Körper, bios) have...