Reviewed by: The Explicit Body in Performance Gabrielle Cody The Explicit Body in Performance. By Rebecca Schneider. London: Routledge, 1997; pp. x + 237. $18.95 paper. Rebecca Schneider has written a compelling and useful study of what she terms feminist “explicit body performance.” The crux of her argument is that such explicitness, or “explosive literality,” is the means of a cultural criticism that “explicates bodies in social relations” (2). The Explicit Body in Performance charts how commodity capitalism has shaped representational structures of desire, and how explicit body artists expose the power relations of culturally sanctioned perspectivalism. In Schneider’s own words, “[t]he performers in this study use their bodies as the stages across which they re-enact social dramas and traumas that have arbitrated cultural differenciations between truth and illusion, reality and dream, fact and fantasy, natural and unnatural, essential and constructed” (6–7). Schneider has researched thirty years of feminist explicit body performance, from its early manifestations in the late 1960s and 1970s in the work of artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Shigeko Kubota and Suzanne Lacy, to more recent work by Veronica Vera, Annie Sprinkle, Cindy Sherman, Karen Finley, Ann Magnuson, Sandra Bernhard, Spiderwomen, and Robbie McCauley, among others. For Schneider, the significance of these performers is that they “speak-back” to the cultural viewing authorities that have legislated “appropriate” bodies throughout Western history. The value of their work, therefore, lies not only in its explicitness, but also in its bold exposure of “who determines the explication of that explicitness” (2). Schneider’s study is framed by an astute reading of modernism’s ostensible break with the “appropriate” body. In particular, she is interested in how these artists subvert the ambiguous position of the prostitute (a figure viewed by Walter Benjamin as a “fissure” in the signifying system of early capitalism, since she is at once commodity and seller), and in how they challenge notions of primitivism adopted by the historical avant-garde in order to collapse perspectivalism and reinscribe the feminine. In six chapters informed by a rigorous combination of Lacanian, poststructuralist, and materialist readings, Schneider demonstrates how perspectivalism and commodity capitalism have worked in tandem to position “the emblematic female body in a particular relation to impossibility” by placing her “always beyond reach, symbolizing that which can never quite be acquired” (5) and pushing this female figure into a vanishing point that deprives her of sight, and reciprocity. Schneider’s premise is that the event of perspectival representation is gendered, empowering the unseen male watcher. (This premise may be usefully compared to Peggy Phelan’s in her Unmarked: The Politics of Performance.) Each chapter explores the particular strategies of explicit body performers in challenging “the constructed ‘savagery’ of the body marked for race and gender” (176) by a masculine symbolic. The socio-historical mark of the explicit and self-framed body is the subject of Schneider’s first two chapters. In “Binary Terror and the Body Made Explicit” Schneider cogently illuminates the links between commodities and women in modernist art. Schneider contrasts Manet’s, Courbet’s and Duchamp’s fantasy prostitutes and vanishing vulvas—objects of fascination and horror—with the self-possessed prostitution of “post-porn modernists” such as Veronica Vera and Annie Sprinkle, whose 1980s creations terrorized the comfortable binary opposition between art and pornography. Similarly, Schneider argues that negative reception of Schneemann’s work by the art and critical establishments during the 1970s was not due to “the body displayed,” but rather “the authority of the agent” (35). As Schneider notes, Schneemann’s controversial Eye/Body “suggested embodied vision, a bodily eye—sighted eyes—artist’s eyes—not only in the seer, but in the body of the seen” (35). In “Logic of the Twister, Eye of the Storm,” Schneider deepens her critique of perspectivalism through a highly evocative personal chronicle of [End Page 543] the meaning of her own spectatorship and subjecthood in viewing Schneemann and Sprinkle’s self-exposed bodies. The scope of Schneider’s reflection is vast; it speaks to the complexity of the over-determined institutional frame that has frustrated subject formation and scopic reciprocity and rendered the female subject invisible to herself. But Sprinkle too, as...