Language, visuality, and the body. On the return of discourse in contemporary performance

Abstract

This article deals with the return of discourse in experimental performance-based artistic practices. By putting this return in a historical perspective, we wish to address the questions it raises on the relation between language, image, and the body, resituating the avant-garde heritage in a contemporary context where intermediality and transdisciplinarity tend to become the norm rather than the exception. The discussion of the status and function of discourse in this context calls on the field of theatre and its ambivalent role in modern aesthetics, both as a specifically determined artistic discipline, and as a blending of heterogeneous elements, which defy the assigned limitations of creative practice. The confrontation of Antonin Artaud's writings with Michael Fried's conception of theatricality aims to bring to the fore the cultural transformations and historical paradoxes which inform the shift from theatre to performance as an experimental field situated ''between'' the arts and embracing a wide range of practices, from visual arts to music and dance. The case of lecture-performance enables us to call attention to the internal contradictions of the ''educational'' interpretation of such experimental practices and their autonomization inside the limits of a specific artistic genre. The main argument is that, despite the plurality of its origins and its claims to intermediality and transdisciplinarity, lectureperformance as a genre is attracted by or gravitates around the extended field of the visual arts. By focusing on the work of Jerôme Bel, Noé Soulier, Giuseppe Chico, Barbara Matijevic, and Carole Douillard, we stress some of the ways contemporary discursive strategies enable to displace visual spectacle toward a conception of the body as the limit of signification.