Skin Deep: Female Flesh in UK Live Art since 1999

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Notes

Adrian Heathfield, ‘Alive’, in Live: Art and Performance, ed. by Adrian Heathfield (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), pp. 7–13 (p. 11).

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, ‘Bodies for Sale – Whole or in Parts’, Commodifying Bodies, ed. by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant (London and New York: SAGE Publications, 2002), pp. 1–8 (p. 1).

Donna Dickenson, Property in the Body: Feminist Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 4.

Ibid., p. 3.

Rohan Hardcastle, Law and the Human Body: Property Rights, Ownership and Control (Oxford and Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2009), p. 32.

Ibid.

Dickenson, Property in the Body, p. 16.

Amelia Hill, ‘Our Lives Are About Alice – That's Why I Am Selling a Kidney’, Observer, 22 February 2004,  <www.guardian. co.uk/uk/2004/feb/22/health.healthandwellbeing> [accessed 25 August 2011].

Oliver Burkeman, ‘Anything Goes’, Guardian, 20 September 1999,  <www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/1999/sep/10/features11.g2?INTCMP=SRCH> [accessed 25 August 2011].

Alistair Campbell, The Body in Bioethics (London & New York: Routledge), p. 18.

Ibid., p. 15.

Ibid.

Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 19.

Dickenson, Property in the Body, p. 4.

Ibid., p. 25.

Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between the Self and the World, trans. by Thomas Dunlap (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 2. In terms of female artists working in the 1960s and 1970s who challenged representations of women, Gina Pane, Marina Abramović and Carolee Schneemann are key examples. See also: Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, The Artist's Body (London: Phaidon Press, 2000); Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Kathy O'Dell, Contract with the Skin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Marisa Carnesky, Carnesky Productions, <http://www.carnesky.com/productions.html>  [accessed 10 April 2011].

On the history and politics of the sideshow and circus, see: Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Michael M. Chemers, Staging Stigma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Ricky Jay, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (New York: Villard Books, 1986); Ricky Jay, Jay's Journal of Anomalies (New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2003).

The tattoo was created by Alex Binnie at Into You, London, funded by an Arts Council grant. Binnie's then-wife, Nicola Bowery (formerly the wife of Leigh Bowery) made the sequinned costume worn by Carnesky in her Whore of Babylon vignette in the same show. Thanks to Dominic Johnson for these extra notes.

Marisa Carnesky, Jewess Tattooess, performed at the ICA, London 1999.

D. Gareth Jones and Maja I. Whitaker, Speaking for the Dead: The Human Body in Biology and Medicine (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 36.

John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), Chapter 5, Article 26, <http://libertyonline.hypermall.com/Locke/second/second-frame.htm> [accessed 28 April 2011].

Dickenson, Property in the Body, p. 39.

Donna Dickenson, Property, Women and Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), p.6.

Dickenson, Property in the Body, p. 56.

Thanks to Dominic Johnson for drawing my attention to these provocative connections in Carnesky's later works.

Dickenson, Property in the Body, p. 19.

See Stuart Millar, ‘Organ Removal Scandal Widens’, Guardian, 6 December 1999, <www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/dec/06/stuartmillar?INTCMP=SRCH> [accessed 25 August 2011].

The legal and ethical complexities around organ acquisition and retention have a long and interesting history, and are suggested in Carnesky's The Quickening of the Wax, Chelsea Theatre, London, 2010. Here she explored the controversial legacy of Madame Tussaud, who was apparently called upon in the French Revolution to make death masks from guillotined heads, sent to her from the place of execution. See Marina Warner, ‘Anatomies and Heroes’, in Phantasmagoria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 31–44.

Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue Economies, p. 34.

Hardcastle, Law and the Human Body, p. 4.

See Dickenson, Property in the Body and Hardcastle, Law and the Human Body for extensive analyses of the current legal situation, its implications and potential remedies.

Jennifer Willet, ‘Bodies in Biotechnology: Embodies Models for Understanding Biotechnology in Contemporary Art’, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 14 (2006), 1–8 (p. 2).

Ibid., p. 4.

See Rachel Zerihan, ‘Revisiting Catharsis in Contemporary Live Art Practice: Kira O'Reilly's Evocative Skin Works’, Theatre Research International 35 (Spring 2010), 32–42. See also J. L. Turk and Elizabeth Allen, ‘Bleeding and Cupping’, in Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 65 (Spring 1983), 128–31 for an extended examination of these practices in medical history.

Kira O'Reilly, unpublished correspondence with the author, 26 September 2011. Thanks to O'Reilly for her notes and thoughts on this essay.

SymbioticA, <http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au> [accessed 3 April 2011]. O'Reilly, unpublished correspondence with the author.

Kira O'Reilly, ‘Marsyas – Beside Myself’, in Sk-interfaces, ed. by Jens Hauser (Liverpool: FACT and Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp. 96–101 (p. 97).

For further details about the process of tissue culturing, see Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, ‘The Tissue Culture and Art Project: The Semi-Living as Agents of Irony’, in Performance and Technology, ed. by Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 153–68; and Adele Senior, ‘In the Face of the Victim: Confronting the Other in the Tissue Culture and Art Project’, in Sk-interfaces, pp. 76–83.

O'Reilly, ‘Marsyas’, p. 97. Emphasis in original.

O'Reilly has also performed other works with pigs, such as Falling Asleep with a Pig (Arts Catalyst/A Foundation, London, 2009). See Bryndís Snaebjörnsdottir and Mark Wilson, ‘Falling Asleep with a Pig (Interview with Kira O'Reilly)’, Antennae 12 (Spring 2010), 38–48.

O'Reilly, ‘Marsyas’, p. 101.

O'Reilly notes that ‘the pigs’ bodies were ‘always [obtained] fresh from an abattoir, and, therefore, with their innards removed’. This creates a ‘huge and open cavity’, which many ‘participants chose to investigate’. O'Reilly, unpublished correspondence with the author, 26 September 2011.

O'Reilly, ‘Marsyas’, p. 97.

Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, ‘Pig Bodies and Vegetative States: Diagnosing the Symptoms of a Culture of Excess’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 18 (2008), 133–51 (p. 145).

O'Reilly, ‘Marsyas’, p. 99.

Ibid., p. 98.

Dickenson, Property in the Body, p. 18.

Ibid., p. 8. Gene patents can be obtained for specific, isolated gene sequences, for the chemical composition of a genetic sequence or for the processes of extraction of a gene. Biobanking refers to any archive of biological specimens used for research and experimentation. The UK established its first biobank in 2007.

Ibid.

Willet, ‘Bodies in Biotechnology’, p. 6.

Dickenson, Property in the Body, p. 56.

Alok Jha, ‘First British Human–Animal Hybrid Embryos Created by Scientists’, Guardian, 2 April 2008, <www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/apr/02/medicalresearch.ethicsofscience> [accessed 25 August 2011].

Benthien, Skin, p. 86.

Ibid., p. 89.

Dickenson, Property in the Body, p. 180.

Much work on the subject of female agency and subjectivity in relation to biomedical practices and ethics focuses solely on ORLAN, providing a wide range of analysis but which neglects other female artists whose work is relevant and vital to the debate. See ORLAN: A Hybrid Body of Art Works, ed. by Simon Donger and Simon Shepherd with ORLAN (London and New York: Routledge, 2010).