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Un-figuring the Body
A group exhibition organized by the CSULB Museum Studies Program

Un-figuring the Body presented the work of three Los Angeles-based performance artists, Skip Arnold, Dawn Kasper, and Johanna Went, whose practices challenge not only cultural boundaries but also the limits of the body itself. The exhibition focused on the return to the body as a tool, in order to question the demarcation between experience and representation, the gap between feeling and knowing. No longer the privileged site of authentic meaning, the body is seen as part of a complex cultural matrix. The artworks serve to examine the site of art, asking how the artist, their body, the object, or the viewer, gives art its meaning. Working in and around the preeminent foregrounding of representation during the 1990s, these artists also ask where does the body itself starts and stops. Through taping, branding, constraining, containing, or otherwise masking, Arnold, Kasper, and Went bridge the space between the art historical understanding of performance art and the influences of the Los Angeles counter-culture movements. Arnold, Kasper, and Went reflect the experimental nature of Los Angeles-based art in their amorphous exchange of form and image, never defining the body, but rather, un-figuring it. The exhibition included the video performance work of Skip Arnold, four live performances by Dawn Kasper, and the costumes, with accompanying video documentation, of Johanna Went.

Un-figuring the Body was organized for the University Art Museum by participants in the Graduate Program in Museum Studies and was funded by the Department of Art and the College of the Arts at California State University, Long Beach.

Image credit: Johanna Went, Geisha Forest, 2007, found kimono, found embroidery, doll hands, fabric, 75 x 30 x 20”, courtesy of the artist, photo courtesy of Albert Sanchez.