Degree Date
2023
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
Abstract
Towards a Performative Migratory Aesthetics in Works by Womxn-Identifying Practitioners in the United States, 1970–2018 traces ritual—repeated performative actions across time—in performance, theater, and social practice works by womxn-identifying contemporary artists and collectives working in performance. Using an interdisciplinary methodological approach, including art historical formal analysis, performance studies concepts of embodiment, and decolonial theoretical analyses of socio-cultural landscapes, I theorize, in part through the work of Mieke Bal, what I term a “performative migratory aesthetics.” In such a theorization, I argue that the migratory conditions of movement, memory, heterochrony, and contact double as ritualized strategies of performance, serving to construct liminal identities in 1970s works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ana Mendieta, and Adrian Piper, which then persist and transform throughout the 1980s–2010s in performances by Urban Bush Women, Spiderwoman Theater, Tania Bruguera, and Tania El Khoury.
A burgeoning discourse concerning art about migration has emerged concurrently with the so-called 2010s “migration crisis;” however, this discourse focuses on representational art. The current discourse temporally and geographically locates the emergence of the contemporary “migration crisis” in Europe, rather than a factor within worldwide globalization, and rarely centers the gendered experiences of the immigrant global minority—womxn-identifying people. In contrast, my research begins with a theoretical matrix for a “performative migratory aesthetics” apart from the rhetoric of crisis that analyzes the linked migratory conditions and ontological performance properties of movement, memory, heterochrony, and contact. It is accompanied by four chapters of chronological associative case studies featuring migratory conditions doubling as ritualized strategies in performance art, theater, dance, video, and social practice emerging in the wake of the landmark U.S. legislation, the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, during the onset of increased global mobilities.
Citation
McLaughlin, Laurel V., "Towards a Performative Migratory Aesthetics of Work by Womxn-Identifying Practitioners in the United States, 1970–2018," Ph.D. Diss., Bryn Mawr College, 2023.