Diane Borsato, Three Performances (afterJoseph Beuys,

Marina Abramovir, and Bonnie Sherk) (2008).

three-channel digital video installation. Details

of Joseph Beuys reenactment. Diane Borsato.
hnage courtesy of Diane Borsato

From This Body to Yours:

Porn, Affect, and Performance
Art Documentation
Adair Rounthwaite

When I think about you, I touch myself.

The Divinyls
In its photography-based forms, pornography might be provisionally defined as the documentation of a performance coded as sexually explicit. Pornography, like performance art documentation
images, is defined by the specific way it positions itself iti relation
to its profilmic event, which it codes in retrospect as real. Porn is
a form of performance documentation that is designed to create
a new performanceof a sexual sensation, and often of masturbation, accompanied by orgasmin the viewer. In this article I
will argue that in its relationship to affect, there is no essential
difference between pornography as document atid the documentation of performance art. Moreover, I suggest that considering
porn's production of affect can shed light on the tvirn toward performance reenacttrient that has taken place in performance art
of the past decade. Thinking about porn from this perspective
Camera Obscura 78, Volume 26, Number 3
DOI 10.1215/02705346-1415434 2011 hy Camera Obscura
Published by Duke Llniversity Press
63

64 Camera Obscura

can remap its place in feminist academic discourse, shifting away

from questions of censorship, freedom of expression, and identity
that were debated extensively during the "sex wars" of the 1980s,
toward a consideration of how porn records and produces affect.
Many of the questions that have been asked of porn deal with its
character as sexually explicit, and thus its difference from other
forms of cultural production, instead of with the structures of
reception germane to itor, in other words, how it makes people
feelwhich might bring out its connections with other forms.
Pornography as a performance document not only records
a past performance but also projects forward toward a future performance in the form of the new bodily pleasure it will generate.
Porn needs a certain kind of affect: without the ability to generate
erotic pleasure, it is ftindamentally unsuccessful. Porn shows imagery coded as erotic, often including images of orgasm happening
to a body, with the goal of making erotic sensation happen again,
elsewhere, to another body. This has long been the goal of porn,
btit it was not originally the goal of performance art documentation, which from the period of the 1960s to the 1990s was largely
understood as a record of a unique event and not as an invitation
to imitate the performer's actions. This has changed in the past
decade, with a wave of artists' reenactments (if past performances,
including Marina Abramovic's now-iconic Seven Easy Pieces of 2005.
These reenacted performances are accompanied by a growing
scholarly interest within art history and performance studies in
the question of performance repetition and reenactment and in
the ways in which each affects understandings of the ontology of
performance.' Images originally understood as performance doctitiients or records have become performance "scripts" or "scores,"
inviting new kinds of engagement from artists and calling into
question the function of performance documentation as a category. The way that porn as document gives rise to new affect is
thus relevant to the analysis of other practices and pleasures that
are not explicitly erotic.
The masturbatory mode of reception germane to porn has
wider relevance for contemporary cultural production and viewing.

From This Body to Yours 65

Through readings of the work of porn-star-turned-performanceartist Annie Sprinkle (b. Ellen Steinberg) and the younger Canadian artist Diane Borsato, I will explore how looking with pleasure
at porn can help us understand the peculiar mechanics of the
performance documentation image, as well as the desire on the
part of contemporary artists to make these images live again. What
is the relationship between the performance reenactment and the
document of a past performance artwork? And what is the specific
cartography of pleasure associated with reenactment from documentation? In Sprinkle's 1981 film Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle (US),
masturbation appears as an activity in which the phenomenon of
spectatorship and the performance of pleasure become blurred.
Similarly, in performance reenactment, viewers of the documentation of past performance become performers themselves, creating
a constellation between document and body in which the document, originally a recording of a past event, incites the production
of new, live affects.
Sprinkle and Borsato are feminist practitioners whose performances may superficially seem to have little in common. Sprinkle began her career in the mainstream porn industry in the mid1970s, gradually transitioning to directing her own films, such as
Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle. In the 1990s, Sprinkle tnoved increasingly
toward creating films, performances, and publications that were
explicitly feminist and that engaged in a playful and experimental
way with women's, queer, and transgender sexuality. These works
include various self-help-style videos, such as Annie Sprinkle's Amazing World of Orgasm (US, 2004) and The Sluts and Goddesses Video

Wcrrkshop (US, 1992), in which Sprinkle appears as an experienced

"sexpert," encouraging viewers to explore various elements of their
own fantasies.
Toronto-based artist Borsato, who has shown in Canada
and internationally since the late 1990s, produces work primarily
in the form of social process interventions involving herself and
delegated performers. I will focus here on Borsato's three-channel
video installation from 2008 titled Three Performances (after Joseph
Beuys, Marina Abramovic, and Bonnie Sherk) in which the artist is

66 . Camera Obscura

filmed reenacting three iconic performance artworks in her home,

witb ber cat. Altbougb Borsato's video, unlike Sprinkle's performance, is not explicitly sexual, I will argue tbat botb produce or
respond to tbe performance documentation image as sometbing
tbat provokes a certain masturbatory logic. Tbis logic revolves
around self-pleasure and tbe plenitude of affect and performs
a disintegration of tbe oppositions tinique/repeated, present/
absent, and staged/real. Performance tbeorist Rebecca Scbneider
is interested in "body-to-body transmission" and other types of corporeal knowledge communication that let performance "remain
differently" in tbe body.'-^ Tbrougb reading Sprinkle's and Bor.sato's
"masttn-batory" performances, I will explore not only body-to-body
transmission of affect btit tbe specific corporeal effects born of
image-to-body transmission.'^ Tbese forms of transmission are key
to tbe reception of pornograpby. Tbe transmission of performance
from one body to anotber also carries a political cbarge, wbich I
will investigate through a discussion of tbe role of bodily normativity in tbe performances of Borsato and Sprinkle as well as tbose of
Abramovic.
Drawing on Barucb Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, I use tbe
term affect bere in tbe sense of a cbange in a body's power of acting, tbe ways in wbicb it can act on or be acted on by anotber
body.'' Affective cbanges involve alterations to tbe body's capacity
to experience certain states or sensations. In What Is Philosophy?
Deleuze and Flix Guattari write tbat affects "are no longer feelings
or affections; tbey go beyond tbe strengtb of tbose wbo undergo
tbem.'"^ My focus, tberefore, is not only on individtial experience
or sensation but also on bow sensation is created by tbe movement
of transformative currents among bodies across tbe meditim of
tbe pbotograpbic documentation image. In tbis exploration, tbe
document will abandon its role as a trace of a past moment tbat
preserves, commtmicates, or deconstructs that moment, and will
instead become an affective vector between bodies tbat gives rise
to new connections and pleasures.

From This Body to Yours 67

Still from Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle (dir. Annie Sprinkle.

US. 1981). Distribpix/Video X Pix. Image courtesy of
Annie Sprinkle and Distribpix/Video X Pix

Experiencing the (Erotic) Document

It was not until the early 1990s that Annie Sprinkle became widely
recognized as having transitioned from the mainstream porn
industry to a feminist performance practice that combined live
shows, writings on sexuality, and instructional videos. However,
Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, the first film that Sprinkle both starred
in and directed, already contains many of the elements that were
to become hallmarks of her later performance practice. These
elements include an autobiographical emphasisshe shows the
viewer real photographs of her childhood at the beginning of the
film, for exampleand the importance of women's self-pleasure.
Deep Inside, in contrast to Sprinkle's videos from the 1990s onward,
was still marketed to a mainstream porn audience, and very successfully so: it became the second-largest-grossing porn film of
1981. The masturbatory logic cultivated in Sprinkle's practice,
which I argue characterizes performance documentation more
widely, can be seen in a masturbation scene in Deep Inside that is
over six minutes long. In this scene. Sprinkle lies on a bed with a
royal blue bedspread, wearing silver heels, thigh-highs, black pant-

68 . Camera Obscura
es, and a silver corset. Reclined with her head on a pillow and her
exposed vagina facing the viewer, she brings herself to multiple
orgasms using an electric vibrator.
In her later autobiographical film Herstory of Pom: Reel to
Real (US, 1999), Sprinkle focuses extensively on Deep Lnside and
specifies the importance of the masturbation scene: "Now in this
scene, I wanted to show a REAL woman's orgasm. You know, a lot
of people, including most porn directors, they didti't believe that
women really had real orgasms. And if they did, well, they weren't
itnportant anyway. But now I was directing, I wanted to show a real
orgasm." In Sprinkle's comments, the idea of realness is positioned
as a challenge to masculinist porn production practices that negate
women's pleasure. Throughout the scene. Sprinkle constantly
addresses the viewer, inciting her or him to pleasure in a way that
explicitly eroticizes the technological mediation of the film that
connects her orgasm to the viewer's projected orgasm:
I like to spread my legs for you ... Do you like to look at my thighs and
my pussy?. . . Would you like to .see it? I'll show it to you ... I can feel
your eyes all over it. I can feel your eyes on it, and it feels so good having
you watch me like this ... Why don't you just tingle yourself like this with
me. I want you to become very very clooose. 1 want you with me. I want
you getting hot with me ... Tickle my asshole. Tickle my asshole and
stick myfingerin it. Oh, I love doing this for you ... I want you to get off
with me ... Oh, I wish you were going to fuck me. Btit nooooo, I just like
having you watch.
In this monologue. Sprinkle gets off noisily to the idea of "you,"
the projected viewer. It is not the specific characteristics of "you"
that Sprinkle says she finds erotic but the negation of the viewer's specificity into an empty and general viewing posidon, made
possible by the fact that this is an image document and not a live
event. You, the desired affective receiver of Sprinkle's performance, are structurally unknown to her, and the other bodily
sites in which her performance has been received are unknown
to you. Working with the specificity of the filmic medium in her
mode of addressing the viewer. Sprinkle positions her approach in

From This Body to Yours . 69

opposition to mainstream discourses that see the activity of viewing porn as inferior or secondary to having real sex. As Eugenie
Brinkema notes about John Stagliano's The Adventures ofButtman
(US, 1989), a film in which a man masturbates to televised footage of a scene to which he appeared indifferent when viewing it
live, porn involves the eroticization of the process of framing and
mediation itself'
In the masturbation scene from Deep Inside, Sprinkle
appears to take pleasure in the disintegration of the boundary
between what she does to herself, and what the gaze of the camera
does to her. This can be seen in the line "tickle my asshole and stick
my finger in it," where there is a slide between what sounds like an
order to the viewer, and an action that we see Sprinkle undertake
herself Annie wants you as the viewer to get off with her: she wants
to create a performance in which the document will allow a transfer of pleasurable affect between her body and yours. She wants
your activity of looking to be a masturbatory one, one not only
accompanied by literal masttirbation but also taking pleasure in
the doctiment in and of itself, making the document live again by
creating affect in your body. Your body becomes an affected prosthesis of the document, a document that aims to recreate affect in
multiple, temporally and spatially scattered bodily sites. The performance becomes history, but the document, which preserves a
trace ofthat history, keeps producing affects in which another body
undergoes a similar performance. In Deep Inside, masturbation is
something that unites looking and experiencing and draws closer
together the roles of the performer and the viewer.
The ways in which Deep Inside as document can create new
clusters of affect are indissociable from the different modes of production and distribution of the moving image the film has gone
through since its creation. In one scene. Sprinkle enters a movie
theater in which a film of hers is playing and proceeds to have sex
with a number of the men watching the film. Notably, there are no
women in the theater. This scene stages the locale of reception as a
crossover between document and live erotic experience on the part
of the viewer. That crossover is one I achieve differently, less publicly, by downloading Deep Inside and watching it on my MacBook.

7O . Camera Obscura

It is changes in the dissemination of porn, notjust changes in social

attitudes and production styles, that have made porn more accessible to women. Deep Inside's travel between various technologies
of the moving image from 1981 to 2011 opens it to new affective
potential that could not have been anticipated by Sprinkle at the
time of its creation.
Sprinkle's model of the performance document as a vector
of affective transfer between bodies, which enables a plentitude of
pleastire instead of being located on the side of distancing or loss,
differs in emphasis from a number of current theoretical models
of performance documentation. One of the best articulated theorizations of the performance document's status is developed by
Amelia Jones in her article " 'Presence' in Absentia: Experiencing
Performance as Documentation," in which she writes that performance, whether live or documented, cannot provide the viewer
with tmproblematized access to the artist's experience or subjectivity. Jones argues, and Sprinkle might agree, that documentation
is fundamentally intersubjective, instead of being a transparent
record that furnishes proof of the event. For Jones, it is specifically the uneasy relationship of the perfortnative body/subject to
documentation that most strongly challenges the fixed modernist
subject and "the masculinism, racism, colonialism, classism, and
heterosexism built into this fantasy."' In other words, body art's
stibversive potential lies in its relationship to documentation, not
in the supposedly raw live event. Jones stresses the body's supplementarity, its lack of plentitude and dependence on context and
various types of authority. For Jones, that supplementarity and the
documentary traces that record performance but fail to make it
present again are the condition of possibility of performance.**
In Jones's largely celebratory readings of feminist performance in " 'Presence' in Absentia," her description of watching
Sprinkle bring herself to a twenty-minute orgasm on stage during
"Sex Magic Masturbation Ritual," part of the performance PostPost-Pom Modernist (performed 1990-93), emerges as an important moment. This is the only performance Jones has seen live of
all those that she addresses in her article.

From This Body to Yours . 71

"My first reaction on seeing tbis elaborately orchestrated

performance o jouissance," ]ones writes, "was to assert to my partner tbat sbe was faking it. My secondary response was to wonder
wby I needed to tbink tbat sbe was faking it. As Cbris Straayer
puts it, 'Whether Annie Sprinkle is acting (and/) or experiencing
orgasms in her performances cannot be determined by us' and, I
would add, tbis is tbe case whether we view the performance live or
not."-'Jones is qtiick to reassert ber point tbat seeing a performance
live is not better tban viewing its documentation. However, tbis
description of a live performance is tbe only place in the article
wbere tbe fragile, fertile gap between wbat Jones depicts as ber
own culturally made subjectivity, evidenced by ber initial reaction
to tbe orgasm, and tbe rational feminist subject sbe performs in
tbe rest of the essay, one who reserves judgment about Sprinkle's
subjectivity, is opened up and put on display to ber readers. Jones
writes berself bere as asking bistoriograpbic questions of Sprinkle's
performance and tbe evidence it provides to tbe performance historian: Is it real? Is it true? Does the exterior evidence match the
depth of interior experience?
Tbese questions are raised tbrougb a process of Jones
reflecting on an embodied situation from the past: she was sitting
in tbe tbeater, seeing tbe performance, and sbe turned or leaned
in toward ber partner and said, "Sbe's faking it." Sucb reflexivity
about one's own embodied process of gaining knowledge is not by
any means limited to viewing performance live, but tbe process
bas substantial, tbough not essential, differences from viewing performance documentary. Viewing live performance is sometbing
usually done in a group, in a social situation in wbicb tbe stibject
is aware of tbe presence of otbers, at least to some degree. I say "to
some degree" bere because I do not want to suggest that viewing
live performance is a situation of total immersion, btit ratber to
note its difference in terms of social intensity from many experiences of viewing performance documentation. For me there is a
degree of tension, of slight expectation, in sucb sittiations tbat is
not present wben I am at bome, alone, looking at images in a book
or on my computer. In a social situation, I am immersed in tbe ten-

72 Camera Obscura

sion or excitement of the group dynamic, and I think differently,

less reflectively, than I am able to do after that moment and configuration of bodies have passed and I have had time and physical
space to think things over.
In the reflective time-space of writing after viewing Sprinkle's performance, Jones is productively able to problematize her
role as a historian, one who falls into and then climbs out of normative modes ofjudging women's bodily experience, and who makes a
problematic evidentiary statement and then turns it into a question
t hat bounces back on herself. That space is one that can be opened
to accommodate a greater attention to all embodied practices of
experiencing performance, both live and through documentation,
on the part of both artists and other spectators.'" Sprinkle's work
itself provides my model for creating that opening, performing
like the spectiltim she uses to open her vaginal canal to viewers
during "The Public Cervix Announcement," another segment of
Post-Post-Pom Modernist.

Much existing scholarship on Sprinkle focuses on issues

of (dis)identification, specifically that of the female, feminist academic with Sprinkle's identity-in-perforniance, and on the way in
which she performs the category of "woman." Graldine Harris,
writing on Post-Post-Pom Modernist, foregrounds her own viewing
experience of the live event and, interestingly, discusses an experience very similar to Jones's of the final orgasm. Harris also debates
whether the orgasm is real, and also writes about that moment of
debate self-reflexively to question her own relation to the performance." Linda Williams argties that in accepting but not totally
identifying with her cultural hailing as "whore," Sprinkle creates
a space for her own agency. For Williams, Sprinkle's subversive
repetitions consist in an ever-widening range of sexual acts that
expand ideas of sexual performance and allow her to expand her
own desire, often by reworking male porn conventions, namely
the cum shot.'^
Rebecca Schneider argues that Sprinkle presents her body
as a "dialectical image." "Sprinkle's work became, for me," Schneider writes, "problematically emblematic of the tense stand-off
between the literal, material body and her complex ghosting, the

From This Body lo Yours 73

symbolic body of 'woman.'"''Through coming to know Sprinkle

personally and discussing Sprinkle's performance with the artist
herself, Schneider's initial anxiety about objectifying Sprinkle by
speaking for her came to be replaced by a more implicated viewing
position, in which she realized the extent of her own seduction by
desires she had cast as other. Schneider comes to view the distinction between privileged academic and othered whore as in itself
symptomatic of a patriarchal order that both denies the commodification of academic thought and negates the creative import of
performance such as Sprinkle's.
The analyses of Harris, Williams, and Schneider all focus
on how Sprinkle's performance agendvally reworks the relationship
between woman as image and whore as role, in a way that productively unsettles the viewer's typical modes of (dis)identification. In
contrast, I argue that Sprinkle's biggest contribution to contemporary discourses on women's sexuality lies in formulating a practice
in which images and subject-positions formed in the violence of
patriarchal culture can be worked through in a sex-positive way.
The violence and danger of the porn inditstry, which are clearly
acknowledged by Sprinkle in a number of her videos and writings,
are portrayed by her as the impetus to produce more images and
more affects, instead of as motives to restrict, purify, or erase one's
experiences, sexual practices, or discourses on sexuality.''' This is
a possibility that Sprinkle, through her emphasis on varied bodies
and sexualities, explicitly opens to as wide an audience as possible,
one that is not restricted by divisions of identification and disidentification. Key to this is the position implicit in Sprinkle's work that
discourses on pleasure should not be structured around a real/
unreal binary standard for judging affective experiencesboth
those of ourselves and those of othersbecause what matters is
how something is subjectively experienced and what kind of stibject
those cumulative experiences produce. Sprinkle's affirmative, nonbinary discourse is one enabled by the proliferation of pleasurable
affect, and its spreading out between bodies.

74 Camera Obscura

Realness, Repetition, and Live Performance

Because Sprinkle initially developed her practice in the area of
porn films, her performance since the 1970s has been concerned
with generating future pleasurable affects in a way that complicates the relationship between reality, liveness, and staging. In the
art of Marina Abramovic and other feminist performance artists
working in the 1970s, the live participation of the artist's body in a
given action, and the attendant affective change the body underwent, acted as a guarantee that something had occurred.'-^' I find
that viewing documentation images of Abramovic's early works,
partictilarly those in which she did physical harm to herselfas
in the 1975 art action Lips of Thomas, where she etched a star on
her stomach with a razoris indissociable from a cringe; the
imagination recoils from the idea of the real, having-been-there
pain. The pain does not produce a tiiimetic affect in the body of
the contemporary documentation viewer, but rather is performed
as past in the act of viewing, appearing as acute yet distant. The
chaining together of authenticity, temporal singularity, and bodily
affect was accomplished by Abramovic in the rules she established
for herself early in her performance career: no rehearsal, no repetition, and no predicated end."' These rules summarize a fairly
orthodox feminist position on the ontology of performance, which
differentiates performance from theater on the basis that performance is not repeated and cannot be saved or reperformed.'''
Abramovic broke her own rules in 2005 with her Seven Easy
Pieces performance series at the Guggenheim museum in New
York, in which she reperformed six famous performance works,
including Lips of Thomas, on six consecutive days, followed by a
new performance of her own on the seventh day.'^ In an interview
about the performance, Abramovic stated.
The big problem with performance is that it only makes sense live
We don't really know what happened in the 1970s. My proposal was to
gather material from living artists and see if I could "re-feel" certain
performances, repeating them.... Nobody actually knows how to deal
with performance if someone wants to buy it, and today there is a lot of
appropriation of performances and the artists are not even notified. My

From This Body to Yours 75

idea was to establish certain moral rules. If someone wants to remake a

performance, they must ask the artist for the rights and pay for it. . . .
That's why the focus wasn't to remake performances, since I only
performed Seven Easy Pieces once, but it was an example of how things
should be done.'^

Even in the act of reenacting performances, the connection between

the unique affect of the performer's body and the moral imperative
of performance remains. Abramovic doesn't redo, she refeels,^^ and
for her it is the act of creating anew in her own body the affect of
the original performance that allows an intervention into the way
that performance documentation is understood today.
For Abramovic, the authenticity of refeeling is linked to a
strange copyright structure in which she attempts to singlehandedly alter the way that performance memory and performance
documentation are circulated and appropriated. This seems, in
a certain respect, like a performance art parallel of the assertion
that the problems raised by digital music sharing could be solved
if a moral imperative to return to buying CDs were instilled in millions of consumers worldwide. In Seven Easy Pieces, the body aims
to be not just a document but the document, the one that reverses
the pattern of performance consumption and dissemination by
providing a stiperior kind of access to the past.
Though, as noted above, seeing a live performance is different from viewing its documentation, I disagree with Abramovic
that reperforming the past provides any kind of privileged access
to the original. Diachronie time continually tmfolds and each
new moment is unique, and though synchronie time or temporal
return may be mimicked, invoked, or even experienced, they cannot be achieved ontologically outside of diachronic progression.
Seven Easy Pieces was a new performance created on the basis of
existing performance documentation, not a present-making of the
original performances. Under the current regime of technological
reproducibility, images can survive through time, bttt bodily affects
created by performance cannot, even though the original affects
may have been incredibly intense (Abramovic, for example, bears
a scar on her stomach from the original Lips of Thomas, which she

76 Camera Obscura

reut for Seven Easy Pieces, but the affect and sensation of a scar are
different from that of a bleeding wound). As sucb, performance
affects must be repeatedly recreated in tbe present, generating new
events tbat may be connected conceptually tbrotigb documentation from tbe perspective of performers or witnesses, but tbat are
nevertbeless ontologically unique.
In contrast to Seven Easy Pieces, tbe mainstream porn films
in wbicb Sprinkle starred during tbe 1970s were documented
performances designed to create a repetitive affect in viewers
tbat was mimetic to tbat experienced by tbe actors/participants.2'
Tbat mimetic affective relationsbip bas formed tbe basis of the
expansion of Sprinkle's practice into forms frequently involving sex
education and sexual modeling, a practice at tbe heart of which
lies masttnbation. As stated above, masturbation breaks down tbe
distinction between staging and reality, in tbat one can decide
bow and wben to stage an act of masturbation and really bave an
orgasm, tbougb its moment of arrival remains at least somewhat
spontaneotis. Sprinkle's later work in particular encourages people
to see that staging/reality as empowering and to use it to explore
their subjectivities. Additionally, ber works since Deep Lnside bave
been engaged in refuting the idea tbat the porn star is simply an
actor, by flesbing otit ber own ptiblic persona as a porn star into a
performance of complex, reflective, desiring subjectivity. In Sprinkle's work, tbe relationsbip between exteriorly manifested bebavior
or action and individual experience is not fixed but kept in an
irresolvable tension. Tbat tension botb presents tbe porn film as a
document of experience, instead of only a tbeatrical performance,
and leaves room for an indeterminacy in terms of wbat the viewer
understands the performer to be experiencing. In this respect, the
experience of viewing Sprinkle's porn becomes increasingly one
in wbicb "viewers are forced to engage deeply witb tbis particularized subject wbo so dramatically stages ber work and/as berself,"
as Jones writes of Yayoi Kusama's art.22
Since Deep Inside, orgasm bas occupied an oppositional
position in Sprinkle's work, in tbat sbe presents it as cballenging
tbe dicbotomy between real and not-real tbat characterizes various
discourses on women's sexuality.^s In her book Post-Pom Modem-

From This Body to Yours 77

ist, she directly addresses the incredulity of viewers who question

the reality of the orgasm she achieves on stage during "Sex Magic
Masturbation Ritual":
The intensity of masturbating on stage in front of hundreds of people
brings up a kaleidoscope of feelings that get magnified onstage.
Oftentimes, I feel strong, happy, compassionate, and powerful.
Sometimes I feel sad, tired, angry, and vulnerable. ...
The key is to always try to practice acceptance of what's there, or
not there, and to have no expectations.
So, do I have a REAL orgasm? This seems to be the foremost thing
on many people's minds
Why people are so hung up on this point
is rather odd and amusing to me. Having an orgasm was never the
primary goal of thisritual.The ritual is about learning and teaching,
about provoking thoughts and feelings, and about entering a state of
ecstasy in order to bring prayers and wishes to the Divine.^^
Sprinkle asserts the irreducibility of the orgasm to real/not-real by
underscoring its variability with each performance, and describing an ethico-erotic practice of staying true to that variation.
The "kaleidoscope of feelings" that gets brought up for
Sprinkle is both emotional and affective, and it is modified, "magnified," by being on stage. The goal of this act of masturbation is not
a clitoral or vaginal orgasm, but a room orgasm, an event in which
Sprinkle renders herself a vector for connecting the audience to
the "Divine."2'^ She aims to use the bodies present, including hers,
and their capacities to be affected, to create something that was not
there before. Sprinkle resists the localization of the orga.sm in her
body, thereby reworking the connection between authenticity and
bodily manifestations of affect present in both mainstream porn
and in 1970s performance art such as Abramovic's. A sureness on
the viewer's part about the capacity of exterior signs of transformation to indicate an authentic affective change in the body gives way
to a questioning of what is happening to the performer's body.
That body is thus given a depth, complexity, and opacity for the
viewer, who can no longer maintain the illusion that the relationship between affective change and the performer's experience can
be rendered transparent.

78 Camera Obscura

As can be seen in the differences between Sprinkle's performances in Deeplmide and in "Sex Magic Masturbation Ritual,"
and also in her comments about these performances quoted above,
t he way in which she deploys the notion of realness in order to create this opacity varies depending on the audience and discursive
context. Brinkema provisionally defines pornography as "a series
of formal codes that highlight unsimulated sexual intercourse
as the profilmic event of the work with the intention of producing a sexual affect in the spectator."26 This is a useful definition,
but I want to stress how Sprinkle reveals the separation of those
codes from any reality of the profilmic, and foregrounds the
way in which the codes can be tactically manipulated. Sprinkle's
practice, throughout its trajectory from mainstream porn to art
performance, einphasizes how porn's production of self-pleasure
has always involved layered and contradictory assumptions on the
part of different producers and audiences about what constitutes
the real of a certain body In Deep Lnside, a woman's real pleasure
becomes the basis for challenging the masculinism of male porn
directors, whereas in "Sex Magic Masturbation Ritual," an assertion that a real orgasm is not the point pushes back against the
performance art audience's demand to know the real frotn the
fake and to draw conclusions about Sprinkle's subjective experience based on that distinction.

Self-Pleasuring Performance
In both Sprinkle's and Borsato's performances, the notion of a
similar performance occurring elsewhere, whether in the future
(for viewers of Sprinkle's porn) or in the past (with the older performance works Borsato reenacts), acts as a structuring fanta.sy
that shapes the present production of affect in performance. Masttirbatory spectatorship, in which looking easily slides into reenacting, may start with a fantasy of another performance occurring
elsewhere or in another time, but it does not end there: it is about
creating a different form of pleasure in the present instead of perfectly replicating another scene.

From This Body to Yours 79

Joseph Beuys, 1 Like Anurica and America Likes Me (lq']^),

performance, Ren Block Clallery. Artists Rights Society

(ARS), NewYork/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Marina Abramovic,
Dragon Heads (1992),

performance, 85
minutes, Caixa de
Pensiones, Barcelona.
Marina Abramovic.
Image courtesy of
Sean Kelly Gallery,
New York

8o . Camera Obscura

In her three-channel video installation Three Performances

(afterJoseph Beuys, Marina Abramovit\ and Bonnie Sherk) (2008), Borsato reperforms three performances from earlier moments in
history These are / Like America and America Likes Me (1974), in
which Joseph Beuys wrapped himself in felt and stayed in a room
with a coyote for five days; Dragon Heads (1992), in which Marina
Abramovic sat naked in a chair on slabs of ice, with snakes cuding
around her; and Ptiblic Lunch (1971), in which Bonnie Sherk was
served an elegant catered lunch in a cage at the San Francisco
public zoo, while tigers in the neighboring cage ate their lunch of
raw meat. Borsato reperforms these performances in her home, a
sphere traditionally associated with the private. But she uses digital
video technology to make the activity she engages in ptiblic, making her home a stage for a performance.
Borsato chose to create a video installation, that is, to show
her reenactment of performances originally presented live to audiences only in the form of video documentation. Thne Performances
cites the static, frontal shot of early video art as a documentation of
performance in the work of artists such as Bruce Nauman, or that
of Borsato's fellow Torontonian Lisa Steele (in Birthday Suit rvith
Scars and Defects, 1974). The play between the title of Borsato's work,
the original subject matter it quotes, and the final product of the
video installation projection creates a shift in emphasis from the
live performance as artwork, as it was for Beuys, Abramovic, and
Sherk, to performance documentation as artwork that acknowledges its connection to an earlier historical moment in which the
live, not-yet-mediated performance was of primary importance.
At the point of the video's creation, a few years after
Abramovic's extremely high-profile Seven Easy Pieces, reenacting performance had itself already become a reenactment of Abramovic's
work. (Compared to Abramovic's hard-core, true-to-the-originalaffect approach to reenactment discussed above, Borsato's video
installation is lighthearted and goofy Borsato's reenactment takes
place explicitly at home, in the artist's wooden-floored apartment.
/ Like America is performed in a slant-ceilinged bedroom with a
mattress on the floor covered in a sky-blue sheet. Newspapers litter

From This Body to Yours 81

tbe floor, tbere is a bicycle in the back left, and the performance
is framed by a clotbes rack on one side and a dresser on tbe otber.
Abramovic's Dragon Heads is reenacted in front of a somewbat disorderly bookcase, witb sketcbbook drawings and a picture of a cat
tacked up on one wall. Borsato sits in a ctisbioned, 1970s living
room cbair, wearing wbite flip-flops tbat matcb tbe icy snow surroimding ber seat. Public Lunch is reenacted in a kitcben, not in a
cage, witb a fridge on tbe artist's left and a sbelf to her right holding
dry goods.
In all three segments, Borsato's small, plump cat plays the
role of the wild animal used in the original performance. Tbe artist
states that one of ber goals was to "propose a critical complication to the artists' ideas about nature and our relationsbips to (or
distinctions from) animals." Tbe cat as domestic animal literally
domesticates tbe risk implied by tbe animals used in tbe original
performance: Beuys's and Abramovic's works carried a degree of
real danger for tbe performers, a danger spoofed and rendered
comical in Borsato's video. Tbis, in combination witb tbe cat's total
lack of awareness of its participation in tbe video, is tbe piece's
major source of bumor. Simultaneously, tbe cat's demonstrable
affection for Borsato gives tbe work a subtly moving quality. In the
Beuys-inspired piece, it refuses to be berded with tbe cane, preferring instead to snuggle, a desire to wbicb tbe artist ultimately gives
in. In the Sherk work, it is totally uninterested in the steak presented
for its consumption and instead jumps on the table from which
Borsato is eating ber genteel luncb. In tbe Abramovic reenactment,
tbe pussy lies on its back on Borsato's naked tbigbsrigbt in front
of tbe artist's pussylicking itself contentedly.
Abramovic has recently started calling berself the "grandmother of performance art," and indeed, Borsato's performance,
one tbat redoes vintage Abramovic and also emulates the older
artist's own turn toward reperformance, would seem to give credence to this claim. However, Abramovic's claim to occupy tbis
role in performance bistory is a complex and power-loaded one. I
would argue tbat Borsato's Three Performances inberits as mucb from
Sprinkle, the (still sexy) grandmother of feminist porn, as it does

82 Camera Obscura

from Abramovic. Instead of restoring a legitimate lineage of proper

accreditation to performance art practice, Borsato performs a series
of transfers from documentation image, to live performance, to a
new documentation image. This newly created image is characterized by a tone of playful silliness that is much more reminiscent of
the practice of Sprinklewho has had herself photographed popping topless out of a giant foam-rubber vagina, for examplethan
it is of Abramovic's dead serious, almost priestess-like guardianship
of the history of performance art.
Moreover, when Sprinkle's work is brought into dialogue
with that of Borsato and Abramovic, the way in which Sprinkle's
films emphasize the specificity of her body, and its pleastirable
relationship to different bodies, can usefully draw attention to the
covert corporeal politics of performance reenactment. Is it just a
coincidence that performance reenactment has been popularized
by performance art's grandmother and not one of its grandfathers?
What uniquely positions Abramovic to promote the reenactment
paradigm, as opposed to a surviving 1970s male performance
artist?'-' I would argue that in works such as Abramovic's Seven
Easy Pieces and Borsato's Three Performances, the white female body
appears supposedly neutral, or unmarked, and thereby functions
as a privileged site for the reproduction of performance. Notably,
all of the performances that Abramovic and Borsato reenact were
originally done by white performers, accentuating the unmarked
qtiality of the white body in both the original and the reenacted
performances. The white female body thus comes to serve as a
particularly fertile ground for the reembodiment of affect.
How would Borsato's and Abramovic's performances resonate differently with audiences were their works to be performed
by bodies that signified as nonnormative, for example, hairy bodies, transgendered bodies, disabled bodies, or overweight bodies?28
Sprinkle's presentation of her own, increasingly aging body, in
which she unapologetically flaunts her fleshy voluptuousness, is a
nonnormative form of performance. However, we might need to
turn to a different practice, by a nonwhite performer who foregrounds the difference between her performative and her ana-

From This Body to Yours . 83

tomical gender, in order to make more visible the effects that

the social coding of bodies has on reperformance. The potential
power of these shifts from performing bodies that go unmarked iti
dominant culture to those that are labeled as Other is explored by
Vaginal Davis in her reenactments of international art star Vanessa
Beecroft's perfortnances. Davis's reperformances of Beecroft derive
much of their pithiness and humor from Davis's own emboditnent
as a tall, African-American drag queen, who in reperforming the
persona of the petite, white Beecroft is able critically to highlight
a number of the privileged assumptions that underlie Beecroft's
work. For example, Davis reenacted a photograph of Beecroft
clothed in a white gown holding two black babies by presenting
herself, in a similar outfit and pose, holding two white babies.'-^^
Sprinkle, like Davis, creates performances that think
through the potential relationships between different forms of
embodiment. Specifically, Sprinkle foregrounds her own desire for
bodies that are other than her own, including transgender bodies,
in her film Linda/Les and Annie (US, 1992), and differently abled
bodies, in Annie Sprinkle's Amazing World of Orgasm. In Sprinkle's
exploration of these non normative bodies of others, it is ultimately
impossible to draw a dividing line between an objectifying exoticism and an intersubjective engagement that works positively to
encourage everyone to engage in a sex-positive exploration of her
or his own desire. The idea that we, as sexual beings, are always in
some way objectified simultaneous to undergoing subjective erotic
experience is a thread running throughout all of Sprinkle's work.
She consistently foregrounds an awareness of how certain bodies
are coded in dominant culture, but, at the same time, she does not
let those codings proscribe the kinds of pleasurable arrangements
into which bodies are able to enter. The point here that is relevant
to performance reenactment is that it is always important to be
aware of the dominant cultural coding of the performer's body,
and the meanings that that coding may enable, as with Davis's
skewering of Beecroft, or that it may reproduce silently, as occurs
in the reproduction of the whiteness of performance art history in
the works of Abramovic and Borsato.

84 Camera Obscura

In Borsato's Three Performances, the cat constitutes an important nonhuman bodily presence whose performance forms almost
a greater point of interest in the video than does the artist's own.
In the reenactment of Abramovic's Dragon Heads, the video image
fuses the cat, which lies on Borsato's naked lap, into a sort of assemblage with the artist's body The video makes Borsato and the cat
seem less like individual actors interacting in an enclosed space, as
in the Beuys and Sherk reenactments, and more like a single body
that performs as one. Borsato has stated that in the Abramovic
reenactment, the cat "licks herself ttnconsciously in a perversely
erotic context."''"
This poses the question, what exactly is so erotic here? Is it
just that this reenactment involves nudity and the others do not?
Was the Abramovic work inherently more erotic than the other two
to begin with? I aigue that what is erotic in this perfortnance is the
becoming-masturbatory of experiencing performance documentation. As stated above, in this work Borsato reenacts Abramovic
twice, both redoing Dragon Heads and employing a mode of reenactment similar to Seven Easy Pieces. But her performance might also
be read as a teenacttnent of Sprinkle's Public Cervix Announcement,
in which Sprinkle uses a speculum to open her cervix to viewing by
audience members. I return to Jones and to her comments about
the importance of this performance for Sprinkle's depiction of her
own subjectivity: "While Sprinkle can't illustrate herself as a full
subject of pleasure and desire, she can situate herself in relation
to us in such a way as to reclaim her own 'look' (the gaze of her
ctmt), if only momentarily, from the voyeuristic relation. Sprinkle's
performance of self poitits to the always already mediated nature
of embodied subjectivity as well as the sexual pleasure that gives
this subjectivity 'life.' "'"
Sprinkle explicitly eroticizes technological mediation of the
reception of erotic performance. Her momentary reclaiming of
the "look" of her cunt, a reclaiming in which she stages the voyeuristic relation in which she is viewed, is the result of an embrace
of her body's technologized relation to the generalized viewer as
an empowering relation. In Three Performances, the cat becomes

From This Body to Yours 85

Borsato's vaginal prosthetic as the speculum was Sprinkle's, but

the cat enables a very different form of desiring subjectivity, one
turned in on itself. Whereas the speculum enables viewers to look
at Sprinkle's cervix, which, according to Jones, allows her to reclaim
her cervix's "look," the cat embodies a type of pleasure that cannot
even be made aware that it is being looked at.
That pleasure gets off on itself and by itself, and does so in
the context of a fantasy about a performance that took place once,
somewhere else, in the past. Borsato takes the bare bones of these
iconic performances and reembodies them to create different
clusters of affects than those undergone by the bodies of the original performers. It is as if Borsato is receiving these performances,
which she has only viewed through photographic documentation
(being too young to have viewed the original performances), as
Annie Sprinkle wants viewers to receive the masturbation scene in
Deep Inside. Borsato takes Beuys's, Abramovic's, and Sherk's performance documentations as an invitation to engage in an approximately mimetic reperformance of their actions, in which some of
the changes in her body may be the samethe Beuys-inspired
combining of body and wool blanket into a new, tent-like form, for
exampleand many will change.
It is in the changesthe cat instead of the coyote, snakes,
and tigersthat Borsato's desire is most strongly performed, and
that the gap between the fantasy of the performance and the presence of lived embodiment, which are joined by the document,
becomes visible. The cat instead of the coyote both shows Borsato's
distance from the original performance and marks the highly personal, intimate quality of her appropriation of that performance.
The documents that record the original performance thus become
both a means of recording performance history and vectors that
enable new events that consist of a new, ontologically tmique set of
affects, arranged around the idea of the original performance as
a structuring fantasy.
Borsato presents this process to her audience in the form
of a video, another document, through which the transfer of
affect might possibly be reperformed again each time the video is

86 . Camera Obscura

watcbed. And tbe trendiness of reperformance testifies to the fact

that it seems to generate more of itself: a contagious chain reaction
of spectators becoming (re)performers. Borsato's performance
takes seriously the lyric witb wbicb I opened tbis essay"Wben
I think about you, I toticb myself"but tbe "you" here is the historical performance, addressed like an otber around wbom the
fantasy tbat fuels self-pleasuring is built. Tbat "you" of bistory
enables a practice in wbicb tbe Borsato/cat assemblage toucbes
itself and takes pleasure in tbe reconfigured self-relation permitted
by the document. Tbe privacy of tbis act is stressed by the intimate
domestic setting. It is presented to us in tbe video only as secondary
viewers, but in its reinbabiting of performance documentation, it
structurally reworks tbe notion of the document and opens itself
to being imitated, and tbereby reaffected.
Tbrougbout tbis analysis, a goal bas been to broaden understandings of tbe relevance of Sprinkle's practice beyond sexually
explicit performance to consider what its treatment of affect and
subjectivity mean for tbe broader field of contemporary performance art. Following Micbel Foucault's discussion of tbe medicalization of masturbation in The History of Sexuality, volume l, attributing any necessarily empowering quality to masturbation would
be problematic.32 However, I believe tbat it is important, particularly for women, to tbink tbrougb self-pleasure as an autonomous
practice of self-care tbat is an important kind of sexual experience,
and not simply second-best to getting pleasure from otbers. In tbe
academic and artistic spberes, "masturbatory" bas long been used
as a derogatory term for work that is irrevocably self-involved and
self-pleasuring. Sprinkle's oeuvre, bowever, opens tbe possibility for
reconsidering the importance of masturbation in botb tbese registers by positing self-pleasure as sometbing tbat does not necessarily
cotne at tbe expense of otbers and tbat can in fact be an important
tool both for working tbrougb one's own bistory and for creating
intersubjecdve connection. I read Borsato's video as broadening
tbis masturbatory paradigm beyond personal bistory to suggest
tbat at stake in tbe new reenactment paradigm is a process of performance art taking pleasure in its own bistory, across the work

From This Body to Yours 87

of performance artists getting off on their connection to a history

that has preceded them. In different ways. Sprinkle and Borsato
suggest that both we as individual subjects and performance studies as a discipline should take some time to consider our intimate
relationships with ourselves.

Notes

Thank you to Jane Blocker, in whose seminar on writing history

I began work on this essay; to Julian St. Jacques, for inviting me
to present a version of it on a College Art Association Feminist
Art Project panel in 2010; and to Niels Niessen, for his insightful
feedback. This research was conducted with the support of a doctoral
fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada.
1.

See, for example, Rebecca Schneider, Performance Remains: Art

and War in Times of Theatrical ReenactmerU (New York: Routledge,
2011).

2.

See Rebecca Schneider, "Archives: Performance Remains,"

Performance Research 6, no. 2 (2001): 100-108.

3.

Depending on the type of image in question, this form of

affective transmission might include celluloid-to-body, pixelto-body, or photo-to-body transmission. Each would produce
different material and semantic configurations worthy of
analysis in their own right, but this article will focus on laying
the groundwork for image-to-body transmission of affect broadly
conceived.

4.

In book 3 o Ethics, Spinoza writes, "By affect I understand

affections of the body by which the body's power of acting is
increased or diminished, aided or restrained." Baruch Spinoza,
Ethics, trans. G. H. R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 164. In Spinoza's system, human bodies are just
one variety of the category of modes, which includes all existent
material bodies. These bodies constantly bump into each other,
causing some to gain or lose power, to change direction, or to
change form. Gilles Deleuze unpacks Spinoza's definition of
affect, stating that the affect "involves an increase or decrease

88 . Camera Obscura
of the power of acting, for the body and the mind alike." Gilles
Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philo.sofjhy, trans. Robert Hurley (San
Franci.sco: City Lights Books, 1988), 49. For Deleuze's more
extensive analysis of affect in Spinoza, see Deleuze, Expressionism
in Philo.sophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (Brooklyn, NY: Zone
Books, 1990), particularly chap. 14, "What Can a Body Do?"
5.

Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Ls Philosophy? trans.

Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 164.

6.

Eugenie Brinkema, "The Title Does Not Ask, but Demands That
You Make a Choice: On the Otherwise Films of Bruce Labruce,"
CnYicMTO 48, no. i (2006): 99.

7.

Amelia Jones, " 'Presence' in Absentia: Experiencing

Performance as Documentation," ArtJournal F,6, no. 4 (1997): 12.

8.

Jones's arguments have been critiqtied by Catherine Elwes in

"On Performance and Performativity: Women Artists and Their
Critics," Third Text 18, no. 2 (2004): 193-97. Elwes argues that
Jones negates the specificity of the live event, and particularly
the factors of scale, motion, social interactivity, and duration that
distinguish the live event from its documentation. Elwes accuses
Jones of securing her own authority by asserting an intellectual
response over a "gut" reaction, and goes on to claim that "as with
so many things in life, when it comes to a live event, in order
to properly understand what it was that happened, you had to
be there" (197). I want to note here that in trying to emphasize
the live affects created by performance documentation, I am
not siding with Flwes in this debate, because her argument
is essentialist in that it seeks to restore authority to a "real,"
unproblematized kernel, and concomitantly to those who were
there to experience it (which obviously carries various levels of
privilege). Jones has continued to explore issues of performance,
subjectivity, and mediation in her book Self/Image: Technology,
Representation, and the Contemporary Stibject (London: Routledge,
2006).

9.

Jones, " 'Presence' in Absentia," 17. Jones quotes Chris Straayer

from "The Seduction of Boundaries: Feminist Fluidity in
Annie Sprinkle's Art/Education/Sex," in Dirty Looks: Women,
Pornography, Power, ed. Pamela Church and Roma Gibson
(London: British Film Institute, 1993).

From This Body to Yours 89

10. Laura Gull's recent edited volume Deleuze and Performance
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) attempts to
make an intervention in performance studies in this respect,
appealing to Deleuze's work to think through performance in a
way that breaks out of the logic of representation and of identitybased models emphasizing fixed subjectivity. Gull, in a 2007
dialogue with performer Matthew Goulish, argues that Derrida's
work has been privileged in performance studies, but that
Deleuze's oeuvre offers a way of reconceivitig performance "as
the challenge of finding ways for both performer and audience
to access presence conceived as . . . universal becoming." Laura
Gull and Matthew Goulish, "The Presence Project: Laura
Gull and Matthew Goulish, 'A Dialogue on Becoming,' " The
Presence Project, 13 March 2007, presence.stanford.edu:3455/
collaboratory/1029.
11. Graldine Harris, Staging Femininities: Performance and
Petformativity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999),
163.
12. Linda Williams, "A Provoking Agent: The Pornography and
Performatice of Annie Sprinkle," Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography,
Power, ed. Pamela Ghurch and Roma Gibson (London: British
Film Institute, 1993), 365-72.
13. Rebecca Schneider, foreword to Annie Sprinkle and Gabriclle
Gody, Hardcore from the Heart: Annie Sprinkle Solo (London:
Gontinuum, 2001), viii.
14. See, for example. Sprinkle's description in the director's
comments for Herstory of Pom: Reel to Real (1999) of a scene that
got too "heavy" in a film early in her career. In the voice-over
commentary available on the DVD, Sprinkle states that she
reconstructs this scene specifically to represent the risks involved
in porn acting. There is a fictive aspect to that reconstruction, as
with all autonarration, but this does not decrease its importance
or its relevance to Spritikle's larger experience of the porn
industry.
15. In her catalog essay for Seven Easy Pieces, Erika Fischer-Lichte
argues that during the original performance of Lips of Thomas
(1975), Abramovic "did not emit the slightest sign of pain. She
restricted herself to performing actions that perceivably changed
her body; she transgressed its limits without ever showing any

go . Camera Obscura
external signs of the inner states triggered by it." Erika FischerLichte, "Performance Art: Experiencing Liminality," in Marina
Abramovic, Seven Easy Pieces (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2007),
34. For Fischer-Lichte, Abramovic's performance of the 1970s
explicitly severed affect from emotion or experience, categories
that are often conflated. The goal was to produce an affective
change in the body and display that body in its altered state, not
to probe the artist's subjective experience.
16. yimxv MiVAVCioVxc, Seven Easy Pieces, 15.
17. See feminist performance theorist Peggy Phelan's classic
articulation of performance's "ontology of disappearance"
in "The Ontology of Performance: Representation without
Reproduction," in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Vxtnaon:

Routledge, 1993), 146-66. Various later theorists, including

Schneider ("Archives"), have contested Phelan's idea that
performance's identity consists in a tendency to disappear.
18. The works reperformed were: Body I'ressure by Bruce Nauman
(Dsseldorf, \t}-]^). Seedbed hy\\\.o Acconc (New York, 1972);
Action Pants: Genital Panic hyYaUe Export (Munich, 1969); The
Conditioning, Eirst Action of Self-Portrait(.i) by Gina Pane (1973); How
to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare by Joseph Beuys (Dsseldorf,

1965); Lips of Thomas by Marina Abramovic (Innsbruck, 1975);

and Entering the Other Side, Abramovic's new performance.
19. As qtioted in Fabio Cypriano, "Performance and Reenactment:
Analyzing Marina Abramovic's Seven Easy Pieces," idanca.net,
2 September 2009, idanca.net/lang/en-us/2009/09/02/
performance-e-reencenacao-uma-analise-de-seven-eeasy-pieces
-de-marina-abramovic/12156/.
20. In this sense, Abramovic's understanding of her performance is
similar to the performances of Civil War reenactment dealt with
by Rebecca Schneider in her current work (2011). Many Civil
War reenactors believe that through refeeling the battle, they
are able to gain access to a dimension of history that is lost in
dominant, written historical narratives.
21. These include Slippery When Wet (dir. Joseph Sarno, US, 1976),
Teenage Deviate (dir. Ralph Ell, US, 1976), Blow Some My Way

(dir. Joe Davian, US, 1975), and numerous others.

From This Body to Yours . 91

22. Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 7.
23.

I see tbis strategy as opposed to both some feminist positions

that take an unproblematized real experience as their ground
and masculinist positions embodied in much mainstream porn,
in which women's over-the-top performance of tbe reality of
orgasm is simply a prop to sbore up a virile masculine identity.

24. Annie Sprinkle, Post-Pom Modernist: My Twenty-Five Years as a

Multimedia Whore (San Francisco: Cleis, 1998), 170-71.
25. It is not totally clear to me bow Sprinkle understands tbe divine,
and I would like to refrain from speculating too mucb on tbat
bere. A number of her later works contain references to yoga and
to tantric sex, or otber traditional spiritual sexual practices. An
exploration of tbe role tbat tbese influences play in Sprinkle's
later practice, and of tbe relationsbip between staging and
experience that her use of them sets up, could be a departure
point for considering wbat divinity means to her.
26. Brinkema, "Tbe Title Does Not Ask," 100.
27.

It is notable tbat a number of the male performance artists from

tbe 1970s wbo are still making artincluding Vito Acconci,
Paul McCartby, and Bruce Naumanbave turned away from
performance to the creation of objects, wberea.s Abramovic, the
most prominent female performance artist of that generation,
has pursued reperformance. Wbereas for tbis generation of male
artists the performative use of their own bodies was something
that they eventually abandoned, both Abramovic and Sprinkle
continue exploring tbe vicissitudes of performance as a life
project.

28. In ber recent book, Sbannon Jackson makes a similar point

in relation to tbe different positioning of female and male
performance artists in the 1970s: activities such as sweeping
or vacuuming performed as art by male artists including Allan
Kaprow, Steve Paxton, and Robert Dunn took on a distinctly
different meaning when performed by Jill Johnston, Lucinda
Childs, or Mierle Laderman Ukeles. See Jackson, Social Works:
Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 89.

92 Camera Obscura
29. For detailed discussions of Davis's work, and the way in which
it intervenes in politics of embodiment and identity, see
Jos Esteban Muoz, Disidentifications: Queers ofGolor and the
Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999), and Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics
ofDesire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
30. Diane Borsato, "Three Performances (after Joseph Beuys,
Marina Ahramovic, and Bonnie Sherk)," dianeborsato.net/
projects/three-performances-after-joseph-beuys-marina
-abramovic-and-bonnie-sherk/ (accessed April 2011).
31. Jones, "'Presence' in Absentia," 16.
32.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans.

Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990).

Adair Rounthwaite is a PhD candidate in art history at the

University of Minnesota, specializing in contemporary art. Her
articles have previously appeared in Representations (2010) and in the
journal of Visual Gultwv (2008).

From This Body to Yours 93

Diane Borsato, Three Performances (afterJoseph Beuys,

Marina Abramovic, and Bonnie Sherk) (2008), detail of
Bonnie Sherk reenactment. Diane Borsato.
Image courtesy of Diane Borsato

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