Exposing the Body, Exploring ‘homo respondens’, and Rethinking Human-Nature Relations as Matrix for New Social Visions: When Short Film Meets Happening in the Works by Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono

Wilfried Raussert

doi:10.32870/elojoquepiensa.v0i23.373

Wilfried Raussert Dr

DOI: https://doi.org/10.32870/elojoquepiensa.v0i23.373

Palabras clave: experimental short film, body, happening, intersubjectivity, non-human world

Resumen

The essay at hand looks at the ways in which the female body is revisited, redefined and connected to the world in selected experimental short films and happenings by two female artists, Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann. The analytical focus lies on the shifting relations between subject and object and human and non-human world within their artistic practice. Their presentation and representation of bodies in experimental short films and performances is strongly embedded in the happening culture of the 1960s. The two artists feel at home in both genres; hence, they move freely between film and performance art. Both select the undressing, naked as well as exposed body to express new visions of relationality beyond human subjectivity. Bakhtin’s discourse on the grotesque body and its dialogic potential serves as a theoretical approach.

Biografía del autor/a

Wilfried Raussert, Dr

wilfried rAussert (Germany) is chair of North American Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. He is director of the International Associa- tion of Inter-American Studies, member of the steering committee of CALAS (Bielefeld-Guadalajara), and co-founder of the Black Americas Network at the Center for InterAmerican Studies. Among his recent publications are the edited volumes The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies and the Routledge Handbook to the Culture and Media of the Americas (2020). As photographer, he published four books, among them Black Matters (Roseway, 2020), and Art Begins in Streets, Art Lives in Streets (Kipu, 2016).

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