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Articles

Volume 33, Number 1 (2012)

Walking the Edge of the Stage in Theory; Or, Janet Cardiff's Sensorium for Intermedial Bodies

Submitted
May 17, 2013
Published
2012-01-01

Abstract

This article examines Janet Cardiff’s site-specific art, and in particular, the 2005 audio walk, Her Long Black Hair, as a possible site of refusal or an alternative to the panoptic docile, disciplined Foucaultian body. This paper investigates Cardiff’s sound-based collaboration, often performed with artist Georges Bures Miller, as a sensorial, chorographic, and intermedial practice that challenges discourses of representation, such as conformist, dominant fixed perceptions of identity and scripted subjectivity. Cardiff’s work demonstrates the process of intermediality and how the intermedial body disrupts linear and visual narratives or sites that fix identity through the constructs of the historical and cultural. The article forwards critical questions about the conditioned human desire for bodily fixity, surveillance, and panoptical structures promoting normative, disciplinary hierarchies, especially through nostalgia for narratological closure. Cardiff’s work, her performance and artistic strategies, offer other avenues for inhabitation of the radical sensorium, the body as palimpsestuous, inner theatre, wherein she invites us to participate differently—to listen and see, to experience differently. The article also takes up an intermedial, palimpsestic form with spaces created for moments of pause and reflection: an enacting of the site-specific intermedial and palimpsestic body.