Eleanor Antin uses the body as material for her art piece Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1973). This work of art comprises 148 black-and-white photographs documenting the artist’s loss of 10 pounds over 37 days. Every morning she was photographed naked in the same four stances to record her barely perceptible self-induced weight loss. Antin’s performance purposely toyed with the traditional process of Greek sculptors, who were said to find their ideal form by chipping…

Performativity and the Body: Physicality, Materiality, and Trace

Chris Burden. Trans-fixed (1974)

Going further in the study of the symbolic action in Contemporary Art, I encounter a…