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Walking into the Yugoslavian born performance artist, Marina Abramovic's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on a spring day in 2010 I was greeted by bodies, many bodies, in extreme forms of experience, pushing the limits of endurance, sometimes clothed and sometimes not, and often accompanied by piercing screams. I was entering the fascinating world of body as art, as canvas, as experiment, as subject and object. As part of the audience I felt transfixed by this visceral art; intermittently and simultaneously horrified and curious as I moved through various powerful performance pieces.
The body has become our cultural symbol, the site for exploring subjectivity and creating identity (Suchet, 2009). We are in a new era, an era of soma, as the body has become the vehicle to enact the wish to transform, transcend and liberate the self. It is estimated that approximately 20 million Americans have tattoos with an even greater number of body piercers (Greif et al, 1999). What are the meanings of this growing fascination with marking the body? Self control through self inscription, claims Victoria Pitts (2003). There is a wish to rewrite the body's meaning, in a literal manner, reconciling the inner sense of self with the body. These visible markings become a body biography, a personal history inscribed on their skins. Some express their desire to free the body from its constraints, to go beyond limits, a process, in Abramovic's words, “of liberation to the point of self obliteration” (MOMA, ). Some claim spiritual enlightenment and self-actualization; self transformation through bodily transformations.
I find myself drawn into this world. There is something compelling and fascinating about these bodies and the relationship they have with their inhabitants. Perhaps there is something of the horror and the abject that infects those who enter the space.
Under the Skin, is unique as an in depth psychoanalytic study of body modification, and needs to be re