Alienating Aesthetics: Performance Art and the Medical Imagination

Abstract

Alienating Aesthetics considers the relationship between surgical practice and anatomical displays in museums, performance art, theatre, avant-garde film, and medical fictions. This project looks at the purpose of art that uses surgery as a bizarre aesthetic strategy in order to answer the question of why an artist would want to alienate a spectator. Drawing on Bertolt Brecht’s critique of empathy, I argue that these alienating performances draw out an ethics of discomfort. I contend that discomfort may be a generative emotion that can catalyze an important revision of how to define empathy. Rather than an ability to identify with the other, this dissertation draws out a definition of empathy that requires spectators to remain present to disturbing objects, subjects, and scenes, while holding one’s own needs or comforts in abeyance. Chapters on artists such as dramatist Suzan Lori Parks, visual artist Riva Lehrer, poet Dionne Brand, performance artist ORLAN, and novelist J.G. Ballard, among others, put conceptions of Brechtian alienation in dialogue with Narrative Medicine, gender studies, and social justice models.