Reviewed by:

• Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s by Dominic Johnson
• Ivan Bujan

The bodies we inhabit are contested sites of inquiry. Their porous flesh and armored materiality serve as vessels for political, cultural, and polemical meaning-making, rendering them at once vectors of power relations and sources of resistance. For decades, performance studies has been investigating the nuances of these power dynamics by pursuing a central question: What can a racialized, sexualized, and gendered body do? Scholar and performance artist Dominic Johnson’s Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s reflects his ongoing commitment to animating this question with discernible passion and care. By considering how performance, both cultural and quotidian, challenges larger structural inequalities, Unlimited Action is in conversation with scholarship that has been asking similar questions for decades, including The Explicit Body in Performance (1997) by Rebecca Schneider, Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998) by Amelia Jones, Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013) by Jennifer Doyle, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (2014) by Amber Jamilla Musser, and Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (2015) by Uri McMillan, to name a few.

Unlimited Action assumes that all actions are intrinsically subjected to a set of legal, economic, or social limits. At the same time, inspired by philosopher Georges Bataille, Unlimited Action considers limits to be imposed only to be violated or surpassed (15). Johnson’s book therefore examines actions, predominantly in the 1970s, that defied conventional aesthetics through a mode he terms “the performance of extremity,” or the use of physical or emotional discomfort, obscenity, and criminality “to an extent that harasses the artist, us and the category of art” (7). Unlimited Action argues that contemporary critics, who often disregarded the work, could not have fully “captured” extreme performance actions precisely because they went beyond the limits of social acceptability, propriety, and legibility. Influenced by the early twentieth-century European avant-garde as well as the experimental projects of the 1960s, performances of extremity intertwined aesthetic and quotidian realms, positing the inextricability of art and life. While tending to such intertwinement, performances of extremity not only challenged conventional aesthetic practice, they also exposed, expanded, or reimagined imposed social, cultural, and political limits. Extremity therefore served as the artists’ means of resistance to traditional art-making in the postwar era.

Johnson’s study brings to light less researched European and British performance artists from the 1970s, including Kerry Trengove, Ulay, COUM Transmissions, Anne Bean, the Kipper Kids, and Stephen Cripps, whose work was often illegible to and discredited by critics. Although every performance is placed within a specific historical, cultural, and political context and juxtaposed with other well-known performances of the time, Unlimited Action is not a chronological survey but rather a collection of curated case studies. Informed by critical theory, cultural studies, and performance studies, and enriched by archival ephemera, each chapter reaffirms the historical and cultural importance of performance centered around endurance, injury, or duress.

The first chapter explores the significance of the physical and psychological endurance and manual labor in Trengove’s An Eight Day Passage (1977). In his analysis of Trengove’s action, which consisted of digging a hole in the gallery floors and walls for eight days, Johnson claims that by appropriating endurance and manual labor in the gallery setting, Trengove resituated art as coterminous with life rather than contained by aesthetic or commercial frames. Along the same lines, chapter 2 is dedicated to Ulay’s There is a Criminal Touch to Art (1976), a performance of extremity in which the artist stole a nineteenth-century painting considered Germany’s “national treasure” from a highly secured museum. Johnson argues that the criminal element of this action, and “the national insult” it provoked (62), had a twofold effect: Ulay placed in question his German identity in the postwar period, while expanding the formal parameters of the aesthetic. The first two chapters also explore the accusation [End Page 120] that machoism, tied to physical endurance and criminality...

审核人：

• 无限行动：多米尼克·约翰逊（Dominic Johnson）在1970年代的极端表现
• 伊万·布扬（Ivan Bujan）

我们居住的尸体是有争议的调查地点。他们多肉的身体和铠甲的物质性充当了政治，文化和辩论意义的创造的容器，使它们立即成为权力关系和抵抗力量的载体。几十年来，性能研究一直在研究一个核心问题：种族化，性别化和性别化的身体能做什么呢？学者兼表演艺术家多米尼克·约翰逊（Dominic Johnson）的《无限行动：1970年代的极端表现》反映了他在致力于以清晰的热情和关怀为这个问题提供动画方面的持续承诺。通过考虑性能，无论是文化表现还是民俗表现，都将挑战更大的结构性不平等，无限行动与数十年来一直在问类似问题的奖学金进行对话，包括丽贝卡·施耐德（Rebecca Schneider）的表演中的显露身体（1997 ），阿米莉亚·琼斯（Amelia Jones）的人体艺术/表演主题（1998），《反对我：当代的困难与情感》。珍妮弗·多伊尔（Jennifer Doyle）的《艺术》（Art）（2013），琥珀色贾米拉·穆瑟（Amber Jamilla Musser）的《煽情肉体：种族，力量和受虐狂》（2014），以及乌里·麦克米兰（Uri McMillan）的《化身：黑人女性主义艺术和表演的家谱》（2015）。

“无限行动”假设所有行动本质上都受到一系列法律，经济或社会限制。同时，在哲学家乔治·巴塔耶（Georges Bataille）的启发下，《无限行动》（Unlimited Action）认为施加的限制仅是被违反或超越的（15）。因此，约翰逊的书主要是在1970年代考察了行为，这些行为以他所谓的“极端表现”或使用身体或情感上的不适，淫秽和犯罪行为的方式违背了传统美学，在某种程度上骚扰了艺术家我们和艺术类别”（7）。无限行动认为当代批评家常常无视这项工作，却不能完全“捕捉”极端表现行为，因为它们超出了社会可接受性，礼节性和可读性的范围。受20世纪早期欧洲前卫艺术和1960年代的实验项目的影响，四肢的表演交织了美学和日常的领域，认为艺术和生活是密不可分的。在趋向于这种交织的同时，四肢的表演不仅挑战了传统的美学实践，而且还暴露，扩展或重新构想了施加的社会，文化和政治限制。因此，四肢是战后时代艺术家抵抗传统艺术创作的手段。

约翰逊的研究揭露了1970年代较少研究的欧洲和英国表演艺术家，包括克里·特伦戈夫，乌莱，库姆变速箱，安妮·比恩，基珀·基德和斯蒂芬·克里普斯，他们的作品常常被评论家认不清。尽管每场演出都是在特定的历史，文化和政治背景下进行的，并与当时的其他知名演出并列，但《无极限行动》并不是按时间顺序进行的调查，而是精心策划的案例研究的集合。每章都以批判性理论，文化研究和性能研究为基础，并通过档案短篇小说加以充实，重申了以耐力，伤害或胁迫为中心的性能在历史和文化上的重要性。

第一章探讨了特伦戈夫（Trengove）的《八日通行证》（An August Day Passage，1977年）中的身体和心理承受力以及体力劳动的重要性。约翰逊（Johnson）在分析特伦戈夫（Trengove）的行为时，包括在画廊的地板和墙壁上挖了一个洞，为期八天，他声称，通过在画廊环境中分配耐力和体力劳动，特伦戈夫将艺术重新定位为与生活息息相关，而不是被美学或美学所束缚。商业框架。同样，第二章专门介绍乌来的《艺术有刑事触角》。（1976年）的一种极端表演，艺术家从一个高度安全的博物馆偷走了19世纪的一幅画，认为德国是“国宝”。约翰逊（Johnson）辩称，这一行为的犯罪成分及其引发的“国家侮辱”（62）具有双重影响：乌莱（Ulay）在战后时期质疑他的德国身份，同时扩大了美学的形式参数。前两章还探讨了指责[End Page 120]与男子气概和犯罪相关的男子气概。