Running Bodies: Contemporary Art's Histories

Abstract

The basic, universal movement of the running body has been repeated and made visible in aesthetic, scientific, and political debates. Such debates of the body may depend on live movements in real space-time, movements articulated by motion capture devices, or movements that exercise in imagination: a head of state who uses the running body to manipulate his political subject, for example, or a series of images taken from an optical motion capture system that simultaneously represents and dissects movement patterns of the body in its swiftest motions, or a sound art installation that voices the familiar dynamics of running steps and heavy breathing. In each instance, the bodily practice of running is extracted from its seemingly unmediated everyday, placed instead within aesthetic methodologies and technologies to scrutinize the movement and its complex of meanings. This action is meant to reveal that real experience-that nonfictional movement, as it were-of the body running, to see into the rhetorical, cultural productions of our public, bodily realities. I begin this inquiry by defining the term "running body" and examining the manner in which that body was scientifically observed and aesthetically codified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then, the running body is investigated in experimental choreography, visual arts, and political demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s. Thirdly, I will address the use of the actual running body within contemporary art exhibitions, as either an intervention or interruption to accustomed meaning-making within traditional spaces for art. At the dissertation's end will be an exploration of the running body as a critical method for reorienting the narrative of contemporary history with image technologies, art installation devices, and the moving body. This study demonstrates that if, at the very base of our existence, our bodies move the world and, in turn, the world around us moves our body, this same reciprocity can hold true in shaping historical consciousness and self-consciousness.