Reading 3 - Olivia Collins

Olivia Collins
Trauma, bodies, and performance art: Towards an embodied ethics of seeing is an article that discusses how performance artists address the idea of trauma through their work by using their bodies. Through performance art, people redefine what it means to be a “traumatized body” and hope to move toward an ethical spectatorship. Oliver makes the argument that trauma studies correlate with unwanted spectatorship and how performance art tries to take this back from the viewer. She explains that performance art openly problematize these issues. Oliver says that it is discomforting when the audience of a performance pieces will observe and ignore. I can see how this would be discomforting but I also feel that it comes with the medium that you can not control how people react. While there are many performance artists who make art in reference to trauma in life, not all performance artists do. To say that you need to experience or react to trauma to become a performance artist is not accurate. It also seems that all of this only applies to women. Female bodies are automatically seen as political so I can see how this idea of trauma can be used with all the example of women performance artists. As far as this reading with our class, it clearly is in reference to our current project and drawing performance artists counts as drawing the human body.