Is There Any Body Out There?

Abstract In my article I sketch two problems with the way philosophers think of the human body in performance art. The first problem is that presence is easy to presuppose when it comes to living bodies—their observability helps us take them for granted. But in this crude notion of presence there is a ruse of intelligibility and simplicity that human bodies, and especially human bodies in performance art, do not lend themselves to. The second problem is the philosophical propensity to regard the human body in art not only as an object of aesthetic appreciation but also as one of aestheticization. I start by tracing these philosophical problems back to Dewey’s account of experience. I then compare two divergent views of embodiment in performance art—Arthur Danto’s and Amelia Jones’—in order to both articulate the persistence of Dewey’s legacy and to propose a theoretical alternative to it. In the last part of the article, I utilize the insight of somaesthetics towards a better understanding of Dewey and I consider the broader application of somaesthetics to the bodily and aesthetic rigours that performance art pioneers.