Artistic adventures of the body. A few remarks about the tensions between visuality and experience of the mediatized body

Abstract

Art has explored the problem of the body and corporeality in various ways. As a result, the body was subject to constant reinterpretations in the artistic practice - as an object of different narratives, goals, politics, a field of interference, an object of artistic fetishization, sexualization or desexualization. This text discusses selected aspects of the presence and experience of the body in visual arts, referring to artistic realizations and endeavours of radically different “nature”, and thus - referring to the ontology of the work of art. The main field of reflection is the transition from the representation of the body (media images of an absent body) to the presentation and presence of a real body as a material and medium of expression. In this context, not only the consequences related to the artistic mediatization and performatization of the body and corporeality are presented, but also the tensions between observing (visuality) and the experience of the mediatized body.