Focusing on 1970's performance artists Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Gina Pane, and collaborators Marina Abramovi`c/Ulay as well as those with similar sensibilities from the late 1980's onward (Bob Flanagan, David Wojnarowicz, Simon Leung, Catherine Opie, Ron Athey, Lutz Bacher, and Robby Garfinkel), O'Dell provides photographic documentation of performances and quotations from interviews with many of the artists. Throughout, O'Dell asks what we can do about the institutionalized forms of masochism for which these performances are metaphors. |