Body art in extremis – станице за дистрибуцију времена
Body Art in Extremis – Stations for the Distribution of Time

Summary/Abstract: In DeLillo’s prose, especially in the novels preceding Body Artist, the worlds presented, their time and space, rely on fragments and artifacts, objects and events from everyday life, trinkets and details from newspaper clips and radio news bulletins which served as a gauge for the flow of time and for the duration of events –DeLillo constructed sequences of images whirling one after another, densifying time and compacting its spans. In the novel Body Artist, there is a conspicuous absence of this mechanism. In a secluded house, time retreats to its origins, circles in a closed loop, only to be liberated once again when a new system of binary pairs creates anew node compatible with the network from which the old node was extracted. The events are limited to the re-enactment of the basic sensory perceptions and the repetition of the auditory sequences, and as such, they are materialized through the strata of the different media, from a webcam device broadcasting images from a road in a Finnish city of Kotka, to the materialization of a second body, whose origin remains undetermined. This is the body which reproduces the past in a progression of erratic vocalized sequences of time that is forever lost for the protagonist. The body will beara name “Mr. Tattle” and it will be a medium of its own, a lost connection that Lauren,the protagonist, struggles to re-appropriate. She will unite all the strata in her own body and in the performance Body Time, trying to reinstate the time flow and to create a new self-perception of her own identity.

• Details
• Contents