Elise Archias’s The Concrete Body

The Concrete Body: Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci, by Elise Archias. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 240 pages.

THE INVOLUNTARY EXPRESSIONS and accidental actions of bodies are at the center of Elise Archias’s account of 1960s and early-’70s performance. Taking three New York–based protagonists as her guides, Archias argues that Yvonne Rainer’s choreography of pedestrian movement, Carolee Schneemann’s material treatment of sensation, and Vito Acconci’s self-assigned feats of physical endurance all shared a capacity to make visible unintended behaviors on the part of their

print October 2017

ALIZA NISENBAUM

PERSPECTIVE OFTEN doesn’t add up in Aliza Nisenbaum’s paintings: A window juts out of the wall that frames it; a coffee table refuses to recede, instead tilting up off the floor; sometimes depth is missing entirely so that the people in a portrait or the elements of a still life appear as if they might spill right out of a picture. This is true, for example, of 2 Years of Correspondence from Inmate 39807, 2016, which depicts a heap of drawings and letters that the Mexican-born, New York–based artist received from someone she was close to throughout their incarceration. The accumulated pages are