Lydie Pearl's 'Corps, sexe et art' Examines Body Art Through Gender Lens

Lydie Pearl's book 'Corps, sexe et art' explores body art practices and their societal context, dividing the 20th century into two periods pivoting around the fall of the Berlin Wall. The work uses sexual identity and gender confusion as a thread to discuss roughly forty years of body art, featuring artists such as Joël Peter Witkin, Michel Journiac, and Otto Mühl. Pearl argues that these artists engage the body differently based on gender, with varying fantasies of fusion or destruction toward the opposite sex. She interprets the loss of individuality as a key to understanding these practices, linking it to globalization, the omnipresence of science, and the disappearance of myths. However, the book's structure is fragmented into chapters often dedicated to a single artist, making it read like a collection of essays, and it lacks an iconography that could have provided visual unity. The review, written by Sophie Delpeux, notes that while the questioning of ambivalences is interesting, the coherence and strength of the argument suffer.