Vanishing Corporeality and the Ethics of Presence: Decontextualizing Performance Art in Recourse to Metamodernity

Abstract

This article proposes a rethinking of performance art in the theoretical framework of metamodernity, emphasizing the dynamic interplay between postmodern irony and modernist sincerity as central to the current performative practices. The study places performance art in the context of the body as a medium, an ephemerality and a relationality, and explores how the artist's body becomes a critical site of negotiation for identity, power, violence and resistance. It draws on important avant-garde genealogies and current practitioners to question the shift from passive viewing to participatory co-presence. The article also addresses philosophical concepts of performativity, discipline, and spectacle to explain how corporeal exposure and the aesthetics of suffering challenge dominant epistemologies and ethical regimes. These performative acts are read not only as critiques of commodification and authority, but as attempts at reconstructing meaning in an uncertain and fragmented world, through a metamodern lens. Vulnerability and agency, detachment and affect, redefine performance art as a dynamic praxis of becoming. Finally, the study suggests that metamodernity provides a fruitful approach to the understanding of performance art as a dynamic ethical-aesthetic space, where presence, relationality and affective engagement redefine the potentialities of artistic and social experience in the contemporary moment.