Arts & Bodies

Arts on Earth’s focus this Fall is the dynamic, tortured, joyful, complex relationship between our arts and our bodies across epochs and cultures.
For more information on Arts on Earth events, please visit Arts on Bodies.

We often speak of our experience of the arts as ​“transcendent” — transcendently beautiful, transcending normal human limits of performance and perception, speaking directly to the transcendent ​“soul.”

Yet art is inescapably made by corporeal beings, whose very corporeality determines the media, methods, instruments, forms, colors, tones, and materials through which we create. Furthermore, the very experience of transcendence is a corporeal one, determined by the state of the sensory and cognitive apparatus of the co-creating perceiver of art. Too, the production of art can take a heavy toll on artists’ bodies, through the absorption of lead, the inhalation of petroleum distillates, the stresses of poverty and creative work, and the repetitive punishment of muscles, joints, vocal cords, eyes, and other body parts.

Through Arts & Bodies we will examine how art is delimited and exalted by bodies, and vice-versa; how we use our arts to affect and reflect our thinking about, and our relationship with, our bodies. We will participate in and study art that is a direct extension of the body, such as dance and vocal music; art that celebrates the body; and art that probes, explores, challenges, plays in, teases about, and sometimes closes (or attempts to close), the gap we often experience between ​“I” and ​“my body.”

We’ll investigate how disciplines such as engineering, law, medicine, and business have affected the ways in which arts and bodies interact, and how anthropology, art history, philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines have interpreted the impulses and effects of art/​body interactions.