Janig Begoc

Janig Begoc
Period: 2010-2011
Profession: Art historian Janig Bégoc was born in 1978 in Brest. With a PhD in art history, she has taught at UCO (Angers), ENSAI (Rennes) and Université Rennes 2, where she is an associate member of the “Histoire et critique des arts” research group. Her research focuses on the history, critical reception and historiography of body and performance art. Her project at Villa Medici is divided into two parts. The first is devoted to the aesthetic, theoretical and ideological issues involved in the dissemination of body art in Italy in the 1970s. Centered on the critical reception of this art form, the study also explores the conditions of its mediatization in galleries and museums, as well as the ways in which it was put into history. By crossing the history of performance art with that of its reception, the aim is to assess the pivotal role of the peninsula in the dissemination of international art forms and, at the same time, the evolution of the methods and objects of Italian art criticism. The research is structured around four axes: The sources of Body art (an archaeology of action art terminology); Works, photographs and documents; Producing, presenting and exhibiting Body art; Singular critical paths. The second section deals with the anthropological issues surrounding performance art. Its aim is to examine how the representations of suffering produced by artists are symptomatic of a survival of archetypal gestures and images that draw their source from a heterogeneous iconographic repertoire, largely inspired by religious painting, and in particular by the figure of the martyr and the postures of torture. This investigation allows us to consider body art not only in relation to the history of twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes, but also on the anthropological scale of the material history of images.