Ciało jako przedmiot praktyk ascetycznych w sztuce współczesnej (Opałka, Dudek-Dürer, Orlan)

Abstract

I'd like to consider the activities of three artists - Roman Opalka, Andrzej Dudek-Dürer and Orlan - as a contemporary form of asceticism. If we envisage a homeostatic relation between body and mind to be a 'normal state', the asceticism tends to undermine it. In the perspective of asceticism body is a ballast which should undergo practices of depreciation. Although these practices are justified in religious contexts, in a context of the art and secularized culture they seem to be an aberration. I'd like to outline motivations of Opalka, Dudek-Dürer and Orlan and relations between body and mind which their art evokes. Do they really act at the edge of pathology or do they rather express - may be extremely - the condition of contemporary human being and his or her body?