Food and the Social Body in US Performance Art, 1962–1980

Author

Janine DeFeo, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

2-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Art History

Advisor

Siona Wilson

Committee Members

Mona Hadler

Barbara Katz Rothman

Maria Elena Buszek

Subject Categories

American Art and Architecture | History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology | Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Keywords

performance art, feminism, food studies

Abstract

Food is a force of connection, a vector that passes through the borders of the body and links our biological organism with the social and political world. This complex, life-sustaining substance began to appear in US art in the early 1960s not just as an image, but as a literal material. Artists associated with every major artistic movement in the ’60s and ’70s, working in every conceivable medium, experimented with food. It was particularly evident in performance art, where its use underlined the visceral presence of and social links between bodies, including of performers, participants, and audience members. In case studies on performances by Alison Knowles, Adrian Piper, and Suzanne Lacy, this dissertation argues that these artists used food to engage what I call the “social body”—an experience of the physical body as entangled with, interpellated by, and sustained by its social and political roles. This exploration was particularly urgent in the context of the all-consuming politicization of daily life in New Left thought and activism. Situated at the intersection of food studies and art history, “Food and the Social Body in US Performance Art, 1962–1980” is the first dissertation to theorize and historicize the material use of food in this period’s art production.

Through the use of food, Knowles, Piper, and Lacy’s performances intentionally and unintentionally indexed wide-ranging social and political concerns. These include how gender, v race, and class structure interpersonal interactions; the nature of personal responsibility and involvement in global crises like the Vietnam War; and the relationship between the individual and the political community. Pulling from period cookbooks, made-for-TV movies, feminist-vegetarian treatises, psychological discourses of anorexia nervosa, and more, this dissertation marshals a wide range of cultural material to match the multifaceted way food functions in these artworks. In so doing, my study attends carefully to the politics of everyday biological life to articulate a new narrative of how the art of the 1960s and 1970s relates to its social and political context.

Recommended Citation

DeFeo, Janine, "Food and the Social Body in US Performance Art, 1962–1980" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6129