PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art

Ravetto-Biagioli, Kriss.
The Visual Grammar of Suffering: Pia Lindman and the Performance of Grief
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - PAJ 84 (Volume 28, Number 3), September 2006, pp. 77-92

The MIT Press

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli - TThe Visual Grammar of Suffering Pia Lindman and the Performance of Grief - PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28:3 PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28.3 (2006) 77-92 The Visual Grammar of Suffering Pia Lindman and the Performance of Grief Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli Pia Lindman is perhaps best known for her Public Sauna at P.S.1 in 2000, where she installed a working sauna in an artspace and invited the audience to join in the performance, defying the taboo of nudity in American culture and foregrounding the centrality of the human body in art. Like Public Sauna, her more recent work belongs in the tradition of minimalist and community-oriented art. Site-specific in nature, it concerns the relation of the body to public space in everyday life and the broader socio-political issues inscribed in those dynamics. Lindman provokes us to think about how everyday interactions with bodies, architecture, media, and public art affect our sense of self and our experience of social space. By drawing attention to how social interactions are themselves performative, her work also reveals the inherent performativity of making and experiencing art. Her recent New York Times demonstrates the tensions between human gestures of private suffering and the political motivations for monumentalizing personal grief. Lindman has performed New York Times in Mexico City, Tokyo, Helsinki, Vienna, Berlin, and most recently at Battery Park, the Vera List...