The Body of Knowledge

Description:

Combining live monologues with prerecorded sound and video, Body of Knowledge (1988) is a one-hour performance by Judy Radul that presents a philosophical meditation on the tension between being and knowing. 

The performance opens with Radul in a nurse’s uniform, cradling one of Western Front’s resident cats. She recites “ma-ma-ma…” her voice rising until it breaks into a yell, exhausting itself. She abruptly turns, lifting her skirt to reveal “I KNOW” scrawled in charcoal across her bare skin. 

In subsequent acts, she binds herself to a chair with bandages inscribed with text on gender and epistemology; covers her face and arms in white flour and black charcoal; and reads a poem about her blood. A cast of performers lip-sync to a recording of Radul reciting her personal medical history, displacing her speech (and therefore, subjectivity) through surrogate voices. 

These actions are intercut with Her Knowing of She Cutting I or Interrogation of the Pear, a video collage of personal and stock images overlaid with poetic text, spliced with footage of Radul watching the video alone on a monitor. Elements from the live performance parallel parts of the video—Radul scrawls “I KNOW A WOMAN” on paper in charcoal, the cat runs across the screen—adding yet another layer of mediation between embodiment and representation. 

Across these shifting acts, Radul continually withholds direct access to her body, grounding the audience’s experience instead in her speech. Viewed through a phenomenological lens, the performance situates knowledge in the material experience of the body, refracted through poetic phrasing, substitution, and absence. 

Presented as part of Ideophrenia, a performance series focused on challenging poetic tradition within a multimedia, interdisciplinary context. 

Curated by Susi Milne.

Video documentation is available upon request.