ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Light Body (2016), by artist Lia Chavez (b. 1978), a practitioner of contemporary performance and embodied art. Chavez employs ascetic disciplines, meditation techniques, and neurological training alongside religious practices culled from Tibetan Buddhism and Christian mysticism. By drawing upon Eastern and Western traditions of ancient wisdom, she demonstrates that the body is a studio within which one acts in order to know. Through fasting, contemplative practice, and extended periods of silence, Chavez disciplines her flesh through habituated actions. Her ascetic commitments place her in the historical lineage of monastics and saints’ lives, which might be read as early forms of performance art. To explore this connection, this chapter examines Gregory Nyssen’s 4th-century text, The Life of Macrina, which depicts his monastic sister as a living icon. The locus of Macrina’s iconicity is her very flesh – glowing radiantly at the moment of her death. Thus, The Life of Macrina serves as an imaginative prototype for Chavez, a mystic-as-artist who substantiates spiritual phenomena into nondiscursive expressions. In short, Light Body is a prism of excess, embodying creativity in carefully choreographed steps and turns, representing the transfigured bodies of holy fools as rainbows of colored light.
