1. See Sacred Naked Nature Girls, “Company History,” promotional text, 1996. [BACK]

2. The original reference appears in Job 1:21: “When Job heard of the destruction of his animals and of his sons, he said, ‘Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’” (in W. B. Fulghum, Jr., A Dictionary of Biblical Allusions in En glish Literature [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965], 181). I take the phrase as a literal description of an existential condition. [BACK]

3. In the original biblical context, “Legion” is a name for devils. I am purposely invert ing the terms of this parable here. The original parable from Mark 5:9 and Luke 8:30 relates: “When Jesus met the man possessed with devils, in the country of the Gadarenes, he asked him his name. The maniac replied, ‘My name is Legion: for we are many,’ meaning possessed by many devils. Jesus permitted the devils to enter a herd of [Gadarene swine], and the man was cured” (in ibid., 152). [BACK]

4. Author's interviews with Danielle Brazell, Laura Meyers, and Denise Uyehara, March 28, 1997, and with Brazell, Meyers, Uyehara, Akilah Oliver, and Elia Arce, Oct. 13, 1997, both in Los Angeles. (Unless otherwise indicated, my information about SNNG is based on these interviews.) When I inquired about each member's ethnic background, Meyers replied that she prefers to identify herself with Texas. For her, Texas is an ethnicity. For more on Brazell's and Uyehara's individual work, see Chapter 5. [BACK]

5. Untitled Flesh was an experimental performance, still unnamed, when SNNG first presented it in Boulder in April 1994. The relatively finished version premiered at Highways in August 1994 and toured to the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago; Sushi Performance and Visual Arts, San Diego; Echo Theatre, Portland, Oregon; Luna Sea Women's Performance Project, San Francisco. On the second piece, see Meiling Cheng, “Sacred Naked Nature Girls,” Theatre Fo rum (Summer-Fall 1997): 5–13. [BACK]

7. Quoted from a Web site on spiritual adultery (www.acts17–11.com/sa.html). [BACK]

8. SNNG, “Artistic Statement,” 1993. [BACK]

9. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1; Jones and Stephenson, “Introduction,” in Performing the Body/Performing the Text, 1–10. [BACK]

10. Amelia Jones argues that corporeal and identificational particularities evinced in a performing body have the potential to expose the normative prejudices inherent in modernist/formalist art history and criticism. In Jones's words, “when the body in performance is female, obviously queer, non-white, exaggeratedly (hyper) masculine, or otherwise enacted against the grain of the normative subject (the straight, white, upper-middle-class, male subject coincident with the category ‘artist’ in western culture) the hidden logic of exclusionism underlying modernist art history and criticism is exposed” (Body Art/Performing the Subject [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998], 7). [BACK]

11. Jon Cruz suggests that “essentialism” can be avoided by “a retreat from systems and histories to the present and the local.” He believes such an epistemological move to the specific “has restored the problem of meaning, retrieved the value of hermeneutics, and brought social and cultural analysis back to an appreciation” for the individual subjects (“From Farce to Tragedy: Reflections on the Reification of Race at Century's End,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield [Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 19–39). [BACK]

12. As Cruz phrases it, “Multiculturalism is, in part, about groups struggling to achieve moral solidarity, a precious good in an era of profound transformation and instability” (ibid., 31). [BACK]

13. The quotations are from SNNG's “Artistic Statement” and “Company Activities,” both 1993. [BACK]

14. Phelan, Unmarked, 1, 2, 10. [BACK]

15. Ibid., 6, 7, 2, 9. [BACK]

16. Ibid., 27, 19. [BACK]

17. Michele Wallace, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (New York: Verso, 1990), 5. [BACK]

18. Jill Dolan, “The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance,” Theatre Journal 39 (May 1989): 160. [BACK]

19. Susan Gubar, “Sapphistries,” Signs 10, no. 1 (Autumn 1984): 43–62. [BACK]

20. The phrase “carefully blind” alludes to Phelan's astute remark on vision and blindness:

21. Ibid., 13. [BACK]

22. Ibid., 8. [BACK]

23. Wallace, Invisibility Blues, 6. [BACK]

24. I thank Amelia Jones for her contribution to this insight. [BACK]

25. Phelan uses the conflation, “I/eye,” to analyze the intricate relations between subjectivity (I) and the visual faculty (eye) discussed by Lacan (see Unmarked, 20). I understand that many other scholars have used such a conflation, but I am alluding specifically to Phelan's usage here. [BACK]

26. Dolan, “The Dynamics of Desire,” 161. [BACK]

27. Dolan discusses Wilke, Schneemann, and Leslie Labowitz in her article: “Wilke, Labowitz, and other artists attempt to use nudity in performance to create female subjectivity, but they are caught in the gender-polarized terms and objectifying strictures of the performance apparatus”(ibid., 159). [BACK]

28. For a succinct commentary on the Western tradition of male erotic art, see Carol Duncan's “The Aesthetics of Power in Modern Erotic Art,” in Feminist Art Criticism, ed. Arlene Raven, Cassandra L. Langer, and Joanna Frueh (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 59–69. [BACK]

29. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 44. [BACK]

30. Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism Semiotics Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 25–26, 27. [BACK]

31. See William Rubin, ed., Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 99; James R. Mellow, “Picasso: The Artist in His Studio,” in Picasso: The Avignon Painting (New York: Pace Gallery, exhibition catalog, 1981), 4. [BACK]

32. I thank Amelia Jones for pointing out the relevance of primitivism to my argument here. [BACK]

33. André Salmon, “On Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, ” in A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences, ed. Marilyn McCully (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 57. [BACK]

34. Gert Schiff, “Picasso's Suite 347, or Painting as an Act of Love,” in Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730–1970, ed. Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 239. [BACK]

35. Cited in Linda Nochlin, “Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art,” in ibid., 14. [BACK]

36. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 172. [BACK]

37. Mellow, Picasso, 4–5. [BACK]

38. Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed. Bruce McPherson (New York: Documentext, 1979), 63. [BACK]

39. Duncan, “The Aesthetics of Power,” 59, 62. [BACK]

40. Steinberg, Other Criteria, 173. [BACK]

41. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 28. [BACK]

42. Coco Fusco, “Sacred Naked Nature Girls: An Interview,” Bomb (Summer 1995): 21–22. [BACK]

43. Unpublished interview by Elysia Paladino with SNNG, March 26, 1996. I thank Paladino for allowing me to use this document. [BACK]

44. Again a reference to the Bible. The Hebrew prophets denounce Jezebel, the daughter of the King of Tyre and wife of King Ahab, because she introduces different types of worship to the Israelites. Like Medea, Jezebel commits murder to help her husband, King Ahab. Later King Jehu orders that Jezebel be thrown out the window as a punishment for her flirtation with him. Her body is eaten by dogs. See Fulghum, Dictionary of Biblical Allusions, 129–30. [BACK]

45. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeolog y of the Human Sciences [translator unnoted] (New York: Vintage, 1970), xvii. [BACK]

46. I base my description on Moira Roth's documentation in The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970–1980 (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983), 86. [BACK]

47. See Linda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), for a substantial examination of contemporary lesbian sadomasochistic performances. [BACK]

48. In Fusco, “Sacred Naked Nature Girls,” 21. [BACK]

49. Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (New York: Routledge, 1996). [BACK]

50. Marianne Dresser, “Working Girls: The Sacred Naked Nature Girls at Luna Sea,” Bay Area Reporter, April 20, 1995, 34. [BACK]

51. Fusco, “Sacred Naked Nature Girls,” 21. [BACK]

52. Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 465. [BACK]

53. Gubar mentions Sappho and the island of Lesbos in “Sapphistries”; an account of the Amazons can be found in Edith Hamilton, Mytholog y: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York: Mentor, 1942), 287. [BACK]

54. Schneemann performed Interior Scroll twice, in 1975 and 1977. In the second performance she painted her body with mud. See Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, 234–39. A description of Wilke's Starification Object Series (S.O.S.) appears in Roth, The Amazing Decade, 146. See also Amelia Jones's excellent studies of Schneemann and Wilke in “Interpreting Feminist Bodies: The Unframeability of Desire,” The Rhetoric of the Frame, ed. P. Duro (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 223–41; also Jones, “The Rhetoric of the Pose: Hannah Wilke and the Radical Narcissism of Feminist Body Art,” in Body Art/Performing the Subject, 151–96. For 1990s exhibitions of the two artists' work, see Intra-Venus: Hannah Wilke (New York: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, exhibition catalog, 1995) and Carolee Schneemann: Up To and Including Her Limits (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, exhibition catalog, 1997). [BACK]

55. Unpublished interview with SNNG by Paladino. [BACK]

56. Gloria Feman Orenstein, “The Reemergence of the Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women,” in Feminist Art Criticism, 72, 72–73, 71. [BACK]

57. Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (New York: Anchor, 1996), 6. [BACK]

58. Fusco, “Sacred Naked Nature Girls,” 22. [BACK]

59. Ibid., 22. [BACK]