The language of gesture: Untimely bodies and contemporary performance

Abstract

This chapter explores the medieval interests of two twenty-first century pieces of art: Elizabeth Price’s immersive video installation, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012), and Michael Landy’s Saints Alive (2013). Both of these works turn to medieval culture in order to examine the untimeliness of the body and this chapter traces their sources and explores how their work speaks with, and to, medieval representations of the body. It contextualises Price and Landy’s work with explorations of medieval effigies and the Middle English poem St Erkenwald. The methodology of this chapter is informed by Aby Warburg’s work on gesture in early modern art and interrogates moments of contact and communication across time.