Training to failure or how i learned to stop winning and love losing
Brown, Hannah
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125733
Description
Title
Training to failure or how i learned to stop winning and love losing
Author(s)
Brown, Hannah
Issue Date
2024-07-17
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Weissman, Terri
Department of Study
Art & Design
Discipline
Art History
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.A.
Degree Level
Thesis
Keyword(s)
Performance
Queer Theory
Abstract
Training to Failure is a bodybuilding practice which entails repeating an exercise to the point of momentary muscular failure. It is an act which aims, at the outset, to max out one’s endurance, to ensure that the body will be unable to overcome an action it has been repeating in an effort to achieve hypertrophy (the enlargement of muscle, tissue, organs). Outside of the weight room, Training to Failure can be thought of as something which is repeated until it can’t be. It can be, for instance, a disruption of embodied histories, a vector which points to the work required of identity construction and maintenance, something which is both performed by the body (internally) and acted upon it (externally). Training to Failure operates as a dialectic, a push and pull, the body as site of both agency and incapacitation.
Training to Failure, and all of its bodily consequences, emerges in three seemingly unrelated works: Jeff Tremaine’s 2022 film Jackass Forever, Cassils’ 2010 performance Hard Times, and Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh's durational work Art/Life One Year Performance, which took place between 1983 and 1984. These three works foreground a kind of bittersweet commitment to feats which purposefully exhaust bodily endurance and, in doing so, force a breakdown in performativity. These works use repetition to expose gender’s construction and what it means to have a body. The inability to repeat a motion, which in these works signals a breakdown in performativity, points to difference, and functions as an acknowledgement of all the scaffolding that upholds gender norms. Situated together, such moments of corporeal failure and lapses in the ability to perform demonstrate, in different ways, the fragility of bodily autonomy and the transgressive potential of Training to Failure.
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