Disengagement with painting, recurrent throughout the avantgarde art history, find its various manifestations in the 1960s American art. They allegedly attempt to restore the corporeal dimensions of aesthetic experience, questioning the idea of modernist pure opticality. The body itself, however, goes through curious changes. In the practices of minimal art that expel illusionism and anthropomorphic naturalism, a physical experience of the viewer becomes essential to the theatrical presence of the art object, whereas the body to be represented or projected in the work must disappear. And it does so more thoroughly with raw, unformed, mutable materiality in post-minimal art. The performance art of the same period places emphasis on one's experience of one's own body, rather than the body as a visible form/spectacle. The role of the artist's body also changes, as the discourse of technology enters into art-making. The body trained and structured as an expert within a certain tradition is no longer valued ; instead, the artist's body internalizes more and more technological prostheses, thus approximating the status as the cyborg.
