Review of Performance Histories, Bonnie Marranca (New York: PAJ Publications, 2008).

Abstract

In early 2000, a gallery in New York City exhibited photographs of lynchings that occurred in America’s South and Midwest in the first half of the twentieth century. They not only depicted the deaths themselves, but also the crowds who watched these ‘spectacles’ and later bought postcards of the events to send home and keep as souvenirs. Several years earlier, a different NYC gallery displayed photos taken by the feminist artist Hannah Wilke documenting her own terminal cancer. She had died the year before. Photos exposed her body ravaged by chemotherapy…