Exploring the body as subject and object - How the artist becomes the object and the object becomes the artist simultaneously

This thesis will discuss, within the first chapter, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's views of the body as subject and object. This discussion is situated between performance art and sculptural body art practices, exploring the instinctiveness of the body's movement within an environment as both subject and object through the idea of phenomenology of the lived-body. Looking at the debate of disembodiment and embodiment, this study is a discussion on the conflict of the body as subject and object by analysing the obscurity of the performing body. It will examine the theories of Merleau-Ponty's lived-body and the chiasm. He states the body is in constant communication with the world, exchanging and negotiating itself with the space around it.