Meat Joy’s affective reach depended on physically engaging spectators’ senses

Evidence

Infantile yet erotic, more polymorphous in its perversity than Flaming Creatures, Meat Joy similarly freed sexuality from gender—and, beginning as it did with an exclusively involved heterosexual couple to wind up in an a-orgasmic Dionysian paint-spattered orgy—not only gender. Moreover, the piece physically involved the audience. Spectators were not only engaged by what they saw but what they touched (performers occasionally brushed against them) and smelled. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 602

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader frame on how 60s avant-garde works demanded embodied audience participation, relevant to the material conditions of dense downtown scenes. — connects to: Husserl held that perceived objects actively move, attract, and repel subjects — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 353