Tuesday, 8 March 2011

Performance art basix..

X By 1970, Performance Art was a global term, and its definition a bit more specific. "Performance Art" meant that it was live, and it was art, not theater. Performance Art also meant that it was art that could not be bought, sold or traded as a commodity. Actually, the latter sentence is of major importance. Performance artists saw (and see) the movement as a means of taking their art directly to a public forum, thus completely eliminating the need for galleries, agents, brokers, tax accountants and any other aspect of capitalism. It's a sort of social commentary on the purity of art, you see.
The 1970s also saw the heyday of "Body Art" (an offshoot of Performance Art), which began in the 1960s. In Body Art, the artist's own flesh (or the flesh of others) is the canvas. Body Art can range from covering volunteers with blue paint and then having them writhe on a canvas, to self-mutilation in front of an audience. (Body Art is often disturbing, as you may well imagine.)
Additionally, the 1970s saw the rise of the autobiography being incorporated into a performance piece. This kind of story-telling is much more entertaining to most people than, say, seeing someone shot with a gun. (This actually happened, in a Body Art piece, in Venice, California, in 1971.) The autobiographical pieces are also a great platform for presenting one's views on social causes or issues.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, Performance Art has increasingly incorporated technological media into pieces - mainly because we have acquired exponential amounts of new technology. Recently, in fact, an 80's pop musician made the news for Performance Art pieces which use a Microsoft® PowerPoint presentation as the crux of the performance. Where Performance Art goes from here is only a matter of combining technology and imagination. In other words, there are no foreseeable boundaries for Performance Art.

• Performance Art is live.
• Performance Art has no rules or guidelines. It is art because the artist says it is art. It is experimental.
• Performance Art is not for sale. It may, however, sell admission tickets and film rights.
• Performance Art may be comprised of painting or sculpture (or both), dialogue, poetry, music, dance, opera, film footage, turned on television sets, laser lights, live animals and fire. Or all of the above. There are as many variables as there are artists.
• Performance Art is a legitimate artistic movement. It has longevity (some performance artists, in fact, have rather large bodies of work) and is a degreed course of study in many post-secondary institutions.
Dada, Futurism, the Bauhaus and the Black Mountain College all inspired and helped pave the way for Performance Art.
• Performance Art is closely related to Conceptual Art. Both Fluxus and Body Art are types of Performance Art.
• Performance Art may be entertaining, amusing, shocking or horrifying. No matter which adjective applies, it is meant to be memorable.
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XX Susan Griffen tells a story about surrealist poet Robert Desnos, who was imprisoned in the Nazi death camps:
One day Desnos and others were taken away from their barracks. The prisoners rode on the back of a flatbed truck; they knew the truck was going to the gas chamber; no one spoke. Soon they arrived and the guards ordered them off the truck. When they began to move toward the gas chamber, suddenly a Desnos jumped out of line and grabbed the hand of the woman in front of him. He was animated and he began to read her palm. The forecast was good: a long life, many grandchildren, abundant joy. A person nearby offered his palm to Desnos. Here, too, Desnos foresaw a long life filled with happiness and success. The other prisoners came to life, eagerly thrusting their palms toward Desnos and, in each case, he foresaw long and joyous lives.
The guards became visibly disoriented. Minutes before they were on a routine mission the outcome of which seemed inevitable, but now they became tentative in their movements. Desnos was so effective in creating a new reality that the guards were unable to go through with the executions. They ordered the prisoners back onto the truck and took them back to the barracks. Desnos never was executed. Through the power of imagination, he saved his own life and the lives of others.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEP_field

The Surveillance Camera Players arrange dramatic performances intended for viewing on surveillance cameras, then find examples of these cameras in their surroundings and put on interpretations of Ubu Roi and Waiting for Godot for the lucky security guards or video cassette recorders monitoring the scene.

Andrew Epstein of Amhurst College in Massachusetts created a commentary on the U.S. War on Drugs by taking it to its logical conclusion. He posted signs that read “In order to curb the use of caffeine at Amherst College, the sale and distribution of coffee are no longer permitted on campus. Effective Immediately.” Then he shut down and cloaked the old coffee machines and sent out confederates to peddle coffee beans out on the sidewalk black market.
The best part of this is that it was all done above-board with the approval of the campus administration under the guise of an art project. “I suspect if he had come to the administration as an activist, there would have been much stronger resistance,” said Epstein’s faculty advisor. “It shows us how art has this kind of peculiar permission.”

A 17-year-old girl stopped Governor George Wallace from speaking at the Georgia State House by applauding him!


One of the techniques used by the Nazi invaders of Poland to stamp out resistance was to demolish statues and monuments dedicated to Polish patriotism or heroes. Many Poles adopted the practice of pretending that the monuments still existed, for instance walking around the empty spaces where they had been as if they were still there.

Three men were arrested for throwing paper airplanes through the airspace of the U.S. embassy in Norway, while the U.S. was bombing Afghanistan.

Lorin Partridge shows up at anti-war protests with pro-war picket signs that read “War is Groovy” and “Killing People is No Big Deal.”


Seattle municipal bus driver Reggie Wilson drives a route all his own:
He entertains his passengers with jokes, stories and spontaneous poems in the bus, which he’s decorated with smiley faces. He hides candies and snacks under the bus seats on special occasions, and he has a cache of stuffed animals for crying kids. He leads sing-a-longs featuring bus and work-themed songs: “If You’re Happy That It’s Friday, Say Uh-huh” and “Ride, Ride, Ride the Bus Gently Down the Street.”
In San Francisco, California, a man by the name of Brian Anthony Young impersonated a state fish and game warden for three months, checking licenses, issuing citations and confiscating fish. He said that “boredom and drugs” led him to perform the inspections on more than 200 anglers, boats, restaurants and stores.

In March 1999 a group of people on social welfare visited Bloemendaal, the richest town in the Netherlands. They brought gifts such as home baked cakes or flower bulbs and offered them to the rich. An accompanying note said “You pay a lot of taxes, which we profit from. With this gesture we would like to express our thanks.”

Here’s a good story: A student at MIT spent her summer days at the Harvard football field, wearing a black-and-white striped shirt and tossing bird seed around while blowing a whistle. A few months later, football season began, and when the referee blew the whistle for the first home game, the field was suddenly covered with birds.

A group of students in Georgia threw a rave and a fashion show in a Wal-Mart. “We just wanted something we could do at Wal-Mart to bring the youth culture and the art world into kinda like a fluorescent-lit wasteland.”

http://idealorder.org/

Marathon..The real winner, Jacqueline Gareau of Canada, crossed the line in 2:34:28, but was essentially ignored by the media that flocked to interview Ruiz, who had crossed the line earlier. Apparently, Ruiz had dropped out of the race, hopped on the subway, got off about a mile from the finish line, and ran in from there. The effect was to rob Gareau of her moment of triumph, although she was later honored in a special ceremony a couple of weeks after the race. Second-place finisher Patti Lyons, whose 2:35:08 finish set a new American record, was also pretty much completely ignored. 


Ronald M. Chroniak robbed a bank and then went outside and started handing out money to people, saying “I just robbed the bank; have a nice day,” until his arrest.

A hunter in Uganda was being sought by authorities upset over his habit of shooting gorillas with tranquilizer darts and then dressing them in clown suits.


Choi Chung-ching staged regular funerals to drive away potential buyers of housing near his home, successfully exploiting a superstitious custom (but eventually getting sued).


Danah Boyd has a delightful story about spontanous group performance art:
Last night, I attended a renegade party buried in San Francisco. We could see the road from our location, but the road could not see us. When we saw cop car after cop car drive by, we knew it was over. But still, as they stopped, we crouched down, climbed trees, hid behind bushes. The officer climbed the hill with his flashlight, shining it on people. He got to the top where he realized there were at least 150 people there.
“Oh. My. God.” was the only thing he could mutter. And he kept repeating it.
In response, someone jumped up and yelled “Surprise!” at which point everyone jumped into singing “Happy Birthday” to the officer. His eyes were wide with shock, jaw still slack…

They’re calling it Munchausen by Internet Syndrome. Some people are manufacturing on-line personæ that are complete with realistic pathos, tragedy, disease, trauma or sextuplets, and then they go on to suck up the virtual sympathy of other folks on-line (and sometimes their charitable donations).

Apparently, in Virginia, all you gotta do to get a new driver’s license photo is go to the department of motor vehicles and ask. So a couple of pranksters drove from one to the next, getting their photos taken at one after another, wearing ridiculous clothes, wigs, fake beards, and mugging for the camera with grotesque expressions. Oh yeah, then they made a movie about it


First and foremost was a fellow who called himself George Psalmanazar (his real name is lost to history). In the late 17th Century, George wandered around Europe pretending to be a cannibal prince from the exotic orient. He made up an alphabet and lectured widely about the pagan practices and exotic wildlife of his home nation, even teaching at Oxford on the subject. In 1704 he compiled these observations into the book “An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa.”
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Tate on Performance Art:
Art in which the medium is the artist's own body and the artwork takes the form of actions performed by the artist. Performance art has origins in Futurism and Dada, but became a major phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s and can be seen as a branch of Conceptual art. In Germany and Austria it was known as Actionism. An important influence on the emergence of Performance was the photographs of the Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock making his so-called action paintings, taken in 1950 by the photographer Hans Namuth. Performance art had its immediate origins in the more overtly theatrical Happenings organised by Allan Kaprow and others in New York in the late 1950s. By the mid 1960s this theatrical element was being stripped out by early Performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman. In Europe the German artist Joseph Beuys was a hugely influential pioneer of Performance art, making a wide impact with his 'actions' from 1963 on. These were powerful expressions of the pain of human existence, and complex allegories of social and political issues and man's relationship to nature. In Britain the artist duo Gilbert & George made highly original Performance works from 1969. A major problem for early Performance artists was the ephemeral nature of the medium. Right from the start performance pieces were recorded in photography, film and video, and these eventually became the primary means by which Performance reached a wide public.
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Ryan Trecartin

K-CoreaINC.K (section a) from Ryan Trecartin on Vimeo.

http://www.youtube.com/user/WianTreetin#p/u/34/lPwbkjwIsGw
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http://xaviercha.com/
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Tino Seghal wiki
In Sehgal's 2010 work "This Progress" at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the artist empties Frank Lloyd Wright's famed spiral gallery of all art work. The museum visitor is met at the base of the spiral by a child, who asks a small group what they think progress is. As they begin their ascent up the spiral ramp the visitors continue their conversation until they are met by a high school student who picks up the conversation. Further still, they are met by a young adult and lastly an older adult who finishes their ascent to the upper-most point in the Guggenheim. For "This is New" a museum attendant barks out headlines from the day's paper to visitors. In "This Success/This Failure" young children attempt to play without using objects and sometimes draw visitors into their games. "Instead of allowing some things to rise up to your face, dancing bruce and dan and other things" (2000) - is a live re-enactment of movements from dance-influenced video-works by Dan Graham and Bruce Nauman. For "This is Good" (2001) a museum worker waves their arms and hops from one leg to the other, then states the title of the piece. In "This is Propaganda" (2002) a museum guard sings a song with the lyrics "This is propaganda/you know/you know" twice, then announces the title and year of the work, each time a visitor enters the room. For "This objective of that object" (2004) the visitor becomes surrounded by five people who remain with their backs to the visitors. The five chant, "The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion," and if the visitor does not respond they slowly sink to the ground. If the visitor says something they begin a discussion.

http://www.fondazionenicolatrussardi.com/exhibitions/tino_sehgal.html