1. Perform
“Changes in art are generally
insignificant unless they involve
some form of cognitive change,
and unless they presuppose
some modification of those
processes of triangulation by
means of which a spectator, a
work of art, and a world of
practices and referents are
located relative to each other.”
Charles Harrison
“Conceptual Art and the
Suppression of the Beholder”
1
2. Society of Spectacle
• “spectacle was a spectacle, a
circus, a show, an exhibition, a
one way transmission of
experience. It was a form of
‘communication to which one
side, the audience, can never
reply; a culture based on the
reduction of almost everyone to
a state of abject non-creativity,
of receptivity, passivity and
isolation.’
• Christopher Gray ‘Everyone will live
in his own Cathedral”: the
Situationists 1958-1964
3. “The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is
the one that achieves madness. Am I right? Eh? “
Turner (aka Mick Jagger) in Performance (dir. Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg 1970)
4. Unhinged Performances - critically gone
“She stood before me quite naked
– or nearly so. Over the nipples of
her breast were two tin tomato
cans, fastened with a green string
around her back. Between the
tomato cans hung a very small
birdcage and within it a crestfallen
canary. One arm was covered
from wrist to shoulder with celluloid
curtain rings, which she later
admitted to have pilfered from a
furniture display in wanamakers.
She removed her hat, which had
been trimmed with carrots, beets,
and other vegetables. Her hair was
close cropped and dyed vermilion.
“
Baroness Elsa
Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism
4
6. Off the wall into the space - from passive object of
consumption to active body of production
• From the 1960’s
onwards the body
burst out of the
often idealising
(ideological)
confines of the
picture frame
into the physical
space of the art
gallery.
6
7. The Roots of Performance or Body art
“a happening cannot be reproduced” Allan Kaprow
Yves Klein Claus Oldenburg
Snapshots from the City 1960
Cabaret Voltaire
The Spectator in Minimalism
The gesturing body
8. Happenings - “a happening cannot be reproduced” Allan Kaprow
The happening seeks to
erase the line between art
and life, between viewer
and maker, between artist
and audience.
To increase awareness of
the latent potential of
people to collaborate
together across social
spaces is its political ‘act’.
Claus Oldenburg
Snapshots from the City
1960
8
9. The gesturing body - Process and Chance
“here the direct application of
an automatic approach to the
act makes it clear that not
only is this not the old craft
of painting, but it is perhaps
bordering on ritual itself,
which happens to use paint as
one of its materials.”
Allan Kaprow 1958
9
10. The Spectator in time in space
• A decisive shift in the role of the
spectator. In typically
Greenbergian modernism the
viewer was taken out of time and
space and history - a disembodied
eye who was lifted somewhere
else. In minimalism the viewers
experience of the artwork was
concretely tied to the experience
of the space as a physical being.
A physical self-conscious about
looking at the physical objects of Robert Morris
minimalism was key. It was a Untitled
profoundly different kind of artistic 1965
consumption.
10
11. Key features of Conceptualism
• The dematerialisation of the art object
• Resistance to the art market / to corporate
buying power. Critique of the institutions of art
(museums, critics, dealers):
• Investigation of the status of the art object -the
ontology of art
• A rejection of the myths of modernism -
especially in relation to ideas of expression,
authenticity (see collaborative practice)
• New mediums - the embrace of non
conventional forms for artistic communication -
text, photography, video, performance- the
search for more democratic forms of
communicating
• A questioning of the social role of the artist
artists no longer mute doers
• A re-imagining of the role of the spectator - a
John Baldessari
shift from a passive consumer of aesthetic ‘What is Painting’
objects- to an active reader and interpreter 1968
11
12. The ontology of art
Joseph Kosuth remarked that the
‘purest’ definition of conceptual art
would be that it is an inquiry into the foundations
of the concept ‘art’.
12
13. 1. The irrational riot of the
body
• Talking dirty in the
institution
13
15. “….it can be seen that museums betray, in the smallest
details of their morphology and their organisation,
their true function, which is to strengthen the feeling of
belonging in some and the feeling of exclusion in
others. Everything in these civic temples in which
bourgeois society deposits its most sacred possessions
[…] combines to indicate that the world of art is as
contrary to the world of the everyday life as the sacred
is to the profane. The prohibition against touching the
objects, the religious silence which is forced upon
visitors, the puritan asceticism of the facilities, always
scarce and uncomfortable, the almost systematic
refusal of any instruction, the grandiose solemnity of
the decoration and the decorum, [..] monumental
staircases both outside and inside, everything seems
done to remind people that the transition from the
profane world to the sacred, presupposes , as
Durkheim says, ‘a genuine metamorphosis’, a radical
spiritual change…”
Pierre Bourdieu
“A Sociological Theory of Art’ in “The Pure Gaze:
Essays on Art”
printed in “The Field of Cultural Production”
15
16. “The thing is, wisdom has always
derogated the body, with its corruptions
and distractions, as a threat to truth.
There is a foolishness of the body: it’s
always liable to the contingencies,
myopia and errors of passion, appetite,
need. This is why fasting, which is as old
as religion itself, is regarded as a
technique of seeking proximity to God.
When fasting the soul is not being jostled
by the seductions and satisfactions of
salivating mouths, rumbling bellies,
delicious smells, and all devastating
invitations to bite, chew, suck and
swallow. Food is an enemy of the soul
because the mouth and belly couldn’t
care less about eternity. ”
Dave Beech “Getting Carried Away”
Variant issue 1
16
17. “The resulting trajectory of
Acconci’s compulsive ejaculations
effected a literal cum-shot in the
face of the transcendent
cleanliness and geometric order of
the then ascendant aesthetic of
minimalism, tainting the purity of
its precious bodily fluids with his
venereal discharge. “
Douglas Fogle
“A Scatological Aesthetics for the
Tired of Seeing”
Chapmanworld catalogue
17
18. 2. The personal is political
The ‘threat ‘ of ‘irrational’
female body
18
20. Carolee Schneemann
Interior Scroll
“Physical equivalences are
enacted as a psychic and imagistic
stream in which layered elements
mesh and gain intensity by the
energy complement of the
audience.”
Carolee Schneemann,
More than Meat Joy 1979
20
22. Marina Abramovic
“Rhythm 0”
1974
IN “Rhythm O” Abramovic offered
herself passively to spectators, who
could do what they liked with a range
of objects and her body. A text
On the wall read “there are seventy
two on the table that can be used on
me as desired. I am the object.”By
the end of the performance all her
clothes had been cut off with razor
blades, she had been cut, painted,
cleaned, decorated, crowned with
thorns and had a loaded gun pressed
to her head. After six hours the
performance was halted by
concerned spectators.
22
23. Putting myself in the Picture
“Since 1960 I have been concerned
with the creation of a formal
imagery that is specifically female,
a new language that fuses mind
and body into erotic objects that are
nameable and at the same time
quite abstract. Its content has
always related to my own body and
feelings, reflecting pleasure as well
as pain, the ambiguity and
complexity of emotions.”
Hannah Wilke
23
27. Performance Art -A Serious Business
Hermann Nitsch
“Because I live in a
technically civilised world, I
sometimes have need to
wallow in mud like a pig. ”
Otto Muhl 1963
28. Performance Art -A Serious Business
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=26R9KFdt5aY&feature=PlayList&p=0FEF07D6133E662B&playnext=1&index=10
Chris Burden “Trans-Fixed” 1974 Chris Burden ‘Shoot’ 1971
29. Criticisms?
• Performance art had a
limited impact outside the
university or gallery circuit.
Hermetic.
• Constricted by ideas about
authenticity, truth,
endurance.
• Handicapped by a zealous
earnestness and moral
superiority.
• Unproblematic relationship
with documentation. 29
29
31. The Laws of Sculptors
• 1. Always be smartly
dressed, well groomed
relaxed friendly polite
and in complete control
2. Make the world
believe in you and be
prepared to pay heavily
for this privilege
3. Never worry assess
discuss or criticise but
remain quietly respectful
and calm
4 The Lord chisels still,
so don’t leave your
bench for long
31
35. “the sense of modern masculinity
as an extended adolescence draws
on what might be called the
feminisation of masculinity. In this
work it is as if the link between
hysteria and powerlessness in
women’s art of the 80’s has shifted
to that of the experience of men”
John Roberts “Domestic Squabbles”
in “Who’s Afraid of red, white and
Blue?”
edited by David Burrows
35
37. Performances Return (Second Wave)90’s…
Reasons for:
• The liveness of live art “you had to be there”. In a
mediated culture, performance art’s insistence on
the particularity of the ‘event’ in space and time is
central.
• Slow art in a fast culture
• Cheap art in an expensive culture (high return on
minimum investment - low overheads - cynical).
Flexible, strategic, zero drag.
• Looking glum is no longer good for ‘serious’
performance ‘business..’. The avant-garde
opposition to entertainment, commerce has lost its
power and authority.
37
40. • Aleksandr Brener:
• “in the mid 1990’s he tried to copulate
with his wife on a city sidewalk during
frosty weather, and on another occasion
to give himself a blowjob in public (he
failed in both). Elsewhere he attempted to
force his way into the Ministry of Defense
in Moscow to put slippers on the
Minster’s feet; and at the height of the
war in Chechnya he pranced around Red
Square with boxing gloves, announcing
that he was challenging Boris Yeltsin to a
fight. Late in 1996, Brener sprayed a
dollar sign on Kasmir Malevich’s White
Square on a White Background [..] for
which he was arrested and imprisoned.”
• Brandon Taylor, Art of Today, p.199 13
41. Tehching Hsieh
(b. 1950, Taiwan)
Best known for his five One Year
Performances: between 1978 and
1986, the artist spent one year locked
inside a cage, one year punching a
time clock every hour, one year
completely outdoors, one year tied to
another person, and, lastly, one year
without making, viewing, discussing,
reading about, or in any other way
participating in art. Hsieh's final
performance piece, Thirteen Year
Plan, was completed in 1999 after a
process lasting thirteen years.
41
42. In 1994, Zhang Huan lathered his nude body in honey
For My New York, he wore a suit made of fresh cuts of meat
and fish oil and sat down on a roughhewn latrine seat
stitched together and strode down Fifth Avenue, releasing
in a public bathroom in Beijingʼs East Village art colony,
white doves from a cage, a Buddhist gesture of
offering himself up as a tasty lunch to hoards of
compassion.
swarming flies and insects.
ZHANG HUAN ‘My New York’ 2002
12 Square Meters
1994
43. Body as Metaphor
Francis Alys, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002
Zhang Huan, To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond,
Five hundred volunteers attempt to shift a sand 1997.
Dune outside Lima, Peru. Forty workers who had gone to Beijing looking for work,
were invited to stand in a pond on the city’s outskirts in
an attempt to raise the water level.
There presence in the pond had no real effect, but alluded
to the political potential of mass action
43
46. Inside each of the
makeshift boxes
were Chechnyan
refugees seeking
asylum in Germany.
In Germany it is
illegal for immigrants
to be ;aid for work,
consequently their
presence could not
be announced by the
gallery.Their lack of
status highlighted by
their literal
invisibility beneath
the boxes.
46
47. “For art to be great art it has to
be serious art”
47
48. Hayley Newman
Connotations-Performance Images 1994-98.
“Proposing that the use of imagery ‘is antithetical to “real” ‘event’,
Newman conceived a work that would subvert the processes by
which performance works (often attended by very few people) are
distributed to the many through publications consisting of
documentary images and accompanying descriptive texts.”
Aaron Williamson
51. •ARTIST EATS FOX 2004 • OCEAN WAVE II 2003/4
•In a private at home performance, Mark ate • On December 28th 2003 Mark set out
a fox which caused widespread controversy. from Peckham in South East London and
He said that he was trying to bring to the attempted to sail 400 miles to Glasgow in
attention of people the plight of crackhead's. Scotland in a shopping trolley, along the
Stating that a million people marched for way he collected gifts from English
foxes and a million people marched against people intending to hand them out to the
foxes, but what about the crackhead's who people of Scotland as a reconciliation for
is going to march for them the William Wallace thing. He failed in his
attempt after 17 days and 65 miles, due
to bad weather conditions and poor
equipment.
52. •MONKEY NUT 2003
•Mark pushed a monkey nut along
• RUNNING TAP 2005
the road for 7 miles with his nose,
starting at Goldsmiths College in • In an extraordinary art performance,
environmentally conscious artist Mark McGowan
South London and ending at Number turned on a cold water tap in the House Gallery
10 Downing Street where he handed in Camberwell, London and planned to leave it
running for one year, wasting 15 million litres of
his nut in, he was protesting against water. Due to the intervention of Thames Water,
student fees. he had to turn it off again after one month.
• McGowan said,
• ‘Basically it was an art piece for people to come
and look at and enjoy aesthetically, it was also a
comment on a social and environment issue.'
53. EARLESS 2005
McGowan TV Coverage Mark pulled a television along the road with
his ear for six miles from Milan central train
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=0dOA_2T4wtE station to Silvio Burlesconi's house, protesting
against politicians control of the media.
• AUTUMN LEAVES PROTEST 2005
• Mark nailed his feet to the gallery wall
protesting against leaves.
54. The Virtues of Being Stupid
• The writer Dean Kenning in an article for Art
Monthly argues that McGowan’s ‘idiotic’
performances are more ‘political’ and ‘critical’
than the Mark Wallinger’s exemplary ‘hands off’
‘political work ‘ ‘State Britain’.
• In contrast to Wallinger’s critically respectable,
‘serious’ ‘adult’ appropriation of Brain Haw’s
protest, McGowan’s various unofficial
interventions operate in a ‘childish’ manner which
challenges not only the logic of the mass media
(he can’t be easily catergorised) but also the
critical sensibilities of the art world - primarily
through his use of humour and vulgarity, and his
inability to align himself successfully with
‘proper’ ‘critical’ art discourse.
53
53
55. •“But without any justification for why the
seemingly stupid things he is doing should be
worthy of the designation (as art by an artist) ,
he simply takes this category of derision and
barely disguised resentment and flings it back in
the public’s face, but in a way that engages
dialogue literally at street level rather than
requires the experts to be sent in. This is why
McGowan is an embarrassment to the art
world:rather than clinging to official discourse
as an amulet against presumed mass ignorance,
he seems to confirm the common view that art
is indulgent nonsense.”
•Dean Kenning, Artmonthly
54
56. • ‘Deploying a politics of subversion,
contemporary anarchist practices
exercises a satirical pressure on the
state in order to show that other forms
of life are possible. Picking up on my
thoughts about humour, it is the
exposed, self-ridiculing and self
undermining character of these forms
that I find most compelling, as
opposed to the pious humourlessness
of most forms of vangurdist active
nihilism and some forms of
contemporary protest’
• Simon Critchley, ‘Infinitely Demanding
Ethics of Commitment Politics of
Resistance
55
57. Tino Sehgal ' critique is a trap since it also affirms what it criticises
and does not propose a solution to the problem'”
56
60. What fascinates Chetwynd is how she can amass groups of people
into acts of rational absurdity. This is not about humiliation, and
Chetwynd is always a participant in her productions, dressing up as
a slovenly bikini-clad minx for her Evening with Jabba the Hutt (in
which she had re-imagined the infamous slave trader of Star Wars
as a pina colada-supping bon viveur), or prancing round as a
eunuch in her homage to Meat Loaf. 59
61. Andrea Fraser
In an inversion of her familiar role as museum guide, the
short and sweet Little Frank and His Carp, seen at
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, finds Fraser in the unaccustomed
position of happy museum visitor. Surreptitiously shot at
the Guggenheim Bilbao, it depicts an unannounced
performance for which Fraser cheerfully strolls through
the atrium of Frank Gehry’s building led by the ubiquitous
educational tool of the 21st-century museum, the audio
guide. Fraser uses the disembodied voice - by turns
ingratiatingly celebratory, condescending, sycophantic and
authoritative - as a ready-made, a fetish object akin to the
TV remote control. Dutifully responding to its emotional
cues and manipulative subtexts, Fraser admiringly
approaches the abstracted fish-shaped tower at the centre
of the hall (which, we are reminded, is a signature of the
Gehry mythology). Heeding the blandly eroticized
invitation to caress the tower’s walls (’run your hand over
them ... feel how smooth it is’), at the video’s climax
Fraser yields to what becomes a comically masturbatory
performance, stroking the leading edge of little Frank’s
over-sized ‘carp’ as well as her own flanks. Much to the
surprised amusement of a nearby clutch of art tourists,
Fraser renders unto the museum what its audio guide
implicitly demands of the ideal cultural consumer: the
unquestioned union of the institution and its public.
Andrea Fraser Little Frank and His Carp 2001
James Trainor, Frieze issue 66
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64. Self Reflexive Role Playing for Everyone!
“think about the word parenting for God’s sake -try to imagine your grandfather saying it.”
“as soon as our children were old
enough to understand any of this,
we began to include them. We did it
automatically. We let them know that
we were making choices. We invited
them to share in our self
consciousness about our roles in
innumerable implicit and explicit
ways, some light and humourous,
some more serious. And that
inevitably meant we invited them to
be self conscious about themselves
and their roles, as well. “
Mediated, Thomas De Zengotita.
62
66. “Savoir Etre has replaced savoir faire”
“all these people are enticed, nudged or
forced to promote an attractive and
desirable commodity, and so to try as
hard as they can, and using the best
means at their disposal, to enhance the
market value of the goods they sell. And
the commodity they are prompted to put
on the market, promote and sell are
themselves. [..] The test they need to pass
in order to be admitted to the social
prizes they covet demands them to recast
themselves as commodities: that is, as
products capable of catching the
attention and attracting demand and
customers.”
Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming LIfe, pg. 6
64
69. “to be forever free in the
power, glory, spirituality
and romance, liberated in
the mainstream, critically
gone.”
Jeff Koons, Artforum, 1987
67
67
70. You’re having a laugh - Leigh Bowery
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBc7DPu2O5c
Leigh Bowery (Sunshine,
Australia, 1961 – London,
1994)
Leigh Bowery - performance
artist, alternative model,
fashion designer, make up
artist, contemporary dancer,
TV commercial star, artist
muse, club promoter, band
member, singer, musician,
video star and living art
installation
71. • Ursula Martinez
• She sets fire to her tits,
interrogates her parents, re-
defines class, blurs fiction with
reality, cures homosexuals,
gives birth to penises, tells
autobiographical stories,
deconstructs performance and
sings South London suburban
flamenco - from high brow to
low brow, from spectacle to
confessional, from live art to
light entertainment, Ursula
Martinez produces solo and
collaborative performance for
theatre, site-specific,
installation, cabaret, night club,
film, television…… birthdays,
weddings and Barmitzvahs!
69
69
74. Fabienne Audéoud & John Russell: The withdrawal from conversation/
the return of the Oceanic: the weight of the breast
6|9|2002
7.30pm
• 'The withdrawal from conversation/the return of the Oceanic: the weight of the breast' was one of the most
successful live art events ever staged at the South London Gallery. More than 250 people packed the
gallery to see the performance in which twenty women, each playing a full professional drum kit and
performing topless sustained the performance for 45 minutes. The performers were recruited through live
art websites and 'The Stage' magazine on a first come first served basis.
71
71
75. Some key aspects of Performance
• The corrupting force of the irrationality of the bodies drives (desire, sex)
as a counter and pollutant of western modernist rationalism. As with
much avant gardist work this was an attempt to dissolve the boundary
between art and life. To puncture the notion of art as a transcendental
separate realm of human experience.
• Crucial in this respect was the work of a generation of women artists who
both undermined and attacked the power, authority and control of
western representations the female body, offering instead their own self
created images of the female form.
• A switch of emphasis away from the object to the maker. An interest in
the process of making work as opposed to the finished object. Part of the
broader rejection of making objects - a further instance of the
dematerialisation of art. Temporal, ephemeral art that exists only as
documentation. Again a move away from the discredited ‘traditional and
now ideological tainted forms of painting and sculpture. Performance art
was also frequently collaborative; again a further rejection of the classic
model of the lone heroic (male) author.
72
76. • An attempt to rethink the relationship between artists, artwork and viewer.
Specifically, as with conceptualism, a desire to invite a far more active and
engaged reading and engagement with art. As with minimalism the hope was to
create in the viewer a far more self -conscious state where they were aware of
the act of looking and interpretation. Unlike minimalism this was predicated on
the use of the human form.
• As an extension of this, an often overly theatrical use of highly ritualistic, often
violent, deliberately transgressive forms, designed to shake the audience out of
their perceived apathy and alienation. . As Hermann Nitsch remarked this art as
trying to “reach an anaesthetized society”
• The importance of photography and video in documenting, recording and
distributing the work.
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