Performance Art - Post 6 - Bell (˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶)

(.◜◡◝) .˚✮🎧✮˚.⋆*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Performance Art .˚✮🎧✮˚.⋆*ੈ✩‧₊˚(◜◡◝.)

Performance art, relatively new as it was brought about during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is a form of art that branches apart from the traditional methods and materials we think of when we consider art. Expanding from the use of narratives, artists work to create performances that are meant to be raw, and at times unscripted, that will push the audience to engage with the work in order to reflect on real world experiences. According to Dr. Spivey and The Art Assignment's article, Performance art, an introduction, "Modern artists used live events to promote extremist beliefs, often through deliberate provocation and attempts to offend bourgeois tastes or expectations" (para. 3). While traditional methods weren't used in full, artists still incorporated them in their performances as well as other art forms such as theatre, spoken or written word, or even the inclusion of materials found in nature. Although, performance art encouraged or left the choice of engagement up to the viewer, Menand's article, Yoko Ono's Art of Defiance, reminds us that there are "...people in the audience who don’t go onstage because they find the spectacle repellent or violative can tell themselves that at least they are not participating" (para. 52), which in its own way is engaging with the performance through not interacting. Performance can come from "yes ands" as much as "nos". However, Chapter Three of textbook, The Art of Activism, also reminds us that demonstration and protest, also serve as an a/effective means of performance art. In relating to the stories of Jesus, especially his actions within the temple, Duncombe and Lambert inform us that "when we protest we are also demonstrating to the world who we are, what we believe in, and how we'd like the world to be" (pg. 90). Overall, performance art uses many mediums and forms, including that of the artist's self, to create impromptu narratives or tell stories meant to relate to audience, meant to stir something new within them, or even just push back against injustices in a way that's no longer singular but collective.

Performance art, an introduction by The Art Assignment and Dr. Virginia B. Spivey

♡𐙚ּ ֶָ֢. "...at its worst, performance art can seem gratuitous, boring, or just plain weird. But, at its best, it taps into our most basic shared instincts; our physical and psychological needs...; our individual fears and self consciousness; our concerns about life, the future and the world..."

Without the knowledge of, or even without the desire to learn the difference, a performance and performance art, one would immediately think of those improv dance groups you would hire for proposals. While talented in their own right, it is considerably boring and at times cringe. Performance art, the nitty gritty of it, coming from artists like Marina Abramovic and her works like Rhythm 0, where she invited audience members to "do whatever they wanted" with items she provided, forces its audience to experience what the artist does, pushes active participation despite consequences and highlights the realities between the physical, emotional and psychological. 

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0, 1974.

⋆˚𝜗𝜚˚⋆ "Artists of the 1960 and 70s also experimented with other “dematerialized” formats including Earthworks and Conceptual art that resisted commodification and traditional modes of museum display."

Earthworks, also known as Land Art, was meant as an artist's attempt to alter the way their audiences viewed art, through creating art that was essentially embedded into landscapes or throughout the "material" world in ways meant to explore the theme of permeance. Artists wanted to pull people away from galleries and museums so that they can actually experience art, emphasizing engagement as well. An artist known for this would be Robert Smithson who created the Spiral Jetty, created through the mass collection of rocks manipulated into a spiral along Rozel Point.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970.

Yoko Ono’s Art of Defiance | The New Yorker

 ˚ʚ♡ɞ˚  "...she and Keisuke would lie on their backs looking at the sky through an opening in the roof of the house where they lived. She would ask him what kind of dinner he wanted, and then tell him to imagine it in his mind. This seemed to make him happier. She later called it 'maybe my first piece of art'."

This seemingly small act would be, as Yoko even states herself, her first attempt at a performance piece in childhood. Many of us had played with dolls and created scenarios, alone or with others, were we become fully immersed within a unseen reality. She creates an experience for her brother, as we would when we imagine anything.

(ꈍᴗꈍ)♡ "The New York art world of 1960, even in its most radical downtown incarnation, was male-dominated. Of the eleven artists who headlined events in the Chambers Street series, only one was a woman. To Ono’s annoyance, Young was credited as the organizer and director of the series. She was identified as the woman whose loft it was."

This excerpt alone is frustrating to read, even with learning previously through Dr. Maura Reilly's piece on Curatorial Activism on how marginalized works are treated. Dr. Reilly in her piece, Toward A Curatorial Activism, wrote "...it is evident that sexism and racism have become so insidiously woven into the institutional fabric, language and logic of the mainstream art world that the inequities in representation often go undetected". Yoko Ono's treatment during this time, having been the one to own the space and organize, is disheartening. It's also frustrating to even consider that the very men involved, especially Young, may have done nothing to change how the whole thing was portrayed and could have even actively perpetuated a cycle to continue where women of the time, and their hard work, was considered as less than. 

Chapter Three: History | The Art of Activism

(ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ "In order to be heard and understood, an activist needs to learn how to use popular culture, but they also need to know how to transform it so that it speaks to and for their own cause."

This is very similar to discussing meme culture and how it helps activists to spread awareness on a particular subject, or cause, as well as reflect on events happening within the mainstream. Essentially, activists need to be up to date not just on popular culture but on the way, or the means, that many people consume it or come across it. This alone helps in creating something that could go viral and help their messages come across.

ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ♡ "We often think of performance as something that manifests a fiction...it usually allows us to visualize and to act out our dreams, to 'demonstrate our convictions or prefigure our ideals...performance is useful for dramatizing what already exists."

The act of performing, very much like in theatre, is meant to bring ideas and thoughts to reality. Giving them permeance allows for us to build a collective that shares in a vision as well as execute it. We can looks to movements of the past for examples of these actions, or performances, like Rosa Park's refusal to move to th back of the bus or the sit-ins at diners during the Civil Rights movement. Through occupying spaces, these "performers" use their actions to speak on the equality they demanded that was unjustly refused to them. Bring an abstract thought alive so that those who relate can feel and see what they were.