Post 6: Performance Art
Performance art, an introduction by The Art Assignment and Dr. Virginia B. Spivey
“For feminist artists in particular, using their body in live performance proved effective in challenging historical representations of women, made mostly by male artists for male patrons.”
Sometimes people rise an eyebrow at this idea of women showing their body, getting into scandals. However, from my perspective, women doing art with their body is not only performance art but also, in someway, activist. As these women are deciding how to use their bodies instead of the patriarchy taking this choice for them without their consent. Because, nobody truly raises an eyebrow when it comes to men objectifying women but when they decided to take their body autonomy into their own hands, people go crazy
“Ironically, the need to position performance within art’s history has led museums and scholars to focus heavily on photographs and videos that were intended only as documents of live events.”
I see this as usually when people are against something, the more they make it popular or make relevant other stuff, in this case, art. Sometimes, there is products that the more controversial and noise it makes, the more it sells. Which is kind of ironic when we think about how performance art was created to be not be sold, but the remaining and documentation of it are constantly desired by museums and other art buyers.
Yoko Ono’s Art of Defiance | The New Yorker
“Ono later said that 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.”
Reading this part of the article, I am starting to realize something that has been shown through her artistic years. And is how she uses the absence of materials as the materials for the art itself. Reflecting not only on her when she went though her most difficult moment but also probably for others that went through others. Trying to mimic a sensation of fullness or possession while actually continue to being empty handed.
“Unless I rebelled against it, I wouldn’t have survived.”
Being a woman during those years and taking in mind what is her legacy worldwide had to make not only her but many women (even nowadays) were expected to be either “the best of the best” or follow the gender roles from that era. However, as Yoko Ono herself, many of them didn’t wanted either of those routes. Choosing instead doing whatever they wanted and even being one of the principal names of an art movement. Swimming against the tide it was what, even if some people disagree with it, made her somebody in the art world.
The Art of Activism. Chapter 3: History
Pag. 104. “We are always drawing from repositories of words, images, and meanings that already exist. This is what makes changing society so hard: we are working within the very culture we are trying to change.”
This reminds me of the cases of when people even if they are part of minorities, they can also practice the same attitudes and behaviors that are used to harm their social groups, sometimes even advocating for the harm towards their communities. However, fortunately, many people realize those behaviors and start “deconstructing” themselves, leaving that behavior that is just shooting themselves in the foot and opening more their mind.
Pag. 121-122. “They blurred the traditional boundaries between what was under-stood as the public and the private, the political and the personal. In doing this, feminists fundamentally challenged notions of what was defined as political, making the case that the “personal is political,”which meant, among other things, that equity within the home was as important as (and interconnected with) equality at a voting booth.This radically redefined the terrain of politics and activism.”
Even nowadays, this message stills hits and in such bigger aspect, as for many people, unfortunately, their mere existence is political. “Second Wave” feminist being one of the first who started the question on how much of our lives is actually non political? How much of my personal is on my hands? What parts are actually me and not the build by the forces of the patriarchy? Creating this questions and challenging it is, until this day, revolutionary. As people, even though of our actual political environment, they are challenging everything, all the systems, more than ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment