Post 7: Preforming Arts Activism

 Chapter 4 Quotes and Responses:

"This is culture as the patterns and byproducts of everyday life: the languages we use, the rituals we preform, and the unspoken rules we abide by. Its what is created and recreated through work, play conversations, and everyday interactions in our homes, schools, jobs and places of worship"(pg. 133).

• Culture is hard  to tie down due to its ever changing nature and creation, but its what is everyday, what keeps societies pushing through and creating character, union. This is something that not everyone puts thought in until its pointed out or noticed by another due to its rutinary nature. 

 "As artistic activist, we can choose tactics that hold up a mirror to things that people either cannot or do not want to see: lives locked away behind prison walls, wars in distant countries, or abstract forces like endemic poverty or suctional racism"(pg.147).

• I read this to be similar to the famous spiderman quote, "with great power comes great reasonability", the same thing goes here, as art activist, its a job to create work that disturb the comfortable and comfort's the disturbs, its made not just because art is cool but because art has always inherently been political- if you think about it any artwork can be seen as political, there's always a "saying" even if you think otherwise. 

Shaun Leonardo Interview:

"Art became a pathway, a way in which I could experience these vulnerabilities and wear them, share them to an immediate audience"(1:00). "The only thing that I've arrived at, which keeps me in the work is the personal change that I sense in these individuals that are the kids I grew up with- Art is the power in this space- because it is unfixed"(10:04).

• This interview was really good and it was a refreshing view into performance art. Sometimes I can be another artist who looks away from performance work, like hitting butter. But Leonardo doesn't do thar, he uses his own vulnerabilities and peoples, weather its the audience or participants as mediums in his work. Showcasing vulnerability outside of gender and the individual alone but a collective group. Even preforming on his own he knows that he will also be reflecting a experience or group, pushing the harmful expectations and assumptions- like he had mentioned with his own masculinity. In the end what art is meant to do, in an unlimited space is to bring people together. 

Performance: Sunshine

Though this isn't exactly inspired by our text, but by experience, which is something Leonardo ties to, vulnerability. Sometimes the most political thing you can do is be vulnerable, especially to ourselves. An act of selfcare and grounding, partaking in what's excisable to everyone, the sun.

1. Go outside where sunlight is visible.

2. As long as you'd like, stand where your body would be hit with that sunlight.

3. close your eyes, take a deep breath, 

lift your head towards the sun and feel the heat on your skin.

4. when you finally feel at peace, ask for strength and courage to move forward.

5, Thank the sun.

continue your day. 

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