How have performance artists sought to utilise and reference the body within their work?
Why have so many performance artists sought to specifically focus on the body as the subject of their work?
Performance art: how and why artists utilise, reference and focus on the body in their work.
200 words x 11 paragraphs or equivalent
Introduction
This essay will explore how artists throughout time have utilised and refrecnced the body within performance art. Beginning with happenings and fluxus art and moving through time to the post human mostly interdisciplinary until dematerialisation it will discuss a select number of themes and movements the body is the most relatable object/subject to human kind
Dada artists first
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Taking a great deal of inspiration from the Dadaists, Fluxus employed humor, the everyday and the element of chance to its works. "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot." One of the most famous and influential musical art performances of this movement was John Cage's 4'33". This performance could be attempted my anyone with the instructions that one would, prepare the instrument (a piano) and then sit in silence in front of an audience for the complete duration of 4 minutes and 33 seconds. This shifted the focus of the "performance" to the necessity of the audience and the music created by their bodies and environments. Cage was interested in these chance noises that was created when there was nothing played which came from spending time in an anechoic chamber where he discovered that true silence could never be achieved as you will always be able to hear your nervous system and circulatory system. The coughing and stirring of the audience, the aleatory music became the performance. This movement was a precursor to the happenings of Allan Kaprow which werfe more influenced by theatre than the avant garde music that fluxus …show more content…
"I thought of the vagina in many ways - physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation.” These are just some of the words Carolee Schneeman read out as she performed her piece Interior Scroll. This 1975 performance at the Woman Here and Now conference in East Hampton New York, was an example of the feminist exploration of the female body both as subject and object of art. Schneeman’s performance involved her entering the room in only a sheet and apron disrobing and standing on a table in the centre of the room where she covered herself in mud and read from a book written by herself then slowly drawing out a paper scroll from her vagina and reading from this too. Shneeman uses her body to contrast the traditional representation of the female body as an object. This performance was a construction of the exclusion and sexism in which she had experienced in the art world and life in general, with emphasis on the female body as the creator and in creation itself giving the female in art a subjectivity that wasn’t previously
People usually expect to see paintings and sculptures in Art Galleries. Imagine the surprise one finds when they are presented with a man stitching his face into a bizarre caricature, or connected to a machine which controls the artist’s body. These shocking pieces of performance art come under the broad umbrella that is Postmodernism. Emphasis on meaning and shock value has replaced traditional skills and aesthetic values evident in the earlier Modernist movements.
Colette Conroy, senior lecturer of drama at University of Hull, in her work Theatre and the Body, discusses how the body is used within performance. Conroy focuses on four fundamental issues: bodies and meaning, bodies and power, bodies and mind, and bodies and culture. This paper will discuss bodies and meaning, power and culture in association with The Nether, Lysistrata, and Disgraced respectively. Conroy employs the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Judith Baker, and many others to help discuss the purpose of human bodies within theatre.
When I first read about Marina Abramovic, I found her performance art can be both shocking and hold the attention of one. Her work ranges in physical intensity, emotional exposure, and sadness. Marina Abramovic work is about self abuse, self discipline, and unreasonable punishment and great courage. Through the conditions she puts herself and her audience in her performance. In my opinion, I feel Marina Abramovic and my main goal as an artist is not only to completely change the way art is seen by the public, but to push the performance the same line as fine art.
Putman, D. (1990). THE AESTHETIC RELATION OF MUSICAL PERFORMER AND AUDIENCE. British Journal of Aesthetics. 30 (4), 1-2.
Imagine pondering into a reconstruction of reality through only the visual sense. Without tasting, smelling, touching, or hearing, it may be hard to find oneself in an alternate universe through a piece of art work, which was the artist’s intended purpose. The eyes serve a much higher purpose than to view an object, the absorptions of electromagnetic waves allows for one to endeavor on a journey and enter a world of no limitation. During the 15th century, specifically the Early Renaissance, Flemish altarpieces swept Europe with their strong attention to details. Works of altarpieces were able to encompass significant details that the audience may typically only pay a cursory glance. The size of altarpieces was its most obvious feat but also its most important. Artists, such as Jan van Eyck, Melchior Broederlam, and Robert Campin, contributed to the vast growth of the Early Renaissance by enhancing visual effects with the use of pious symbols. Jan van Eyck embodied the “rebirth” later labeled as the Renaissance by employing his method of oils at such a level that he was once credited for being the inventor of oil painting. Although van Eyck, Broederlam, and Campin each contributed to the rise of the Early Renaissance, van Eyck’s altarpiece Adoration of the Mystic Lamb epitomized the artworks produced during this time period by vividly incorporating symbols to reconstruct the teachings of Christianity.
In the University Of Arizona Museum Of Art, the Pfeiffer Gallery is displaying many art pieces of oil on canvas paintings. These paintings are mostly portraits of people, both famous and not. They are painted by a variety of artists of European decent and American decent between the mid 1700’s and the early 1900’s. The painting by Elizabeth Louise Vigee-Lebrun caught my eye and drew me in to look closely at its composition.
Within new media, there exists the desire and possibility to produce new effects upon the viewer, to grant new experiences. Pipilotti Rist seeks the creation of virtual utopias within the limitations of the video medium in installations such as her recent work at the Museum of Modern Art, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) in 2009. The work transforms the typically bare atrium of the Museum of Modern Art into an active environment, where a reciprocal relationship between the viewer and the projection can take place. Communication between viewers also forms an essential component in the work; discourse becomes the mediator in the spectator’s relationship to the imagery.
The female body is the site of extensive theoretical discourse and intense political struggle; it has become the expressions of culture but also has become a site for social and political control. Through history the female body has been the site of discrimination, exploitation, abuse and oppression. She has also occupied a dominant position in the discourse of beauty; its imagery being pervasive and manipulated throughout literature, visual arts and religions and also the site of scientific and psychological investigation. Through historically male dominated fields of expertise and political power, the female body has become the subject to conscious and unconscious patriarchal influences.
Abstract Expressionism is making its comeback within the art world. Coined as an artist movement in the 1940’s and 1950’s, at the New York School, American Abstract Expressionist began to express many ideas relevant to humanity and the world around human civilization. However, the subject matters, contributing to artists, were not meant to represent the ever-changing world around them. Rather, how the world around them affected the artist themselves. The works swayed by such worldly influences, become an important article within the artists’ pieces. Subjectively, looking inward to express the artist psyche, artists within the Abstract Expressionism movement became a part of their paintings. Making the paintings more of a representation of one’s self.
Waskul, D., & Vannini, P. (2006). Introduction: The body in symbolic interaction. In D. Waskul & P. Vannini (Eds.), Body/ Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the BodyRetrieved from http://ia600800.us.archive.org/19/items/BodyembodimentSymbolicInteractionAndTheSociologyOfBody/BodyEmbodiment-WaskulVannini.pdf
3“The busts define the body as both symbolic and imaginary: a cultural means of self-articulation and a psychic image of the self”. In one point of view the effaced busts could also be seen to represent an eclipse of the self. These actions enact the autoerotic and narcissistic procedures of founding a self by internalizing an image of one’s own body. Another way of looking at Antoni’s Lick and Lather is as a pre-symbolic process of identifying oneself through the theory of the imaginary body. The actions she did enact an autoerotic and narcissistic procedure of founding a self by internalizing an image of one’s own body. The process of identification after this process is both productive and destructive of identity, by which it undermines its
21.The disposition of some bodies toward the exercise of artistic talent and others toward talent in
Judith Butler’s piece “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” focuses on the relationship between body and gender, and how the two influence one another. The “various acts by which cultural identity is constituted and assumed” (Butler 525) serve as the foundation upon which we can start to dissect the reality behind how “bodies get crafted into genders” (Butler 525). Butler believes that “the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time” (Butler 523) because she compares gender to “an act which has been rehearsed” (Butler 526), one that has been performed “invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure” (Butler 531).
A conventional face represents an idealised self-portrait. In ‘Transfiguration’, Olivier de Sagazan builds an existential performance based on layers of clay that he paints onto his face and body to transform, disfigure and take apart his own figure from the physical world that constraints his emotions and passions. Jolting viewers out of ordinary patterns of thinking. Sagazan’s face test his viewers perceptions of the totemic face, the grotesque face, the face in performance, the violent face—all the while creating a dialogue between past, present, and what’s yet to come.
Stanislavski advocates that actors should utilize gymnastics and ballet to develop and control their use of the body, exercising both the physical being and the mind. He then goes on to propose that actors should develop external plasticity, or a flexibility of movement. This can be developed from creating, or improving, one’s inner sense of the movement of energy. A final major remark Stanislavski makes on the process of developing the movement of the physical character is an actor should eliminate all superfluous gestures. Only a few, simple touches are needed, and they truly polish up the realism of the