Tag: performance art

Chris Burden – Doorway to Heaven (1973)

Burden is an artist that people know of without really having a clue as to his batshit audacity.

Arguably, the work Burden is best know for is the Urban Light permanent installation at LACMA.

The indelible impact of the work is really the only connective tissue with his early work–for which he is both criminally under-appreciated and simultaneously revered by preeminent tastemakers despite some extremely problematic to unethical pieces.

He carved out a name for himself with early performances at UC-Irvine, including: Five Day Locker Piece (he locked himself in a locker for five straight days), Shoot (a friend shot him in the arm with a .22 caliber rifle) and Trans-Fixed where he himself crucified by having both of his arms nailed to the roof of a VW Beetle.

The picture above is from his Doorway to Heaven performance. In his own words:

At 6 p.m. I stood in the doorway of my studio facing the Venice
boardwalk. A few spectators watched as I pushed two live electric wires
into my chest. The wires crossed and exploded, burning me but saving me
from electrocution.

This was not the first piece to involve the potential of electrocution. In a piece which preceded Shoot, he had himself bolted to the floor and left two live electrical lines spooling into two buckets containing water. The premise of the work was that that no one in the audience would kick them over and by doing so electrocute him.

A documentary titled Burden was made about him several years ago. It’s a good resource if you don’t know much about him and want an engaging introduction. (If you already know about him and his work it’s a little frustrating because while it does collect some great rare reels from performances/interviews, it really is very light on details about his process and they really softball any sort of criticism as far as the more ethical reprehensible aspects of several of his early to late career.

Janine Antoni – Loving Care (1993)

Antoni’s work is interested in not only commenting on what goes into the making of something, she’s also preoccupied with feminine embodiment and commodification of bodies, objects and processes.

Loving Care was performed at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London.

On her hands and knees, Antoni dipped her head into a bucket of Loving Care hair dye and used her head/hair to mop the gallery floor.

There’s a number of things at play here–most notably: subversion.  The beauty standards of western culture being founded upon notions that as a woman–you as you are naturally is not enough, you need to diminish signs of aging or invite attention through drastic changes to hair color.

Using it against its intent, there’s an emphasis placed on its ability to alter semi-permanently. This is again tied into the stereotypically notion of men as being preoccupied with higher considerations so that it’s women’s jobs to worry about things like ensuring the floors are clean–only in this case, the act of cleaning is transgressed and subverted.

An interesting facet of the conceptualization is–as anyone who has ever mopped a space knows–you work in such a way that you have an exit behind you. Antoni did exactly that but this meant that as she mopped/painted the floor, she pushed the people out of the gallery behind her. By implication: everyone could see the beginning of the labor but that scope dwindled as the work advanced towards completion. (The notion being that we all know the floor gets cleaned but even if we bother to note that it’s clean, we are programmed to not really bother to follow that through to any sort of appreciation for such completion.)

Source: sentimental-obsessions

Otto Muehl – Oh Sensibility (1970)

My response to this was what the fuck is even going on here? (See also: is that a real live fucking goose?)

I
was intrigued enough to look into this a bit and my initial curiosity
now makes sense. It seems Muehl was–at least initially–a sculptor
preoccupied with “overcom[ing] easel painting by representing its destruction process.”

That was the early 60s, by the 70s, Muehl shifted his efforts so that they were more inline with NY style happenings–a
very particular flavor of performance art. (I won’t pretend that much
of it hasn’t dated poorly but I do think that young artists–especially
photographers/image makers–do themselves a service by becoming familiar
with the tradition.)

Muehl pursued what he called Viennese
Actionism–essentially happenings in and around Vienna. (The influence
of Fluxus on Viennese Actionsim should absolutely be noted–as the
action from which the above photo emerged was apparently filmed. You can
watch it here.
Full disclosure: I’ve tried to watch it twice and just can’t get beyond
the pantomine of a painfully self-conscious orgy aspect of it.)

A
decade later he renounced Viennese Actionism as painfully bourgeois (a
paraphrase) and began the Friedrichshof commune–where he behaved more
or less like a authoritarian David Koresh.

His behavior at the
commune landed him in jail in the 1990s. The commune he built fell apart
and by the time he was released from prison, he moved to another
commune in Portugal.

Source: neo-catharsis

Cao Yu – Fountain [excerpt] (2015)

In physics, there is what’s termed the ‘observer effect’. It suggests that by watching (or, I suppose, more accurately: by attempting to measure certain phenomena) the mere act of watching changes that which is observed).

I was unfamiliar with this performance before @psyche8eros featured it–I am super impressed with it, not just in and of itself but also because of how it plays the varying experiences and perspectives of the viewer against each other, and is sharpened in the process.

Fountain pivots on lactation–a physical process.

I’ve known many folks who have been pregnant. Most of those have experienced some degree of anxiety with regards to the question of whether or not to breast feed.

There’s the questions regarding how the body changes during pregnancy as well as post-partum. Concern over whether one’s body can accommodate breast feeding. As well as the social stigmas associated with breast feeding. (Just think back to the most recent manufactured outrage about a new parent breast feeding their child in public and that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.)

This removes feeding of any progeny from the equation and merely illustrates the physicality of the process. And I’m of the opinion that most of the folks I’ve known with such anxieties, would’ve been reassured if they had been able to watch this.

Thus a pregnant viewer is likely to see this video through a very specific filter.

Is this just made for pregnant folks? Hardly.

I think it’s interesting to consider several conceptual points: yes, it’s about lactation but about lactation less any sort of consuming progeny.

In that way it’s not so unlike heterosexual pornography–where procreation is not procreative but focused instead of documenting the pleasure associated with the process. The lighting, milk-droplet dotted flesh and decontextualization are all borrowed from pornography.

So yes, you can see it as lactophilic in nature. (Although I think to see it as only that requires a certain degree of privilege, since the decontextualization–porn-y or otherwise–makes the proceedings about the body, not in any objective way, but by bearing witness to a mechanical process of the body.)

The coup de grace is how the title ties the depiction of process into the art historical tradition of objects (instead of process) as the purpose of art.

ashoutintothevoid:

Emma Sulkowicz is on the cover of this month’s New York Magazine and that is the coolest thing wow

I sat with Marina Abromovic for fifteen minutes–an experience which remains one of the most far reaching in my life.

But this… this is brave and extraordinary and devastating and elegant and absolutely fucking brilliant. And I tear up whenever I think about it.

Conceptual Art in 2014? It’s Emma Sulkowicz.

Source: ashoutintothevoid

Ana Mendieta – Blood Sign #2 1974

Mendieta genius is indisputable but I have no goddamn clue what-so-fucking-ever of how to approach it.

A lot of ink has been spilled about her performance of gender, her concern with identity politics. Yeah. Check. Got it. I see that too. But what about the questions of medium in her work: photographs of sculptures, performance as sculpture, photography of performance as sculpture, the inherently ephemeral nature of performance rendered repeatable via video.

It’s all a complete mindfuck to me–but not alienating more a fascinating puzzle I can’t tear myself away from no matter how little progress I make.

Mendieta only cracked for me in the last week as a result of ‘discovering’ her ‘Untitled (Rape Scene).

***Trigger Warning***

I recommend read the Tate’s comments on the work first as they describe the images and you can decide from there whether or not you actually want to view them.

I am not ready to talk about the images. That will take months, if not years. But something clicked for me about Mendieta’s work: the zen-like focus of her execution counter-balanced by randomization– the way the paint on her hands smears unevenly, the muddy lighting at the scene of the crime–utilizes her own body as a fulcrum to not only balance multifarious and otherwise dichotomous elements but to enact great violence upon innocence that offers the required blood sacrifice without perpetuating any further harm.