Performance art

-What is performance art? You have to feel it and do it. It is an intensity, like method acting and the toolkit of Stanislavsky, of being the person and becoming the role. It is to be confronted with something that is real, being in the physical world; it’s moving and interacting.

Performance art was part of the avant-garde (which was covered in last years ‘Exploring creative arts) eg. Futurists- a dark dystopian idea, the celebration of machines and warfare- and Dada, Surrealists, Fluxus who were more psychoanalysis, performance was in all those forms.

The significance of performance art has a lot to do with feminist art as well:

-up until 1960’s, female artists weren’t well recognised. Around 98% of work in a gallery were by men. The were feminist art movements- as well as feminist movements- throughout the 20th century, for exammple, The Guerrilla Girls, formed in the 1980’s. One of their slogans spoke: 

-Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut’ where people were invited to cut her clotting, until she was makes and exposed/ vulnerable- this is a feminist art piece, but also highly performance. It speaks of the vulnerability of many women in the world. 

Abramovic's 'Pain and pleasure'

One particular artist, who is heavily featured within the course of creative arts, is Marina Abramovic, who doesn’t say she is a feminist artist, however many of her performance artworks can be interpreted to be explicit statements about the treatment of women (not necessarily to be seen as a feminist context). She is not a feminist artist, she says, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have a feminist interpretation. E.g. ‘Pain and pleasure’ where she stood in a room with a table filled with different objects and the audience can do whatever they want to her with those objects, and after that time was up, she walked towards them and they ran away. There was the idea of “I am here, these are the things that you can put me through” which is at first confronting for the audience but once they start, participants saw her as an object, using other objects to treat her however they wished, sometimes in an aggressive way. It confirms the idea that if you give your life in someone else's hands, they can take your life, which is even more confronting to discover for the participant.

Both of Abramovic and Yoko’s work helped reveal the co-ordinates of a society; this is what performance art is. 

-Other performance art includes the work of Sophie Calle (research further), ‘The Shadow,' where she asked her mother to get a private detective to follow her and document her. While this was occurring, she was also keeping a diary and after the week, she put the two documentations together (objectivity and subjectivity- the personal feelings and thoughts). So we can observe the study’s personal experience and the outsider’s observation. It can also be interpreted to show how easy it is for someone to track and follow someone else, but it can also be a statement saying that what someone observes, compared to what a person experiences differs- just like with art. It can also be an act to prove her own existence, to say “I have objective hard evidence that I exist.”