Live Art Practices Research Articles

Temporary Performance Artist Communities:

This article addresses the case model for the Live art exhibition project Venice International Performance Art Week, founded and curated by artist duo VestAndPage (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes) in 2012. Since its inception, it has promoted performance art and Live art practices on a local, national, and international scale through live performance events, exhibitions, formative learning programs, and co-creation experiences. Founded on the principles of sustainability, hospitality, and care, it has become a recognized international platform where dialogue and exchange, artistic expressions and cultures can flourish proactively among performers. The project formats have evolved over the time, progressively focusing on forming temporary performance artist communities in terms of a social sculpture. Its core mission is to foster exchange among performers, Live artists, and people: a gathering reunion, a people’s project made by the people for the people. It functions as a think-tank for outlining conceptual visions which declaredly overcome imposed and external human conditioning, generating accretive reflection on topics such as poetic and civil sovereignty, inclusiveness, and accessibility through performance practices. As the project founders, we have also conceived it as a breeding ground for future professional opportunities of the participating artists, curators, and cultural operators, as well as a means to broaden the audience for performance art and Live art, both locally and internationally. The Venice International Performance Art Week has now adapted into an experiential co-creation artist-in-residence format. This enables to expand performance art and Live art beyond works of presentation and display, focusing instead on real time co-creation of interdisciplinary collective productions.

Installation Art and the Issue of Gentrification: Exploring the Expanded Scenography of Zelige Door on Golborne Road

The concept of expanded scenography is applied to the analysis of the design and public interaction with the multisensory digital art installation Zelige Door on Golborne Road. This is an attempt to re-think visual and live art practices with communities and the creation of immersive digital environments in terms of a “scenographic ecology of relations.” The analysis aims to reconceptualise the field of environmental-centric live performance in the digital context by exploring an art installation designed to facilitate a synchronic dialogue amongst different design elements and participants on issues related to the aesthetics of the place, urban development, Community Memories, heritage and migration. Concepts such as participatory dramaturgy and remediation will be employed to analyse and theoretically locate the expanded scenography of relations of Zelige Door on Golborne Road within the wider context of activist actions in Britain aimed at preserving and making visible the intangible heritage of migrant communities in contested urban areas undergoing gentrification.

Alternative Medicine: Contagion and Cure in Karel Čapek's The White Plague.

Though written amid an atmosphere of unprecedented medical advance in both diagnosis and therapeutics, Karel Čapek's The White Plague takes a starkly critical stance against overconfidence in medical science and its dubious ethical orbit. This article explores Čapek's censure of those who would privilege scientific interest in disease over the holistic plight of the sufferer. Provocatively, Čapek achieves this not only via the play's content, but also-prefiguring aspects of contemporary live art practice by several decades-by placing audience members in worrying proximity to abject ill bodies. Čapek proposes a sort of theatrical homeopathy, suggesting that limited exposure to the threat of disease might spur spectators toward empathy for those who suffer and promote a healthier, more compassionate society.

Engaging impermanence: Stuart Brisley and Ken McMullen’s Being and Doing (1984)

Abstract The article discusses film documentations that record and represent artists’ live performance work. Documents are understood as aesthetic artefacts, and the text explores in detail the modes of documentation, that use the time-based medium of film to engage with performance art’s negotiation of duration and impermanence. Taking the example of Being and Doing, an experimental documentation of live art practices by Stuart Brisley and Ken McMullen from 1984, I address the question of how to account for the afterlife of performance art’s material remains when they are reframed and restaged in and as moving images.

Diaspora in the Field of Vision

Diasporic artists have become visible in small but significant numbers since the expansion in post-war education in Britain – supported in part by those sympathetic to the politics of educational equality and in part by those for whom education and diasporic experience were the enabling factors for their practices. Out of these practices emerged the critical debates about visual cultural diversity, now commonplace within contemporary art education. This article will address some of the key issues that have been made apparent in the work of some contemporary diasporic artists who live, work and have studied in Britain. These issues will be looked at within the frame of contemporary British art education and its changing role in the current era. In addition, the article will look at how emerging contemporary art practices (for example, live art practices) figure in the hierarchies that dominate the existing institutional structures in higher education in Britain.

Revisiting Catharsis in Contemporary Live Art Practice: Kira O'Reilly's Evocative Skin Works

This article examines catharsis in recent one-to-one performances I shared with UK-based artist Kira O'Reilly. Focusing on my inter-experience ofMy Mother(2003) andUntitled Action: NRLA, The Arches, Glasgow(2005), I argue that both performances can be read as troubling and elucidating ideas about the presence, nature and affect of catharsis. I raise questions and reveal my responses to felt states such as risk, intimacy and confession, and draw on hysteria and Kristeva's concept ofle vréelto articulate the embodied knowledge of my close encounters with O'Reilly's visceral body artworks. Ultimately I propose that O'Reilly's performance practice adopts cathartic strategies that activate aesthetic, formal and material kinds of feminist political responsibility in her performance ‘other’.

Live art's digital horizons: recording recent developments in live art practices

'Live Art' is an area of time-based arts practice which arises from inter-related or hybridized forms of contemporary Visual Arts, Theatre, Dance, Music, and Moving Image. Live Art events that have occurred in the UK over the past thirty years have been documented as part of a digitized database (The Live Art Archive). As well as using digital means to record and preserve key presentations, Live Art events are increasingly incorporating computer-generated states and situations as a significant aspect of their performances. Both the facilities and the dilemmas prompted by advances in computing technology are becoming integral to Live Art concerns, a development which predictably will continue into the next generation of Live Art events with intriguing and imaginative results. This paper charts this evolution