Performance Artwork Research Articles

On Rosemberg Sandoval's Performance Actions: Questioning the North/South Paradigm

This essay deals with the performance artwork of Colombian artist Rosemberg Sandoval vis-a-vis the North/South paradigm. Sandoval (b. 1959) is a visual and performance artist trying to explicitly c...

The Artist as a Work-in-Progress: General Idea and the Construction of Collective Identity

In its twenty-five years of activity (1969–1994), the art collective General Idea developed a complex artistic mythology and identity that permitted it to produce a substantial corpus of work while confronting challenges provoked by evolving social relationships and, eventually, HIV/AIDS. The group maintained a cohesive partnership, a ‘collaborative body’ that subsumed individual members' identities within a collective whole. This paper analyses the conceptual projects and artists' statements of the group's first decade, many of which belong to the domain of Correspondence and Mail Art. It argues that these textual and performative artworks strategically constructed an elaborate collective identity. They equally functioned as a vehicle through which to develop methods and strategies of collaborative practice, reflecting debates about authorship such as those theorized contemporaneously by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.

Memory is Not Transparent

The attempt and rejection of the institutionalization of performance artworks is an ongoing dialectic in which I am partially implicated. Between 2008 and 2009 I curated an exhibition program, NOTES on a return, which had at its core the desire to reflect on how performance artworks could occupy the space of the institution, as critical acts and as manifesting an intangible but acknowledged presence.

Corpus Corvus

Corpus Corvus is a mixed reality performance artwork that utilizes stereoscopic projection, motion capture animation, an integrated physical/media choreographic vocabulary, and electroacoustic composition to explore the Pacific Northwest Native American myth of the raven as god and thief who steals the sun and creates the universe. Formally, the work explores the relationship between movement of a physical body and stereoscopic animation in a physical/digital three-dimensional image field. The animation is generated from motion capture data and kinesthetic media composition processes based on physical choreography. Through precise temporal alignment and stereoscopic theatrical effect, the projected animation is perceived to surround the performing body in physical space. The art/research process contextualizing Corpus Corvus is a practice-based exploration and discovery of an emerging poetics that extends the human sensory system into immersive media perceptual hyperspaces. This paper illuminates the process of research, manifestation, and discovery that informs the artwork and its poetics.

Censorship as Criticism: Performance Art and Fair Use in Virtual Territory

The author discusses the removal of his machinima-based performance artwork from the popular online video sharing site Vimeo, based on the accusation that it violated the service’s terms of use. The artist challenged the validity of Vimeo’s administrators via a series of emails, without much success. By examining this particular case, the author raises a series of important questions related to copyright, e.g. who owns virtual space and who is responsible for policing it? Are multi-user games a territory or a tool? Can a creative act transform a videogame from private property into a public art site? And perhaps most appropriate in the author’s situation: can copyright censors distinguish their personal criticism of an artwork from that work’s legal status?

‘After Hard Times’: Disjunctive Temporality and Ethics of Memory in Art by Aisling O'Beirn, Sandra Johnston and Heather Allen

Looking at works by Northern Ireland-based artists Mary McIntyre, Heather Allen and Aisling O'Beirn, who have been practising since the early 1990s, this essay explores their response to an altered socio-political landscape in Northern Ireland, although they are still not reducible to this location as their sole context, either thematically or as their point of origin. I consider how the artists' shifting concerns and aesthetic strategies engage with ideological and experiential transformations in the post-Ceasefire period; and how they explore the re-politicization of space through modes of deconstruction and ambivalence. Whether, as Mieke Bal claims, political art today is characterized by a crucial ambivalence, this is in any case an unsettling feature of Mary McIntyre's photographs. Her reworking of the sublime in recent landscape photographs offers a simultaneous sense of enthralment and estrangement in order to explore tensions between affect and its potential use to veil political events, and between what can be understood as fact and fiction in the representation of place. Northern Ireland's changed socio-political context sees women re-marginalized in and by mainstream politics and discursive practices; and to attend to McIntyre's engagement with the political, which has largely been neglected by critics, I trace her works' subversion of the gendered, ideological categories of public and private that are undergoing constant re-formation. I also consider the subversion of these categories in Heather Allen's performance artwork Klub (2001), which featured accompanying musicians, a DJ, and dancers, in a bar transformed temporarily into a club. Interlacing the political with the personal, the performance articulated autobiographical experience and its immersion in a context of the sectarian violence of the Troubles. Klub also marked a pivotal moment in Belfast's recent transmogrification into a selectively amnesiac ‘post-Conflict’ boomtown. Working with sculpture and installation, Aisling O'Beirn has made a substantial body of work engaged with urban locations, internationally and in Northern Ireland. ‘Northern Ireland’ and ‘Belfast’ have been consistently deconstructed in her practice, with Belfast as a site of surveillance and, more recently, in its gentrified turn. The artist has a longstanding interest in vernacular culture as a source of empowerment, politicization and alternative politics.

RAINING, DROWNING AND SWIMMING: FU BAOSHI AND WATER

Water is a prominent element in the media of Chinese ink painting and, in the form of clouds, rivers, floods and mist, it is a major subject of Chinese painting. In the culturally distinctive modernist practice of Fu Baoshi (1904–1965), these two identities of water self‐consciously encounter one another. The artist's attention to watery themes in his work is unprecedented, and he is one of the first painters to focus on the direct depiction of falling rain. The essay considers Fu's representations of rain, the theme of water in his images of the poet‐statesman Qu Yuan and (after the founding of the People's Republic in 1949) in paintings illustrating the poems of Chinese leader Mao Zedong. Fu's water‐themed works are examined here with reference to the inherited stock of Chinese cultural meanings as well as to recent artistic practice in the People's Republic and to the Maoist state ideology which informed it. The potential meanings of these water‐themed works are considered, and politically subversive connotations are discovered. The essay concludes by reflecting on the theme of water in contemporary practice, particularly in Song Dong's performance art work of 1996, Printing on Water.

Walls of Dialogue in the Chinese Space

Since the early 1980s, Beijing has been undergoing a period of phenomenal structural transformation and immense growth, as a consequence of the open door policy. The dramatic change of the Chinese capital has progressively forced its inhabitants to face the challenge of managing the fabric and culture of the urban environment in order to adapt to a new city, while burgeoning nationalism and the development of local and international tourism have constructed Beijing as a showcase for national identity. Day after day the traditional houses ( siheyuan) and tiny alleyways ( hutong) of Beijing are destroyed, neutralized, and rebuilt to turn the capital into an international metropolis. This article focuses on the graffiti and performance artworks of Beijing-based Zhang Dali — one of the artists most concerned with the transformation of the city. The human head profile that invaded the Beijing cityscape in the 1990s — often found inscribed on the walls and buildings demarcated for destruction ( chai) — is called “Dialogue” ( duihua). It is a figurative symbol that cannot escape attention. Investigating Zhang’s work through the lens of Foucault’s and Benjamin’s theoretical approaches to history, this article deals with the relationship between subjective representation and spatial transformation, and raises the critical question of artistic agency in public space.

Performing Resistance

Many contemporary artists, critical theorists, and educators challenge the cultural assumptions that are embedded in our understandings of technology and its relationship to art, the body, and human life. In this article, we discuss the performance artworks of osseus labyrint, Goat Island, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, and Juan Ybarra. Each of these collectives or groupings of artists work within the critical and multiple spaces of technology to explore questions of the body and its relationship to identity. These are also the questions that we raise as art educators who are concerned about the ubiquitous ways that technologies mediate our lives and those of our students—how we learn and what we learn both inside and outside our classrooms. We argue that performance art and critical theory provide a pedagogical space wherein art educators can examine and critique their social and historical assumptions of what it means to be human and create new metaphors for living and learning in contemporary technological cultures, such as those performed by the artists discussed.

Maintain radio silence: listening to the gaps between the words 2000–2003

The author describes the development of a series of performance pieces and artworks from 2000 to the present, which use as raw materials ‘silences’ collected in real time from radio broadcasts and improvising musicians. These works employ original software written in the SuperCollider programming language.

Mexican Territory

I am a politicized Mexican woman artist, working in a highly charged environment: Mexico City of the late 1990s. I articulate the complexities of my country's political crises through both cultural activism and the creation of performance and installation artworks. Focusing on the body and its limitations, I search for archetypal symbols and metaphors that explain our condition as women and as a society in crisis.

'And this strength is in me still': Embodying Memory in Works by Jewish Women Performance Artists

Performance art calls for a merging of the boundaries between 'life' and 'theatre', and many of its practitioners engage in what has come to be known as 'autoperformance', wherein the performer adopts a loosely autobiographical persona in order to designate one portion of the ongoing drama of his or her life as a theatrical event. The most popularly known of these autoperformers is Spalding Gray, whose Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box have played to a wide range of audiences. The complexities and contradictions of memory are central to autoperformance for several reasons. Since the 'text' of a performance art work exists primarily in the moment of enactment, its recording and preservation engage us immediately in the postmodern act of redefining textuality as fragmentary or partial. As Peggy Phelan points out, citing Richard Schechner, the 'primary interest' in 'much postmodern performance art' is a result of 'the discourse it promotes after the fact'.' Postmodern art often seeks to confront and reinterpret the past, particularly as it presents itself to us through various texts, in order to reinscribe that past in an ongoing present. One might say that autoperformers use subjective memory to 'play out' the postmodern interest in drawing and reshaping the past as narration transforms it into the present tense. Autoperformance's narratives simultaneously create and confront history by the theatrical insistence on the continuous present tense of the performance moment, combined with the responses to, and integration of, multiple previously-existing 'texts' that range from songs tojokes to diary fragments to excerpts from other theatrical and literary works. Susan Rubin Suleiman's description of a postmodernist aesthetic includes the sense of a need to 'address' the past; Suleiman sees the postmodern as 'that moment of extreme (perhaps tragic, perhaps playful) self-consciousness when the present our present takes to reflecting on its relation to the past and to the future primarily as a problem of repetition'. She asks, in a reference that calls the Holocaust to mind, 'How does one create a future that will acknowledge and incorporate the past a past that

Tracks of Motion in an Enclosed Space: Connections between Performance and Visual Imagery

The author traces three stages in the development of his system for making art and the influence of scientific ideas on that system. He begins with performance artwork, explores painting as a record of process, investigates the impact of pattern and color on perception, and then moves to the use of geometric patterns. Alpert examines the two spheres of meaning expressed in his performance artwork: one based in a humanistic outlook, the other in scientific ideas and terminology. The process used to make the performance-inspired paintings is described as the simple action of shaking paint in a box, further elaborated into a scheme for the production of visual images.

Anticipation, Action and Analysis: A New Methodology for Practice as Research

This paper proposes a new methodology for practice-as-research: “Anticipation, Action, and Analysis”. Critical evaluation of my performance artwork Lost for Words functions as the vehicle to describe Anticipation, Action, and Analysis and to theorise, articulate and demonstrate how slapstick can offer useful insights into the operations of the physical body in participative art performance that go beyond abstract theorisation. Scrutinising and examining slapstick’s performativity in relation to the subject of participation (Bourriaud 1998; Bishop 2006) within Performance Art, this paper concentrates discussion on my performance Lost for Words (2011) as a performance that by making use of slapstick as an extreme physical bodily interruptive process, really supports the problems and difficulties involved in participation within Performance Art. My definition of slapstick in this performance relates to undertaking a set of actions which forces participants’ bodies to interrupt how it normally behaves. The paper achieves this by addressing what happens when, as part of the structural framework of the performance, interruptive processes related to bodily incongruity and repetition (Heiser, 2008) are engineered into activities undertaken by participants engaging in physical and bodily processes. Defining the term collectivity as meaning being a member of a group of people with possibly shared experiences, interests and motivations, the paper also amplifies consideration of how the performance can be used to provide useful insights into the importance that collectivity and conviviality (Bourriaud 1998; Clayton 2007) plays within participatory processes. By way of contrast, the paper explores how the anti-social nature of Schadenfreude (Glenn 2003; Miller, 1993; Svendsen 2010 et al.) can also play its part as well as the, as argued, contradictory nature of hospitality (Derrida 2000) in examining how the performer and audience relation can be construed as host/guest.