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A participatory account of performance art in the city Walking through the city, your mobile rings. You pick up your phone and answer. You are expecting this call, but the voice on the other side is unfamiliar. It is unclear if it is a recording or a real person, yet it is reassuring. It prompts you to partake in an experience that you earlier consented to, although you are not sure about the aim or the outcome. The voice tells you to remain alert, to avoid talking to anyone and to go to a specific location in a few hours’ time. The voice is intense and
. 1 of 3. Piper situated the Catalysis works in relation to previous ‘events and happening-type situations’, while warning that performance art often shared the limitations of more discrete art forms such as painting and sculpture: When an artificial environment is created, the viewer relinquishes his role as essentially passive ‘substance’ on which the catalytic agent works in order to become part of the catalytic agent. In either case the potential impact of the work is diminished: In the former case, the final work is incomplete; in the latter, the
’s equality both in the region and globally, and a desire to change that state of affairs. Finally, given that many artists in the region were exploring gender-related issues during the socialist period independently of one another, Jana Gerzova describes their work as ‘islands of interest in feminism’. 17 One of the aims of this chapter, then, is to connect these islands using performance art as a bridge. While all the artists in this chapter were working in different sociopolitical contexts within the overall context of state-sponsored socialism in Eastern Europe and
moment human meat connects heavily with itself, the puncher and the punched – and in a different manner, the viewing body – are suddenly, violently intimate with what the novelist and boxing 158 Unlimited action connoisseur Norman Mailer calls ‘the aesthetic juice of the punches’, a libidinal ‘juice’ extracted from the raw material of the human form under duress (2000: 8) – even if or especially when the fight is mounted in the space of performance. For Amelia Jones, the material reality of the boxer in performance art provokes a sympathetic corporeal relation in
-injury, crisis, irrationality, unimaginable endurance, sabotage, incrimination or self-erasure. This conclusion takes two related issues – the reckless and the impossible – as the subject of its inquiry, hopefully to tease out some implications of these states of being and non-being. I do so by introducing a final case study, in relative brief, namely the work of Stephen Cripps, whose dangerous and risk-prone pyrotechnic performances and interactive sculptures were significant to the development of performance art – and the incipient cultural logic of the performance of
Another type of machine I have argued for the importance of the aesthetic machine – in particular digitally mediated performance art – as a form of deliberation on contemporary urban living. This type of aesthetic machine is not situated in opposition to technical machines, nor does it confer a higher degree of agency to its technical components. The aesthetic machine is assembled from several other machines as it traverses other ‘Universes of value’ (Guattari, 1995 : 105). In this chapter I analyse these machines to understand how they operate and how they
, muddle and compare the spaces of art and law, art and pornography and mail art and performance art – so as to ‘cut up’ these domains, in William Burroughs’ practical sense of creating new texts by splicing existing ones, to absolve oneself of superegoic injunctions and subjective inhibitions (Burroughs 1993: 61). P-Orridge’s performed intervention did not affect the outcome of the trial and neither could it change the law nor prevent the future prosecutions of The dirtying intention 95 similarly inclined artists. Rather, I argue, the Mail Action allowed P
the challenge not to isolate and celebrate individual works or confer iconicity and exemplarity upon them in the course of our attention. Bean puts the historian in an extreme methodological position, one that is exacerbated by the absence (or strategic inaccessibility) of much of her archive. The flight is the thing The Whitechapel Gallery’s archive holds a letter to Bean, written by the curators of Short History of Performance Vol. 1 (2002) a major retrospective of performance art of the 1960s and 1970s – also sent to other performance artists, including Yoko Ono
time that artists began to ‘expose the institution of art as a deeply problematic field, making apparent the intersections where political, economic and ideological interests directly intervened and interfered in the production of public culture’. 1 In the 1960s, critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler noted a shift in focus, from the creation of objects to the process of creation in Minimal, Conceptual and performance art. 2 In foregrounding process and the experience of the artwork, artists aimed to circumvent the formal atmosphere of the museum, creating an
They (art catalogue text writers, curators, journalists, etc.) always read my work in the geopolitical context of the country I represent. So no matter what my work was about – it was seen only in the light of this Balkan communism – post-communism, war-post-war, anti-modern tradition, weird local habits, and described in terms of cultural, social and political references related to the place I come from. – Vladimir Nikolić, 2007 Roselee Goldberg reductively characterises performance art from the former communist countries in Eastern Europe prior to the