My Performance Art

For my performance art project I chose to do an activity in a public place so that the reactions of other people could be used as part of the art. I felt that a public bathroom on campus that gets a lot of use would be a prime setting to be able to use the reactions of spectators as part of the performance. I thought there would be ironic humor in having a romantic date in the bathroom and would tie in perfectly with our discussions of decontextualization. I set up a table and chairs complete with a waiter and flowers and filmed our date as people entered and reacted, with mostly laughs or confused looks. We ate food and drank wine and engaged in as much conversation as we could amidst the interruptions from people entering and exiting. There were a couple of toilet flushes too which was especially humorous. Once people caught on, they would run get their friends or even faculty to come see what we were doing.

Nam June Paik and The Residents

I'm glad we talked about Nam June Paik the other day because I have often heard his name as influential in art, but never knew exactly what his influence was. Turns out he was one of the main pioneers of video art and electronic music. I found it interesting that he was classically trained in music, yet opted for a more non traditionalist approach to creating more abstract, atonal electronic music using synthesizers. My favorite piece of his was where he was dragging a violin along the ground by a string. It ties in perfectly with the decontextualization we have been talking about as well as the examples of performance art we have examined. It's saying, "Here I am, playing the violin. Why do I have to play it the expected way with a bow? This is creating a sound just in a different way." Like any great art, it forces people to think of things in a different way.
I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't know who the Residents were until this class because they seem to have been such pioneers in the realm of music videos. Coming from a generation who has grown up watching music videos, it seems important to be exposed to this group. Like the Gorillas who we watched last week, they concealed their identities from the public by using animation and costumes/masks to hide their faces. Even in public they wore the eyeball masks and top hats. It seems they are performance artists as well as avant garde experimental musicians. There music videos were definitely trippy and disturbing but it's interesting to finally be exposed to truly the first music videos.

Look but Don't Touch

The New York Times article about the performance art piece at MOMA was very interesting. It's truly an example of how simplistic the artist's concept can be and how the reactions and involvement of the viewers can contribute greatly to the art itself. The naked man and woman stood facing each other while visitors walked through the narrow passage way between them. I found it shocking that despite the warnings about improper contact and touching, people still violated the performers. It seems that the art piece proved to be very telling of human nature and allowed not only the audience to be participants, but it allowed the performers to be spectators of the audience members. It seems that the performers would need to very comfortable with their bodies and being violated in unexpected ways. It's especially interesting for me because the participants were regular performers outside of the performance art piece: dancers, choreographers etc. and it stretched them as performers to have this experience because the audience reaction is quite different than that of a regular performance; they are part of it and the performers learn something about the nature of the spectators.

What is Performance Art?

What is performance art? I still don't know. We spent the last week exploring it in class and I have to say I am a little nervous to have to create my own performance art piece. It seems that all are so starkly different that nothing can be wrong...or can it? Santiago has repeatedly told us that performance art is different from performing arts. It seems like unlike performing, it doesn't seek to be accepted or even understood by an audience. The audience brings its own thoughts and interpretations to the piece and that creates part of the art. Many seem to make some sort of political or societal statement of critique. I particularly liked Tom Geogenan's "Strange Fruit." At first glance, I thought it was something absurdly bizarre that had no context, but after listening to Billie Holiday's song of the same name about the lynching of slaves, it took on a new meaning. While it's message isn't clear, maybe it's just to make people think and develop their own interpretations, but the context definitely helps. Same goes for French performance artist Orlan's televised lyposuction performance art piece. Why she chose to film herself getting the surgery seems shocking and strange but one can only guess it can be interpreted as some statement about beauty. I was a little uncomfortable with the performance pieces where people used their own blood or mutilate their bodies as art. But they are saying they can do what they want with their body including using it as a canvas. It echoes Deuchamp who claimed that anything even the most mundane of objects (such as a urinal) could be deemed art by the artist declaring it so.

Xerox Project

This was my xerox project. It ended up being fun to do even though I think I missed the point of the assignment a little bit. After seeing the rest of the class' project, mine lacked detail and a real creative concept. Mine was not outside of the box enough. I was afraid mine would be a bit too literal, afterall it was the only collage that actually used the parts to create the structure of a person of sorts. I played it "safe" but it was still fun. And I felt like a badass laying on the xerox machine in the library :)

Pop Art and Andy Warhol

Last class we talked about Andy Warhol and boy, was he a character. He came across as such a complete pompous asshole and it was rather amusing. Emerging in a time when the reactionary beatniks were lashing out against society, pop artist Andy Warhol and his followers said "hey, let's just embrace it." His art completely mirrored commercialism and the media at the time. Much like Marcel Deuchamp, his paintings of ordinary objects (such as the campbell's soup can and the coca cola bottles) were decontextualized, taking out of their natural contexts and deemed art. Someone even was quoted in the documentary as saying that Andy Warhol would point his finger and say, "That's art!" I also had no idea that he produced the music to the Velvet Underground...pretty cool! Toward the end of class we watched a bit of video footage on Yves Klein who was one of the first examples of performance art. He would have women put blue paint on their bodies and press themselves up against a blank canvas, creating imprints. I thought the work of Rachel Whiteread was really interesting. She would make molds of the empty space of objects such as chairs, staircases, bookshelves etc. So she would make say a mold of the inside of a house and all of the empty space would create the mold. I thought it was a brilliant idea.

Grid Art and Surrealism

This is my grid art project. I used a scrabble board as my grid and decided to do my own take of Van Gogh's "Starry Night." I based my picture of the central swirl of wind in the painting and using mosaic tiles I followed the grid, yet simultaneously broke it in order to achieve the circular motion. I used sequins to create the moon and different stars. It ended up being a fun experiment and unlike anything I've ever done.
Class was very interesting on Wednesday. We focused a lot on the artwork of Marcel Deuchamp. He starts as an impressionist painter who fell on the side of more realistic art and transitions to more abstract surrealist cubism and installation art. He is famous for turning ordinary objects into artwork such as R. Mutt: the photograph of a urinal turned upside down. I must admit I had a hard time seeing the value until Santiago talked about how it was decontextualizing a familiar object by taking it out of its natural place and exposing the beauty of simply the object out of its expected context. Boy does he have a sense of humor too! His piece where he has drawn a mustache on the Mona Lisa includes the initials L.H.O.O.Q. which when pronounced phonetically in French translates to "Her ass is on fire!" It's hilarious to think that artists were being this subversive this early in the 1900s.
Un Chien Andalou was very trippy. It was like a car crash that you cant turn away from. The images that stuck out as memorable were obviously the famous eye cutting sequence, the graphic sequence of the man trying to molest a woman, bugs eating their way into a man's hand, and a moth with an image of a skull on the back of its head. It seemed like a nightmare. I'll be interested to see if we talk anymore in class about what the hidden meanings could be.