Archive for the 'performance art' Category

Learning from being there?

Published
by
Lucas
on December 5, 2007
in performance art and re-enactment
. 3 Comments

concordia talk
[natty flyer designed by Abe, who organised the talk].

Last night I gave an informal slideshow talk about re-enactment and performance art at Concordia University in Montreal. Abe de Bruyn, an Aussie performance practitioner who I had met in Melbourne a few years back, is studying here now, and has initiated a series of guest lectures broadly on the topic of video and performance art.

I collected together a bunch of pictures I took on my recent trip to New York, to discuss re-enacting performance art as a strategy which is relevant to art history, archiving and documentation, as well something which is of social and phenomenological interest.
Continue reading ‘Learning from being there?’

Inhabiting Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull

Published
by
Lucas
on November 23, 2007
in performance art and re-enactment
. 1 Comment

kaprow push pull instructions
[Excerpt from instructions page at Kaprow's Push and Pull. The full text of the instructions is available online here, or for the typewriter/paper feel, read them here.]

Creative Time organised a presentation of Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann, during the Performa Festival. It ran for three days at a space called Passerby.

Push and Pull is a dynamic installation in which anyone can come and rearrange furniture which is spread around in a room. Well, we might call it an installation now, but in Kaprow’s day (the piece was first presented in 1963) it was a “Happening” (or an “Environment”). It’s clear that Kaprow, in the four years since 18 Happenings in 6 Parts was presented, had substantially reworked his idea of what a Happening should be. If 18 Happenings in 6 Parts was a sort of experimental theatre involving specially prepared “actors”, then by the time he devised Push and Pull, Kaprow had moved on to creating situations where the “audience” was now the primary activator of the work.
Continue reading ‘Inhabiting Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull’

18 Happenings in 6 Parts

Published
by
admin
on November 13, 2007
in performance art and re-enactment
. 6 Comments

allan kaprow happening
[more photos here]

On Sunday night Lizzie and I went down to Long Island City to see the “re-do” of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. I’m a big fan of Kaprow’s work and his writings, and I’m also really interested in re-enactment or re-creation as a method of experiencing ephemeral artwork from the past. (Karinne Keithly has written another account of 18 Happenings over here).

A few notes on the event:
Continue reading ‘18 Happenings in 6 Parts’

Lone Twin interviewed by Christopher Hewitt

Published
by
Lucas
on November 22, 2006
in Writing by others and performance art
. 0 Comments

the following is a cut and paste from this word document here (or here if you want google’s transformation into html).

-It’s a spiel and interview about Lone Twin, which was put together by the erstwhile Christopher Hewitt for the 2004 Brussels KunstenFESTIVALdesArts. I’m pasting it here because it’s really interesting, and because there’s not much of this depth available on the web about Lone Twin.

Continue reading ‘Lone Twin interviewed by Christopher Hewitt’

Augusto Boal and Theater of the Oppressed

Published
by
Lucas
on November 22, 2006
in performance art and public art
. 0 Comments

A short while ago I went to Adelaide to run part of a workshop on experimental public art practices. I tried some exercises from Augusto Boal’s book “Games for Actors and Non-Actors”.
Here are a few links I noted about Boal from around the net…

http://www.theatrelinks.com/oppressed.htm

http://www.theatreoftheoppressed.org/en/index.php?nodeID=162

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/12.11/15-boal.html

http://ctoatala.org/maps.html#australia

http://www.northernvisions.org/boal.htm

abramovic’s re-enactments

Published
by
Lucas
on January 30, 2006
in performance art and re-enactment
. 0 Comments

Thanks to Spiros, who has boldly been experimenting with the intimacy of performance at Gertrude Street…
A review of Marina Abramovic’s 7 easy pieces at the Guggenheim last November. Abramovic re-enacted performances from the 1970s by Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Gina Pane, Valie Export, Joseph Beuys, and herself. This review by Johanna Burton captures the difficult territory that this kind of work negotiates - bringing ephemeral, poorly documented work to solid “reality” in the present. Particularly interesting for me was Burton’s remark about the tendency of the performances to become like 3 dimensional images:

the “reenactments,” particularly in retrospect, cemented themselves in my mind as sophisticated holograms, both present and past, fact and fiction.

I find it fascinating that this impulse exists to try and physically grasp what has become iconic and influential in the history of art.

See the entries under the category “re-enactment” for more on this issue.

with-out: Spiros Panigirakis

Published
by
Lucas
on January 22, 2006
in collaboration and performance art
. 1 Comment

Spiros, a clubbsy fellow in Melbourne, is doing a fascinating process-oriented project at the moment. Check out the blog here: http://with-out.blogspot.com

It's tricky to see exactly what is going on  -  many layers of activity. But Spiros is engaging particular groups, [activist groups?], and designing posters for them (but not particularly "useful" posters, I think). He's also running workshops in the gallery, collaborative reading groups where the participants wear odd head-pieces, and is struggling mightily with the forces of gravity and a large curtain. It's part of the midsumma festival, at gertrude gallery.

nontheatrical performance: Kaprow

Published
by
Lucas
on January 13, 2006
in performance art and theory
. 0 Comments

the following is taken from 'Nontheatrical Performance (1976) by Allan Kaprow, in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life…

…artists themselves, [...] today are so trained to accept anything as annexable to art that they have a ready-made “art-frame” in their heads that can be set down anywhere, at any time. They do not require the traditional signs, rooms, arrangements, and rites of performance because performance is an attitude about involvement on some plane in something going on. It does not have to be onstage, and it really does not have to be announced.

[…]

here is the ball game I perceive: an artist can

(1)    work within recognizable art modes and present the work in recognizable art contexts

    e.g.,    paintings in galleries
                poetry in poetry books
                music in concert halls, etc.

(2)    work in unrecognisable, ie nonart, modes but present the work in recognisable art contexts

    e.g.,    a pizza parlour in a gallery
                a telephone book sold as poetry, etc.

(3)    work in recognizable art modes but present the work in nonart contexts

    e.g.,    a “Rembrandt as an ironing board”
                a fugue in an air-conditioning duct
                a sonnet as a want ad, etc.

(4) work in nonart modes but present the work in nonart contexts

    e.g.,     perception tests in a psychology lab
                anti-erosion terracing in the hills
                typewriter repairing
                garbage collecting, etc. (with the proviso that the art world knows about it)

(5)    work in nonart modes and nonart contexts but cease the call the work art, retaining instead the private consciousness that sometimes it may be art, too

    e.g.,     systems analysis
                social work in a ghetto
                hitchhiking
                thinking, etc.

[…]

Performance in the nontheatrical sense that I am discussing hovers very close to this fifth possibility, yet the intellectual discipline it implies and the indifference to validation by the art world it requires suggest that the person enganged in it would view art less as a profession than as a metaphor. At present such performance is generally nonart activity conducted in nonart contexts but offered as quasi-art to art-minded people. That is, to those not interested in whether it is or isn’t art, who may, however, be interested for other reasons, it need not be justified as an artwork.

Kaprow’s Fluids (1967)

Published
by
Lucas
on January 12, 2006
in performance art
. 0 Comments

FLUIDS
A HAPPENING BY
ALLAN KAPROW

DURING THREE DAYS, ABOUT TWENTY
RECTANGULAR ENCLOSURES OF ICE
BLOCKS (MEASURING ABOUT 30
FEET LONG, 10 WIDE AND 8
HIGH) ARE BUILD THROUGHOUT
THE CITY. THEIR WALLS ARE
UNBROKEN. THEY ARE LEFT TO MELT

-THOSE INTERESTED IN PARTICIPATING SHOULD ATTEND A PRELIMINARY MEETING AT THE PASADENA ART MUSEUM, 46 NORTH LOS ROBLES AVENUE, PASADENA, AT 8.30PM, OCTOBER 11 10, 1967. THE HAPPENING WILL BE THOROUGHLY DISCUSSED BY ALLAN KAPROW AND ALL DETAILS WORKED OUT.

[-poster for FLUIDS (1967) - from the funny old book Adrian Henri, Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance, Praeger, New York, 1974, p97]

[Update November 27, 2007: Fluids was remade at the Performa Festival in NYC in 2007. Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend that event, but I have written about Push and Pull, and 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, which were also recreated during Performa.]

rent a body

Published
by
Lucas
on November 21, 2005
in Relational Aesthetics and performance art
. 0 Comments
"Everybody rents themselves in the marketplace," said Cao, a 31-year old Spanish conceptual artist. "You work, and somebody pays you for it; there is no difference between that and prostitution." While questions about the body as a commodity are central to the "company mission" of Rent-A-Body, Cao is decidedly not in the business of carnal knowledge: sexual rentals of any kind are strictly prohibited.

The agency, according to its promotional brochure, offers "an up-to-date body. . . prepared to function as a living extension of your will." The prospective customer is promised "an articulate, versatile human, in possession of a wide variety of mental and physical capabilities. . . for a reasonable hourly fee." If this sounds to you like a boutique-y version of Temps USA serfdom, you're on the right track.

for the whole essay, go to:
http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/0696June/Eyebot/rentyerbody.html
thanks to margie for the link!