Picturing, Pledges and Other Scripted Acts: Performance (In) Art

TPQ: Text and Performance Quarterly, 2021

Leonardo, 2009

Transactions publishes short refereed papers. It provides a fast track to publishing key new results, ideas and developments in practice. This format is particularly valuable to young researchers and, in particular, Ph.D. students in the later part of their studies. Practicing artists are encouraged to report on new work and new concepts through Transactions. Papers are solicited matching the stated aims and scope of Leonardo, but restricted to two pages of published material. A fast referee process is employed in which the result is restricted to "accept" or "reject." The announcement of results or developments in a Transactions paper will not exclude that work from subsequent publication in a full Leonardo paper. However, any such submission will be considered by Leonardo in the normal way, as a new paper. Papers should be submitted electronically in final camera ready form at <http:// www.leonardo-transactions.com>, where formatting instructions and a template may be found. MIT Press is now able to include authors' multi-media files linked to published Leonardo articles. As with other sections of Leonardo, from now on, once a paper has been accepted in Transactions, authors will be offered the opportunity to provide such supplementary material. Associated with Transactions is an open electronic database of new work, Research Announcements. This will be a moderated web site that makes submitted Transactions papers available, with the author's agreement, from the date of receipt by the editor. Other announcements of research results and new practice may also be included. Transactions makes calls for papers in specific areas. These announcements are not exclusive, so no relevant topic will be excluded if the submission is of sufficient quality. The current call is for contributions that address one of the following two areas: • The use of scientific evaluation methods within art practice. • Artists' reports on their recent work that include reflection on practice.

2016

The 1970s saw the emergence of the performative turn in many areas of the humanities. Although its most important representatives emphasized that it did include visual arts, specific examples were usually limited to action art phenomena, bordering on performance art, painting, or sculpture. This article is an attempt to demonstrate that the performative approach to art can be traced back to the avant-garde movement of the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, Paul Klee’s concept of painting discussed here shifts the performative aspect from the artist&#39;s activity to the elements of the image, interpreted from the point of view of their interactions. The article examines the theoretical and pedagogical writings by Klee (both published during his lifetime and posthumously), considered as the basis for the interpretation of his paintings. The artist assumed that the pictorial elements are bound by the principle of motion – a line is a trace left by a moving point, while a p...

To look at Performance art privileging an anthropoetic approach means also to focus on what is the actual evidence contained in the term ‘performance art’. Instead of hazarding poignant definitions that, thus seductive, as a pure product of the mind, in many cases they end to be just sentences and definitions per se, to continue considering this practice ‘open’ as much as possible, as all art ought to be, is what counts the most. As a matter of fact, definitions are always perilous somehow, as they may confine and devaluate in a square grid a practice (here specifically the practice of Performance art), which instead is in constant evolution and permutation, often enigmatic, which today is clearly contaminated by interdisciplinary modes, multiplicity of strategies, tactics, and a large variety of techniques.

2012

first published in catalogue of FUTURE OF IMAGINATION 8, Singapore, 2012

This article focuses on the relationship between performance documents and visual art objects in response to a philosophical position concerning documentation forms held by Philip Auslander. By addressing visual art forms over what may be argued as modern technological approaches to documenting performance – digital video-recording and still photography – this article reports on a selection of practice-based research projects within the canon of Performance Art that use non-traditional forms of performance documentation to propose that bringing together visual art and performance-related discourses is helpful in articulating the document. Rather than focusing on a discussion concerning a politics of form connected to the document in terms of representation and ideas surrounding ‘truth’ (i.e. how different forms of document may be hierarchically placed in their attempt to represent an action that is now absent), the article concentrates on the act of producing documentation as a process that is both liminal and embodied. Addressing and then departing from earlier research by the author that prioritizes different levels of witness via the document, the main research projects address first-hand witness to gain a better understanding of how the act of documentation can be viewed as a performative process and an opportunity for social communication. Whereas the discourse connecting visual art objects with philosophies regarding the performance document remains under- explored, the article can be read as a benchmark for critical engagement in its attempt to combine performance and visual art-related concerns into two idiosyncratic but not highly disparate forms of creative practice. Keywords: audience; body; communication; document; liminality; Performance Art; performativity; visual art; witness

2004

Art History, 2008

Bodies that Matter Again: Transformative Potentialities of Shape Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performing Arts, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Despite the many acts of denial and resistance embodied in the phrase "death of the avant-garde," interest in experimental, innovative, and politically radical performance continues to animate theatre and performance studies. For all their attacks upon tradition and critical institutions, the historical and subsequent avant-gardes remain critical touchstones for continued research in the disciplines of theatre, performance studies, film and cinema studies, media study, art history, visual studies, dance, music, and nearly every area of the performing arts. "Avant-Gardes in Performance" features exciting new scholarship on radical and avant-garde performance. By engaging with the charged term "avant-garde," we consider performance practices and events that are formally avant-garde, as defined by experimentation and breaks with traditional structures, practices, and content; historically avant-garde, defined within the global aesthetic movements of the early twentieth century, including modernism and its many global aftermaths; and politically radical, defined by identification with extreme political movements on the right and left alike. The series brings together close attention to a wide range of innovative performances with critical analyses that challenge conventional academic practices.

An examination of Viennese Actionist performance art, and particularly the work of founder-member Günter Brus, in the 1960s. Taking account of the historical conditions of post-War Vienna, the incipient counter-culture, the Cold War, and an existential crisis in our relationship with our own bodies are sites of meaning and repression of meaning, I examine ways in which abjection and self-destruction in performance art can provide a basis for subversion of a hegemonic, commodified, 'clean' capitalist body.