Notes On Performance Art, The Body And The Political

Constantly resisting time and space, performance is an art that historically spotlights the artist within a certain spatial and temporal frame (the here-and-now), in relation to an audience and a specific political, social and cultural context. By allowing the artist to be its first spectator and searching for a simultaneous exchange between performer and spectator, performance art proposes conditions of socialisation that challenge normative structures of power and spectatorship. Starting from an understanding of the artists as researchers working perceptually, reflexively and also qualitatively, this thesis explores the field of performance art and focuses on their relation to the artwork as intimate, subjective, and transformative. The core of my ethnographic fieldwork was developed between October and December 2014 within the frame of two international festivals based in Northern Italy (Turin and Venice) dedicated to the practice of performance art — torinoPERFORMANCEART and the Venice International Performance Art Week. A highly ethnographic, reflexive and subjective approach is combined with a diversified theoretical frame of reference. Phenomenology and embodiment as points of philosophical departure provide the necessary threshold to overcome the dualistic Cartesian subject widely questioned in performance art: a holistic approach to performance as a series of dialogical, relational, and transformative processes thus allows for deeper investigation on its practice and alternative understandings of its documentation. Contemporary art theories further expand the discussion of performance and tackle some of its critical points and enduring ambivalences. Intending to make a contribution to the already existing efforts of those anthropologists working at the crossroads between art and anthropology, as well as to welcome fruitful dialogues with the artists it engages, the attempt is to trespass fixed positions and binary pathways of thought by exploring the potentials of experience, its continuities and transformations that creatively involve and intersect ethnographies and artistic researches.

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.

This text is a part of critical and curatorial reflections from the II Venice International Performance Art Week 2014 catalogue "Ritual Body - Poetic Body". The biological body becomes indistinguishable from the political body and the body’s limits are set by the political manipulations of biological life. The body is discursively constructed and cannot be separate from its social, aesthetic and symbolic formation. Rituals as a powerful social practice reaffirm the identity of participants as a group or community members and help to create and reproduced the social and political order. What connect the ritual body and political body – is a desire to accomplish or implement this ‘symbolical order’. What are the social, gender and aesthetic dimensions of the body within the performance art? Can we liberate our own bodies from the total domination of power and politics?

Characteristic subjects in my artwork are overlooked history, places, peoples and aspects that have been marginalized by the mainstream culture or narrative. My motivation in this art performance is the question: Can we relate? How can art performance make conscious change that may bring peace through human awareness? As a child of the 70’s I lived through the radical approach of peace making. Learning it is not merely a political process yet also an individual process. The United Nations can set precedent, for instance, yet it is the people who ultimately carry out the process. Dr. Anya Stanger, Doctor of Philosophy in Social Science, Syracuse University researched from 1980-2013. Her data shows that who performs the action deeply matters in terms of how the action is understood, publicized, legitimized, discounted, and mobilized—i.e., effective. On the most surface level, then, it can be said that our most general and visible identities impact the breadth of what we can do as art activists, who we can reach, and what we can change. In our initial critique this semester you mentioned being of privilege. Importantly, it is for me that privilege not only enables, it also motivates direct action. There is an important history of using privilege “for good” in U.S justice struggles, for instance; white student involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, U.S. citizens involved in the Central American Solidarity movement and white abolitionists working to end slavery. "Speaking as a privileged first world person who is responsible and able to act…. demonstrates at once an instance of acknowledging one’s social location, a political understanding of unequal relations, a powerful claiming of personal responsibility and a remarkable demonstration of commitment to solidarity as a standing-with others—as your own person. In these ways, enacting privilege power may be more than a paternalist retrenchment or reification of a colonialist savior complex, and rather become an important method of solidarity.” (Stanger) Art performance as activism is focuses on the issues that as an artist, I am genuinely responsible to speak for; as such the artist is doing their own “work.” “It is important how we act in accompaniment. Not to think of the artist as nonpartisan or neutral. The artist must be aware of the impacts of their political location, be direct and knowledgeable about their race and privilege, and forge purposeful connections through acts of solidarity with those we live and work with (2012, Stanger).” In other words, using privilege well, crucially begins in an understanding of oneself, one’s location, and one’s public/visible identity—and then builds from this place to responsibly work with others. This analysis does not seek to categorize the various understandings and deployments of privilege power as a binary (good/bad, effective/ineffective, sufficient/insufficient), but instead to illuminate the spectrum of understandings expressed by participants in the performance. It is what is so important about engaging with a developed level of personal consciousness. The identity of the group is important. They are representative of many immigrant nations. There are Syrian, Pakistani, Kurdish, South African, German and American. Their religious beliefs are varied, some without a name: “my religion is of the people” Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim. Part of my commitment in performance art is that it be more normalized and better understood as part of our history and as a part of the human condition—to see relatedness as essential rather than exceptional aspect of cultural emergence, with people who are intelligent, courageous and real rather than naïve, heroic or ideal. I found this commitment echoed in the participants’ sentiments. I spent time meeting with immigrants, listening to them, attending language lessons and visiting those who live in the refugee housing of working class and poor people to listen firsthand to the real effects of the Syrian war and poverty. My approach is personal without the “intelligence” gained by drones or journalistic research. “First, there are the facts, research showing that socio-cultural conditions and changes affect human development (therefore history) on the whole. Secondly, this human development affects the socio-cultural context and which may contribute to cultural stability and change.” (Trommsdorff, 2000, 2007). I use the theme of nurture in relation to nature. (Nursing Home, Kreuzberg Pavillon, October). We are a mirroring culture, we relate to and reflect on who and what we meet. There is a basic aspect within the human species to meet and then make choice to relate. “Can we Relate” is the question, the inquiry. As we meet difference in culture, in color, language and even ability, we are then given an opportunity to relate. It is also that as human beings, we are all related in our humanness of form. This performance asks us to consider if the other aspects of politics, nationalism, religion, gender and beliefs can melt into the oneness of a what human relatedness we experience with one another. Practically the event and response is what matters. This art performance speaks for the participants. Their actions a response to the public performance. The added artistic potential will be of a video from the art performance. A video would be an artistic expression of the event in form.

A Live Gathering: Performance and politics in contemporary Europe, edited by Ana Vujanovic, with Livia Piazza, Berlin: b_books, 2019

The main question we raise with this book is how performance can be political in present day European representative democracy, a system which no longer draws on the live gathering of people. Several leading European (mostly female) thinkers analyse artistic practices that have emerged alongside new social movements – such as Solidarity in Greece or Municipalism in Spain – investigating how theatre, dance and performance respond to the new political insights and experiments. It is a context wherein the previously well-known tactics and tools, such as participation, identity politics or spontaneous usage of public space don’t suffice. Thus we must build and learn a new vocabulary of politicality of performance that includes opaque words such as ‘innervation’, ‘preenactment’, ‘prefiguration’ or ‘recreation’. ISBN 978-3-942214-29-2

With(out) Trace: inter-disciplinary investigations into time, space and the body.

As I have mentioned in my synopsis for this paper one of my research groups examines the notion of public space and performativity. After its start we baptized our research subject Unpacking Performativity, for one of its goals was to unravel the way performativity works. I say work because the term is explicitly connected to action, to working in reality. Moreover, it is connected in a special way to the public. If we compare the concept of performativity with beauty or the sublime or with other common aesthetical concepts, performativity is a rather young invention. The first time that this neologism was used, was in the 1955 lectures by the well­ known philosopher of language, John Austin. He wanted to stress the effectiveness of language in reality; that is to say, to point at the effect some uses of language can have in reality. " I pronounce you man and wife " is not only a dictum but it is followed by or is spoken when two people are in fact coupled publicly. The words do what they say. The effectiveness on a specific behaviour of a public event and its denomination as performative were an answer to an upcoming interest in the renewal of the relationship between the audience and the work of art and the artist. In this paper I should like to inquire how this relationship was developed in different art disciplines and how they coped with this new performative attitude. I will focus on the theories of performing arts and the fine arts together for although they seem to talk about the same phenomenon they also seem to hardly talk to each other. In relation to these, probably, different discourses I should like to concentrate on their respective use of the body. This very agent seems to be important with regard to the performative. Performativity has intruded many more fields of art and knowledge than we imagine, for even gardens are analysed in performative terms. 1 This is no coincidence because it seems that we are getting increasingly interested in several aspects of the body and its relationships. But how is the body connected to performativity and how is it related to the public or the audience? When we follow the discourse in the field of the performing arts we come across a line of

Contemporary Theatre Review , 2019

New Trends and Issues Proceedings on Humanities and Social Sciences

The break between object and image was added to the perception of reality and truth which changed with the Internet, social networks and the like in the 1990s. The possibilities that technology provides completed the effort of the postmodernist discourse in art to destroy tradition. All values are being reconstructed. While art is rapidly being digitised, Performance Art has taken its places in art's agenda. In this article, performance art will be elaborated and analysed with a focus on ceramic art. Performance art is the life itself, it is not repetitive, and it is what happens presently. It communes with the audience. As the object of art that exists at the moment, it cannot be bought, sold or moved. It is a way of transmitting the artist's ideas in an unusual, striking and unmediated way that is different from the traditional art forms. In the performances, it is mostly seen that breaking traditional forms, using the clay in raw form rather than firing it, reflecting the plasticity of the clay and revitalising it are used as assets. Performance art is a model of rebellion against the era in which we are imprisoned in mass communication and distanced from reality under the image bombardment. It is necessary to see the performance art as an experiment or suggestion, as the object of art which exists presently, rather than as a show to meet expectations.

My essay in the exhibition catalogue of the 2nd Venice International Performance Art Week 2014 “Ritual Body - Political Body” : “SOCIAL CARNAL LOVE – THE INTERMEDIARY BODY AND THE POLIS” by Francesco Kiais Tracing a parallel between the membranes that physically unite and separate the fetus from the world surrounding the womb, and the walls of prehistoric caves, - touched and decorated by dozens of hands -, and between those and the public spaces and authorities buildings of today's metropolis, - which seem progressively distant and untouchable from the people -, I try to create a dialogue with the works of some of the artists present in the exhibition, about art as a medium that historically testifies the degree of closeness or distance of people from what contains them as a society: be it nature, culture, or urban space. Identifying some guide elements in the traditional and contemporary iconography and in the evolution of urban spaces in different historical periods, I try to show the persistence of the need for "contact" that is revealed through history between the communities of citizens and the cities and their institutions; starting from the "agora" as a synthesis of the founding elements of the Western democratic city model, but also as a synthesis of archaic cultural elements that preceded the "polis". One of the conclusions of this theoretical and visual path is that the artist / performer is the one who brings with him/herself, through history, the primary need of social cohesion and cultural identity, both in the dialogue between an elite and the mass, and in a horizontally diffused discourse without hierarchical verticality. The artist, therefore, even when he/she engages politically in an ideological sense, always offers a universal point of view, bringing the "political" and the "ritual" to join. In a path that goes from the prehistoric labyrinth that placed the myth to its center, to the structure of the Renaissance cities that placed the political, religious and economic power at the center of the urban space, I approach the form of the "global city", which extends its borders in virtual reality, giving a different and more important weight to the phenomenon of incarnation in the "presence" of the Performer, of his/her artistic gesture and its values as a "public art work".

This essay reflects my desire to know more about whether we could understand performance art as a form of ritualistic practice as defined by Frits Staal (1979). For the development of my argument I will draw upon the performance The Artist Is Present by Marina Abramovic (2010). The central question of my essay is: How is The Artist Is Present by Marina Abramovic a ritual? In relation to this question I claim that The Artist Is Present is a ritual as defined by Staal.