Performance art notes

 clothes can be interpreted by an audience in very different ways, depending on their culture and the situation where it is presented

THE PERFORMANCE STUDIES READER edited by henry bial

"performance...is a broad spectrum of activities including at the very least the performing arts, rituals, healing, sports, popular entertainments, and performance in everyday life" page 7 richard schechner the broad spectrum approach

"as for the broad spectrum approach - treating performative behaviour not just the performing arts, as a subject for serious scholarly study - this idea is just beginning to make some headway among the academic establishment." page 8 same as above

"as an artform, performance lacks a distinctive medium" (carroll 1986: 78) page 43

"by theorizing embodiment, event, and agency in relation to live (and mediated) performance, Performance studies can potentially offer something of a counterweight to the emphasis in Cultural studies on literature and media, text as an extended metaphor for culture, and enrich the discussion of discourse, representation, the body, and identity." page 43
'
Ray birdwhistell "performance is an inherant constituent of all communication "page 44


"THE LINE BETWEEN ART AND LIFE SHOULD BE KEPT AS FLUID, AND PERHAPS INDISTINCT, AS POSSIBLE" allan kaprow,  perform by jens hoffman and joan jonas



PERFORM - jens hoffman etc

page 11 -
 "its used in a wide variety of fields and areas of the contemporary world, from the realms of ecomomy, business, technology science and medicine to art, popular culture, sports, politics and academia. Athe same time, even though everyone is using it, it seems difficult to settle on a clear and precise definition for the term."

"performance resists classification"

"the execution of an action, the accomplishment of a task or the manner in which something functions and operates"

PAGE 12 
Performance can mean many different things in different areas of life. For example "'performance is used to describe the so-called productivity of an employee" in the business world, or "how well or poorly a piece of antique furniture...fares during an auction". "the more we read and hear about performance, the more confusing it seems to become. suddenly activities as diverse as cooking or joke-telling seem to qualify as performance...What is this all about? Society as performance? The world as a stage?"
A more defined definition of performance is ...
Some argue that audience has to play a role in it, which it does with clothing. Everyone you intereact with during the day, who is more likely to speak to you or avoid you due to your clothing etc

+()%*£*@ EG Some describe performance art that "performance may also be understood mroe generally as any activity that involves the presentation of rehearsed or pre-established sequences of words or actions. Schechner calls this 'restored behaviour' or 'twice-behaved behaviour' (performance studies reader) which .
Putting clothes on in the morning, to reflect a certain decade 
Putting on high heels, knowing you will be uncomfortable to preparing to sacrifice comfort for your appearance

clothiing has closely echoed developments in the government since the 1600s? Much like how 'this painting' showed the freedom of blah in this period. Unlike theatre, campaigns or other art at the time, dressing for the day became a way to subtlely express your beliefs and stance on 
More specifically, like the boom in the 80s, dressing monogamous etc

Public is the most important element.. without people to see, clothes are nothing

PAGE 14
research AUSTIN GOFFMAN "costruction of identity as a performative process"

PAGE 15 - performance art is 'generally executed by an artits or group of artists in front of a live audience at a specific time and at a specific place. in contrast to theatre, performance art does not present the illusion of events, but rather presents actual events as art"
"in contrast to theatres, , it is not based on a predetermined set of dialogues"

PAGE16
'we discover that 'body art' is also, in fact, a broadly inclusive term that cannot be reduced to one particular idea."

PAGE17
"Kaprow's Happenings foreshadowed performance art in various ways, as they brought together a set of attributes unknown in art of that time. They were freely planned, provisional and spontaneous artistic events that directly related to everyday life. In particular, the desire to locate, explore and bridge the gap between art and life was key to Kaprow's artistic and theoretical inquiries."

PAGE 181
Martha Rosler "the adoption of performance is in part a reflection of the broad abandonment, in most of Western culture, of the search for self apart from its formation in social situations... I have wanted to 'policitize' the most invisible elements of everyday life - to suggest that these things are worthy of attention and, most importantly, subject to change"
The breakdown of family could be to blame, forever soul search, no identity



PAGE 42 - paul mccarthey "most importantly, pinnochion costumes that the audience must wear if they want to watch the film inside the box. mccarthey wants us to assum eand share the role of the leading player in his film..why have we been asked to dress up?"

PAGE 62 - gilbert and george "being living sculptures is our life blood, our destiny, our romance,  our disaster, our light and life"

page 78 - nikki s lee

page 110 - adrian piper - wears wet paint clothes, or stinking clothes and goes out in public

page 156 - cremaster cycle

page 162 - carlos amorales - transformation through clothes and makeup into wrestlers

WHAT I WANT TO DO IS SHOW THAT THIS ISNT THAT DISSIMILAR TO REAL LIFE



20th century performance reader

page 120
simone de beauvoir claims 'one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman'

"gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time - an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts" it is these acts of behaviour, dress, and ritual that women have become accustomed to which is key to this investigation

pge 123
"to be female is, according to that distinction,  a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is the have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of 'woman', to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialise oneself in obedience to an historically delimitated possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project

as a strategy of survival, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. Discrete genders are part of what 'humanises' individuals within contemporary culture; those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished."

page 131/2
"Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and insessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds."


page 148
in arguement, some might say that if the subject has no perception of their performance, how can it be performing. how important 'the idea of the public display of technical skill is to this traditional concept of 'performance'
'these arts require the physical presence of a trained or skilled human beings whose demonstration of their skills is the performance."

'restored behaviour ' actions consciously seperated from the person doing them
Schechners useful concept of 'restored behaviour' points to a quality of performance not involved with the display of skills, but rather with a certain distance between 'self' and behaviour, analagous to that between an actor and the role the actor plays on stage."


the performance studies reader

page 27 'audiences..whom regard the experience as made up of material to be interpreted, to be reflected upon, to be engaged in'.

page 59
"performance may also be understood mroe generally as any activity that involves the presentation of rehearsed or pre-established sequences of words or actions. Schechner calls this 'restored behaviour' or 'twice-behaved behaviour'

page 61
'when an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. they are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess"

"one finds the performer can be fully taken in by his own act; he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality"
'when his audience is also convinced in this way about the show he puts on then, for the moment at least, only the sociologist or the socially disgruntled will have any doubts about the 'realness' of what is presented."
So we believe that when we put on these new styles, that's our new self.

page 62
"we know that in service occupations practitioners who may otherwise be sincere are sometimes forced to delude their customers because their customers show such a heartfelt demand for it. Doctors who are led into giving placebos, filling station attendants who resignedly check and recheck tire pressures for anxious women motorists, shoe clerks who sell a shoe that fits but tell the customers it is the size she wants to hear - therse are cynical performers whose audiences will not allow them to be sincere. " Which is similar to the expectations accustomed to women in certain walks of life. 

"starting with a lack of inward belief in ones role, the individual may follow the natural movements described by park:

it is probably no mere historical accident that the word person in its first meaning, is a mask. it is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consiously, playing a role... it is in these roles that we know each other; it is in the roles that we know ourselves

in a sense, and in so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves - the role we are striving to live up to - this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be. in the end, our conception of our role becomes second nature and an integral part of our personality. We come into the world as individuals, achieve character, and become persons" but fashion is trying to dissuade this by encouraging us all to follow a certain path.REFER BACK TO THIS PAGE FOR STORIES

page76
"art imitates life"
"life has become art"

page190
"the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time"

page 194
"the sight of a tranvestite on stage can compel pleasure and applause while the sight of the same tranvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence... on the street or in the bus, there is no presumption that the act is distinct from a reality; the disquieting effect of the act is that there are no conventions that demarcate the imaginary form the real"

"... appearance contradicts reality of a gender"
"gender realilty is performative, which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed"gender is dramatised by certain poses, posture and gestures. then link this to the russian 'work suits' and clothes to fit everyone.. but still labelled out different genders

page 197
"there is...nothing about femaleness that is waiting to be expressed; there is, on the other hand, a good deal about the diverse experiences of women that is being expressed and still needs to be expressed"

"gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy"




PERFORMANCE :LIVE ART SINCE THE 60s

Everyday appearance is combining paints, sculpting, costume

PAGE 10
"according to photographer Richard Avedon who insists the 'all portraiture is performance," even Rembrandt, "must have been acting when he made his own self-portraits....Not just making faces, but always, throughout his life, working in the full tradition of performance"

[TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES]"Several factors explain this surge of interest (in performance). One is the interactivity of modern life in the last years of the twentieth century, which provides endless opportunities for participation... cyberspace offers the illusion of constant movement"

It's not just clothing advancements, technological advances have meant this surge of pretense within the public. We put on personas to video, photograph and .  We fear being captured in the same outfit twice 

PAGE16
"everyday life was not only material for art, but was itself art"

PAGE21
"during the 1970s when conceptual art made it difficult for viewers to respond to its somewhat didactic content and its anti-consumerist ideology, performance art become the predominant art form of the period. The range of material grew enormously, to include body art, living sculpture, autobiography, feminism, ritual, costume art, and more" at the same time people were becomming more adventurous with their clothing. the hippy culture of the 70s blah blah. People were addressing issues through their own clothing. By punk, tshirts with slogans etc

PAGE26
In the mid 70s androyny was explored by david bowie, lou reed, roxy music etc and by "in the late 70s.. artists in the united states... men often dressed in standard-issue black jeans and white shirts, sometimes with skinny black ties, and women in gender-neutral pants, boots and sweaters." but now, androgeny isn't used to show gender equality, [QUOTE FASHION BRANDS TAKE ON ANDROGYNY]
Androgyny was used to blur the lines between male and female, empowering 
"In being androgynous, especially in a sex-stereotyped society, a person would need to be open to experience, flexible, accepting of apparent opposites, unconcerned about social norms, and self-reliant"

PAGE27
"in the 1990s, a new generation of artists, among them catherine opie, yasumasa morimura, and lyle ashton harris, explored this fascination with disguise in a range of costumes and personae. Their selfconscious and art-directed performance in front of the camera resulted in life-size, glossy photographs whose super-realism emulated the thrill of live performance."

PAGE30
"Historically, performance art has been a medium that challenges and violates borders between disciplines and genders, between private and public, and between everyday life and art, and that follows no rules."

"new technologies have created an avant-garde for the masses, a popular world of computers, websites, zines and virtual realisties, subscribed to by global youth who navigate its brilliant pathways with the exhilaration and energy of first-time explorers"

PAGE33
"More people 'see' performance through reproduction than can ever actually attend them... readers may view the image of a one-time only performancy as frequently as they like, resuscitating the live performance repeatedly in their imagination"


MARINA ABROMAVIC

"To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre," she replied. "Theatre is fake… The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real."

 Why put yourself though such suffering in the name of art? Abramovic has no easy answers to that question. "I am obsessive always, even as a child," she says, suddenly serious, and, for the first time, pausing for thought. "On one side is this strict orthodox religion, on the other is communism, and I am this little girl pulled between the two. It makes me who I am. It turns me into the kind of person that Freud would have a field day with, for sure." She hoots with laughter again and reaches for the English tea.

 I realise the power of art that does not hang on the walls of galleries."

Abramovic is adamant, though, that, as she puts it: "Performance art has to live and survive. It cannot be put on walls. If we do not perform and recreate it, the art fuckers and the theatre fuckers and the dance fuckers will rip us off without credit even more than they do anyway. I am sick and tired of the mistreatment of performance art. Even the pop-video fuckers steal from it. I want to bring young people in afresh so they can experience the beautiful work of Beuys and Acconci. The best way to do that is to bring those works alive, to perform them."
Relates to bart hess but his isn't performance

http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=633