The Last Source

Over the course of the semester my source has really developed past my initial interests. When we were first told that we were to pick a source that we would be working with the entire semester, I knew I had to pick something good. I tried to think of a source that was meaningful to me in many ways.

My first ideas were marriage, loneliness, and contradiction. After further class discussion and searching deeper within I realized my interest in these three ideas was merely really a combined interest in the contradiction between paired lifestyles and single lifestyles.

When my source was to start to take shape from words to images, I quickly composed a pro and a con list for both being with someone and being by alone. I used my lists to come up with my ideas for my photos and then hit the town. Over the three weeks of images I to really show the contradictory as well as the complementary sides to both arguments.

Next we brought our images further to create an artist book. I stuck tight to my source, which I had now defined as a song I had written called Paperclips. The thought of paperclips took hold of me and I would not let go. I completed my artist book as structure of images and paperclips trying to further prove my point of how weak yet strong these bonds can create.

From my artist book I found my source, still defined completely by my song, in both sound and video. After doing so, I really started to want to focus my source in, and start to really examine my own relationships. This started after I had a personal experience with love that made me realize it wasn’t even what I thought I wanted.

I really started to shift my source towards these places in myself. I realized how my art work played even more a crucial role in my life than I had thought before. It keeps loneliness at bay but hinders new relationships. My art work is my jealous boyfriend who freaks out the second any one new comes anywhere near, but I'm okay with that, it really works for me.

That said I went into my final project wanted to reflect on my work. I originally wanted to finish my side project I had been doing all year, but with Lana’s directional assistance, approached a new idea, leaving Paperclips completely, to really try to show my relationship with my artwork, in all its beautiful glory.

From questioning love and what it was I wanted from love to learning that it’s my own personal relationship with myself and my artwork that completes me the way I thought only love of another person could. I feel my source and this class has really helped to open my eyes and see, despite my attempts to stick to one specific idea. Once I let go and let the source start speaking, everything came together, just they way I had hoped for.

(all i can) B

Click to Play

Visual Language 2 Final Project

Second to last Progress

THE VIDEO IS COMPELTE!

I ended up not using the poem at all. i think it was a strong wise choice. The images and music are speaking so much already, I didnt need more.

So, here's what to expect

next blog

1 MY FINAL VIDEO!
2 my final source writing
3. WRAP UP!my relief once the dvd and the two aforementioned items are complete as well as my final reflections on my experiences in VL2 this semester

YAH!

The Poem for the Video---Video Version!

eyes straight ahead
set flight in course

no rules no context
dying to be

tightly fastened absolute destiny
never say forever

alone in the dark
i can live out my plans

looking for new a way
to escape my body

with an hour ahead
and a highway behind

eyes on the road
feet on the ground

don’t shed a tear
honesty is everything

its just a sacrifice ive had to make
in learning that

the only love that really counts
is the love you have for yourself

The Videos are up, at last!

My quick final teaser and paperclip video from before are up at last! The quality looks like shit but at least they are FINALLY up!

The song is ready.

My DVD is getting there.

Haha, excellence.

Now to continue forth!

VL2 2 Minute Video

Click to Play

final clip

Click to Play

On the note of progress!

The song has come together, it is not yet finished completely but is whole, and beautifully so.

I wrote it with my good friend Jorge We had never actually played together before but when we started friday something started working shone through today!

Wish I could post song up here.

Video still NOT my friend. Gonna talk to people I know tomorrow who I know have videos up on the internet.

So tomorrow is predominitly Form Study, but I need to actually find a way to get these videos up as well as completely edit together the music for the video and align poetry with images.

Thursday is some simple ouch ups in Final Cut and once finished with that the DVD of everything!

Then thats that.

Progress Report

Just put up the still images from the video. Having the ABSOLUTE WORST TIME OF MY LIFE getting my video up. At this point I have two versions of it. The one I made Friday in class and the newer one with the new ending suggested by Lana and the new still images AND a new title!

I still need to add the poetry.

The music is half way there still, actually may get finished immediately after I finish typing this.

So, now its a matter of finishing the music, one more visit to final cut, and the dvd. Oh and getting these fucking video up. This video/internet process is KILLING ME! Ahhh! I have seriously tried like 15 times today and last friday and NOTHING WILL WORK! Oy! Well, guess Ill keep trying then.

I even made a 10 second clip of the video just in hopes the smallness would help with the interneting and still nothing.

So, yah, thats the progress report and now im off to piano land.

Images in the Video

Here are all the stills from the video again cropped nicely this time!

Final Project Progress!

So, this is actually my update for last class. I completed the first draft of my video for the final on Friday in class after having had braved the crazy wind on Thursday painting by the river and taping it and taking pictures and having a BLAST!

So I imported and edited my footage and made a video roughly six minutes, as I had planned. Lana and I watched it together and she seemed generally optimistic with my progress, which excited me greatly! So she gave me some ideas (which all are great ideas) and I went home and started working on the music. I plan to post my silent video on here in a few seconds, but unfortunitly can not post the music as its an image and a video posting sorta sight here. Right, so I started playing the piano and watching the movie, fully aware that the music was absolutely, positively, no doubt going to make or break my video.

So I sat and I played and I tried and it just wasn't it yet I slightly worried that my piano skills weren't ready for such an endeveor I decided to make it work. I kept working on it and after twenty more minutes my phone started to vibrate. It was my old buddy Jorge. He wanted to hangout. I wanted to keep working. He plays music too. So I picked him up and we got started. He played my old keyboard and I played my digital piano and in no time at all we had the video on and half of the music was written. It was beautiful. Almost as beautiful as the actually feeling of creating the painting just the day before. Wow, what a beautiful couple of days I had :)

So we recorded his part. I am currently cleaning it up I have recorded my part as well. I have begun to really turn it into the music for this video. Tomorrow night, Tuesday, Jorge and I plan to finish the other half, which we started working on before we ran out of time on Friday.

ALSO! Very important information.I almost have Final Cut on my lap top, and will by tomorrow. I plan to use the ideas of Lana to my advantage and clean up my video even more tomorrow before we record. I am to spend ALL of Thursday finishing this up because I am out of work at 9:30 AM. Wednesdays form study ALL day unfortunitly :(

I also have organized my SCHOOL folder on my laptop so I am pretty ready to finish this project and burn the DVD of my semester in VL2! Oh I can't believe Friday's already the end September, come, quicker!

So, now that I've said every last possible thing I needed to say, at last, here's my actual evidential progress known as the first version of the movie which is my final. I really could have just said here's my final video! Yah, so, with ANYMORE further adieu, here's the video!

OH WAIT, ONE LAST THING! Ignore the title, IT IS CHANGING! I REALLY don't like the title right now, it is way too gay, even for me! HAHA! Right. Ok, ok, for real this time! My Final (thus far):














AH!!!

My video WILL NOT LOAD! I believe that it may have to do with the fact that it is not compressed for the internet yet and is just in quicktime... I am unsure... I am trying to call Haley but she didn't answer. I will ask my roomate when he gets home. Maybe after I get FINAL CUT actually installed and working on here I will be all set. I am pissed!

THE VIDEO WILL COME!

:)

The source and the project behind the final

Alright, so I have made much progress in my final due next week. Lots of my progress is posted, but here is a lil something something as to what's actually going on at this point.

My source has shifted into a real hard look at my own relationship with art, particulaly my own art, and how the process of making art fulfills my needs for human relationship as well as cover my own lonileness. The video is going to be a collage of sped up video image and still images of me painting with a musical score to it.

I feel a video of me working in my primal instinctive nature blended with the music and the new poem I wrote to correspond with the music really show my source and how art fulfills me, as this whole semester I have been investigating a single life vs non single life, trying to figure out why I didn't have someone and how it affected me Somewhere along the lines my source spoke further to me and instead of trying to find all these different pieces to make this puzzle, it told me that the only piece that really mattered spoke inside of me. I realized the only way I know how to really let that voice out is through my hands On the piano, with a brush, anything and everything artistic If my hands are dirty, then I am happy. So for the final I really focused on the marriage between my life and art and the balance art creates for me as a person.

SO CLOSE!!!

DONE-Video shot (thursday)
DONE-images taken (thursday)
DONE-new poem conceived (but never concrete)
DONE-post poem and images to blog

WILL DO STILL-Absolute final proposal. to blog and printed

The Images of the Process

Progress leading into 4/24

vl2 4/24

NOT DONE-Absolute final proposal. to blog and printed
DONE-Video shot (thursday)
DONE-images taken (thursday)
DONE-new poem conceived (but never concrete)
HALF DONE-post poem and images to blog
NEED TO DO-buy and install final cut
OH YAH!-equipment needed: 2 video cameras, 1 digital camera, tripod for digital camera


more to follow

The New Poem

no rules no context
never say forever
dying to be
tightly fastened
absolute destiny
quiet and polite
you also ache too
alone in the dark
drive home all alone
hoping tonights the night
i can live out my plans
whatever it is
im sure ill buy in
looking for someway
to escape my body
woke up the next day
in the model boys bed
i could not believe
what my luck had given
just an hour ahead
with a highway behind
eyes straight ahead
set flight in course
eyes on the road
feet on the ground
so just let it go
don’t shed a tear
ill only hurt you
ill never let you in
its just a sacrifice
ive had to make
in learning the only love
that really counts
is the love you have
for yourself

Today's Progress

Today was a day of discovery for me. I learned that I was trying to do too much that wasn't even what I was really supposed to do. So, with that said, here is my new final proposal.

For my final I am going to be making a video using both film and digital photography, as well as piano and spoken word. After talking to Lana, I went back to my computer puzzled. How can I do this? Her idea was to make a video of my creating of art. liked that idea but how to execute was beyond me. Her suggestion was to either take a video of me creating or do still shots with the piece slightly furthered each shot. After racking my brain, I decided I wanted to do both. My idea is that I will super speed up the video images then just stop with still images of whatever it is i'm making constantly a step further, until finished at the end. Here's the sequence idea:

Still
Motion
Still
Motion
Still
Motion
Still
Motion
Still
Motion
Still
Motion
Still
Motion
Still

An idea I have is to go backwards after the canvus is done until it is empty again. I am still really unsure of this idea...guess Ill see how it all looks...

Then, I want to take the videos and images and compose small appropriate piano riffs taking from 7 songs of FY that most embody my source. The songs are:

a new light
paperclips
emo mcdreamy
stalking the book
daylight savings time
ill never let you in
could it be

Once the songs are in place I am going to write a new poem made from the most source poignant lines in those songs. I will do a spoken word recording to go with the piano.

So that is my new video project conceived today in class.

Oh and I forgot to mention one big thing... the source behind all this has shifted toward the idea of my questioning of love as well as my relationship with art. I will further detail my source with next weeks postings, s well s my final final final proposal!

LASTLY! New timeline!

Due Next Week:

-Absolute final proposal. to blog and printed
-Video shot (thursday)
-images taken (thursday)
-new poem conceived (but never concrete)
-post poem and images to blog
-buy and install final cut (life is too hard without at my fingertips!)
-equipment needed: camera, digital camera, tripod for digital camera, lights

In Class Next Friday:
-Video rendering and beginning of editing (post clip to blog)
-meet with Lana again

To Finish before due:
-put video and images together
-compose music
-record music
-record poem
-put music and poem on video
-post final video
-put together the DVD

5/1
Judgement day has come!

artists to research!

Amanda Palmer

Dennis Oppenheim

Yoko Ono

Dan Graham

Rebecca Horn

Joan Jonas

Laurie Anderson

Bruce Newman

Henry Flynt

La Monte Young

John Latham

Joseph Beuys

Philip Corner

George Maciunas

Nam June Paik

Alison Knowles

Dick Higgins

Giuseppe Chiari

Philip Glass

Steve Reich

Terry Riley

Herman Nitsch

Julia Heyward

Michael Smith

Adrian Piper

Rose English

John Kelly

Spalding Gray

Sankai Juko

Source Statement and Final Proposal

FOUNDATION YEAR (the skeleton)

Throughout the semester, I have been exploring this combined source of being with someone vs. being single, with emphasis on the pros and cons of each. For the final, I have further dug into this source to identify that my interest in this source is one of a questionative nature. Love confuses me. Love scares me. Love is something I think I want, but why? Because I am supposed to? My questioning love and being so unsure is expressed through my work all the time. I have come to see that I constantly bury myself in my work for two reasons. The first is to avoid the undeniable loneliness I constantly feel inside myself. The second is that I use my work as a tool to hide behind, helping me avoiding human emotion and human connection. As much as I want it, it scares me too much to actually go for it.

Now to make this soul searching really connect into my final source project, I have realized that my interest in my original source was because although single, my work is my greatest relationship in my life. My original comparing and contrasting was merely me trying to figure this out. As I mentioned in my source statement, I constantly keep myself busy with my artwork. Besides all the school assignments, my favorite thing to do is write music on the piano. Through this entire year, I have written fifteen new songs all reflecting on my experience with going to art school and my never satisfied quench for love. For my final, I want to really wrap up my work on these songs, which collectively, are titled “Foundation Year”. I plan to use paintings as backgrounds for a new artist book of the poetry that make up FY as well as a fifteen song demo of the instrumental version of FY. To top it al off, I plan to do some sort of in class performance as well, just not sure of which kind I want to do yet. I feel this is the best was to end my freshman year. I am going to SIM next year and hope to someday see these songs staged as a musical punk journey through the insanity of love and art school.

Some more research

Performance art.
Descriptive term applied to ‘live’ presentations by artists. It was first used very loosely by artists in the early 1960s in the USA to refer to the many live events taking place at that time, such as Happenings, Fluxus concerts, Events, body art or (in Germany) Aktionen and Demonstrationen. In 1969 performance was more specifically incorporated into titles of work in the USA and UK and was interchangeable with ‘performance piece’ or simply ‘piece’, as in Vito Acconci’s Performance Test or Following Piece (both 1969), and by many other artists such as Dennis Oppenheim, Yoko Ono (b 1933), Dan Graham, Rebecca Horn, Joan Jonas, Laurie Anderson and Bruce Nauman. It was closely linked to the ideological tenets and philosophy of CONCEPTUAL ART, which insisted on ‘an art of which the material is concepts’ and on ‘an art that could not be bought and sold’; those who made performance pieces did so as a statement against the gallery system and the art establishment.

The term ‘performance’ was originally adopted in the early 1970s to emphasize the fact that the work was made by artists and to distinguish such events from theatre; the early pieces were esoteric and paradoxical and far from entertaining. The frequent use in the following decade of the term ‘live art’ was an attempt to explain its connections with the art world. It had connotations of theatre or entertainment, frankly admitting a new tendency towards vaudeville or cabaret, and avowing the fact that in New York, in particular, performances increasingly took place in East Village cabaret settings or, on a few occasions, on television shows.

1. Origins of performance art.

The history of performance art in the 20th century is one of a permissive, open-ended medium with endless variables, executed by artists impatient with the limitations of more established art forms and determined to take their art directly to the public. Because the crossbreeding of the arts is fundamental to performance, artists draw on many disciplines and media including literature, poetry, theatre, music, dance, architecture or painting, as well as video, film, slides or narrative for their material. Performance art defies precise or easy definition. In its broadest sense it is any form of ‘live art’ in a public setting closely related to the fine-art modes of the time. It has been used by artists as a means of confronting the prevailing art establishment or as a way of bringing to life the many formal and conceptual ideas on which the making of art is based.

Such a radical stance against the conventions of art has made performance a catalyst in the history of 20th-century art; whenever a certain school, be it Cubism, Minimalism or conceptual art, reached an impasse, artists turned to performance as a way of breaking down categories and indicating new directions. Most of what is written about earlier art movements (e.g. Constructivism, Dada or Surrealism) continues to concentrate on the art objects produced, but these movements often found their sources and attempted to resolve problematic issues in performance. Most of the original Zurich Dadaists, for example, were poets, cabaret artistes and performers who, before creating Dada objects, exhibited works from immediately preceding movements such as Expressionism. Similarly, most of the Parisian Dadaists and Surrealists were poets, writers and agitators before they began producing objects and paintings.

Performance manifestos, beginning with Futurism, have been the expression of dissidents who have attempted to find other means to evaluate art experience in everyday life. Performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. Conversely, public interest in the medium, especially from the 1980s, stems from an apparent desire to be a spectator to the distinct community of the art world and to be surprised by the unexpected, unorthodox presentations that the artists devise. The work may be presented solo or with a group, with lighting, music or visuals made either by the performance artist or in collaboration, and performed in venues ranging from the art gallery or museum to ‘alternative spaces’, such as the theatre, café, bar or street. The performer is the artist, seldom a ‘character’ like an actor in the theatre, and the content rarely follows a traditional plot or narrative. The performance might be a series of intimate gestures or large-scale visual theatre, lasting any time from a few minutes to many hours; it might be performed once or repeated, with or without a prepared script, spontaneously improvised or rehearsed over many months.

(i) Renaissance forerunners.

Performances, like tribal dances, medieval Passion plays, Renaissance spectacles or the soirées arranged by artists in the 1920s in their studios in Paris, provide a presence for the artist in society. This presence can be esoteric, shamanistic, instructive, provocative or entertaining, depending on the nature of the performance. Renaissance examples show the artist in the role of creator and director of spectacles, fantastic triumphal parades that often required the construction of elaborate temporary architecture or performances of allegorical spectacles. Leonardo da Vinci was well known for his ‘follies’; Vasari described his demonstration of the flexibility of the intestines of a bullock, inflated by a pair of blacksmith’s bellows to fill an entire room. Leonardo also designed the Festa del paradiso (1490), in which performers dressed as planets revolved on specially built platforms while reciting verses about the return of the Golden Age. A triumphal procession was designed in 1535 by Polidoro da Caravaggio for Emperor Charles V at Messina; in 1589 Bernardo Buontalenti organized elaborate festivities for the marriage of Christine de Lorraine and Ferdinando I de’ Medici in Florence, which included a mock naval battle in the flooded courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti. Gianlorenzo Bernini staged spectacles, for which he wrote scripts, designed scenes and costumes, built architectural elements and achieved daring engineering feats, such as the Inundation of the Tiber (1638), in which realistic flood scenes apparently caused the collapse of near by buildings.

(ii) Futurism.

The history of 20th-century performance art began on 20 February 1909 with the publication of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘Manifeste de fondation du Futurisme’ in Paris in Le Figaro. This was followed by the first ‘Futurist Evening’ in January 1910, at the Teatro Rossetti in Trieste, a combination of political rally, poetry, variety theatre and loud readings or declamations by members of the Futurist group. The manifestos celebrated the machine and war and rejected such things as museums, critics and feminism. A successful evening provoked the audience to the point of rioting. The Futurists performed in theatres and piazzas throughout Italy. Their words were shouted or distributed in pamphlet form and reached a broad and extensive audience, making Futurism the first art movement to be publicized by the new techniques of mass communication.

Some extracts from Marinetti’s manifesto were published in March 1909 in a Russian newspaper. Young Russian poets and painters, such as Velimir Khlebnikov, Nikolay Kulbin, David Burlyuk and Vladimir Mayakovsky, began publishing their Futurist poetry c. 1912, as a break with Russian Symbolism. They were given the name Futurists by the press although they disputed the Italian connection, insisting instead on their essentially Russian heritage and damning ‘Paris and Munich decadence’. (In 1914 Marinetti lectured in Moscow and St Petersburg and emphasized the rift between the Italian and Russian Futurists.) During 1913–14 the Russian Futurists arranged recitals, confrontations and exhibitions and walked the streets in trademark outfits; Mayakovsky wore a yellow blouse, and Burlyuk wore a frock coat with collar trimmed with multicoloured rags, his face painted with a picture of a little dog. They organized a Futurist tour of Russia visiting 17 cities and produced a Futurist theatre festival. This included Alekséy Kruchonykh’s opera Pobeda nad solntsem (‘Victory over the sun’, 1913) with sets and costumes by Kazimir Malevich and Mayakovsky’s tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky (1913), thus setting the scene for two decades of collaboration between artists of many disciplines in the highly charged social and political atmosphere of the time. Committed to making a revolutionary art for large and often illiterate audiences, based on the current political situation, they took as models the circus, music-hall, variety theatre, eurhythmics, Japanese theatre and the puppet-show. Constructivist and Suprematist artists, architects, dramatists, film makers and composers were involved in the creation of revolutionary theatre. Agit-trains and agit-ships travelled across the country, stopping at remote villages and quaysides to perform. The overtly political Blue Blouse group used ‘living newspapers’, theatre, film and dance to relate its message and eventually involved more than 100,000 members who joined clubs all over the country. Momentous events such as the Storming of the Winter Palace (1920) directed by Nikolay Yevreinov and involving 8000 citizens re-created that occasion three years later. The announcement of a policy of Socialist Realism as the official and enforceable cultural code at the Writers Congress in Moscow in 1934 ended this freedom of performance.

(iii) Dada.

In Zurich, where many artists sought a neutral refuge from World War I, performance took the form of ‘literary cabaret’ as conceived by former cabaret artiste Emmy Hennings (1885–1948) and her poet lover Hugo Ball. Inspired by cabaret life in Munich and by Marinetti, particularly his ‘words in liberty’ poetry, they opened Cabaret Voltaire on 5 February 1916 in a small bar on the Spiegelgasse as a ‘centre for artistic entertainment’. Ball invited all artists ‘whatever their orientation’, and on the opening night Marcel Janco and George Janco, his brother, and Tristan Tzara, among others, brought portfolios and pictures, which were immediately hung on the walls. Hennings sang in French and Danish, Tzara read Romanian poetry, and a balalaika orchestra played popular tunes and Russian dance. Cabaret Voltaire was the hub of new poetry, music and dance; according to Ball, they pushed ‘the plasticity of the word to the point where it can scarcely be equalled’. Ball invented sound poems with an ‘African rhythm’, which he recited in costume. Simultaneous poems read by several performers at once were interspersed with lectures, dance and song. Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and other dancers from Rudolph Laban’s school read and performed their own and others’ verse, amid décor painted by the artists. According to Arp, on some nights there was ‘total pandemonium’. After five months, the owner of the bar stopped the cabaret, by which time Ball was ‘ready to close shop’, and Tzara was preparing to turn Dada into a ‘tendency in art’. Dada recitals were given at the Weighhouse (Waag) hall in Zurich (1916), an anthology Collection Dada (Zurich, 1916) was issued, and a Dada gallery opened in January 1917, lasting for 11 weeks, by which time Ball had left Zurich, Huelsenbeck had returned to Berlin and Arp to Cologne, where new and very different Dada groups were emerging. At the end of 1919 Tzara transferred Dada’s base from Zurich to Paris.

Berlin Dada was overtly political and anti-Expressionist. Participants, such as Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, Gerhard Preis, Johannes Baader (1875–1955), Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, called for a ‘large-scale Dadaist propaganda campaign with 150 circuses for the enlightenment of the proletariat’ and the requisition of churches for their performances. They went on a Dada tour of what was then Czechoslovakia and organized the First International Dada Fair (Berlin, 1920). In Cologne, Max Ernst and Johannes Theodor Baargeld were responsible for the Dada exhibition of April 1920, which had to be entered through the pissoir of a beer-hall. Francis Picabia took the Dada message from Zurich to Barcelona and New York, as did Marcel Duchamp who exhibited his Fountain (a urinal) in 1917 at the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in the Grand Central Palace, New York (for illustration see READY-MADE).

Paris Dada was launched by Tzara, who along with the Littérature group (writers Paul Eluard, André Breton, André Salmon, Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau and Paul Fraenkel) arranged the first of the Littérature Friday meetings on 23 January 1920; there masked figures recited a disjointed poem by Breton, Picabia executed large drawings on a blackboard, and Tzara read an obscene newspaper article, calling it a poem, to the accompaniment of bells and rattles. Simultaneous poems were typical fare, sometimes with as many as 40 people chanting manifestos ‘like psalms’. Audiences responded by throwing all sorts of rubbish at the performers, just as Marinetti had encouraged the audiences to do at Futurist performances a decade earlier. The press and public responded enthusiastically. Parade (1917), a ballet with text by Cocteau, music by Erik Satie, costumes by Pablo Picasso and choreography by Léonide Massine, and Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias of the same year had established a precedent for outraging the critics and the public. Dada festivals and concerts became frequent, and scandals were a regular outcome of events such as the Dada excursion to a church and the trial in absentia of an eminent established writer Auguste-Maurice Barrès.

Enmity between Tzara and Breton soon led to the formation of a breakaway group, the Surrealists (1924), led by Breton and comprising most of the Dada group. They published the Manifeste du Surréalisme (Paris, 1924), formed a Bureau of Surrealist Research and published the first issue of the magazine La Révolution surréaliste (1924). Focusing on automatism, simultaneity, chance, the importance of the subconscious and of the dream, their writings gave some indication of the motives behind the seemingly nonsensical Dada performances. Works such as Aragon’s Armoire à glace (Paris, 1923) or Roger Gilbert Lecomte’s Odyssey of Ulysses the Palimped (Paris, 1924) were considered typical Surrealist plays, despite their somewhat realistic acting and direction. It was Picabia and Satie’s ballet Relâche, which opened on 3 December 1924 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, that fused Dada experiment and Surrealist principles. A brief cinematic prologue was followed by a first act consisting of a series of simultaneous events: downstage a figure (Man Ray) paced up and down, occasionally measuring the dimension of the stage floor; a fireman, chain-smoking, poured water endlessly from one bucket into another, and in the background the Ballet Suédois dancers revolved in darkness, an occasional spotlight revealing a tableau vivant of a naked couple representing the Adam and Eve of Lucas Cranach (i). These events were set against an enormous backdrop comprising metal discs, each reflecting a powerful light bulb, that virtually blinded the audience. During the interval Picabia’s film Entr’acte, shot by René Clair, was shown, ending with the cast breaking through the paper screen to begin the second act. Surrealist performance, with its concentration on language, had the greatest effect on theatre, influencing, for example, Antonin Artaud’s Théâtre de la cruauté.

(iv) The Bauhaus.

At the Bauhaus, founded in 1919, a theatre workshop was included in the curriculum from the start. Lothar Schreyer (b 1886), a former member of the group associated with Der Sturm in Berlin, led the workshop in exploring the limits of Expressionist theatre, which resembled religious play acting. Language was reduced to emotionally charged stammering and movement to pantomimic gestures. Sound, colour and light reinforced the melodramatic content of the work. This was in conflict with the Bauhaus’s direction, which was clearly stated by the exhibition Art and Technology—A New Unity, shown during Bauhaus Week (1923). Oskar Schlemmer took over the Bauhaus theatre workshop in time to give a performance on the fourth day of Bauhaus Week, 17 August 1923, entitled the Figural Cabinet 1, which had been performed a year earlier at a Bauhaus party. Many performances began as theme events for the Bauhaus’s notorious parties; some were an exploration in ‘real space’ of Schlemmer’s drawing course ‘Mensch und Kunstfigur’; others explored the idea of the dancer as a puppet or as a mechanical figure (inspired by Heinrich von Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater of 1810). Some performances were presented as lecture demonstrations at Bauhaus exhibitions, and a repertory toured numerous northern European cities in 1929, including the Slat Dance (1927), Gesture Dance (1926), Metal Dance (1929), Dance of Hoops, Chorus of Masks, Dance of Forms, Dance in Space or Game with Building Blocks (1926; first performed Bauhaus, Dessau). Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett of 1922 and 1926 (for illustration see SCHLEMMER, OSKAR) was performed for the last time at the International Dance Congress in Paris in 1932, shortly before Schlemmer left the Bauhaus. Other artists who created works for the Bauhaus theatre workshop included Vasily Kandinsky, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Kurt Schmidt and Toni Hergt (with their marionette play Die Abenteuer des kleinen Buckligen, 1924), Xanti Schawinsky (1904–79) and Andreas Weininger. The Bauhaus theatre workshop emphasized performance as a means to create equivalents in real painting or sculpture, investigating the relationship between sound, movement, space and light. It held a pivotal position as a meeting-place within the school for all the arts.

(v) Black Mountain College and Happenings.

When the Bauhaus was closed in 1933 by the Nazis, many artists who taught there moved to the USA. Josef Albers, who taught at a new experimental school, BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE in North Carolina, from 1933 to 1949, invited his former Bauhaus colleague Xanti Schawinsky to create a stage studies programme there in 1936. Works from the Bauhaus (e.g. Spectodrama: Play, Life, Illusion, 1936) were performed. From 1944 Black Mountain College was known for its summer schools, which attracted significant artists from different disciplines, including R. Buckminster Fuller, John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Cage’s manifesto, The Future of Music: Credo (1937; published New York, 1958), was influenced by the Futurist Luigi Russolo’s D’arte dei rumori (Milan, 1913). He suggested that ‘everyday sounds’, such as static between radio stations, should be considered material for experimental music. Merce Cunningham followed a similar principle with dance in using everyday movements such as walking. Cage and Cunningham collaborated with Black Mountain College artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Olsen (1910–70) and David Tudor on a special ‘untitled event’ in the summer of 1952, which influenced performance art for the next 20 years and was the forerunner to Happenings. Cage taught a composition course at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1956. His students were painters, film makers, musicians and poets such as Al Hansen (b 1927), Dick Higgins (b 1938), Jackson Mac Low (b 1922), George Brecht and Allan Kaprow, all of whom later created Happenings and Fluxus concerts. Allan Kaprow first defined the term as ‘Something to take place; a happening’ (Anthologist, spring 1959). The first public presentation of a Happening was Intermission Piece (June 1959) at the Reuben Gallery on Fourth Avenue in New York. For Kaprow, Happenings were ‘spatial representations of a multileveled attitude to painting’; for Hansen, ‘a form of theater in which one puts parts together in the manner of making a collage’. In spirit they were influenced by photographs and written accounts of Jackson Pollock at work on his action paintings.

The term ‘Happening’ soon came to be used by numerous artists with different meanings. The painter and sculptor Red Grooms (b 1937), citing the circus as his inspiration, created sets that he likened to ‘an acrobat’s apparatus’; Claes Oldenburg stated his interest in ‘objects in motion’ (typewriters, hamburgers, ice-cream cones and people) as the basis for his staged performances in The Store (1961), a small storefront in downtown New York, where he exhibited work and performed. For Jim Dine, Happenings were an extension of ‘acting out everything in everyday life’, and for Robert Whitman (b 1935) they were a means of exploring time ‘in the same way as paint or plaster’. Happenings were also made by Carolee Schneeman (b 1939), who termed them kinetic theatre; in France by Robert Filliou and Ben; and in West Germany by Wolf Vostell.

2. Developments from the 1960s.

From the early 1960s, events taking place around the world had as participants not only visual artists but also composers, musicians, poets and film makers, such as Henry Flynt (b 1940), La Monte Young (b 1935), John Latham, Joseph Beuys, Philip Corner, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas (b 1931), Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles (b 1933) and Dick Higgins. Many came together in a series of ‘newest music’ concerts in New York in March 1961 at the AG Gallery, Madison Avenue. These concerts included a lecture demonstration on concrete music and a festival of electronic music, with works by Maciunas, Mac Low and Higgins, a concert of new sounds and noises, with works by Toshi Tchiyanagi, Mac Low and J. Byrd, and four evenings of film. Soon the term FLUXUS (suggesting art and music in a state of ‘flux’) came to be used to describe this loosely connected and very large international group of artists experimenting on the edges of numerous disciplines. The International Fluxus Festival of the Newest Music, organized by Maciunas and presented at the Wiesbaden Museum in September 1962, established their ideas in a formal art setting. Other major Fluxus artists who arranged and performed at many festivals in the 1960s in the USA, Europe and Japan were Paik, Giuseppe Chiari (b 1926), Beuys, Ben, Schneeman, Knowles, Ono, La Monte Young, Brecht and the Gutai group.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s the art world became a haven for the most provocative and far-reaching experiments in dance, music, film and theatre. Taking Cunningham’s earlier proposals for a more ‘natural’ dance choreography, as well as the pioneering expressionistic dance concerts of Anna Halprin in San Francisco, a new generation of important figures began to emerge. Simone Forti (b 1935), Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer (b 1934), Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk and Laura Dean, among others, performed at the Judson Church in New York, as part of a group called Grand Union or individually and in collaboration with such visual artists as Rauschenberg or Robert Morris (ii). Brown developed her signature repetitions, Forti her movements that were based on closely watched animals, Rainer her special brand of sculptural or minimal dances and Dean her spinning dances, reminiscent of whirling dervishes. Musicians such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley used the art world as the context for their most innovative work.

Highly sophisticated artists such as Yves Klein in Paris and Piero Manzoni in Milan created sensual and charged conceptual art works and performances; Klein’s Anthropometries of the Blue Period (1960) was an unforgettable evening at the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contemporain in Paris, when nude models, their bodies dripping in blue paint, writhed on canvas. Manzoni eliminated the canvas altogether, making ‘living masterpieces’ by signing a person or by presenting them with a document that declared them a work of art. ‘Body art’ could be said to have emerged from these early 1960s presentations. It was based on the notion that the artist’s body was indeed an artist’s prime material. Greatly varied works were created, emphasizing social and political polemics, violence or aggression, presenting the artist as shaman or the idea of the artist’s body as an ‘aesthetic object’. In England, Stuart Brisley from 1966 created disturbing socially critical tableaux centred on his own actions, for example ZL 65 63 95C , performed at Gallery House, London, in 1972. Chris Burden in Los Angeles was often the willing victim of orchestrated acts of violence, such as being shot at with a gun and live ammunition in Venice, CA, in Shooting Piece (1971), as though to reinforce our immunity through frequent exposure to television’s endless killings. English artists Gilbert and George presented themselves as ‘living sculptures’ in tableaux vivants such as Underneath the Arches (1969). Urs Lüthi created a series of performances that investigated sexuality and gender, as did Katarina Sieverding (b 1944). Luigi Ontani dressed himself as different figures from well-known historical paintings. Pair Behaviour Tableaux (1976) by Scott Burton (b 1939) illuminated body language between two men in highly stylized, almost motionless performances, while Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Arnulf Rainer and Otto Muehl in Austria used body art to explore the body language of the mentally disturbed. Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, John Baldessari, Dan Graham and Bruce Nauman were responsible for extraordinary experiments ranging from humour and self-analysis to analysis of the body in space. The exploration of the relationships between artist and spectator that characterized performance art of the 1970s was an essential corollary to conceptual art.

Throughout the 1970s performance art was an essential forum for experiments in sculpture, dance, music, video and film, allowing for the creation of some of the most original cross-overs and multidisciplinary work. It provided the most direct access to artists and their ideas for a public largely baffled by conceptual art’s ‘non-materialistic’ stance. The fact that it could not be bought or sold gave it an added importance within the terms of conceptual art, and it became the ideal vehicle for a generation intent on developing an entirely new aesthetic in art as well as a method of ‘exhibiting’ that was independent of the commercial-gallery system. A plethora of ‘alternative spaces’ (usually artist-run exhibition and performance spaces) characterized the 1970s. Eventually museums, art schools and establishment institutions were obliged to respond to the energy and excitement emanating from the alternative spaces, and by the mid-1970s performance events were being organized at the Venice Biennale, at the Hayward Gallery in London and at MOMA in New York.

From the beginning of the 1970s performance took on many forms and styles. ‘Body art’ and Aktionen described actions, usually by individual artists, that were demonstrations of formal ideas of space as well as more lyrical explorations of cultural metaphors; the term Aktionen was usually preferred by German artists who disliked the implication of performance as entertainment in the English language. Joseph Beuys’s Aktionen described mythological and metaphorical states of German culture in the 1970s; Klaus Rinke, with Monika Baumgartl, illustrated formal ideas of sculpture and space. In Italy, Jannis Kounellis elaborated on imagery culled from art history, and in Paris and Turin, Gina Pane inflicted wounds on herself in a series of masochistic works in which she physically identified with the suffering experienced in society at large. In Vienna, Hermann Nitsch staged ritualistic slaughtering of animals in bloody pageants that recalled Dionysian excess in Greek tragedy. Marina Abramovičj (b 1946) created marathon endurance works investigating psychic states. Autobiography emerged as a general reference in the early 1970s and indicated a new direction with its confessional story-telling, which for the first time made performance far more accessible and entertaining. Laurie Anderson, Julia Heyward (b 1949), Michael Smith (b 1942), Stuart Sherman, Adrian Piper (b 1948), Mitchell Kriegman, Bruce McLean and many others made work that attracted attention outside the art world. Other artists used the solo performance for cultural commentary and as an appropriate platform for such issues as feminism. In this area Rebecca Horn, Hannah Wilkie (b 1941), Ulrike Rosenbach (b 1943), Susan Hiller, Rose English, Arleen P. Schloss (b 1943), Suzanne Lacy (b 1945), Martha Storey Wilson (b 1947), Jacki Apple and Eleanor Antin created powerful and seminal works. Costume performance emerged as a popular theme by the late 1970s with Mr Peanut and General Idea in Toronto and Pat Oleszko with works such as Coat of Arms (1976) in New York.

By the late 1970s, with the emergence of punk music and the coming of age of the first fully fledged ‘media generation’, artists looked to the media for their inspiration. Robert Longo’s first performances of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Empire (1981), combined actual film footage with heroic imagery and scenes that could have been the setting for a Hollywood spectacle. Laurie Anderson’s song O Superman enjoyed popular success in Britain in 1981, leading to a record contract, concerts to overflowing audiences and a film and television show by means of which she became a media star. The emergence of performance ‘cabaret’ took place in the mid-1980s, particularly influenced by Eric Bogosian (b 1953) with his searing monologues such as Men in the Cities (1982), which consisted of Bogosian, without props or scenery, performing a series of male portraits that described a particular mood of American life in the 1980s. In New York, East Village clubs were the venues for hundreds of performance cabaret artists including John Kelly, the Alien Comic, Karen Finley, Ethyl Eichelberger and John Jesurun, many of whom would move on to make media-related performances, and a few of whom, such as Ann Magnuson, would actually make the cross-over into film, television and theatre.

The 1980s generally were characterized by media-orientated work, which often which often appeared more theatrical and fitted more easily on a proscenium stage than the work of the previous decade. Such artists as Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray (b 1941) came to theatre on their own terms. They wrote, acted and often directed their own work—stages were bare, narratives infrequent—and they still referred to art world concerns rather than those of theatre. The autobiographical monologues by Spalding Gray, from the Performing Garage, typified the ambiguity of definition at this time between theatre and performance art. The wide variety of scale and format of performance allowed for the inclusion of new and vastly different work, such as Butoh, which since the 1960s had been a highly charged and disturbing form of theatrical dance in Japan. Troupes such as Sankai Juko toured Europe and the USA with their Zen-influenced, stylized work, as did German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, who created mesmerizing large-scale visual dramas, combining dance, text, sound and extraordinary architecture to tell her eerie tales. In the early 1970s Robert Wilson had created an astonishing ‘Theater of Images’ with works such as Einstein on the Beach (first performed in July 1976 at the Festival d’Avignon), in which he collaborated with many of the most important performance artists from New York, including Philip Glass, Lucinda Childs and others; in the 1980s he continued to make works that played on the edges of many disciplines. The Ontological Hysteric Theatre of Richard Foreman (b 1937), with its focus on language that was as concrete as the changing visual collage of his highly controlled performances, became increasingly popular in the 1980s with the tendency towards more theatrical work. In England ‘living painting’ emerged as a reaction to this theatrical and media-orientated performance; Miranda Payne, Stephen Taylor Woodrow and Raymond O’Daly each created work that shared an emphasis on the ‘art’ context of performance, with works comprised of live figures actually suspended on a wall as living painting.

The apparent co-option of performance by the popular media in the 1980s led many to question whether performance could retain its anarchic ways and still function as a catalyst shaping new ideas in fine arts. A first history of the medium appeared in 1979 and performance reached a peak of acceptance with major annual festivals, specialist magazines and art-school curricula that charted its course. In 1986 a Hollywood film even featured a ‘performance artist’ and her Hollywood-style performances (lighting small fires in a large loft while moaning and writhing) as the underlying theme of an art-world thriller. For the first time there was a generation of artists who worked exclusively in performance, whereas before this an artist was more likely to use performance as an experimental stepping-stone to mature work in painting or sculpture. Many performance artists were building up a body of work over 25 years or more and making new productions that showed the evolution of their thinking over that period. It also became possible for performance artists to show retrospectives for serious art-historical review, and, correspondingly, new work could now be considered in terms of performance history. Despite the acceptance of the form as a valid genre with its own history, practitioners and critics, performance remains an open-ended medium, without rules and guidelines. The extraordinary range of material encompassed continues to defy easy definition and performance continues to be an important means to break through the limits or conventions imposed on art activity. In addition, the lively invention of performance of the 1970s and 1980s greatly influenced new movements in theatre, dance and opera of the 1990s.

Bibliography

H. Carter: The New Spirit in the Russian Theatre, 1917–1928 (London, 1929)

W. Gropius, ed.: The Theater of the Bauhaus (Middletown, CT, 1960)

C. Tomkins: The Bride and the Bachelors (London, 1965)

M. Kirby: Happenings (New York, 1966)

G. Brecht and R. Filliou: Games at the Cedilla (New York, 1967)

M. Kirby: The Art of Time (New York, 1968)

R. Kostelanetz: The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York, 1968)

M. Kirby: Futurist Performance (New York, 1971)

Avalanche Mag., 1–6 (1972–4)

H. Ball: Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (New York, 1974)

J. E. Bowlt: Russian Art, 1875–1975 (Austin, 1976)

J. E. Bowlt: Russian Art of the Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934 (New York, 1976)

V. Acconci: Headlines and Image (exh. cat., Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus., 1978)

A. A. Bronson and P. Gale, eds: Performance by Artists (Toronto, 1979)

R. Goldberg: Performance; Live Art, 1909 to the Present (London, 1979)

G. Battock and R. Nicklas, eds: The Art of Performance (New York, 1984)

For further bibliography see BAUHAUS, DADA, FLUXUS, FUTURISM.

Researching

AUTHOR:
Nicola Trezzi
TITLE:
PERFORMING ROLES: CATHERINE WOOD
SOURCE:
Flash Art (International Edition) 41 42 N/D 2008
COPYRIGHT:
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.
    Catherine Wood is curator of contemporary art/performance at Tate. Flash Art spoke to her about the current state of performance and its relationship to various projects in the museum.
    Nicola Trezzi: Let's talk about the resurrection of performance. Why has the interest in this practice been increasing over the past 5 to 6years?
    Catherine Wood: I think in the '90s artists such as Matthew Barney and Vanessa Beecroft renewed this interest by including the performing body and mass choreographies as new kinds of picture-making. Around the beginning of the 2000s there was a lot of interest in performance in London, like Mark Leckey and Ed Laliq's donAtella music performance in Brixton and Spartacus Chetwynd's low-fi remakes of films such as The Wicker Man or her group performance of Thriller that erupted in the midst of Seb Patane's Nerd club night in Hoxton.
    NT: Your title is "curator of contemporary art/performance at Tak," could you explain your role? CW In 2001, my job grew out of a one-year sponsorship for a live program across both London Tates. The sponsor was keen on high profile events with well known musicians, but I was also interested to give a platform to the exciting new work that was happening in artist-run or temporary spaces. I programmed work by David Thorpe, hobby-popmuseum and others. It was incredible witnessing Leckey's Big Box Statue Action in the classical Octagon gallery at Tate Britain or Amorales's wrestling match that transformed the Turbine Hall into an arena with 2000 people. Then I have established a regular live program at Tate and research certain acquisitions for the collection. We have kept 'performance' in the title because it helps to know who's the main point of contact for a particular historic specialism. I have always fought for work by visual artists who also make performance work, rather than championing 'the performing arts.'
    NT: Could "The World as a Stage" (co-curated with Jessica Morgan) be considered an advanced version of 'Relational Aesthetics' with a little bit of Big Brother, Wagner's total theater, all mixed with the ever more enlarged participation of visitors in art events, like fairs, biennials etc.?
    CW: That puts it pretty well! All of those things were touched upon in our discussions. We were interested in bringing together artists who approached ideas of 'theatricality' or performance but not too literally. As far as situating the work in the show vis à vis 'relational aesthetics,' we were interested in a more formal, pictorial notion of 'theatre' than the open-endedness that those works implied.
    NT: Who are the first five artists who come to your mind when you think about performance? CW: Yvonne Rainer, Joan Jonas, Otto Muehl, Guy de Cointet, Jeff Koons.
    NT: What do you think about Kippenberger as a performer? The artist anticipated the recent collapse of the barrier between art and entertainment. Is there any connection with today's state of performance?
    CW: Kippenberger is of course a perfect example of the artist who engages a 'performative' attitude in the whole of his practice, playing the role of the artist as a star. He looked at his artistic predecessors such as Picasso and Beuys and at their cultivation of 'genius' personae and saw that our time could no longer believe in that myth in the same way, so he staged a brilliant game with the media playing on those notions, understanding that the artist was as much the work as any objects he produced. I'm collaborating on a Tate exhibition that deals expressly with this theme, drawing on the legacy of Andy Warhol's business art activities, with Jack Bankowsky and Alison Gingeras.
    NT: Speaking of Koons and Kippenberger, do you consider these two artists in the legacy of Warhol and Beuys's double-edged western attitude towards participation and mass culture?
    CW: Koons has taken his inhabitation of a persona to such an extreme that it is almost impossible to unpick any idea of authenticity from the image of himself. Beuys engaged in a similar fascination with mass multiples and populism, perhaps the materials he used put him outside of the 'pop' camp and thus outside of the idea that his persona was artificial and constructed. Kippenberger explicitly played on his own awareness of this, so they're different, but I think Beuys is an important artist to bring into this discussion.
    NT: What issues must a museum take into consideration as it engages in the preservation of performance-based works?
    CW: Our acquisition of Tino Sehgal's This is Propaganda (2002) was an intriguing process (although he expressly terms his works 'situations' rather than performances). Sehgal does not allow for any written documentation, transcription or photography of his work, and so the entire event was conducted as a verbal contract, recited and witnessed by our director and head of acquisitons, his gallerist, our respective lawyers. Jessica Morgan and I are now official 'keepers' of the instructions of this piece within the institution. If we leave Tate, the idea is that we would teach it to our successors.
    NT: What are your upcoming projects?
    CW: In November we present a new work by Sturtevant, as well as showing previously unseen performances. The new wing of the museum called Tate Modern phase Two will also open up new possibilities for live or cross-disciplinary work when this opens in 2012.
ADDED MATERIAL
Tate Modern redevelopment. Tate Modern south-em oil tank. Courtesy Tate Media, London.







Next to Performance
AUTHOR:
Marie de Brugcrolle
TITLE:
NEXT TO PERFORMANCE
SOURCE:
Flash Art (International Edition) 40 88-90 N/D 2007
COPYRIGHT:
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.
    IN A RECENT CONVERSATION, the French dancer and choreographer Jérôme Bel articulated a distinction between the 'fine am artist,' or 'visual artist,' and the dancer or actor dramaturgy, that is, time-based work. What trace of dance still remains in the museum? The spectator's body penetrated by the choreographer, Jérôme Bel's headphones or the insistent regard of Tino Sehgal's stripteasers.
    Here I would like to discuss what develops, now at the beginning of the 21 st century, after the action, from performance props, from today's objects, and how they are to be considered.
    What should be done with what's left over? What is the status of objects after a happening, event action or performance? Do they take on a new status, and if so, what? How should one present these objects? Like separate, consummate works? Like documents, fetishes, leftovers. indices? With these questions in mind I'll address the work of ten artists who are establishing a new set of stakes.
THE ARTIST'S BODY
    For Mike Kelley, artistic experience is created through an interaction with an object or a film. This process, both of identification and detachment, approaches the disquieting eeriness developed in his catalogue essay "Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny" (1993), which accompanied his exhibition "The Uncanny."(FN1) He notes the powerful role played by certain objects -- notably mannequins and fetish dolls, their scale changes in particular -- in the shift from the real to the symbolic. "I didn't keep any of the residue, or document those works... Without me, it was no longer a sculpture," he said.
    One should note that it is the artist's body that transforms the ensemble of actions and objects into sculpture.
    A work lasts only so long as the artist, objects and spectators share a space. The same is true a priori for a detachment from representation in the theatrical illusion of a common present. And yet Vito Acconci's gesture in 1973, at Galleria Schema in Florence, Italy, when he violently pushed a young woman in the audience, demonstrated that the boundary, however tacit, between the stage and the public still persists (Ballroom). Al this point, wouldn't the real stakes of performance today be in objects rather than in a pseudo-interaction with the public?
    The artist's body is a sculptural vector for Mike Kelley, as well as for Bas Jan Ader and Wolfgang Stoerchle, two European artists who were working in Los Angeles in the '60s and '70s.
    These artists all use language, sound and movement like materials for stage scenery.
    Bas Jan Ader's work reveals an aesthetic in which the disappearance of the body transforms objects into remnants. "He shared a common territory with Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, who likewise used performance to 'write' verbal formulae with their bodies. By 1973, he had moved on to combine performance and inscription in more indirect ways. In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles), completed in 1973, documents a dusk-to-dawn journey, undertaken by the artist on foot, from an inland valley in Southern California to the sea."(FN2) Adopting California clichés as European imagery -- urban drift, peregrinations, sunset -- Bas Jan Ader subtitled his piece with excerpts from pop songs. In another piece, he arranged all his clothes on the roof of a house (All My Clothes, 1970), like the sloughed off skins of an absent body. Fatalistic premonition? In any case, his last piece, the now mythic In Search of The Miraculous (1975), would have been the final chapter of a three-part work, before finishing with an exhibition at the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands. Bas Jan Ader decided to cross the Atlantic alone in a sailboat and disappeared definitively.
    In 2006, Julien Bismuth (Paris, 1973) and Jean-Pascal Flavien (Le Mans, France, 1971) created Plouf! off the coast of Brazil. The two artists board a sailboat and simulate a shipwreck. As the boat goes under, they wave colored flags as distress signals. The text in itself is a series of fragmented stories, interrupted or scrambled by others (as often happens to messages at sea), interspersed with phrases pulled from nautical manuals ("I am drifting... The way is of my ship...").
    At the end of the performance, only three things remain: the images, the flags and the text. The text and the flags depend upon each other in order to make sense. The flags clarify certain parts of the text, just as the text explains the presence of the flags.
    Semaphore becomes colorful sequences or animated tableaux. The quotation and the détournement proceed from the displacement, or the translation, of one dimension into another. The same goes for a return to the symbolic through the prop, with a light-hearted awareness of the history of performance. Detachment sidesteps any simplistic fetishizing in the work of Catherine Sullivan, such as in her 2004 reprisal of the 1964 Fluxus Festival in Aix-ia-Chapelle (Aachen, Germany) in Tis a Pity She's a Fluxus Whore (2002), premiered at the 7th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2003, or in 2004. when she x-rayed the Fluxus collection of the Musée d'An Contemporain de Lyon.
    These two examples show how emphatically these questions of re-interpretation -- and thus of the transfer of isolated, heroic gestures into a repertory, like in theater -- are posed.
THE YOUNG SCENE: MATERIALS AND SETTINGS
    For the youngest artists, who never attended the events themselves, the history of performance is transmitted through photographs and books. This raises the question of the authority to commit shameless reprises and to produce new interpretations. How can a work such as this be transmitted? In the case of Guy de Cointet (1934-1983), the artist left a repertory of twenty works. In his oeuvre, the status of objects is determined: they are sculptures before and after the performance. They become accessories, texts or characters during the action, but may be exhibited independently afterward. In his theatrical performances, language is hypostatized in color-coded objects, the same as in his drawings, where the network of lines reveals a narrative. Drawing inspiration from "soap operas" and their rhythmic interruptions of commercials and ready-made images, he directly incorporates snippets of overheard conversations and excerpts from life in his dialogues. These "props," as well as his drawings, compose a narrative only revealed in fragments,
    In Tell Me (1979), A New Life (1981) and The Bride Groom (1983), the manipulation of objects activates the text. The cryptic text continues to work in the spectator's mind after the action has concluded -- quite similar to the first performances of Mike Kelley who, like
    Paul McCarthy, was influenced by Cointet. Persectaphone (1978), for example, uses sculptures to support a discourse that, though intended to explain the objects, make less and less sense and disintegrates little by little.
    In his recent performance Leipzig Calendar Works (2005-07), Tris Vonna-Michell (Rochford, UK, 1982) applies a principal of deconstruction of meaning using pre-existing narratives: books heaped in piles on the floor. The protocol entails a time limit, chosen by the spectator. In several minutes of a reading so rapid that that time limit leaves both story and public in suspense. Tris Vonna-Michell applies the formula of "reader's digest" to performance. The work also channels the acceleration of time provoked by today's information overload.
    What is the duration of a work? What constitutes an event today? To ask the spectator to choose a time limit is to implicate him historically. For Narrative (Fold/Unfold) (2007), Julien Bismuth prints the performance scrip! on a rather large piece of paper, the size of a page from the New York Tirnes. Half of the sheet is printed. An actor recites the text while folding and unfolding the sheet according to the stage directions. The folds reflect, in a more or less abstract manner, the developments of history, in which events open (unfold) and close (fold) the narrative or allegorical surfaces or pockets. The artist thus passes from the rapid temporality of the episodic news brief, to the narration of a story.
REPLAYING THE REAL
    Certain artists "replay the real" or take distance from history by introducing a breach in today's continuous stream of images and information. What produces "drama" in the etymological and theatrical sense of action? And how does one act, how can one appropriate the past? This is one of the stakes in the work of Vasco Araújo (Lisbon, 1975) who interrogates recent history through a confrontation with myth, opera epics and everyday anecdotes. Transitioning from the singular to the heroic, he investigates a sometimes painful past, like Portugal's neutrality during WWII (Hypolito, 2003), or the community's responsibility for the individual (About Being Different, 2007). Midway through the '60s. Bruce Nauman came to the conclusion that anything an artist did in his studio was art. Since then, the city itself has become the stage on which Kirsten Mosher (La Jolla. CA 1963) inverts the systems of signs. Since the mid '90s. the artist unceasingly shuttled between the original and the model, using motorized puppets (Action Men) and toy cars, and installing her miniature stage sets in the enter of New York, In 1994, she began the series "Carmen" -- short videos composed of small mannequins carrying cars on their shoulders. In her latest, she directs herself carrying a car, now a costume, as she moves through the streets of Beacon, New York, encased in this 'Trojan horse,'
THE ATER AND PERFORMANCE
    If for Pan! McCarthy the mask (persona) of Greek theater was re placed by the camera, one can witness here a return to deliberate theatricality. That is the case for Ulla von Brandenburg (Karlsruhe, Germany, 1974) in the Super 8 film Reiter (Rider), where she films people maintaining frozen poses. Similar to erotic 18th-century tableaux vivants or to certain Pierre Klossowskt drawings, the shots are nonetheless filmed, that is, they occur in time. A standing individual appears to read a script, the raised cloth behind him evoking a curtain. The artist creates doubt as to the quality of what we're watching, between the dubious amateurishness of a sadomasochistic play and the construction of a stage set. What is more, her tableaux vivants could be said to effect a reversal of what is generally expected from a performance, since she immobilizes and turns the actors into quasi objects themselves.
    The distinctive codes between theater, performance, and sculptural installation seem hazier now, as if the categorical border crossings between disciplines since the '50s had finally been digested. Yet the processes animated by the cited artists develop through an awareness of the props left behind, and a will to reactivate the chora, antiquity's choir, in the civic space of the agora.
ADDED MATERIAL
    (Translated from French by Joanna Fiduccia)
    Marie de Brugerolle is an art critic and curator based in Lyon. France.
ULLA VON BRANDENBURG, Reiter (Rider), 2004, Film super 8, B&W, projection, 2 mins. Courtesy Art: Concept, Paris; CATHERINE SULLIVAN, The Resuscitation of Uplifting (Chittenden Lobby: Triangle Aria), 2005. Still fom 3 mm film. Courtesy Gió Marconi, Milan. Opposite: GUY DE COINTET, Tell Me, 1979. Performance. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Courtesy Guy de Cointet Estate/Air dd Paris, Paris.
TRIS VONNA-MICHELL, Leipzig Calendar Works, 2005-07, Performance al the HFBK Gallery in Hamburg, October 2006. Courtesy the artist; KIRSTEN MOSHER, Carmen Parking (series), 2007. Performance. Courtesy the artist; VASCO ARALÚJO, Le ballet de la nuit, 2001. Wood and glass cabinet, plasticine figures, 105 × 105 × 140 cm. Courtesy the artist.
JULIEN BISMUTH AND JEAN-PASCAL FLAVIEN, Plouf!, 2006. Performance in Rio de Janeiro, July 26th. 2006. Courtesy the artists.
FOOTNOTES
1. Mike Kelley, "Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny," originally published in The Uncanny. Arnhem, The Netherlands., and "New Introduction," in The Uncanny inhibition catalogue, Tute Liverpool and MUMoK. Vienna. 2004. "The Uneanny" originated as part of an international exhibition of figurative sculpture for Sonsbeek 93, in Arnhem. Holland
2. Thomas Crow, And Gravity, exhibition catalogue, CNAC Magasin, Grenoble, 1996.

Final Book Pages

Here are the 18 pages I am going to scan in order to create the first part of my final---the poetry book.



this is the cover




this will be the table of contents




for the poem A NEW LIGHT




for the poem FOUR YEARS




for the poem OH I'VE




for the poem EMO MCDREAMY




for the poem HANGING IN THE LIVING ROOM




for the poem CHRIST DIED FOR OUR SINS




for the poem PAPERCLIPS




for the poem CON ARTIST GYPSY




for the poem STALKING THE BOOK




for the poem WORD




for the poem DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME





for the poem PILED HIGH (I'LL NEVER LET YOU IN)




for the poem SUMMER (2003)




for the poem TELL ME THAT I SUCK




for the poem COULD IT BE




for the last page




On friday in class I will scan all of these images and then during the next week I will photoshop each page to include the poems. That will be ready to printed by the 25th. For the 25th ill have a recording of the 5 minute overture piece I am going to create to accompany the poetry book so I can edit it in class on the 25th. Then over the course of the final week I will finalize the music, ensure the poetry book is finished, and rehearse the poetry I would like to read in class on the last day of class on the first. Thats my timeline.

I am planning to do a powerpoint presentation slideshow of my book (as well as the physical copy) that will be timed to the recording which will go along with the live poetry reading.

Now I'm cooking!