Contemporary Performance Art
Contemporary performance art pushes the boundaries of what art can be by interweaving the artist’s own body and other media into a performance piece. Performance artists realized that art was supposed to invoke an experience for the audience and that could not be done through the structured fine arts techniques that they were used to; they needed to push further to eliminate the space between the artist and the spectator. Performance artists use all means to make their audience feel a certain way, whether that be feelings of happiness, love, depression, pain, friendship, discomfort, etc. Performance artists also include their audiences by making them question a certain idea or belief that is portrayed during the performance. “They questioned the accepted premises of art and attempted to re-define (sic) its meaning and function”(Goldberg 152). Performance art usually asks the audience to think about a grander idea and question themselves about these deep topics. The parameters of what is considered performance art is vast with many different styles and ideologies present. The most engaging thing about performance art is that it is so openly abstract that even, “…the proof of one’s own existence, and the entire sphere of everything “private” are used as repertory material”(Vergine 15). Contemporary performance art as a whole is a broad topic, but highlighting the origins as well as some pivotal artists should articulate the key components of what contemporary performance art truly is.
The birthplace of the essential ideas of performance art was at Black Mountain College, located in a small mountain town in North Carolina. The size of the college itself and the number of students was terribly limited, but what was not limited was the faculty’s ability to push their students through experimental ways of study. Black Mountain College was, “Founded in 1933 by scholar John A. Rice…” and the college was not like other schools in that, “…the school was a reaction to the more traditional schools of the time” (The Artist of Black Mountain College). Most movements in art occurred because of what was happening in that historical time period and performance art is no exception. Artists want to portray the world around them and how it makes them feel, so most art reflects what is happening in the world during a specific time period. The emergence of performance art was a response, “…to the existential threat posed by the Holocaust and the atomic age…” (Stiles and Selz 798). This connection between performance art and the Holocaust is apparent in Black Mountain college because of Josef Albers and others like him, who were over the art program at the college. He fled from Nazi Germany with many other artists after Nazis shut down the German art school called Bauhaus (Kino). The experimental avant-garde styles of Black Mountain College became very popular and spread like wildfire. As these ideas spread throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan, various terms were being coined, “… to describe their performance works, including happenings, Fluxus, actions, rituals, demonstrations, destructions, and events… among others” (Stiles and Selz 798). In the end, all of these specific terms are combined in order to fit into and represent the singular movement of performance art. Black Mountain College is also “…the site of what some regard as the first happening, mounted in 1952 by the composer John Cage,” who worked there for a time (Kino). While no one knows exactly what took place during the first happening, we do know that John Cage helped organize this performance along with other artists, which influenced performance art and the art world as a whole. The first happening and other works that were spreading throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan opened the door for other artists, such as Marina Abramovic and Ulay, to question themselves about what art could be and the meaning behind art.
Marina Abramovic and Ulay were both performance artists who started doing performance art in the 1970s. Marina and Ulay’s devoted friendship and passionate love for each other created the circumstances for powerful collaborative works that explored the aspects of their relationship. They were both artists before they met and started collaborating. One of Abramovic’s most significant pieces, before they met, was a performance called Rhythm O. During this performance, she stood in front of the audience completely passive, the audience could do anything to her, she never gave in and exerted her own will. “Abramovic’s work relentlessly and systematically tested the limits of the body” (Warr).
By the end of the performance which lasted about six hours, her clothes had been cut off from her body with razor blades, someone sucked blood from a cut on her neck, and several different sexual assaults were performed on her body. The performance eventually came to an end because a gun was thrust into her mouth which caused a fight to break out within the audience. In the above image, her eyes are filled with tears, but her will to keep going was unwavering. The purpose of the piece was “…the expression of a life-or-death commitment to a process out of one’s own control, the substitution of the artist’s person for his or her work…” (McEvilley 39). Around the time of Marina’s Rhythm O, Ulay was also exploring the controversial side of performance art. One of Ulay’s controversial performance pieces was him challenging his own heritage as a German in a post-war society. He did so by stealing Adolf Hitler’s favorite painting, Spitzweg’s Der Arme Poet, and running down the streets of Berlin while holding the painting. Neither Marina Abramovic or Ulay were afraid of the controversy their artwork brought and together they would explore what art is further, pushing the boundaries as they went. McEvilley speaking about Marina and Ulay, “They were fugitives or desperadoes when they met, and each responded with passionate recognition to the desperation in the other”(69). Some of Marina and Ulay’s collaborative work include: Rest-Energy, which involved Marina holding a bow and Ulay holding an arrow pointed at her heart, and Relation in Time, which involved the two artists sitting back to back with their hair braided together for 16 hours straight.
Their collaborative work explored love and friendship and this can clearly be seen in Rest-Energy. The viewer can see how much trust Marina puts into Ulay’s hands during this performance piece. It also explores the, “…intensity of the male-female relationship…” (McEvilley 42). I believe that Relation in Time truly shows how Marina and Ulay’s lives were woven into one another, almost as if you could not have one without the other. “Each one of them rediscovered himself in the other and took refuge in the other’s containment” (McEvilley 69). Marina Abramovic and Ulay made performance art their own and continued to push boundaries in art throughout their careers, especially when they parted ways on the Great Wall of China in their last collaborative performance piece.
Some artists took performance art a step further, exploring the radical limits a body can withstand pain for the purpose of art or exploring the act of making their audiences feel discomfort through their performance pieces. Chris Burden was intrigued by the reality of pain and how his audience might find discomfort in his own pain. Burden’s most famous works were actually only viewed by a few people and became popular afterwards. He is famous for his more violent works such as Shoot and Through the Night Softly. In Shoot, Burden asks someone to shoot him from fifteen feet away with a .22 rifle. If this performance was to go as planned, the bullet would have only nicked his arm, but to his surprise and the distress of his audience the bullet went straight through his arm.
In Through the Night Softly, Burden crawls through a LA street riddled with broken glass, while wearing only underwear with his hands behind his back. The broken glass easily rips through his skin. I can imagine people passing by cringing at the bloody site. Chris Burden was not trying to kill himself, but he was trying to pose a question to his audience. Burden said, “Art doesn’t have a purpose… I don’t think my pieces provide answers, they just ask questions…”(Stiles and Selz 899).
Another artist that aimed to make his audience feel discomfort was Vito Acconci. Unlike Burden, Acconci did not rely only on making his viewers uncomfortable with his own pain, but used odd fantasies to make the viewer feel intense discomfort at times. Acconci is a body artist that is known to follow people, burn his body hair off, bite himself until he draws blood, use videography to record himself explaining odd fantasies in detail, and masturbation in some of his performance pieces. In Vito Acconci’s Undertone, Acconci sits at a table with his hands below the table on his knees. You can see him rubbing his own legs up and down while he describes a fantasy of a woman under the table rubbing his legs. He uses repetitive lines as the fantasy gets more and more intense. Some viewers often start to feel a tingling sensation in their own legs as if they were able to feel his fantasy too.
Vito Acconci wanted his performance art to escape the limits of a gallery and explore the outside world, one way of doing so was his work titled Following Piece. During this work Acconci followed random passerbyers on the streets of New York City. He would follow them until they went inside a private area which he could not enter. Sometimes his pursuits were only 2-3 minutes, other times he could be following them for hours.
Contemporary performance art has a vast amount of artists with a vast amount of ideas being covered in their work from making the audience feel trust to making the audience feel immensely uncomfortable and everything in between, it is all up to the artist. Each performance artist that has been discussed, while their works are dramatically different, have the same goal of including their audience in an experience that makes them question themselves or an idea. Each artist felt that the traditional fine art means of producing artwork was not enough and had to push through the boundaries of controversy in order to produce their works.
Works Cited
Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Art: from Futurism to the Present. Revised and Expanded ed., Thames & Hudson, 2001.
Kino, Carol. “In the Spirit of Black Mountain College, an Avant-Garde Incubator.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 16 Mar. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/arts/artsspecial/in-the-spirit-of-black-mountain-college-an-avant-garde-incubator.html.
McEvilley. Art, Love, Friendship: Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Together & Apart. McPherson & Company, 2010.
Stiles, Kristine, and Peter Selz. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: a Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. Univ. of California Press, 2012.
“The Artists of Black Mountain College.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 16 Oct. 2015, www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/artists-black-mountain-college/5719/.
Vergine, Lea. Body Art and Performance: the Body as Language. Skira, 2000.
Warr, Tracey. “To rupture is to find: Tracey Warr takes us through the history of Marina Abramovic.” Women’s Art Magazine, May-June 1995, p. 11+. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A262690875/AONE?u=tel_a_clscc&sid=AONE&xid=9618c91a. Accessed 28 Sept. 2018.