Category: Live
Marina Abramović
(Via Duncan.)
Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art”. Abramović’s work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.
Jason Maling (redux)
(Previously.)
His recent projects, Triangulation (in collaboration with Torie Nimervoll) and The Vorticist warrant an entry of their own.
Age article about The Vorticist.
Blog entries of mine about Triangulation, as mounted at the Abbotsford Convent in February 2010 and Melbourne Central shopping centre in August 2010.
Year of the Rope by Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh
(Via Twyllan Mynodal.)
Intro to interview here (word doc):
No two artists are more central to a discussion of the Life/Art Experiment than Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh. For years, on opposite coasts, they had each cordoned off whole sections of their daily lives and called them art. When we heard that they were working together on a one-year piece, it seemed like a natural. When we heard they had vowed to spend a whole year in New York City tied to each other with a piece of rope, it seemed perfect—yet hardly possible. Alex and Allyson Grey were artists married to each other, and just as obsessively concerned with coupling at the intersection of art and life. In June 1984, while the Hsieh/Montano piece was still in progress, High Performance asked the four artists to meet for a conversation about it.
Once
Presented as part of of Punctum‘s In-Habit, a slate of live art projects mounted at the Abbotsford Convent in February (which also included Jason Maling & Torie Nimmervoll’s Triangulation):
We encounter strangers every day through chance. What happens when two strangers respond to an invitation and choose to meet? You are invited to encounter a stranger for 10 minutes, in silence, and then respond to that encounter. Record your impressions via written word, or voice recording.
From RealTime Arts:
There is a strange, aberrant tension in the convent’s Bishop’s Parlour. The age and restraint of the space and its imagined histories (vows of silence, ‘audiences’ with the Bishop) creep into the experience. I am seated by an usher at a small table with a lamp in the centre of the room. Left alone for a long moment, the tension is interrupted by the entrance of another. A woman sits and establishes direct eye contact. The lamp is flicked on by the usher. The shadows in the room retreat and harden. Silence.
Fast mind. Rapid passage of thoughts and images. Discomfort manifests in smiles and corsetted laughs. We look at each other and away to the edges of the spongy darkness. Our gaze returns to the stranger opposite—often, more often. Time slows. Somehow we begin a conversation in writing. Are we breaking the rules? What is forbidden? What is allowed? We relax into a playful meditation on the nature and quality of silence. An usher enters…the stranger is gone.
Subsequently, sharing experience with the usher is also charged—it too has its intimacies. Like the first stranger, the usher becomes the human face of an unknowable structure that refuses revelation—of intent, meaning and significance. Here, the work of the piece continues and takes the form of a kind of ‘confession’ of experience and of unusually open avowal.
The silence, the site and the two meetings form and frame the ‘work’ of the piece and its artifice, the pretext of its enquiry. Beyond this, the piece works ‘in’ the participants. Each stranger becomes the site at which a kind of alchemical fusion of projection and introspection lifts itself into consciousness. The work functions as a hiatus, a pause by means of which to see and experience another, to feel habitual avoidance, looking and being looked at, to sense movement towards and away from each other and all of the electricity, e-motion, ethics and responsibility of that…just once.
YES.
Reactor
(Via RH‘s PhD thesis.)
From website:
Based in the UK, Reactor is a group of contemporary artists whose collective practice is focused on creating projects in which audiences become active participants. By developing situations that leave no room for the passive observer Reactor create work in which, rather than being forced, active engagement becomes the norm. Group dynamics and social interaction come to the fore, as participants immerse themselves in an unknown that invites risk-taking and a heightened sense of reality. The multilayered and social nature of the experience encourages diverse interpretations of the meaning of the work and emphasises the responsibility individuals have in forming collective perceptions of reality.
As described by former member Dave Bond:
Reactor began life as an exhibition of the same name, staged in September of 2002, in which all the artworks focused around the active participation of the audience. The exhibition took place in the same warehouse building that also housed our two separate studio groups of Graze and Aldaran, and when we found out the building was doomed to be demolished to make way for student flats the core members of both groups banded together and formed something new: Reactor.
Reactor was both a collection of artists who worked individually but also an organisation that worked collaboratively to stage events and exhibitions, continuing the original ethos of interaction and involvement with the audience.
This collaboration reached another level with the development of GHAOS: where previously we had generally worked individually on our own elements of Reactor projects, GHAOS projects were created entirely as a group under the sole authorship of Reactor. GHAOS methodology evolved an exuberant and darkly comic attitude, entwining complex systems with elaborate wordplay, often confusing and manipulating the audience but simultaneously encouraging them to involve themselves in the bizarre fantasies presented to them to make the leap from being passive spectators to ‘GHAOS Actors’. In October 2005 this cumulated in the event Total GHAOS: a totalitarian utopia ruled by the Reactor Party under the principles of GHAOS.
Post-GHAOS and following a period of assessment, Reactor decided to maintain the group practice and develop less frequent but more complex, large-scale events. Continuing to misdirect and confuse audience perceptions, initially under the secret identity of Ivan’s Dogs, a fake artists group from Northern Ireland, and then going on to develop events exploring social and group dynamics and psychological experimentation in The Geodecity Project and The Tetra Phase.
Nate Hill
(Via Kev.)
Joshua Sofaer
Joshua Sofaer (b. 1972 Cambridge, England) is an artist who is centrally concerned with modes of collaboration and participation.
From Perform Every Day:
In a world of natural look makeup where people spend hours putting on various different applications in an attempt to look like they are wearing none at all, is it any wonder that there is some confusion over what reality might really be?
Part of this confusion is to do with performance; how to discern ‘what is’ and ‘what is performance’? From the global ramifications of party and nation politics to the esoteric world of live art, from the tragic spectacular of international terrorism to the undergraduate drama student, from the stock-market to soap-opera, from high performance drugs to performance studies – ‘performance’ is the modus operandi of contemporary culture. It seems now that there is only performance.
Do not despair!
If we begin to understand the things we take for granted in our everyday lives as constructs of performance in and of themselves, if we relish these everyday performances for what they offer us, then there is hope. We become the audience of our very own private theatre.
Also: Any Questions; Seven Reasons Why Live Art Gives Better Value.
Robin Hely
Whatever his shortcomings as a human being, he’s undeniably an amazing artist. And his sociopathy and his genius kind of go hand in hand.
“As an artist, I have a big problem,” he said to me once. “I don’t really like art. I just love fucking with peoples’ heads.”
Yeah.
“Interventionist performance art”, he’s calling it now. Previously known as “interactive public theatre”. I still like “reality art”. Whatever it is, it’s something else.
Interesting review of “Sherrie“. Origin of the spycam. Missing Person –> Who Is Robert Henley?. Oh, and then there’s this. Changed my life, y’know.
I miss the evil bastard. He’s never dull.
(Previously.)
Harry Goldgar, Telepath
Googling on the phrase “telepathy project”, I found this. See also.
I think most people would call this psychosis, not art. But like many manifestations of delusional paranoia, it’s also recognisable as beautiful art, even if it wasn’t created with that intent.
We all live in our own dreamworld(s) – some people’s are just more divergent from the norm (and, for better or worse, a lot more interesting) than others’.