Category: Live

Live Art

From the UK’s Live Art Development Agency:

Disrupting borders, breaking rules, defying traditions, resisting definitions, asking awkward questions and activating audiences, Live Art breaks the rules about who is making art, how they are making it and who they are making it for.

Live Art practices have proved to be especially equipped to meet the complexity and sophistication of contemporary audiences’ values, identities and expectations. Live Art questions assumptions and defies expectations about who an audience can be, what they might be interested in, and the means by which they can be addressed.

Live Art occupies a huge range of sites and circumstances, from the institutional to artist led interventions; from actions in galleries and performances in theatres, to artists working outside of the constraints of official culture, within civic or social spheres, in challenging and unexpected sites, or at the points where live and mediated cultures converge. Some may experience Live Art in a gallery, others in a theatre, and others still as an occurrence in some unusual location or a process in which they are involved.

Live Art can also span extremities of scales – from intimate one on one encounters, to civic spectacles, to the mass participation of virtual events. Wherever they may take place or whatever shape they may be, Live Art practices are concerned with all kinds of interventions in the public sphere and all kinds of encounters with an audience.

Live Art offers immersive experiences, often disrupting distinctions between spectator and participant. Live Art asks us what it means to be here, now. In the simultaneity and interactivity of a media saturated society, Live Art is about immediacy and reality: creating spaces to explore the experience of things, the ambiguities of meaning and the responsibilities of our individual agency.

Live Art is on the frontline of enquiries into what our culture is and where it is located, who our artists are and where they come from, what an audience can be and how they can be addressed.

Jason Maling

From website:

From drawing and durational process, through to live workshops and public performance, Maling’s work can best be described by the term ‘Live Art’. It extends through a broad range of media and is characterised by a formality of composition with a fluidity of outcome. Often appearing game-like, the roles of players and the rules of play continually evolve through individual and collective expressions of what is ‘allowed’. The results can be as simple as a broken tool or as elaborate as a sprawling narrative. It’s about the space between what could happen and what did.

Of particular note: Project George.

Drawing

Cults As Art

The previous two posts inevitably bring to mind of a certain other individual whose work I’ve admired. But can he be legitimately classified as an Artist?

In my terms, absolutely. But then I think everything people do is recognisable as art. (And that all institutions are recognisable as cults..)

What about this guy?

The Church of Scientology was not intended to be art in any conventional sense. Its purpose was to make money and slaves for Mr Hubbard, shoring up his rampant god complex.

“Writing stories for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a creative man wants to make a million dollars, the way to do it is to start your own religion.” Etc.

But however venal its objectives, it’s also a bizarre, byzantine and beautiful creative accomplishment – and LRH is recognisable as a Reality Artist of jawdropping genius. (A greedy, sadistic, megalomaniacal cunt, sure – but that’s neither here nor there. He got his. And genius in ugly forms is still genius.)

These speculations stem largely from my experiences with this singular beastie – the most extreme example I know of a mind control cult which was, covertly but very explicitly, created and maintained as a legitimate Art Project.

Distinctions, eh.

Lynn Hershman

(Via J.)

Specifically: Roberta Breitmore.

ROBERTA BREITMORE was, for 9 years, a private performance of a simulated person. In an era of alternatives, she became an objectified alternative personality. Roberta’s first live action was to place an ad in a local newspaper advertising for a roommate. People who answered the ad became participants in her adventure. As she became part of their reality, they became part of her fiction.

Yes.

(More links.)