Category: Referrals

Hermann Nitsch

(Via J.)

Specifically the Orgies Mystery Theatre (possibly unstable Google cache link; original is down).

This 6-day play will incorporate all the elements that have made Nitsch so notorious: the slaughter, evisceration and crucifixion of (totemic) animals, the drenching of naked performers in torrents of blood and entrails to a cacophony of revved up tanks, scream choirs and orchestras, interspersed by wandering brass bands playing Austrian tavern music…. Among other materials the artist’s palette will consist of 300 actors and musicians, 3 live bulls, a great many slaughtered pigs and sheep, intestines, fresh flowers, 3,000 litres of fresh blood, gallons of paint, etc., and wine enough for continuous intoxication. One must bear in mind that this ‘work of art’, in a very palpable sense, will also be a public festival:
“the participants are sitting in every corner of the fields, the orchards and vineyards, happily eating and drinking wine…..happiness flows rich and intoxicating through our blood….”

Damn.

“the profession to practise art is the priesthood for a new view of existence…..[art becomes]…the means for a profounder, intenser rapture within life and must be intensified to the point of a shameless, analytical exhibitionism, that demands the sacrifice of total self-abandonment.” [Nitsch, blood organ manifesto, 1962]

That’s what I’m talking about. Or not.

In a strong sense, one has to be there– and in this being-there lies a subjective moment not readily transformed into discursive language.

Yes.

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.)

On Kawara

(Via Em.)

From Wikipedia:

On Kawara (born December 24, 1932) is a Japanese conceptual artist living in New York City since 1965. He has shown in many solo and group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1976.

Since 1966 he has made a long series of “date paintings” (the Today series), which consist entirely of the date on which the painting was executed in simple white lettering set against a solid background. Other series of works include the I Went and I Met series of postcards sent to his friends detailing aspects of his life, another series of postcards, I Got Up At, rubber-stamped with the time he got up that morning, and a series of telegrams sent to various people bearing the message “I AM STILL ALIVE”.

Much like the Today series, Kawara uses a number of days followed by date the work was executed as his life-dates. So the piece entitled Title at the National Gallery of Art has Kawara’s life-dates as 26,697 (January 27, 2006) which, when calculated, place Kawara’s birthdate at December 24, 1932.

Kawara does not give interviews nor comments about his work.

See also:

Other, related works in his oeuvre confirm the existentialism at the heart of his metaphysics. For example, in 1970 he began intermittently to send telegrams to friends and professional colleagues that always contain the same message: I am still alive. Once a medium of urgent news, the telegram has become almost obsolete as a means of communication. Normally it announces timely or memorable events, such as unexpected deaths, but Kawara’s messages invert these customary practices: given that everyone is assumed to be alive until the contrary is announced, Kawara’s reassurance that he is still living seems gratuitous—absurd. Moreover, even though it was true at the moment it was sent, it may not be so by the time it is received.

Imbued in equal measure with humor and pathos, these terse missives nonetheless offer testimony to a fundamental state: consciousness, a precondition to all other forms of being. Although destined initially for the attention of a single recipient, they were immediately understood to be a form of conceptual art and hence soon exhibited or published in catalogues and monographs on the artist.

Kawara does not give interviews nor comments about his work.

No.

Yes.

(Update 20/10/07: I’d never heard of On Kawara when I posted this. Not consciously, anyway.)