In 1977, a collection of photos entitled Relation in space was published as part of the Amatori del libro ("Booklovers") series by Edizioni del Cavallino, the publishing house headed by Paolo ...Cardazzo. Cardazzo began the Amatori del libro series in 1944, with the goals of publishing refined illustrated volumes and printing collections of lithographs or drawings, all accompanied by critical texts and aimed at connoisseurs. In the 1970s the collections of lithographs and drawings were replaced by photos, a reflection of the changes in artistic expression at the time and a renewed interest in photography. Relation in space - 30 numbered, signed copies presented in a black leather portfolio - contains seven black and white photos taken by Mario Sillani Djerrahian (1940) to "artistically" document Marina Abramović and Ulay's performance of the same name. The show was staged on 16 July 1976 at the Cantieri Navali della Giudecca during the XXXVII Venice Biennale (in the Attivo section curated by Tommaso Trini). Paolo Cardazzo also made a complete video recording of the performance. The photos are accompanied by a "description of the action", done in agreement with the Serbian artist (as shown in documentation from the Cardazzo archive), which helps to contextualize Sillani’s pictures. The Relation in space collection allows us to see the role of photography in objectively viewing certain aspects of the performance, offering not only a documentary vision of the event (as provided by the video recording), but also an artistic vision, which will endure over time.
Unlimited action concerns the limits imposed upon art and life, and the means by which artists have exposed, refused, or otherwise reshaped the horizon of aesthetics and of the practice of art, by ...way of performance art. It examines the 'performance of extremity' as practices at the limits of the histories of performance and art, in performance art's most fertile and prescient decade, the 1970s. Dominic Johnson recounts and analyses game-changing performance events by six artists: Kerry Trengove, Ulay, Genesis P-Orridge, Anne Bean, the Kipper Kids, and Stephen Cripps. Through close encounters with these six artists and their works, and a broader contextual milieu of artists and works, Johnson articulates a counter-history of actions in a new narrative of performance art in the 1970s, to rethink and rediscover the history of contemporary art and performance.Unlimited action concerns the limits imposed upon art and life, and the means by which artists have exposed, refused, or otherwise reshaped the horizon of aesthetics and of the practice of art, by way of performance art. It examines the 'performance of extremity' as practices at the limits of the histories of performance and art, in performance art's most fertile and prescient decade, the 1970s. Dominic Johnson recounts and analyses game-changing performance events by six artists: Kerry Trengove, Ulay, Genesis P-Orridge, Anne Bean, the Kipper Kids, and Stephen Cripps. Through close encounters with these six artists and their works, and a broader contextual milieu of artists and works, Johnson articulates a counter-history of actions in a new narrative of performance art in the 1970s, to rethink and rediscover the history of contemporary art and performance.
Trafficking in Air Drobnick, Jim
Performance research,
09/2003, Letnik:
8, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In a special issue devoted to smell, discusses breath-based performance art from the early 20th century onwards. The author reviews a number of scientific, medical and entertainment practices which ...might be viewed as precedents to contemporary performances that foreground the act of breathing. He analyses the role that air and smell played in the writings and works of the avant-garde artists Marinetti, Franz Marc, Enrico Prampolini, Kurt Schwitters, August Macke, Oskar Kokoschka, and Marcel Duchamp, and considers later performances that focused on the physical act of respiration, exemplified by George Maciunas's Breath Flux Test (c.1971), Tom Johnson's Running out of Breath (1976), Chris Burden's Velvet Water (1974), Gelatin's Weltwunder (2000), Breathing In-Breathing Out (1977; illus.) by Abramovic and Ulay, and the acts of the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, and on various aspects of the breath including its political, auratic and palpable dimensions, such as Gordon Matta-Clark's anti-pollution performance Fresh Air Cart (1972; illus.), Clara Ursitti's Untitled (1995) and Abigail Lane's You Know Who You Are (Smoking Shoes) (1997; illus.), and its transformational powers, such as Lygia Clark's Sensorial Masks (1967) and Benita-Immanuel Grosser's Participating, at the Same Time (1996).
Gilbert & George's and Marina Abramovic/Ulay's actions of the 1970s were collaborations that blurred and doubled the "normal" figure of the artist as an individual body. This type of collaboration ...had the properties of a third identity, but did the new identity resemble a third hand, a doppelganger (an apparition associated with death, sometimes experienced historically as a shadow or as the double of a living person), or a phantom extension of the artists' joint will, rather like a phantom limb?
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