Performance art in Western Europe and North America developed in part as a response to the commercialisation of the art object, as artists endeavoured to create works of art that could not be bought ...or sold. But what are the roots of performance art in Eastern Europe and Russia, where there was no real art market to speak of? While many artworks created in the ‘East’ may resemble Western performance art practices, their origins, as well as their meaning and significance, is decidedly different. By placing specific performances from Russia, Latvia and Poland from the late- and post-communist periods within a local and international context, this book pinpoints the nuances between performance art East and West. Performance art in Eastern Europe is examined for the first time as agent and chronicle of the transition from Soviet and satellite states to free-market democracies. Drawing upon previously unpublished sources and exclusive interviews with the artists themselves, Amy Bryzgel explores the actions of the period, from Miervaldis Polis's Bronze Man to Oleg Kulik's Russian Dog performances. Bryzgel demonstrates that in the late-1980s and early 1990s, performance art in Eastern Europe went beyond the modernist critique to express ideas outside the official discourse, shocking and empowering the citizenry, both effecting and mirroring the social changes taking place at the time. Performing the East opens the way to an urgent reassessment of the history, function and meaning of performance art practices in East-Central Europe.
After World War II, the concept of borders became unsettled, especially after the rise of subaltern and multicultural studies in the 1980s. Art at the U.S.-Mexico border came to a turning point at ...the beginning of that decade with the election of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Beginning with a political history of the border, with an emphasis on the Chicano movement and its art production, Ila Sheren explores the forces behind the shift in thinking about the border in the late twentieth century. Particularly in the world of visual art, borders have come to represent a space of performance rather than a geographical boundary, a cultural terrain meant to be negotiated rather than a physical line. From 1980 forward, Sheren argues, the border became portable through performance and conceptual work. This dematerialization of the physical border after the 1980s worked in two opposite directions—the movement of border thinking to the rest of the world, as well as the importation of ideas to the border itself. Beginning with site-specific conceptual artwork of the 1980s, particularly the performances of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, Sheren shows how these works reconfigured the border as an active site. Sheren moves on to examine artists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, and Marcos Ramirez "ERRE." Although Sheren places emphasis on the Chicano movement and its art production, this groundbreaking book suggests possibilities for the expansion of the concept of portability to contemporary art projects beyond the region.
The award-winning play Venus vs Modernity unpacks the life of Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman of Khoi descent, who was exhibited as a freak show in nineteenth-century Europe under the name ..."Hottentot Venus." At the peak of her fame in the early 1800s, Saartjie Baartman became a reference point for abolitionists, fashion designers, and political satirists alike. Her remains were dissected and put on display at the French National Museum for 150 years. In 2002, Saartjie Baartman was finally returned to the land of her birth.
This article investigates how the performance of Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady foregrounds the matter of visibility as a construct shaped by habitual patterns of perception, which in turn frames ...cultural bodies in ways that are marginalized, obscured and often misunderstood. Through the lens of habit, this play reveals how entrenched ways of seeing contribute to ‘habitual suffering’, the phenomenon where repeated exposure to simplified cultural representations leads to a diminished grasp of individuals’ multi-layered identities. The play’s interrogation of the audience’s passive consumption of the protagonist, Afong Moy, as a spectacle within a museum setting, resonates with Judith Butler’s theory of ‘frames’. Drawing on this conceptual framework, this article dissects the mechanisms through which habitual perspectives are formed and perpetuated. In doing so, it questions the spectators’ complicity in these processes and explores the potential for performing arts to disrupt and reconfigure the habitual gaze.By examining the paradoxical role of habit that simultaneously provides comfort through routinization and dulls sensory acuity, the article elaborates on how visibility is materially affected by the repetitive nature of human behaviour. It further suggests that the performing space can serve as a concrete medium to manifest, challenge and alter the ingrained way audiences engage with and interpret otherness, promoting a more nuanced and empathetic approach to cross-cultural encounters.
The study of the tableau vivant raises issues on a number of levels — theatrical, narrative, spatial, pictorial, and temporal — and provides insight into questions of sexuality, gender, race, social ...class, and the relationship of the individual to the material world. The origin of this issue is the two-day conference Stay Still, Translate : Performance, Presentation, Conservation of the Tableau Vivant in Canada that was held in 2017 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. The symposium, which was organized by Mélanie Boucher and in which we both presented papers, and the present publication were opportunities to build on our work together for the special issue of the journal Espace entitled “Statue Play,” which focused on the immobility of the performing body in contemporary art.
Fungi Media positions performance art of bodily mutations as a form of corporeal philosophy. Examining ecologies of rot and fungal decomposition, it outlines a theory of fungosexuality beyond sexual ...reproduction and binary gender roles. This theoretical perspective repositions queer sexualities in the context of the original meaning of the term ‘queer’, which is ‘rot’ – and which stands for a fungi-induced process of decomposition. With this, Fungi Media explores the foundational importance of rot for both breaking down and sustaining bodies, relationships and life as such. "Bockowski’s book – like its decompositional protagonist, fungi – performs what it also examines: some intensive ways in which queer, networked and entangled bodies can break down complex and compromised entities to ‘enable new mutant fusions’. Fungi Media is a fecund new contribution to the emerging field – both figural and literal – of ‘libidinal ecology’; and the book’s exploration of ‘fungosexuality’ is as rich, gamey, provocative and risky as foraging hungrily in a toxic urban ecology full of unfamiliar toadstools" Dominic Pettman, University Professor of Media and New Humanities, The New School for Social Research
How performance art in 1960s Japan formed a legacy of resistance against institutionalization
In Anarchy of the Body , art historian KuroDalaiJee sheds light on vital pieces of postwar Japanese ...avant-garde history by contextualizing the social, cultural, and political trajectories of artists across Japan in the 1960s. A culmination of years of research, Anarchy of the Body draws on an extensive breadth of source material to reveal how the practice of performance by individual artists and art groups during this period formed a legacy of resistance against institutionalization, both within the art world and more broadly in Japanese society. This book contains 256 high-quality reproductions, including rare performance photographs not readily accessible elsewhere, as well as a comprehensive chronology. KuroDalaiJee was awarded the 2010 Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists (criticism category) by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
Contributors: Kurokawa Noriyuki (editor), Jason M. Beckman (translation editor), Andrew Maerkle (translator), Shima Yumiko (translator), Alice Kiwako Ashiwa (editorial assistant), Daniel González (translator), Claire Tanaka (translator), Giles Murray (translator), Jenny Preston (translator)
Translated from the original Japanese edition published with T okyo: Grambooks, 2010.
In cooperation with Art Platform Japan / The Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan Art Platform Japan is an initiative by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan, to maintain the sustainable development of the contemporary art scene in Japan.
The artistic tradition that emerged as a form of cultural resistance in the 1970s changed during the transition from socialism to capitalism. This volume presents the evolution of the Moscow-based ...conceptual artist group called Collective Actions, proposing it as a case-study for understanding the transformations that took place in Eastern European art after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Esanu introduces Moscow Conceptualism by performing a close examination of the Collective Actions group’s ten-volume publication Journeys Outside the City and of the Dictionary of Moscow Conceptualism. He analyzes above all the evolution of Collective Actions through ten consecutive phases, discussing changes that occur in each new volume of the Journeys. Compares the part of the Journeys produced in the Soviet period with those volumes assembled after the dissolution of the USSR. The concept of “transition” and the activities of Soros Centers for Contemporary Art are also analyzed.
The context of our co-authored contribution to the ‘Aesthetic Relations’ conference-publication is a performance devised by Lucie in 2020 to which she invited Kiraṇ as a collaborator. Due to ...international travel restrictions however, our physical co-pres-ence in a studio and on stage remained suspended throughout that year. Our exchanges nevertheless continued in adaptive turns both before and after that performance. It is this condition of, at once, compromised yet consistent relation with each other that we refer to as ‘suspension’. For us this suspension was at first admittedly a source of disruption, even anxiety of interrupting our artistic flow. Yet there came a point during the year when this swelling tension ruptured, and a strange ease set in. Nothing had changed on the surface (travel restrictions were only extended), yet something had shifted under our skins. While still physically across continents, our online presentation at the conference was a joint essay at articulating, both textually and performatively, the unassuming complexity of this thing that is suspension. By the time of this publication in 2022, we have somewhat broken this suspension by physically meeting in Switzerland in August 2021. As such we have decided not to edit the text that was performed at the conference back in January 2021, and only append it with this contextual note.
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