created 2024-31-12, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025artperformancedadasurrealism
Why I'm reading
Further reading on performance art and study about “performance.” A newer edition of this book is being released in the fall, and I have it pre-ordered but rather than wait I’m reading this earlier edition.
Conceptual art = art of ideas over product.
Performance manifestos, from the Futurists to the present, have been the expression of dissidents who have attempted to find other means to evaluate art experience in everyday life. Performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture.
Futurism
NOTE
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of the Futurist movement.
Marinetti raged against the cult of tradition and commercialization of art, singing the praises of patriotic militarism and war.
Having already used Cubism and Orphism to modernize the appearance of their paintings, the young Futurists translated some of the original manifesto ideas of ‘speed and love of danger’ into a blueprint for Futurist painting.
The Futurist painters turned to performance as the most direct means of forcing an audience to take note of their ideas. Subsequent manifestos made these intentions very clear: they instructed painters to ‘go out into the street, launch assaults from theatres and introduce the fisticuff into the artistic battle’
Futurists must teach all authors and performers to despise the audience, he insisted. Applause merely indicated ‘something mediocre, dull, regurgitated or too well digested’. Booing assured the actor that the audience was alive, not simply blinded by ‘intellectual intoxication’. He suggested various tricks designed to infuriate the audience: double booking the auditorium, coating the seats with glue. And he encouraged his friends to do whatever came to mind on stage.
Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation - Declaim - liberate intellectual circles from the old, static, pacifistic and nostalgic declamation.
Zang tumb tumb, Marinetti’s ‘onomatopoetic artillery’
Intonarumori
Intonarumori are experimental musical instruments invented and built by the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo between roughly 1910 and 1930. There were 27 varieties of intonarumori built in total, with different names.
rel:The Art of Noise
Futurist Dance of 1917: one must go beyond ‘muscular possibilities’ and aim in the dance for ‘that ideal multiplied body of the motor that we have so long dreamed of’. He proposed a Dance of the Shrapnel including such instructions as ‘with the feet mark the boom — boom of the projectile coming from the cannon’s mouth’. And for the Dance of the Aviatrix, he recommended that the danseuse ‘simulate with jerks and weavings of her body the successive efforts of a plane trying to take off’!
Synthetic Theater, consists of brief performances. The Futurists refused to, explain the meaning.
Negative Act: A man walks busily on stage, he takes off the overcoat and notices the audience “I have absolutely nothing to tell you, bring down the curtain.” also,
For example, Marinetti’s Synthesis 23 Feet consisted of the feet of the performers only. ‘A curtain edged in black should be raised to about the height of a man’s stomach’, the script explained. ‘The public sees only legs in action. The actors must try to give the greatest expression to the attitudes and movements of their lower extremities. ’
Simultaneity: a work is valuable only to the extent that it was improvised, not extensively prepared.
Simultaneity: it consisted of two different spaces, ‘with performers in both, occupying the stage at the same time. For most of the play, the various actions took place in separate worlds, quite unaware of each other. At one point, however, the ‘life of the beautiful cocotte’ penetrated that of the bourgeois family in the adjacent scene.
Action broke through the partitions, and scenes followed in quick succession
in and out of the adjacent sets. rel:Kinderbook Concepts
Marinetti’s dream, for he had called for an art that ‘must be an alcohol, not a balm’ and it was precisely this drunkenness that characterized the rising circles of art groups who were turning to performance as a means of spreading their radical art propositions. ‘Thanks to us’, Marinetti wrote, ‘the time will come when life will no longer be a simple matter of bread and labour, nor a life of idleness either, but a work of art.‘
Russian Futurism and Constructivism
Italian Futurism — suspiciously foreign but more acceptable since it echoed this call to abandon old art forms - was reinterpreted in the Russian context, providing a general weapon against art of the past.
‘Art is not only a monarch’, it read, ‘but also a newsman and a decorator. The synthesis of decoration and illustration is the basis of our self-painting. We decorate life and preach — that’s why we paint ourselves.’
Production art was virtually an ethical proclamation by the Constructivists: they believed that in order to oust the reigning academicism, speculative activites such as painting and the ‘outmoded tools of brushes and paint’ must be put aside. Moreover they insisted that artists use ‘real space and real materials’. Circus, music hall and variety theatre, the eurhythmies of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and eurhythmics of Rudolf von Laban, Japanese theatre and the puppet show were all meticulously examined
Mechanical Dances
Foregger’s Mechanical Dances were first performed in February 1923. One of the dances imitated a transmission: two men stood about ten feet apart and several women, holding onto each other’s ankles, moved in a chain around them. Another dance represented a saw: two men holding the hands and feet of a woman, swinging her in curved movements. Sound effects, including the smashing of glass and the striking of different metal objects backstage, were provided by a lively noise orchestra.
Dada
Franklin Wedekind’s performances reveled in the license given the artist to be a mad outsider, exempt from society’s normal behavior.
NOTE
Douglas Adams is Wedekind’s great-grandson. Pandora’s Box is his play.
Hugo Ball
‘In an age like ours, when people are assaulted daily by the most monstrous things without being able to keep account of their impressions, in such an age aesthetic production becomes a prescribed course. But all living art will be irrational, primitive, complex: it will speak a secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox.’
At Cabaret Voltaire,performance was key to rediscovering pleasure in art.
Simultaneous Poems: a contrapuntal recitative in which three or more voices speak, sing, whistle, etc. at the same time, in such a way that the elegiac, humorous, or bizarre content of the piece is brought out by these combinations. In such a simultaneous poem, the wilful quality of an organic work is given powerful expression, and so is its limitation by the accompaniment. Noises (an rrrr drawn out for minutes, or crashes, or sirens, etc.) are superior to the human voice in energy.
Tzara’s dadaist manifesto ‘Let us destroy let us be good let us create a new force of gravity NO = YES Dada means nothing’, ‘The bourgeois salad in the eternal basin is insipid and I hate good sense.’
Surrealism
rel:Surrealism
Lured by advertisements stating Charlie Chaplin would make an appearance, crowds gathered. This was a false claim. Seven performers read the manifesto by Ribemont-Dessaignes warning the public that their ‘decaying teeth, ears, tongues full of sores’ would be pulled out and their ‘putrid bones’ broken. This barrage of insult was followed by Aragon’s company chanting ‘no more painters, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans … no more of these idiocies, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING!’
Roussel’s notorious Impressions d’Afrique, an adaptation of his 1910 prose fantasy of the same name, with its contest of The Incomparables Club’ including the debut of the Earthworm Zither Player — a trained earthworm whose drops of mercury-like ‘sweat’ sliding down the chords of the instrument produced sound.
Apollinaire’s preface to Parade had correctly anticipated the emergence of this New Spirit; moreover, it suggested that the New Spirit contained a notion of ‘surrealism (surrealisme)
Apollinaire invented the adjective surrealist, which defines a tendency in art. When man wanted to imitate walking he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. In the same way, he has created surrealism.
While Tzara stood firmly for the rescue and preservation of Dada, Breton announced its death. ‘Though Dada had its hour of fame’, he wrote, ‘it left few regrets.’ ‘Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears… . Set off on the roads.’
Surrealists had their own premises, the Bureau of Surrealistic Research “a romantic inn for the unclassifiable ideas and continuing revolts.” Press releases were issued carrying the address of the bureau, and newspaper advertisements specified that the research bureau, ‘nourished by life itself’, would receive all bearers of secrets: ‘inventors, madmen, revolutionaries, misfits, dreamers’.
Breton’s early definition of Surrealism: noun masc., pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing, or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought.
Artuad’s The Jet of Blood - At one point the Whore bit ‘God’s wrist’ resulting in an ‘immense jet of blood’ shooting across the stage. Despite the brevity and virtually unreahsable images of the play, the work reflected the Surrealist dream world and its obsession with memory.
Bauhaus
Unlike the rebellious Futurist or Dada provocations, Gropius’s Romantic Bauhaus manifesto had called for the unification of all the arts in a ‘cathedral of Socialism’. The cautious optimism expressed in the manifesto provided a hopeful yardstick for cultural recovery in a divided and impoverished postwar Germany.
In a lecture—demonstration given at the Bauhaus in 1927, Schlemmer and 90 students illustrated these abstract theories: first the square surface of the floor was divided into bisecting axes and diagonals, completed by a circle. Then taut wires crossed the empty stage, defining the ‘volume’ or cubic dimension of the space. Following these guidelines, the dancers moved within the ‘spatial linear web’, their movement dictated by the already geometrically divided stage. Phase two added costumes emphasizing various parts of the body, leading to gestures, characterization, and abstract colour harmonies provided by the coloured attire. Thus the demonstration led the viewers through the ‘mathematical dance’ to the ‘space dance’ to the ‘gesture dance’, culminating in the combination of elements of variety theatre and circus suggested by the masks and props in the final sequence.
Triadic Ballet ‘Why Triadic?’, the director noted: Triadic — from triad (three) because of the three dancers and the three parts of the symphonic architectonic composition and the fusion of the dance, the costumes and the music.’
Living Art c. 1933 to 1970s
Black Mountain College, North Carolina
In the autumn of 1933, twenty-two students and nine faculty members moved into a huge white-columned building complex overlooking the town of Black Mountain. Despite the lack of explicit manifesto or public declaration of its ends, the small community slowly acquired a reputation as an interdisciplinary educational hide-out.
Cage wanted to capture and control noise sound, and use them as instruments. Cage, “one way to write music: study Duchamp”
Non-intention in music: ‘An indeterminate piece’, he wrote, ‘even though it might sound like a totally determined one, is made essentially without intention so that, in opposition to music of results, two performances of it will be different.’
‘My favorite piece’, Cage had written, ‘is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.’
Ken Dewey’s City Scale (1963), with Anthony Martin and Ramon Sender, began in the evening with spectators filling out government forms at one end of the city, only to be led through the streets to a series of occurrences and places: a model undressing at an apartment window, a car ballet in a car park, a singer in a shop window, weather balloons in a desolate park, a cafeteria, a bookshop, and as the sun came up on the next day, a brief finale by a ‘celery man’ in a cinema.
Yves Klein
Yves Klein, born in Nice in 1928, was throughout his life determined to find a vessel for a ‘spiritual’ pictorial space, and it was this that led him eventually to live actions. To Klein, painting was ‘like the window of a prison, where the lines, contours, forms and composition are determined by the bars’.
He showed work entirely from what he called his ‘blue period’, having searched, as he said, ‘for the most perfect expression of blue for more than a year’.
It was at this time that Klein wrote ‘my paintings are now invisible’ and his work The Surfaces and Volumes of Invisible Pictorial Sensibility, exhibited in one of the rooms at the Allendy, was precisely that — invisible. It consisted of a completely empty space. rel: Survey of Invisibility
Joseph Beuys
The German artist Joseph Beuys believed that art should effectively transform people’s everyday lives. He too resorted to dramatic actions and lectures in an attempt to change consciousness. ‘We have to revolutionize human thought’, he said, ‘First of all revolution takes place within man. When man is really a free, creative being who can produce something new and original, he can revolutionize time.’
Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me: Loaded into an ambulance, he was driven to the space which he would share with a wild coyote for seven days. During that time, he conversed privately with the animal, only a chainlink fence separating them from the visitors to the gallery. His daily rituals included a series of interactions with the coyote, introducing it to objects — felt, walking stick, gloves, electric torch, and the Wall Street Journal (delivered daily) - which it pawed and urinated on, as if acknowledging in its own way the man’s presence.
The Art of Ideas and the Media Generation 1968 to 2000
The art object came to be considered entirely superfluous within this aesthetic and the notion of‘conceptual art’ was formulated as ‘an art of which the material is concepts’. Disregard for the art object was linked to its being seen as a mere pawn in the art market: if the function of the art object was to be an economic one, the argument went, then conceptual work could have no such use.
In Performance both audience and performer experienced the work simultaneously.
Segment on Stanley Brouwn
The Artist’s Body
Acconci acted out Following Piece as part of ‘Street Works IV’ (1969). The piece consisted simply of Acconci following randomly chosen individuals in the street, abandoning them once they left the street to enter a building. It was invisible in that people were unaware that it was going on.
The New York performer Trisha Brown added a further dimension to the viewer’s notion of the body in space. Works such as Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1969), or Walking on the Wall (1970), were designed to disorient the audience’s sense of gravitational balance. The first consisted of a man, strapped in mountaineering harness, walking down the vertical wall- face of a seven-story building in lower Manhattan. The second work, using the same mechanical support, took place in a gallery at the Whitney Museum, where performers moved along the wall at right angles to the audience.
Good Feelings in Good Times (2003) is a work in which the public is asked to form a queue outside an art institution. For Ondak it is both a memory of the Soviet-era supermarket queues of his youth, and a form of‘institutional critique’, with its implication of social and educational hierarchies.‘In the 1970s and 1980s lines often used to form in front of shops,’ Ondak says. ‘In what everybody then called the bad times, people were capable of patiently waiting in queues and feeling good about it, because they thought at the end of it they’d probably get what they were hoping for.’