Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>>Performance is about time and space.
And to that end it's about duration, the duration
of the performance and the endurance of the performer.
Let's look at a couple of examples,
Touching Shay [phonetic] is an artist who has done a series
of year long performances.
Let's look at a little bit of documentation of his work.
[background noise] So we see that this work is about action
and it's about endurance.
It's about the difficulty of his action.
It's about like could you possibly lock yourself
up into a space for a year and not communicate
with other people, not read, not write, not listen to the radio?
So that's one of the things that makes this interesting is
that he's sort of put himself into this position.
It is about his endurance and it's about his like sort
of reaction to it and he's sort of standing in for it.
Now a lot of people have read this as being
about like imprisonment and certainly there are aspects
of it that are, that really are about that but it's also
about like sort of the flow of time.
It's about his personal experience in the United States
at that point in time.
The key to this is the question is like how do we experience it?
This took place in the 70's and many of us weren't even alive
at that point in time.
So how is it that we can get a full understanding of it other
than just to try to live it ourselves,
which is not reasonable.
I mean our experience of it is strictly
through the documentation so it's very important the way
that the documentation is created.
And in this case the documentation, the photographs
and the sort of the recollections
of it are really all that's left.
Knowing that the performance lasted a full year
and having a lawyer notarize that he was
in the space this entire time and that this actually happened,
it adds validity to it but it doesn't add
to our experience of it.
Another artist that I want to talk about is Joseph Beuys.
The first piece that I want to talk about is actually like,
is called I love America and America loves me.
[ Music ]
So this performance is considered very important
for the reception of the German [inaudible] guard
in the United States.
And when he performed it in 1974 he flew into the country,
was loaded into an ambulance, carted off to the gallery space,
brought in on a gurney, put into the gallery for like a period
of like three days with a wild coyote.
And afterwards was then whisked off again,
never having set foot on American soil.
For him, I mean he created,
it was about the relationship with the coyote.
It was about the symbolic gestures
that he made inside the gallery
and you can see some of these on the film.
It was about relating to this wild animal
that eventually ended up just sort of tolerating his presence
and even being a little bit playful, with respect to it.
And at the end of the performance he hugs the coyote
and leaves the country without ever putting foot
on American soil.
One of the things that Beuys created or worked
on was something called Social Sculpture.
And in Social Sculpture the artists, or the art is
about creating a transformation in society.
So I love America and America loves Me was not
about social sculpture but some of his other work,
his later work, was where like he's also a founding member
of the German Green Party.
Now in this he, what he does is he takes his actions
and he uses them to shape society or the environment
and he sees like his medium as society
and himself as a sculptor.
And one of the ways that he does this is through performance
and action and the creation of objects
that have semiotic significance.
The next example that I want
to show you is a group called Survival Research Laboratories.
They're in San Francisco
and what they do is they do machine performance.
Let's look at a little example of theirs.
[ Noise ]
Okay so what you see, what you see and what you hear is
like this loud, this cacophonous series of explosions and fire
and machines, like these horrific monstrous machines
roaming around and destroying things.
And what they're doing is they're using the machines
to stand in for the role of the performer.
Is this legitimate in performance?
Well certainly.
It's certainly interesting.
And these performances then encompass these sort
of ritualized interactions between the machines
and the special effects devices
and the humans are the audience or the operators.
They're not the actual actors.
And it develops like these themes
of sociopolitical satire dealing with this sort of terror
and the frightening quality of these loud, flaming machines.