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Writer's pictureanushka nair

LIVE ART AND PERFORMANCE: ALIVE

Updated: Sep 1, 2019

A summary of the introduction of Adrian Heathfield's book about the 'genre' and tradition of performance and Live Art.



BACKGROUND


  • A result of the Live Culture event at Tate Modern (March 2003)

  • Curators: Lois Keidan, Daniel Brine and Adrian Heathfield.

  • In A-Gadda-Da-Vida: collaborative exhibition of Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst and Sarah Lucas.



ABOUT


  • Exploring the live element in contemporary arts: phenomenon of a sculpture that is performing and the aliveness of an object.

  • Live Art: confluence of the aesthetic elements/approach of performance with/in visual art.

  • Performance aesthetics have a history of : corporeal matter, movement in time, living objects and composite environments (Oblivion incorporates these elements) ; dynamics of space and time and embodied existence.

  • Immediate, immersive and interactive :encounter with and within time.

  • Vital elements and purpose: Social ritual, connecting the past with present, liminal temporality.


DYNAMICS EXPLORED:


TIME

  • It is dissected in performance: challenging its duration through the body, its flow through repetition, changing the idea of 'rehearsed' time through improvisation.

  • The occurence of Time in its dual capacity: La Ribot's Panoramix (2003) by exploring its fleeting and enduring quality. Subjective time.

  • The paradox of two impossible desires : to be present in the moment and to save/preserve the moment.

  • Temporality is scrutinised by questioning the commodification of time through slowing the speed, examining gestures, relations and meaning making/production.

  • Through questioning this, it is de-habitualising our need for instant relationship between art and meaning, desire and fulfillment, intention and realisation.




SPACE

  • It's form, operation and politics.

  • Site-specific art: investigates the matter, concept and perception of space.

  • Self in relation to Others: what is 'ours' and 'theirs' through interventions in public/social spaces, displacing,subverting or usurping places, re-ordering space and relation to question spatial divisions.

  • artists works pics



BODY

  • The artists body as objectified and the body that is malleable to be an object in relation to other materials. The blurred lines between subject and object.

  • Relation between self and others; intersubjectivity.

  • Sex, gender and ethnicity

  • Performer-spectator relationship : the unspoken contract, the 'divide'

  • Body Art: play of relations between surface and depth,corporeal experience inside and outside etc

  • Passive recipient of societal norms and active agent of testing these borders of the body.


ELEMENTAL LIFE

  • Human-animal relationships and dynamics.

  • Renouncing anthropocentrism

  • Commune with animal nature to re examine our values of art, culture and human exchange

  • Sensate opening: abject, liminal, without identity

  • Bio-political: placement of certain bodies by cultural authorities in conditions without humans or only to humans.

  • artists work pictures










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