Performance Art
Performance Art Insider - Marina Abramović - New York
marinafilm.com
Marina Abramović was born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Since the beginning of her career in the early 1970s when she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. As a vital member of the generation of pioneering performance artists that includes Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, Abramović created some of the most historic early performance pieces and continues to make important durational works. Abramović has presented her work with performances, sound, photography, video and sculpture in solo exhibitions at major institutions in the U.S. and Europe. Her work has also been included in many large-scale international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1976 and 1997) and Documenta VI, VII and IX, Kassel, Germany (1977, 1982 and 1992). In 1998, the exhibition Artist Body - Public Body toured extensively, including stops at Kunstmuseum and Grosse Halle, Bern, Switzerland and La Gallera, Valencia, Spain. In 2004, Abramović also exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York and had a significant solo show, The Star, at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan and the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan. In 2011, Abramović participated in visionary director Robert Wilson's, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, the critically acclaimed re-imagination of Abramović's biography, which continues to tour internationally. The feature length documentary, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, premiered in January 2012 at the Sundance Film Festival and has since received widespread critical acclaim. Abramović is currently developing the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) in Hudson, New York, an interdisciplinary performance and education center dedicated to the presentation and preservation of long durational work and the fostering of collaborations between art, science, technology and spirituality. skny.com/artists/marina-abramovi A documentary that follows the Serbian performance artist as she prepares for a retrospective of her work at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Performance Art Talk
Comedian and art enthusiast Frank Skinner explores performance art and its origins; from dada and surrealism through to Yoko Ono and Joseph Beuys. Unlock Art is Tate's new short film series, offering a witty inside track on the world of art. Frank Skinner joins forces with new Doctor Who actor Peter Capaldi, Alan Cumming and other celebrity art fans to introduce some of the big ideas that have shaped art history. A new film is released each month, with topics ranging from the history of the nude and the nature of the art market, to surrealism and Pop art. The topic of the last of the eight films in the series will be put to an online public vote.youtube.com/watch?v=CAz6a5FwZJQ |
Featured Performance - Marigolds
What is Performance Art?
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or via media; the performer can be present or absent. It can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body, or presence in a medium, and a relationship between performer and audience. Performance art can happen anywhere, in any venue or setting and for any length of time. The actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. In the second half of the decade, computer-aided forms of performance art began to take place.
Since January 2003 Tate Modern in London has had a curated programme of live art and performance and in 2012 The Tanks at Tate Modern were opened: the first dedicated spaces for performance, film and installation in a major modern and contemporary art museum. From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Marina Abramović's work, the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA's history. During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed "The Artist is Present," a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium, while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. A support group for the "sitters," "Sitting with Marina," was established on Facebook. The performance attracted celebrities such as Björk and James Franco and received coverage on the internet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_art Quote
What I can't tell with a photo I will tell with a painting, and what I can't tell with a painting I will tell with a video or text sometimes, et cetera.
-Francis Alys |
Worth Reading
No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience
(Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture) Purchase link: amazon.com/No-Innocent-Bystanders-Performance-Interfaces/dp/1611683351/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406143411&sr=1-3&keywords=performance+art Average Price: $26.96 Pages: 224 Synopsis: At a moment when performance art and performance generally are at the center of the international art world, Frazer Ward offers us insightful readings of major performance pieces by the likes of Acconci, Burden, Abramovi , and Hsieh, and confronts the twisting and troubled relationship that performance art has had with the spectator and the public sphere. Ward contends that the ethical challenges with which performance art confronts its viewers speak to the reimagining of the audience, in terms that suggest the collapse of notions like “public” and “community.” A thoughtful, even urgent discussion of the relationship between art and the audience that will appeal to a broad range of art historians, artists, and others interested in constructions of the public sphere. |
Yoko Ono: Performances at the Louisiana Museum