1.
Museum of Modern Art
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The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is identified as one of the largest and most influential museums of modern art in the world. The MoMA Library includes approximately 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, over 1,000 periodical titles, the archives holds primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art. The idea for The Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1929 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and they became known variously as the Ladies, the daring ladies and the adamantine ladies. They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and it opened to the public on November 7,1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Abby had invited A. Conger Goodyear, the president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. At the time, it was Americas premier museum devoted exclusively to art. One of Abbys early recruits for the staff was the noted Japanese-American photographer Soichi Sunami. Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Sachs and Frank Crowninshield to join him as founding trustees, Sachs, the associate director and curator of prints and drawings at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, was referred to in those days as a collector of curators. Goodyear asked him to recommend a director and Sachs suggested Alfred H. Barr, under Barrs guidance, the museums holdings quickly expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing. Its first successful exhibition was in November 1929, displaying paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne. Abbys husband was opposed to the museum and refused to release funds for the venture. Nevertheless, he donated the land for the current site of the museum, plus other gifts over time. During that time it initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists, the museum also gained international prominence with the hugely successful and now famous Picasso retrospective of 1939–40, held in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago. In its range of presented works, it represented a significant reinterpretation of Picasso for future art scholars, Boy Leading a Horse was briefly contested over ownership with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1941, MoMA hosted the exhibition, Indian Art of the United States. His brother, David Rockefeller, also joined the board of trustees in 1948. David subsequently employed the noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the garden and name it in honor of his mother
2.
Performance art
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Performance art is a performance presented to an audience within a fine art context, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated. The performance can be live or via media, the performer can be present or absent and it can be any situation that involves four basic elements, time, space, the performers body, or presence in a medium, and a relationship between performer and audience. Performance art can happen anywhere, in any type of venue or setting, the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. Performance art is a contested concept, any single definition of it implies the recognition of rival uses. As concepts like democracy or art, it implies productive disagreement with itself, the meaning of the term in the narrower sense is related to postmodernist traditions in Western culture. The ideal had been an ephemeral and authentic experience for performer, the widely discussed difference, how concepts of visual arts and concepts of performing arts are utilized, can determine the meanings of a performance art presentation. It therefore can include action or spoken word as a communication between the artist and audience, or even ignore expectations of an audience, rather than following a script written beforehand, some kinds of performance art nevertheless can be close to performing arts. Performance artists often challenge the audience to think in new and unconventional ways, break conventions of traditional arts, and break down conventional ideas about what art is. Some artists, e. g. the Viennese Actionists and neo-Dadaists, prefer to use the terms live art, action art, actions, as genres of performance art appear body art, fluxus-performance, happening, action poetry, and intermedia. Performance art activity is not confined to European or American art traditions, notable practitioners can be found in Asia, Performance artists and theorists point to different traditions and histories, ranging from tribal to sporting and ritual or religious events. There are also accounts of Renaissance artists such as itinerant poets putting on performances that could be said to be ancestors of performance art. Western cultural theorists often trace performance art activity back to the beginning of the 20th century, to the Russian constructivists, Futurists, Dada provided a significant progenitor with the unconventional performances of poetry, often at the Cabaret Voltaire, by the likes of Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara. Russian Futurist artists could be identified as precursors of performance, such as David Burliuk, abstract expressionism and Action painting preceded the Fluxus movement, Happenings and the emergence of Performance Art. Performance art was anticipated, if not explicitly formulated, by Japans Gutai group of the 1950s, in the late 1960s Earth artists as diverse as Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer and Carl Andre created environmental pieces that predict the performance art of the 1970s. Works of conceptual artists in the early 1980s, like Sol LeWitt, who converted mural-style drawing into an act of performance by others, were influenced by Yves Klein and the Earth artists as well. In the 1960s a variety of new works, concepts and the number of artists led to new kinds of performance art. Kaprow had coined the term Happening describing a new artform, at the beginning of the 1960s, a Happening allows the artist to experiment with body motion, recorded sounds, written and spoken texts, and even smells
3.
Chris Burden
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Christopher Lee Chris Burden was an American artist working in performance, sculpture and installation art. Christopher Lee Burden, the son of Robert Burden, an engineer, and Rhoda Burden, Burden began to work in performance art in the early 1970s, he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His first significant performance work, Five Day Locker Piece, was created for his master’s thesis at the University of California, Irvine. His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the 1971 performance piece Shoot, other performances from the 1970s were Match Piece, Deadman, B. C. Mexico, Fire Roll, TV Hijack, Doomed and Honest Labor, One of Burden’s most reproduced and cited pieces, Trans-Fixed took place on April 23,1974 at Speedway Avenue in Venice, California. For this performance, Burden lay face up on a Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into both of his hands, as if he were being crucified on the car. The car was pushed out of the garage and the engine revved for two minutes before being pushed back into the garage, later that year, Burden performed his piece White Light/White Heat at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York. For this work of experiment performance and self-inflicting danger, Burden spent twenty-two days lying on a platform in the corner of the gallery. He was out of sight from all viewers and he could not see them either, according to Burden, he did not eat, talk, or come down the entire time. Burden planned to remain in position until someone interfered in some way with the piece. By the end of the 1970s, Burden turned instead to vast engineered sculptural installations. In 1975, he created the fully operational B-Car, a lightweight four-wheeled vehicle that he described as being able to travel 100 miles per hour, a reconstruction of the first ever made Mechanical television. Burden cited the performance in his letter of resignation, saying that the student should have been suspended during the investigation into whether school safety rules had been violated, the performance allegedly involved a loaded gun, but authorities were unable to substantiate this. In 1979, Burden first exhibited his notable Big Wheel exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery and it was later exhibited in 2009 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 1980, he produced The Atomic Alphabet – a giant, poster-sized hand-colored lithograph – and performed the text dressed in leather, twenty editions of the work were produced and are largely in the possession of museums, including SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Many of Chris Burden’s later sculptures are intricate installations and structures consisting of small parts. In 1992, he exhibited his Fist of Light during the Whitney Biennial exhibition in New York and it consisted of a sealed kitchen-sized metal box with hundreds of metal halide lamps burning inside. It required an air conditioner to cool the room
4.
Tehching Hsieh
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Tehching Hsieh is a performance artist. He has been called a master by fellow performance artist Marina Abramović and he was one of 15 children from a family in southern Taiwan, his father had five wives. He dropped out from school and started creating paintings, he went on to create several performance pieces after finishing his three years of compulsory military service in Taiwan. In 1974, he jumped ship to a pier on the Delaware River, near Philadelphia, from 1978 to 1986, Hsieh accomplished five One Year Performances, from 1986–1999, he worked on what he called his Thirteen-Year Plan. On 1 January 2000, in his report to the public and he stopped making art since then. The year after its release, he told the New York Times, in 2009, the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited a collection documenting his performance. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York also showed one of his works in 2009 as part of its exhibition, The Third Mind, American Artists Contemplate Asia. He is most known for six durational performance pieces completed between 1978 and 2000, during the year, he did not allow himself to talk, to read, to write, or to listen to radio and TV. A lawyer, Robert Projansky, notarized the entire process and made sure the artist never left the cage during that one year and his loftmate came daily to deliver food, remove the artists waste, and take a single photograph to document the project. In addition, this performance was open to be viewed once or twice a month from 11am to 5pm, for one year, from 11 April 1980 through 11 April 1981, Hsieh punched a time clock every hour on the hour. Each time he punched the clock, he took a picture of himself. He shaved his head before the piece, so his growing hair reflects the passage of time, documentation of this piece was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2009, using film, punch cards and photographs. This work was the first of Hsiehs ever to be displayed in the UK at the Liverpool Biennial in 2010 and he moved around New York City with a packbag and a sleeping bag. In this performance, Hsieh and Linda Montano spent one year between 4 July 1983 and 4 July 1984 tied to each other with an 8-foot-long rope and they had to stay in the same room and were not allowed to touch each other until the end of the one-year period. Both of them shaved their hair in the beginning of the year, at the beginning of this epic piece, Hsieh declared, Will make Art during this time. This plan began on his 36th birthday,31 December 1986, at the end, on 1 January 2000 he issued his concluding report, I kept myself alive. I passed the December 31st,1999, the report consisted of cutout letters pasted onto a single sheet of paper. His pieces are not feats of stamina nor consciously motivated by a desire to suffer (although they have described as ordeals
5.
Ulay
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Ulay is an artist based in Amsterdam and Ljubljana. Since 1971, he is known in circles as Ulay. His artistic trajectory amounts to a radical and historically unique oeuvre, situated at the intersection of photography and his lifelong struggle with his sense of “German-ness” turned him into a modern nomad, a cosmopolitan free thinker whose identity has never been defined by nationality. In the early 1970s, as a man, he moved to Amsterdam. Here he began an adventure in photography. This way of accessing knowledge through the intelligence of the body offers a fundamental rationale for his predilection for photography and performance. The modes of display as filmic successions and series of actions were not very common at the time, in other works from the same Renais sense series, the hybrid identity and transgender visual rhetoric is replaced by the representation of the androgynous. These works translate different feelings and needs, the desire to obtain an androgynous unity, among these experiences, his relationship with Paula Françoise-Piso is of special importance, because she played more than the role of a muse. Precisely this knowledge of the potential of photography opened up new perspectives for him on how to use the medium, how to escape it. The two consecutive actions entitled FOTOTOT, realized in 1976 at De Appel in Amsterdam, are the first in a line of experiments that aim to dismantle this myth of photographic objectivity. This approach once again explains his lifetime predilection for photographic experiments, in many ways, these FOTOTOT actions are emblematic, they assert Ulay’s strong commitment to objectivity, a commitment to which he would remain loyal throughout his life. And it also prefigures the articulation of a critique that questions the validity of the photographic approach in the absence of the artist’s own artistic program. He photographed the work in its new context, and shortly thereafter called the director to come. Their experience of life and creation is inextricably linked to the experience of totality, in the years of Relation Work that refer to the collaboration with Marina Abramović, Ulay controlled the outcome of the documentation of their joint performances in terms of photography and video. By the end of the 1990s, Ulay started investigating the role of the audience, the combination between the haptical and optical visuality creates a picture of a different quality that is new and provocative in all senses. Beyond the obvious references to the symbolism of national identities, these works bring to light Berlin’s historical sites as an aesthetic experience, after these works, Ulay abandoned issues related to self-identity and headed towards projects that explore new social and technological developments. He senses that in new paradigms, art can claim to be contemporary only to the extent to which it exposes the nothingness and its own exhaustion. Consequently, in his works realized at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, as a result, visual representation took on a new function, to serve as a place of encounters, or as ‘social interstice’
6.
Vito Acconci
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Vito Hannibal Acconci is an American designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist. Acconci was married to the artist Rosemary Mayer, Acconci went to a Roman Catholic elementary school, high school, and college. He attended Regis High School in New York City and he received a BA in literature from the College of the Holy Cross in 1962 and an MFA in literature and poetry from the University of Iowa. He noted, There wasnt a woman in my classroom between kindergarten and graduate school, Acconci began his career as a poet, editing 0 TO9 with Bernadette Mayer in the late 1960s. In the late 1960s, Acconci transformed himself into a performance and video artist using his own body as a subject for photography, film, video, most of his early work incorporated subversive social comment. His performance and video work was marked heavily by confrontation and Situationism, in the mid-1970s, Acconci expanded his métier into the world of audio/visual installations. One installation/performance piece from this period is Seedbed, one motivation behind Seedbed was to involve the public in the works production by creating a situation of reciprocal interchange between artist and viewer. Cindy Nemser was the first art critic to write about Vito Acconci for Arts Magazine in 1971, Nemser also later did an interview with Vito Acconci which became the cover piece for Arts Magazine. In the article Video, the Aesthetics of Narcissism, Rosalind Krauss refers to aspects of Narcissism apparent in the work of Acconci. “A line of sight begin Acconci’s plane of vision ends on the eyes of his projected double”, Krauss uses this description to underline aspects of narcissism in the Vito Acconci work Centers. Krauss also goes on to explain the basis behind the actions of video in comparison to discussions of object art. In the 1980s, Acconci turned to permanent sculptures and installations, during this time he invited viewers to create artwork by activating machinery that erected shelters and signs. Later, in January 1983, Acconci was a visiting artist at Middlebury College, during that time, he completed Way Station I, which was his first permanent installation. The work sparked immense controversy on the campus, and was eventually set on fire. Acconci Studio is located on Jay Street in Brooklyn, the artist has focused on architecture and landscape design that integrates public and private space. One example of this is Walkways Through the Wall, which flow through structural boundaries of the Midwest Airlines Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and provide seating at both ends. The project replaced the existing facade with a series of panels that pivot vertically or horizontally to open the entire length of the gallery directly onto the street. Another example of his work is Dirt Wall at the Arvada Center for the Arts, the wall begins outside the Arvada Center and extends inside, rising from ground level to a height of 24 feet
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