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
7.
David Blaine
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David Blaine is an American magician, illusionist and endurance artist. He is best known for his feats of endurance, and has set. Blaine revolutionized the way magic is shown on television by focusing on spectator reactions and his idea was to turn the camera around on the people watching instead of the performer, to make the audience watch the audience. The New York Times noted that hes taken a craft thats been around for hundreds of years and done something unique, according to the New York Daily News, Blaine can lay claim to his own brand of wizardry. The magic he offers operates on a personal level. Blaine was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Patrice Maureen White, a teacher, and William Perez. His father was of half Puerto Rican and half Italian descent, when Blaine was four years old, he saw a magician performing magic in the subway. This triggered a lifelong interest for him and he was raised by his single mother and attended many schools in Brooklyn. When he was 10 years old, his mother married John Bukalo and they moved to Little Falls, New Jersey, when Blaine was 17 years old, he moved to Manhattan, New York. On May 19,1997, Blaines first television special, David Blaine and it really, really does break new ground, said Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller. When asked about his style, Blaine explained, “Id like to bring magic back to the place it used to be 100 years ago. ”Time commented, His deceptively low-key. Jon Racherbaumer commented, Make no mistake about it, the focus of show, boys. It is really about theatrical proxemics, about the show-within-a-show and the spontaneous, USA Today called Blaine the hottest name in magic right now. According to CNN, Blaines only communication to the world was by a hand buzzer. BBC News reported that the coffin had six inches of headroom. During the endurance stunt Blaine did not eat and drank only two to three US tablespoons of water a day. An estimated 75,000 people visited the site, including Marie Blood, Harry Houdinis niece, who said, My uncle did some amazing things, on the final day of the stunt, April 12, hundreds of news teams were stationed at the site for the coffin-opening. A team of construction workers removed a portion of the 75 cubic feet of gravel surrounding the 6-foot deep coffin before a crane lifted the water tank, Blaine emerged and told the crowd, I saw something very prophetic
8.
Ragnar Kjartansson (performance artist)
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Ragnar Kjartansson is an Icelandic performance artist. Kjartansson was born in 1976 in Reykjavík, where he lives today. His mother, Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir, is an actress in Iceland and used to perform with his father, Kjartan Ragnarsson, now a director. Through both of his parents professions, Ragnar was exposed to the theater from an young age. He was in and out of growing up, most notably as former member of the Icelandic band Trabant. He soon transferred mediums to visual art as he felt like a poser playing music and he began with visual art, and attended the Royal Academy, Stockholm, Sweden in 2000. He also attended the Icelandic Academy of the Arts, painting department, here he took a course in Feminist Art - and learned about the works of Marina Ambromovic and Vito Acconci and Chris Burden. This is where he found interest in blending the fake, repetitively rehearsed world of theatrics with which he was raised, since then his career has been characterized by experiments with visual art, music and theater. He works simultaneously as an artist and a musician and considers himself mainly as a performance artist, Ragnar currently lives and works in Reykjavik. He uses humor as a tool to disarm the audience, repetition is a reoccurring trait in his works, stemming from both a background in theater and in religion. And religion as a repetition to bring one closer to a greater path and this is embodied through any duration pieces, repeating process across many hours, days, months, even years. In a work entitled, Me and My Mother Ragnar has his mom stand in front of a recording camera and these videos have been made every five years since his graduation in 2000. Kjartansson represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2009, claimed to be the youngest artist ever to do so, Ragnar made a painting a day for six months, totaling in 144 paintings produced of the same model. These paintings were then displayed covering the walls in very close proximity, in 2011, Kjartansson won the inaugural Malcolm Award at Performa 11, the visual art performance biennial. Kristjan Johannson, an Icelandic tenor, played the count, with members of his class in the other roles. Also in 2011, Ragnar made Song 2011 in the Carnegie Museum of Art and this work involved his three beautiful nieces, sitting in the center of the museum surrounded by neoclassical sculptures, singing the same elegant refrain for six hours. The weight of the world is love, the lyrics change, the melody changes, the energy changes. The composition was created based on the acoustics of the space, it was highly considered how the sound would resonate and be absorbed
9.
Stan Lai
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Lai was born on 26 October 1954 in Washington D. C. where his father was serving in the Republic of Chinas Embassy. He returned to Taiwan in 1966, in 1976, Lai was graduate from Fu Jen Catholic University. In 1978, Lai married Ding Nai-chu. After the marriage, the couple went to US for further studies, the couple have two daughters, Stephanie, an actress, and Celeste Lai, an animator. He received his Ph. D. in Dramatic Art from University of California and he is also Professor and Founding Dean of the College of Theatre at Taipei National University of the Arts. In 1984, Lai and Ding founded Performance Workshop, a theatre group that has become one of the most celebrated in the Chinese world. Lai became the Artistic Director while Ding is the Managing Director and their work has revitalized theatre in Taiwan and had deep influence on the current theatre in mainland China. His films have won awards at Berlin, Tokyo and Singapore. In 2010, he was chosen by Newsweek China as Man of the Year in the field of Culture, in 2011, he received the Grand Cordon, Order of Brilliant Star from the Presidential Office, the highest civilian decoration for Taiwan. In 2006 and 2007, Lai taught at Stanford University as Visiting Professor, in 2013 he lectured at Berkeley as Avenali Fellow and Artist in Residence. In 2016, Lai directed the San Francisco Opera’s production of the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber, Stan Lais plays have been described as The pinnacle of our era of theatre. Since 1984, his over 30 original plays have continually pioneered the way toward new horizons in modern Chinese theatre, china’s prominent literary critic Yu Qiuyu says that Lai’s work “always has the ability to touch the heartstrings of countless audiences. Unauthorized productions of the play in China alone number over an astounding 1,000 performances, in 2007, Lai directed his own English translation of the play at Stanford University. Lais “crosstalk” plays, starting with the groundbreaking That Evening, We Performed Crosstalk have virtually forged a new theatrical genre and these hugely popular works have resuscitated the dying traditional performing art form of Xiangsheng. Lai remains a significant cultural bridge between Taiwan and China, and his influence on contemporary Chinese culture continues to grow, aside from his creative base in Taipei, Lai has been commissioned to create new works in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Beijing. In 2009 Lai was also director of the Deaflympics Opening and Closing Ceremonies held in Taipei. The Far Eastern Economic Review describes his work as the most exciting theatre in the Chinese-speaking world, Newsweek calls it the most recent piece of evidence that Taiwan is creating the boldest Chinese art in Asia today. International Herald Tribune says His work is never one dimensional or linear, in 2013, Lai served as the Artistic Director of the Inauagural Wuzhen Theatre Festival in the scenic water town of Wuzhen, China. A Dream Like A Dream opened the festival, Lais main tool for playwriting is his use of improvisation in collaboration with the actors, which include many of the most respected names of the time
10.
Eric Millikin
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Eric Millikin, also known as Eric Monster Millikin, is an American contemporary artist and activist based in Detroit. He is known for his work in Internet art, Postinternet art. Millikin also works in art and body art, including artistic drinking projects. His artwork is often controversial and semi-autobiographical, with political, romantic, occult, horror, Millikins art often includes self-portraits as well as portraits of celebrities and political figures. The artwork is mixed media, often combining expressionist paintings and optical illusions with found objects, Millikins works often include text written in free verse, anagrams, ambigrams and cut-up technique poetry. Millikins artwork has also published in books, serialized in newspapers. Millikin often collaborates with artist Casey Sorrow, together, Millikin and Sorrow created and popularized the international animal rights holiday World Monkey Day. Totally Sweet, a series of pop art, large-scale portraits of monsters, each created from thousands of packages of Halloween candy, Millikin uses over 40 different kinds of candy, and a single portrait can take between 5,000 and 10,000 candies. Included in the series are portraits of monsters as Freddy Krueger, Lily Munster, Gort, Godzilla. Millikin compares his artistic technique of building large monsters from many parts to the similar techniques Victor Frankenstein used to create his monster. Inverting a national flag in such a way is a commonly used distress signal, Witches and Stitches, a series of early digital comics, from the 1980s, which were the first webcomics ever published. This unauthorized Wizard of Oz parody comic was published by Millikin on CompuServe as early as 1985 when he was in elementary school, publishing on Compuserve allowed Millikin to self-publish, avoiding censorship. Witches and Stitches was popular with audiences around the world and Millikins success inspired many artists to create their own webcomics, copies of Witches and Stitches are now often difficult to find because Millikin was threatened with a lawsuit over the comic. Millikins outspoken autobiographical style paved the way for artists to express their thoughts. The paintings feature illusionary impossible objects, ambigrams and palindromes, fetus-X, a series of alternative comics created in collaboration with Casey Sorrow. Fetus-X featured a psychic zombie fetus floating in a jar of formaldehyde who may or may not be Millikins missing conjoined twin or his clone from a timeline or dimension. The comic was run for a time in Michigan State Universitys The State News in 2000. After the Catholic League protested the comic and then MSU president M. Peter McPherson declared he wanted it banned, during the controversy over the comic, many people protested on both sides of the issue
11.
Bruce Nauman
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Bruce Nauman is an American artist. His practice spans a range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico, Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but his fathers work as an engineer for General Electric meant that the family moved often. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and art with William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California, in 1964 he gave up painting to dedicate himself to sculpture, performance and cinema collaborations with William Allan and Robert Nelson. He worked as an assistant to Wayne Thiebaud, upon graduation, he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1966 to 1968, and at the University of California at Irvine in 1970. In 1968 he met the singer and performance artist Meredith Monk, Nauman moved from Northern California to Pasadena in 1969. In 1979, Nauman further moved to Pecos, New Mexico, in 1989, he established a home and studio in Galisteo, New Mexico, where he continues to work and live along with his wife, the painter Susan Rothenberg. In his studio soon after graduating, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product. ”Nauman set up a studio in a grocery shop in the Mission district of San Francisco. These two locations provided the setting for a series of performed actions which he captured in time, on a fixed camera. Between 1966 and 1970 he made several videos, in which he used his body to explore the potentials of art and the role of the artist, much of his work is characterized by an interest in language, often manifesting itself in a playful, mischievous manner. He has a strong interest in setting the metaphoric and descriptive functions of language against each other. For example, the neon Run From Fear – Fun From Rear, or the photograph Bound To Fail and he seems to be fascinated by the nature of communication and languages inherent problems, as well as the role of the artist as supposed communicator and manipulator of visual symbols. Naumans use of neon as a medium was very recurrent in his works and he uses neon in irony by making illusions to the numinous connotations of light, similarly to Mario Merz, who used neon new life to assemblages of mundane objects. Neon also connotes the public atmosphere by the means of advertising and his Self Portrait as a Fountain shows the artist spouting a stream of water from his mouth. A series of inspired by one of the artists dreams was brought together under the title of Dream Passage and created in 1983,1984. In his installation Changing Light Corridor with Rooms, a corridor is shrouded in darkness. In 1988, after a hiatus of two decades focused on time-based media, he resumed his work with cast objects
12.
Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)
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Mattress Performance was a work of endurance performance art by Emma Sulkowicz, conducted as her senior thesis during the final year of her visual arts degree at Columbia University in New York City. Begun in September 2014, the piece involved her carrying a 50-lb mattress—of the kind Columbia uses in its dorms—wherever she went on campus. She said the piece would end when a student she alleges raped her in her room in 2012 was expelled from or otherwise left the university. Sulkowicz carried the mattress until the end of the Spring semester as well as to her graduating ceremony in May 2015, the student Sulkowicz accused was found not responsible in 2013 by a university inquiry into the allegations. He called Sulkowiczs accusation untrue and unfounded and Mattress Performance an act of bullying, Sulkowicz filed a police complaint in May 2014, the district attorneys office did not pursue criminal charges, citing a lack of reasonable suspicion. The suit was dismissed in March 2016, the student filed an amended complaint on April 25,2016. The piece has been subject to controversy with praise from art critics, Art critic Jerry Saltz called Mattress Performance pure radical vulnerability and one of the best art shows of 2014. Social critic Camille Paglia criticized Mattress Performance stating that feminist works should empower women, Emma Sulkowicz is the daughter of Sandra Leong and Kerry Sulkowicz, psychiatrists from Manhattan. She attended Dalton School on the Upper East Side, and in 2011 began her visual arts degree at Columbia University, the student Sulkowicz accused denies the allegation, insisting that the encounter was entirely consensual. In April 2013,8 months after the encounter, Sulkowicz filed a complaint with the university, Sulkowicz says she filed her complaint after she encountered two other female students who said they had been victimized by the same individual. One was a girlfriend who said she was emotionally abused during their long-term relationship. The other said that on one occasion the accused student had moved toward her aggressively, grabbed her arms, shortly after Sulkowicz filed her complaint, the two other students with whom she was acquainted also filed complaints with the university against the same student. Columbia ultimately cleared him of responsibility in all three cases, the case attracted wider attention when the three female students who filed complaints gave interviews to the New York Post, which broke the story on December 11,2013, without naming those involved. In April 2014 Sulkowicz appeared with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand at a conference about campus sexual assault. The Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation in January 2015, on May 14,2014, Sulcowicz filed a complaint with the NYPD. The district attorneys office interviewed Sulkowicz and the student she accused in August, Sulkowicz created Mattress Performance in the summer of 2014 for her senior thesis while at Yale University Summer School of Art and Music. Her first effort was a video of herself moving a bed out of a room, accompanied by the audio of her filing the police report, the mattress later became the focus of the piece. Sulkowiczs thesis was supervised by artist Jon Kessler, a professor at Columbia, as the idea for Mattress Performance developed, Kessler and Sulkowicz discussed the nature of endurance art and the work of Tehching Hsieh, Marina Abramović, Ulay and Chris Burden
13.
Zhang Huan
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Zhang Huan is a Chinese artist based in Shanghai and New York City. He began his career as a painter and then transitioned to performance art before making a comeback to painting and he is primarily a performance artist but also makes photographs and sculpture. He received his B. A. from Henan University in Kaifeng, Zhang Huan began his work as part of a small artistic community, known as the Beijing East Village, located on the margins of the city. The group of friends from art school pioneered this particular brand of performance in China, zhang’s performances always involve his body in one way or another, usually naked, occasionally involving masochistic actions. For example, an exhibited photography showed him as a man, his head half-shaved. His skin was wet and covered with flies and his face looked blank but tough, as if he were trying to meditate his way through pain. In a more benign group performance called To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, he asked 40 migrant laborers to stand in a pond, their presence, presumably. For another titled To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, he and nine other artists climbed a mountain near Beijing, stripped and lay down on top of one another to create a second, Zhang involves the body in his sculptures as well. He makes giant copper hands and feet, magnified versions of fragments of broken Buddhist figures that he found in Tibet, by using quasi-religious ritual, he seeks to discover the point at which the spiritual can manifest via the corporeal. He uses simple repetitive gestures, usually regarded as meaningless work-for-work’s-sake chores, Buddhism, with its temple music, sculptures and philosophy are a prevalent theme in Zhang Huan’s work. His sculpture Long Ear Ash Head, for example, consists of a head made of incense ash. It fuses the artist’s image with the lengthened earlobes representing happiness and he continued to explore Buddhism with sculpture Sydney Buddha, an exhibition where two Buddha sculptures were positioned facing each other, One, a headless metal statue. The other, a sculpture made from over 20 tonnes of incense ash. Of Sydney Buddha, the artist said, “The piece conveys the collective memory, soul, thoughts and prayers and it implies a collective ineffectiveness, arising from taking action when none should be taken, upsetting the natural order of things. He has exhibited at shows including the 2002 Whitney Biennial and Rituals at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In the nearly 40 different performance art pieces that Zhang Huan performs and he did not have much space for himself, which impressed the idea of China’s overpopulation on him at young age. In 1994, Zhang Huan was in a village in China. He found a public restroom just off the street and went on in, because of a lot of rain the village had been receiving, the restroom wasn’t cleaned recently due to “weather precautions”
14.
Stylite
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A stylite or pillar-saint is a type of Christian ascetic who live on pillars, preaching, fasting and praying. Stylites believe that the mortification of their bodies would help ensure the salvation of their souls, Stylites were common in the early days of the Byzantine Empire. The first known stylite was Simeon Stylites the Elder who climbed a pillar in Syria in 423, palladius of Galatia tells of Epidius, a hermit in Palestine who dwelt in a mountaintop cave for twenty-five years until his death. St. Gregory of Nazianzus speaks of a solitary who stood upright for many years together, absorbed in contemplation, theodoret assures us that he had seen a hermit who had passed ten years in a tub suspended in midair from poles. In any case Simeon had a series of imitators, particularly in Syria. Daniel the Stylite may have been the first of these, for he had been a disciple of Simeon, daniel was a Syrian by birth but he established himself near Constantinople, where he was visited by both the Emperor Leo and the Emperor Zeno. Saint Luke the Younger, another famous pillar hermit, lived in the 10th century on Mount Olympus, daniel the Stylite lived on his pillar for 33 years after being blessed by and receiving the cowl of St. Simeon the Stylite. There were many others besides these who were not so famous, one or two isolated attempts seem to have been made to introduce this form of asceticism into the West, but it met with little favour. In the East cases were found as far back the 12th century, in the Russian Orthodox Church the practice continued until 1461, for the majority of the pillar hermits the extreme austerity of the lives of the Simeons and of Alypius was somewhat mitigated. Nonetheless, the life was one of endurance and privation. In recent centuries this form of monastic asceticism has become virtually extinct, however, in modern-day Georgia a monk of the Orthodox Church, Maxime Qavtaradze, has lived on top of Katskhi Pillar for 20 years, coming down only twice a week. This pillar is a rock formation jutting upward from the ground to a height of approximately one hundred. Evidence of use by stylites as late as the 13th century has been found on the top of the rock, with the aid of local villagers and the National Agency for Cultural Heritage Preservation of Georgia, Qavtaradze restored the 1200-year-old monastic chapel on the top of the rock. A film documentary on the project was completed in 2013, the Vertigo stunt performed by David Blaine on 22 March 2002 was in part inspired by the Pillar-Saints, as he declared in the TV documentary about this stunt. A song named Stylitis was written by the Greek singer-songwriter Thanasis Papakonstantinou in 1998, in Mark Twains A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, the title character encounters a stylite who prays by Metania and uses the pedal motion to sew shirts describes as St. Stylites. Umberto Ecos Baudolino temporarily becomes a stylite towards the end of the book, luis Buñuels Simón del desierto is a humorous film about the life of a stylite. In Terry Pratchetts Small Gods, a book from the Discworld series, in the episode Souvenirs of the TV series M*A*S*H, Cpl. Klinger sets a pole sitting record, in Anatole Frances Thaïs Paphnuce on his path to damnation becomes a stylite but unwittingly falling to temptation
15.
Jon Kessler
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Jon Kessler is an American artist. He began college at SUNY Purchase from 1974—78 but left two years to travel in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. He returned to Purchase in 1978 and graduated in 1980 with honors, following graduation, Kessler took up a studio in Brooklyn, New York where he continues to work today. He was one of the founders of the Bozart toy company and he also plays guitar for the X-Patsys, a band he started with artist Robert Longo and actress Barbara Sukowa. Kessler is best known for his sculptures that leave the mechanics exposed for the viewer. His work often combines centuries-old analog mechanisms with digital technology to explore the runoff of consumerist, much of Kessler’s work from the 1990s examined the interactions and tensions between Orient and Occident. He often presented Asia as a construct of Western Orientalism, while at the same time portraying the West in a state of decline. Kessler blended these visions with equal parts humor and tragedy in pieces such as The Last Birdrunner, a kinetic sculpture based on the science fiction movie Blade Runner. The Last Birdrunner represents, according to Artforum critic Neville Wakefield, “the nemesis of … utopian dreams in the guise of a lonely cockatoo wearing a life vest. ”With the advent of 9/11, Kessler’s focus shifted to confront themes of surveillance, isolationism, and war mongering in the United States. Kessler’s most recent exhibition, Palace at 4 A. M. is an “obsessive, aggressive, cheap color televisions stacked into scattered mounds project the live feed from the surveillance cameras, while images of American soldiers entering Saddam Hussein’s palace loom large on the wall. Here Kessler signals the demise of utopia by depicting the world as a “pell-mell kaleidoscopic mishmash… where all hell breaks loose all the time and human life is twisted as readily as metal. ”“You spend all your time polishing metal, ” Kessler is quoted as saying of his earlier work. “That refinement is like a trap, and it sends the viewers’ eyes to the place and breaks trust with them. This … show is about exposing mechanisms – of the sculpture, Kessler has recently expanded his practice of drawing and is currently working on a project with Dieu Donné, a papermaking studio in Manhattan, New York. Kessler is currently being sued for his role in approving Emma Sulkowiczs Mattress Performance art project and his work is also in many permanent collections, including those of the MoMA, the Whitney Museum, MOCA, Walker Art Center, and the Israel Museum. Kessler received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1983 and again in 1985, the St. Jon Kessler official website Jon Kessler at ARNDT Berlin Jon Kessler at culturebase. net
16.
Roberta Smith
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Roberta Smith is an American art critic for the New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art. Born in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas and her career in the arts started in 1968 while an undergraduate summer intern at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D. C. The following year she was awarded a fellowship to participate in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum where she met Donald Judd and became interested in minimal art. After graduation, she returned to New York City in 1971 to take a job at the Museum of Modern Art, followed by part-time assistant jobs to Judd. While at the Paula Cooper Gallery she wrote reviews for Artforum, and subsequently for Art in America. She began writing for the New York Times in 1986 and she writes not only about contemporary art but about the visual arts in general, including decorative arts, popular and outsider art, design and architecture. In 2003 the College Art Association awarded her the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, Smith lives in New York City with her husband Jerry Saltz, senior art critic for New York Magazine. Articles in the New York Times, accessed May 18,2009 Interview in the Brooklyn Rail, accessed May 18,2009
17.
Franz Kafka
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Franz Kafka was a Prague German-language novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His best known works include Die Verwandlung, Der Process, the term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those in his writing. Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague and he trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education he was employed with an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and he became engaged to several women but never married. He died in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis and his work went on to influence a vast range of writers, critics, artists, and philosophers during the 20th century. Kafka was born near the Old Town Square in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his family were middle-class Ashkenazi Jews. His father, Hermann Kafka, was the child of Jakob Kafka, a shochet or ritual slaughterer in Osek. Hermann brought the Kafka family to Prague, after working as a travelling sales representative, he eventually became a fancy goods and clothing retailer who employed up to 15 people and used the image of a jackdaw as his business logo. Kafkas mother, Julie, was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a retail merchant in Poděbrady. Hermann and Julie had six children, of whom Franz was the eldest, franzs two brothers, Georg and Heinrich, died in infancy before Franz was seven, his three sisters were Gabriele, Valerie and Ottilie. They all died during the Holocaust of World War II, Valli was deported to the Łódź Ghetto in Poland in 1942, but that is the last documentation of her. On business days, both parents were absent from the home, with Julie Kafka working as many as 12 hours each day helping to manage the family business, consequently, Kafkas childhood was somewhat lonely, and the children were reared largely by a series of governesses and servants. The dominating figure of Kafkas father had a significant influence on Kafkas writing, the Kafka family had a servant girl living with them in a cramped apartment. In November 1913 the family moved into an apartment, although Ellie. In early August 1914, just after World War I began, both Ellie and Valli also had children. Franz at age 31 moved into Vallis former apartment, quiet by contrast, from 1889 to 1893, Kafka attended the Deutsche Knabenschule German boys elementary school at the Masný trh/Fleischmarkt, now known as Masná Street. His Jewish education ended with his Bar Mitzvah celebration at the age of 13, Kafka never enjoyed attending the synagogue and went with his father only on four high holidays a year. German was the language of instruction, but Kafka also spoke and he studied the latter at the gymnasium for eight years, achieving good grades
18.
A Hunger Artist
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A Hunger Artist is a short story by Franz Kafka first published in Die neue Rundschau in 1922. The story was included in the collection A Hunger Artist. The protagonist, a hunger artist who experiences the decline in appreciation of his craft, is a creation of Kafka. The title of the story has been translated also to A Fasting Artist, a Hunger Artist was first published in the periodical Die neue Rundschau in 1922 and was subsequently included as the title piece in the short story collection. A Hunger Artist explores the familiar Kafka themes of death, art, isolation, asceticism, spiritual poverty, futility, personal failure, a Hunger Artist is told retrospectively through third-person narration. The narrator looks back several decades from today, to a time when the public marvelled at the hunger artist. It then depicts the waning interest in such displays, the story begins with a general description of the hunger artist and then narrows in on a single performer, the protagonist. The hunger artist performed in a cage for the curious spectators, despite such precautions, many, including some of the watchers themselves, were convinced that the hunger artist cheated. Such suspicions annoyed the hunger artist, as did the forty-day limit imposed on his fasting by his promoter, the impresario insisted that after forty days public sympathy for the hunger artist inevitably declined. The hunger artist, however, found the time limit irksome and arbitrary, as it prevented him from bettering his own record, from fasting indefinitely. At the end of a fast the hunger artist, amid highly theatrical fanfare, would be carried from his cage and made to eat and these performances, followed by intervals of recuperation, were repeated for many years. Despite his fame, the hunger artist felt dissatisfied and misunderstood, if a spectator, observing his apparent melancholy, tried to console him, he would erupt in fury, shaking the bars of his cage. The impresario would punish such outbursts by apologizing to the audience and he would then mention the hunger artists boast that he could fast much longer than he was doing, but would show photographs of the hunger artist near death at the end of a previous fast. In this way he suggested that the hunger artists sadness and poor physique was caused by fasting, the impresarios perversion of the truth further exasperated the hunger artist. Seemingly overnight, popular tastes changed and public fasting went out of fashion, the hunger artist broke his ties with the impresario and hired himself to a circus, where he hoped to perform truly prodigious feats of fasting. No longer an attraction, he was given a cage on the outskirts of the circus. Eventually, the hunger artist was completely ignored, no one, not even the artist himself, counted the days of his fast. One day an overseer noticed the hunger artists cage with its dirty straw and he wondered why the cage was unused, when he and the attendants inspected it, however, they found the hunger artist near death
19.
7000 Oaks
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7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration is a work of land art by the German artist Joseph Beuys. It was first publicly presented in 1982 at the documenta 7, with the help of volunteers, Beuys planted 7,000 oak trees over several years in Kassel, Germany, each with an accompanying basalt stone. In regard to the urbanization of the setting the work was an extensive artistic. The project, though at first controversial, has become an important part of Kassels cityscape, the project was of enormous scope, and met with some controversy. While the biggest difficulty of the project was raising the money, much of it was political, from the conservative state government dominated by the Christian Democrats. Some people thought the stone markers were ugly, even piling pink stones on the sites in 1982 as a prank. Also, a motorcyclist had died as a result of one of the stone markers, however, as more trees were planted peoples perception of the project as a parking lot destroyer had met with increasing tolerance. “I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time, the oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heart wood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet ever since the Druids and they used their oaks to define their holy places. I can see such a use for the future, the tree planting enterprise provides a very simple but radical possibility for this when we start with the seven thousand oaks. ”The planting of seven thousand oak trees is only a symbolic beginning. Contrary to its initiative, progressive features such a symbolic beginning requires a marker, Beuys art works and performances are not about entertaining and amusing the audience. It is a message from the tradition, a recognition of the whole based upon a new concept of beauty that extends beyond the instant gratification. I not only want to stimulate people, I want to provoke them and it is a movement from the tradition, the expected, and the established for an inclusive openness. Completed in 1987 by his son, Wenzel, on the first anniversary of his fathers death, the project was organized around Beuys philosophy that ‘everyone can be an artist’ by acknowledging the creativity inherent in volunteers planting trees on their own. The goal of the project was also to “extend the traditional role of the art gallery so the gallery extends out into the city”,1982 in art The Letters of Utrecht Living sculpture Social sculpture Beuys, Joseph, Blum, Bernhard, Rappmann, Rainer
20.
Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol
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Ceci Nest Pas Un Viol is a work of performance art by American artist Emma Sulkowicz. Released on 3 June 2015, the work consists of a website hosting a video, introductory text. The video shows Sulkowicz having sex with an actor in a dorm room at Columbia University in New York City. It was directed by artist Ted Lawson in early 2015, while Sulkowicz was in her year of a visual-arts degree at Columbia. The film illustrates the shift between consensual and non-consensual sex, the online response in the comments to the video is a central part of the work, described as an example of participatory art. Sulkowicz wanted to know what the public does with, which begins with the way they deal with it from the moment its disseminated, shortly after it appeared, the video was taken offline by a denial-of-service attack. By 9 June 2015, there were 2,700 comments on the site, Sulkowicz said she strongly believed in the videos importance, but that making it had been a traumatizing experience. Emma Sulkowicz is an American artist and anti-rape activist, the daughter of Sandra Leong and Kerry Sulkowicz, Sulkowicz is of Chinese-Japanese-Jewish descent. She attended Dalton School and Columbia University, obtaining a degree in arts in 2015. Her senior thesis at Columbia and her first notable artwork was Mattress Performance, the university cleared the student of responsibility, the district attorneys office declined to pursue criminal charges, citing lack of reasonable suspicion. Ceci Nest Pas Un Viol consists of a website that hosts a video, an introductory text and its existence was made public by a Facebook post from the videos director, Ted Lawson. Sulkowicz says she had the idea for the piece in December 2014, Lawson told ArtNet that he thought the piece was super risky and courageous. Sulkowicz stressed that it was a piece from Mattress Performance. Sulkowicz wrote the script and introductory text, chose the position of the cameras, the lighting, the scene was filmed in one continuous take three times during the Columbia spring break in March 2015. According to Lawson, Sulkowicz had insisted on it being completely real, thats what makes it a performance art piece. Sulkowicz told the Guardian that making the video had been traumatizing and she said elsewhere that vulnerability is part of what makes performance art good. The introductory text said that the video was not an enactment of Sulkowiczs rape allegation, rather, Ceci Nest Pas Un Viol. about your decisions, starting now. Sulkowicz gives only provisional consent to view the video, Do not watch this video if your motives would upset me, my desires are unclear to you and you might be wondering why Ive made myself this vulnerable
21.
Yoko Ono
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Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist who is also known for her work in performance art and filmmaking. She is the wife and widow of singer-songwriter John Lennon of the Beatles. Ono grew up in Tokyo, and studied at Gakushuin and she withdrew from her course after two years and rejoined her family in New York in 1953. She spent some time at Sarah Lawrence College, and then involved in New York Citys downtown artists scene. She first met Lennon in 1966 at her own art exhibition in London and she brought feminism to the forefront in her music, influencing artists as diverse as the B-52s and Meredith Monk. Ono achieved commercial and critical acclaim in 1980 with the chart-topping album Double Fantasy, public appreciation of Onos work has shifted over time, helped by a retrospective at a Whitney Museum branch in 1989 and the 1992 release of the six-disc box set Onobox. She received a Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale in 2009, as Lennons widow, Ono works to preserve his legacy. She funded Strawberry Fields in New York City, the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland, and she has made significant philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace, Philippine and Japan disaster relief, and other causes. In 2012 Yoko Ono received the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Human Rights Award endowed by Alexandra Hildebrandt, the award is given annually in recognition of extraordinary, non-violent commitment to human rights. Ono continues her activism, inaugurating a biennial $50,000 LennonOno Grant for Peace in 2002. She has a daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, from her marriage to Anthony Cox, Ono was born on February 18,1933, in Tokyo, to Isoko Ono and Eisuke Ono, a banker and former classical pianist. Isokos father was ennobled in 1915, isokos maternal grandfather Zenjiro Yasuda was an affiliate of the Yasuda clan and zaibatsu. Eisuke came from a line of samurai warrior-scholars. The kanji translation of Yokos first name Yoko means ocean child, Two weeks before Yokos birth, Eisuke was transferred to San Francisco by his employer, the Yokohama Specie Bank. The rest of the family followed soon after, with Yoko meeting Eisuke when she was two and her younger brother Keisuke was born in December 1936. Yoko was enrolled in piano lessons from the age of 4, in 1937, the family was transferred back to Japan and Ono enrolled at Tokyos Gakushuin, one of the most exclusive schools in Japan. In 1940, the moved to New York City. The next year, Eisuke was transferred from New York City to Hanoi, Ono was enrolled in Keimei Gakuen, an exclusive Christian primary school run by the Mitsui family
22.
One & Other
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One & Other was a public art project by Antony Gormley, in which 2,400 members of the public occupied the usually vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, for an hour each for 100 days. The project began at 9 am on Monday 6 July 2009, the first person to officially occupy the plinth was Rachel Wardell from Lincolnshire. A documentary art book by Gormley, entitled One and Other, was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 14 October 2010, the Wellcome Trust has posted online at its website its series of oral-history interviews of the 2400 plinthers. The project was opened by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, minutes before the official launch Stuart Holmes, an anti-smoking protester, managed to clamber onto the plinth and displayed a banner calling for a ban on tobacco. Gormley urged him to do the thing and give up his place to the first official plinther. He did so and descended in the cherry picker used to carry participants to, members of the public could apply for an hour on the plinth via the projects website. Gormley himself applied but didnt get a place, on 14 July at 8.00 pm, poet R. N. Taber read a selection of his poems, while photographer Alex Boyd collaborated with Scottish Makar Edwin Morgan for his time on the plinth. On 12 August at 1 am, a naked plinther was asked to cover up by the police, streamed live online by SkyArts, the exhibit quickly developed a cadre of regular Twitter followers who provided a running commentary of events on the plinth. Archive of official website Review by Adrian Searle Review by Jonathan Jones in September. And in October Why I made an exhibition of myself on the plinth Resistance on the Plinth
23.
Rhythm 0
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Rhythm 0 was a six-hour work of performance art by Yugoslav artist Marina Abramović in Studio Morra, Naples. The work involved Abramović standing still while the audience was invited to do to her whatever they wished, using one of 72 objects she had placed on a table. These included a rose, feather, perfume, honey, bread, grapes, wine, scissors, a scalpel, nails, a bar. Abramović and the visitors stood in the space, making it clear that the latter were part of the work. The purpose of the piece, she said, was to find out how far the public would go, What is the public about and her instructions were placed on the table, Instructions. There are 72 objects on the table one can use on me as desired. During this period I take full responsibility, duration,6 hours Abramović said the work pushed her body to the limits. Visitors were gentle to begin with, offering her a rose or a kiss, art critic Thomas McEvilley, who was present, wrote, It began tamely. Someone thrust her arms into the air, the Neapolitan night began to heat up. In the third hour all her clothes were cut from her with razor blades, in the fourth hour the same blades began to explore her skin. Her throat was slashed so someone could suck her blood, various minor sexual assaults were carried out on her body. She was so committed to the piece that she would not have resisted rape or murder, faced with her abdication of will, with its implied collapse of human psychology, a protective group began to define itself in the audience. When a loaded gun was thrust to Marinas head and her own finger was being worked around the trigger, as Abramović described it later, “What I learned was that. If you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you. ”, “I felt really violated, they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up, everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation. ”When the gallery announced the work was over, and Abramović began to move again, she said the audience left, unable to face her as a person
24.
Seven Easy Pieces
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Seven Easy Pieces was a series of performances given by artist Marina Abramović in New York City at the Guggenheim Museum in November 2005. Theres nobody to keep the history straight, she told the New York Times in an interview published in early November 2005, I felt like I have this function to do it. Seven Easy Pieces is also available in DVD and its considered to be useful for performing arts students who study post-structuralism. Seven Easy Pieces comprised seven individual works – two of her own and five by other artists – performed on seven consecutive nights beginning on November 9th
25.
Three Weeks in May
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Three Weeks in May, Speaking Out On Rape, A Political Art Piece was an extended work of performance art and activism by Suzanne Lacy. The piece took place in Los Angeles, California from May 8 to May 24,1977, Lacy designed Three Weeks in May in collaboration with artists Leslie Labowitz, Jill Soderholm, Melissa Hoffman and Barbara Cohen. It was sponsored by the Womans Building and Studio Watts Workshop, Lacy designed the expanded performance to be a simultaneous juxtaposition of art and non-art activities within an extended time frame, taking place within the context of popular culture. Lacy had a background in the anti-rape movement, the media was engaged through press conferences, television programs, and radio talk shows. The City Mall Shopping Center was chosen as the site of a piece due to its proximity to Los Angeles City Hall. Two 25-foot maps of the greater Los Angeles Area were used for Three Weeks, on one of the maps, every day Lacy used a large red RAPE stamp to mark locations where rapes from the previous day had been reported. Reports were taken from the Los Angeles Police Department, who assigned an officer to work with Lacy. The second map included rape hotlines and the locations of crisis centers. Labowitz organized a series addressing rape that was held at lunchtime in the underground City Mall Shopping Center for four consecutive days. She collaborated with different groups for the performances, the Rape was developed in collaboration with Women against Rape, Men against Rape. All Men Are Potential Rapists included two men from the Los Angeles Mens Collective, the performances Myths about Rape and Women Fight Back were done with the help of Womans Building members. Lacy created the performance installation She Who Would Fly at Garage Gallery for Three Weeks, over the course of two afternoons, she invited women to voice their experiences with rape. The women then wrote their experiences on paper that was taped to the location where they were assaulted on one of the maps that covered the walls of the small gallery space. Poet Deena Metzger scrawled a description of her rape on one of the walls and she Who Would Fly was opened to the public for an evening and visitors could enter four at a time and read the stories. A winged lamb carcass was suspended from the ceiling and four performers, each having experienced sexual violence, sat silently above the door, Three Weeks in May prompted the police and the city government to address violence against women openly and to publicize rape hotlines. Lacy and Labowitz continued to collaborate on art projects, addressing gender violence again that December with their In Mourning. Three Weeks in May was the first of Lacys large scale public art projects, in the NWSA Journal, art historian Vivien Green Fryd wrote that Lacys Three Weeks marked the beginning of New Genre Public Art. It included presentations, conversations, and a performance called Storytelling Rape and this time the map was installed prominently on the Los Angeles Police Departments main campus
26.
Untitled (Rape Scene)
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Untitled is a color photograph documentation created from a 35mm slide by Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta. She made it during an April 1973 performance while still a student at the University of Iowa and it is one of three photographs she created in reaction to the rape and murder of a woman on campus. Some time later, Mendieta recalled that her audience all sat down, I stayed in position about an hour. In 1980, she commented that the rape had moved and frightened her, elaborating, I can’t see being theoretical about an issue like that. On another occasion she explained that she had created this work as a reaction against the idea of violence against women, art writer Megan Heuer describes the work as capturing the artists interest in violence. Influenced by the work of the Viennese Actionists, Untitled also expresses Mendietas desire to evoke a reaction from her audience. Ana Mendieta, exhibition catalogue, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona,1996. Viso, Olga M. Ana Mendieta, Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972–1985, exhibition catalogue, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC,2004
27.
Bas Jan Ader
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Bastiaan Johan Christiaan Bas Jan Ader was a Dutch conceptual artist, performance artist, photographer and filmmaker. He had lived in Los Angeles, California for the last twelve years of his life and his work was in many instances presented as photographs and film of his performances. He made performative installations, including Please Dont Leave Me, Ader was lost at sea in 1975, three weeks after he set off from the United States in a small sailing boat, attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean and reach the United Kingdom. His deserted vessel was found off the coast of Ireland on 18 April 1976, born on 19 April 1942, Ader grew up in Winschoten, northern Netherlands. His father, Bastiaan Jan Ader and his mother Johanna Adriana Ader-Appels were both Calvinist ministers and his father was executed in 1944 by the German occupying force for helping Jews escape The Holocaust. His mother raised him and his brother, Erik, during adolescence, Ader took art classes at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, and later in the United States during a study abroad program. Ader graduated from the Otis College of Art and Design in 1965 with a BFA, after graduating, he taught at various institutions, including Mt. San Antonio College, Immaculate Heart College, and the University of California, Irvine. Ader created a handful of photographs as well as several short films in which he is the sole performer. In 1969–70 he anonymously published the satirical conceptual art magazine Landslide with his friend William Leavitt, the magazine featured “interviews” with nonexistent artists, such as “Brian Shitart”, and pranks such as “expandable sculpture” which was five packing peanuts in an envelope. Although satirical of conceptual art, the magazine itself is considered a work of conceptual art, due to his loss at sea, the piece was not completed. The title “In Search of the Miraculous” was a reference to P. D, ouspenskys mystical book In Search of the Miraculous. On 9 July 1975, Ader set off in a 13 ft “Guppy 13” pocket cruiser named Ocean Wave, to make his single-handed west–east crossing of the North Atlantic. Having estimated that the voyage should take him no longer than two and a half months, Ader only managed to stay in touch for three weeks before radio contact broke off. His unmanned boat would not be found until ten months later, although the vessel had been spotted 60 mi off the American East Coast and again near the Azores, its sole crewman was never heard from again and is presumed dead. It is unknown whether Ader was dragged to his death by a wave, became disorientated and jumped overboard. The boat itself, recovered by the Spanish fishing vessel that found it, was taken to Coruña from where it was some time between 18 May and 7 June 1976. Aders mother wrote the poem From the Deep Waters of Sleep on 12 October 1975, after having what she described as a premonition of his death, in the distance I hear a train rumbling in the early morning. It is going East and passes the border, I feel my heart beating too
28.
Laurie Anderson
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Laura Phillips Laurie Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of art projects in New York during the 1970s, making particular use of language, technology. She became widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single O Superman reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave, Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair. In the late 1990s, she developed a talking stick, a six-foot long baton-like MIDI controller that can access, Anderson started dating Lou Reed in 1992, and was married to him from 2008 until his death in 2013. Anderson was born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, on June 5,1947 and she graduated from Glenbard West High School. She attended Mills College in California, and eventually graduated from Barnard College magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, in 1972, she obtained an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University. Her first performance-art piece—a symphony played on automobile horns—was performed in 1969, in 1970, she drew the underground comix Baloney Moccasins, which was published by George DiCaprio. She performed in New York during the 1970s, two early pieces, New York Social Life and Time to Go, are included in the 1977 compilation New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, along with works by Pauline Oliveros and others. Two other pieces were included on Airwaves, a collection of pieces by various artists. She also recorded a lecture for Vision, a set of artists released by Crown Point Press as a set of 6 LPs. Many of Andersons earliest recordings remain unreleased, or were only issued in limited quantities, such as her first single, among the musicians on these early recordings are Peter Gordon on saxophone, Scott Johnson on guitar, Ken Deifik on harmonica, and Joe Kos on drums. Photographs and descriptions of many of early performances were included in Andersons retrospective book. Among the Giorno-released recordings was Youre the Guy I Want to Share My Money With and she also worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s. In 1980 Anderson was awarded a doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1982 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts—Film, Anderson became widely known outside the art world in 1981 with the single O Superman, originally released in a limited quantity by B. Georges One Ten Records, which reached number two in the British charts
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