{"id":618,"date":"2015-04-15T00:13:35","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T00:13:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/art-history-concepts.webspace.wheatoncollege.edu\/?page_id=618"},"modified":"2015-05-11T14:39:50","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T14:39:50","slug":"performance","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/art-history-concepts.webspace.wheatoncollege.edu\/?page_id=618","title":{"rendered":"Performance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lena Sawyer<\/h3>\n
\"Still<\/a>

Figure 1. Still from: Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975. Video<\/p><\/div>\n

Performance is a form of conceptual art that draws from a number of different media. In performance art, the artist expands her role as producer, since she implements her body as an instrument in the work itself. Works\u00a0in this genre also rely on elements such as time, setting, audience, context, and sound to provoke visceral and emotional responses in their viewers.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Performance seeks to create a more immediate experience for its viewer and open up the arts to a wider audience who can, in turn, potentially feel more directly involved in the production of the work.<\/p>\n

Some art historians mark the beginning of performance art with the Italian Futurist movement and works such as Luigi Russolo\u2019s “noise-sound” music (c.1909-1910).<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Dadaists working in Zurich also performed at Cabaret Voltaire, a performance space organized by Hugo Ball.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Ball performed recitations of unintelligible poems such as Karawane <\/i>(1916) that resisted typical language.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> These early forms of performance art were later followed by Bauhaus, Fluxus, Happenings, Feminist performance, and many others.<\/p>\n

By using the human body, performance can challenge the perceived limits of human physicality through works that involve endurance or physical pain. In\u00a0Chris Burden\u2019s Five Day Locker<\/i> (1971) for example, the artist\u00a0locked himself into a small gym locker for five consecutive days. By doing so, he challenged his body and mind to exist under circumstances that, to many, would seem impossible.<\/p>\n

Burden\u2019s work demonstrates how contested the definition of performance art is, due to its nature as a medium that seeks to defy the limits of any given medium, even the body. Combined with the way in which artists use activities that may appear to be entirely quotidien in any number of locations, for paying, non-paying, and accidental audiences, it\u2019s hard to say what is and isn\u2019t performance art.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Actions that may seem commonplace are often placed under examination, through a manipulation of context or time. The artist Martha Rosler acted out a situation that seems incredibly banal in Semiotics of the Kitchen <\/i>(1975). In this video, she stands in a kitchen while wearing an apron, demonstrating the various uses of kitchen utensils [Figure 1]. However, by modeling their function with violent gestures but\u00a0without any perceivable facial or vocal emotion, she reveals the contrived, meaningless, and often infuriating tasks allotted to women confined to the domestic sphere.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

In each of these works, there is an exploration on both the part of the artist and the viewer which\u00a0encourages them both to consider what has been thought of as \u2018natural\u2019 behavior, and then to question it. The works use\u00a0the bodies of the artists as instruments, which contain meaning due to their identities and physical forms. Performance may offer alternative ways of thinking and acting that were once deemed unnatural or impossible. For example, in the past, women were considered to be genetically inclined toward housework, a notion examined and challenged in Betty Friedan\u2019s The Feminine Mystique <\/em>(1963).<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Rosler’s work reveals the constructed nature of this perception by showing the actions to be both demeaning and repetitive with little thoughtful intention<\/a> behind them. By making forceful movements with each utensil, she underscores the hidden aggression required to maintain\u00a0all gender roles.<\/p>\n

Rosler\u2019s work may appear to be \u201cbad acting,\u201d as it is devoid of the behaviors many would have assumed of a housewife, constructed through media representations of the \u2018ideal woman\u2019 such as Julia Child. Indeed, the kind of performance that would infuriate theatergoers, in which the performative element is clear \u2013 read: \u201cbad acting\u201d \u2013 is what makes them effective in creating a critique of social expectations that would otherwise go unnoticed, looked over as \u201cnormal.\u201d<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In this way, Rosler\u2019s blank facial expression and unexpected movements actively counter these socially presupposed images of the jovial housewife.<\/p>\n

Performance has played a role in moving society forward, even as its function and appearance may change.<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Semiotics of the Kitchen <\/i>contributed to the wider feminist<\/a> movement that continues to this day while contemporary performance pieces are direct results of daily life and experience and may aim to disgust, annoy, or uplift their viewers, but all with an intention of altering perception.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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