Performance

For performance, in my own practice I am concerned with the with the conceptual and technical possibilities of a means of expression, which underpins an attempt to deal with something repressed. This subsequently with all the narcissism and autobiographical details that surrounds it returns to the surface of an experience.
Exploring the temporality, contingency and instability my body, exploring the notion that identity within and beyond cultural boundaries appears to be ‘acted out,’ rather than being an inherent quality. Breaking down these boundaries between art and life, in proposing to erase the division between the everyday and the artistically produced, and more specifically between the artist and the viewer.  
For it is performance that critics such as Peggy Phelan, cognitively argues that for the authentic witnessing of a performance, and the cathartic physical experience for both the audience and the artist themself, appears to inevitably guarantee an authentic knowledge and inviolate interpretation of that experience.  Phelan critiques that experience is merely about the disappearance, rather than preservation in performance that retains and transform one to an authentic knowing.
Performance creates immediacy and unpredictability, being ephemeral and ideally spontaneous, with no repetition and no predicted ending, rather a place of experience.This place of experience and encounter of an artwork opens up dialogue, an utterance or a place of becoming.
We are forced to thought. A fundamental encounter that is not an object of recognition, or a representation of something already in language, rather an object of encounter. 
Our knowledge of meaning and our habitual modes of being and subjectivities are challenged and ruptured. For this encounter of rupture, a moment of affirmation occurs which obliges us to see the world differently.  Life becomes a history of these encounters, always necessarily occurring beyond representations. Art brings these two concise moments of rupture and affirmation together, breaking one world and creating another, bringing the possibility of something new.
It is important to remember than meaning is not fixed, rather it maintains ability/ minority to hold you in place rather than fixing you in place, supporting you rather than locking you down.

Valie EXPORT

Valie EXPORT is a prolific contemporary artist who transformed herself into a brand identity.  EXPORT’s art explores the nexus of relationships including experience, politics and personal identity. EXPORT continually uses the body in performance as a means of investigating physical and psychological limits and challenging false egalitarianism of gender and sexist ideologies that subsequently characterize society. EXPORT explores and radicalises questions surrounding the artist representation of mental states and the conditioning of reality. Through her means of performance, experimental films, and conceptual photographs trying to separate the female body from eroticism, EXPORT created contradiction by exploiting her body directly without mediation. Her paradoxical affirmation of the self and body by a masochistic fragmentation and exposure, ultimately confronts the public with a provocative, aggressive and invasive attempt to question their physical and mental identity.

 Articulating one of EXPORT’s most emblematic performance works,  Cinema 1968. EXPORT provocatively sought to reverse the cinematic experience and voyeurism of watching sexually portrayed images of women.1 For EXPORT, the interaction of the human body and its media image motivates her performances to communicate a direct analogy between the cinema screen and the human skin. This confrontation challenges the perceived cliché of the representation of women passively displayed as object of pleasure, creating a relationship with the body on proximity and intimacy rather than voyeurism and visual mastery of the cinematic experience.

Rather than the viewer anonymously engaged in spurious pleasure, EXPORT entices the public to feel her breasts the “real thing” within a strapped on box over her bare chest reminiscing a cinematic theatre. Dependent on soliciting public participation collaborator Peter Weibel invited members of the public upon the streets in Vienna, to exclusively access her body for physical public molestation.  EXPORT who resembled a mannequin wearing a wig activated a space which the beholders hands caressed her breasts, an act of sexual freedom. For export, the tactility of this performance was framed to directly confront social prescriptions prevailing patriarchal ownership of women.   This subjective experience is an example of how reinterpretation can activate the public.

My interest in this artist is for her performance and intent notion of personal identity embedded in her oeuvre. Her radical and 

Eleanor Antins

Eleanor Antins is conceptual artist that uses her body as a means of both subject and material. Through various media including photography, video, installation, performance and film she creates her self in multitudes of identities. From the 1970s, she produced filmed and photographed performances to critique the representation of the female body, through which she explores the notion of the self-portrait and studies the construction of identity.  Similarily to women artists such as Marina Abramovic and VALIE EXPORT, Eleanor works with her own appearance to create scripted and performative conceptual works.

Specifically interested in relation to my own practice is her concerns and conceptual ideas of the physical manifestation of the pressures put on women in western society. Derived from how physical standard for women are continuously designed and re-designed according to the perception of society.

Carving: A Traditional Sculpture  (1972), a documentation that took place over a course of 36 days, which she documented 4 angles of her body everyday. Standing naked everyday in the four same stances to record her barely perceptible self-induced weight loss, accumulating 148 black and white photographs. The photographs are installed vertically from each day, which the entire process can be read horizontally, like a filmstrip.

Conceptually and technically she both becomes the sculptor and the sculpted as she carves away at herself, removing fat. The photographs, which act as an anthropometric measurement, that is to convey objectivity to measure the human body.  Her method of carving her own body was a performance purposely toyed with reference to the male- sculptor as he carves out the ideal female shape in classical art, and then puts that particular representation in society.