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. 

Identity?

There have been significant shifts in art, artists that critique and interrogate perceptions of the human body. This however has been embedded and immersed not only in the content and ideas surrounding the work, but also the way in which the art has been formed in ways of canvas, brush, frame and platform.  Physical and mental limitations as a stable and finite form of self has been progressively eroded, which artists have investigated the contingency, temporality and instability of the body.  By exploring the human body we are immersed in ones identity, whether being notorious or concealed, we become oblivious to the problematic formality of identity. 

Identity, which is not an inherent quality, rather it is acted out within and beyond cultural boundaries. Therefore identity is never static, it is always changing and corrupting as humans change and develop into age. It becomes a problematic status in which an artist will never capture the true identity of one at that exact time, and an increasing gap immerses, as the artist’s own perceptions and decisions interfere with capturing that identity. In contemporary practice artists prolifically use their own bodily existence more commonly within performance, which lets the viewer capture and immerse in the identity of the artist performing at that exact time and space with no extrinsic or material interference. 
Warr, T. (Ed.). (2000). The artist's body. Phaidon.

Andy Warhol

Artist Andy Warhol (1928-1987), one of the 20th century’s great pop art icons. Warhol exhibition brought to New Zealand’s Te Papa Museum, in Wellington recapitulates the impact and drawing on what remains an enigmatic figure in contemporary art and art history, even 25 years after his death.

Questions may arise how I am influenced by his work in relevance to my immediate practice. Seeing the exhibition in flesh encapsulated emotions towards the desire to reflect on the immediate effect he has on my contemporary practice and also reflect on the Warhol exhibition and the significance of his work on society. 

Te Papa’s Warhol: Immortal exhibition features the artists portraits and self portraits accrues various means of media including drawing, photobooth, snapshots, polaroids, paintings, screen prints, installations, and films. 

Warhol's featuring self portraits  appear glitteringly public yet intensively private. And openly gay yet quietly devout. Astronomically successful, yet painfully. The works which appear constantly changing and shifting between telling us nothing or telling us all. Precipitating emotions that fluctuate between a vulnerable and invulnerable, both superficial and profound. Throughout the exhibiting works we see him adopting different roles that appear playful, yet fraught in the exploration of his identity. One of the exhibiting self portraits appear a consuming jumble as three of Andy Warhol's faces appear overlapping and merging into one another yet slightly altered angles which only one pair of eyes meet the viewers. Self portraits have tradition been considered as a direct impression of an artists character. But for Warhol they were part of  care contrived public persona. 

There becomes an immediate attention to the idea of seriality noted throughout the exhibition.
It becomes evident the the printed reproductions and sources of images of Andy's work appear a misleading representation and impression that the paintings are uniformly flat in colour. But in flesh some of his painting is surprisingly painterly, elusive and shapeshifting.
Warhol said that he painted anybody that asks which he ttys to make people look good in a big yet simple design mostly.
Warhol himself was romantic about the relationship between art and commerce. Warhol craved fame for himself, but he also understood the way in which it could annihilate the person behind the image.”What is Warhol saying about fame, and the way it deforms not on the famous but us?” 

As a reflection from the talk week this year, I had very informative and positive feedback which has precipitated my practice with ongoing and various tangents and ideas to follow through in developing and devolving myself in the ideas of identity and personal embodiment. As a reflection throughout another postgraduate students critique, we discussed the problematic phrase of writing or words in art as a confusing and interference with the art itself. Something which I would like to understand thoroughly and question why it is essentially problematic.
Although we discussed that writing can be problematic, two of the Artists involved in the critique both suggested to take this liberation to the opposite extreme by exploring the relentless possibilities and encounter of the work by exaggerating the diaristic mentality into a physical stream of diaristic words. One that would encounter, spacial facades, installation, time, embodiment, severalty, and conceptual mark making. All of which are conformed in this continuous stream of mark making and diaristic assertion of which we acutely assume is truthfully and accurately displaying the conceptual representation of the artists identity.
The encounter of the work is played in a push/pull negotiation as the viewer is pushed away from the work to encounter the over all play and ambiguity of the size and spacial relations which loose detail to the diaristic writing becoming unreadable. The encounter therefor emphasises the exaggeration of the diaristic form rather than the content which is only played into the viewers conceptual encounter when pulled closely to the work to which segments of the diarist writing are read, rather than the labour some acquired effort to read the whole script which becomes dislodging to the mentality of the desired encounter with the work. The viewer can become equally aware to the conceptual ideas within the diaristic writing by obtaining the key words in a small segment such as identity, mental, disorder, which frame ideas much more abstract than the work itself does.
The work which I also experimented with rotating the work to the opposite side to play with the frustration of words that appear unreadable. This is evident in one of the images above which I have left a partial and controlled segment of the work rolled back, which evidently only exposes that section of script for the viewer to interpret, and leaving the rest of the script visually evident but dislodging and frustratingly unreadable. This may work more superior to the work telling the viewer everything when displayed directly to the front, as the viewer can form their own perspective and idea of there position in the work appearing far more connected than displayed directly to the viewer. This exists because a space is narrated sitting between what is told in this diaristic script and the viewers response and encounter, which appears disconnected.

Behind the masks we wear

We all suffer shame and disgust. It is an affect that forces us to confront our own bodily existence.1 The exhibition ‘Behind The Masks We Wear’ is critiquing mainstream social and cultural aesthetics of shame and disgust, which undermine our desired self-conception.  Artists Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville, Andrew Salgado, Jo Spence and I create an intimate engagement with the viewer imposing our personal bodily existence in the work, rejecting culturally imposed notions of shame attached to our body and identity. 

The exhibition, held in ARTSPACE Dubai, a contemporary Middle Eastern gallery, which constructs a socio-political dialogue between the Western cultural arts exhibited in this site. This conversation surrounds the theme of identity, and the aesthetics of shame and disgust, which is immersed in a different cultural structure. Differences between the customary laws and Islamic laws fabricate problems of male-female inequality, imposing ethical implications of disgust towards being a female. This obliterates a females ability to speak or display their identity, which is far more apparent and significant than Western society.

But one would question why you would immerse these exhibiting contemporary Western artists in a Middle Eastern gallery?

The exhibition is controversial as it unmasks and speaks in a candid and frank manner, critiquing the socio-political issues and universal emotions that define our identity and self-conception. The exhibited work not only speaks for Muslim women in Middle Eastern countries, but society as a whole who are suppressed to speak or display oneself in such manner represented in these artworks.

Each artist explores the concept of identity, creating dialogue between the viewers and the artist as the dynamics between self and society explored. The concept of the self is motivated and structured by desire, desire which is a disposition of immersing in pleasure or satisfaction. These artists objectify and make prolific the neglected emotions, which are controversial to desire, consequently why they are denied in self-conception. Both individually and collectively these artists critique the concerns of habitually confined socially constructed emotions of self, by which they immerse themselves with aesthetics of disgust, shame, embarrassment, fear, inequity and isolation embedded within their work. These artists attempt to liberate themselves from confining representations of self by speaking of concerns that society does not speak for.

 

Interrogating and revealing autobiographical details from her life, artist Tracey Emin confronts her audience with shocking, expressive and confessional qualities, which enables her to establish intimacy with the viewer.   Illustrated in Tracey Emins exhibiting work My Bed, where she puts her most personal space on display, contained with all her embarrassing glory. Confronting the viewer with shock of such a personal diminishment reveals that she is as imperfect and insecure as the rest of us.

Emin situates herself open to scrutiny, uncovering the blunt and fearless manner of displaying the truth, which can be excruciating to observe.[1] This evokes repelling and nauseating sensibilities to the shame and embarrassment, which is embodied in the frankness of this work.

The work is notably a multifaceted sculptural installation, condensed with various contained statements. The installation, which is spilling the edges with detritus, vomit stains, used condoms, bottles, dirty clothes and anything that was present in her room, is activated and charged into an artwork.2 Presenting the symbolic qualities to the progression of life, the bed is a place of birth, death, sex, fertility, illness and loss.3

Similarly to Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville examines the aesthetics of disgust, by which she critiques the scrutiny of beauty and pleasure immersed in Western traditions of aesthetics.4 Interrogating assumptions of beauty, Saville depicts the female body spilling the canvas with puckered and folded skin, distorted and foreshortened, obliterating and redefining the symbolic representations of beauty.

The philosophical encounter and power of disgust forces the viewer to confront their own bodily existence, which is contradictory and ambiguous. This encounter of disgust reveals how society has been habituated to the abstract systems that structure our cultural perception.5

Savilles exhibits Plan, a self-portrait as a cosmetic surgery patient. The exaggerated perspective accentuates the pubic area and expanses of thighs and torso, tilting the head into an ambiguity of the bodily remarks.  The face has a profound and haunting sensibility to the silent supplication and helplessness as the complexion of the grey painterly embodiment conjures affective representations to sorrow, disparity, injury and dismay. 6

Interrogation the preconceived representation of traditional nudes, exposes that the female body has been passively displayed provocatively for the pleasure and objectification of the male gaze. Savilles paintings obliterate this objectified gaze; forcing and returning the viewers gaze behind their own mask.7

Immersed in the concept of truth and representation, artist Andrew Salado’s works are highly remarkable because of the prominent raw emotions spilling behind the fields of figurative painting. The sensation of such confronting yet emotional and wounded works activates the viewer to consider the tangibility and impermanence of the body, but also conceptually questions the fragility of one self and identity.  Salgado’s assertive, bold and visually demanding work convenes the notion of masculinity and personal identity into a provocative response to his political experience of hate crime being heterosexual.  Salgado exhibits ‘That wasn’t my weakness’ a self-portrait which he asserts the notion that as individuals we wear masks as disguises to protect ourselves, which he confronts with concepts of sexuality, masculinity and identity.8 Salgado uses his aggressive manner and political structural style of painting as a political tool to communicate and confront the aesthetics of shame and disgust in being heterosexual.9

Jo Spence an iconic feminist and socialist photographer artist, deeply concerned with social and political dilemmas and ambiguities inherent in our everyday lives. Spence immerses her audience into the traumatic emotions, and confronts the fear of shame and embarrassment in disclosing her imperfect and distorted breast. 10Documenting the blunt reality and truth of pain, trauma, illness and death, she invites the audience in her journey and emotions immersed in her illness with cancer, which she contrives that art is healing.11 Jo Spence’s exhibiting work I framed my breast for posterity is attempting to convict her vulnerability, pain and suffering and to engage the viewer in the experience.11 The viewer is forced to attend his or her own embodiment as the artist herself is making meaning of hers. Spence’s famed breast illustrates the divide of her identity before and after cancer. The frame does not literally cut off her breast but isolates her breast and suggests nothing outside the frame appears more important.12

In the following work, as with the previous mentioned artists, I have explored my own embodiment immersed in the fear of shame and disgust. The exhibiting work Diary Of My Former Self explores the way we encapsulate emotions and resides the personal experience of purging and anorexia. The toilet acts as a diary to which the confined emotions where hypothetically flushed away, in fear of decrementing my desirable persona.  The diaristic writing in the toilet reveals the emotions sacred and encapsulated within my mind, and suggests the lack the ability to convey how we feel, or lack poise to express our thoughts or dispositions in fear of shame.

The second exhibiting work hypothetically questions how social and political constructs would change if emotions appeared on our skin, rather than immersed in our mind. Would it become apparent that we are much the same? As humans, we all struggle with fear and indecision of what is right and wrong. Should we embrace difference in social expectations? Would we know how to rightfully conjure our own emotions that align with the way we represent ourselves and experiences? 

The photograph of my body is positioned away from the viewer portraying a sensibility to shame and acute sense of self-awareness. The prominent and gruelling backbone of my body makes the words appear more confronting and aligned with the bodily remarks.  The exploited body illustrates interest in to the isolation of the mind, remarked in the agitation and pain of these suffocating raw emotions. Illustrated within one of the images is the attempt to diminish and rub away the exposed words convicted on the skin being a detriment to the mind.  There is a tormenting dialogue between the neurotic and anxious attempt to wipe these emotions away, which define the contours of my prominent ribs and body, exposing the conspiring act of the fragmental mind.

The exhibition collectively reflects the theme of identity immersed in the artist’s embodiment and autobiographical details revealed imposing through the exhibiting works.  The viewer is confronted with the thematic concerns to consider the aesthetics of disgust and shame, appearing visually evident in Tracey Emin and Jenny Savilles work combined with emotively driven work of Andrew Salgado, Jo Spence and myself. The exhibition subsequently encourages the viewer to consider their own bodily existence and to interrogate ethical implications that confine ones emotions with fear of shame and disgust.

Are we entering a changing society where words do not deem fully capable of capturing the meaning of experiences, rather we rely on visual domains to confront and manifest our physiological emotions?

---

1 Meagher, Michelle. 2003. “Jenny Saville and a feminist aesthetics of disgust." Hypatia 18, no. 4. 1

[1] Emin, Tracey., Elliott, Patrick., Schnabel, Julian. 2008. Tracey emin: 20 years. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland.

2 Emin, Tracey., Elliott, Patrick., Schnabel, Julian. 2008. Tracey emin: 20 years. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland

3 Merck, Mandy.,  and Townsend, Chris. 2002. The Art of Tracey Emin. London:Thames and Hudson. 10

4 Meagher, Michelle. 2003. “Jenny Saville and a feminist aesthetics of disgust." Hypatia 18, no. 4. 1

5 Meagher, Michelle. 2003. 23-42

6 Shrage, Laurie J., ed. 2009. You've changed: Sex reassignment and personal identity. Oxford University Press, USA. Robinson, Hilary. 2006. Reading art, reading irigaray: The politics of art by women. New York: I.B. Tauris.

7 Poole, Tanya Katherine. 2000. An exploration of female physicality and psyche and how these inform art-making. PhD diss., Rhodes University. 7

8 Simpson, P.2013. “Making sense of sexuality; the paintings of andrew salgado take the art world by storm.” The Ottawa Citizen, May 6. Accessed June 13, 2013.

9 Lederman, M. 2012. ‘THE BREAKOUT / ANDREW SALGADO.’ The Globe and Mail, October 25..

10 Wilson, Siona. 1996. White metonymy: A discussion around Jo Spence and Terry Dennett's colonization. Third Text 10, no. 37: 3-16

11

11 Bell, Susan E. 2012. Living with breast cancer in text and image: making art to make sense. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3, no. 1 (2006): 31-44.Brand, P. Z. Beauty Unlimited. Indiana University Press. 37

12 Bell, Susan E. 2012 37-38

---