Proformance and Experience

Jackson Pollock said “I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.”  Contemporary art often values the process by which art is made more than the finished product.   Artists who use their body to express something often have no product to purvey, placing the value entirely in the concept.   It is a form of art that not only emphasizes experimentation, but individual experience.   There are some performers who have tested the boundaries of human experience, and some who have perished because of it.  Here are a few I find fascinating. 

I know of no other artist as audacious as the politically charged, Guatemalan performance artist Regina Jose Galindo.  Her work has been presented at many well respected venues and was included in the 2005 Venice Biennual.  Simply by listing her performances you can understand why she garners so much attention.  In her performances she has been water boarded, she has been placed in solitary confinement, she has shaved her entire body and walked nude through the streets of Venice, she has had her hymen reconstructed, she carved the word “Perra” (meaning “bitch” in English), into her leg, she has walked through the streets of Guatemala City leaving footprints of human blood, she has built herself into a tomb of brick and chiseled her way out and she has competed in a ring with a professional wrestler. 

Initially I dismissed these acts as spectacle, until I investigated the purpose of this self-humiliation and torment.  This self-induced conflict communicates clearly the troubled state of the world, her country and the horrific events that occur and are routinely ignored.  The conflict that she experiences daily is completely in sync with these extreme acts.  She carved” Perra” into her leg to draw attention to the fact that women’s bodies in Guatemala are often found tortured and left with inscriptions carved into them.  In an interview she spoke about how violence is so commonplace it is often ignored.   She once saw a woman’s hacked up legs near home that didn’t even draw a passing glance.  In another performance she confronted social hierarchy by dressing as a maid for a month and endured the relentless verbal abuse and exclusion that those in positions of servitude receive on a daily basis.  She had a well-respected plastic surgeon draw on her body in front of an audience that included dozens of reporters.  The surgeon drew many lines on her to show what procedures needed to be done to make her ideal.  Regina, not only speaks of injustice, she subjects herself to that very same injustice, allowing her to experience, empathize and express herself in a way that would be impossible through traditional art mediums.

Bomb magazine conducted a fascinating interview with this very intelligent and thought provoking woman.  Her videos are also widely available online. http://bombsite.com/issues/94/articles/2780

Maria Ambromavich calls herself the grandmother of performance art.  Maria used her performance as exploration, and a way to press physical boundaries.  In some of her performances she has tested her ability to endure pain, she has also taken drugs in front of an audience that blocked her mental, then her physical capacities, and to test her moral and physical boundaries she exchanged places for four hours with a prostitute.

During one well known performance Maria and her then boyfriend, Ulay, tested social boundaries when they stood naked, facing opposite each other, at the narrow doorway of a gallery.  To enter a person had to brush up against one artist or the other.   This piece was recreated at the NY Met, not entirely capturing the concept, as you were (understandably) forbidden to touch either performer.

Maria Ambromavich- Art Must Be Beautiful

One of her most prominent acts came about as a reaction to the criticism that performance artists are simply masochists and exhibitionists.  She decided to play a passive role and to put the performance into the power of the audience.  In an act titled Rhythm 0 she laid 72 items on a table, so picked for their ability to give pain or pleasure.  These items included tissues, a rose, knives, a feather duster, grapes, honey, scissors, and a gun loaded with a single bullet.  She allowed the audience to do what they wished with her for six hours.  At first they were playful, but it soon became very aggressive.  They cut off her clothes, made cuts upon her throat, put thorns in her stomach, put her half naked upon the table and stuck a knife into the table between her legs, one person even held the loaded gun to her head.  As soon as she stood at the end of the performance the audience fled.  

Maria faces her fears.  If an idea makes her afraid she wants to confront it, overcome it, and understand it.

In his early years Chris Burden used his body for a similar kind of exploration.  He gained attention from a performance entitled “Shoot”.  At a well-known art gallery in Santa Monica he had a friend of his shoot him in the arm.  He also had himself nailed crucifixion style to a VW bug.   Like Ambromavich, these performances dealt with pushing one’s own physical limitations.   While Chris has performances that seem to be for the purpose of attracting attention and creating shock value, the breadth of his later work convinces me that he also wanted to do what had not been done.  I do believe he wanted to generate attention, but I also believe it takes a lot of courage to try things that would almost certainly draw great criticism, and to experience something most other people would not willingly experience.

Chris Burden - Shoot

Jan Bas Ader fascinates me because of the length he took his final performance to.  While he spent his career creating videos of himself crying, rolling off of rooftops and falling into a river, his last work was almost certainly suicide.  In a piece entitled “In Search of the Miraculous”, this amateur sailor set out to cross the Atlantic Ocean by himself in a 13 foot sailboat.  There are some who say that Ader actually believed he would make it.  If he did, I would say he would have found the miraculous.  While I certainly don't condone suicide for the sake of art, I am interested in the idea of taking on the impossible.  Success results in accolades and other forms of positive reinforcement; it takes a lot of inward motivation and perhaps a bit of insanity to give your all for certain failure.  Yet if your art is about testing boundaries, failure is the only way to really know the extent of those boundaries.

There are times when my art has reflected this need to push physical limits and to challenge my own boundaries.  I have worked myself to the point of exhaustion, operating on very little sleep, very little to eat, and pushed myself past the point of exhaustion until my limbs were numb. I sometimes push the boundaries of social diction for the purpose of experimentation.  It is interesting to see where boundaries lie.  Testing limitations carries with it a kind of vulnerability because you must live with the consequences of experimentation.  I have since switched to healthier methods of creation, mostly because I find it difficult to lead a responsible life and my ability to perform tasks greatly declines without adequate balance.  Yet I am still fascinated by those who are willing to take such great risks for the sake of conceptual and personal exploration.