From the start I was interested in doing a piece that made no sense what so ever, much like in the style of Dada performances. I started to look at smaller scale performance art performers, so I took to youtube to find some videos posted by people.

Two of my favourites were:

Video 1: Performed by Olivier de Sagazan in 2008.

I like this video because it isn’t about understanding what it happening, there is no explanation given to understand, it is completely up to you to interpret it as you wish. I’m not one to try and understand a piece like this and just watch and enjoy instead. If I had to give my own explanation about what was going on it would be to do with the fact that he keeps putting layers of what looks like clay on his face, and these layers cover up who he really is, each creating a new appearance for himself. When he digs through it all at the end it could be him deciding that he isn’t happy with whatever new appearance he creates and wants back his old original one…but that’s just my own take on it!

Another favourite of mine which I think took amazing talent and planning is

Video2: Penwald: 2: 8 circles” a performance by Tony Orrico hosted by Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences at the Keck Center, Washington DC on Thursday, May 20, 2010.

The description for this video states that “Using the dimensions of his body as measure, Orrico references geometry, biomechanics, endurance, and ideas represented by da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. His performance challenges constructed ideas about what constitutes art and where it can be seen.”

The fact that he took into account all of the above factors and so carefully planned every part of the performance to end up with the final finished piece shows how much he was committed to art and the level of endurance needed to carry out the whole performance shows hard work and careful planning and training.

What I like about these two piece of performance art is that they both show two opposite ends of the spectrum of which performance art has. The first video shows no sign of months of planning and looks effortless, for all we know he could of thought of that performance within the same week in which it was performed, yet in the second video we see that such a piece require a lot of planning and if you made a mistake it would be a lot more obvious to the human eye, where as in the first video if Olivier made a mistake we would not know. Despite both of these performance being very different they both still caught my attention equally.

After researching into performance art and looking at how something little could have a big impact I have decided that for my final performance I would like to do something small for eight minutes. A few ideas came to me such as;

• Making toast
• Tying my shoelaces
• Slow motion sneezing
• spending 8 minutes to close the door then get to the centre of the stage and the lighths go down.
• Writing a word.

I don’t know if anyone has ever tried slow motion sneezing for eight minutes but it is very difficult!

Works cited:

Orrico, Tony (2010) Penwald: 2: 8 hosted by Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences at the Keck Center, Washington DC
Accessed online April 2013 at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vldw0qs3A8

Video 1:

Sagazan, de Olivier (2008) Untitled.
Accessed April 2013 at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYBXRwsDjY

Posted on – April 24rd 2013