Figure 1: Mel Brimfield, This is Performance Art, 2011, C-print, edition 1.

Many of us could have experienced performance art at some point or another and not even have been aware. Performance art can take place in  any location at all. It could involve many people or just one, or sometimes nobody at all. It can be very complicated, or can be something as simple as a person standing on the same spot for a period of time, doing absolutely nothing. The reason I love performance art is because to me it is undefinable and it’s extremely difficult to determine when a performance crosses the line from performance to performance art.

Figure 2: Performance artists in Jubilee Gardens.

Taken by Adrian Pingstone in November 2004.

The above image is another classic example of performance art that we see everywhere and yet have probably never classed as ‘performance art’. Figure one and two both show how a whole performance can be captured and understood in one photo when it comes to performance art. Another thing that interests me is the amount of skill needed to something so little as standing completely motionless for long periods of time like shown in figure two. Drawing from my own experience of when I performed in a commedia dell’arte piece in which we had to stay frozen for over half an hour and were only allowed to move once it got to our turn to act I know how much you need to use your muscles to stay still for such a long time, whilst it make look effortless it takes a lot of work and commitment to pull off, I don’t feel like this is something which is appreciated enough when viewing this kind of work.

One person who I feel has truly mastered Marina Abramovic, my personal favourite of her work being The Artist is Present(2010) A 736-hour and 30-minute piece which spanned over a month and a half where Marina would sit in a chair in the MoMa museum at a table and sit completely motionless while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her.

“Spectators stare on in anticipation but of course Abramovic does nothing. In return, participants cry, scowl and smile. Sometimes all in quick succession. But mostly, they cry. “

-Karimah Ashadu, Art/Design, ‘The Artist is Present’: Marina Abramovic.

Figure 3: A spectator reacting to sitting opposite Abramovic.

One of my favourite moments is when Abramovic’s ex partner and co actor of many years sat opposite her and they were reunited. Even though she stayed motionless throughout the most part of this performance, their hands still reached over the table for each other, it was a very touching moment. The fact that Marina, although almost motionless can provoke such emotion from people as shown above is what I like about this piece of work, it shows that in this case, less is definitely more.

Figure 4: Marina Abramavic and Ulay, reunited.

Works cited:

Figure three and four:

Akers, Matthew (2012) Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present [DVD] New York.
Accessed online April 2013 at: http://karimahashadu.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-artist-is-present-marina-abramovic.html

Figure one:

Brimfield, Mel (20111) This is Performance Art, First edition, released for Ceri Hand Gallery, London, England
Accessed April 2013 Online at: http://membership.contemporaryartsociety.org/archive/talk-a-short-history-of-performance-art/attachment/belles-4/

Figure two:

Pingstone, Adrian (2004) Performance Artists in Jubilee Gardens, released for public domain, London, England
Accessed April 2013 online at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Performance.art.london.arp.500pix.jpg

 Posted on – 19th April 2013

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

I started to think about writing a word for 8 minutes, and then I turned my attention to the amount of time that my performance was going to run for, 8 minutes. I started to think about what happened around the word minute by minute. I found a few things including this photo;

Figure 1: 20 Things That Happen Every Minute [Infographic] (2009)

I planned on somehow incorporating some of the above facts in my performance, I just wasn’t quite sure how yet. One idea I had had was writing the word change really slow over the space of 8 minutes then after this showing what had changed around the word in that 8 minutes. I like this idea however, I thought it was to obvious and that the audience would be able to guess what was going on, which didn’t follow my original idea of wanting something which made no sense.

Works Cited:

‘Fancylad’ (2009) 20 Things that happen in one minute.
Accessed online April 2013 at: http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=45981

With only two weeks to go and ever changing ideas it was time to decide on a final idea. Still focusing on the number 8 I decided that every minute of my performance a slide was going to pop up saying what had happened in the last minute/2 minutes etc around the world. I then thought a little further and decided that I could film something over the period of eight hours and then speed it up so that it shows for 8 minutes, and throughout the video the slides showing what has happened over the eight minutes could be shown. I chose to film my back garden as it showed the changing weather throughout the day. As my camera only filmed for half an hour I had to load each video onto my laptop every 30 minutes and then start again so the video was not continuous. Seen as my dogs are in and out of the garden all day there was no way I could cut them out of the video but decided they were much of a bother because they were part of the natural course of the day, as were my dad and brother working on the garden. Never being a fan of technology the situation was not made any better when I filmed the final part when the sun set, put it on my laptop, and then it completely vanished and was no where to be seen on my laptop or the camera, so I had done a whole days filming for nothing. The next day I filmed again, and (I can’t believe it either) the final video did not work again. I was not going to do a whole other days filming, and couldn’t just film night time of a different day as my garden had been changed slightly, things weren’t on the washing line, a big object in the middle of the garden had been moved etc. Once I had edited all the videos to make an eight minute video in movie maker I decided to put a sepia effect on it as I liked the old style it gave it and covered for the fact that there was no sunset.

This is the end project:

I decided to cut the video of my garden down to seven minutes and then to add on a video of myself eating my breakfast and music (which will both be explained in the next post)

Posted on – April 30th 2013.

4

If anyone had told me that I would be reading the entire back of a cereal box for my last ever performance of my degree I probably would have told them they were crazy. However that said, this is what I have decided to do, whilst the video is playing behind me. This idea came to me when I was eating breakfast this morning and it just so happened to take me 8 minutes, after I had finished I went to look at what went into the cereal, and then suddenly and for no reason what so ever decided that this would be what action I do for eight minutes whilst the video I had made was playing behind me. It captures the act of the passing of time and how we are very out of tune of what happens around us in the world minute by minute. To me I was shocked to find out what had happened worldwide just whilst I ate my breakfast and it was an eye opener. One thing I wanted to avoid in this performance was making it seem like a ‘charity advert’ so as you can see in the video I made and posted on the last post I added in random facts such as how many iPhones were sold in a minute nad how much Oprah Winfrey made. I decided on the music that was added to the video as I thought it was a nice contrast to what I was saying, whilst I was eating breakfast on stage (which is quite calm) the fast forwarded video playing behind and the music was somewhat frantic, until the end where the music and video changed which changed the tone of the video. After searching through my cupboards I found a cereal that would take me a while to read; All Bran Chocolate Crunch.

I thought I may as well go for it and read every single word on the box and not just the contents of the cereal. Closer to the day of the performance I decided that I was going to sit round a table for the performance for a more intimate feeling because I wanted to attention on the video and not myself. The lighting I wanted to keep very minimal as I didn’t feel the piece needed a wild light design. I just wanted a dim general wash of the stage.

Posted on – May 9th 2013