Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, video still, 5:50 minutes, 1978–79; image courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EIA), New York
Brief History (Performance)
Renaissance Forerunners
Leonardo da Vinci was well known for his ‘follies’; Vasari described
his demonstration of the flexibility of the intestines of a bullock, inflated by
a pair of blacksmith’s bellows to fill an entire room. Leonardo also designed
the Festa del paradiso (1490), in which performers dressed as planets
revolved on specially built platforms while reciting verses about the return of
the Golden Age.
Futurist
the first ‘Futurist Evening’ in January 1910, at the Teatro Rossetti in
Trieste, a combination of political rally, poetry, variety theatre and loud
readings or declamations by members of the Futurist
group.
Dada
Paris
Dada was launched by Tzara, who along with the Littérature group (writers Paul
Eluard, André Breton, André Salmon, Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau and Paul Fraenkel)
arranged the first of the Littérature Friday meetings on 23 January 1920; there
masked figures recited a disjointed poem by Breton, Picabia executed large
drawings on a blackboard, and Tzara read an obscene newspaper article, calling
it a poem, to the accompaniment of bells and rattles. Simultaneous poems were
typical fare, sometimes with as many as 40 people chanting manifestos ‘like
psalms’. Audiences responded by throwing all sorts of rubbish at the performers,
just as Marinetti had encouraged the audiences to do at Futurist performances a
decade earlier. The press and public responded enthusiastically. Parade
(1917), a ballet with text by Cocteau, music by Erik Satie, costumes by Pablo
Picasso and choreography by Léonide Massine, and Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les
Mamelles de Tirésias of the same year had established a precedent for
outraging the critics and the public. Dada festivals and concerts became
frequent, and scandals were a regular outcome of events such as the Dada
excursion to a church and the trial in absentiaof an eminent established
writer Auguste-Maurice Barrès.
The
Bauhaus.
The
Bauhaus theatre workshop emphasized performance as a
means to create equivalents in real painting or sculpture, investigating the
relationship between sound, movement, space and light. It held a pivotal
position as a meeting-place within the school for all the arts.
Black Mountain College and Happenings.
When the Bauhaus was closed in 1933 by the Nazis, many artists who
taught there moved to the USA. Josef Albers, who taught at a new experimental
school, BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE in North Carolina.
The first public presentation of a Happening was Intermission Piece (June
1959) at the Reuben Gallery on Fourth Avenue in New York. For Kaprow, Happenings
were ‘spatial representations of a multileveled attitude to painting’; for
Hansen, ‘a form of theater in which one puts parts together in the manner of
making a collage’. In spirit they were influenced by photographs and written
accounts of Jackson Pollock at work on his action paintings.
The
term ‘Happening’ soon came to be used by numerous artists with different
meanings. The painter and sculptor Red Grooms, citing the circus as his
inspiration, created sets that he likened to ‘an acrobat’s apparatus’;Claes
Oldenburg stated his interest in ‘objects in motion’ (typewriters, hamburgers,
ice-cream cones and people) as the basis for his staged performancesin
The Store (1961), a small storefront in downtown New York, where he
exhibited work and performed. For Jim Dine, Happenings were an extension of
‘acting out everything in everyday life’, and for Robert Whitman (b1935)
they were a means of exploring time ‘in the same way as paint or plaster’.
Happenings were also made by Carolee Schneeman, who termed them kinetic theatre;
in France by Robert Filliou and Ben; and in West Germany by Wolf
Vostell.
Developments from the
1960s.
·
Soon the term FLUXUS
(suggesting art and music in a state of ‘flux’) came to be used
to describe this loosely connected and very large international group of artists
experimenting on the edges of numerous disciplines.
·
During
the late 1960s and early 1970s the art world became a
haven for the most provocative and far-reaching experiments in dance, music,
film and theatre.
·
Highly sophisticated artists such as Yves Klein in Paris and Piero Manzoni in Milan
created sensual and charged conceptual art works and
performances;
·
Manzoni eliminated the canvas altogether, making ‘living masterpieces’ by signing a
person or by presenting them with a document that declared them a work of
art. ‘Body art’ could be said to have emerged from these early 1960s
presentations.
·
Urs Lüthi created a series of performances that
investigated sexuality and gender, as did Katarina Sieverding
70’s
·
The
fact that it could not be bought or sold gave it an added importance within the
terms of conceptual art, and it became the ideal vehicle for a
generation intent on developing an entirely new aesthetic in artas well
as a method of ‘exhibiting’ that was
independent of the commercial-gallery system.
·
Other artists used the solo performance for
cultural commentary and as an appropriate platform for such issues as feminism.
In this area Rebecca Horn, Hannah Wilkie, Ulrike Rosenbach (b 1943),
Susan Hiller, Rose English, Arleen P. Schloss (b 1943), Suzanne Lacy
(b1945), Martha Storey Wilson (b 1947), Jacki Apple and Eleanor
Antin created powerful and seminal work
80’s
·
The wide variety of scale and format of performanceallowed
for the inclusion of new and vastly different work, such as Butoh, which since
the 1960s had been a highly charged and disturbing form of theatrical dance in
Japan.
·
The Ontological Hysteric Theatre of Richard Foreman (b1937), with its focus
on language that was as concrete as the changing visual collage of his highly
controlled performances, became increasingly popular in the 1980s with
the tendency towards more theatrical work. In England ‘living painting’ emerged
as a reaction to this theatrical and media-orientated performance; Miranda Payne, Stephen Taylor Woodrow and
Raymond O’Daly each created work that shared an emphasis on the ‘art’ context of
performance, with works comprised of live figures actually suspended on a wall as living
painting.
NOW
·
performance remains an open-ended medium, without rules and guidelines.
The extraordinary range of material encompassed continues to defy easy definition and performance
continues to be an important means to break through the limits or conventions
imposed on art activity. In addition, the lively invention of performance of the
1970s and 1980s greatly influenced new movements in theatre, dance and opera of
the 1990s.