Reflection of Performance Art by Kristine Stiles

            Kristine Stiles outlines how performance art has forged a “transpersonal visual aesthetic” as it functions as an “interstitial continuum” that links subjects to subjects through mutual identification (p.76).  Stiles investigates the linkage, or ‘commissure’ to recount the the prevalent courses in which performance has contributed to contemporary art and expression through the challenging the processes.

            Stiles examines Jim Dime’s performance piece The Smiling Workman in which Dime’s “actions transcribed into language his psychological compulsion to produce images and his feeling of being ‘a prisoner of the urge to work’” (p. 77).  What is interesting about Dime’s performance is that not only that he became the subject, but rather his choice in using his left hand to paint which became the object. Stiles mentions the connotation of the left hand in the Eastern world as being unclean (p. 81). The symbolic usage of the hand as the object transcended to the viewer is so impactful that it questions what is being presented and what is represented? Is it the hand? Is it what the hand has created? Is it both?

            The ‘gap’ between the performer and the viewer has been seldom discussed in any other course I have taken so far therefore I find the the explanation of “commissure” very intriguing. Dime’s “personal need for communication and interpersonal relationships” (p. 83) connects the viewer to the piece in a way that a painting never could.

            Overall, Stiles piece highlights how rapidly performance art has effected art and art history post WWII to present day due to politics, race, gender, and the relationship between each. The role in which women have played in the surge of performance art is also compelling. It was only in 1969 that Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro first taught feminist performance (p.88).

            Stiles believes that “performance artists have posited their medium as a model for imagining, enacting, and living life differently” (p.95) and I would agree that performance art has redefined art at a rapid rate.