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.
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