The 1970’s emergence of performance
art in the western world was brought into the mainstream realm of the art world. The
1980’s and 1990’s performance art challenged performance and the movement of
the body during a massive sociopolitical uprising of the 1980’s. The eighties
outwardly and without avail confronted issues with cultural identity.
RoseLee Goldberg expresses that
artists were increasingly using performance to examine their cultural roots
(p.210). This I found interesting as it provided a platform for ‘otherness’ whether
it be race, gender, culture, east, west, so on. Goldberg does not necessarily suggest
that this platform is new, but I do like that she highlights politics such as the
end of the Cold War as well as the AIDS epidemic as examples of what the world was confronting at large. The influx of artists from
former communist countries to the West that made it evident that performance
art had functioned almost exclusively in the East as a form of political opposition
in the years of repression (p.214). This eludes that performance and the ideology
of the movement of the body in it’s purest form is so powerful that government
must place restrictions on it. This statement also feels timeless as the world is experiencing this type of censorship today.
Goldberg expresses “that minorities
were increasingly pressing the issue of ethnic identity and multiculturalism” (p.210)
during the 1980’s and 1990’s. I feel that this section seemed to have separated
race and culture from the political and economic issues of Wall Street
crashing, Nelson Mandela’s release from from prison, and protests for democracy
in China. Goldberg’s separation of minorities from geopolitics feels skewed and
frustrates me that these are issues are not related in her statement. Perhaps, I am misunderstanding her statement? Global politics, culture, race, and gender issues are all components to the arts and the creative process.
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