Futurism

In chapter 1 of Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present RoseLee Goldberg presents a brief history of the Futurist performance movement, which began in Paris in the early 1900s with Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. Marinetti utilized the political turmoil of Paris and the existing problems with nationalism and colonialism merged with the dissatisfaction artists were already beginning to portray. Futurist performances commented on other tradition art forms as well as political issues of the time and many traditional artists began to use their medium to support the Futurist movement and ideals. Thus, performance became a preferred form of presenting ideas for some. Other artists, such as painters began to utilize their paintings in performance, as it was viewed as “the most direct means of forcing an audience to take note of their ideas.” (p 14) Additionally, performance gave artist opportunities to be both “creators” and “art objects” and comparatively equal to one another because of the lack of distinction between different types of artists. (p 14) In other words, painters were no longer separate from poets because all artists were encouraged to perform, rather than simply make art.

One aspect I found particularly interesting was the discussion of variety theater. Variety theater seemed to offer a simplistic glimpse into Futurist performance. Throughout the chapter, I had a difficult time pinning down a concrete definition of Futurism. Variety theater seemed, however, to somewhat explain an aspect of Futurism in it’s desire to distinguish itself from traditional art forms and masters. The utilization of this distinction to disregarded artistic rules and instead invented new forms of art, that astonished viewers and “coerced the audience into collaborations, liberating them from their passive roles as ‘stupid voyeurs’.” (p 17) This speaks to the idea that Futurist performers deemed it necessary to surprise the audience with it’s antics in an effort to deliberately force the viewers into working against conformity and perhaps questioning many social and political aspects of society. I’m curious as to why Futurist artists felt such measures needed to be taken. Why did Futurist performancers have to create such ludicrous production to “disrupt the complacent public?” (p 14)

Futurism as 'an alcohol, not a balm'

            From its very beginning, Futurist artists seemed to glorify the violent antagonism that rose out of public unrest in Italy at the turn of the 20^th century. Goldberg portrays Marinetti and his followers as detractors against “the cult of tradition and commercialization of art (13),” including the complacency intrinsic to spectatorship of the arts. (14) Marinetti devised specific performative methods in subsequent manifestoes to attain these means, including declamation and the ‘mechanization’ of performers. These markedly defined and explosive acts became vehicles to much murkier ends, which was no doubt Marinetti’s intention. Goldberg describes “Marinetti’s dream” to make art into ‘an alcohol, not a balm,’ in which to “[characterize] the rising circles of art groups who were turning to performance as a means of spreading their radical art propositions.” (30) In my mind, Italian Futurism had developed into an open-ended philosophical question that became highly susceptible to political propagandistic contamination.

Goldberg highlights Futurist artists’ evolving tendency toward the politically propagandistic in the second chapter: “The early Revolutionary collaborations saw the gradual adaptation of Futurist and Constructivist ideas to theatre in the name of ‘production art.’ … Each [artist] suggested possibilities for arriving at popular entertainment models which would appeal to large and not necessarily educated audiences. Liberally laced with news of social and political events, ideology and the new spirit of Communism, they seemed the perfect vehicles for communicating the new art as much as the new ideology to a wide public.” (38) Mayakovsky and his colleagues’ pronounced involvement with ROSTA and agitprop, further leading to the reenactment of ‘The Storming of the Winter Palace,’ might have helped to pigeonhole the representation of Futurism’s legacy in Russia as a propagandistic vehicle for the Communist agenda.

            Marinetti’s originating idyllic conception of “universal dynamism” was an attempt to disregard the traditional, preconceived discourse of the past. Performance became an effective way to prompt the call for change and the means of looking to the future. However, in the process, I believe the Futurists were unwilling to acknowledge the dangers of their open-ended position as well as the bias involved in “declaiming” universality of their cause. Even though they had scorned the influence of the past, they were still the product of it.

Thoughts on RoseLee Goldberg: Futurism

Jessica Wildman

Futurism and the Futurist movement was spearheaded by Tommaso Marinetti through his Futurist manifesto published in Le Figaro in 1909 (p. 11). What began as an attack on the establishment of academic art, via writing, coalesced into in art form in itself that was a precursor to modern and contemporary performance art. I find it interesting that in all its anarchic sensibilities Futurism was dictated by manifestos. For example, Piedgrotta, a performance by Marinetti, Giocomo Balla, and Francesco Cangiullo led to the manifesto, Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation which declared "instructions on how to perform" (p. 18). 

It's understood that one of the goals and intentions of the movement was to go straight to the public by bypassing the high art aristocracy. I do believe it distinguished itself as a movement outside of the bounds of tradition and created a dialogue with audiences that was formerly nonexistent; however, I believe that the written how to's and how to not's of the Futurist manifestos is indicative of exclusivity. I question the efficacy of the manifestos written by the Futurists in their anti-establishment purpose. In a sense, its pleas for disorder and unpredictability counterintuitively created the movement's own establishment and order. 

Marinetti criticized the traditional arts because of the passive role of audience as "stupid voyeurs" (p. 17). In my opinion, this viewpoint puts the responsibility on the artist to create an inclusive and collaborative creative process. I think it's important for performance in art, music, and theatre to help people transcend time and space. I like that, "the mediocre, dull, regurgitated or too well digested" performances that simple applause warrant as explained by Marinetti on page 16 are to be avoided, but I disagree of the Futurists teachings that, "authors and performers [are] to despise the audience". I believe so because performance is so very dependent on the audience. 

Jones Introduction to Body Art

What I enjoyed most about the Introduction to Body Art is how it highlights women, beginning in the 1960’s, conquering a ‘new’ position in the mainstream art world. Jones describes this movement as art that “specifically anitformalist in impulse, opening up the circuits of desire informing artistic production of reception” (p.5). The works of Carolee Schneemann and Yahoi Kusama challenged the viewer/audience to look at the body in which the woman decides how to present herself and allowing what she wants to convey.

Considering the dates of which Schneemann and Kusama, I can not help but think of the Yves Kline performance, Anthropometries of the Blue Epoch, which occurred only a few short years earlier in 1960. As described in lecture, Kline never touched the paint during this performance. He controlled nude women by directing them where to place their bodies, how much paint, etc. to in order to create his piece. Why I think of this Kline in comparison to Schneemann and Kusama is to emphasize the way these two particular (female) artists changed the perception of the female nude.

Kusama used her ‘otherness’ of her race and gender while she makes a production of sexuality in her piece, Sex Obsession Food Obsession Macaroni Infinity Nets and Kusama, 1962. Having to remind myself that this is a piece way beyond it’s time, a woman directing herself rather than being directed by the hetero normative male artist really puts a twist on performance. Kusama is not an object, but is she objectifying the former role of women in art? Schneedmann uses the body’s exterior as a shell that magnifies the interior body’s intelligence and most importantly, a magnificent voice that had not been taken seriously in the art world.

In the mid-twentieth century, it seems very provocative for a woman to ‘allow’ or deem herself as silly, playful, yet serious, at the same time in control of herself and her surroundings.

Thoughts on Kristine Stiles: Performance

Jessica Wildman

Performance has been, as described by Kristine Stiles, “difficult to accept and theorize...as a critical term of art history” (p 75). Stiles explains that this difficulty is due to performance having integrated the artist as both subject and object. While the self-portrait could arguably be, like performance, a coalescence of subject and object, the astounding difference arises in the interactive, interconnecting, and “transpersonal” nature of performance. This aesthetic, Stiles explains, “functions as an interstitial continuum linking subjects to subjects through mutual identification” (p 76). Stiles uses the term “commissure” to, “describe a key structural feature of performance art: its operation of connector” (p 83). 

Performance art resonants deeply with me. I believe that we are spiritual beings in physical form. Fascinated by the notion that we are made of the same thing as the stars, interconnected and part of a larger whole, these ideas have become theme in my own work. Stiles says, “performance visualizes the otherwise invisible covenant take takes place between doing and seeing others doing and seeing” (p 83). The use of the word “covenant” speaks volumes of the power of this art form and the human element inherent in performance.  I am particularly fascinated by the idea that performance transcends the boundaries of time and space that traditional static art works are beholden to.

I also quite enjoy that performance does not adhere to any form particularly, but changes with advances in technologies. “By the 1980’s, digital and electronic media made more explicit and transparent just how pervasively lens culture had become part of performance” (p 87). I like to think of performance as a harbinger. It predicts and informs, but often without knowledge of the magnitude of its relevancy. 

Anthony Scott AH 5560 09/13/2015

Reflection:  Stiles, Performance

    I have extracted that Kristine Stiles thesis is the terminology applied to “performance art” as it has evolved through the twentieth century. Stiles titles the thesis and emphasizes the term (performance) as being key, wrapped around Jim Dines’ "The Smiling Workman" as a continual example of the internal and/or intent of performance art, thus posing as a “commissure” in itself in regard to terminologies applied to performance art in the twentieth century (p. 77). The multiple content and variety of emphases and expressions performed (with body) throughout this time period being political, urban societal, sexual and/or racial awareness and injustice to name a few, there emerged several attempts to labeling the performing arts, separate it from conventional art historian views through embracing it, and rejecting it.      

     Styles opens with the clarification of performing arts and its separation from conventional arts, as the “artwork is the artist” to which the human body itself is “being and doing” as a “representation and presentation” between the artist and audience (p. 75). The multiple achievements available to link “mutual identification” of the subject, or subjects, to an object through “interstitial continuum” are seemingly infinite as performance has so displayed throughout the twentieth century (p. 76). With the endless opportunities to communicate, listed above, and in conjunction to Styles, it is my belief that through the “mimesis” in performances, brought about the need for categorizing and applying terminologies to the different intents and styles of performing artist. The “challenging distinctions between the real and artificial” through the achievements with the use of commissure purposely blurred the artist intention in some cases, and dramatically emphasized truth and exposure in others (P. 88). For example, the “hybrid presentational art” of the OMT was bluntly “controversial and political” exposing the truths of past “violent” Western cultural history, to “derive” from (p. 89). In addition, the 1960’s women’s performances bringing “public attention…to women’s issues” (p. 86). With this “direct engagement in the social sphere” arousing “cultural change” (p. 89) resulting in bringing forth public awareness of injustice, and challenging the preexisting social and political structures, one might question the intentions of political and dominate financial organizations suppressing the performing arts by applying new terms.

     Styles notates “the term “performance” is due primarily to the insistence of critics” during the 1970’s, on the contrary, artist continued to apply their own “original appellations”. Furthermore, in the 1980’s the term “Perfotainment” has been used to describe “some styles of performance” (p. 85). With today’s technology and animation capabilities available and at demand, thus adopting possible (new terms) applied to performance, I cannot imagine the disregard of live performance as a means to communicate as an art. Regardless to the terms applied, performance art is still an “act of doing” with the “human body”, telling the “truth about art” and the “conditions of truth” politically and socially (p. 95). It is my personal concern for the arts that political suppression exist towards performing arts, as Styles outlines the “decade debate in Congress” of the “National Endowment for the Arts”. Even know this was a debate of “tax dollars” (p. 94, 95) for the funding of, one may conclude the debate was to suppress the freedom of expression in the Arts, which is freedom of speech, and the desire to communicate. With the humans need to understand and 

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.