Sherman Fleming

In Kristin Stiles’ article about the work of Sherman Fleming, I particularly was interested in the ways in which Fleming attempts to communicate to his viewers in his performances. Fleming prefers his performances to be “populist,” perhaps because performance art has gradually become removed from popular notions of the visual arts (page 36). Fleming believes that artists who tend to avoid conventionalizing their art can unfortunately lose their audience and an understanding of their work (page 36). Fleming employs movement, such as dance, in order to connect with his viewer and make his work easy to identify with: “‘I think that dance, like in Ax Vapor, really hits people somewhere around here,’ (he points to the lower chakras: the region of the hear, guts and sexual organs) (page 36).”  Stiles notes the importance of performance and its connection to the viewer, “This ability to capture the mind of the observer through the physical magnetism and movement of the body is of cardinal significance in performance and one of the central means by which the quality of the work may be judged (page 37). I admire that Fleming attempts to make his performances understandable to his audience, and even considers how to spread this connection without viewers feeling threatened by his work (page 36). But how much should a performance artist concern him or herself with making their work understandable? Not every viewer will be able to connect. Should the notion of connecting with the viewer always be considered by the artist when first developing a new performance work?

"Couple in a Cage"

               Diana Taylor's piece on A Savage Performance: Guillermo 'omez-Pena and Coco Fusco's "Couple in a Cage" examines Pena and Fusco's recreation of colonialism in contemporary time. "Couple in a Cage" was performed in the early 1990's and traveled the world exhibiting Pena and Fusco while incorporating the very real theme of "other". Taylor discusses that for many centuries, "The 'primitive' body as object reaffirms the cultural supremacy and authority of viewing the subject-the one who sees, interprets, and records from the divine Columbus to the ethnographer... The objectified, 'primitive' body exists,  isolated and removed" (p. 163).  Taylor also examines that the 'encounters' with the 'other' and breaks it down by stating that the only way society understands 'discovery' is through the eyes of the 'explorer'. This automatically is a separation between us and them.
               I like Pena and Fusco's performance because it scrutinizes the barbaric American history that has been taught for the last couple of centuries. From their avoidance of eye contact, the use of collars and leashes to be worn for when the artists needed to use the bathroom, as well as using an unintelligible, their performance eroticized and sexualized a fable. Through their exploitation of 'other' it seemed to open a dialogue and (hopefully) helped bring to question how history has been written i.e. the discoverers vs. discover-ees. 

Reflections on Diana Taylor: A Savage Performance

In Diana Taylor’s essay “A Savage Performance” the author discusses the role of the museum in an ethnographic context as it relates to Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s “Couple in a Cage” performance. Taylor states, “Museums enact the knower/known relationship, preserve (a particular) history, (certain) traditions, and (dominant) values” (p 164). I found Taylor’s phraseology with the use of parentheses in this passage effective in communicating the hegemonic devices at work within the curation of museums especially those of natural history or ethnography. The authority of the museum to edit is exemplary of their power and dominance of other societies or cultures, as Taylor explains, “the monumentality of most museums emphasizes the discrepancy in power between the society which can contain all others, and those represented only by remains, the shards and fragments salvaged in miniature displays” (p164).  The museum itself, a symbol of that hegemonic order, functions as the authoritative superior which has the power to “contain", display or exhibit the “other” cultures. 

The artists created a documentary of the performance. I find the discussion of whether the video does the same thing as the very museums and discoverers that the artists are critiquing to be quite interesting. Does this video perpetuate the view of “us and them”? Does “reversing the ethnographic lens” provide an insight to the audience subject? (p169). Taylor explains, “the subject of analysis in the Cage performance is not the “couple” inside but the audience outside” (p 172). If that is the case, than the video provides the audience to see themselves as subject, albeit unknowing performers. The author asked artist Gómez-Peña, “what his ideal spectator would have done”; his response, “open the cage and let us out” (p 169). In the discussion of intervention I cannot help but consider the standardized restrictions of the museum in context of performance and theatricality and their symbolic relationship to colonialism; specifically, "don’t touch the art" and "don’t interrupt the show”.

Taylor Reflection

            Diana Taylor’s discussion in the section on “Theatricality” adds some dimension to the consideration of Gómez-Peña’s “Welcome to the Third World.” By supplanting the anonymous faces of the “indigenous” from various “exotic” lands with the names of famous Western Europeans who were known for exploitation of non-western culture, Gómez-Peña quite effectively satirizes the colonialist incentive to use “indigenous bodies [to] perform as a ‘truth factor; they ‘prove’ the material facticity of an ‘other’ and authenticate the discoverer/missionary/anthropologist’s adventure….” Taylor also discusses the “unidirectional gaze” involving the “native body” as an object to be viewed (“discovered”) by the “civilized observer.” I think there is somewhat of a parallel between this idea and the last words by Gómez-Peña in this piece: “I talk, therefore I am.” Taylor emphasizes the presentation of the “native bodies” as “not speaking.” “Voiceless, it lets us speak for it…. ‘We,’ those viewers who look through the eyes of the explorer, are (like the explorer) positioned safely outside the frame, free to define, theorize, and debate their (never ‘our’) societies.” (162)

"Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West"

Diana Taylor’s article discusses the performance, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit, by Cuco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. In this traveling performance, the two artists confined themselves in a cage where viewers could observe and explore them. The artists chose specific places for their performances, countries that have histories of abuse towards natives (page 163). This performance “repeated the colonialist gesture of producing the ‘savage’ body, and it historicized the practice by highlighting its citational character (page 164.” What I found interesting in Taylor’s discussion of this performance was her exploration of the histories of confining the “other.” For example, the way in which museums present a discrepancy in power and how they come to represent “the theatricality of colonialism (page 167).”  When Taylor uses the word “theatricality” does she mean colonialism is a spectacle in this context? Taylor also claims that “the cage confronted the viewer with the unnatural and violent history of representation and exhibition of non-Western human beings (page 167).” The cage also brings into discussion the history of caging rebellious people in Latin America and pre-Hispanic times. The cage in this performance opens the artists up to being labeled and classified, while they remain silent, removing any individuality, similar to the effects of colonialism and even imprisonment (page 167). In what ways can we see the artists owning any sense of agency in this performance?

Tito Vasconcelos and Dark Camp Drag

            In her introduction chapter on the immense variety of Latin American performance artists, Fusco identifies a recurrent theme that we have come across in our previous readings on performance artists, particularly those who have identified with the Black Atlantic Diaspora: “It seems to me that the necessary antidote to facile interpretations of cultural difference,… [as it] attempts to impose a single form of syncretism as a moral imperative, is to encourage awareness just how much of the experimentation in Latin American visual art, literature, and theater in this century has adjudicated between national and regional influences and international vocabularies, and to demonstrate how these experiments cannot be reduced to any single formula.” However, she points out some important cultural forms that have inspired many Latin American performance artists, including sainete criollo, the Mexican carpa, and Caribbean cabarets. (6-7)

            Of the list of Latin American performance artists she selects, one of them who intrigues me is the Mexican drag performer Tito Vasconcelos (his campy last name plays with the popular Christian phrase/song, "Vaya con Dios," but means "Go with Jealousy" instead of "Go with God," and most likely was taken from the influential writer/philosopher, José Vasconcelos, who was involved in the Mexican Revolution during the 1910s). Fusco describes Antonio Prieto’s analysis of Vasconcelos’s type of drag performance as “dark camp” – “the kind of camp that is grotesque, ‘displays an almost sadistic delight with cruelty.’” Prieto also says that this kind of drag performance was successful against the highly heteronormative-dominating society of Mexico as exuding a kind of “symbolic terrorism.” (11) Today, the use of dark camp has become more accepted, and even fashionable, in many drag communities in urban cities of the U.S., especially following the legacy of American drag queens from the 70s and 80s, such as the brazen and twisted work of Divine and John Waters. Could this type of dark camp performance still have value of agency today, after it has passed through the processes of commodification and popularization?

Reflections on Goldberg: The Media Generation

Jessica Wildman

In Goldberg’s discussion of "the media generation”, the author explains that, “by 1979, the move of performance toward popular culture was reflected in the art world in general" (p 190). The 1960’s and 1970’s saw performance artists like Adrian Piper and Carolee Schneemann vehemently rejecting the art establishment in terms of race and gender inequality; however, the media generation of the 1980’s gave rise to a group of artists who began to commercialize the form, breaking what Goldberg calls, “conceptual art’s cardinal rule, of concept over product, by turning from performance and conceptual art to painting” (p 190). I find this commercialization or commodification of art to be quite interesting. Goldberg states, “the generation that created this about-turn mostly comprised students of conceptual artists who understood their mentors’ analysis of consumerism and the media” (p 190). I wonder if those, “struggling unknowns”, who were transformed into, “art stars”, in the early 1980’s produced that identity and career themselves or if it was the construct of the art world elites? With that question in mind I can’t help but think of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, and the significance of those elite networks within the art world. 

I was in Barnes and Noble last week sifting through the magazines and there was a publication with Marina Abromovic on the cover (I forgot the publication). The article was fascinating. Arguably the most prominent performance artist of recent years was discussing how she often does not get paid for her performance work, and makes most of her income teaching. It makes me think that performance is the one form of art with a driving force that sustains itself, not monetarily, but on meaning. That’s not to say that traditional art forms like sculpture and painting are churned out and contrived, but knowing that performance is difficult to monetize those suspicions dissipate. Is this true? As an artist myself I find that to be an existential question. How can one create work that sustains a life and art practice that isn't consumable/consumerist?