Performance Art and Media Arts History - Coursework Example

ARTIST Marina Abramovic is a Serbian­-born artist who is based in NY exploring the relationships betweenthe audience and the performer, body limits and the possibilities with the mind. Rhythm 10 This was her first performance in 1973 in which she was exploring the elements of gesture and ritual, she had 20 knives and the media elements of 2 tapes, while playing the Russian game (rhythmic jabs aimed at the spaces between the splayed hands). Every time she hurt herself she changed to a new knife and recorded the operation; this was done with the 20 knives. She then tried to repeat the operation again trying to replicate similar movement in an attempt to replicate the history. This is how she began considering the state of consciousness of the performer. She noted that once a performer entered into the performance state, the performer could push their body to do things they could never normally do absolutely. Technology During the 19th century, performance arts were available to the people by way of commercial artists and organizations in America however in Europe during the same period there was governmental support and the tradition of upper-class patronage. So in the US performance art groups were ran by individual owners of for-profit enterprises. The shows were performed for mixed audiences and were generally performed by touring companies of musicians and actors in the smaller cities and towns. There was high musical literacy among the young cultured women of the upper and middle class and they staged performances for friends and family as a popular evening entertainment. (Butsch 2000) At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a decline in the commercial travel/touring companies, there were in total 327 theaters in 1899 in America but fewer than 100 by the year 1915(Baumol & Bowen 1966). The major agent of this dramatic change was the introduction and emergence of the new medium of movies. Many commercial live performing arts organizations were lost to the new technologies; film, radio, recorded music and eventually television. This was the beginning in the change in the mode of delivery of the performance arts in America. Many artists’ positions were extreme and polarized with the emergence of electronic media with some working with and others against various medium of their choice with the aim of emphasizing materiality and corporeal presence. The experiments would lead up to a situation where the physical body disappeared due to the media. By the mid 60’s one could hardly envision that in only a few decades, the purchase of electronic media/tools would be possible at virtually any store, supermarket or outlet, however it was possible to experiment with the interaction between art and technology media while completely ignoring the electronics industry. This was seen in the experimental initiatives for the possible relationships between the artist and the engineer under the acronym E.A.T Experimenters’ Art and Technology. In the area of media art the group staged a series of trailblazers known as ‘9 evenings’ in the US in 1966. In explored the interactivity of engineering and art and so no theater or museum was well equipped to handle the media that was on display leading to them using the vast and empty New York Armory. This was the beginning of selecting unusual sites and abandoned old spaces for the purpose of media events and temporally art festivals in the following years (Debord 1967) Laurie Andersons performance which was set around the theme of, I (Laurie), am in my own body as others are in their own cars went on to prove that mass media events would be able to evolve from traditional performances (Sayre 1992) She went on to rise from a street performer to a pop icon with the stage release of ‘United States I – IV) in the early 80’s. The show consisted of live narrative in an electronically altered voice, a pool of associated images and electronic body scans. One can follow a straight line from ‘9 evenings’ through to ‘United States I – IV’ and finally to the live performances of rock shows in the 80’s and 90’s. the technological and logistical complications of ‘ 9 evenings’ are still evident today and this is a reason why many art directors of live shows shy away from live electronic media. Alex Hay possibly captures the use of the new media early on in the years of 1966 when he commented that he wanted to pick faint body sounds such as cardiac sounds, brain waves, muscle sounds so as to amplify its activity, its changing tempo and value.” (Whitman 1966). He clearly shows an intimate linkage of technology and the permeation of the body. Other artists tackled the same problem in various ways with some working in opposition to technology and traditional theater venues. Eventually the television set as a media was to assert its importance to the performance actor. Other exponents who have been of the notion of the performativity shaped by the gender theory by Judith butler who stated that the performance is most essentially the movement of the bodies and its signifying processes that often drive the event or the spectacle. Such that in a performance the body must be allocated some autonomy that is preceding the intentionally acting person thereby the body speaks of social conventions be it one’s body, someone else’s or a collective. (Angerer 1990) Another artist Vanessa Beecroft’s artistic concept is in relation to the television’s mode of communication in which one sender is able to inform multiple receivers. Here the view is that the body is a specific location which means that to the receiver that body is the field of action. Media would be used when the issues of social situations and personal experiences were being experimented on by Abramovic and Ulay. Their motto consisted on the ideas that Art had no fixed living space, needed no rehearsals and had no predictable end. (Abramovic & Ulay 1980). The duos performances under the motto of ‘No Rehearsals’ are probably the longest and more importantly the most consistent. They explore the interplay and the borders of impotence and power, the self and others, passive watching and active participation etc. This couple’s work on the extreme physical experience and its mental dimensions lasted over a sustained long period, however Ulay’s critical reflection on the museum as a bourgeoisie institution and the effect of mass media documented a real life Art robbery so as to show the predictable reaction by the tabloids and the aftermath of his actions Other art forms were very suspicious of the audience but were also trying to insist on their status as ‘art’. This included the solo performances before a camera for viewing at a differed point in time, e.g. Bruce Newman’s early films. They focused on how even private gestures and attitudes would be able to impact on the public, so the performances would take place at home yet still be able to address an audience that is public. While defending ‘step-piece’ Acconci said that the public could see the activities he performed in his apartment during any morning of the performance month and whenever he could not be home, he would perform the activity wherever he would be. (Nauman 1970) Artists extended the venue of the art into the private sphere deliberately. Sanja Ivekovićwent on to show how private space can be subject to public surveillance and an intimate and private, sexual act can become a public threat in the eyes of a totalitarian state. It was shown in photographs, the act points to the media instrument of the surveillance state and the resulting Public theatrics. (Ljubjlana 1998.) The technological advances thus led an attitude which isolated the 1st person from the process of production and reception as shown by Nauman’s performances in a studio (which became regarded as a performativity act) Nauman describes the ‘body’ as a ‘sphere’ which had its own unique ‘mental and psychic activities. As the reality of the body was being investigated by the use of media, the use of media was also being used as an argument against these realities. The use of body to portray art was an extreme example of the physical essentialism of the ego and the ego’s subjectivity. Some artists on the other hand, wanted to prove that every physical formation had its own testament of the cultural determination that led up to the formations. In a sense the bipolarity that was spoken of at the beginning of the essay became evident i.e. the use of media to demonstrate the materiality of the body & its presence and to show - on the other hand, the exploration of the immateriality and the gradual of the body by the use of media since the 60’s. This era laid the foundation for virtualization of ‘the body’ both conceptually and technologically. Some of the earliest performances dedicated to the substitution of the real body with that of an electronic body can be seen in the expanded cinema works e.g. Bodily Fluids and Functions (Son et Lumière). In this show a video projector was used as the art board, it was screened in Liverpool in 1966 by artists Joan Hills & Mark Boyle. Another such performance was “the Sperm Sequence” in which a couple was hidden behind a screen while wired to EEG and ECG equipment as they had intercourse, the data from the two machines was projected and televised behind the couple. This work is largely forgotten now but it helped to define a new motif which was – the interest in the image of the body as viewed from the inside. The visualization of the body has become more perfected in the past years and although sometimes the technological advances and media have oft outpaced the artists grasp on them, the artists have nonetheless been able to succeed by use of sensors, implants, and other interfaces in showing some of the impossible to manipulate processes that are ongoing in the body as works of art. With the advancement of bio-engineering in the 90’s there grew an interest in the use of this new media towards expressing an interaction between human activity and computer action on an artistic platform. As shown in Gabriel Ulrike’s work “Breathe” (1992), the artist now no longer had to view the inner self in the confines of laboratory conditions. He now had an immense data realm to work with which could be represented in various audio-visual platforms and be construed as performativity art. Between 2000 and now, technology has had the greatest impact on the art scene since the technology itself with the media has grown by leaps and bounds. Some of the impacts and problems associated with the new technologies include: 1. The internet is under close scrutiny due to the fact it is largely unregulated and offers a wider audience that is variegated and many owners and companies are usually worried that once a performance lands on the net they are locked out and cannot have control over it and the question of copy rights infringements also arise. 2. The audiences of the traditional arts such as live performances usually get a different experience when the same performance is staged on the internet or on television sets. This is because the new technologies also use new methods of relaying emotion and experiences such as the use of close ups and long shots. 3. There is the daunting cost of refitting opera houses to become studios since the modern opera houses are designed and built with broadcast in mind, thus cameras and thee lighting systems are designed in a way that the opera house can also act as a studio for broadcasting purposes. 4. There is the budgetary problem and issue since the new technologies require the need for new staff to be hired for the purpose of producing high quality work and also for maintenance, preservation and storage of the new mediums e.g. digital sets and backgrounds. 5. New technologies come with new ways in which the traditional art forms are being documented e.g. by use of simulcasts and also podcasts. 6. By pairing up of real ‘bodies’ and virtual ones dance companies are coming up with hybrid presentations that have created new sensations. 7. There has been the development of various computer software’s that choreographers to sketch what a performance would look like before the performers get to stage, here the performers will be aided by computer controlled sensors that help to correlate images and sound. This sensors could also manipulate lighting, video equipment, robotics, music& sound and the real time animations 8. Theaters can also gain useful preproduction benefits from new technologies such as; remote rehearsals done via video-links, creation of digital sets through digital projection of images and sound, use of the ever growing new software’s that aid and simplify the set designs, and the easier audio and video playback of the rehearsals for the performers. CONCLUSION All around the globe there have been lots of contemporary performativity approaches which keep trying to link media and the body through various artistic forms e.g. by the use of dance choreography, internet real-time connectivity and other aspects of telematics. Now many events have reduced their focus on the interaction between the real bodies with the mediated one, but artistically, interest is concentrating on the narrative and new treatment of the expanded data realm. The treatment that was given to ‘ GOLLUM’ in peter Jackson’s ‘Lord Of The Rings’ trilogy shows an example of how the ‘body’ can be replaced by an imaginary modeled computer character that behaves and acts like a human being. Thus the data ‘data helmet’ has been replaced by an entire data suit (an entire second skin) that will become less and less noticeable as time goes by. Indeed the symbiotic relationship that is shared between the computer and human beings is slowly leaving the realm of science fiction and entering into reality. The ‘body’ is leaving its biological sense and can now be pre-fabricated from an imaginary model. These external manipulations are possible as shown in the example of GOLLUM and they have demonstrated clearly how the body’s performativity aspect can be translated by use of binary codes Work Cited Baumol, William J., and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts—The Economic Dilemma: A Study of Problems Common to Theater, Opera, Music, and Dance, New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1966. Bruce Nauman, Notes and Projects (1970), in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Butsch, Richard, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.University Press, 2000. Gary Hill, Liminal Performance, in Conversations on Art and Performance, Bonnie Marranca/Gautam Dasgupta (eds.), Baltimore, 1999, p. 363. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967 (French original publ. in Paris, 1967) Henry M. Sayre, the Object of Performance. The American Avant-garde since 1970, Chicago, 1992, p. 108). Kreidler, John, “Leverage Lost: The Nonprofit Arts in the Post-Ford Era,” Journal Of Arts Management, Law, and Society, Vol. 26, No. 2, 1996, pp. 79–100. Ljubjlana Body and the East. From the 60s to the Present, Museum of Modern Art, , 1998. Marie-Luise Angerer, Performance, in DuMonts Begriffslexikon zur zeitgenössischen Kunst, op. cit., p. 243. In Gender Trouble (London, 1990) and Bodies That Matter (London, 1993), Marina Abramovic/Ulay—Ulay/Marina Abramovic, Relation Work and Detour, Amsterdam, 1980, motto on p. 19. Quoted in Simone Whitman, Theater and Engineering. An Experiment—Notes by a participant, New York, 1966, E.A.T. Archive, ZKM Mediathek. Read More