Editorial Report

Identity

[endif]--After watching Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present[1], I somehow discovered this inner interest about such a mysterious form of art. “The film follows Abramovic as she prepares and executes her 2010 retrospective show, in which young artists repreformed some of her earlier work and she unveiled a new piece (…): to sit entirely still, in silence, in a chair, across from museum visitors, for 750 hours.”[2] But why is this considered to be art? Akers never gets around to answer that question.

“Artist Joseph Beuys argued that every human activity counts as art as long as it is a conscious act.”[3] Performance is described to be a happening/event in relation to space and time, concerned with concepts as the moment, presence, memory and identity. This offers limitless possibilities opposing to the traditional visual arts, the element of absence of the artist is lost earning then a sense of ephemeralness to the body of work, making this art resistant to commercial forces. This interconnects with the reason why it became so popular in the early 20th century where two wars stroked and traditional values were being questioned but also today where “is ideally suited to communicating online with audiences present and future.”[4]

Two of the questions that came along with this definition were: Why is this art? And why are they artists themselves? Along with: Does this mean that anyone can produce art? This brings a whole new mind-set to the table. Performance uses social critique as a means to exist beyond the everyday awareness. “It often forces us to think about issues in a way that can be disturbing and uncomfortable, but it can also make us laugh by calling attention to the absurdities in life and the idiosyncrasies of human behaviour.”[5] This calls for a query for identity. A search to understand “every body as a self”[6]. How do we perceive the world around us? How do we perceive others? This is the same as asking: How do we perceive ourselves?

[endif]--In the early 1970s, George Maciunas was the “leading light of Fluxus, the international network of concept artists”[7], believing that the movement itself constituted a debate. “Was it an art movement, an anti-art movement, a socio-political movement or, as the artists themselves tended to protest, not a movement at all?”[8].

This flow of avant-garde-like art brought a lot of refreshing artists to the spotlight. For various reasons, different minded artists approached identity in distinct levels.

[endif]--On one hand, there is this Zen-like attitude among the community. Artists like Yoko Ono used the mundane and the repetitive to represent a dialogue between two states: “a process of ‘becoming’ as opposed to the state of ‘being’ represented by static objects”[9]. An example of this is Box of Smile (1984), where the identity of the self is questioned by a true reflection. “Ono has confirmed that her work constructs this Zen Koan exchange, which she sees as being a dialogue with the self, analogous to looking into a mirror”[10].

On the other hand, social activism starts to raise, but this time not as part of an artistic perspective necessarily but as a human need. Ai Weiwei uses his power as an artist to convey this concept mainly through the internet, using his blog as a ‘social sculpture’ of today. Weiwei’s origins as a Chinese citizen took him to strive on mapping out our society believing that “Maps (…) produce new realities as much as they seek to document current ones.”[11] An example of this is Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), where our identity as humans is questioned by dropping a valuable forgotten object of the past.

Both these two aspects examine identity in different angles, leading to the conclusion that art reflects not only the self but the humanity as whole. Going back to the initial questions of the interpretation of art, performance and concept art in general define a very specific relationship between the piece and the audience. Dan Graham “wished to combine the role of the active performer and passive spectator in one and the same person.”[12] and he also believed that this relationship should impose “an uncomfortable and self-conscious state on the audience in an attempt to reduce the gap between the two”[13].

Marina’s performance at the MoMA in 2010 was an attempt to make this statement come to life. Because in reality the piece’s only completed once the audience is present, making this interaction a constant exchange of understanding and knowledge and the reactions reproduced by previous actions make this art thrive for flat hierarchies being then considered a humanity's mirror.

[1] Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, 2012. [DVD] Matthew Akers, USA: HBO.

[2] Wait, Why Did That Woman Sit in the MoMA for 750 Hours? (2012). The Atlantic. [online] Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/07/wait-why-did-that-woman-sit-in-the-moma-for-750-hours/259069/. [Accessed 03 December 2016].

[3] Khan Academy. 2014. Unlock Art: Frank Skinner on Performance Art (video) | Khan Academy. [online] Available at: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/global-culture/conceptual-performance/v/unlock-art-frank-skinner-on-performance-art. [Accessed 03 December 2016].

[4] RoseLee Goldberg, 2011. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (Third Edition) (World of Art). 3 Edition. Thames & Hudson.

[5] Khan Academy. 2014. Performance Art: An Introduction (article) | Khan Academy. [online] Available at: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/global-culture/conceptual-performance/a/performance-art-an-introduction. [Accessed 03 December 2016].

[6] The Art Assignment. 2016. The Case for Performance Art | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios. [Online Video]. 8 September 2016. Available from: https://youtu.be/EmMTKdUAokM. [Accessed: 3 December 2016]

[7], [8] Ken Johnson. 2011. ‘Fluxus and the Essential Questons of Life’ - Review - The New York Times. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/arts/design/fluxus-and-the-essential-questions-of-life-review.html. [Accessed 03 December 2016].

[9], [10] Chrissie Iles, 1997. Yoko Ono: Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?. Edition. Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.

[11] Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2011. Ai Weiwei Speaks: with Hans Ulrich Obrist (Penguin Special). Edition. Penguin.

[12], 13 RoseLee Goldberg, 2011. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (Third Edition) (World of Art). 3 Edition. Thames & Hudson.

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