While reorganizing my Film/MTV section this week, I came across a book on the Dance and Musicals shelf. Hidden out of sight and wrapped in shrink wrap, I found two copies of Lea Vergine’s Body Art and Performance.
Flipping through this documented history, I recognized several faces—mostly on account of super saturating my undergraduate schedule with art history. Vergine has compiled key works from sixty artists who have given the Performance Art movement its momentum. She also provides a statement of response from each artist on each profile. Some artists’ texts are humorous, some are incoherent, much reflecting the wide range of what is expected from live performance art. Exemplifying the ideals of the performance art mode, these profiled projects are process obsessed! The artist tries to present the common or the unusual, the sacred or the base, all from a perspective that yields a new look on the subject matter.
The viewer is also encouraged to take part in the study of less widely accepted art forms, such as body language and gestures. One profile that intrigued me is Terry Fox’s 1973 performance piece “yield.” A busy installation set over two rooms, the observer is taken through a reconstructed labyrinth from Chartres, leading to a living floor-bound skeleton made of flour. Parts of the skeleton have started to mold and the viewer is asked the considered the process of death and living of the constructed reality.
His explanation coupled with pictures, I feel that I have gathered a sense of the scene’s original impact, and an idea of his thoughts on arrangement of space. There’s one left on the shelf! Grab it before it goes and suspends itself from hooks from the ceiling or rips it pages in half, or something else graphic and (hopefully) poignant that defined the performance art movement in the 50s, 60s and 70s.
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