Performance Art Research Paper

1788 Words4 Pages

How have performance artists sought to utilise and reference the body within their work? 
Why have so many performance artists sought to specifically focus on the body as the subject of their work?

Performance art: how and why artists utilise, reference and focus on the body in their work.

200 words x 11 paragraphs or equivalent

Introduction
This essay will explore how artists throughout time have utilised and refrecnced the body within performance art. Beginning with happenings and fluxus art and moving through time to the post human mostly interdisciplinary until dematerialisation it will discuss a select number of themes and movements the body is the most relatable object/subject to human kind

Dada artists first …show more content…

Taking a great deal of inspiration from the Dadaists, Fluxus employed humor, the everyday and the element of chance to its works. "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot." One of the most famous and influential musical art performances of this movement was John Cage's 4'33". This performance could be attempted my anyone with the instructions that one would, prepare the instrument (a piano) and then sit in silence in front of an audience for the complete duration of 4 minutes and 33 seconds. This shifted the focus of the "performance" to the necessity of the audience and the music created by their bodies and environments. Cage was interested in these chance noises that was created when there was nothing played which came from spending time in an anechoic chamber where he discovered that true silence could never be achieved as you will always be able to hear your nervous system and circulatory system. The coughing and stirring of the audience, the aleatory music became the performance. This movement was a precursor to the happenings of Allan Kaprow which werfe more influenced by theatre than the avant garde music that fluxus …show more content…

"I thought of the vagina in many ways - physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation.” These are just some of the words Carolee Schneeman read out as she performed her piece Interior Scroll. This 1975 performance at the Woman Here and Now conference in East Hampton New York, was an example of the feminist exploration of the female body both as subject and object of art. Schneeman’s performance involved her entering the room in only a sheet and apron disrobing and standing on a table in the centre of the room where she covered herself in mud and read from a book written by herself then slowly drawing out a paper scroll from her vagina and reading from this too. Shneeman uses her body to contrast the traditional representation of the female body as an object. This performance was a construction of the exclusion and sexism in which she had experienced in the art world and life in general, with emphasis on the female body as the creator and in creation itself giving the female in art a subjectivity that wasn’t previously

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