Within the contemporary art world, the performance is considered as a new medium that display acts within a fine arts context. The performance which has its origins in movements of the 1960s including minimalism, modernism and onwards utilises various subject matter provided by the artist to convey artistic messages, critiquing the world around them. These messages are shaped by the artists varying degree of curiosity as well as positive and negative experiences, demonstrated throughout the artist’s performance. The varying level of curiosity alongside these experiences are factors that contribute to the completion of the performance. These factors can influence artists leading to unconventional depictions to prove the artists message. Unconditional …show more content…
Burden who is in control within his performance, places himself resting flat on a constructed platform roughly 60 cm from the ceiling. This position, however blockades any view of Burden to the audience essentially making him physically invisible throughout the performance. Although invisible to the audience, Burden remained physically present, forcing the audience to interact by using other senses other than vision to be aware of his presence . Senses that tricked the audience to believe Burden was both present and not present within his allocated space for his performance. The performance, lasting 22 days was designed by Burden to place belief that was unable to be authenticated in his presence during the performance. Burden intentionally allowed this to occur to investigate the then current relationship between the audience and the performance. A relationship where the audience would question if Burden’s presence at the performance was truly there. As a result, Burden placed a huge toll on his body stating that “during the entire piece, I did not eat, talk or come down, I did not see anyone, and no one saw me” . Burden’s idea and execution in his performance provides many similarities including materialistically where similar subject matter …show more content…
The audience is merely reduced to the role of spectators as they witness Yang resting face down on a traditional wooden bench, slowly being branded by a heavy iron on the back of his right shoulder. What is revealed is his identification number given to him by the Chinese Communist state in the form of burnt flesh. The audience in this instance gaze in shock, horror and empathize with Yang’s pain. Yang intentionally places the audience as spectators as referred to by cultural graduate Josh Willcocks who infers that the audience imagines and experiences the pain psychologically as if we are the ones receiving that pain whilst not physically present at Yang’s performance . Yang as a result metaphorically allows us to relate to his situation as he attempts to convey the idea that we ourselves do not own the body that we have but rather it is owned by the society in which we reside in . Yang’s exploration of his idea is different to his counterparts where in his performance, he utilises this one sided relationship between the artist and audience to depict on a social and political level. These levels provide the effects of defining an individual as a number instead of a human being, thus crushing the relationship between humans. Materialistically, Yang’s performance allows us as the
People usually expect to see paintings and sculptures in Art Galleries. Imagine the surprise one finds when they are presented with a man stitching his face into a bizarre caricature, or connected to a machine which controls the artist’s body. These shocking pieces of performance art come under the broad umbrella that is Postmodernism. Emphasis on meaning and shock value has replaced traditional skills and aesthetic values evident in the earlier Modernist movements.
The story “The Execution of Mayor Yin” takes a perilous look at the dark side of the events that happened during the Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao’s Red Guards were tasked with a cultural cleansing that left many people more confused at the roles they played in society than it reinforced the social class structure. The story tells of a young member of the Red Guard and the personal conflict he suffered during the cleansing of Hsingan, which lay to rest his uncle and possibly even a good friend. The torment the people suffered and the personal struggle Hsaio Wu battled with coincide strongly with the age old question, “Are humans inherently evil?”
Art Review Magazine recently named Ai Weiwei “the most powerful artist in the world”, primarily because (Like Warhol) his reach extends further then the art world. Born in 1957 in Beijing, China, Weiwei is the son of the famous Chinese poet Ai Qing. Weiwei was introduced to the price of dissidents at an early age when his farther was denounced during the Anti-Rightist movement and sent (with the rest of his family) to a labour camp for the remaining duration of the Cultural Revolution.
Art has always been considered the effervescent universal tool of communication. Art does not require a concrete directive . One sculpture,drawing or written creative piece, can evoke a myriad of emotions and meaning . Artistic pieces can sometimes be considered the regurgitation of the artist's internal sanctum. In Richard Hooks graphic painting,Adoption of the Human Race, the effect of the imagery,symbols ,color and emotional content projects a profound unification of a spiritual edict.
“I don’t want to be part of this kind of denying reality. We live in this time. We have to speak out” (Klayman). Ai Weiwei is an internationally known Chinese artist as well as activist, and his motivation and determination can be summed up by this quote. In all of his pieces, Weiwei critically examines the social and administrative issues facing China today. Many of his works exhibit multiple themes that can be interpreted in various different ways. This lends itself to the universal appeal of his art and makes it a more effective medium of conveying his messages to viewers. Ai Weiwei’s activist artwork—and activist artwork in general—is important to society because it effectively forces the viewer to engage in a self-reflective process that makes the viewer critically examine his or her own beliefs and world. Nevertheless, censorship greatly hinders the dissemination of the critical and thought provoking messages of Ai Weiwei’s art and makes his artwork less effective. In order to gain a better understanding of the relationship of Ai Weiwei’s activist art and the Communist Party’s subsequent censorship, I will examine Ai Weiwei’s influential childhood, his specific brand of activist artwork, the censorship of the Chinese government and the effects of censorship on the effectiveness of Ai Weiwei’s art.
What do I see in her performance? Her art performance “The Artist is Present” is the first career exhibition the MoMA under took for a performan...
This analysis draws focus on the differences between Hua’s novel and Zhang’s film by juxtaposing two key themes and dual-symbolism that had changed from one format to another. The paper is broken up into two parts and begins with an introduction and analysis of Yu Hua’s novel and Zhang’s film. Finally, the second part analyzes the film and novel’s representations of two themes and symbolism that tie in with the GPCR. This paper posits that while Zhang’s film does contain many adjustments based on its adaptation, those changes were not simply a means by which he would meet the status quo, rather they were a means by which the film could become more realistic and exploits the true nature of the GPCR.
However, even though the terms being used are grotesque and seem to describe beasts, the very conditions being described are so humanly in their nature that it cannot possibly be all dehumanizing. In this chapter, the protagonist is the fallen friend of Dong-Ho named, Jeong-dae, describing his experience as a soul post-death and the scene that followed his murder. The imagery he looks down as a fallen soul he describes in detail, “I’d lost so much blood that my heart finally stopped, the blood had continued to drain from my body, leaving the skin of my face transparent as writing paper” (51). The narrator himself describes his appearance as comparable to objects rather than a human and thus the interpretation that these words and scenes are dehumanizing is easy to understand. However, blood, heart, skin, face, body, even stench from the deceased, the limpness of a dead body, the convulsions that follow a blunt force trauma, all of these are human features and characteristics. These are the reactions and affects of trauma that any human would experience and it is clearly distinct form that of an animal because it is able to be talked about an communicated in language form souls or from others seeing it. Through these descriptions and graphic scenes, the author is humanizing the victims and allowing all readers to hear and feel the horrors that is the effects of war and violence on the human
But in following Kaprow’s expectations for his pieces, collective activity merely means the viewer’s willful participation in the scripted performance exactly as intended. While Kaprow activated the audience within the artwork, he failed to create an environment of exchange in which the process of interaction was as important a factor as the event itself. His insistence on the following of a precise course of events, developed entirely by him, restricts the kind of interaction he allowed in the work and limits the extent to which it could be considered
..., he acknowledges and reinterprets traditional Chinese art in his works. This is his mode of expression via shanshui tradition, and his ways of thinking, viewing and perceiving are infiltrated by the literati ethos. He works in the computer with his countless digital photographs, he creates virtual city landscape, combining the countless small format snapshots in a way that imitate the characteristic structure and composition of the classical shanshui. In his works, we can see that it always visualizes how China is developing and illustrates the consequences of modernization, globalization and the destruction of China’s ecological equilibrium caused by the speedy growth of its megacities over the past few decades. Yang said, “ The media… is not important, no matter what method you use to create, to maintain the creative spirit of the ancients is the most import.”1
The value of art, in fact, is conventionally determined by its aesthetic taste, by its meaning and by the feelings it conveys (Klamer, 1996). This explains why, in order to replace the inability to explain the condicio of creativity, artists are often referred to as “genius”. Being the criterions to appraise pieces of arts not evident and universal, the strongest contributions to the ease of the artist-genius come from the critics, who can revalue and exalt their histories and their qualities (Tota, 1999). With the intersection between the social and the intellectual activity, indeed the interaction with the public became the discriminating factor for the evaluation of arts. Being professionals, in fact, means transform one’s knowledge and ability into an instrument to satisfy shared needs (Tessarolo, 2014).
... cannot be shared in the legal Chinese media. Moreover, despite the repeated refusal of the label “political poet,” political reading of his work remain an exasperating continual practice and fortunately for him, he cannot avoid being read by his Chinese readers against the social context of coeval China.
Modern art runs a very important role in man’s life throughout history, because it that does not only give us inspiration but also the freedom to express ourselves through the use of different mediums.
The point of this essay was to illustrate the key concepts of the Performance Theory, to show how to understand them and apply them on the actual performances and actions. I think that the most important thing to elucidate is that „everything around us is a performance.“ So after all, everybody is a performer and an actor in their own way. And life is a performance.
I picture myself center stage in the most enormous and fantastically beautiful theater in the world. Its walls and ceilings are covered in impeccable Victorian paintings of angels in the sky. A single ray of light shines down upon my face, shining through the still, silent darkness, and all attention is on me and me alone. The theater is a packed house; however, my audience is not that of human beings, but rather the angels from the paintings on the walls come alive, sitting intently in the rows of plush seats. Their warmth encompasses my body, and I know at that moment that it is time to begin.