Grace Ndiritu, The Nightingale, video, 2004. |
In Extremis: The Artist as Artist, Subject, Canvas, and Document |
Sigalit Landau, Barbed Hula, 2000, Digital video projection, A.P. 1, Duration: 1 min. 48 sec.
Faith Wilding, Waiting, Performance, 1972.
Sheridon Davies, Yoko Ono Bandaged, 1967, Liverpool, © Sheridon Davies. |
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Centre D'Art Contemporain Geneve Since the mid-1960s, many artists have used their own bodies as both the subject and the object — i.e. the material — of their work. To understand the evolution of this phenomenon, the exhibition presents a large selection of historical and contemporary videos. An occasion to (re)discover works by artists such as Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Fabrice Gygi, Sigalit Landau, Grace Ndiritu, Hayley Newman, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, and Salla Tykkä. All the artists in this exhibition address questions of identity on one level or another. In this age of supposed globalization, an exploration of individual identity is crucial. Our construction of our selves, our identity as it is projected through our physical presence, is an enduring obsession of artists. Perhaps part of this fascination comes from the fact that it is our physical body which first presents our self to the world; we are not necessarily fully in possession or control of our appearance — we ourselves do not see our own body as it is seen by others. The body precedes the self, and this physical self may be only a partial representation, or even a betrayal, of who we ourselves think we are. With video technology in the mid-1960s, artists were suddenly able to make temporal recordings of work that weren’t just photographic stills, relatively easily and less expensively. This flourishing new technology offered them the opportunity to extend the “confrontational dynamics” of their work. The years from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s witnessed enormous social and political upheavals, both in the US and in Europe. A performative aesthetic flourished in a context where suddenly the traditional art object seemed to have limited relevance, and in which artists sought to bring art closer to life. Video became a working method rather than a specific medium, a useful tool with which to confront the audience more immediately with the artist’s presence, as well as with the process of making provocative, poetic, and politically challenging work. It was a means by which to reveal activities that took place within the intimacy of the artist’s studio (e.g. Bruce Nauman), or within the artist’s psyche (e.g. Vito Acconci). Performance related work from the 1960s and 1970s has heightened relevance in contemporary practice with the resurgence of more performative (and more conceptually structured) work, and artists are increasingly reassessing and referring to work from this time. Many of the artists and the ground-breaking work of this earlier period are known through writings, as well as through photographic reproductions of the work, but not from the first hand experience of the work itself, the video tapes, as these until recently have rarely been shown, available only as the original fragile recording. As the art historian Kathy O’Dell has pointed out, ‘what do all the photographs taken of any performance really add up to when one considers that each photograph reveals, depending on the camera’s f/stop setting, only 1/15th, 1/30th or even 1/60th of a second of the performed action?’ This is now changing, and more and more important work from this early period is becoming increasingly accessible, technology once again leading the way as original formats are restored and archived. In the 1990s, again a time of upheaval and political and social uncertainty and unrest now on a global scale, performance once again became a popular genre, and the body an eloquent site in which to ground work. With the end of the 1980s market boom, resulting in less money floating around the art world, performance and video became very appealing. As in the 1970s, these relatively new media offered artists the freedom to find forms of expression that were not bound up in the history of previous artistic practice, and allowed a very immediate (and intimate) expression of the sense of angst and individual disorientation being felt at the close of the twentieth century. The title I Am Making Art derives from a 1971 video work by John Baldessari, in which he refers humorously to the work of artists who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, explored the use of their own bodies and gestures as an artistic medium. The exhibition comprises a large selection of these historical works, and juxtaposes them with recent ones which pursue the same initial problematics as well as introducing new perspectives. Bound or beaten, naked or painted, still or spasmodic: the body is presented in all possible guises. The artists “live” their art, expanding the age-old tradition of self-portraiture as the body is used to disrupt norms and accepted signifiers of identity. The project is divided into four categories, inevitably artificial, as much of the work spans many different readings; as such they are useful presentation devices. The body can be used as a more or less personal or impersonal material; with no fixed vocabulary, it is a fluid signifying system. In Ritual, Transgression, Endurance, Risk, risky or taboo actions are framed in an art context to allow the artists to investigate limits. Simple actions are performed repetitively in Process, Duration, Repetition, until they take on a new significance. The process of making the work is exposed, and becomes the work itself. In Identity and Transformation, the artists explore their relationships with themselves or the outside world, between themselves and others, between themselves and the viewer, playing with masquerade, display, and the gaze. Lastly is Feminism, a notion once again being debated in the art world, and which was a vital area of activity within the genre in the 1960s and 1970s as women artists found a new voice and a new way of making work, allowing them far greater visibility than before. No longer delimited by the tradition of a patriarchal history, female artists found the freedom to explore issues of gender and hierarchies of power, addressing questions about the status of women, both as artists as well as in the broader social context. |
Oleg Kulik, Reservoir Dog, Performance at Kunsthaus, Zurich, 1995. |
