Happenings, Fluxus, Body Art and other “Activities” performance, politics, real life “Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with truth” - Thich Nhat Hanh

Performance An umbrella term: includes dance, film, video, performance art, live art, activism, emerging practices of the digital age and can include daily behaviors framed or contextualized as ‘performance’ or ‘art’. “The performance world is usually the most permissive place where artists with the most radical ideas can find their feet, then twenty years later be taken back into the fold.” R. Goldberg

Performance Art The materials are the actions or “activities” of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time. Can happen anywhere, at any time, or for any length of time. Can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the ‘performer's’ ‘body’ and a relationship between performer and audience. Performer can be an object or a robot. Umbrelled today under the terms ‘Live Art’ or ‘Time Based Art’.

Live Art "Live Art should not be understood as a description of an art form but as a strategy to ‘include' a diversity of practices and artists that might otherwise find themselves ‘excluded' from all kinds of policy and provision and all kinds of curatorial contexts and critical debates.” Live Art Development Agency

Live Art To create experiences for the audience by foregrounding the experiential. To activate audiences. To shock, destroy pretense, to break apart traditional representation. To open up different kinds of engagement with meaning. Almost always underneath it is a social concern. “Disrupting borders, breaking rules, defying traditions, resisting definitions, asking awkward questions and activating audience... Live Art breaks the rules about who is making art, how they are making it and who they are making it for.” LADA

“Leap Into the Void” Yves Klein 1960 / Elizabeth Streb 1996 The artist is the masterpiece

Gutai Movement 1950s Japan

Electric Dress (1956)

These images had a strong impact on artists in the 50s and 60s. Jackson Pollock in his studio 1949 The artist is literally in the canvas. The canvas is marked by “action”. The image extends beyond its frame. Artists translated this concept to space: The site as a canvas. Life as the canvas.

Cage / Cunningham 1952 Black Mountain Event is the first “Happening.” Variations V (1965)

Happenings ‘Happenings are events that, put simply, happen. … In contrast to the arts of the past, they have no structural beginning, middle, or end. Their form is open-ended and fluid; nothing obvious is sought and therefore nothing is won, except the certainty of a number of occurrences to which we are more than normally attentive.’ - Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (1993), 16

18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959)

Yard (1961)

Happenings Site-specific: Art designed for a particular place, often linked to its history and dependent on the space for its form or content. “Conceived for, dependent upon, and inseparable from their location” (Richard Serra) Installation Art: Many installations are site-specific in that they are designed to exist only in the space for which they were created. But generally, the term is applied to interior spaces and the emphasis is on the viewers experience.

Words (1962)

Household (1964)

Fluxus Whereas happenings were sometimes complicated, lengthy performances meant to blur the lines between performer and audience, performance and reality, life and art, Fluxus performances: Were performed on stages including Carnegie Hall in New York. Had a clear, beginning middle and end. Valued simplicity over complexity Were usually brief and simple – often a single action or word Celebrated the banal Didn’t wear costumes, wore their own clothes or a formal business suit. Dead-pan wit.

The art forms most closely associated with Fluxus are Fluxus boxes and event scores.

“Action is the purest form of Poetry”

American Flag (1970)

Cut Piece (1964)

Vagina Painting ( 1965)

Robert Rauschenberg with Carolyn Brown and Alex Hay in Pelican (1963)

Body Art / The Artist’s Body Yves Klein (Blue)

Piero Manzoni Living Sculpture (1961)

Chris Burden Shoot (1971) Gina Pane The Conditioning (1973)

Marina Abramovic & Ulay

Marina Abramovic & Ulay: Retrospective Preparations 2010: 53 Retrospective Preparations 2010 Rest Energy (1980) 2:30 Rest Energy (1980)

Stelarc The Body as Evolutionary Architecture

Gilbert & George (4:00)

6 July 1962 Judson Memorial Church, Greenwich Village NY Robert Dunn; Rainer, Paxton, David Gordon, Deborah Hay, Trisha Brown

Judson Dance Theater/ Grand Union Yvonne Rainer b Trio A, The Mind is a Muscle (1966), No Manifesto (1965) Steve Paxton b Contact Improvisation

Judson Dance Theater/ Dynamic Bodies Last week when observing Cunningham we focused our Close Movement Analysis primarily on Spatial qualities and Shape. Today we’re going to add to this the investigation of the dynamic qualities The same physical action (in spatial terms) can be performed in many different was depending on the dynamic qualities of the movement.

Effort/Dynamics There are four basic effort continuums. They include all the shading in between – Weight: light to strong – Flow: free to bound – Time: sustained to quick/sudden – Space: flexible to direct Remember, when analyzing movement we don’t break it down into little parts, instead we look for patterns and how they are distributed: – Roles – Gender – In space and time. Are certain patterns dominant or reoccuring?

Trio A Yvonne Rainer: Trio A 09:55 - First created 1965 by Rainer Filmed in 1978 Yvonne Rainer: Trio A 09:55 - First created 1965 by Rainer Filmed in 1978