Month: October 2019

In my performance piece, I’m thinking about incorporating a Buddhists’ religious ritual to create a sense of “alienness” to this campus of little cultural diversity. One approach is to video record the process of performing this ritual with the audience’s reaction in the background.  The performance artist Kimsooja’s A Needle Woman is a successful precedent.

I knew from the beginning I wanted to work with paint which is something I have strayed from. To me, paint would allow me to freely express myself and still leave behind physical documentation that was created through the process. It was set to take place in my room, a place that will always remain private.

I have an idea for my project but I am not sure exactly what I am going to do for the physical documentation part yet. My main idea is to stand outside of a main academic building during lunch hour and seek out participation from students passing by. I want them to engage with the work in their own individual ways. I’m thinking of painting a wooden board with a color-coded guide of circular “buttons” next to words that would categorize a typical student applying to college, including one for “none of the above”. The colors would indicate which word corresponds with which color. Then, I could ask them to paint colors of what they feel represents them in these scenarios. I plan to video record this performance piece as well as presenting the final board after the performance is over, providing two forms of documentation. The goal of this project is to showcase the pressure students feel to place themselves in these categories when filling out applications, while also placing myself in a live performance setting.

For my project, one issue I am having is since I want to incorporate paint somewhere public on campus, I am wondering if there will be a big hassle for cleanup and if I should plan on bringing a tarp incase it gets a bit messy. I feel as though since I want to use right in front of the Fairnon steps as my performance location I feel as though its peak busy times would be the best time to perform my piece. I am not sure if 11:50-12:30 or 5:50-6:45 would be the best time to get the most people to engage with my performance. Another issue is whether or not it is more successful for the class to see my piece live and see people putting paint on me or if it is enough just with video/photo documentation and then bringing the work of art itself into class. These are some of the things I am currently thinking about right now regarding my piece.  As for the audience I want people who are walking by Fairnon and then I will definitely ask people in different club and class groupchats to come as well and help me out and engage with my work.

I am not exactly sure what I want to do for my performance piece however I am really inspired by Marina Abramović’s work and how much she engages with the audience. Since doing my site-specific piece and really getting out of my comfort zone I feel a lot more comfortable and excited about doing something that relies on others to make the performance work. I am really intrigued by the idea of using the library or front of the library for my location of my piece. I feel as though this is a major hub for a lot of students and it is very academics focused.

For my artist research, the artist I chose to further research was Marina Abramović. Marina is a Yugoslav artist best known for her performance pieces. When I saw her name come up I did not realize that I had actually been shown one of her works in capstone, her work just caught my eye. However, as I continued to research her, I came across Rhythm 0 which I had heard of before. This was a piece where Marina stood before an audience for six hours and allowed the audience to do whatever they pleased. She had a table full of objects, 72 to be exact, even a loaded gun. The purpose of her work was to see how far people would go with this. Marina found this piece to be much more challenging than she had anticipated and that what the audience did to her was grueling. “What I learned was that … if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you … I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”. She experienced a lot during this piece. I found it very fascinating and impressive that she put so much trust into these people and endured all of this treatment for six full hours. I think it also says a lot about our society that once she started walking away everyone ran in fear of facing her.

I was first intrigued by this artist when I walked into MoMA in 2016 and Maria Hassibi’s installation was taking place on the main stair case. I still remember my reaction to the piece itself. I remember trying to understand it and trying to remain calm while right next to it. I remember feeling overwhelmed by the number of individuals who were there, something I did expect when visiting MoMA but never did I expect to find so many visitors that were still at MoMA. MoMA has always been a fast paced environment, it is something that is part of MoMA. However, the piece itself had made me question the relationship performance art creates between the work itself and the audience. This is why I decided to go back and look deeper into her work.