The Body in Contemporary Art
Lorna Simpson - Momentum
This performance piece really caught my eye. The striking figures all dressed in a golden yellow. The major hair pieces. All matching each other. Before I read about it I began to watch. I could see that each performer danced in a similar non synchronised way and not all the same. There were moments of standing in a line waiting and looking nervous. I got a sense that it was improvised but in an organised fashion. They act as if they are waiting around for the performance to begin or their turn to dance. The difference in enthusiasm sums up the feeling of a collective performance in a school setting.
When I read about this piece I learned that Lorna had fixated on a memory of performing a dance on stage in a gold bodysuit and gold shoes, as a child, and that she didn't want to be there. She wished she had been watching instead. "I don't know if that was the moment I felt a need to recapture 'the moment',". A reaction to a memory of which this time she could this time watch.
Adrian Piper.
Her work surrounds the themes of Race, Gender and Prejudice in daily life. She performs them herself. Mainly dressing up in the idea she wants to provoke on the street. Her 'Wet Paint' performance where she paints a shirt white then walks about with a wet paint sign around her neck, and the idea is to replicate the looks and avoidance that racism provokes in people.
Part of her alter ego 'Mythic Being' who is a male character and to which Adrian extracts a sentence from her teenage journal and resights it over and over in public. often repeating words and restyling it in order to understand it. The combination of public revelation and private contemplation was an exorcism of sorts, the artist has explained.
I'm not a massive fan of performance art. I find it a little pretentious. But I enjoyed looking at these 2 artists who used the human body to portray an idea or moment. I like the idea of a responsive piece. Like those performances where someone stands in the street holding out pens for people to write on their skin. A sort of body positive piece. It's not my area of interested but if I was pushed into it I would choose to look for a social interaction to push myself out of my comfort zone and engage a reaction from strangers.
This performance piece really caught my eye. The striking figures all dressed in a golden yellow. The major hair pieces. All matching each other. Before I read about it I began to watch. I could see that each performer danced in a similar non synchronised way and not all the same. There were moments of standing in a line waiting and looking nervous. I got a sense that it was improvised but in an organised fashion. They act as if they are waiting around for the performance to begin or their turn to dance. The difference in enthusiasm sums up the feeling of a collective performance in a school setting.
When I read about this piece I learned that Lorna had fixated on a memory of performing a dance on stage in a gold bodysuit and gold shoes, as a child, and that she didn't want to be there. She wished she had been watching instead. "I don't know if that was the moment I felt a need to recapture 'the moment',". A reaction to a memory of which this time she could this time watch.
Adrian Piper.
Her work surrounds the themes of Race, Gender and Prejudice in daily life. She performs them herself. Mainly dressing up in the idea she wants to provoke on the street. Her 'Wet Paint' performance where she paints a shirt white then walks about with a wet paint sign around her neck, and the idea is to replicate the looks and avoidance that racism provokes in people.
Part of her alter ego 'Mythic Being' who is a male character and to which Adrian extracts a sentence from her teenage journal and resights it over and over in public. often repeating words and restyling it in order to understand it. The combination of public revelation and private contemplation was an exorcism of sorts, the artist has explained.
I'm not a massive fan of performance art. I find it a little pretentious. But I enjoyed looking at these 2 artists who used the human body to portray an idea or moment. I like the idea of a responsive piece. Like those performances where someone stands in the street holding out pens for people to write on their skin. A sort of body positive piece. It's not my area of interested but if I was pushed into it I would choose to look for a social interaction to push myself out of my comfort zone and engage a reaction from strangers.
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