CROSS-LEVEL LECTURE 4 - ARE PERFORMANCE ARTISTS MASOCHISTS AND DO WE ENJOY MAKING THEM SUFFER?

Lynne Fanthome – Cross Level Lecture 4 –  Are performance artists masochists and do we enjoy making them suffer?

In Fanthome’s fourth Lecture she was quick to note her intently flippant title. An attempt to draw our awareness to the shock factor delivered by Performance Artists since the 1960s. She spoke of the idea that Modern Art shocks into an awakening of consciousness.

Providing examples of Teching Hsieh’s Jump Piece (1973) and Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960). These artists using their physical; bodies as artistic strategy to shock their followers. As we all have bodies, an instant emotional response is to be had from witnessing artists put their bodies in extreme conditions.

Fanthome referenced Walter Benjamin’s concepts of shock as a feature of modernity.  Making a point of performance art as a new media of the 20th century and how this coincided with the technological advancements. Was performance art catapulted due to riding on this age of new-ness?  Benjamin theorised that artists have a function for dealing with modernity and illustrating issues to resolve them.

“The ultimate hero of modernity is the figure who seeks to give voice to its paradoxes and illusions, who participates in, while yet still retaining the capacity to give form to, the fragmented, fleeting experiences of the modern.” (Benjamin)
This quote from Benjamin illustrates the role of the contemporary artist – to give air to the other side of social and political norms.

Fanthome discussed the Futurist Manifesto – “The nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their electric moons.” They poetically described the development of transport, of consumer culture that never rested. A new era in constant state of production.

She spoke of surrealism as a critique of our social environments by offering art that comments on an alternate reality. Opening out an inner consciousness – challenging social rules of thinking and feeling. How dreams function to get through repression. The movement ran parallel to Freud’s psychological theory of the unconscious.

SALAVADOR DALI/ LUIS BRUNELL – UN CHIEN ANDELOU.




Further Artists/Reading

- AMELIA JONES - Masochism and male masochism –

- VITO ACCONCI - Research into the limits of his body - attention seeking, exploring the embeddedness of ourselves in the present experience.

- KATHY O DELL- Empathy, identification, identify with another body.

- MARINA ABRAMOVICH - Social experiments. **This type of performance art sensationalises this way of performing – in terms of social experiments it installs an anxiety in the audiences that take away from the connection between a sedate performance artist. – won’t want to be in close proximity to performance artist. – fear ** Do these practices destroy the distance between audience and object (performer)

- CHRIS BURDEN – shoot 1971

- FRANCO B – Turbine Halll -I miss you 2003 - Still life – using his own body to embody the experiences of the people who suffer. Still life metaphorical title – engage the audience to think about other people. – Human vulnerability – trying to expose humanity through his body. – Modern day saints? Sacrificial? – religion - Italian artist.

- *SEDATE PERFORMANCE ART* -
- Richard Long – A line made by walking - 1962
- Bruce Nauman - Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square. 1968. 16mm film transferred to video (black and white, silent), 10 min.