Performance Proposal

TITLE:

This Is Why I Don’t Go To Gym

DESCRIPTION:

This is a performance artwork that I will be doing on April 8th. For the duration of the class time, I will be using a PC set to built muscle.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Being at an art school, I’ve spend too much time in front of a computer researching, reading and writing… etc. I’m tired of them all. I feel I need to do some exercise.

BUDGET:

$800 for a PC set, $40 for my training wear

Through Installation and Traces

For the last two weeks, students have been presenting their individual performance art works at the Emily Carr FVIM 322 class. Some are multilayered and sophisticated, and some are simple and explicit. As performance art is a broad genre and it encourages artists to work in almost any kind of styles and formats. Its flexibility opens up a great opportunity for artists to express their feelings and thoughts.

Francisco Granados painted himself with gold leafs and syrup to show a Canadian-ness inside him.

Jennifer Somerstein sat in a white set with a large screen projected behind her confessing her rack of artistic talent.

Victor Chan left a threatening note to the class to test people’s trust to him and his art practice.

There were many unique and creative works, and one thing in common for all these artists is that they all make use of their own body in their performances to express their inner feelings or alter egos. I believe that there is a strong link between performance and self discipline. As if it is the essence for performance artists to constantly challenge their bodies and challenging their limits, artists tend to put themselves into a risky position and revels their privacy when they are physically involved with their works.

Community Based Art

Naomi Singer, Winter Solstice Lantern Festival

Winter Solstice Lantern Festival takes place on December at the darkest night of the year. People from all over the town would walk in a parade with lanterns, and convene on Granville Island to celebrate the night. When Naomi Singer, a student graduated from Emily Carr University, launched the festival at the False Creek Community Centre in 1994, it was only a small group. Nowadays, as rumor spreads, the event gained its popularity and has been performed in a much larger scale.
Compared to the city where I was brought up (Tokyo), I find Vancouver very rich in nature and people environmentally friendly. At the same time, I also feel that the distance between houses and people are very large that it is hard to interact with others. One would often lose connection to the society when he or she tries to approach nature, however,  Singer’s project merges the boundary between nature and society that I find it might be the most old fashioned and low-budget method of making earth and humans coexists as one.

Durational Performance

Zhu Fadong, This Person is for Sale

In 1994, Zhu Fadong walked around Beijing City carrying a black briefcase and dressed in a dark blue Mao jacket, written on his back in red characters was: “This person is for sale.” Zhu Fadong continued the performance for two weeks. He would start at his house and took a different route around the city each time.
China has shown a great economic development in last few decades. On the other hand, the gap between rich and poor has become more and more conspicuous as well. Lower class workers works in very low wages, as the result their individual values seem worthless, and people are turned into commodities to be sold off. I feel that the work strongly points out the loss of identity for Chinese citizens in an increasingly commercialized society. Through his performance, Zhu Fadong was appealing self awakening to the public.

Relational Performance Art

Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Light and Dark

Abramovic and Ulay began their collaboration work since 1976. As they were born on the same day, and spoke of themselves as parts of a two-headed body, the main concepts they explored were the ego and artistic identity. In the work of Light and Dark, Abramovic and Ulay sat cross-legged on a small platform in front of a seated audience, and kept slapping each other’s face by turns for 40 minutes, and then walked off when one of them failed to strike back.
I felt that the performance associates strongly to relationship between married couples. When two people are committed to each other, and have to face each other every day, their confrontation would become inevitable. Because their relation is interdependent, hurting the partner also means hurting self. The act is a way of communicating, and a search for one’s conscience. What awaits them in the end is either separation or a solution.

Shadow Performance – 3 min. x 3

Shadow performance was an unexplored filed to me. I’d never thought is more than a pastime. So I had a little hesitation in participating the event. But I guess this is the merit of being an art student. You can fool around, and in the end still make art works out of it (>o<)b

I was an audience for the following three group performances:

Group 1

The performance was about a journey. A mouse like figure comes out of a sleeping person’s mouth, and goes into a dreamy world. I found the group had a very thoughtful use of shadow images. I especially liked the rise of mountain. The technique of overlapping images of mountain on top of previous images smoothly took me to next scenes. Also, the change of colours and designs on the background was very pleasing to eyes. They made a clear division of foreground and background, so that it was a good method in creating depth of field.

Group 3

Masks of men meet a mask of a pig head. Mysterious dance, deep voice chorus, and African drum,, etc. The performance looked like some sort of a religious ceremony. It was simple. Thus powerful in ways of conveying a grotesque and scary feature. Fear of sleeping at night, fear of swaying shadows, fear of dark corners at quiet streets. The work reminded me of all kinds of fears and traumatic experiences of darkness and shadow. And I absolutely hated it.

Group 4

The performance was about a man-eater. A giant takes a little girl out from a cage and eat her alive. I thought of Gayo’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son when I saw the performance. In Gayo’s painting, Cronus, a mythological figure ate his children as he feared of them surpassing him. Compared to Gayo’s work, the group took a rather straight forward process in depicting the idea of power structure. But I guess clarity and simplicity is the virtue of shadow performance. I associated the two works together as they both depicts the relationship between the act of eating and desire of oppressing weaks. I wonder whether eating is an ultimate way of establishing power structures. As people often have desires of surpassing other people, the urge of cannibalism might exist within every one of us. So the projector not only enlarged our shadows, but also increased our desires as well. Last but not least, I think the group made a very good effort and success in using the mechanism of TV screen to created mini figures.  

About A Show

I can’t remember the last time I paid to watch any kind of show. So I got very enthusiastic when I decided to go to The BeAst of Taylor Mac. 

But I felt been cheated. Despite of its reputation, I find the whole thing very cheap.

Not necessarily that I didn’t enjoy the show, but I’m sure that I wouldn’t stop my steps, if I saw him/her performing on the street. 

 

Taylor Mac

Performance Art

Performance artists are full of surprises.

You think they are just crazy, but somehow they find ways to get people’s attention and respect.

#1 Yoko Ono

 

#2 Chris Burden

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/artworld/2007/05/14/070514craw_artworld_schjeldahl

#3 Matthew Barney

http://www.cremaster.net/

Electric Stimulus

This is a very unique performance by a Japanese artist & computer programmer Daido Manabe.

I don’t know what SPCA would say, but I think it would be even more interesting if he can use the device on animals.

Installation Review – Inanimate Alice

Not until very recent that I started to encounter with works of Digital Video Art. It is an unfamiliar genre to me, and I felt overwhelmed since most of works that I’ve seen are obscure as they are abstract and conceptual. In that sense, I found Inanimate Alice, a collaboration work by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, is much more self-explanatory and accessible. However, it adapts the features of game so strongly that it questions me about the essence of digital art, and its relation to the mass media.
The work takes us to a journey through the life of Alice, who grows up in the early years of the 21st century. It addresses issues of the younger generation becoming too involved into the computerized contemporary society, through the depiction of the alienated girl becoming even more alienated because of her obsession with her portable mini computer (ba-xi). It is an ongoing series of a web-based project, presented in multimedia with the combination of sound, text, images, and interactive art.

So far, three out of the ten stories have been completed, and each story captures a different stage of Alice’s growth as well as the very sentimental emotion of her reacting to the out world. Although the complex and sophisticated plot lines are also the significant aspects of the work, because it is an interactive flash animation, its style make the work no different from other Internet based media or materials, in which people seem to value more on the dynamicity and catchiness of graphic effects than its concept or ideas.
Due to the influences of mass media and the needs for the fast pacing commercial industry, many people are attached to things only through its surface these days. No thoughts but entertainments. People are reluctant to seek meanings behind works and receiving data insensitively, as the result, becoming the slaves to the mass medias and information technology.
Art is composed by its idea. Pop culture has served its purpose that people should start looking into the core of works more. Inanimate Alice challenges the boundary between art and media, and addresses issues of the contemporary culture through both its style and content of the work. It was presented on the Internet instead of a gallery space as if it is asking its audiences to discover the message behind.