9/18/02

November 11th: the McCarthy project

Time, space and the body: the body is a site of performance, magnitudes of performance.

The historical avant-garde concerned itself with ideas. With the emergence of Cage and Kaprow, formalism became the dominant…

How are time and space presented when it doesn’t mean anything. The body as a kind of stage became important. On which, in which, and about which the performance took place. The body was transparent in old performance. The actor’s body became a character… not a body… Pace Theater…
Thursday nights: performance nights… PS 122, Dumbo, The Kitchen… Happy Days… Beckett…

Thursday at 10:30 in the morning, Goldberg is teaching in a studio… LA artists:

Redressive: it is a revealing of dominant values… sounds a lot about Auslander’s resistance… The empowerment of subjects… An enabling discourse that allows for healing… resistance is about survival (doing our own thing) but redressive function emphasizes healing/enabling… it has fundamentally different ideology from New York based artists because it’s a primarily female (which NY is Kaprow and Cage)…
Cheng’s utopia is a muticentric, multiple pathways… all these different subjectivities that bump up against eachother… her performativity is a prosthetic limb that goes against the object-oriented performances…

The feminist performance movement was the most important time…
1. geography : the space determines participant behavior and subsequently the epistemological
2. performances themselves
3. her role as a critic and a writer: subjective writing, interventionist… Conscitious cartographer… the critical subject that is marginalized like the performers themselves… She draws upon Elain Scary’s notion of the body… materialist criticism… language is capable of registering in its own contours the weight of the material world and the language may alter the material world…

language occupies space in its materiality… the use of language as a material act… language as a vehicle of the individual… Materialist criticism… aspires the generate new voices… Her writing is a performance itself…
Performance art is a survival art… There’s a whole aspect of groups on the west coast that are fairly different from east coast artists…

The large projects are male projects… Judy Chicago (quilt project)… Suzanne Lacy (old women… groups hundreds of women in Southern California)… Anna Halprin… (these are always collaborative)…

Marina Abramavic
Art must be beautiful… artist must be beautiful.. (brushing the hair… repeating those words) She looks like she’s hacking her hair into pieces. It gets pretty violent… and then sorta sexy… she starts combing her face too. He body is the stage in which the performance take places… In wilke, the body was the performer by not necessarily the stage. (Shit man, this is taking forever).
The mouth is make AHHHHHHH sounds that slowing rise in pitch and themouth never closes… It sounds really disturbing. She’s laying the ground. Sometimes it sounds like an organism. Sometimes it sounds like she’s giving birth. Sometimes is sounds like a vocal training excersie. It sounds very emotional but there’s no emotion involved at all. It goes on indefinitely. Her head is back. This is definitely a duration piece. It does feel as there’s some degree of pain, emotional, meaningful stuff. Shit. This is really grating.
Feeling the memory: eyeball enamel cracked gangrene mucous timid ear eardrums yellow gat neck wrinkles dry breasts nipple stomach nape intestines heath trachea legs anus shows heel arthitus tuberculosis leprosy influenza cold lungs walking room linoleum chairs armchair lounge floor bronze doorknoc key wall corner curtain shutters blinds labryth

These different continuum. Virtuositic, non-virtuostic,

Body site of performance, body as agent of performance
Meaning is specified, or indeterminate… The thing is there to be itself…
Triumphal… There’s all these different continuum… perforamcne art is distinct from the theatrical stuff… performance stuff is more thematically localized (there are still themes within even Richard Foreman)… however there is a problem with some performance artists.

Kaprow said in 1961 that Happenings

1. have no plot

2. no virtuositc

3. rely on chance (highly controlled by dice, guided by game rules, rule-bound) not improvised, uncoltrolledor compulsive.

4. transient, once-only

5. something haphazard… and hip (this pissed Kaprow off)1. happening… nightclub, audience assemble, drawn in the action, food, film, stuff goes on

2. extravaganza: stage, arena, large audiences, lots of different kinds of artists (unified single art work) more highly theatricalized.

3. event: small audience in a theater watches a performance (woman combing her hair)

4. piped piper happening: journeys through the city… all this stuff has been absorbed into popular culture (organized wandering) took off from tourism… made tourism an art and then

5. the idea/conceptual happening: most radical… Its raining in Tokyo… the read light on Brooklyn bridge… you don’t have to go see it… it performs within the interplay between the nothing happing in the image and the brain-space where the thing takes place in the mind (the long list of words)

6. the activity: something directly involved in the world… close to sports, war games, and shopping… everyday activities and rituals… you ride the subway with a present-centered consciousness so that it becomes an activity… Timetable music… performance at the railroad station… obtain timetables and when read they start their stopwatches and then they. Open a closed window and close an open one. Add to the object another object to make an other…

The performative in the Kaprow sense is being aware of an action. The less it does the more it is a performance.

Use the postal system to send mail to people you don’t know.

Spend the rest of your life in detention without the chance of a trial.

Life like art… art like art… His heart is the life like art… Most performance art is non-narrational quality (don’t refer to things outside themselves).