Lecture V
Wood, C. (2018). Performance in Contemporary Art. London: Tate. pp. 74-82
Goldberg, R. (2018). Performance Now Live Art for the Twenty-First Century. London:
Thames & Hudson Ltd. pp.71-85
Heddon, D. (2012). Histories and practices of live art. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp.
175-191
TEDx Talks (2014). Radical art, radical communities, and radical dreams: Guillermo Gómez-
Peña at TEDxCalArts [online video] Available
from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1KkjVpc5Go [Accessed 18 July 2019]
Gómez-Peña, G. (2011). A rebel performance artist goes through his mid-life crisis. In:
Keidan, L. The Live Art Almanac Vol.2. London: Live Art Development Agency. pp. 27-30
ARTISTS
Carlos Martiel
is a performance artist who engages in complex performances that develop almost as rituals, in which he often exposes his naked body to extremely painful states that resemble the sacrificial trail of some religious beliefs. Martiel’s performances are visceral statements that seem to respond to the human condition under difficult situations, such as censorship or persecution for cultural or political reasons. (CubaArtNews)
Regina Jose Galindo
is a Guatemalan performance artist who specializes in body art and her work is very political.
Zackary Drucker
is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals.
Cassils
is a visual artist working in live performance, film, sound, sculpture and photography. Drawing on conceptualism, feminism, body art, gay male aesthetics; Cassils forges a series of powerfully trained bodies for different performative purposes.
Keith Henessy
is an independent artist-scholar-activist-teacher dancing in and around live performance. His performances engage improvisation, ritual, collaboration, and protest as tools for investigating political realities. Practices inspired by anarchism, critical whiteness, post/Modern dance, activist art, the Bay Area, wicca, punk, contact improvisation, indigeneity, and queer-feminist performance motivate and mobilize Hennessy’s work.
CONCEPTS
Live art
The term live art refers to performances or events undertaken or staged by an artist or a group of artists as a work of art, usually innovative and exploratory in nature.
The term is mainly used to refer to performance art, action art and their precursor happenings, together with later developments of performance since the 1960s (Tate).
Performance Art
Artworks that are created through actions performed by the artist or other participants, which may be live or recorded, spontaneous or scripted.
More recently, performance has been understood as a way of engaging directly with social reality, the specifics of space and the politics of identity. In 2016, theorist Jonah Westerman remarked ‘performance is not (and never was) a medium, not something that an artwork can be but rather a set of questions and concerns about how art relates to people and the wider social world’ (Tate).
Politics
Political in terms of performance art, is the adressing of systems, rules, conventions and their possibilities for transformation regarding social and cultural matters.