Assignment 3 : Due 10/15

1. Write detailed instructions of an original performance idea as considered towards engaging a live audience (you can still perform it alone in studio but it must be easily transferrable to an audience setting) as well as a performative audience (or audience engaging recorded visuals or relic).

Here are some examples (do not perform these):

CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI
Untitled
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[1] GET YOUR NEIGHBOR'S PHOTO ALBUM [2] GIVE THE NEIGHBOR YOURS IN EXCHANGE [3] ENLARGE ALL THE PICTURES TO 8 X 10 [4] FRAME THEM IN SOME SIMPLE FASHION AND HANG THEM ON THE WALLS OF YOUR APARTMENT [5] YOUR NEIGHBOR SHOULD DO THE SAME WITH YOUR ALBUM

YOKO ONO
Wish Piece
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y.o. '96 Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree. Ask your friends to do the same. Keep wishing Until the branches are covered with wishes.

JOHN BALDESSARI [ B-001A ]
How To Kill A Bug
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Equipment: 2 wooden planks, 1" x 4" x 18," labeled A and B. 1. Place bug on end of wooden plank A. 2. Strike area where bug is located on plank A with plank B. 3. Remove remains of bug from both planks and repeat with successive bugs as necessary

LIAM GILLICK
Untitled
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Using a pipe and a cable detector locate all the cables and metalwork hidden below the surface of chosen wall. Loosely mark their location using a light blue pencil. |

FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES [ G-003B ]
Untitled

"Untitled" Get 180 lbs. of a local wrapped candy and drop in a corner.

ULRIKE GROSSARTH [G-008A]
Exercises

Bring closets, tables, stools, chairs, sofas, shelves, other stands into an empty room set down lean, shove under, force in, tilt pile up, make fit stack up to closet height up into the door frames close doors. open doors enter into the mass of material climb, sag in, slip farther, remain lying weight, pressure, counter-pressure in the stillness of the persevering materials lean, give way, fit in disappear rest.|

SIMRYN GILL [ G-013A ]
Somewhere Between
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Approach a stranger who you perceive to be somehow different to yourself. The difference between yourself and this person could be of any nature, for instance - age, class, lifestyle, politics, skin color, religion etc etc. However, the category or categories of difference that you chose, should be one(s) that deeply inform your own life. Ask someone to take a photograph of yourself with this person. Send in the photo stating the date and the place.

SHERE HITE [ H-004A ]
Untitled
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Embrace an important friend in a full-length hug for 31 minutes. Contact should be frontal, body to body, full length, with legs, chests, pelvises and heads touching. Speak a maximum of twenty words each to each other. Do not proceed to other activities or to "sex." The room should be silent, without music. Alternately, videotape your embrace. There should not be a third party present videotaping; the camera should be set on a tripod with no operator. After, write your sensations on a large paper or blackboard. Read them out loud.

2. Perform

The following video is a student example of a performance. This documentation is weak and absolutely not a visually engaging performative event on its on. Please do not turn in the video or photography section of step 3 of the assignment with this type of aesthetic.



3. Creatively document/portray the emotional and visual essence of the performance through video, still images, sound, or a combination of media in such a way that the documentation becomes its own performative piece or artwork (visually engaging).

Challenge yourself with this portion of the assignment. Possibilities: Make an experimental short film of the performance. Shoot 8mm or 16 mm film. Record the sounds of the performance with a high quality mic from the position of the audience and/ or the performer. Use a camera as part of the performance. Shoot the event through a pinhole. Shoot the event with a large format camera.

The main idea is to reveal the nature of the performance and what occurred in a specific time and space (document- where, when, why, and how) but to also interpret and edit this documentation in such a way as to recharge the exhibition space (classroom) with a powerful new experience that acts as a performative event . This is not an easy task and may require you to have a friend document the event. The documentation is in effect a new piece of artwork that the class will critique.

Media Requirements for this step:

Photos only: 3 prints minimum size 11x14
Video Only: minimum 2 minutes
Sound Only: minimum 2 minutes
Mixed Media: Please discuss with instructor.


Burden


Marclay's Guitar Drag is a great example of mixing the document and the performative.


Marclay




Rist



Rist


If you combine the aesthetic quality of the two following photos you will be on the right track.



Sandy Skoglund Photograph



Sandy Skoglund Documentation of Performance



Rist



Rist


Up to and Including Her Limits 1973-76
Carolee Schneeman




Ana Mendieta

4. Collect Relics of the event with the intention of exhibiting them.

" Another way of becoming a trace is the idea of relic. Some artists use their performance material like relics. The "left overs" are shown like pieces of art themselves and they should be loaded with a kind of energy that came from the actions that were made with them (like the shattered glass that Chris Burden crawled through in his performance "Through the night softly" in 1973. It was exhibited more then once in different museums.). "


Rebecca Horn

Rebecca Horn


Up to and Including Her Limits Installation
Carolee Schneeman

4. Formally present instructions, documentation, and relic to class for critique as separate but related artworks

Rebecca Horn

Rebecca Horn, born 1944 in Michelstadt, Germany, as daughter of a business man and textile designer, begins her studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Hamburg in 1964. The scholarship of DAAD makes a stay in London (1971/72) possible. At this time Rebecca Horn starts creating performances with body related sculptures. All activities have the same subject in common: to extend, to enlarge or to narrow the body by applying masks, attachments and textile applications to the body of the actor. In the same way as in her first body sculpture "Arm-Extension" (1968), she researches in her performances the new experience of space, the poetical relaying of psychological states and physical limitation. Rebecca Horn's main focus is the interaction of object (or actor), viewer and environment. "There are only participants." (quoted from: Carl Haenlein; "Rebecca Horn. The Glance of Infinity", Zurich 1997, p. 49). The viewer in his external passiveness takes part in the same degree as the actor or the object (and engine) of the installation.

Ideas of touch and sensory awareness are explored in this work. Horn has described how wearing these gloves altered her relationship with her surroundings, so that distant objects came within her reach: ‘the finger gloves are light. I can move them without any effort. Feel, touch, grasp anything, but keeping a certain distance from the objects. The lever-action of the lengthened fingers intensifies the various sense-data of the hand; ...I feel me touching, I see me grasping, I control the distance between me and the objects.’ Implicit in the work is the idea that touching makes possible an intimacy between our own body and those of others.

Finger Gloves 1972
Fingerhandschuhe
Wood, fabric and metal sculpture
Relic Purchased with assistance from Tate Members 2002
T07845

A still from an early film made in 1970 about the 'Einhorn' ('Unicorn') performance, in which a woman walks through the countryside for 12 hours with the 'Unicorn’ object on her head. It demonstrates Rebecca Horn's interest in the poetical/mythological figures thematized in her performances, and also points to the sculptural aspect of the body extensions collectively presented in the films 'Performances I’, 1972, and ‘Performances II’, 1973.



Unicorn 1970-2
Einhorn
Fabric, wood and metal sculpture
Relic Purchased with assistance from Tate Members 2002
T07842