BMA 312 Art History

Ana Mendieta, Silueta Series: Untitled (Volcano) 1979

Patricia Joan Godwin Assignment 1

Art made from, with and of the body has an immediacy and directness that is ineluctable and familiar virtually everyone can relate to it implicitly and emphatically because the body is the most fundamental aspect of human existence. Ned Rifkin (Viso 2004)

Abstract Performance Art is an interesting and diverse field attracting many artists who yearn to literally put themselves into their art. During the 1900s diverse methods of performance were trialled by artists questioning the Establishment as society transitioned rapidly throughout the century. In the 60s and 70s the Post-Minimalist Movement included a plethora of Performance and Body Artists. Carolee Schneemann, Joseph Beuys and Ana Mendieta were three very dissimilar artists who all used performance to express their deeply personal concerns. The burgeoning of what came to be known as Postmodern thought disputed the assumption of ultimate knowability and fixed meaning and gave rise to subjective personally constructed realities. All three artists demonstrate the use of their alternative realities through their performances. In my personal work I am extremely interested in the symbolic and subconscious meanings and how action and words create meaning and belief. This essay is an introduction to set the stage for the second essay in which I intend to examine Performativity, the way in which language and non-verbal acts can arbitrate in human activity to create reality.

Introduction Since the dawn of time creative people have reflected the ebb and flow of public opinion through ritual, mark making and with objects. Lippard (1983) states that art making is a ritual, perhaps the most valid..... in danger of becoming as disengaged as institutionalized religion (p 159). Whenever an Art Movement reaches an impasse as each must logically do there is a resurgence of Performance Art. Ritual, the vehicle used to connect to the Spiritual, is often employed by Performance Artists as they attempt to reconnect their audiences to the art world. Ritual, the core of human belief systems,

incorporates the balance between private and public; theory and practice; object and action and is closely aligned to Performance.

The Futurists and Dadaism Historically each Movement reflects the current mood of culture as well as what has gone before. This is no less true of contemporary times where Performance Art has become a major vehicle for artists involved in redefining the nature of art. The Futurist Movement of the early 1900s, revered speed, technology, youth and violence and the technological triumph of humanity over nature. Wealthy Italian poet turned Futurist performer, Fillippo Tommaso Marinetti, wrote and performed tirades aimed at liberat(ing) intellectual circles from the old, static, pacifist and nostalgic declamation (Marinetti in Goldberg, 2001, p 18). Marinetti had wanted to infuriate, incite and offend his audience believing it was the artists duty to incessantly ..... invent new elements of astonishment (Marinetti in Goldberg, 2001, p 17) in order to shock the audience out of their complacency and make them active participants in his performances. Simultaneously, German Dadaist Benjamin Franklin Wedekind constructed irreverent, satirical (sometimes obscene and immoral) performances with the express intention of provoking the spectator. Goldberg (2001) comments that Wedekind took pleasure in being able to revel in the licence given to the artist to be a mad outsider, exempt from societys normal behaviour. (p 52)

Modernism After the end of the Second World War, the moral outrage of Western society following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no less than the horror of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, could not adequately be conveyed by Expressionist painters. Artists of the times revisited the Dada and Futurist models of Performance for inspiration. While the Dadaists and Futurists touchstone techniques of chance, simultaneity and surprise had been an anarchistic attack on bourgeois complacency, the return to this paradigm after the Second World War did not contain the same vitriol. Performance artists now tended to express ironic resignation with nihilistic overtones as with Allan Kaprows random and disjointed 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959).

As the tumult of the Second World War receded, the huge technological engine spawned by international conflict continued to restructure society, the new artists became incorporated into the process of the rebuilding and reaffirmation of humanity. The technological explosion produced, as one of its consequences, the space programme. The concomitant invention of the computer prepared the way for mass communication, and this, combined with the decline of the British Empire facilitated the emergence of the Spectacle of Capitalism and Mass Culture in the United States (Foster, Krauss, Bois & Buchloh, 2004). Modernism emerged celebrating youth, sex and status and a new relationship between private fantasy and public reality and the breakdown of the boundaries between the two.

Development of Body Art Around this time artists began to use bodies not just in performance but as performance. Piero Manzonis performance Living Sculpture (1961), in which he signed naked womyns bodies declaring them art, and Yves Kleins Anthropometries of the Blue Period (1960), where he painted womyn blue and dragged them around on a canvas, both legitimized the body as an art material and opened the door to Body Art.

Piero Manzonis Living Sculpture, 1961

Yves Klein Anthropometries of the Blue Period, 1960

A turning point in American social climate was sparked with the debacle of the Vietnam War in the early 60s. As the society became increasingly politically charged, rebellion against the establishment escalated. Anthems by Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez (to name a few) reverberated throughout society in a postmodern confrontation of the implicit collective belief that there was one Absolute Reality that could be determined and understood.

In art this translated into a belief that the formal structural meaning of a piece could be completely known (Causey, 1998). Artists joined in the defiance of the Establishment. One such was Robert Morris, a Minimalist investigating impersonal, simple, obvious nonfigurative sculpture that evoked the manufactured object and formal relationships. Morris was also part of the 60s American dance movement which rejected talent and technique in favour of the mundane tasks of everyday life. Their performances included things such as the ritualistic concentration on walking in a straight line (Causey, 1998). Morris, with Carolee Schneemann, created Site (1965) which expressed the

relationship of the static and mobile elements of an object. Morris, dressed in white, manipulated boards around the motionless Schneemann changing the relationships between volume and space. Performances of this nature continued to subvert the Modernist assumption that fixed meanings are determinable through the formal structure of the works
Robert Morris, Site, first performed 1965

(Causey, 1998). Moreover they

demanded an intensive inter-subjective engagement from the viewer.

Carolee Schneemann Schneemann went on to do a performance in 1963 called Eye Body where she covered her naked body in grease paint, chalk ropes and plastic in order to transform herself into a visual territory (Schneemann in Jones, 1998). Schneemann came from a background in Abstract Expressionism and her move into performance was a brave pre-Feminist attempt at challenging the dominance of a presupposed male perspective as the One-and-Only way in which to interpret the Art World. She constantly used subversive techniques in her performances predominantly using her body in an eroticised narrative in order to confront what had come to be termed the male gaze.

Performing Inner Scroll (1975) Schneemann interrogated Modernist formalisms reliance upon the myopic and macho ideology of individualism as she withdrew a scroll from her vagina and read from it. The scroll readdressed womyn towards the serpent symbolism of early goddess religion recalling the generativity and transformativity of womyn (Warr and Jones 2000). The performance was a culmination of Schneemann's research into vulvic space and reflected on the inner knowledge of womyn. According to Jones (1998) by drawing attention to the presence of interior female genitalia in a patriarchal world that defined womyn by the lack of a penis, Schneemann challenged gendered subjectivity in a time before the Feminist Movement had been formally established

Carolee Schneemann: Eye Body #10. 1963/1973, Vintage silver print, hand coloured with scratching, 14 x 11 in. (356 x 279 mm), un-mounted., Signed, titled and dated in ink bottom left corner of print.

Joseph Beuys Joseph Beuys, on the other hand, worked to revolutionise human thought (Beuys in Goldberg, 2001 p 149). Beuys, rescued by Tartars after being shot down in World War II, believed that art should be a transformative experience that dignified the mundane. Jones, (2006) writes that his performances maintained a social relevance, whilst employing a highly personalised and symbolic ritual content (p 75). He examined the relationship between society and individual political and private.

Beuys used specific, subjectively relevant, objects and materials repetitively to express his ideas. Among his preferred metaphors were honey, felt and fat - all symbols of life and regererativity and personally relevant to him as a reflection of the nurturance and healing he experienced while in the care of the Tartars. The performances he executed were thick with complex iconography and bleak symbolism, reminiscent of the Passion Plays of Christianity (Goldberg 2001).

Beuys repeatedly transformed himself into what he called a social sculpture where he had meditative or interactive conversations with himself or his audience. In How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare, (1965) Beuys, his head covered in honey and gold leaf, held a long conversation with a dead hare because he said a hare comprehends more than many humans with their stubborn rationalism (quoted by Ursula Meyer 1970 in Warr and Jones 2000). Later, in 1974, wrapped in felt, he had himself delivered, by ambulance, to an enclosure which he then shared for a week with a wild coyote performing I Like America and America Likes Me. The title was deeply sardonic as Beuys opposed the United States, military involvement in Vietnam and the performance was a challenge to the hegemony of American art. In addition, the use of the coyote was confrontational as the coyote, a god in the mythology of the American Indian, was symbolic of damage done to the continent of America and its native peoples by the colonising Western world.

Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead hare, 1965 Galerie Schmela, Dusseldorf (2000)

Ana Mendieta Ana Mendieta was born in Cuba and moved to America at a young age and therefore her concerns cantered around her otherness as an ethnic womyn transplanted into a capitalist culture. Mendietas work had very strong ritual overtones in their repetition in earth, mud, branches and flowers, snow, fire, water and blood. She made over two hundred works where she showed her body or later, the imprint of her body, integrated into the Earth. In this way her body or the cavity left by her body - suggests the womb of Mother Earth and references the rituals of early South American goddess religions. For Mendieta, the earth was a living thing and she conceived the word magicoreligious to describe the power she believed she invoked in making primitive ritual a reality in her contemporary life (Blocker 1999).

Blocker (1999) also points out that all performance works to produce transformation. While performing her body as her identity, Mendieta moved away from displaying her body and started to depict the absence of her body instead. Besides, her pieces, although not concerned with what was then the most powerful movement in the world, never-the-less bear the imprint of Feminisms most fundamental conflict. In addition she was aware of the Goddess Movements prevalent in her time. For Mendieta, however, these Movements were the domain of the white, middle class, womyn of North American descent, and that her experience of other was diametrically opposed to theirs. Feminism and the Goddess were the least of her concerns. Her ethnicity made her feel far more other than did her sex. Her use of the absence of her body points to the instability of her feelings of national identity particularly when she used fire in her pieces leaving behind a pile of ashes to be swept up and disposed off.

In 1984 in a statement for a project she did at Brad College she wrote: Opposed to Earthworks of the 1970s, which use nature in its most literal sense, my purpose and interest is rooted in natures symbolical [sic] meaning (Mendieta in Viso, 2004). Another comment she made helps to clarify her viewpoint: It is a whole process of intimate life-death-birth (Mendieta in Viso, 2004).

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, IOWA, 1979 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Lifetime colour photograph 50.96 x 33.18 cm) 201/16 x 131/16 in

Her Silueta series displays her context. Prominently and compellingly she uses her body outline centrally positioned as the primary structure a term which denoted the exceptionally pared down Minimalist aesthetic. This stark outline acted as a counter balance to natures nuanced processes of transformation (Vito, 2004). Mendietas compulsive creation of this sculptural motif was aimed at producing an unending depiction of the relation of her body to the earth. She does not at any stage attempt to alter the course of nature she merely places herself within her environment and allows it to act upon her. Her Siluetas are metaphorical and suggestive confronting violence, discrimination, rage, suffering and division as well as injecting elements of harmony and regeneration, especially in her later works. He pieces have no finality, they all encompass process and the making and are wrapped up in the physicality of material transformation over time, be that historical or temporal.

Discussion Phenomenologist theory gesture, language and symbols constitute acts through which society is created and maintained. Jones (1998) writes Body art is specifically antiformalist in impulse, .....Works that invoke the artists enactment of her or his body in all of its sexual, racial, and other particularities and overtly solicit spectatorial desires unhinge the very deep structures and assumptions embedded in the formalist model of art evaluation. (p 5) All three performers discussed above appear to be aware of this power that they invoke in order to work through issues that are of primary concern to each individually.

Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, claimed that gender is not a stable identity but rather one that has to be claimed and established (Butler, 2003). Butler elaborates that gender is something that is created and maintained through a stylized repetition of acts (p 392). Schneemann exaggeratedly performed her body as a sexual object in order to importune her audience for the purpose of re-negotiating the misinformed doctrine of an objective, impartial art history and criticism. She attempted to reconstruct Reality in the presence of her audience

by repetition of acts which, in phenomenologist theory, is how new identity is created. Was she successful? Many would answer No to that question, saying that she merely incorporated herself into the Patriarchal Capitalist Spectacle of her times. However it is undeniable that since performances of the body such as those produced by Schneemann, the status of womyn in society, the way they perceive themselves and the way they are perceived by men, has dramatically altered, and is still shifting.

Beuys was intent on raising the social consciousness and experimented with the role of the artist as entertainer/teacher and sharman/professor (Warr and Jones 2000) inspired people with a sense of responsibility for the culture in which they lived. Again it is controversial as to whether or not he succeeded. Beuys and his contemporaries worked to challenge the priority of the Art Object in the hollowed grounds of the Gallery. Their objective was to put art back into the public domain. However as Lippard states, Immateriality and impermanence.....strategies against commodificatioin, have often backfired, leading to the same kinds of isolation and inaccessibility the artists had hoped to overcome (1983, p 159). There are several reasons for this. One is that by the very nature of performance it cannot be stored or retained in any way other than in photographs. Ironically now the photographic evidence of many of these famous performance works are on display in Galleries. However, as Merleau-Ponty stated, the body makes not just an historical impression but is rather a set of ideas whose possibilities are recurrently comprehended and made manifest (Butler, 2003). Performance art provides one avenue for artists to challenge social inequalities and reestablish new ones, and Beuys certainly did this.

Unlike Schneemann who used her body as a weapon for the initiation of a Femininist voice, or Beuys who targeted society at large, Ana Mendieta used her body, and its relationship to the Earth, as a tool for investigating her own self identity. Unless her viewer understood the particularised aspects of Mendietas belief system they could not read the true meaning of the work. This is true in varying degrees of all three of the artists described herein. These strategies have certainly been disruptive to the Modernist assumption of transparency of meaning and presence. (Jones, 1998)

As postmodern and poststructuralist thought and performance focused on reaching the viewer in novel and motivating ways, the notion of de-centeredness became prominent. Acceptance of alternate voices, deceptively described as pluralism, struggled to be heard. Mendietas voice was one of these as her pieces straddle many concepts, including race, colour, religion, gender, nation and earth. She was truly ahead of her time in desiring a multicultural society where all people are equally empowered. Another astonishing quality of Mendietas work is that she calls for an awareness of the importance of humanitys reliance on Mother Earth.

Performance is now as controversial as it was when it was first enacted. Mostly now, in Art, it has given way to Installation. It can perhaps best be understood as a stepping stone in the development of human thought towards understand the psyche of humanity and the self.

Bibliography

Blocker, J. (1999). Where is Ana Mendieta? Durham and London, UK: Duke University Press.

Butler, J. (2003). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. In A. Jones (Ed), The feminist and visual culture reader. London and New York: Routledge.

Causey, A. (1998). Sculpture since 1945. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Foster, H., Krauss, R., Bois. Y-A., & Buchloh, B.H.D. (2004). Art since 1900: modernism, anti-modernism, postmodernism. London, UK: Thames & Hudson Ltd.

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Jones, A, (Ed) (2006) A companion to contemporary art since 1945. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Warr, T., & Jones, A. (2000). The artists body. New York, NY: Phaidon Press Ltd.

Viso, O.M. (2004). Ana Mendieta: earth body. Washington DC, and Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution