DETAILED COURSE DESCRIPTION

The course introduces performance art from the early 20th-century to the present day, through a chosen series of case studies. It examines the multidisciplinary nature of performance art tracing it back to the first Futurist experiments and Dada cabarets of the 1910s, analyzing its developments over time, and concluding with the current debates and practices in the field. The course explores the evolution of a time-based media that includes diverse elements – such as live presentation, physical movement, relational experience, and impermanence – which offered artists an alternative way of expression to the permanence of painting or sculpture. The course further analyzes performance art in relationship to other performative disciplines such as theatre, dance, video art, fashion, the digital world and addresses key subject areas of contemporary art including happenings, body art, feminist practices, institutional critique, relational aesthetics and social engagement.

SUMMARY OF COURSE CONTENT

Performance in visual art, can be defined as artworks that are created through live actions performed by the artist or other participants that can be both spontaneous or scripted. While the term ‘performance art’ only became used in the 1970s, the history of performance begins in the early 20th century.

Across institutions and biennials, project spaces, and even the commercial sector, a turn towards performance is emerging more than ever within the contemporary art landscape. Following a slow but steady pace, throughout time, performance went through a rapid development, being considered an opportunity to experiment with different forms of live-ness, which gave the chance to many artists to express ideas impactfully to an audience.

At the same time, performance art has destabilized our traditional modes of thinking about art and its perception, while questioning the systems of power underlying the museum and the art market. This course explores how artists have used performance as a meaningful artistic tool that has had a big impact on the social-psychological pathways that connect the spectator to an artwork, and an artwork to an exhibition space. Using case studies ranging from the 1910s to the present day, it examines how the time-and site-specific experience of performance art is translated into the world. Different practices in performance art will lead us to understand how performance is a way of engaging directly with social reality and the politics of identity, in the past, and in current times.

Class presentations and discussions will be supplemented by videos and readings. Interconnected assignments will give participants the opportunity to theoretically and creatively reflect on the course content.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Students will:

·      Become familiar with key historical performances, with lesser-known performance artists and with more recent practices, with a specific focus on art from the 1960s to the present.

·      Explore theoretical ideas coming from the philosophical branches of epistemology and ontology in relation to performance art.

·      Investigate the theories, frameworks and practices in the field of performance art and how these are developing and responding to the contemporary world.

·      Critically think through the complexities of the worlds they inhabit, the relationships that are part of it, and how performance art interprets these complexities with its original way of working.

·      Understand how performances have focused on the ambiguity of history and the impact of ideologies on collective consciousness.

·      Read performance art as a social and cultural constructing practice.

·      Acquire the ability to enquire into the power of the art as language and as experience.

·      Develop their own way of approaching performance.

Note: The course places an emphasis on western art because “performance art” was initially a western art-category. Examples from other geographic areas will be brought into exam to reflect the richness of the global history of performance art after 1960 and in the current time. Students will be encouraged to write research papers on artists from places other than the U.S. or Europe.

SCHEDULE

Class 1
Course presentation and introduction
Definition of the term performance and its evolution

Class 2
Early Avant-Gardes Performance: Futurism

20^th century performance art has its roots in early avant-gardes which will be explored during the first part of the course.
Futurism: Manifesto on performance; Grande serata Futurista; Noise Music; Mechanical Movements , Futurist Ballets, Synthetic Theatre (Marinetti, De Pero, Carrà, Russolo, Prampolini, Balla for Stravinsky)

Class 3
Early Avant-Gardes Performance: Dada

20^th century performance art has its roots in early avant-gardes which will be explored during the first part of the course.
Dada: Cabaret Voltaire; Zurich, Berlin, New York (Ball, Janco, Sophie Taeuber and Jean Arp, Tzara, Richter, Grosz, Schwitter)

Class 4
Early Avant-Gardes Performance: Surrealism

20^th century performance art has its roots in early avant-gardes which will be explored during the first part of the course.
Surrealism: Raymond Russel’s Impression d’Afrique; Parade by Satie, Picasso, Cocteau, Massine; Les Mamelles de Tirésias by Apollinaire; Le Coeur à gaz, by Tzara and Sonia Delauny; Relâche and Entr’acte

Class 5
Early Avant-Gardes Performance: Bauhaus

20^th century performance art has its roots in early avant-gardes which will be explored during the first part of the course.

Bauhaus: The stage; Schlemmer’s theory of performance; Mechanical Ballets

Class 6
In class presentations

Class 7
Post-war Performance Art: Black Mountain College of Arts
Performance in the United States began to emerge in the late thirties with the arrival of European war exiles in New York, By 1945 it had become an activity in its own right.
Black Mountain College of Arts; John Cage and Merce Cunningham

Class 8

Post-war Performance Art: Gutai

The Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Gutai Art Association) was formed in 1954 in Osaka and pursued radical ideas and approaches to making art which anticipated later performance and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s.

Case studies: Yoshihara Jiro, Kanayama Akira, Murakami Saburo, Shiraga Kazuo and Shozo Shimamoto

Class 9

Mid Century Performance Art: Fluxus

Fluxus was a loose international group of artists, poets, and musicians with a shared impulse to integrate art and life.

Case studies: George Maciunas, George Brecht, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, John Cage, La Monte Young-

Class 10

Happenings and Live Art
Happenings typically took place in an environment created within a gallery and involved light, sound, projections and the participation of the spectator.

Case studies: Allan Kaprow; Jime Dine, Claes Oldenburg.

Class 11

The New Dance
Dance as a way of life, that uses everyday activities in its choreographies: Dancer’s Workshop Company, San Francisco; The Judson Dance Group; Dance and Minimalism.

Case studies: Robert Morris, Meredith Monk, Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Carmen Beuchat.

Class 12

Midterm Examination

Class 13

Performance in Europe in the 1960s-1970s
Viennese Actionism was a group founded in 1962 whose actions were deliberately shocking in order to underline the endemic violence of humanity.

Case Studies: Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler

Class 14
Performance in Europe in the 1960s-1970s
Politics, memory and performance. Case studies: Jospeh Beuys, Jannis Kounellis
Beyond reality. Case studies: Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni

The Living Sculpture: Case studies: Gilbert and George, Luigi Ontani

Class 15

Bodies, Space, Gestures, Actions
Case studies: Dennis Oppenheim, Dan Graham, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Bas Jan Ader, John Baldessari

Class 16

Bodies, Space, Gestures, Actions
Case studies: Dennis Oppenheim, Dan Graham, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Bas Jan Ader, John Baldessari

Class 17

Feminism and Performance Art: Gender, Identities and Statements

Case studies: Julia Heyward, Laurie Anderson, Hannah Wilke, Rebecca Horn, Adrienne Piper, Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas, VALIE EXPORT, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic, Janine Antoni, Roni Horn, Gina Pane, Orlan

Class 18

Feminism and Performance Art: Gender, Identities and Statements

Case studies: Julia Heyward, Laurie Anderson, Hannah Wilke, Rebecca Horn, Adrienne Piper, Martha Rosler, Lynda Benglis, Joan Jonas, VALIE EXPORT, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic, Janine Antoni, Roni Horn, Gina Pane, Orlan

Class 19
Feminism and Performance Art: Gender, Identities and Statements

Case studies: Julia Heyward, Laurie Anderson, Hannah Wilke, Rebecca Horn, Adrienne Piper, Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas, VALIE EXPORT, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic, Janine Antoni, Roni Horn, Gina Pane, Orlan

Class 20
Performance and Institutional Critique
Institutional critique is the act of critiquing an institution as artistic practice, the institution usually being a museum or an art gallery.
Case studies: Andrea Fraser, Judy Chicago, Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Class 21
The 1980s and 1990s: A Different Kind of Intimacy: Performance and Protest in the Era of HIV/AIDS

Case Studies: General Idea, Tim Miller, David Wojnarowicz, Patrick Scully, Ron Vawter, Robert Mapplethorpe, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Andres Serrano, Karen Finley, Holly Hughe, Guerila Girls, Coco Fusco.

Class 22

Performance and Relational Aesthetics
Relational Aesthetics is a term created by curator Nicolas Bourriaud in the 1990s to describe the tendency to make art based on, or inspired by, human relations and their social context.

Case studies: Jason Rhoades, Gabriel Orozco, Maurizio Cattelan, Vanessa Beecroft, Rirkrit Tiravanija

Class 23
New Frontiers in Choreography
Jérôme Bel, Michael Clarke, William Forsythe, Alexandra Bachzetsis

Class 24

"Il Tempo del Postino" (Postman Time), 2009 was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno as a group show that would occupy time rather than space. A "visual art opera" that encompassed sound, performance, and cinema, Obrist and Parreno presented a sequential display of time-based art and choreography on stage. 

Overview of the show.

Class 25

Recent Boundaries in Performance Art
Hidden histories, marginalized narratives: Wu Tsang, Simon Fujiwara , Boychild
Musicscapes: Ragnar Kjartansson, Lina Lapelytè

New socially engaged practices: Theaster Gates

Class 26
Recent Boundaries in Performance Art: The Performative
- Tino Seghal: choreographed, open-ended and renewable human interactions. An open experience.
- Anne Imhof's hybridizations between cultural forms.

Class 27
Course Review

Class 28
Final Exam Review