Performing Bodies : Anthony Bond

A brief history
Performance has been an important element in avant-garde art throughout the 20th century. It has roots in the idea of the Gezamtkunstwerke in which all the arts might be brought together in some totalising experience. The English performance artist Stuart Brisley makes more archaic references characterising body art as an alienated modern form of the rituals that used to form part of community life as a kind of cathartic release on special feast days etc.

VIDEO Brisley Haxey Hood event from Being and doing

Art movements such as constructivism, futurism and dada all aimed to break down categorical boundaries between art forms and indeed between art and life. They also questioned the rule of reason and accepted social codes of behaviour. To some degree this was a political protest at the direction of society and in particular the First World War as an expression of apparently rationally determined modern policies. At the same time aspects of their assumed irrationalism could be seen as a primitivising tendency in modernism in line with cubism�s appropriation of African ritual objects and anticipating surrealism�s flirtation with psychoanalysis.

There is a tension between cathartic action and political action that runs throughout this history and perhaps this comes to a head in the recent works of Mike Parr where for example he had his face sewn into grotesque grimaces as a means of raising the issues of refugees in our concentration camps.

1.L Alfred Jarray poster for Ubu Roi 1896
Alfred Jarray and Artaud�s theatre of the absurd are often quoted as the starting point of this history in the 20th century. At the two performances of Jarray�s Ubu Roi at Lugn�-Po�s Th��tre de l�Oeuvre in 1896 The audience broke out into fights between supporters and objectors as the pear shaped P�re Ubu walked on stage and pronounced MERDRE several times. The set incidentally had been the work of painters not usually associated with performance art including Bonnard, Vuillard and Toulouse-Lautrec thereby marking the end of the century and revealing a widespread preparedness for aesthetic and intellectual risk taking entering the next.

1.R Marinettis futurist manifesto published in Le Figaro 1909
The young Marinetti had been present at this event and quickly adopted an absurdist element into his Futurist Manifesto. In 1909 he produced his own play Roi Bombance that was a slightly lame forerunner for the futurist performances to come. The first of these was performed at Trieste as a protest against the Austrian Invasion it was a Jarray like event in which the Manifesto was declaimed accompanied by much noise making. The event marked the group out as political troublemakers and from then on their performances were attended by large numbers of police.

2.L Russolo and Piatti with his noise instruments1913 &
Marinetti insisted that the Futurist declaim as much with their legs as with their hands and that the hands should wield different noise making instruments. Russolo made his instruments for the art of noises to produce the noise of trams, trains, explosions and shouting crowds at the turn of a handle.
2.R Marinetti�s Feet 1915 a performance only for feet and legs

3. L Vladimir Mayakovsky at the Mad dog caf� 1914
3. R Larionov and Goncharova in a scene from a futurist film 1914
Marinetti�s manifesto was published in Russia in 1909 as well as in Paris and encouraged young artists and poets like Mayakovsky, Livshits and Khlebnikov to make their own quasi-futurist performances. This activity gathered round the Stray Dog Caf� in Mikhailovskaya square St Petersburg. These performances included self-painting and they took to the streets in their weird attire setting the stage for performance art that declares art and life set free from conventions as well as from the confines of theatre and museum.

4.L George Grosz walking the streets of Berlin dressed as death 1918
During the First World War Dada artists continue this multimedia approach emphasising the absurd. There was a live connection to the expressionist movement�s critique of the war for example the expressionist painter George Grosz walked the streets of Berlin in 1918 dressed as dada death.

4.R Hugo Ball reciting karawane 1916
In 1916 Hugo Ball recited a sound poem Karawane at cabaret Voltaire. This was a species of verse without words or a sound poem. The idea was to liberate poetry and art from the tyranny of reason.
Gadji beri bimba
Glandridi lauli lonni cadori��..etc

5.L Kurt Schwitters Merz theatre and the score for the Ursonata 1923
Kurt Schwitters proposed a Merz theatre calling for
�equality in principle between all materials, human beings, idiots, whistling, wire netting and thought pumps�
Schwitters performed his famous poems Anna Blume and the Ursonata at the Bauhaus in 1923
Dll rrrrrrr beeeeee bo
Dll rrrrrrr   beeeeee bo fumms bo
      rrrrrrr   beeeeee bo fumms bo wo
                   beeeeee bo fumms bo wo taa
��etc

5.R Marcel Duchamp (a la Cranach) 1924
The great Marcel Duchamp may be considered to have made his whole life into a performance. He is certainly the artist most credited with dissolving the boundaries of art and life through his deployment of the readymade. Picabia enrolled Duchamp in his performance and film clip Rel�che in 1924 where he poses as Adam after a painting by Cranach.

6. LBauhaus stage demonstration - multiple exposure photo by Lux Feininger
At the Bauhaus experimental design was very much part of a wilder experimentation with media including light shows and theatre.

6. R Xani Schawinsky A scene from Circus 1924
Oscar Schlemer and Xani Schawinsky became famous for performances with elaborate costumes that were more sculpture than clothing transforming the figures into machines or semi cubist sculptures. The props and costumes were used to perform mechanical ballets while Hirschfeld-Mack created sound/light shows to accompany them.

1960s plus or minus 10
The Sixties have a magical power for the baby boomers that were just out of school in time to enjoy them but the liberation we experienced had already been forged in the years immediately after the war and throughout the fifties. The sixties also lingered on into the 70s when flower power turned nasty after too much acid or conversely became refocused by the international response to violence in Vietnam and a general renewal of activism in relation to the environment and the repression of capital.

There are parallel trajectories that occasionally collide and merge in these three decades that I have gathered together as the sixties. There was the politically driven performance that has its origins in dada. This often involved theatrical effects and sound and was always aimed at breaking boundaries between performer and audience thus symbolically empowering the masses.

7.L Jackson Pollock at work 1952
Then there is the evolution of self-expression or psychodrama that emerges from painting. The signature gestures of Abstract expressionism can be seen as a precursor for this performance. Indeed Jackson Pollock literally appears as a performance artist in the Namuth film of him at work. This film completely transforms the way we think of painting into a trace of a performed action.

7.R Yves Klein Anthropmetry performance 1960
Painting is also the background from which Yves Klein arises although his Anthropometries were constructed in part as a satire on George Mathieu who had emulated Pollock by painting as a public performance in his dealer gallery. In Japan Gutai artists were also exploring the possibilities of performance in conjunction with painting eg. Shiraga. I will return to Klein in more detail later.

8. L Kazuo Shiraga Gutai performance as painting 1955
There is a relationship here between dance and painting that is possible to see as a continuation of Chang painting traditions and Zen philosophy.
8.R Min Tanaka Sydney Biennale performance 1982
Min Tanaka performed in Sydney in the 1982 Biennal. He began by moving almost imperceptibly up the steps and into the gallery slowly increasing speed till he ended with a cathartic whirling. His background was in Bhuto theatre. Zen was very influential for this generation Beat and otherwise in America and to a degree in bohemian circles in Europe. Artists such as Cage were attracted to it for the state of mind produced by meditation that supersedes rational knowledge with an acute and immanent awareness of the world. The idea that we could learn to see the world as if for the first time was an attractive one for modern artists, they wanted to see if art could also produce epiphanies. It also meshed well with the surrealist idea of making the everyday strange, a process that was also about refreshing perception and allowing new insights.
9.L Meret Oppenheim Spring Feast 1959
Meret Oppenheim was associated with Surrealism and this performance must have been one of the first of what was to become a virtual genre of bodily associations with food and other substances in the 60s and 70s for example Carolee Schneeman�s Meat Joy 1964.
9.R Carolee Schneeman�s Meat Joy 1964

In the fifties there was a renewal of a political response to organised culture in the USA that brought about protest art, happenings and everything we associate with the beat generation. This certainly seemed to embrace an element of dada. Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerawak working on the West coast experimented with mind-altering drugs and experimental forms of writing, theatre, and above all life style. This was to be the background for the coming hippy generation whose psychedelic music and imagery became the popularly recognised signature style of the sixties. I recall vigorously performing Ginsberg�s Howl at the top of the steps at Sacre Coeur in 1961 and no one seemed to mind too much.

10.L Xanti Schawinsky�s Danse macabre at Black Mountain College 1938
On the East coast at Black Mountain College in Carolina European Bauhaus influence had been introduced already by Joseph Albers in 1938. Albers brought out his old German colleague Xani Schawinsky to teach performance art, Schawinsky organised a number of performances in which the audience participated and improvisation was an important element. He made the audience dress up and there was no spatial division between audience and performer. This interactivity was to become a key to later performance ideology.

John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham were attracted to Black Mountain where they established a new American performance based on improvisation and audience participation. Cage�s 4�33� was first performed at Black Mountain in 1952. For 4�33� the pianist sat at the open piano occasionally moving his arms but never touching the keyboard. The audience was to take it that every incidental sound such as a cough or a passing plane that they heard during the duration of the performance was the work i.e. the work was theirs to do - to meditate on the incidental sounds of the world.

10. R John Cage Variations V 1965 AV performance with merce Cunningham in the background
Meanwhile in the New School for Social Research in New York, a small college for experimental music Cage was working with artists including painters, musicians, filmmakers, and poets. Amongst them Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, George Segal, Larry Poons, and Jim Dine. Assemblages and environments were one way to go beyond painting but performance was an inevitable extension of this.
11. L Robert Rauschenberg�s Pelican 1963
11.R Jim Dine�s Car crash 1960

12.LJim Dine�s Smiling workman 1960
12.R Robert Morris Site 1965

13.L Alan Kaprow 18 happenings in 6 parts 1959
Alan Kaprow was to be very influential in the early happenings in New York. 18happenings in 6 parts took lace at the Reuben gallery in 1959. This event was performed for a larger public whereas some earlier pieces were restricted to a few friends and colleagues. The invited audience received various strange objects through the mail, pieces of paper and photos, cut out figures and some basic instructions on what they would experience and what was required of them.

Three rooms had been created with transparent plastic walls each filled with chairs arranged so the audience faced in different directions. Coloured lights were strung throughout the space. The third room was the control room from which the performers would enter and return. Full-length mirrors in the other rooms recorded what was happening. The spectators were given precise instructions as to what to do and the ring of a bell signalled their movements from room to room. Although this was supposed to be haphazard it was in effect very controlled. The performers marched up and down declaiming slides were projected and loud sounds played and painters painted canvases set into the walls. It must have been very much like a futurist performance in many ways.
13.R Alan Kaprow Garage 1962
This piece was one of many happenings in which Kaprow acted out a strict script but the audience was free to wander through it and to interact.

14.L Alan Kaprow Calling 1965
In this work a number of models were hung upside down in various country locations calling out to each other while in town wrapped figures called each other by phone.

Andy Warhol was also involved in performance in particular with experimental film works and the musical avant-garde on the edge of pop.
14.R Andy Warhol at the factory 1964

15.L Andy Warhol Velvet Underground and Nico 1966
His film Empire state in which the camera rolls for 24 hours recording in real time nothing much happens so in a way this is a precursor for some of the endurance pieces we will see details from later.

In Europe there were also Happenings in the early sixties, I was lucky enough to be around at the time and experienced some that occurred at the original ICA building at Dover Street. This was a space set up by the independent group that partly grew out of British Surrealism in the late 1940s and was to blur with Pop Art in the early sixties.
15.R Eduardo Paolozzi Bunk portfolio 1947-52
The group included Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton who both later played an important role in Pop that also sought to transgress the boundaries of fine art. Interestingly Paolozzi was very influenced by Kurt Schwitters. He saw an exhibition of collages at Marlborough in 1947 and immediately started his own Bunk collages in response. In this way the historical knot is given another twist.

These happenings at the ICA were far less orchestrated than Kaprow�s although their inception was based on hearsay of his work. We arrived at the old Dover street venue of the ICA and milled about till the rumours of possible strategies began to filter through - possibly started by agents provocateur. I found myself in one of two groups that commandeered two old pianos that became the mounts for a destructive jousting match. After an hour or so the pianos were reduced to rubble that we then proceeded to assemble back into junk sculpture.

Destructive events have a long history in art for example Tingeley�s self destructing machine that did its thing finally blowing itself apart at MOMA in 1960
16.L Jean Tingueley Hommage to New york 1960
1960 and Study for the end of the world 1962
16.R Jean TingueleyStudy for the end of the world 1962

17.L Jean TingueleyStudy for the end of the world 1962
Fluxus also had a tendency to destruct and the Piano was a favourite victim perhaps because of its genteel past associations.
17.R George Maciunas and Emmett Williams in Fluxus concert 1962

18.L Nam june Paik Random access 1963
18.R Ben Vautrier and friends in Piano work 1982

19.LBen Vautrier Action 1964
19.R George Brecht solo for Violin �Viola- Cello polishing 1962

In London John Latham who made several works by exploding books had his students at St Martins chew the pages of a book by Clement Greenberg and present the resulting balls of cud as sculpture in jars of oil. Latham also made some very dramatic environments at Better Books just over the road from St Martins. He collaborated on one of these with Bruce Lacey and Jeff Nuttall. The audience had to crawl through congested passages encountering sights, sounds, strange objects and images that referred to the Vietnam War and other current political situations. It was closed down when someone freaked out in the claustrophobic maze- they had made the mistake of thinking it might be a cool place to drop a trip. John was also fired from the college for the book episode. Adrian Henry was another important figure in English performance during the sixties his group mainly performed in Pubs and often ran out of control.

Some people viewed this kind of event as a social laboratory to test the parameters of social behaviour. There were interesting individuals who were active on the edge of contemporary culture at the time. Gordon Pasc was particularly interesting case. He was a cybernetician who made a living by building computer models of social structure and interactions that demonstrated systems of control. His models were fantastic Heath Robinson devices attached to vast arrays of computers that in those days were the size of wardrobes.

He used these models to devise systems for business and on one occasion for the police force. On the other hand he arrived in the laboratory in the morning took rather a lot of cocaine and performed an elaborate Sufi dance. We need ritual in our lives he assured me! He collaborated with a sociologist called Arthur Chisnal who ran the famous jazz club on Eel Pie Island at Twickenham. Between them they contrived all kinds of experiments some of them overt but at times covertly manipulative where the networks of young beatniks and later the hippies all too often participated in their sociological experiments in exchange for free passes to the club.

Pasc was later asked by Roy Ascot to run the foundation year at Ealing art school. His idea was that the students needed to loose all their preconceptions about their relation to the world to question basic assumptions about perception � � what would it be like to have electron microscopes for eyes? Would it be the same world?� He made all the students adopt some very particular positions that interfered with their normal interaction with the environment and with others. For example one was forced to spend the whole day ever day for first semester strapped to a dolly so that they pushed themselves around with their hands on the floor. Everything they did had to be worked out - doors, steps, equipment had to be negotiated help sought thereby powerfully constraining their independence. Another was given a verbal formula every day that they had extract from anyone they wished to speak to before they could ask a direct question. These strategies proved very successful in undermining the student�s preconceptions so much so that half of them ended up in psychiatric care. This was a great time for experimentation.

The political atmosphere that emerged in the sixties was coloured and fuelled by the presence of Herbert Marcuse teaching at the University of California. Marcuse was also to have an influence in swinging London�s liberation politics of the sixties. He spoke at the Roundhouse in 1964 about the emergence of social and biological change that would produce ideal man incapable of war and working in a new collectivity that reconciled art and technology. There was something of the Situationist theory of surplus play in Marcuse�s utopia. He also railed against the repressive nature of tolerance that denied the people of political resistance in the name of endless consumption.

In Europe Yves Klein began making performances in the late 50s most particularly in Germany where his activities most certainly came to the attention of the recovering Joseph Beuys.
20. L Yves Klein Ant 118 1960
In Anthropometries such as Ant 118, Klein used a model�s body as a means of applying paint to the canvas. He claimed that these images capture the energy and the presence of the body. The Anthropometries are part of a series in which he �collaborated� with nature to produce the paintings. As a variation on the �living paintbrushes� which he named Cosmogenies, he tried holding his prepared canvases up against grass waving in the rain and the wind to capture the vitality of the elements. Many of the Anthropometries were executed as performances intended for photographic documentation.
20 R Yves Klein Anthropometries with audience and monotone symphony1960
The stage was designed by his photographers so that the documentation would most effectively show the performers, an orchestra playing Klein�s Monotone Symphony and the audience dressed as for a formal theatrical event. Klein himself wore a tuxedo and white gloves. The venue he chose was the gallery where the Informel artist, Mathieu, exhibited. Mathieu had given public displays of gestural expressionism inspired by the Namuth film of Jackson Pollock in his studio. Klein�s performance was a deliberate parody of Abstract Expressionism.

21.L SLIDE Leap into the Void
Yves Klein�s Leap, 1960. This action of leaping from the second floor window of Collette Allendy�s studio in 1960 was in part a demonstration of his achievements in Judo and Rosicrucian spiritual exercises, yet he deliberately set himself up to be caught faking the evidence. This photograph by Harry Schunk shows a cyclist on the road and a tram across the end of the street. This was the image Klein inserted in a simulated edition of the newspaper, Dimanche which he placed on news stands all over Paris immediately after the event. Within a short time he had the same photograph, but this time without the cyclist and tram, published as a poster for his exhibition in Krefeld. A careful study of the photograph shown in this exhibition reveals that it has been spliced, presumably to remove the image of a safety net.

The authenticity of the performance has been much debated. The interesting thing, however, is the fact that the photograph as an art work is authentic irrespective of the means of production. If we want it to be literal evidence we are not accepting its role as an art object. The viewer may be curious about whether Klein actually leapt, but they will see in the photograph a convincing image of someone flying upwards into the void with a fiercely determined expression. There can be no doubt that Klein wanted to fly as we all do in our dreams.
21. R Yves Klein Transfer of Immaterial pictorial sensitivity zones
In 1960 Klein also began exchanging immaterial art works for gold leaf the collector got nothing material other than Klein�s assurance that they had acquired a piece of an enhanced pictorial zone of sensitivity. Some of the gold would be thrown into the river some went to an ex voto for the patron saint of lost causes St Rita of Nice. Later on he reluctantly agreed to give a certificate so that the dealer had some tangible record of the exchange.

Joseph Beuys was recovering from a long nervous breakdown brought on by his war time experiences at the time Klein was making work at Krefeld and Gelskirchen near by. In fact Klein did the opening show at the new Schmela Gallery in Dusseldorf that Beuys had previously been slated for. In the sixties Beuys began his own performance works.

22. L Joseph Beuys Explaining Pictures to a dead Hare 1965.
It is important when thinking about Beuys that we remember his mirth. Like Duchamp and Klein he saw the funny side of life and of his own most serious endeavours. Laughter is also very close to catharsis.

Beuys carried the hare round the room to see each picture. He wore a magnetic iron sole on one foot and felt on the other. This caused him to shuffle and clank his way about with great difficulty while also signifying insulation and conduction. While communing with the hare and the animal world in general he was also trying to get in touch with the earth itself.
22 Joseph Beuys Explaining Pictures to a dead Hare residues 1965.
The radio made from bone and electrical components was tuned to a virtually inaudible wavelength. Beuys� explanations were mute so explaining and understanding was intuitive and imaginary.

23.L Joseph Beuys Mainstream 1967
23.R Joseph Beuys Mainstream 1967
In this year he also formed the German Student Party. It was a time of political revolt against the Vietnam War and CIA intervention into radical activity in Europe. This performance included comments on this infiltration. His actions as he leapt about and lay on the fat or slithered about the space simulated an epileptic fit.

24.L Joseph Beuys Manressa 1966
24.R Joseph Beuys Manressa 1966
Manressa is a Catalan village where St Ignatius Loyola meditated after recovering from his war wounds in 1523. Beuys saw it as a site of initiation in western history.
In this performance Beuys generated an actual current using a Geisler tube, at times sparks actually flew from his fingertips.

Beuys began his performances as cathartic rituals but they became increasingly political as time went by.

VIDEO Beuys Coyote I like Amerca America Likes Me

SLIDES
25.L Joseph Beuys Fluxus event with Henning Christiansen 1978
25.R Joseph Beuys Fluxus event with Nam June Paik 1978
Beuys was also an active member of Fluxus and contributed to many of the concerts collaborating with Henning Christiansen and Nam June Paik most frequently.

In the last years his performance mostly took the form of lectures and organised conferences dealing with environmental and political issues under the banner of his creation FIU. Among the young artists who took him as a mentor at that time were Anselm Kiefer and Rebecca Horn who both made performances of their own.

26.L Anselm Kiefer Heroic Symbols 1969
26.R Anselm Kiefer To Genet 1969
Kiefer had been making a series of performances himself, dressing up as a Nazi and throwing the salute in various significant sites for the history of The Third Reich. These performances became the basis of some of Kiefer�s first books back at the start of his life and they remain a key to his work to the present. Kiefer has been resolutely ambivalent about his position refusing to affirm what he himself might have done had he been born 20 years earlier, he will not say that he would not have been caught up like the young Beuys.

By refusing to take a position about what might have been, he opened himself up to the criticism that he is a sympathiser. I would argue that on the contrary to accept the possibility that one might have been caught up in the moment is a courageous and necessary intellectual step towards reconciliation. There can be no full reconciliation when empathy stops with the victim.
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27.L Rebecca horn White Body performances 1972
27 R Rebecca horn White Body performances 1972

28.L Rebecca horn Paradise Widow 1972
These objects for performance also appear in herr full length movies such as Der Eintanzer 1978
28.R Rebecca Horn Der Eintanzer 1978

Talk to the following slides/video as commentary

Video Denis Oppenheim; Gingerbread man � Rocked stomach -
Video Hannah Wilke; Through the Large Glass
Video Vito Acconci; Three adaptation studies; Blindfold catching, Soap and eyes, Hand and Mouth
Video Joan Jonas; Organic Honey�s visual telepathy
Video Ana Mendietta; Sweating Blood, Body Tracks, Burial Pyramid, Untitled Mexico, Flower Silhueta, Silhueta en Fuego
Video Tibor Hajas Was ist kunst
Video Stuart Brisley/ Ian Robertson Disassociation 1980
Video Bereś Romantic Manifestation, Krakow Poland 1981
Video Milan Knizak The Big Sleep 1974
Video Stuart Brisley/Ian Robertson Between 1979
Video Chris Burden Shoot 1971, Icarus

SLIDES
In Vienna a group appeared calling themselves Wiene Aktionismus their actions seem to grow out of abstract gestural expressionism and in the case of Nitsche they return to painting in the form of traces or residues.
29. L Otto Muhl Material action 1966
29.RRudolf Schwarzkogler Aktion Wien 1965

30.L Herman Nitsche Aktion 1984
30. R Herman Nitsche Aktion 1984

31.L Herman Nitsche Aktion 1984
31. R Herman Nitsche Aktion 1984

Meanwhile In California Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley have been parodying both the abstract expressionist movement and the literal actions of the Austrians.
32.L Paul McCarthy Grand Pop 1977
32.R Paul McCarthy Grand Pop 1977
There have also been some extraordinary individual performance artists whose work has been painfully personal and yet made strong political statements also among them Gina Pane and Ana Mendietta
33.L Gina Pane
33.R Ana Mendietta

In the seventies a form of body art appeared that was to do with testing bodily limits or finding the breaking point of mind over body.   Mike Parr devised a list of actions as instructions that he later intended to carry out.   The idea of a clear instruction and following it precisely is a realist strategy that anchors the meaning of the work.

Video Mike Parr Extracts from Rules II, III 1972-1975   Hold your Breath, Hold your finger in a candle flame, Have a branding Iron made up with the word artist, Stuff your iose with bread and stick two matches up your nose, Group activities
Video Marina Abramovic/Ulay   Imponderblia / expansion in space / 16 hours without audience/ Light Dark / aaaa-aaaa / incision

Some artists have made tableau where the body is portrayed as a sculpture in the case of Ken Unsworth as a minimalist object in suspension or balance.
Video Ken Unsworth Five secular settings for sculpture as ritual 1975

In England Gilbert and George were also working as living sculptures
Video Gilbert and George Singing sculptures 1969