Performance Art Through The Lens Of Poeises, Catharsis And Cynicism.docx

MVA II

Performance Art: through the lens of poiesis, praxis, catharsis and cynicism PRONOY CHAKRABORTY ASSIGNMENT ON TWENTIETH CENTURY WESTERN ART SUBMITTED TO: DR. JAYARAM PODUVAL

Theoretical Premise and Introduction to Performance Art

The project attempts to locate the genre of Performance Art gaining importance since the nineteen-sixties as a form of resistance to academic formalism within the aesthetic framework of Aristotelian concepts: catharsis (or the discharge or purification of emotions such as pity and fear), poiesis (or the process of art-making; poiein: "to pro-duce" in the sense of bringing into being) and praxis (prattein: "to do" in the sense of acting). It focuses on the critical concern of the artist's body as a medium and tries to probe into the role of the audience who par-takes the experience in such happenings. The Ancient Greek philosophical debate of Mimesis or imitation between Plato and Aristotle becomes the basic theoretical premise in this paper on Western Aesthetics. Aristotle’s defence of the tragic poets and thereby the artists in Poetics is based on the emotive value of art in the society. Aristotle made his case for tragedy by saying it is an “...imitation of a serious and complete action, which possesses magnitude, by being pleasurably embellished through speech with each of the forms separately [employed] in the parts, [through] acting and not through a narrative, by bringing to fruition through pity and fear and the catharsis (purging) of such emotions.” 1Aristotle’s argument was for the Greek form of tragedy which was as much aesthetical as ethical (Aesthetics and Ethics are the two branches of axiology or value judgement in Western Philosophy). Aristotle’s belief in the empirical senses of the body as opposed to the Platonic mind of a philosopher gives sanction to mimetic action but within constitutional moral restraints. The Cynics in ancient Greece however denied both aesthetics and ethics with the conviction that they are mere pretences by which the philosopher flaunts his enriched tastei and qualifies as a pseudo-intellectual. Diogenes, the most popular of the cynics, has survived through multiple fantastic anecdotes which portray him as a man who preached by means of performative rhetoric- his absurd public acts would question established ethical and aesthetical standards of the age. The irrational lifestyle of a Cynic in ancient Greece was a performative rhetoric which functioned as social critique of institutional norms. Performance art, a genre that developed in the nineteen sixties would often cynically rebuke the academic formalism established by critics of taste like Clement Rosenberg and 1

Ananth Mahesh, A Cognitive Interpretation of Aristotle’s concepts of catharsis and tragic pleasure

Michael Fried. Performance art had its first modern predecessors in the Futurist and Dadaist performances or events which sought to radically ridicule and subvert aesthetic standards. By the late nineteen-fifties groups like the Fluxus and the Happenings were active in America with a desire to make art more accessible to the public. Performance, they believed created a bridge with the live audience. Performance also meant that the process of creation was the artist’s central concern- process or poiesis shifts attention to the performer artist rather than the audience whose relation to art is in terms of effect or cathartic. Harold Rosenberg’s American Action Painters sought to look at Jackson Pollock’s drip-paintings as performances where the canvas became the artist’s “arena to act.”2 Rosenberg’s aesthetics sought new standards of judgement- for the process rather than the product. In the nineteen seventies, Performance Art emerged as a genre which defied clear categorization as it swiftly cut across different art-forms and media. To quote Roselee Goldberg: “By its very nature, performance defies precise or easy definition beyond simple declaration that it is live art by artists. Any stricter definition would immediately negate the possibility of performance itself.”3 In the words of Gregory Battcock, “Before man was aware of art he was aware of himself. Awareness of the person is, then, the first art. In performance art the figure of the artist is the tool for the art. It is the art.”

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Photography, film and video

played a major role in documentation of live performances by artists (either in front of the audience or in the studio) to reach a wider public. At posterity, therefore an attempt to engage with Performance Art happens through media-reproductions. The paradigm shifts from the poietic ritualistic act to the profaneii photograph or video, cut off from the original physical context or specific-site of the performance. Performance Art draws equally from theatre, dance, visual arts and poetry and is antithetical to Aristotelian tragedy in lacking a structured narrative script. The artist’s actions have heterogeneous roots: the legacy of theatre and hence a counter point to realism; the lineage of Pollock’s action-painting and also the tradition of shamans and yogis aimed at investigations of the body directed at healing, often reaching transgressive extremes of self-mortification. Core to performance philosophy, is Frederick Nietzsche’s Dionysian manifestation of dance and movement reaching down into the chaotic forces of nature (which were both exhilarating and terrifying) opposed to Apollonian interest in image-making seeking the bearable, indeed

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Rosenberg Harold, American Action Painters, 1952 Goldberg Roselee, Performance Live Art: 1909 to the Present, 1979 4 Battcock Gregory; The Art of Performance, 1979 3

beautiful form. Nietzsche laid emphasis on creative existence and saw the Dionysian artist as the antidote to the ascetic ideal of religion and metaphysics.5 In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche describes his view of man as the unification of two poles of creature and creator. Performance Art as poiesis recalls the Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin’s emphasis on the aesthetics of the creative process itself, rather than the activity of the artist who creates (or praxis). “To author” means creative activity for Bakhtin and in many of the chaotic performance pieces, one sees the reflection of Bakhtin’s idea of the Carnival. The world of Carnival is place for Bakhtin where the physical drama of the body (through birth, coitus, eating, drinking, evacuation and death) is played out.6 In analyzing phenomena such as laughter, masks, grotesque images of the body, display of the sexual body parts and other forms of debasement which are common to Performance Art, Bakhtin’s idea of the grotesque body and the chaotic institution of the Carnival in his classic Rabelais and His World become evident. Nietzsche replaces Aristotelian Plot and Action with Music and Pathos, showing no interest in the logic of the story-line. The Dionysian creative process of a performance like Herman Nitsch’s Orgies Mysteries Theatre uses the trope of ritualized pain as medium for collective experience. The activity of the artist is supposed to transfigure ugliness and lead to pleasure felt as an increase in power. In a recent exhibition, the curator, Simon Zalkind proposed to present Nitsch’s paintings as relics from previous action performances. These Apollonian images are but bloody residues of the prosaic world with the hope of a redemptive future. Achieved through transgressive means, the images are produced by a release of instinctive energy critiquing the devotion and piety veiling the bloodiness of relics in Christianity. The performer and the live audience, the curator argued, were reborn via the ritual in a Utopian world through catharsis of extreme emotions mentioned by Aristotle. Performance artists of Germany and Austria are prone to this cathartic nature of violence in the poietic process of creation, the Vienna Actionists being the most notorious amongst them. In the Soviet and then divided Russia, Performance Art has surfaced prominently as a form of resistance against the authoritarian apathetic political regime. Pyotr Pavlensky’s highly controversial performance pieces like nailing his own balls at the Moscow Square seem analogous to what Diogenes said after masturbating in the open market- “I wish it was this easy to satisfy hunger by rubbing your stomach”. Vito Acconci in his 1973 performance Seed-bed performed a post5 6

White Michel, Nietzsche and the Artist in A Companion to Art Theory, 2002 Haynes Deborah J., Bakhtin and the Visual Arts in A Companion to Art Theory, 2002

modern Diogenes, by masturbating underneath a raised gallery ramp while reading aloud his fantasies about the visitors. Just like Diogenes performed his cultural critique with his theatre of vulgarity7 the performance artist refuses to be docile or disciplined; exposing the repressed moral standards and denaturalized social boundaries through his transgressive act. Likewise, in Communist China, performance artists have been using the art of bodily actions as a protest against censorship in Art. Having established the theoretical premise and introducing the genre of Performance Art, the paper attempts to locate the Aristotelian concepts and the discussion of the Cynics in ancient Greece with specific reference to Performance artists and notable pieces significant in contemporary discourses on Performance Art which considerably push the comfortable boundaries of our Kantian “disinterested” taste for Art.

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Bordwell Marilyn, Remembering the Body- Rhetoric, Performance and Diogenes, the Cynic, 1996

Performance Art: An Aesthetic Reappraisal

“...debasement is the fundamental artistic principle of grotesque realism; all that is sacred and exalted is rethought on the level of the material bodily substratum”. 8

Bakhtin’s grotesque body-the lower stratum (the open mouth, the anus, the vagina) and the penetrative (the nose, the penis) are rebellious to any form of authority like Diogenes’ rhetoric performance and subverts not only the outward moral order but also challenges the hegemony of the rational mind. The cynics named after kynos (Greek for dog) for their characteristic shamelessness in breaching codes of conduct were the classical immoral counterparts to the rationalist tradition of Plato and Aristotle. Carolee Schneemann’s performance Meat joy (1964) at first sight attracts such an absurd turndown. This Dionysianinspired ecstatic group ritualistic rite was a "celebration of flesh as material". Rooted in erotic sensuality, Meat Joy is one of the early manifestations of Schneemann's concern about women's control over their bodies and their sexuality. This was a time when pubic hair and vagina were media-taboos and Schneemann got her footage secretly developed in a pornographic studio. In her 1975 performance Interior Scroll she climbed on to the top of a table, made action poses for model-drawing and after reading from Cezanne: She was painter started taking out a scroll from her vagina and then reading from it aloud. Schneemann drew upon ritualism in using her whole body as an integral part of the art. She thought of the vagina in many ways - physically, conceptually, as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the source of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation. By using her genitals as the source for art she severely questioned the male libidinal energy in the art-world much like the cynic Diogenes who would question the state authority by defacing coinage. Schneemann’s self-enactment and engagement with the audience as a subject as well as an object of desire seriously compromised the myth of a “disinterested” art-history and criticism9 –the modernist narrative Greenberg championed.

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Mikhail Bakhtin quoted in Bordwell Marilyn, Remembering the Body: Rhetoric, Performance and Diogenes, the cynic, 1996 9 Jones Amelia; Body Art/Performing the Subject, 1998

Still from Meat Joy, photograph by Al Giese, Judson Church NYC

Performance

Art,

alternatively

called Body Artiii posits the artist’s narcissist body in a strange self-relation: the body is the subject hence the content of the

work,

delineated

by

its

formal

characteristics and thereby defining it as an object to be intellectually consumed by the audience. Feminist and Gender theories helped locate this body as a locus of “dispersed” or “fragmented” self, as elusive marker of the subject in the socio-political, as a link between natural and cultural.

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Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist, used the trope of her Asian body, photographing herself amidst a landscape of phallic knobs in a collage which would provoke the viewer to react, abandoning the “disinterested” engagement with art. Kusama enacted her own nude body sporting long heels, long black hair and polka dots covering her bare flesh. The performance documented in the photographs, become an enactment of the artist’s philosophy- a philosophy which is deeply cynical of its contemporary institutions and their formal normativity. The narcissist self-image becomes a ploy on which 10

Jones Amelia; Body Art/Performing the Subject, 1998

gender, feminist and ethnic identities and theories are performed in the works of artists like Hannah Wilke, Marina Abramovich and Ana Mendieta. After the 1971 infamous performance Shoot where the artist asked one of his friends to shoot his arm with a .22 rifle from 15 feet, Chris Burden went a step further two years later in a piece titled Through the Night Softly. The action of the poetically and ironically titled performance consisted of Burden slithering across broken glass in his underwear with his hands tied behind his back. Burden wanted to give his viewers the real essence of pain and emphasized this by performing live so that the audience had to experience it in person. Subverting the consumerist media, used for commercial advertisements of products and events, Chris Burden purchased late night commercial spots on a local television station, playing a tensecond clip of this piece in order to show it to the viewers in the comfort of their living room. While Shoot was to be seen with the backdrop of the Vietnam War and critiqued the military command, the latter performance shocked the viewer by inciting pity and fear. The artist’s actions here however are imitative not of a mythical narrative as would be in Aristotle’s Oedipus Rex, rather it is the creation of a self-imposed pain, mimicking the brutal atrocities that have become part of mundane existence. Burden’s performances invited the viewer to share the artist’s pain; catharsis here is not mere purgation or purification of emotions leading to aesthetic pleasure but an instrument for greater social change, as understood by the German playwright, Bertold Brecht. Burden’s performances remind the viewer of his callousness and indifference to the crumbling social and moral orders providing him with a stimulus to act.

Chris Burden, Through the Night Softly

The horrible atrocities performed by Hitler’s Nazi regime during the Second World War affected the Germans and the Austrians physically and psychically. Violence and selfmutilation became common in the performances of a group called the Vienna Actionists. The actionists echoed Vienna-born Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to use performance as a cathartic act in exorcising their own traumatic experiences of the Second World War. The four main Actionists responsible were: Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, Guenter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. They had all received a formal art education at various schools in Vienna, giving them a thorough knowledge of the traditional art forms which they would later rebel against. Their extreme actions such as Piss Aktion where Muehl pissed into Brus’s mouth in front of a live audience at the Hamburg Film Festival in 1969 and Art and Revolution in 1968 violated all norms of decency and called for state intervention in the form of arrests and legal procedures against the artists. In Art and Revolution, an Actionist collective- Gunter Brus, Muehl, Peter Weibel and Oswald Wiener staged a violent and multiple taboo-breaking takeover of a student gathering at the University of Vienna, breaking into a lecture hall before whipping and mutilating themselves, urinating, covering themselves in their own excrement, masturbating, and making themselves vomit - all while singing the Austrian national anthemthe height of cynical transgressive politics Performance Art could achieve. The public space (or Bakhtian market-place) has emerged as the breeding grounds for performances like Russian social-activist and performance-artist, Pyotr Pavlensky’s Fixation in 2013 conceptualized to shock the public and critique the repressive policies of an apathetic government by nailing his own scrotum to the pavement at the Moscow Square in front of Lenin’s mausoleum. In 2014 Pavlensky cut off his ear on the terrace of the Russian psychiatry institute as a bitter response against the government’s political use of psychiatry. The selfimposed suffering of the artist here attains the status of a public spectacle. The intended audience becomes the repressive authority in the form of government officials as well the masses at large, breaking the limits of an exhibitionist gallery space which attract the bourgeoisie, the elite and the Bohemian artist. Within the sanctified gallery space Marina Abramovich in her 1973 performance Rhythm 0 presented herself to the audience with a description reading "I am the object," and, "During this period I take full responsibility." Abramović offerd the spectators an array of 72 objects to either harm or protect her. She was interested in the potential of performance art to bodily transform the audience as well as the artist. The spectators, becoming collaborators rather than passive observers got divided into two fractions- one, which wanted to harm the

artist by holding the loaded gun to her head, making her bleed with a knife; and the other who wanted to protect her and insisted the performance be stopped after six hours, seeing the other group getting increasingly violent. Abramovich had immediate predecessors like Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece from the sixties where the artist had invited the viewer to cut and take any piece of her dress; only that the level of violence has gone up in the span of a decade.11 The white-cube space- a cultural embodiment of aesthetic pleasure turns into a space for unfolding of the viewer’s vindictive desires and animal-instincts by pushing the limits of the artist’s body and mind to extreme ends.

Piss Aktion (1969): Otto Muel and Gunter Brus at the Hamburg Film Festival

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Ward Frazer, No Innocent Bystander: Performance Art and Audience, 2012

Marina Abramovich, Rhythm 0, 1974

i Though it has its predecessors in Plato, Hume and Kant, the idea of 'taste' developed only in the 18th century CE as a corrective to the rise of rationalism, particularly as applied to beauty, and to the rise of egoism, particularly as applied to virtue. Against rationalism about beauty, the eighteenth-century theory of taste held the judgment of beauty to be immediate; against egoism about virtue, it held the pleasure of beauty to be disinterested. The concept of the aesthetic descends from the concept of taste. ii According to Agamben in 'Profanations', to profane is the act of returning what has been ritually separated, back to the use of men or the 'profane sphere "to profane means to open the possibility of a special kind of negligence, which ignores separation, or rather, puts it to particular use." iii

Body Art today is a dated term for Performance Art as it has different connotations today referring to tattooing and jewellery-making on the body. In the seventies however, it was treated by critics and artists alike as a sub-category of Performance Art, in that the artist’s body became the medium for art on which gender, feminist and ethnic theories were performed- the artists using or abusing their body as an act of extreme socio-political critique. Since performance requires bodily actions (and not mere presence), the term has lost its association with Performance Art and cites the tradition of tattoo, piercing and body painting which uses body as the breathing surface for art-making.