[Xmca-l] Re: Destructive "Creativity" and "Creative Destruction"

[mike cole]

ANalissa

One way to connect performance art and chat is through connections to drama
and through drama. Stanislavskii and Eisenshtein play roles here in LSV's
thinking, and many others. The line of work called play worlds would be
another line of investigation.  One thing that connects them is the Russian
term, perzhivanie which is getting a big play these days.
(Pun unintended)
Mike

On Sunday, March 1, 2015, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:

> Hello esteemed xmcars,
>
> I'd also like to share this work of performance art:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternal_Frame
> http://doughallstudio.com/1975-the-eternal-frame/
>
> And then there is this artist who deals with the female body and gender
> (which may be a little challenging for you, so be forewarned!):
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolee_Schneemann
>
> I recently went to see Citizen Four with my father. Laura Poitras, in
> light of this discussion, is, in my mind, a kind of performance artist. For
> that reason, I admire her courage, as I admire the courage of these other
> performance artists I've shared recently who use their bodies as the medium
> to make the statements they chose or choose to make. In Poitras's case, she
> is using her body to cross boundaries where we would prefer they are kept
> intact. Her body never appears in the films but we do hear her disembodied
> voice in the film so we know she is there present, making the decisions to
> film. I think this is somehow a little different than a typical filmmaking
> process, even for documentaries.
>
> The film footage becomes more than a traditional documentary of the
> historical content, since I already knew just from reading the papers most
> of the content in the film before I saw the film. Instead, the film becomes
> but a kind of document or evidence that boundaries have been crossed (Which
> boundaries are for you as the viewer to decide).
>
> Poitras's films are not Hollywood commodifications of preordained
> emotions. She is certainly using the language of film, yet her choices for
> editing is definitely influenced by Ernie Gehr (
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Gehr) as an attempt (in my opinion)
> to push the viewer.
>
> All of this work above, while possibly incorporating text (language),
> would be quite difficult to do with just text. There is a visceral element
> that is at work in the work that transcends the word. The message (meaning)
> is more important than the medium (language).
>
> I'd be curious how the medium of performance art might be considered in
> light of activity theory? Certainly these artists were working within a
> community of others, and while it wasn't the only motivation in all cases,
> they were/are (generally) acting in reaction to capitalism and the
> commodification of art.
>
> I figured that this would be a crowd that would delight in that.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Annalisa
>
>

-- 
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object
that creates history. Ernst Boesch.