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

[HENRY SHONERD]

Annalisa,
If you call Laura Poitras a performance artist, wouldn't you call Judy Chicago a performance artist? (I love her work.  Lives in Belen.) Judy’s life certainly is a performance! What about that Georgia O’Keefe? Walt Whitman? Norman Mailer? Salinger seemed to spend his whole life avoiding the limelight, but, if anything, his non-performance was the perforrmance itself. Okay, Emily Dickinson? In life, she retreated from the world, but in death that retreat was the sun that has burned brightly ever since: “I’m nobody. Who are you?” Which brings to mind the creativity of everyday life. (Shout out to Anna Stetsenko!) On stage everybody! Isn’t there a lot of performance artist in all of us?  
Henry

> On Mar 1, 2015, at 6:49 PM, 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 The film footage becomes more than a traditional documentary of the historical content, since I already knew just from reading the papers most of the content in the film before I saw the film.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
>