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

[mike cole]

My apologies, Annalisa, for incorrectly spelling your name. My own form of
dysgraphia.
mike

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 9:23 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> 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 historical content, since I already knew just from reading the papers most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.
>
>
>
>


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