The crisis of Modernity which from the mid-twentieth
century began to affect occidental thought and culture, and the savage
commercialization of art led to a profound meditation between the artistic and intellectual
circles of the moment, that came to dispute everything done until that moment
and even call into question the effectiveness of the concept of “Avant-garde”.
Some artists reacted to the commercial circuit in
which art had been immersed for decades and began to propose new registrations
of expression that were betting on an art that could not be bought or sold, an
art outside the market and witness of the ephemeral action of the creators in a
certain place and time of which only photography and video would left
knowledge. This new forms of expression were the performance, the happening
and the environment. The first two are
often confused and sometimes both concepts are used interchangeably to refer to
the same reality. By performance it
is understand the art form with a tight script that tries to raise something in
the viewer, but without expecting its intervention, while in the happening the artist’s script is
completely open and for its complete realization is required de viewer’s
participation. Meanwhile, the environment
is a creation of a three-dimensional space (permanent or ephemeral) in which
the artist and the viewer can be enclosed and experience multiple sensations of
sight, smell, hearing, touch and even kinetic ones. However, we will focus in
the two first manifestations for being this closely linked to a new type of art
that began to have a great importance in the 60’s. We are referring to the body art, in which the human body
(either the artist’s or someone else body) becomes the subject and the object
of creation, i.e., becomes a toll and a way of expression. One of its
predecessors was Yves Klein, who in his famous “anthropometries” turns the models into “living brushes” by soaking
their bodies with paint (International Klein Blue) and then leaving their marks
on sheets of white paper laid on the floor, turning the process of creation in
almost a ritual in which the interaction of the body was almost more important
than the result of the action. In this sense, all his actions were made in
front of photographs and journalists to leave testimony of his Aristotelian
idea according to which the form was revealed by the paint and the imprint.
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| Yves Klein, Anthropometry, 1960 |
In other situations, however, simple everyday
actions became the main subject of these actions. Thus, the versatile Andy
Warhol – showing off his man-show category – filmed himself eating and
hamburger, Breuce Nauman photographed himself at the time in which he spat a
stream of water by his mouth, titling his work as Self Portrait as a Fountain, and even the Italian Piero Manzoni
went as far as canning his and commercialize them under the name of Artist’s Shit, selling
them at the price of the share
price of a gram of gold,
demonstrating the level it had reached the commercialization of artistic
production.
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| Bruce Naumann, Self portrait as a fountain, 1967 |
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| Piero Manzoni, Artist's shit, 1961 |
On the other hand, many artists turn the
performance into the most radical way of expressing their inner world, even exposing
their bodies to extreme situations,
making the alienation, masochism, pain and blood (either real or symbolic) in
the main axes of their action. This is
the case of Joseph Beuys and his behaviour under the influence of LSD, Chris
Burden and his real shot in the arm in Shoot
(1971), Dennis Oppenheim and his excessive sun exposure with a book on the abdomen,
Orlan and his constant operations of cosmetic surgery, or Gina Pane and her
multiple lacerations with razor blades.
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| Dennis Oppenheim, Reading positions for second degree burn, 1970 |
Given this situation, sometimes it has been
difficult to separate performance and happening from the most primitives
rituals in which the high doses of cruelty and sexuality are very important.
The precursor of this trend was the known as Viennese Actionism, that turn the “orgiastic mysteries” into the main way of expression, then other
personalities chose similar procedures to drain, through the catharsis that
involved the artistic event, his inner ghosts. That was the case of the Serbian
artist Marina Abramovic and her numerous actions in which she faced the horrors
of the Balkan War, the Cuban Ana Mendieta and her animal sacrifices to denounce
the situation of female inferiority, or the Spanish Pilar Abarracín, who in the
last years has become blood into one of the main components of her creation.
This artists of international knowledge has managed to turn the repeated the
use of stereotypes to highlight the significance of the difference, whether
cultural or of gender. In Toilette (1991), Prohibido el cante (Forbidden
to sing) (2000) o La cabra (The Goat) (2001) we witnessed to harsh rituals
that don’t leave the viewer indifferent and serve the artist to question
critically some aspects of our recent history without losing out of sight the feminist
content.
The list of artists who for half a century have used this type of action is infinite. Each one of them had different
motives, modus
operandi and a language very particular. But nevertheless, they all
shared the same principle: to provoke a mental
reaction in the viewer, either positive
or negative. The important thing was to make emerge the viewer from the state
of annihilation in which he was – the result of accommodation reached for much of the art by replacing the commercial commitment – through a form of art that
reacted against the traditional
and invited him to experience beyond the simple physical object.
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