Feminist Performance Art

"As feminist artist Judy Chicago put it, “Performance can be fueled by rage in a way that painting and sculpture cannot”." - SLEEK Magazine. 

Feminist Performance Art is a movement that is positioned within the Institutional Critique Eric discussed last week.  It emerged in the 1960's out of second wave feminism which underscored the fact that THE BODY IS POLITICAL (and the personal is political). Artists embraced this ideology, creating a critical response to the falsely male-dominated contemporary art history.  In addition, they aimed to "change the contemporary world around them through their art, focusing on intervening in the established art world and the art canon's legacy, as well as in everyday social interactions." 

Although Feminist Performance Art continues to be made today, I've decided to primarily focus on the influential artists and works from the 60s & 70s that dramatically changed the trajectory of art history and influenced the emergence of Social Practice.  Because we are discussing performance, I feel committed to showing you some videos of work but because technology has been troublesome in the past I've decide to forgo that aspiration and instead include video links. 

PBS' The Art Assignment: A Case for Performance Art 

(Excerpt from 5:10-6:42)

YOKO ONO

(born February 18, 1933)

"Artists must not create more objects.  The world is full of everything it needs." -YO 1971

In Cut Piece—one of Yoko Ono’s early performance works—the artist sat alone on a stage, dressed in her best suit, with a pair of scissors in front of her. The audience had been instructed that they could take turns approaching her and use the scissors to cut off a small piece of her clothing, which was theirs to keep. Some people approached hesitantly, cutting a small square of fabric from her sleeve or the hem of her skirt. Others came boldly, snipping away the front of her blouse or the straps of her bra. Ono remained motionless and expressionless throughout, until, at her discretion, the performance ended. In reflecting upon the experience recently, the artist said: “When I do the Cut Piece, I get into a trance, and so I don’t feel too frightened.…We usually give something with a purpose…but I wanted to see what they would take….There was a long silence between one person coming up and the next person coming up. And I said it’s fantastic, beautiful music, you know? Ba-ba-ba-ba, cut! Ba-ba-ba-ba, cut! Beautiful poetry, actually.”  - MoMA.org (link to the page)

CUT PIECE, 1964 (to view just a brief clip start at 7min13)

"We are forever apologetic for being real. Excuse me for farting. Excuse me for making love and smelling like a human being, instead of that celluloid prince and princess image up there on the screen."

-Yoko Ono from her manifesto The Feminization of Society (1972)

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964. Performed on September 15, 2003 at Theatre Le Ranelagh, Paris, France.
Photo: Ken McKay, © Yoko Ono; Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive.

"Above all Yoko's work is generous, more invitation than instruction which needs you to complete it." -PBS The Art Assignment's THE CASE FOR YOKO ONO

VALIE EXPORT

(born May 17, 1940)

VALIE EXPORT is an Austrian artist who was born Waltraud Lehner.  Before her political and artistic revolution, EXPORT was a mother and a wife. In 1967, as she confronted the guilt of her parents’ (mothers’) complacency within the Nazi regime, she changed her name to VALIE EXPORT (written in uppercase letters, like an artistic logo, shedding her father’s and husband’s names and appropriating her new surname from a popular brand of cigarettes).

Export’s early guerrilla performances have attained an iconic status in feminist art history. There are a number of notable works to discuss but I'm specifically highlighting her because of her work "Tap and Touch Cinema" which was performed in ten European cities in 1968-1971. In this work, VALIE EXPORT invited the audience to reach into a curtained box to touch her unclothed body for 30 seconds.  This indicting action asked the audience to question the objectification of the body.

Tap and Touch Cinema,1968 (excerpt 0:50-1:20)

ANA MENDIETA

(November 18, 1948 – September 8, 1985) 

Ana Mendieta was a Cuban American performance artist, sculptor, painter and video artist who is best known for her "earth-body" artwork. Born in Havana, Mendieta arrived in the United States as a refugee in 1961 (two years after Marxist revolutionary leader Fidel Castro overthrew the authoritarian government of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista). She grew up in the 1960s in Iowa and attended the University of Iowa which was a hub of American Art at the time because of their unique Intermedia Department; this is the exact location where I first learned about her in 2001.  

Ana Mendieta – Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), 1972     Ana Mendieta – Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints), 1972.

In Ana Mendieta's short life (37 years) she became a: critical figure in the Body Art movement that came out of performance art movement, using her body (often nude) to denote human's presence and absence (ethereality); an important contributor in the Land Art Movement linking landscape and the work of art and pulling art out of the gallery; and an icon in Feminist Art for her exploration of gender fluidity, the ways which she decolonized her body and her use of  art as a means of exploring her identity.  

Photographs from Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas series.
Via SLEEK Magazine (visualmelt.com, blogs.uoregon.edu and artsy.net)

ADRIAN PIPER

(born September 20, 1948)

"In 1973 Adrian Piper pasted a mustache on her face, put on an Afro wig, and donned round, wire-rimmed shades. Dressed and acting like a man, she went out into the streets.  Muttering passages she had memorized from her journal, the artist was startling and weird, challenging passersby to classify her through the lens of their own preconceptions about race, gender, and class....These street actions formed the basis of The Mythic Being, an influential work of performance art that helped establish Piper’s reputation as provocateur and philosopher." - Art News, "Adrian Piper Pulls Out of Black Performance Art Show," 10/25/13

Adrian Piper, I am the Locus (#1), 1975, oil crayon drawing on photograph.

The Mythic Being, 1973

Adrian Piper is an American conceptual artist and philosopher. Her work addresses ostracism, otherness, racial "passing" and racism. She was raised in Manhattan in an upper-middle-class black family, and attended a private school with mostly wealthy, white students. Piper was influenced by Sol LeWitt and Yvonne Rainer in the late 60s and early 70s. In 1970, she exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art's Information and began to study philosophy in college. Piper has said that she was kicked out of the art world during this time for her race and sex. Her work started to address ostracism, otherness, and attitudes around racism. In Berger's Critique of Pure Racism interview, Piper asserted that while she finds analysis of racism praiseworthy, she wants her artwork to help people confront their racist views.

In The Probable Trust Registry, the piece in which Piper received top honors at the Venice Biennale in 2015, Piper asked visitors to sign contracts with themselves adhering to one of a trio of posted statements (for instance, one read, "I will always do what I say I am going to do."). In a statement accompanying the award, the jury said: "Piper has reformed conceptual practice to include personal subjectivity—of herself, her audience, and the publics in general." They also noted that the piece asks its audience "to engage in a lifelong performance of personal responsibility."

MARINA ABRAMOVIC

(born November 30, 1946)

Marina Abramovic's work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Active for over four decades, Abramović has been described as the "grandmother of performance art." She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body."

Rhythm 0, 1974

To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging (and best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her. Abramović placed on a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, olive oil, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and actions. This tested how vulnerable and aggressive the human subject could be when hidden from social consequences. By the end of the performance, her body was stripped, attacked, and devalued into an image that Abramović described as the "Madonna, mother, and whore." Additionally, markings of aggression were apparent on the artist's body. There were cuts on her neck made by audience members, and her clothes were cut off her body.

The Artist Is Present: March – May 2010

From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Abramovic's work. During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed The Artist Is Present, a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. Ulay made a surprise appearance at the opening night of the show. Abramovic sat across from 1,545 sitters, including Klaus Biesenbach, James Franco, Lou Reed and Bjork; sitters were asked not to touch or speak to the artist.

Other Feminist Performance Artists to research:

Hannah Wilke

Senga Nengudi

Carolee Schneemann

! Women Art Revolution

Guerrilla Girls

Judy Chicago 

Barbara Kruger 

Mary Kelly 

Martha Rosler 

Mierle Laderman Ukeles 
Suzanne Lacy