The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking
place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond
to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in
advance of the event. This posting is by Malik Gaines, Assistant Professor of Art at Hunter College, New York.
Visual art and performance are in a classic bad
relationship. Art stays for the
sex, the good times, the feeling of being alive. But art will belittle performance in public, will call it
late at night but won’t let it stay over, doesn’t really believe what
performance does is valuable.
Art’s esteemed family only barely tolerates the relationship. Performance stays with its more
powerful partner for the money, for the stature, the trips to Europe, for
feeling like it belongs to something, for fear of having to go back to that old
senile boyfriend, the Theater. How
else can it support itself? But
performance never feels like it really belongs in art’s world. It’s always using the wrong fork at
dinner. Performance is always
acting out, marginalizing itself, relishing the freedom of that marginal
position, then wondering why it can’t get any respect in art’s world. These dynamics can be traced back to
each partner’s childhood.
Art was born among aristocrats, but went to school with
merchants who made it big. They
value value. Their wealth is
derived from a displacement of value onto objects. These objects are sometimes
useful, like tools, machines, and slaves; but those are meant to be handled by
the servants. Art’s family is
hierarchical, those on the top surround themselves with beauty. Beauty is not material, like so many tools,
but ideal. One may not touch an
ideal. As this family grew
increasingly rational and scientific, an empirical interest in observation met
an emphasis on visuality to bolster art’s importance. Art has always been very good-looking, and has long served
as a site of contemplation for its many admirers. As such, folks tend to project what they want onto it.
Performance is older than it looks, much older than the
infantilized position imagined by art.
It grew up in a religious milieu, but eventually found its secular
purposes. In either context, it
was always trying to do something, make something happen. In an increasingly alienated and
imagistic world, performance found that it could foreground its own body as the
instrument of ideal relations, a material iteration of ideological
constraints. This act is
ambivalent: it can mystify or deconstruct; it can promote heroism or
criticality. The body and its
cultural trappings are so thoroughly marked, so easily recognized, that
performance can sometimes feel over-determined to those who encounter it.
During a political rough patch, both were radicalized. Art started dating outside its
class. Performance dared to leave
home. They met in an avant-garde
café. The rest is history: or
Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present …
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