PerformanceArt_LaurenDuff

This semester and year hasn't been easy for anyone. I personally prefer to keep my room very tidy or at least for the most part. It got very out of hand at the end of this semester. I decided to get very vulnerable and let everyone into my personal space and show how far it had gotten. I was struggling with all of the things that I needed to do between this project and cleaning my room. When my space isn't clean I feel like I can not hardly think. I kept debating on how what to make my project so I guess I just combined the too. I felt very personal. It also was very retrospective of how the mundane everyday can be a performance. It definable felt like a good restart of what needed to be done after this stressful semester.

For this project I used the disposable coffee cups that many people use not for single cup coffee makers. It was a moment of reflection for sustainability. So much in this world is used once and just thrown away. When I started this idea was to show how this waste and plastic was piling up. It revealed a different meaning on-top of that to me. It was almost symbolic of how this with not sustain and everything will eventually start to collapse with out planet if we just keep piling up the trash. We need to build our world up with better materials or she may in-fact just knock us over. 

I thought I would switch it up with the contrast of someone who we are so used to performing using their power to refuse to perform. When Atlanta passed a bunch of new voting laws the Denver rockies refused to play a play off game there in order to prevent bringing them more revenues. They felt the laws were causing voting suppression and refused to perform which was a performance in itself. 

Pussy Riot is a Punk Rock activist group who work out of Moscow Russia. They wish to bring light to the mistreatment of Women, Lgbtq and other minority groups. They often use self proclaimed guerrilla protesting tactics. Even often get arrested for speaking out. 

Hwang is artist currently working here in Denver and just started workin at MSU Denver. He is originally from South Korea. He has had a residency at the DAM and Redline. He looks to challenge the ideas of the western hierarchy and normative trends. 

Jenkins is an installation and duration performance artist who usually works in Melbourne, Bristol and Berlin. She is based out of Melbourne. She often focuses on the female experience the photos above are from her work “Casting My Womb” where she knit from yarn in her vagina on her menstrual cycle. 

Sometimes it’s just work it to mess with people. Cohen pushes things to the limit while acting completely outlandish, acts like he is serious and sees how far people will let it go. These pictures are from specific act where he interviewed with a person in a gallery and told them that he was using his on excrement to paint. She believed every second of it while it has happening. It is an interesting reflection of how the art world can come off to people. 

Carter Is a painter that uses social media to share videos of herself creating art. She uses her menstrual blood to create the pigments for her painting. He focus is to reclaim her femininity and the womb. I like this concept as the period is often very taboo.

This was a very interesting performance to show how society still had attitudes about different cultures only 30 years ago.  There seems to be very few people at these events who had objections to fetishizing and taking pictures of the people in cages. Little did they know this was a performance to prove a point of how society was not as advanced passed these behaviors as people may have hoped. This would be very interesting to see performed in the 2020′s to see how people who reach. I think that we may have very different responses depending on the different areas of the United states but would hope no one would let this stand for a second. This is pretty wild to see how people react to this situation in this video. 

Amanda Coogan is an Irish artist currently working and living out of Dublin. She works in performance, live, video, and photography. A lot of here work is very self described as gestural and ghosty. She apprenticed under Marina Abramovic , though you can see some of her influence, Coogan defiantly has her own style. Her performances seem to have that aspect of duration often seem in performance art. 

During the fall semester a few class mates of mine were trying to film a dance video for one of our classes on the 16th street mall. We were asked to leave asked to leave various different locations of the mall before we could even start filming. We had white poster boards and I wondered if this had something to do with it. I went down to see if I could recreate and document the same experience as before. I took a blank poster board with nothing written on it and live streamed myself on Instagram. I was only asked that I couldn't display a sign down there  and when I showed him the other-side of my blank poster board he did not ask me to leave. I was not really sure why this was different than it was before. Did they decide that because I was by myself it was not a big deal or had events from the summer passed longer and the security was not as worried? Did my skin color lead them to believe I was not a threat? After I had left down town I looked up what I had done a similar demonstration had been completed by Aslan Sagutdinov in Kazakhstan in 2019. He held up a blank sign to see if he would be detained and he in-fact was.  It leads us to question what is public space? When I was looking up my rights before going down there it says we all have freedom of speech but not necessarily freedom of where or when.  

Tanya Aguiñiga is an artist who grew up in Tijuana and talks about having to cross the border everyday to go to school as a child. This made her feel that she did not belong to either-side as an outcast. These photos are from her a specific performance piece called Metabolizing the Borderline. She Made glass huaraches that people from central America and Mexico where. For her these sandals were supposed to break as she walled along the border showing how many people are not supported once they reach they reach the united states. The performance is uses all of her body to smell, breath, and carry parts of the border. She does this physicaly in this performance but metaphorically everyday of her life. 

Emmett Till’s open casket funeral photo was used to create this painting by Dana Schutz. Parker Bright felt that she should not be using this image to further her art career as a white woman when Emmett Till was a victim of racial violence. He decided to stand in front of the image to counter her work. She claimed that it was in showing what it was like to have lost a child but this seemed a completely inappropriate response. When Bright was asked if he thought white people should only paint white people and black people should only paint white people, and black people should only paint black people? Bright’s response was that we live in a segregated world and until black people can reclaim and represent their own stories white people should not be trying to do it for them.

Yang Zhichao is a former painter turned performance artist living and working in Beijing, China. Zhichao has a  series of performances where he has different objects inserted in his body by a surgeon. The performance in the image above he had a surgeon insert grass from a river under his skin without any numbing agents.  Later  it became infected and his body rejected it. In a different performance he has a piece of metal inserted in his leg, this was not rejected by his body. The artist thought this was an interesting juxtaposition of humans and nature, along with humans and technology. Zhichao is not one to shy away from physical pain like many performance artists. In a different performance he has somebody else brand his identity number into his back. One performance he is completely unaware of the object that is being inserted into his leg. A different work that Zhichao has is a collection of personal bibles from the last 50 years. He talks about how these are like diaries for many individuals. 

Hybrid practices in art and performance art is when the artist is able to look at the  contextual history that may be involved with the piece or performance and conceptual ideas that thy are trying to convey. The deeper meaning that they want to convey and a art historical lens on the actions or materials they are using. 

I really enjoyed the ideation that Janine Antoni had a for all of her art work in this series and video. In all of the pieces she talks about repetition seems to be a large part of her creative process. She likes, bites, blinks, lathers, winks, and weaves over and over again to complete her work. It was interesting to see how different countries and cultures reacted to all of her work. I like when she brings up to ancient stories inspired her to complete the bathtub piece. Antoni really focuses  on the relationships between people and other things in our world. SHe talks about how we just think of cows as something more like a number, or looks at the relation between her parents when she dress them as the other or as she made the night life mold of their hands. She looks at the relationship between her and her daughter. When she tries to feed the belly button that is super symbolic. It was very interesting to see how all of her works connect to each other and lead to the next. I will be fascinated to see what Janine Antoni will continue to work on.