Performance and the Resistant Subject

I didn’t think I would be able to cry on command.

Nao Bustamante (www.naobustamante.com) is an internationally known performance artist born

Feliz Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, 2009 (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles)

Interview between artists Tim Rollins and Felix Gonzalez-Torres cited by José Muñoz. 

MoMA | Print/Out: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Excerpt from Paris is Burning

Eminent American philosopher Judith Butler visits REDCAT to give the third of four Los Angeles lectures in connection with her residency at the CalArts School of Critical Studies' Aesthetics and Politics Program. 

Three Weeks in May by Suzanne Lacy - This is the video I shared in class yesterday. 

Any art made by an artist of color and brought into the Institution is automatically a radical work, by virtue of its authorship, regardless of how these artists define themselves or address issues of race and identity in their practice. That authorship, however, need not always be the focus of the work. It is for the artist to decide, not the audience — otherwise we risk policing identity and reaffirming marginalization. If Foster’s beef is with these institutions and not with the artists themselves, why single out any artists as being “kind of white” at all?

PERFORMANCE ARTISTS such as Marina Abramović currently enjoy a particular cachet in the art world. In Latin America however, a much more politicized version of performance has a long-standing presence as a platform for denouncing social injustice. There is a reason for this: sometimes the body...

"In a series of six classes we will explore the origins of what is now called ART, and its forgotten purpose: TO MAKE THINGS HAPPEN, to maintain the psychic hygiene of a tribe, a society. We believe Art always was, and today is still, at its heart, an intense process of interaction with natural phenomena (fire, weather, migrations, seasons, predators and prey, the quantum particles of existence). Art illumines and exposes a mysterious world and complex world of spiritual quest and shared perception. Ultimately we are examining consciousness in ways essential to our survival as a species."

Feelings.