The 100 Year Exhibit at BU was a collection of performance work from the 1900's up until today. It was set up in a timleine-like fashion with everything stapled to the wall, so you can take things down and put things back up. The works ranged from photographs, to actual physical pieces of art, to videos displayed on small monitors. The curator Kate talked about how all of the work is basically an archive saved onto a hard drive that they could take anywhere and print everything out and set the show back up.
There were a lot of pieces that I liked, but there were a lot of pieces that I just didn't get or didn't care for. There were also a lot of pieces that made me uncomfortable and others that I just didn't like looking at. Although performance art is thought of as weird or there to make the viewer uncomfortable, there were many pieces that I liked. I started at the beginning of the timeline around 1911 with Serge Diaghilev's Petrouchka and 1922 Oskar Schlemmer's Triadisches Ballet and The Figural Cabnet.
All three of these pieces were ballets. Performance art back then was mainly theater and ballets. The costume designs and the movement of the body on stage were two "artistic" characteristics of plays and ballets. Whenever I think of performance art I think of more modern videos and I guess, focus on the more odd aspect of modern art today. I completely forgot that ballets and theater performances are definitely in the category of performance art. I think today though, those types of things are not necessarily but in that category because they are able to stand alone in their own categories.
There were a couple piece where I had to ask myself, is this art? A common question with most modern art today, especially with performance art. A piece that really stuck out to me in terms of "Is this art?" was a piece titled Baby Ikki by Michael Smith. In this piece, Michael Smith is dressed as a baby and crawls around the street of Hartford, CT acting like a baby. Heres a short video that isn't the entire piece, but gives you the gist of what is going on in the video--> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oZfbCm4UeM. I know this is a performance piece, but I don't necessarily understand it. I'd like to hear someone's opinion on why this is considered art. To me, I feel like he is just this man doing some kind of odd street performance that is commonly found in cities. I don't really see the point behind it.
One piece that I really liked was 2008- Measuring the Universe by Roman Ondak. In this piece Onadk has audience members come up to the wall where he marks their height and the their date of birth. The idea is to have the entire galley covered. There are no breaks between the measurements so the process is completely ongoing. They also measure kids and adults so there are all different heights and marks on the wall. Here is a short video where he talks about this piece and shows the piece "in action"--> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNiwsDnzFiw.
When it comes to performance art I find that I tend to like performance work that involves the audience to make a physical piece of work. The process of creating a piece of art can be considered artwork all by itself, but to have an actual physical piece of art on top of that is awesome. I think this is why I like the Measuring the Universe piece. It such a simple idea but the process and the outcome make the idea so much bigger.
Overall, I enjoyed this exhibit. I think that it opened my eyes to a lot of older work that I had never heard about and also newer work that I had never heard about. It also made me think a lot about performance art which is a topic that is not necessarily a common one to come across. I think now with more modern art it is something that we come across a lot more. It is good to get introduced to new ideas and new ways of thinking as far as art making goes, and I think this 100 Years exhibit did just that.
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