Performance Art in the 1990s and the Generation Gap

In the 1990s, the question of the legacy of historical performance was posed with a particular sense of urgency. In the context of most pioneers of the art form having retired from live performance, reenactments not only reproduced past works but positioned artists within the genealogy of performance. The sense of the passage of a generation and the transmission of the memory of past performances were made explicit by Marina Abramović in The Biography (1992), a theatre piece in which she stages the very process of accounting for her past, as well as by Takashi Murakami and Oleg Kulik, who emerged on the art scene in the 1990s and mimicked live works from the past.

Performing Touch and Smell: The Liminality of the Senses

The paper discusses the liminal nature of the sensorial languages in contemporary performing arts. Its starting point will be the following chain of thoughts: during artistic events, a performative action reshaping the performers and the audience takes place, along with the interchange of the roles between the “stage” and “auditorium”, either in the sense of Augusto Boal’s spect-actor or the destruction of the fourth wall and the specific “autopoietic feedback loop” (Erika Fischer-Lichte) between both parties involved. We aim to rethink and re-examine the role of the sensorial language as one of the rarely used yet highly efficient tools of the performative revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries. These revolutions started with the Futurists, continued with the tactile and sensorial performances and politics of Marina Abramović and Yoko Ono, and culminated with Enrique Vargas and his sensorial theatre in different stages from New York’s La Mama radical 1960s productions to his 1990s new sensorial theatre language of his Teatro de los Sentidos. We will try to answer the following questions: How can and how do we touch and smell … in performative actions? Which kind of liminalities does the act of sensorial produce in a contemporary performance?

Cybernetic Sparks and Philosophical Feedback Loops

Gregory Bateson observed that cybernetics is not essentially about "exchanging information across lines of discipline, but in discovering patterns common to many disciplines" (Bateson, 1971, p. 23). This paper adopts his line of thought to join the dots between cybernetics and the philosophy of Existentialism, and then interconnect both with contemporary art. It demonstrates that while terminologies may differ, many of the three fields' primary concerns closely cohere. The world's most ground-breaking artists are found to apply and fuse cybernetic paradigms and Existentialist themes, from Robert Rauschenberg and Marina Abramović to Damien Hirst, Stelarc and Anish Kapoor. The research offers the first detailed comparison between cybernetics and Existentialism, and reveals surprising commonalities. Feedback loops, circular causality and negative entropy are not only central tenets of cybernetics, but also of Existentialism. Autonomy, autopoiesis and interactivity equally unite both fields, and each is visionary and forward looking in seeking radical change and transformations. Both explored artistic endeavours, with Existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus equally renowned for their powerful novels and plays as their philosophical works, while cybernetic art became a major phenomenon in the 1960s following the landmark exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer in the Arts (1968), and influenced artistic practices thereafter.

O ROTEIRO NA PERFORMANCE CINEMATOGRÁFICA ESPAÇO ALÉM – MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ E O BRASIL, DE MARCO DEL FIOL

O propósito deste artigo é estabelecer uma concepção interdisciplinar de roteiro para documentário performático. Verificam-se as interfaces entre documentário e performance por meio da análise diegética da performance cinematográfica Espaço Além - Marina Abramović e o Brasil, de Marco Del Fiol. Identifica-se que a imprevisibilidade narrativa é almejada tanto pelo roteiro aberto do documentário quanto pelo acontecimento performático que são os rituais de transformação comunicados ao público. Conclui-se que o processo de atingir o espectador com experiências de notável intensidade corporal se beneficia do arcabouço teórico-prático dos estudos e da arte da performance em torno da noção de corpo-consciência

A poiésis Dilaporal: formação estética docente e performance art

O presente artigo teve por temática a poiésis, a performance art e a formação estética docente. O objetivo foi investigar processos poéticos no qual o corpo do pesquisador também fosse tema e suporte na poiésis, relacionando à/aos artistas Marina Abramović, Hélio Oiticica e Artur Barrio e a suas obras. De abordagem qualitativa, o percurso metodológico abarcou a Pesquisa Educacional Baseada em Arte (DIAS; IRWIN, 2013) e a matriz a/r/tográfica, organizada em levantamento bibliográfico, aprofundamento teórico, percurso poético e visualidades. Barthes (2018) norteou a análise da investigação, em que o studium perpassou a formação docente, garimpando estesias que foram absorvidas na poíesis em forma de punctum. Os resultados apresentam quatro obras que compõem a série Dilaporal. Conclui-se que as visualidades poetizadas são como garimpagens do a/r/tógrafo na formação estética docente.

What Is Visible When Acting? Acting-Out, Passage à l’Acte and the Dialectics of the Gaze in Phenomenology and Psychoanalytic Theory

"The paper approaches acting from a phenomenological and psychoanalytic point of view. It sheds light on the intrinsic (i.e., invisible) resorts involved when someone is playing a role – or, better yet, assumes a role. In order to make these mechanisms visible, the paper relies on the premise that acting always involves an act. Using the Lacanian theory of acts, I demonstrate that there is a real process taking place when assuming a role, namely when the subject needs to objectify himself. This process can be traced back as far as the “time” of a pre-existent gaze. The aim of the paper is to substantiate the idea that it is necessary for the gaze to enter a dialectics in order for the subject to find its objective place. For illustration, two works of art are used: the performance The Artist is Present by Marina Abramović and the movie A Woman Under the Influence by John Cassavetes. Keywords: act, desire, gaze, objectify, the Other, presence without assignable present, the Real, (in)visible."

CORPO E RESISTÊNCIA EM MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ

Buscando ampliar meu conhecimento enquanto artista, pretendo a partir dessetrabalho, estudar e analisar a priori, o corpo e resistência e alicerçar meus saberes,técnicas, construções e discussões. Encontrei na obra e vida de Marina um rico aparatoque me trouxe luz à construção de personagens, quando se trata ao seu controle docorpo e sua utilização como principal componente das mensagens que pretendiatransmitir por meio da atuação e em suas performances.