How did performance artists of the ’60s and ’70s, famous for their opposition both to lasting art and the political establishment, become the foremost monument builders of the ’80s, ’90s and today? This book argues that the centrality of performance to monuments and indeed public art in general rests not on its ephemerality or anti-authoritarian rhetoric, but on its power to build interpersonal bonds both personal and social.
Part of the Study Room Guide on Live Art and Displacement (P3107).
This exhibition booklet looks closely at the performative aspects of the action work by Vienna Actionists Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler contrasted with works by significant international practitioners of performance art, such as Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden, Tomislav Gotovac, Ion Grigorescu, Paul McCarthy, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Gina Pane, Neša Paripovic, Ewa Partum, Carolee Schneemann, and VALIE EXPORT.
The experimental art scene in post-Tiananmen China has featured an array of animal bodies, both living and dead, as well as interspecies encounters ranging from the playful to the sadistic, from the gently collaborative to the violently conflictual, which interrogate and destabilize contemporary constructions of the nature-culture binary.