Marina Abramović has said somewhere that art has to tell the truth. I’m sure of it but I can’t recall where now because I haven’t been keeping a running notebook of how my research into her words and her works have been thought through. I’ve just been performing it as I go.
If I can’t show a running notebook demonstrating the clarity of my thought, then it’s not academic philosophy (by the way that I learned it) so it must be some kind of other art! I’m mostly saying that because I read somewhere else today that Marina is tired of being asked whether what she is doing is art or not art.
The weird thing is that when I performed ahhh_i_iv_v of the Helium balloon fractal: see attached – I didn’t know yet that Marina was tired of being asked the question. All I knew was that Marina speaks in A minor, and that if I was going to perform her in her own words, I’d have to do it in A minor. That’s why it ended up being a ’round’ that was based in the first place on a memory that I have of singing my part of Three Blind Mice beside a campfire on the Shuswap Lake while someone else was singing Frère Jacques, and in the second place on an A minor chord progression that goes
Amin
Dmin
Emin
Come to think of it, we both saw the same bear outside our tent later that night, but no-one else believed us.
July 17th, 2012 at 3:02 am
wonderful writing bird, i can understand marinas reaction to the question, considering the history – http://www.theartstory.org/movement-performance-art.htm – it’s old, that question, it should have been answered by now, but that it keeps being asked is significant. the last thirty or so years has seen a general decline in culture as regarding art, so it doesnt surprise me that the question is still there. i was part of a few ‘performance art’ pieces while a student. it was thrilling actually. one day, a couple hundred of us went down to the center of boston, copley square. with synchronized watches, we spread out over the area where people gathered for their lunch breaks and mingled into the crowd. then at exactly 12 noon, we all fell down. the protocol was to stay down for 15 minutes. you can imagine what happened. however, the performers really couldnt see what was happening, being as how we were prone, but were able later to see the video that was taken from the tower of a nearby church. some people were shocked, disturbed, upset, “was something wrong? are you sick?” some people were nonplussed and ignored it haha
and some people plopped down and joined us. some people called the police too, that was weird, trying to explain from the ground what we were doing and having to assert our right to lay down on the brickwork of the square if we wanted to. some of the performers got cheeky with the police
and there was a threat to have us arrested for “disturbing the peace”. but we werent disturbing anything, just laying down, so we managed to get thru the 15 minutes w/o any arrests. that was just one. another was an orchestra of 150 kazoos, playing the national anthem in the public gardens. yet another was a group of musicians on stage just banging sticks together rhythmically. that one was rather complex because we each had a score to follow. it always got smiles, anger, laughter, emotions of all kinds. it was actually very enlightening, which imo is what should be.
July 17th, 2012 at 3:05 am
i mean,it was actually very enlightening, which imo is what ART should be
July 17th, 2012 at 9:11 pm
Kathi! Reading of your experience in Boston reminded me of the Sydney flash mob that was getting some attention a few years ago. They were calling out for people to join, and I so wanted to join, but I didn’t have the gumption to follow through on it.
I think there was some controversy at the time about the ‘security threat’ they were causing, but I can’t remember now what the exact threat was. When I looked it up on google, I was ushered over to youtube for this
It brought tears to my eyes for reasons that I’m finding it hard to explain.
I was in a Sydney audience watching Michael Flatley lead it once. I was crying like a baby then, but that can’t fully explain the tears that are in my eyes now. I won’t let it.
I want to go on and explain it, but Bruce wants a pill that can make it stop. I think the pill that Bruce wants is the same pill that I want, but I won’t let it.
I think the reason I won’t let it is because I’ve seen what the pill does to people. One of those people was called Kane, but I haven;’t talked about Kane publicly. Another person was called Michael. That’s not his real name, but it’s close. In any case, I think they were both perofrmance artists. One of them wanted to kill me. One of them wanted to help me. And that’s why I saw them.
It wasn’t a very big step for me to go from seeing them to caring about them. Maybe just because Kane told me he wanted to kill Michael too.
But any way I try
to look at it,
I won’t let them.
Thank you :)
July 18th, 2012 at 5:57 am
flashmobs are great, and i totally know what you mean about the emotion that comes when you witness it. it’s like, wow, this is soooo generous, this is soooo beautiful, this is sooo human sharing of joy at its best, you just wish it could go on forever, that there would be celebration for no reason at all, and ithink the tears might be because u know it will be a short celebration, things will go back to the norm again, and it’s so hard to take in a way, just my opinion. it’s exuberance and joy, it’s “theatre” whereas ‘performance art’ doesnt always have the entertainment factor or even the joyousness, it’s a whole other thing
the pill is a placebo haha but it does make it stop right where it might
cease being a headache and begin to be an adventure