SLIDING SCALE: Oversized Dresses and Small Moments in Visual Art Performance (original) (raw)

About looking and looking away: Performance art, visuality and the vision of excess

Despite the centrality of looking to the experience of performance art, relatively little has been published on the visual as a condition of the production of meaning in this particular art form. Tracing the theoretical roots of performance art's vocabulary to linguistics, anthropology and theories of poststructuralism, it comes as no surprise that the concepts of 'theatricality' and 'performativity' have increasingly gained ground in the history of performance art. However, the act of looking, or looking away, should also be accounted for through an understanding of 'visuality', a third term that highlights the contingency of meaning making. For this, this essay affirms the anthropological paradigm, by focusing on situations of visual extremity in both ritual contexts and performance art, as a series of instances where the problems of vision are thrown into particular relief. However, it shall also strive to underline the differences between the two, just as Bataille has, especially on the ground of the creation and undermining of social orders.

I Live in This Dress: Materiality and Identity in Visual Art Performance

Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 2019

Following the thread of the Feminist New Materialists, in “I Live in this Dress” the author, a visual art performer, examines the workings of materiality and identity within her own practice. The process of three recent works, Point Out, Touch On and Red We (all 2017) includes the design and construction of a sculptural wearable and techniques of traditional garment making—fabric draping, sewing and embroidery—to reveal a co-embodiment and shared authorship between artist and garment, woman and dress. This deep commitment to the material underpins a shift in selfness toward a collective identity, or alterself. Insomuch as the making makes the performance, the author suggests, the making makes the performer.

The Tête-À-Tête of Performance in Fashion and Art

2012

Performance art has always been considered a treat to Modernist Art; it was theatrical in the pejorative sense Michael Fried gave to the word. When we look at his arguments we might conclude that not alone performance art or minimal art is theatrical but fashion as well. Of course Fried did not talk about fashion, neither did Greenberg, but both saw it probably as belonging to mass culture, which was a treat to the autonomy of the so called high art as well. In my presentation I want to look more closely to performance in art and performance in fashion starting in the time Fried published his «Art and Objecthood», the end of the sixties, till about three decades later. I will concentrate more in particular on the early moment and compare this with the situation of the nineties. What has changed in the development of performance art and fashion and in their relation? Performance art in the sixties and seventies tried to stay as far as possible from the theatrical sign or to use the w...

Scale to Size: An Introduction

Art History 38: 2, 251-266, 2015

Among the issues most central to the creation and reception of artworks, scale directly addresses the capacity of artworks to mediate between viewers' expectations and perceptions. A recurring interest in the history of art is a pointed attention to scale that does not simply refer to size alone but to variable relationships between sizes. Standards of measurement, medium, format, and function all affect these relationships whose production fundamentally affects how artworks respond to the time and place of their making. Yet despite the context-specificity of scale, close analysis of how it affects the responsive capacity of artworks offers new possibilities of connection between multiple geographies and periods. By including discussions of a wide range of periods and artworks with a special focus on the language used to discuss scale, this introduction seeks to expand upon these possibilities in anticipation of more fully realizing the promises inherent in the idea of comparative art histories.

Inside the Capsule of Artistic Practices: Wearing and Performing the Moving Image

Fashionating Images: Audiovisual Media Studies Meet Fashion / Comunicazioni Sociali – Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies Vol. 1, Vita e Pensiero Pubs. , 2017

This article focuses on the multi-media artwork The Capsule by the Greek film director Athina Rachel Tsangari, which was commissioned by the non-profit organization DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art in the context of a project that bridges fashion and other art forms. Through an analysis of both the installation piece and the film that comprise the artwork, the article argues that The Capsule introduces a methodological tool for the understanding of artistic practices: a concept named after its own title and adapting Andrew Pickering’s notion of the ‘mangle of practice’ from the context of the production of scientific knowledge to the one defined by two artistic expressions – fashion and cinema – which are often regarded as commodities yet they negotiate in a profound way the processes of subjectification within fixed social norms. The goal of the article is to prove how this particular interaction between fashion and cinema will help us perceive them as primarily performative media, as opposed to representational ones.

Body Issues in Performance Art: Between Theory and Praxis

In his prophetic Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino enhances Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity and Consistency as indispensable qualities to cherish literature. It can be considered a definition or, better, a six-faced metaphor that can also be easily applied to economy, Internet and media communication and, specifically, to Art, interactive Performances and Art Action. Hence also the performer’s role is changing: by becoming increasingly less an ‘actionist of reputed and supposable nonsense’, and increasingly more a ‘communicator’ of things once considered impossible, the performer's work helps to accomplish these things in a better and clearer way.