Global performance explores the cultural experimentation, theoretical strategies, and ideological aims of artists internationally who used the body as the primary aesthetic vehicle of expression, communication, and information in the post-1945 period. Performance art is a corporeal practice consonant with critical thinking and a critique of contemporary cultural conditions. Unique in the visual arts, performance art has been continually censored and the artists have been arrested and fined for their work. We will study the dynamic interchange between artists’ theories of performance, stylistic development, and social change. We will be concerned with the culture of performance art and how its practices have contributed to altering the aesthetic codes of the visual arts from representational to presentational modes, and from an emphasis on static spatial objects to bodies signifying in time and space. The subject of performance art is intrinsically interdisciplinary, requiring a synthetic methodology that draws widely upon different theoretical strategies in art history, anthropology, critical theory, feminism, history, psychology and parapsychology, philosophy, the philosophy of science, political science, and sociology. Students are encouraged to explore any and all disciplinary models in thinking about performance.
|
