Final Reading. Corpus Delecti

I read the 13th story. Luis Alfaro. This is about a play that took place in 1996. In Los Angeles, California. He performs a ritual re-enactment of his mothers slow suicide by consuming the table full of Twinkies. He inhabits her form. He relives her body and voice through his production. There is a poem written that expresses the shame this second-generation Latino feels because of his grandmothers refusal to assimilate into North American culture. The first half of the text is trans-fixed upon the artists conflicted relationship to the past, to his grandmother, and his own 11-year-old Chicano self. The second half of the reading discusses queer theater and social theory. Showing studies of the meaning of sexuality than from thinking the social. The final section of the performance takes on a voice of the charismatic minister, one who might be preaching at his mothers church. Alfaros memory performance, with its focus on the production of hybrid selves and space, is in and of itself a mode of queer theory-making that also functions as social theory.

Corpus Delecti
Performance art of the Americas

Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica

• Talks about how the Internet has an increasing number of artists working with digital communications technology ever since 1994
• Many artist like Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica was one of these artists
• Oiticica engaged in sensorium exploration like social cultural and architectural 

Headed and senatorial works: hoods, masks, goggles, gloves, body suits.

• Clark made many devices that messed with the visual sensory 
• Many hoods and goggles as well 

Parangoles: Samna and interactive art 

• Implications emerging from Oiticica fusion of geometric abstraction and Samba 
• Oiticica had a premature death 
• Died when he was 43

Body/machines hybrids, interface, and network: interactivity into new realms 

• The cyborg had a hybrid of wet and hard ware 
• Had human characteristics like skin and heartbeat 
• " In search of the body "

Corpus Delecti

"Visibility as Strategy: Jesusa Rodriguez's Body in Play"
by Roselyn Costantino

Jesusa Rodriguez is a actress, playwright, scenographer, entrepreneur, and social activist. Her work represents Mexican culture, history, and humanity. Jesusa along with her companion Lilian formed the Divas, a group that produced around 200 shows from the 1990-1997. Rodriguez often uses the female body as the focal point of her piece. She has transgressed tradition women roles in a patriarchal society. They have played an active part in politics. She has always deviated from mainstream art and more serious art. "Frivolous theater" flourished in the nineteenth century because it appealed to all social classes. This type of performance engaged the audience in a way that was very interactive. Rodriguez believed that humor as a necessity for her performances. She believed that you should be in the present and live a life full of laughter. By doing so you can see the world from all angles and see it's infiniteness. 

Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica

Lygia Clark and Helio Oticica had created countless works of art in the 60s and 70s. Both of their artwork pieces usually complemented each other and went together.  Clark merged the body and the mind together while Oiticica engaged in sensorial explorations involving social, cultural, architectural, and environmental spaces. They reframed modernist notions of universal aesthetics by translating them directly into life and the body. They focused their work on the body and created a language of the body through their artwork. Clark often merged the body’s interior and exterior spaces stressing direct connection between the body’s physical and psychological dimensions.  Oiticica focused on the body as a color and the body in space and time. Both artists increased the art vocabulary immensely with their artwork and the different forms that they used. They both created interactive art where the audience would come and interact with the piece.  

Performance Art 227-249

Museums during the early twentieth century had not seemed to incorporate performances that demonstrated contemporary art; this began to change as the art became more popular. Performances contained such meaning in society, and example would be Neshat's performance of 9/11, demonstrating the criticality of the event. Their visual storytelling had then given a three-dimensional performance that needed no words to achieve aesthetic mastery. Other examples of demonstration in art would also be the cultural revolution under Mao Zedong's reign over communist China.  The dismissal of art and culture in order to bring in a reign of modernism had destroyed thousands of years of art (architecture, paintings, martial art, religious practice). In times of struggle art was a tool to record and inform about the world; however hard it may be. Performance art focused a lot on the movement and participation of the audience as seen in Senegalese performances. The use of dance in performance creates a conversation between the audience that transforms images into a message.

Pages 152-176 performance art

My readings began in chapter 7 which discussed the art of ideas and the media generation. The year 1968 prematurely marked the beginning of the decade of the seventies. In that year political events severely unsettled cultural and social life throughout Europe and the United States. The chapter discussed questions and instructions. Some early conceptual 'actions' were more written instructions than actual performance, a set of proposals which the reader could perform or not, at will. The artists body was an attempt to translate the essential elements of one discipline into another characterized the early work of the New York artist Acconci. The artists worked on their bodies as objects to define the body in space. Ritual dealed with emotions and traditions and expressionism in nature. The artists made their bodies to become living sculptures. To make their bodies into objects. Autobiographies were written about these artists to analytically investigate these artists and their products.

Performance Art pages 177-201

This section of the book talked about life style and entertainment. According to Bruce McLean the key to entertainment was the style and perfect pose. During 1973 and 1974 artists researched this "perfect pose" which resulted into hilarious performances in London. Examples of these performances is "The Pose that Took us to the Top, Deep Freeze." (1973) Along with these performances artists walked the streets in crazy costumes. These were known as costume performances. Performance artists drew on all aspects of spectacle and entertainment for the structure of their work. From this style of performance artists transitioned into punk aesthetic. The mood of these pieces were seen as disruptive and cynical.

Performance art 131-151

Dance had been a part of performance theatre, however there was a development of the "new" dance. In the fifties, many artists such as Dada and many other futurists had always been using dance to show everyday tasks. Eventually the exploration of different dance ideas had been adapted to an outdoor platform. Filmmakers would implement their own cinematic takes on the performance, demonstrating a view on the performance that can show not one perspective of the dance, but many. An important dance group was the Judson dance group; their interpretive dance with the implementation of terrain changed the way dance was seen for the better. Absolute dance was a primary factor in this time because it was a time where the most meaning could be demonstrated by the least movement. Art will always be advancing by challenging every rule that has been made by the generation before. Art is and always be challenged, and because of that it will always continue to grow.