Posts Tagged ‘ 1980s ’
So the first piece that we re-performed was Vito Acconci’s Centers.
We then decided to start looking for performance that could utilize our relationship. Performances that incorporated two bodies in their original intention, and ideally works that were concerned with the nature, energy and dynamics of relationship. Read more
So this is a new idea: re-performing objects. We started with Longo sort of arbitrarily – we love his work, but probably wouldn’t have chosen it as a beginning for our investigation of material culture through performing the objects of that culture.
We’ve worked for a long time around the idea of object/surroundings informing identity. For instance, the image above, taken during the project being:paulandkate, captures a system of uniform objects that we created and built as our domestic environment.
But how does using the body to interpret images of the body (or even further: what about sculpture, Earthworks, Conceptualism…) work differently that the re-performance of actual “Performance Art” – or what we are attempting with the Cover Artists?
“31. If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist’s concept involved the material.”
What does it mean to re-perform a drawing? Even if the original drawing was life-sized? How does involving the body – as a viewer, as opposed to a producer – change the experience with the artwork as object?
There is a sort of object-producer dichotomy in the drawing that is absent when we perform the action. Our bodies are object. Object twice-removed…When we do reperformances, we don’t claim authorship at all. We break free from the notion of authorship, so in a very real sense, Longo is still the author; we’re just allowing him to use our material, to use us as material.
Why Longo?
We were looking for: A portrait. A couple. An object that captured the idea of identity wrapped up in the exterior. Something to model Cash & Ruby on. Something that was already present in – already visually present in the art world – while at the same time, related to our cultural consciousness. Our awareness of ourselves during the 1980s in America. A man and a woman wearing business suits. Money. The notion of surface. Radical surface. A young Caucasian man and woman, well-dressed, attractive.
Transporting ourselves from the analog to the digital. Flattening everything. Giving it all the same value. That’s what happens with the composite. We don’t put ourselves into any sort of scene: it’s a completely clean, neutral space, a non-space, digital space. The original piece of work has all sorts of potential. Our reperformance is just one type of actualization that is available for Robert Longo’s original drawing.
This video by Circlesquare takes it to the next level.