Sitting at a bus stop.

What makes something performance art?

The tired old argument comes to mind: are we performing every day? Is life a performance?

The more I am exposed to performance art, the more I am convinced that it is just the snippet of the living of a life, compressed and planned with an audience in mind. It is just living, with the motive to create art.

We watched videos of Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic and so on. I tried to read into the origins of performance art, and came across names like Marta Minujin and Kaprow. I read about the concept of "happenings", Kaprow's performance with a city of ice and the general idealogy that performance art should mimick real life as closely as possible.

This still left me with no ideas in relation to our actual task: to create and perform a work of art.

I finally narrowed down on some basic concepts I wanted to express, and tried to think about how I'd express these ideas using my body and some objects as my medium.

I worked with two classmates and we came up with a performance we made to strange bystanders at the bustop nearby. We traced our faces on sheets of paper we placed over our features blindly, and traced our own faces over the drawings of each others faces. Each sheet of paper, ultimately, held the blind drawings of all three of our faces. The pictures were of all three of us, represented our mental view of our selves: and yet looked nothing truly like us.

This was our concept note:

You are you, and I am me. This we are sure of, with complete certainty, from the time we learn to remember our names.
Our perception of self is built on a concept of identity that we have adopted from the earliest years of our childhood, and our perception of "others" goes hand in hand. Us, and them. You and I.
Identity is a transient, fluid thing. It is a product of pure chance, a selection from seas and seas of individual souls, and to a great extent, convenient assumption. Our mental images of our selves are just direct products of our ability to see, to think, to feel. Blind us, gag us, and we may not know who we are.
Time and life and people pass by us, as other individual souls in an endless sea. Identity forms a blob, morphing, mutating, a never-ending metamorphosis. Either we become each other, and we are everyone, or we never never anyone to begin with. We form a process that never ends, not even when we die.
And yet we are sure of this: you are you, and I am me.

Definitions

We began by watching a film about the life of artist Ai Wei Wei, titled "Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry". It portrayed his journey as a defiant artist that went through great lengths to ensure social change. He was, as an artist, rebellious, brave and a great risk-taker. This brought us to the following questions, resulting in a rather frustrating debate: 

1) Who is an artist? 

2) Does an artist have to be an activist? 

3) What is the difference between a "normal person" and an artist? 

After countless arguments, I finally came to the following basic conclusions: 

An artist is one who, using medium and methodology, consciously expresses his ideas for the purpose of creating art. 

An artist MAY be an activist, but need not necessarily be one. 

A "normal person" is anyone who does not communicate consciously for the purpose of creating art using medium and methodology. 

Therefore, everyone CAN be an artist, but everyone is not necessarily an artist. 

People communicate all the time and constantly express their ideas. But when this expression occurs with the sole purpose of creating art, and expressing this idea directly to a viewer, it becomes art. Therefore anything can be art if it is recognized as art. Unless it is recognized as art - and therefore given the MOTIVE of existing as art - it will not be art. 

We were left with this question: if a viewer does not see art in an artwork, does it cease to be art? 

I thought about this, and played with this idea: that even if a viewer disclaims an artwork as art, it shall still continue to be art as long as it was created with the purpose of being art. 

It is irrelevant whether art is art in the eyes of many, as long as it is art in the eyes of the artist. Just the same way that an artwork could be art in the eyes of many, but not art in the eyes of the artist. 

These views seem transient and entirely moot, but interesting to play around with until I come across new views that negate what I've come across so far. 

The Control Room

Postmodernism has always been a term that perked my interest, be it in the context of literature, film or art. Installation art, in particular, struck me as fascinating because it appears to subscribe directly to postmodernism today - shedding certain concrete ideas about medium and expression to adopt undeniably newer ideas such as using body and space and objects as a medium. The idea appeared to make expression somehow more honest, more direct: make the relationship between the art and the artist as simplistic and strong as that between man and space.

This was one of the things we discussed on the first day of the course - and we came to the conclusion that the "material" in an art work is only employed once it has become the artist's medium. Therefore the artist takes raw material, and in using it to create art, makes it his medium. Therefore this material can be anything. We walked up and down the tables in our classroom, and had that exercise been immortalized in photograph or video, it could've been art. It could've been a performance. Our bodies, the classroom, the tables: these were material. In using them to convey ourselves, me could make these things mediums.

So it becomes a question of choosing material in a world that is a pure array or raw material: what does it take to make a material a medium? Is it necessary to possess this material, mold it with years and years of time and effort, or is it enough to simply choose it, make it yours, title it, interpret it, imbibe it? Where does one draw the line?

As an ironic sort of contradiction to everything we'd discussed previously, we set out to find a space in the building - change nothing about the space - but simply illustrate it as if it were our "installation", and write an artists note about it. This was to take reality and pretend it had been carefully simulated by us, to convey what we wanted to convey. This was to project ourselves onto the surface of something that already existed, and it was a fascinating exercise.

We chose a spot on the basement, that had futuristic windows and ceilings.

This was our artists note: 

THE CONTROL ROOM

Imagine slices of window clouded over with dust and specks of burning white paint, behind which you can see blue, blue sky. 

On the sky is a stripe of smoke barrelling to the heavens of spaceships heading to Mars. 

The windows are placed at about fifteen feet above the ground. The ceilings are painted a stark white. You see, we are in the mind, the rearview mirror, the spectacles of the human mind, except time has gloriously passed. 

Not even the blue sky, with its strip of rocket smoke, is a sign of the past. 

There is a single white beam separating the white walls. There are two large glass electrical sockets with glass domes above the light bulbs on either side. One is connected to an electrical line that goes down the walls. The other is dysfunctional, has no line, alienated, pointless. 

We are within the brain of a futuristic human being and he faces sensory deprivation. He is only partially connected. 

The windows are his eyes, seeing into futuristic sky, swimming with spaceships and yet, these windows are dusty, paint-specked, unclear, dysfunctional. 

The mind of the human being sees into the future, and yet is unable to truly see. The mind of the human being has two electrical light ears, but he is partially deaf. 

Time has passed, and a spaceship goes to Mars.