Performance Piece

For my performance art piece, I wanted to make a statement about social media. My generation has gone from AIM chat to Myspace to Facebook to Twitter and then to an explosion of Snapchat, Tumblr, Instagram etc. Facebook is mainly the only one of these I really use. It is appropriate for finding long-long friends, sharing pictures and posting things. I have never been a fan of dumb statuses though, which is mainly how I see Twitter. My friends forced me to get a Twitter last year and I tried to pick it up, but never really got into it as much as  I feel everyone else did. Twitter to me is just a bunch of annoying statuses about doing nothing and can just be bothersome to some people. People would never say out loud to the entire world, "Going to the bathroom" or "Need a coke" because people would look at them like they were crazy yet people have no problem doing this on the Internet. During my project I was dressed up as a twitter icon and did some of the actions that people on twitter do such as statuses, tweeting at other people, and "following" people. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usme7jVrfmE

Over the boundaries of gender

Meet Eva and Adele, two women who are supporters of the theory that the body is the canvas itself. You don't need a canvas or a video camera, you yourself can be a big statement. If you visit their website, www.evaadele.com, you can get an idea of their different statements, different projects and biographies. One of their statements that I found interesting was "over the boundaries of gender". Eva and Adele are married and although you wouldn't be able to tell, Eva is actually a man, who chooses to express his marriage with Adele as a female-female marriage. Eva had his gender legally changed but chose to keep his body the way it is without undergoing the actual sex change. They are always seen in full make-up in public, as part of their image. One of their projects that I found interesting was CUM. Like any other two 'women' who love having their pictures taken in full make-up, Eva and Adele adore collecting pictures that other people have taken of them and use it to portray to the public how other people see couples. They will often provide a stamped postcard to the photographer so that they can receive a copy of the photo in return for permission for the photo to be used as the photographer likes. 

Xerox Project

Word of advice - Its best to explain to the librarians who stare at you like you are a crazy person and possibly a threat to the library why you are sticking your butt, face and feet on top of the scanner before you do it. Lexy and I entered the library nervous and giggly about sticking our body parts onto a paper machine and after getting a few incriminating looks from others, went to the front desk to explain our project. The librarian was bewildered and told us how previous students had been breaking the scanners doing projects like this and told us to be careful and not get our oils on the machine. He also gave us wipes to clean up after ourselves as if our pores were going to excrete masses of oil and dirt all over his machine. I enjoyed when Lexy scanned her butt and the guy across the room narrowed his eyes at us and she made some awkward comment back to him. My favorite was scanning my ear and seeing all the piercings so visibly captured. 

I ended up doing a vague statement piece on walking blindly into danger. 

I used a yellow caution sign that the janitors use over wet spots as my main object. I used copies of my feet leading up to it to symbolize the start of the walk. All over the front side are hands, and on the back are different pictures of a face. On the side are pictures of wide-open eyes. Interpret if however you like but this is the story I imagined - We are very often blind to what is going on around us and walk straight into a trap where we are bound to fall. The hands are plastered to the caution sign because we always figure out we need to turn back when its too late, and then we cant. You can see the feet moving up on the sign as we begin to fall. The faces are the stages we go through to from blind and happy to eyes open and in panic. Then after it is all over, you tell yourself next time watch out. 

Iconoclast

An iconoclast is a person who pursues the destruction of religious symbols or any time of dogma or conventions or with religious statements with political motives. Iconoclasm is the term of what the iconoclasts are doing. There are examples of iconoclasm all over the world - 
              1. Several Muslim denominations seek out iconoclastic agendas  - Over the years controversy has risen within Islam because of destruction of historic sites by Meccas authorities 
              2. In 2001 there was an act of destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamyan by the Taliban government of Afghanistan. After this protests began because obviously other Muslims and Muslim government did not support this. The act was seen as a threat against "the coexistence between the Buddhas and the Muslim population that marveled at them for over a millennium". 
              3. In 2012 the Tuareg rebellion occurred and Ansar Dine destroyed a few Sufi shrines in the city of Timbuktu, Mali  
              4. From class today, Orlan was shown in several pictures dressed as Mother Theresa religiously making the pictures sexual and turning the crosses upside down. It's completely unnecessary and offensive. 

Sheryl Oring

"I wish to say" is a national campaign started by Sheryl Oring in hopes that the public will voice their opinions and stand up for what they have to say. Oring was concerned that not enough people were expressing their entitled-by-the-constitution opinions to the government and our president. Oring set up a portable puclic office and presents a typewriter to the public so that as they pass, they have the option to write notes to the President (who at the time was Bush). She gives them the card and the stamp. The typewriter is meant to "set the mood". Oring said, "There is something about the typewriter that really draws people in and it is also a symbolic reminder of a different era when people took the time to write letters and people slowed down and listened to each other." Oring planned to take the project she has started nationally, all over the country throughout the election and then will eventually write a book. It is unknown if the president read the letters sent to him. 

Joseph Beuys

                                                   

Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, Germany in 1921 and spent a lot of his early adult life in the military, trained to be an aircraft radio operator and combat pilot. Unfortunately he was wounded many times, one time during a plane crash when he was rescued by nomadic Tartars who decided to rub him down with fat and and wrap him in felt to warm him. (Because of this a lot of his later pieces involved the usage of fat and felt. The image below makes use of the felt) 

                                    

After his return from the war Beuys decided not to pursue a career in medicine like he originally planned and enrolled in the Dusseldorf Academy of Art so that he could started sculpture. He also focussed on drawing and made thousands of drawings during the 1950s. In the 1960s the Academy became more and more important for contemporary art and really helpeed Beuys develop as an artist based on the Fluxus movement. He began performances, which he termed "actions". He exhibited his sculptures, objects, drawings and room installations. His calls for reform and reaching out to the public were moving but were also seen as unconventional and they cost him his job as a teacher after he refused to stop insisting that admission to the art school should be open to anyone.

Brion Gysin - Dream Machine

Born in 1916 in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, Brion Gysin had many skills including being a poet, a painter, writer and performance artist. After graduating from school early, Gysin moved to Paris and took an open course at the Sorbonne called La Civilisation Francaise and began to make literary and artistic contacts with others. He developed a surrealist viewpoint of art and is widely known for his 'cut-up technique' alone with his friend William S. Burroughs. The cut-up technique discovery happened accidentally in the 1950s when Gysin was cutting through newspapers and noticed how the different layers put together offered "interesting juxtapositions of text and image". 
The Dreamachine was shortly after created and is a flicker machine used to work the mind as individuals sit before it with their eyes closed and let the color and light create images in their minds. It was an attempt to create a hallucinatory experience based off an a similar experience Gysin had in his lifetime.