Culture Jamming

Centre for Communication and Civil Engagement

Adbusters

Nancy Strider graduated from Emily Carr last year and she is an active performance artists and culture jammer. Check out here blog to see what she is passionate about:

Came of Age Before Computers

3 Performance Histories

My presentation will focus on artists who have multi-media practices that feature performance as a vital component. The various forms of media in their works, including the body, become vehicles for communication. Other vehicles such as film, photography, and performance begin to mediate or translate the meaning of the performance. Simultaneously, such mediums have the ability to document or extend the life of the work beyond the performance. Furthermore, the spontaneous elements of the performance are preserved, and in some instances, the artist is able to continue to manipulate the work beyond the performance, extending the event of the performance into a creative process.

I am interested in looking at the histories of performers artists who are balancing elements of performance and the performance’s preservation simultaneously. Performance and the respective medias become inextricably attached. The means of Mediation or documentation informs the performance, and the performance informs the means of mediation.

Wolfgang Laib

Laib's spiritual practice consists of performing the creation of his sculpture installations. Laib spends each spring and summer gathering pollen from friend and meadows of Southern Germany, where he lives. His "Pollen" installations involve collection pollen by hand and shaking it into a jar. When he has collected enough material, he distributes the pollen by hand into square like formation on the floor of the exhibition space. His "Milkstone" installations are equally labor intensive. He sands down one side of a square marble slab and places it on the gallery floor. He then pours an even layer of mile onto the slab. when the milk curdles, Laid cleans the slab and repeats the process.



The repetitive nature of his work brings him into a state of mediation where he sees himself as "participating" with natural materials instead of making art. Laib's use of natural material is intended to create an experience of pure potentiality. Laib treats his physical body as a vessel for divine beauty. He does not credit himself for the creation of his art objects. He simply devotes himself to regular spiritual practice and his sculptures become and extension of his performance.

Laib states: “I am not afraid of beauty, unlike most artists today. The pollen, the milk, the beeswax, they have a beauty that is incredible, that is beyond the imagination, something which you cannot believe is a reality—and it is the most real. I could not make it myself, I could not create it myself, but I can participate in it. Trying to create it yourself is only a tragedy, participating in it is a big chance.”—Wolfgang Laib




Laib's work is influenced by both Western and Eastern mysticism. His work is grounded in various aesthetic cultural rituals such as Tibetan Mandalas and Navajo Sand Painting. Laib's conceptual art references are very few, but included performance artist Josephy Beuys. Beuys was know for his shamanistic rituals intended to heal the sick. However, Laib's practice differs from Beuys because he prefers to work in silence and solitude. Instead of using charisma to involve a crowd in his work, he immerses himself in solitary practice where is able to acknowledge himself as part of the larger whole. His sculptures capture the essence of his deliberate performative gestures without the need to explicitly perform in public.

Laib at the Sperone Westwater

Cindy Sherman

Overview of Cindy Sherman's work

Cindy Sherman’s work is often classified as photography however the primary content of her work is achieved through her role as a performance artist. Sherman fused performance and photography to create female archetypes within popular culture. Over the years, Sherman has believably embodied hundreds of female characters.

However, by nature, Sherman is far more introverted and soft-spoken than her pictures would suggest. By working in the medium of photography she is free from the pressures of the live performance space. Instead of being concerned with holding the attention of a live audience, she is able to devote her attention to constructing conditions and embodying her character.
Sherman creates context for her performances by controlling the elements within the frame such as location, props, and costume. Her complex system of visual cues begins to suggest a narrative. Her series Untitled Film Stills evoke the essence of hypothetical female characters within traditions of film. By recreating the fiction, she reveals the fiction.

Working in the medium of photography, Sherman is able to perform outside of the conventional live performance spaces. The settings in Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills range from intimate, domestic, interior spaces to both public and desolate exteriors. Separated from a live audience, Sherman is able to truly create the essence of solitude in her works. Sherman portrays woman and her constructed relationships to internal and external worlds.

In her later Untitled Color Photographs she reduces the roles of costume and set and focuses in on gesture to create characterization. For example, she often positions herself in passive reclining postures to imply submissiveness. She seduction positioning of her body is juxtaposed by her the look of distress in her facial expressions. In one of her Untitled Color Photographs, she poses a schoolgirl crouched down and looking up with a sense of fright and desperation as if she has been attacked. The use of photography gives her performances a heightened sense of voyeurism. The viewer is able to peer into a seemingly private moment of the characters life that we are not supposed to see.

Additionally Sherman uses composition and framing to highlight the performance elements within her photographs. Furthermore, Sherman is able to heighten emotional tension and create a desired mood with lighting. Sherman later dives deeper into the characterization with the use of cosmetics. She also reintroduces wardrobe even more strongly than before in her series of Untitled History Portrait as well as her Untitled portraits of aging women.

Maya Deren

Maya Deren is known as a pioneer in experimental filmmaking, however her role a performer is the most pertinent form of expression in her early films. I will argue that Deren is primarily performance artist, simply working in the medium of film. Deren is drawn to film’s ability to capture the poetry of movement.

I believe that if video had been accessible to her, she would have preferred it. Given the difficulty she had acquiring the funding to make her films, she may have been inclined to make a much larger body of video work because of its comparative affordability.

The narratives in Derens works are much more ambiguous than conventional film. Instead of being driving by story, her performances are comprised of a series of gestures. Maya’s use of gesture is derived from various traditions of live performance including dance. Maya brings the presence of dance into her films simply through the way she moves through the space. She has been described as a dancer, who is not dancing.

Film enabled Deren to explore spaces outside of the conventional live performance environments. Deren performs in remote locations and vicariously brings her audiences to these locations on screen. For instance, in her experimental film “At Land” she creates the metaphor of being a mermaid washed up at shore. Additionally, she is able to manipulate the limitations of time is space. Through film editing, Maya’s performances weave seamlessly between various locations giving the impression that she is navigating through a dream.

In Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren performs multiple characters in her films and through editing she constructs implied relationships between these characters. Through this process, identity is longer a slave of the singular body of live performance. Thus identity becomes decentralized and hangs loose in an altered state of reality.

Later in her career, Maya created collaborative works with artists who expressed themselves through dance (A Study for Choreography for Camera) and martial arts (Meditation of Violence). In relationship to her later works, Deren states, “special attention must be given to the creative possibilities of Time, and that the form as a whole should be ritualistic”. This idea was most clearly articulated in her finished film Ritual in Transfigured Time. As an extension of her art practice, she visited Haiti where she immersed herself within the Haitian Voudoun traditions.