Preformance Art Project

Selling Leaves

By Amanda DiMartini

E hastie collage

Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono was born in Japan in 1933. Her family moved back and forth between Japan and the United States with her father's job. She eventually enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College and developed an appreciation for the arts that led to her own art making.

She was one of the artists who belonged to the Fluxus Movement, and worked mainly with performance and conceptual art. She also dabbled in filmmaking and created 16 films in the late sixties and early seventies. Two of her most famous works are "Cut Piece" (1964) and "This is Not Here" (1970). "Cut Piece" was a performance in which she had the audience cut pieces of her clothing from her body until she was naked. "This is Not Here" was an exhibit with a scene from a living room cut in half. She wanted the audience to complete the image in their minds, so that their participation was integral to the art itself. Her first film from 1964 showed from what seems to be the viewer's prospective, as it depicts a walk through a snow storm on the way to the Taj Mahal. The majority of Ono's artwork relied upon the participation of the viewer, whether mentally or physically.

"This is Not Here" 1970



"Cut Piece" 1964



-Meghan Swisher

John Cage by Tristan

John Cage, American, born in LA, 1912-1992

Cage briefly studied at Pamona College and UCLA. Cage knew that the music he wanted to make was unlike anything being made at the time. He had ‘no feeling for harmony’ and his teachers thought he would not be able to write music. Cage quickly realized that there were other ways to make art with music.

Cage collaborated with dancer Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg at Black Mountain College, a North Carolina-based art college. Cage made music for performances, interested in how music composed by ‘chance’ could ‘sound beautiful.’ Marcel Duchamp was a great influence on Cage. Cage liked Duchamp’s attitude to art––his ‘ready-mades’––and felt similarly. Cage ‘found music around him and did not necessarily rely on expressing something from within.’

Soon, Cage really began experimenting with music and musical instruments. He put metal fragments and screws between piano’s strings, for example. Then, he found new instruments altogether. He was very interested in chance and found sound.

‘Imaginary Landscape No 4’ (1951) was made up of 12 radios played at once. The sound of the piece depended entirely on the quality and content––‘chance’––of the broadcasts at the time of the performance.

Notable works:

‘Water Music’ (1952) used shells and water in an attempt to recreate the natural sounds ‘we find around us each day.’

‘4’33”’ (1952) is a three-movement composition for any instrument. It instructs the player to not play a single not for the duration of the piece. Generally believed to just be ‘four minutes and 33 seconds of silence,’ it is actually supposed to make the listener hear all of the sounds around him. His most important and controversial work.

‘Cartridge Music’ (1960) was made by amplifying numerous household appliances.

He was also very interested in literature. Silence, his first book, came out in 1961. At this point, Cage, inspired by Thoreau and Joyce, began in incorporate literature into his music.

While Cage is one of the most important composers of the 20th century (he composed much ‘straight classical music,’ too), his importance goes far beyond classical music. He changed the way people heard: it was impossible to look at anything––a painting, a book, a person, a tool––without thinking about what it might sound like.

––Tristan Eden

Tristan's Collage

Tristan Eden collage

Vito Acconci - Kyle

- 'City of Words', lithograph by Vito Acconci, 1999

- 'Crash', photointaglio, aquatint, relief and shaped embossing by Vito Acconci, 1985
-Acconci in 1971

Vito Acconci was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1941. His parents were Italian immigrants. When he was young his dad would take him to museums. He also gave Vito his first education in the arts. In 1968 he graduated from the College of the Holy Cross with a BA in literature. After college he worked as an art professor at many different universities. Currently, he teaches in the art department at Brooklyn College.

Acconci began his career as a poet, but later worked on performance and video artist. During this period, he focused on confrontation and Situationism. One work that I found interesting was a description of a performance he did in 1971 called Seedbed. He had a huge ramp installed in a gallery and while people would walk above him on the ramp he would vocalize his fantasies about the people into a loudspeaker. He did all of this while masturbating. One of the motivations for doing such a performance was to involve the spectators in the creation of the piece.

During the 1980’s he began to focus on different types of art. He began to make furniture and machinery that would allow spectators to erect signs and shelters. What interested him most, however, was architecture. He would construct prototypes of theoretical house designs and in 1988 opened the Acconci Studio for focusing on theoretical design and building. Acconci designed the United Bamboo store in Tokyo. Recently he has focused on architecture that blends private and public spaces. One example of this would be a hallway he designed for an airport in Wisconsin called “Walkways in the Wall” that lets people walk through the structural boundaries of the building.

About Beuys

Joseph Beuys was a German sculptor, art teacher, and performance artist, active from the 1950s to the 1980s. Beuys was heavily influenced by folklore, myth, humanism, social philosophy, particularly anthroposophicism, and German Romanticism with their ideas about the individual, the focus on nature, and the environment. He was especially interested in

animals and the mystical powers myth and folklores had imbued in them. His work spoke to naturalistic view of society, encouraging everyone to participate in society through meaningful creative acts (He remarked famously, “every human being is an artist.”) Beuys saw himself in a sort of shamanistic role that channeled the spirituality of human existence in the natural world, initiating a healing and rehabilitative process of society, which would arguably manifest in his later overt political activism. Through this lens of spiritual renewal from an understanding of natural society against the “repressive effects of a senile social system,” we can look at Beuys’s artistic work.

His performance work was first influenced by his encounters with Nam June Paik and the Fluxus group. The Fluxus artists put on public “concerts” that mixed literature, music, visual art, performance art, and everyday life. His engagement with the Fluxus group pushed him further to develop his ideas about the “evolutionary and revolutionary power” of art in society.

Perhaps, his most famous performance (or “actions” as he called them) was I Like America and America Likes Me. For this performance, Beuys was transported in an ambulance from the airplane from to a building room. He did not want to touch American soil, partly in protest of the Vietnam War. Wrapped in a felt blanket, Beuys spent three days in a room with a coyote, a powerful god in Native American folklore that could move between the spiritual and physical world. Everyday, fifty copies of the Wall Street Journal would be brought into the room, which the coyote urinate on. Beuys kept his attention on the coyote throughout the entire three days, and the coyote varyingly regarded Beuys with caution, aggression, and companionship. The coyote, like Native Americans, had been pushed to extinction by modern society, and the performance was an attempt to heal part of this damage.

Years earlier, his action How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, involved Beuys sitting in a room covered in honey and gold in mumbling explanations of drawings on the walls into a dead hare’s ears, which he held in his arms. An iron slab was attached to his feet. The metals iron and gold symbolized connection to the earth and alchemical inquiry, respectively. Anthroposophicism, an influence upon him, taught that bees were the ideal society of brotherhood, and their product was seen in the honey poured on him. The performance spoke to the nature of ideas and their communication, and what this meant for education and politics.

Beuys later formulated an idea of society as one great work of art in which all of its participants, all of us, were artists transforming society through our words and deeds. From this understanding of art, ourselves, and society, we can see how “performance art” is one way to consciously shape the great work of art that is our society.