Performance as a Visual Art Form
Lovers of theatre are usually especially well-equipped to find meaning in anything performance related. Lovers of visual arts are especially good at finding meaning in symbols. What happens when both mediums collide?
Augusto Boal, a Brazilian theatre practitioner, created exercises in the Theatre of the Oppressed that often touched the political or became an inadvertent study of human behaviour. In one exercise his troupe was asked to create a tableau where they interact with one or more refugees. The group portrayed the refugee with one member of the cast kneeling down whilst holding a hand up asking for help, the others, from a good distance, offered a hand up. As Boal observed, however, there was still a distance and the hands did not meet. Whilst the offer of the hand represented the idealistic view of what should be done, an invisible barrier (fear?) even in that made-up reality brought to light a certain hesitation.
Exercises like this can be a great way in which political issues, human nature and behaviour can be explored. The presence of living beings brings an element of unpredictability and power that canvases cannot match. Thus, performance art becomes visual art through the images that linger and the close analysis those allow.
For watchers of human behaviour, Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974) is extremely powerful. Here, the artist lay 72 objects on a table and stood still for 6 hours, letting audience members do anything with those objects. One of the objects was a gun loaded with one bullet.
A more modern outlook comes through the literal lens of Tommy Kha, with his Return To Sender, where the photographer asks strangers to kiss him in any way they wish as he photographs the kiss. The photos are an intriguing look at how people portray themselves in a romantic act, and how their bodies relate to that of the photographer. In a political sense, the work comments and laughs at the common media portrayal of Asian American men as asexual.
More political takes are also achieved in Emma Sulkowicz’s performance piece Carry That Weight. Sulkowicz, who is a survivor of sexual assault that happened during her time as a student at Columbia University, carried the mattress wherever she went on campus to symbolize the permanence of the burden of the sexual assault.
In all these works the self an essential part of the work of art, becoming a bearer of symbolism and meaning; it is constant, and yet, dependent on the viewers’ interpretation. The images linger and haunt. The presence of the living human, a reminder that it could be you. And if it had been, how would you have positioned your body during the kiss? Would you have been the one to place the gun in the artist’s hand? Would you have helped carry the mattress?
