re.act.feminism - performance art of the 1960s and 70s today
Exhibition, video archive, live performances and conference
A project by cross links e.V., curated by Bettina Knaup and Beatrice E. Stammer
Produced in partnership with Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Akademie der Künste
Berlin, 13.12.2008 – 08.02.2009
International Festival of Contemporary Arts, City of Women, Ljubljana, 10.03. - 29.03.2009
Kunsthaus Erfurt, 19.04. - 10.05.2009
NEW
re.act.feminism vol. II – a performing
archive
2011 –2013
Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Galerija Miroslav Kraljević, Zagreb, Croatia
Wyspa Institute for Art, Danzig, Poland
Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark
Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia
Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany
A project by cross links e.V.
funded by Kulturstiftung des Bundes
More details soon
The player will show in this paragraph
Video of the opening at the Akademie der Künste Berlin 2008
produced by Stefan Paubel. copyright cross links e.V
re.act.feminism – performance art of the 1960’s and 70’s today was an
international performance and exhibition project exploring the “return”
of feminist performance art of the 1960’s and 70’s in form of re-dos,
reenactments, appropriations, new articulations, or archival and documentary
projects. The exhibition, performance program and videoarchive featured
more than 70 artists from two generations, providing an exemplary overview
of gender-critical performance art of the 1960s and 70s in Europe and
the USA, and investigating its resonances in current artistic productions.
The curators’ intention was to extend the perspective beyond the canon
of the known and familiar in order to demonstrate the diversity and complexity
of (feminist) performative strategies. This included performance movements
in Eastern and South Eastern Europe as well as the former GDR (since
the beginning of the 1980s) which often developed parallel to and independent
of ‘western art’.
(read more)
Performance art emerging in the 1960s and 70s was infused with ideas
of social emancipation and fundamentally influenced by women artists
interested in feminism. Performance art explored the intersection of
art and life, of private and public. By focusing on the sentient, creating,
knowing, speaking body it is the ideal medium to deconstruct the status
of women as art objects and appropriate the subject position, to dramatize
the social and physical vulnerability of women’s bodies in a patriarchal
society and to deconstruct and subvert notions of stereotypical identity.
Moreover, as a new art form, occurring outside the confines of the traditional
art space, performance was a medium for collective and social intervention
in the public sphere.
The artistic avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s, including feminist performance
art, are currently regaining attention among a younger generation of
artists and also among institutions. There are several reasons for this
interest. On the one hand it reflects the (institutional) desire for
the historicisation of performance as an ephemeral art form. On the other
hand there seems to be a need of a younger generation to actively appropriate
history and –so our thesis– a search for radical artistic expressions
reflecting and stimulating social change.
The “return of performance art” seems to be a paradoxical notion. Performance
art developed in a time of global awakening in the 1960s and 70s as an
ephemeral, process-based art form, in which the body and the actions
of artists, and sometimes also those of audiences, became the artistic
medium. Performance art opposed notions of object-based art and related
strategies of commodification and often left the traditional art institutions,
galleries and museums. Performance was therefore understood as embedded
in the now, the present moment, and therefore haunted by disappearance,
as Peggy Phelan’s has famously stated:
"Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot
be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation
of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes
something other than performance. … Performance’s being ... becomes
itself through disappearance." (Peggy Phelan, Unmarked, 1993)
However, as many authors have claimed successively performance does
not only exist in the live act, but is often intrinsically linked to
its recording and reaches a broader audience only through its traces
and documentation. Authors such as Paul Clarke and Rebecca
Schneider have elaborated further that there might even be a liveness to these traces, documents and recordings, as
well as to the process of transmission:
Documents – so their thesis- are mostly produced intentionally for posterity,
for a future reading and handling and their liveness lies in this future
encounter, in the live circulation and reception, which is anticipated
in its live production. The documents and traces, the mythologies and
stories may trigger phantasies and inspire to re-enact, re-perform or
re-act.
The exhibition re.act.feminism focussed on this contradictory relationship
between the live act and its traces and documents, the fragmentary archives
and the live reception, and reflected on how (performance)history can be
reconstructed and a possible future 'invented'.
Bettina Knaup, Beatrice E. Stammer
