|
|
California Performance Now and Then
January 16 – January 31, 1981
Lecture
California Performance Review
Carl Loeffler
Location: The Renaissance Society
Admission: free
Carl Loeffler is Director of La Mamelle, Inc., an artists' space founded in San Francisco in 1975. The primary activity of La Mamelle is art publishing in a variety of formats--books, magazines, video, audio, microfiche, and rubber stamps. Loeffler has been the guiding force behind La Mamelle's extensive gathering and dissemination of information. He is the editor of Performance Anthology, a Source Book for a Decade of California Performance (1980), an invaluable addition to the very limited body of literature on performance.
Performance
Studio
Tom Marioni
Location: The Renaissance Society
Admission: free
Tom Marioni has set out to remove the distinctions between art and life. His practice includes work as curator, editor, and lecturer as well as activities he terms "art actions." His art actions express both a private and a public self. His first large-scale public work was MOCA, the Museum of Conceptual Art, which he founded in San Francisco in 1970. It was here that many of California's early conceptual artists held many of their events, including one of Marioni's most celebrated public works,The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art.
Studio the artist says: "This work is an art action and situation that recreates the look and feel of my studio where the audience can witness the fact of making an artwork--the equal marriage of sound with a visual image. I will create a self-portrait and vanish into the work."
Lecture
History of Feminist Performance in California
Suzanne Lacy
Location: The Renaissance Society
Admission: free
Since the early 1970's Suzanne Lacy has been creating a feminist art directed toward personal and political change. Chief among her concerns has been the widespread violence against wormen. In two massive public works, involving people from outside the art community, she created images of women's strength to combat the fear and sense of victimization that prevailed in the mass media's treatment of assaults against wormen. Three Weeks in May (1977) involved cooperation with government officials and comunity organizers to stage a series of events that exposed and protested thhe high number of sex crimes in Los Angeles. In Mourning and In Rage (1977) a collaboration with artist Leslie Labowitz, was a powerful response to the Hillside Strangler murders. Both works employed carefully designed media strategies to bring the image of women's strength and outrage to a large television audience. Lacy also co-founded the Women's Building in Los Angeles, which has become a national headquarters of feminist performance art practice.
Performance
The Perpetual Napkin
Barbara Smith
Location: The Renaissance Society
Admission: free
The art of Barbara Smith, one of the first California performance artists, is characterized by personal revelation, ritual, and community involvement. Food and feeding have been the content and metaphor of many of her performances. Works such as White Meal (1969), Surgical Meal (1969), and Mass Meal (1969), provided a re-examination of the cultural, spiritual, and creative implications of the acts of preparing and eating food. In the now-classic work Feed Me (1973), Smith sat naked from dusk to dawn in a room filled with candles, food, flowers, books, records, and other personal objects. Visitors entered the room one at a time and heard her voice on tape repeatedly saying "Feed me." The work profoundly challenged both the artist and the visitor. In Perpetual Napkin Smith continues the food theme. She writes: "We have all been annihilated, we have all been consumed. We eat food and we are eaten. We are one in our Permeability.
There is no fundamental difference between body and soul, matter and energy. The trick is not to escape the body but to transform it at deeper and deeper levels of energizing awareness."
The Perpetual Napkin performance began in advance of the public event. Five people were directed earlier in the week to one of four sites, each at a specified time of the day. They were asked to bring along some food to eat and to follow whatever clues they might find. At each site they found a small table with tablecloth and a red napkin. Nothing else happened except what they experienced themselves. They were asked to return to the gallery to be interviewed about their experiences. The locations selected were: the G.A.R. Room of the Chicago Cultural Center, Billings Hospital and Rockefeller Chapel on the University of Chicago campus, and a near Northside apartment.
Lecture
Coming of Age in 1980
Moira Roth
Location: The Renaissance Society
Admission: free
With the publication of "Toward a History of California Performance," Arts Magazine, Feb., June, 1978, Moira Roth made the first important effort to present a descriptive chronology of a decade of performance work. To prepare for this essay, she spoke to artists all over the West Coast, attempting to reconstruct undocumented works. Her investigation revealed vital informaiton about early performance. Roth continues to contriubte on this subject to both art and drama journals. Some of her recent articles are "A Star is Born," Performing Arts Journal, No. 12, 1980, and "Visions and Revisions," Artforum, November, 1980.
In her lecture, Roth will explore current work including that of young artists whose pieces are more theatrical in form and draw on new wave culture. Roth is an associate professor in the Art History Department at the University of California, San Diego.
Performance
If I Could Only Tell You How Much I Really Love You
Nancy Buchanan
Location: The Renaissance Society
Admission: free
Nancy Buchanan deals with women's issues and other political subjects. Her pieces, often presented in tightly scripted theatrical form, interweave live-action narrative with film and other media. Buchanan's interest in literature can be seen in her poetic use of language and myth. In her first performance Hair Transplant (1972), she shaved the moustache and body hair from a male participant and replaced it with her own. This was one of the first of many pieces to explore the character of male and female identities, roles, and relationships. She recently extended her examination of violence to include the political and industrial sustems that control our lives. These concerns are found in If I Could Only... which the artist calls "a sort of musical comedy." She is joined by staff and students of the School of the Art Institute and California artist Stuart Bender.
 |
|
|
