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Art and Performance
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Art and Performance

A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 February 2023) | Viewed by 9358

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Tim Brennan

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Art and Performance, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M15 6BH, UK
Interests: art and performance

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Arts focuses the many strands of tradition and highlights the emergent themes that occupy the territory between art and performance. There are a range of historical reference points that inform this interface today. From the early C20th Dada and Surrealist events, through Happenings, Fluxus, Actionism, and Performance Art, to Live Art, Third Theatre, Physical Theatre, Mediated Performance, modes of fringe, devising, and many more approaches to developing fields of embodied and discursive activity have been tested and played out.

The relation between Art and Performance is a dynamic one that has arguably retained its vitality and unexpected agility to resist being tied down to organisational structures, institutions and agencies that attempt to provide enabling support structures but which often result in restrictive and limiting frameworks. Shifts in geo-, identity-, ecological, and technological contexts and their developments across the globe have often precipitated and driven the content and adaptations to provoke performative work between Art and Performance. Experiments in education have also, at times, brought the two fields together or into close proximity as a means of sparking new areas of collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and opportunities for the creation of new knowledge.

Prof. Dr. Tim Brennan
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • relation between Art and Performance
  • interdisciplinarity

Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 250 KiB  
Article
Performance, Art, Institutions and Interdisciplinarity
by Rob Gawthrop
Arts 2024, 13(3), 79; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13030079 - 29 Apr 2024
Viewed by 322
Abstract
How have funding, art education, and politics affected the development of performance and interdisciplinary art? In England in particular, performance as an experimental and radical art practice developed largely from underground activities, political action and a range of art forms. Funding bodies, colleges [...] Read more.
How have funding, art education, and politics affected the development of performance and interdisciplinary art? In England in particular, performance as an experimental and radical art practice developed largely from underground activities, political action and a range of art forms. Funding bodies, colleges and art institutions eventually accommodated, albeit to a limited extent, this activity. As financial circumstances were sometimes difficult, artists often provided their own support structures and organisations. Some of these became established as they became successful. Performance art split from the theatrical and became defined as live art. In more recent times, conditions shifted again, and critical, experimental, or avant-garde theatre, film, music, etc., found refuge within contemporary art. Performance however, became increasingly confined and restricted by: the regulatory and academic requirements within universities; the need for evidence for some form of public or social purpose by funding bodies; and the increasingly hostile social and political circumstances. This research draws partly from personal experience and reflects on cultural conditions since the 1970s. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Art and Performance)
8 pages, 194 KiB  
Article
Picturing, Pledges and Other Scripted Acts: Performance (In) Art
by Dave Beech
Arts 2023, 12(2), 60; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12020060 - 20 Mar 2023
Viewed by 915
Abstract
This essay re-examines several examples of non-performance based artworks from the perspective and history of performance art. For instance, the photomontages I produced as an undergrad art student were based on repeated acts of stealing posters from their public sites on the street [...] Read more.
This essay re-examines several examples of non-performance based artworks from the perspective and history of performance art. For instance, the photomontages I produced as an undergrad art student were based on repeated acts of stealing posters from their public sites on the street between my house and the college. Later, while working collaboratively with Mark Hutchinson in Manchester and London, we made photograms and paintings of scenes that we enacted on the street (striking a match, taking a flag for a walk). Years later, as a solo artist again, I produced a body of work in the form of slide presentations that consisted of photographs of me dressed in homemade costumes that cast me as a monster. In my work with the Freee art collective, we used slogans, our own bodies, costumes and props to give material reality to slogans that we treated as scripts. We wrote manifestos and staged events in which participants read. So, while the forms of my work are image based, the rationale is typically tied to the techniques and values of performance. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Art and Performance)
12 pages, 274 KiB  
Article
Acts of Unsettling: An Immersive Adaptation of Berger and Mohr’s A Seventh Man
by Frances Babbage and Michael Pinchbeck
Arts 2023, 12(2), 50; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12020050 - 08 Mar 2023
Viewed by 1181
Abstract
This article examines Michael Pinchbeck and Ollie Smith’s theatrical adaptation of A Seventh Man, the 1975 book by John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr studying the experience of migrant workers in Europe. Pinchbeck and Smith’s 2020 adaptation uses immersive performance strategies in [...] Read more.
This article examines Michael Pinchbeck and Ollie Smith’s theatrical adaptation of A Seventh Man, the 1975 book by John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr studying the experience of migrant workers in Europe. Pinchbeck and Smith’s 2020 adaptation uses immersive performance strategies in dialogue with a multi-voiced, cross-disciplinary publication that itself aims to produce an immersive or ‘animated’ reader engagement. In this article, Babbage and Pinchbeck present source text and performance as examples of practice-as-research, referencing Nelson’s paradigm that establishes different modes of knowledge and points of connection- and dissension-between them. They discuss the book’s cross-disciplinarity and the attempt to reflect this in a new creative context that is spatiotemporal, embodied, social, visual, verbal and aural. The article’s theoretical context draws on writing by Barthes, Berger, Said and Sontag, applying Barthes’ notion of the studium and the punctum to reflect on the dramaturgical rendering of the source text’s ‘interruptive shocks’. Babbage and Pinchbeck argue that, in book and performance, the juxtaposition of different formal languages elicits an encounter with the material that is productively ‘unsettling’. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Art and Performance)
18 pages, 301 KiB  
Article
Performing Venice’s Stones: Vedute Manoeuvre Redux
by Heather H. Yeung
Arts 2022, 11(6), 127; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11060127 - 15 Dec 2022
Viewed by 1131
Abstract
‘Venice excels in blackness and whiteness; water makes commerce between them’. So writes Adrian Stokes, in his 1947 study of the city, its architectures, and its art. This very sentence performs a problem of Venice that has vexed those who have made art, [...] Read more.
‘Venice excels in blackness and whiteness; water makes commerce between them’. So writes Adrian Stokes, in his 1947 study of the city, its architectures, and its art. This very sentence performs a problem of Venice that has vexed those who have made art, literature, and other writing of the city, in the city, from the city: Venice asks us to take its measure, its shadows and light, its water and stones—but this is even more complex than a chiaroscuro, ‘commerce’, aesthetic and economic, plays with what is clear and what is not, tipping us between registers we fail to fully comprehend. And thus we are brought too often to perform and replicate such confusion and inability to ‘account for’ the polytropic, polymaterial, and polytemporal registers the city simultaneously operates upon, or ‘makes commerce between’. And yet there is an artistic method that can account for the strange and often highly problematic spoliate economies of Venice, a method which also bridges walking practice as political performance art, and situated performance as art historical practice. This is a poetic-performance method that is provided by the artist Tim Brennan’s Vedute Manoeuvre, first performed in the Venice Biennale 2011, and re-performed as part of the research work documented here. Vedute Manoeuvre, I claim, is a method whose polyvocalic polyvisual modes, whose art-act as common experience and experience of the complexity of the artistic and architectural commons and commerce of Venice, is perhaps the only way of ‘giving voice to’ the polytropic, polymaterial, and polytemporal problems we encounter when we encounter Venice, its water, and its stones. We thus re-orientate the multiple other ways that spoliate, colonial, archipelagic Venice has been found difficult in previous attempts to perform an accounting of (and, indeed, of artistic commerce with) this vexed and vexing city, with Vedute Manoeuvre as invitation toward a performance ‘redux’, as crux and as solution. The work presented here—an essay in the truest sense—is also a mode of performance which demonstrates in its own attitudes to the question of the manoeuvre the act and art of manoeuvre itself. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Art and Performance)
13 pages, 2553 KiB  
Article
Musing with Petric Bodies, Hanging on to Dear Life
by Julieanna Preston
Arts 2022, 11(6), 124; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11060124 - 12 Dec 2022
Viewed by 1262
Abstract
Musing with Petric Bodies, Hanging on to Dear Life is an essay that critically reflects on the live performance work “Becoming Boulder”, which occurred on 31 January 2015 as part of the Science Communication Art New Zealand Intercreate Symposium at New Plymouth, New [...] Read more.
Musing with Petric Bodies, Hanging on to Dear Life is an essay that critically reflects on the live performance work “Becoming Boulder”, which occurred on 31 January 2015 as part of the Science Communication Art New Zealand Intercreate Symposium at New Plymouth, New Zealand. I performed a contact improvisation with a large andesite boulder, in a king tide, on a stormy day, at a culturally significant place for an extended period of time. Written using the present tense and as a dialogical text, the essay employs ekphrasis and practices geo-poetry to colour the scene and critically contextualise the potentials and limits of empathetic engagement with another form of organic assemblage. Complexities that come with being a foreigner or immigrant, well-versed in contemporary New Materialist discourse, and dwelling in a land rich with indigenous knowledge are voiced amongst gestures to get close to, identify with, and perform as an ancient, far from dead weight, body. While musing and critically contextualising on the potentials and limits of empathetic engagements, the essay seeks to exemplify the value of material situated learning that occurs in the space of making or doing of durational, experimental, site-responsive performance works. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Art and Performance)
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13 pages, 4874 KiB  
Article
The Politics of Seeing Double: Klaus Michael Grüber’s Die Bakchen and the Visual Arts
by Irene Gerogianni
Arts 2022, 11(6), 119; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11060119 - 24 Nov 2022
Viewed by 1721
Abstract
Euripides’ The Bacchae is a Greek tragedy that relies on its capacity to give double vision, by confusing and dismembering the senses. This idea of doubling is taken to the extreme in the Berlin Schaubühne production Die Bakchen, directed by Klaus Michael [...] Read more.
Euripides’ The Bacchae is a Greek tragedy that relies on its capacity to give double vision, by confusing and dismembering the senses. This idea of doubling is taken to the extreme in the Berlin Schaubühne production Die Bakchen, directed by Klaus Michael Grüber in 1974, which formed part of the Antikenprojekt, realized along with Peter Stein. For theatre historians, Grüber’s Die Bakchen delivered a completely new concept of theatre—a theatre of images—capable to bewitch and fascinate the spectators, but distant from a hermeneutic approach with reference to the dramatic text. What is often missed here, however, is the specificity of the visual aspect of the production, which features references to historical works of classical and Renaissance art, as well as to modern sculpture, Arte Povera and conceptual, as well as performance, art pieces. In fact, the idea of doubling seems to be translated by Grüber into an intertextual, intermedial play between the text, the performance on stage, and the visual arts. As a result, the different aspects of the production look familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, not merely by the uneasy separation of theatre and text, but also by the double’s interplay between vision and knowledge. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Art and Performance)
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13 pages, 285 KiB  
Article
The Clinch and the Crack: Rupture and Resolution in Third Theatre’s Laboratory Practices
by Patrick Campbell and Jane Turner
Arts 2022, 11(6), 118; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11060118 - 16 Nov 2022
Viewed by 1598
Abstract
This article maps out our critical engagement with the Third Theatre community pre- and post-COVID-19, with a focus on both performer training and the concrete material ways in which group theatres connected to this small tradition have responded to the challenges of the [...] Read more.
This article maps out our critical engagement with the Third Theatre community pre- and post-COVID-19, with a focus on both performer training and the concrete material ways in which group theatres connected to this small tradition have responded to the challenges of the global pandemic. To illustrate our arguments, we draw on the Japanese craft of kintsugi—the transformative repair of ceramics—as a dispositif, employed to investigate the ways in which theatrical practice can comprise ‘an art of precious scars’, to paraphrase Stephano Carnazzi. This model allows for breaking with form and, importantly, re-modelling energy, which conversely becomes the most important aspect of the theatre laboratory, encompassing the relationships between body and form, individual and group, and artist and the wider society, importantly allowing for the creation of something that is more unique and authentic. Theatrical practice can thus be a clinch (bound like in a mother’s embrace) or jolted through disruption (like the cracks of kintsugi). Importantly, this disruption and its resolution takes place on both a level of form (as in the theatrical exercise) and on a broader, socio-political and economic plain. The article importantly focuses on both phenomena, and in so doing reflects on both the legacy and futurity of the transnational Third Theatre community. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Art and Performance)
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