Tag: performance art

tom-isaacs:

Breadline – Bonita Ely

“Breadline (Anzart-in-Christchurch, New Zealand, 1981) was an extensive ritual which involved making positive and negative impressions of the artist’s body in bread dough. A feast of bread, milk and honey was shared after the bodymoulding exercise and the audience watched as the artist bathed.”

From

Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969-1992 by Anne Marsh

“My 1st action [Versumpfung einer Venus , 1963] was based on the idea of integrating the human body in a

sculpture. Instead of the bulky material used to make the junk sculptures I now mainly worked with soft materials

such as cooking oil, margarine, tomatoes, raspberry juice, milk, whipped cream, eggs sunny side up, raw eggs,

flour, semolina, meat, vegetables, cacao, oranges, ground chocolate, marmalade, cream, peas, cucumbers, fish,

insulating bands, strings, towels, skin cream, dust paint, paste and water. The creative process became increasingly

foregrounded, there was no more final point. The picture and the sculpture had become superfluous. I called

these staging’s with bodies and materials ‘material actions’.”

– Otto Muehl, in: Aktionismus – Aktionsmalerei 1960-65, exhibition catalogue, ed. Peter Noever / MAK, Vienna

1989, p. 26

Source: galerie-krinzinger.at

carolee schneemann

meat joy (1964)

“Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, rope brushes, paper scrap. It’s propulsion is toward the ecstatic– shifting and turning between tenderness, wilderness, precision, abandon: qualities which could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent.”

Source: all-art.org

Cock and Cunt Play, Judy Chicago, first performed at Womanhouse in 1972.

“Cock and Cunt is a skit in three short acts, in which two women dressed identically in black leotards with oversized, pink vinyl genitalia perform with deliberate, awkward, puppet-like movements. It begins with one student, dressed as the ‘cunt’, asking in a high-pitched, halting voice if the other, dressed at the ‘cock’, will help her do the dishes. Shocked, the ‘cock’ refuses, claiming his phallus exempts him from doing dishes. The play continues with the ‘cock’ mounting the ‘cunt’ while he declares the superiority of his sex organ, which is ‘long and hard and straight…like a gun or a missile’, and accuses the ‘cunt’ of threatening to castrate him by asking him to participate in household chores and please her sexually. The performance ends with the ‘cock’ beating the ‘cunt’ to death with his phallus.”

Source: judychicago.com