performance art (six poems)

"at disneyland, where the costumed characters function as both security guards and crowd controllers and where surveillance exists alongside social order, the question springs to mind, is this a threat to individual dignity or a reassurance? if we think after 9/11 the being in a crowded public spce amonst strngers is now dangerous, then we might be reassured by the presence of a life-sized mickey mouse whoe is also a benevolent suveillance officer" finkelstein 150
"calvin klein... produces advertisements where the product is not obviously pn display. in a typical ad for jeans, a young man is standing under a running shower gripping wet jeans to himself in an act of modesty. his finely sculpted body is on display, the narrative askes, what is going on here? what circumstances brought him to the shower with jeans in hand? we are drawn into this narrative..." finkelstein 154
-a lot to be said about capitalism in these two quotes. when it comes down to it, advertisement is about manipulation, economic and political. its about preying on the insecurities of the masses, and to profit from it, and if that insecurity doesn't exist, the capitalist will manufacture it. there's no motivation without profiut under this system, and therefor every ad you see is painstakingly designed to manipulate a specific portion of the population into buying the product.

shiraga kazuo, challenging mud-"Mid-1950s Tokyo art-going audiences were accustomed to styles of painting promoted by the art academies, institutionalized artist associations, and art critics including surrealism, modernist abstraction, and proletarian arts, so they were unprepared for the genre-upending, aesthetic violence of Shiraga’s performance."
i love just the raw anger and "fuck-you-ness" about this piece. it challenges everything about traditional art, and makes the artist very much a part of the installation itself.

gordon matta- splitting- "Beginning in the 1970s, contemporary art abandoned the traditional forms it had historically taken. Painting and sculpture became almost unrecognizable as such. Krauss would later characterize it as a “post-medium” condition, a condition, in other words, in which the familiar categories that defined Western art for centuries were overturned. The medium, that which constituted the material or form of a given artwork, became obsolete, or at least radically reformulated: an art work could now exist in any form."
this piece reminds me of silent films, buster keaton, etc. no particular reason, it just does, perhaps that's why i was drawn to it. this also challenges traditional art in that the medium itself is the art.


for my performance art piece i decided to write and lay out some poetry of mine that i have written over the years ("houston", "laughing gull", "STRAIGHT FROM GOD'S MOUTH", "ghost toast", "six words", and "animal brains")