Memorable performance art actions and artworks

1.1917 - Marcel Duchamp “Fountain” The scandalous work was a porcelain urinal, which was signed "R.Mutt" and titled Fountain. The work is widely seen as an icon of twentieth-century art. Replicas commissioned by Duchamp in the 1960s are now on display in a number of different museums.

2. 1960 - Yves Klein "Leap into the Void”, photo published in the artist's book Dimanche, which apparently shows him jumping off a wall, arms outstretched, towards the pavement. Klein used the photograph as evidence of his ability to undertake unaided lunar travel. In fact, it was a photomontage in which the large tarpaulin Klein leaped onto was removed from the final image.

3. 1961 — Piero Manzoni Artist's Breath A series of red, white or blue balloons, inflated and attached to a wooden base inscribed "Piero Manzoni- Artist's Breath". Piero Manzoni canned not only his breath.

4. 1962 — Christo & Jeane Claude “Iron Curtain” The artists created a wall of oil barrels that stopped the traffic on one of the narrowest streets of Paris. The wall will be 4 meters high and 2.9 meters wide and transformed the street into a dead end. The artwork was not the barricade itself but the resulting traffic jam.The creating of this art work took place during Algerian war protest demonstrations in Paris and the building of The Berlin Wall.

5. 1965 - John Latham "Still and Chew" (employed then as a part-time lecturer) borrowed a copy of Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture — a work that held something of a cult status at that time — from the library and invited students to chew pages from the book, and then distilled the resulting pulp into a clear liquid. This process took several months, and Latham began to receive letters from the library demanding its return. Latham presented a vial of the fermented book-pulp to the library. His teaching contract was not renewed. The vial and correspondence became an artwork of its own.

6. 1969 — Robert Barry “Telepathetic Piece”. His early works employed the least material of materials, like nylon rope, radio waves, quantities of inert gasses released into the air and telepathic messages. He pushed the notion of discrete objects about as far as it can be pushed. About Telepathic Piece he declared " During the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image”.

7. 1970 — Douglas Huebler’photos. Douglas Huebler was a conceptual artist who based his work in photography. A representative example of Huebler's work is a a series of photographs which were taken every two minutes whilst driving along a road for 24 minutes.

8. 1975 – Carolee Schneemann ”Interior Scroll” In her performance, Schneemann entered wrapped in a sheet, under which she wore only an apron. She disrobed and then got on a table naked. Then she outlined her body with dark paint, concurrently, she read from her book Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter. Following this, she dropped the book and slowly extracted from her vagina a scroll from which she read. Schneemann's feminist scroll speech, according to performance theorist Jeanie Forte, made it seem as if "[Schneemann]'s vagina itself is reporting [...] sexism".

……..Etceteras…..

Ex. 3. Arrange yourself in groups. Prepare one-minute (or 30-second) topic on one of the theme.

1. Do the Arts shape society or only reflect it?

2. What does 'good' mean in art?

3. What is the difference between understanding art and appreciating art?

4. What criteria are most appropriate for judging the artwork?

5. What stylistic period of art are we in now?

6. What is artistic quality?

7. Is there such a thing as bad art?

8. Why should people look at something that is disturbing?