“I can say that all my relationship with performance…can be traced back to that episode,” he said in a 2005 interview.

Zhang Huan, born in 1965 in Anyang City, Henan Province, China, has had a long, distinguished career. He’s had solo exhibitions all over the world and has worked as a painter, set designer, photographer and sculptor. He also claims to have coined the name for the prominent 1990’s Chinese artistic community known as the Beijing East Village.

In contrast to his humble beginnings, recently he has been able to live abroad and employ more than a hundred assistants at a time. But it was his outlandish, body-centered performance art pieces from the ‘90s that have left the greatest mark in public and critical imaginations.

A few of his notable performance art works from that period include “12 m2,” a 1994 performance for which Zhang smeared his body with fish oil and honey and sat naked in a filthy, fly-infested public bathroom for three hours; his 1995 piece “To Add One Meter to an Unknown Mountain,” for which people laid naked on top of each other in order to add a meter to the mountain’s height; and 1997’s “To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond,” for which Zhang and his assistants stood naked in the Nanmofang pond in order to raise the lake’s water level.

There have been political readings of Zhang Huan’s work. However, the artist has instead repeatedly emphasized his work’s physical and spiritual dimensions. As he told Art Journal in 1999, “The contact of…iron chains, ice, sparks, flies, and earthworms with my naked body makes me feel my body more strongly and helps me to develop a deeper understanding of the body.”

During the last few years, his work has taken a religiously iconic direction, related to his conversion to Buddhism.

In looking at photos of his art, a single quality might explain Zhang’s popular appeal beyond conceptual art circles: much of his work bears a kind of brute, aesthetic beauty that goes beyond its conceptual framework.

Written by Patricio Maya

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Russia conquered Kazakhstan in the 18th century. By 1936, that vast Middle Asian country had become a Soviet republic. This means that for most of the 20th century indigenous Kazakhstani culture was de-emphasized in favor of Soviet culture. Russian became the country’s official language and communism the official system. The loaded term cultural genocide has been employed. This much is certain: for several decades a set of cultures was forcibly repressed in favor of a foreign ideology. Call it what you will; the scars are still there.

Kazakhstan became independent in 1991. Discarding the Soviet ways and going back to Kazakhstani culture seemed like the natural next step. The problem is that Soviet immigration policies shifted the country’s ethnic make up. Nowadays ethnic Kazakhs make up only about 60% of the population. Russians, Uzbeks, Ukrainian and others make up the rest. Russian is spoken by over 90% of the people and has remained the country’s intercultural language. Finding a common Kazakh mythology for citizens to gather around seems too intricate, to say the least. And yet, Almagul Menlibayeva is giving it a try. Why? Performance artists have a penchant for herculean acts. Also, her quest fulfills a personal need.

Here’s what she said about self-identity during a recent interview:

“People born in the Soviet Union, we don’t know our past. I learned traditions when I went to my grandmother’s village. But in the village you notice only the rituals and everyday behavior. The intellectual information, you cannot get because, it’s very sad to say, but during collectivization, during the 30s, there were a lot of people who died, moved, and ran away from the communists. [It was hard] to get information about who you are, from where you came and why. There was a big gap. I used to say: I’m a modern person, but who am I?”

Here the idea of atavism emerges. Atavism is the recurrence in a plant or an animal of certain primitive characteristics that were present in an ancestor but have not occurred in intermediate generations; it is a reversion to a former or more primitive type. In her art, Menlibayeva continuously invokes her ancient self. She looks for it around the Kazakh steppe. This is a huge grassy area that first was populated by Turkic nomads before the Arabs arrived in the 8th century (Mongols joined in during the 13th century). Now, it would be wrong to pretend to understand who these Islamic Turkic and Mongol nomads really are. It suffices to know that Tengrism—a Central Asian religion characterized by shamanism, animism, totemism, polytheism and ancestor worship—was integral in the development of Central Asian nomadic culture.

“Who am I?” Almagul Menlibayeva asks.

She was born in 1969 in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, and attended Academy of Art and Theater of Albaty. At first she was a painter but eventually found her way to performance art, photography, and video art. She’s a fashionable dark haired woman, who wears thick-framed glasses, speaks English, and calls herself a nomad—not that she gallops through the steppes on horseback looking for animals to sacrifice. She works the Albaty, Berlin, and New York gallery circuits. She’s not a steppe nomad, but then again—here is where her atavism crystalizes. Her rituals evoke the nomadic world. And in her best work, she seems to stand in the middle of her own dreams, changed.

It’s important to understand, however, that instead of inserting herself into an ancient mythological realm, Menlibayeva’s art brings the mythological world out into the present (that is, globalization and post-modernity). Menlibayeva videos and photos display strange images of goddesses that could have been taken from an Alejandro Jodorowski movie, but they also display editing that mirrors the MTV music video aesthetic. The sound effects could have come out of any Hollywood horror movie. Her long legged models would not be out of place in Vogue. In terms of artistic language, Menlibayeva is as accessible as, to use two extreme examples, Cindy Sherman and David LaChapelle. But that’s just the bait. Almagul Menlibayeva’s metaphysics are destined to remain impenetrable.

This serves a purpose. Traditionally, Western artists have been attracted to Orientalism for various reasons, but it has mostly come down to a search for freshness. That’s fine, but unnaturalness is always a danger for those who are overly eager in their foreign expeditions. The opposite is also true. Non-Western art can be either unapproachable or too self-consciously derivative of Western forms. Menlibayeva has devised a cunning system. Her tools may be Western, but she reaches down and digs underneath her own feet. The outcome is rare to the point of implausibility uncontrived exotic art.

-Patricio Maya

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Abramovic was born in 1946 in the former Yugoslavia. Her early pieces used body flagellation and life-threatening actions as ritualistic vehicles. “Rhythm O,” which took place in Naples in 1975, was the most taboo-shattering of her early works. For the piece, Abramovic placed on a table 72 pleasure and pain objects — ranging from honey, to a gun and a bullet — and encouraged the public to do as it pleased with her body. At first, the public was playful, but eventually people tore off most of her clothes, cut her skin and even engaged in mild sexual assault. At some point, a man took the loaded gun and pressed it hard against her temple. Years later, Abramovic described the performance as “Six Hours of Real Horror.”

In the mid-70s, Abramovic’s art took a different turn. She stopped putting her life at such risk. But, most importantly, in 1975 she met Frank Uwe Laysiepen, better known as Ulay. Both artists started a symbiotic artistic and personal relationship that lasted for over 12 years. They lived in a van and produced works that added cerebral and geometrical (or architectural) elements to Abramovic’s ritualistic concerns.

For 1977’s “Imponderabilia,” the two artists stood facing each other naked in a narrow museum entrance. To enter the museum, visitors had to turn sideways and choose to face, and rub up against, one of the artists. That same year, the couple performed “Relation in Movement,” for which they drove their van in counterclockwise circles for 16 hours, or 2,226 laps.

In 1988, Abramovic and Ulay ended their fruitful relationship with “The Lovers,” in which they walked from both ends of the Great Wall of China for 90 days (2,400 miles) met in the middle, hugged, and said good-bye.

After breaking up with Ulay, Abramovic went back to performing alone. Though her work remained ritualistic and, some might say, solipsistic, she was embraced by big art institutions. By the end of the 1990s, her oeuvre had grown to the degree that she started looking back both at her own history and that of performance art.

In 2005 she performed “Seven Easy Pieces.” Five of the seven pieces were recreations of earlier performances by other artists: Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane and Joseph Beuys. Performing someone else’s work was not normally done at the time. Abramovic argued that performance art was about live actions more than about photographs or written records, and that reenacting performances might be the best way to keep performances alive. In 2010, with the artist in her 60s, Abramovic had a career-long retrospective at MoMA. During this retrospective, younger artists reenacted some of her most celebrated pieces, including “Rhythm 0.”

Before the retrospective, Abramovic wondered if younger audiences would actually be interested in her work. “The Artist is Present,” a new piece in which she invited individuals to do nothing but sit across her, and silently establish eye contact, was performed as part of the retrospective. Scores of people, including many celebrities, sat in front of Abramovic. Many cried. Abramovic’s new work, though cool in execution, was compared to old religious art in the fervent reactions it brought out in people. “The Artist is Present” was less shocking than some of her earlier works, but no less challenging than anything she’d done in the ‘70s. The main difference was the amount of mainstream attention the work got — unmatched in the performance art world to date.

Written By Patricio Maya

Featured Series  Made Me Cry
Portraits taken during the MoMA’s exhibit of performance artist “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present”.
Abramović sits at a table in silence, and museum guests can sit across from her and stare.
Some people couldn’t handle the heat.

Portraits > http://marinaabramovicmademecry.tumblr.com

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“I never see myself; they aren’t self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear,” Sherman said of her work to the New York Times in 1990.

Sherman, who lives and works in New York, has been the subject of major global exhibitions for a range of photographic projects that employs of imagery of herself in different costumes, make-up and prosthetics.

Born on January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, N.J., Cindy Sherman grew up in the township of Huntington on Long Island in New York. She first showed interest in the visual arts at Buffalo State College where she began painting, but soon abandoned the form when she grew frustrated with its limitations.

“I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead,” she said of her switch.

She transitioned to photography and produced one of the key series of her early career. For “Untitled Film Stills, 1977–1980,” she shot a series of 69 black-and-white portraits of herself posed as alternative identities, staged to approximate film noir movie stills of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. The work has been considered feminist in the way that it exemplifies the stereotypes women have often played in cinema. Sherman has said that the traces of these iconic-looking characters came from dressing up in her mother’s clothing at a very early age. These mini performances in front of the camera helped her discover the use of her own body as a medium in pictures. “Untitled Film Stills” earned her international attention.

While her physical presence is displayed prominently in her work, Sherman utilizes photography as the conduit to convey her artistic message. She has posed as magazine centerfolds, classical paintings, clowns, and even as a corpse.

Sherman’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague; Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon; Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1997-2000); the Serpentine Gallery in London; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2003); and the Jeu de Paume, Paris (2006). Her “Untitled Film Series” is housed in entirety at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she’ll be honored with a retrospective in 2012.

by Craig Stephens

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In 1969 Lacy enrolled as a student in a new feminist art program begun by the pioneering Judy Chicago at California State University, Fresno. She absorbed herself in the study of female artists and discussed themes of the underrepresented, from racism to lesbianism to rape. In 1970, Lacy commenced “The Violence Series” (1970-1979), a grouping of artworks over the course of a decade all dedicated to making visible the issue of violence against women. For “Three Weeks in May” (1977), Lacy and her collaborators mounted over 30 events, many publicized by television and print outlets, to raise awareness and dialogue about rape. The events culminated in a “Rape Map,” which charted reported rapes over the course of the project. Another notable work is “Crystal Quilts” (1987), an elaborate, hour-long staged performance involving more than 400 female volunteers and a pre-recorded soundtrack. The event was attended by over 3,000 people and reached an even larger audience through its live broadcast on public television.

In 1991, Lacy started TEAM (Teens + Educators + Artists + Media Makers), another decade-long project on increasing awareness, resources and opportunities for the urban minority youth of Oakland, Ca. In 1999, for the culminating event of these efforts, TEAM assembled over 100 red, white and black cars that were then arranged on a rooftop according to color. Lit by car headlights, over 1,000 people roamed the rooftop enjoying dance performances and video installations, as young people and local authorities assembled in breakout groups for town hall-style meetings to discuss the breakdown of trust between the police and the community they were assigned to protect.

With her extensive background orchestrating such events, Lacy currently chairs the Graduate Public Practice department at Otis College of Art and Design.

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Schimmel was protesting on behalf of the artist’s later, and less provocative, work, but undeniably, Burden’s early self-inflicting “danger” performances bore a kind of direct intellectual impact that was fundamental to the development of performance art. Take a piece like “Trans-Fixed” (1974), in which his palms were literally nailed, as if being crucified, to the back of a Volkswagen Beatle in a garage. A shocking act, its simplicity, energy, and referential iconography made it one of Burden’s most influential works.

The same holds true for “Shoot” (1971), a spontaneous performance piece held at the F-Space Gallery in which Burden was shot in the arm by an assistant so as to know what it felt like. Such an act may seem frivolous or naïve, but bringing visceral experience to the forefront of a metaphor-weary art world was subversive and groundbreaking in those days.

Burden was born in Boston in 1946. He studied art in college at Pomona in California, where he created minimalist environmental sculpture. He spent two years at in a grad program at University of California, Irvine with fellow artist Barbara T. Smith and others. He began to experiment with the ways the human body can be used in sculpture, or as the artwork itself, in order to re-engage his viewing audience. He began this period of his career by locking himself in a storage locker for five days with only water.

In a much more staid performance series in the mid-‘70s Burden bought commercial airtime on national television and created advertising spots featuring himself and selling nothing. On one, he broke down his taxable income as an artist. In other, he flashed the names of classical art masters like Michelangelo and Da Vinci, listing himself among them.

Across the last three decades, much of Burden’s work has been sculptural. Some of Burden’s non-performance art works include “B-Car,” 1976, a fully-functioning light-weight car he built himself; “The Reason for the Neutron Bomb,” 1979, an installation consisting of 50,000 nickels and 50,000 matches representing Soviet Union tanks; and, more recently, “Urban Light,” 2008, an outdoor installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art made of 202 restored antique street lamps. Today Burden lives in Los Angeles with his wife Nancy Rubins, also a multimedia artist.

In the years since his famously masochistic performances, he has proved curator Schimmel right by establishing a much fuller, varied career. But the early work was so transformative for the Performance Art Movement that there seems to be no shame in associating his name with his very daring young work.

By Patricio Maya

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Piper attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City in the late ‘60s before pursuing an academic career in philosophy. She received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1981 and worked as a tenured professor at several universities.

Piper has confronted the conflict between racial heritage and physical appearance in many of her projects, with media ranging anywhere from pencil to public performance. Piper, who is part-black, has addressed the experience of being an African American woman who can “pass” for white. In “Mythic Being” (1972-75), she dressed as a man, donning a costume of afro wig, dark sunglasses and mustache, topped off with a cigarette hanging indignantly from her lip. In this façade, meant to elicit negative stereotypes or perceptions of black identity, Piper would sullenly swagger around the city, riding the bus and walking the streets. 

In 1986, Piper created and disbursed “My Calling Card,” a series of business cards that, instead of her contact information, were printed with admonitions to men who tried to pick her up at bars, or white friends who carelessly and unknowingly made racist comments in her presence. In the video “Cornered” (1988), Piper begins by saying flatly to the presumably white viewer, “I’m black.” After a lecture on miscegenation laws and intermarriage, she then concludes that the white viewer is also black.

Many of Piper’s works have a conceptual underpinning, which may have been an influence of her relationship with founding conceptual artist Sol Lewitt, with whom she forged a friendship beginning in her twenties. She was invited to his dinner parties and helped care for his cat when he was out of town. In exchange, he served as her entrée to the New York and European art scenes.

She now lives in Berlin, where she runs the APRA (Adrian Piper Research Archive) Foundation and edits The Berlin Journal of Philosophy.

By Jennifer S. Li

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Born in Havana in 1948, she moved to the United States at age 12 after her family fell out of favor with the Castro regime, her father jailed for treason. She was sent with her sister to Iowa to live with foster families and attend school.

After meeting the prominent sculptor Carl Andre through mutual artist friends, she married him in 1985. Eight months later, the couple was heard arguing in their apartment, and Mendieta fell 34 floors to her death. Andre was charged with second degree murder, but was eventually acquitted. He testified that he was not in the room when she fell. Without additional witnesses, her death will remain a mystery.

Her most cited set of performances is the “Silueta series,” which she started in 1973 and continued for seven years. Some siluetas made use of Mendieta’s own naked body. She created traces of her silhouette from gunpowder and blood. She constructed female body forms from natural materials like tree branches and leaves. Many of the pieces contained performance, film, photography and ephemeral earth sculpture elements. In their variance, they are difficult to categorize.

However, there are elements and concerns that repeat throughout Mendieta’s “Silueta series” and other performances. A interest in the female body, as presented in her own physicality, can be seen in 1972’s “Glass on Body,” for which she pressed different parts of her face and body against a glass, distorting her flesh. The same preoccupation can be seen in 1976’s “Anima,” a performance in which Mendieta built and burned down a bamboo armature with a female body shape.

In trips she made as an artist to Cuba and southern Mexico, she created work that showed her desire to reconnect with her cultural and religious roots, giving way to a spiritual context for reading her art.

Drawing on a tree leaf (untitled, 1982-1984), digging up an outline of her body on the beach (Silueta series, 1976) or performing a quasi religious ritual in which a naked Mendieta breathed life onto a skeleton (untitled performance, 1972) all speak to the ephemerality of life in general, but of hers in particular. Her legacy, nonetheless, remains.

by Patricio Maya

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Born in 1933 to a wealthy Tokyo family with banking and samurai lineage, Yoko Ono grew up studying Buddhism, Japanese aesthetics and classical music. In the 1960s she moved to New York’s Greenwich Village. Ono became acquainted with several significant figures in the art world, including Marcel Duchamp, patron and collector Peggy Guggenheim, composer John Cage, video artist Nam June Paik and Fluxus founding father George Maciunas.

Ono began blurring boundaries between art and everyday life, artist and viewer. And she popularized tenets of Asian culture and spirituality for a larger western audience. One of her noted works from this early period is “Cut Piece” (1964), in which she surrendered her body – and a pair of scissors — to members of a live viewing public so that they could cut off parts of her clothing until eventually she was completely exposed. Performed during a time of the highly politicized Women’s Liberation Movement and Vietnam War protests, the work brought up meanings of feminism, violence and war protest.

In 1964, Ono published Grapefruit, a book that contained whimsical and irreverent directions to the reader, including: “Burn this book after you’ve read it.” The writing in Grapefruit, which also included an introduction by John Lennon, is taken from Yoko Ono’s famed “instruction pieces.” Among these is the popular “Wish Tree” (1996) that was inspired by her childhood visits to wish trees at Japanese temples. This work has been reinstalled and performed at a multitude of museums around the world Inspired by her childhood visits to wish trees at Japanese temples, the work has been reinstalled and performed at a multitude of museums the world over: “Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of the wish tree… Keep wishing.” Ono’s works are often suffused with the uncomplicated yet meaningful messages of Zen spirituality.

As she has said, “Sometimes something simple gives more to people.”

By Jennifer S. Li

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Born into a wealthy family in Tokyo in 1967, her first experience performing was as a young girl in a school play, for which she made her own costume and remembers the experience of pretending to be someone else. At 16 she became a professional model. The experience of being photographed was very formative, and influenced the way she later approached her artwork, often putting herself on camera. She attended Bunka Fashion College in her home city, and had others take photos of herself modeling the clothes she made.

Her first piece of performance art, “Play With Me” (1994), toyed with the idea that a model’s job is to be an unemotional object of desire for the viewer. She wore a sexualized cyborg costume and a long blue wig and stood outside a Tokyo toy store, suggesting a connection between herself and the other plastic figurines inside. Another early work had her dress up as an alien who had just arrived on earth, interacting with people on the Tokyo subway. And in “Tea Ceremony” and “Love Hotel” (both 1994), she continued to play with Japanese stereotypes of women in submissive roles.

Mori decided to leave Japan and move to London in 1988 to study art, and then to New York in 1992, where she felt she might have more opportunity to express herself and explore her individuality away from Japanese culture. But in her work, she has always drawn from that heritage, especially traditional eastern spirituality. She mediates that tradition with influences from western art history and culture, as well as her interest in technology. For “Esoteric Cosmos” (1996-98) she created a series of images that depict different aspects of the four natural elements, picturing herself as a levitating goddess.

Lately she has removed herself from the frame, and instead invited her viewers to directly engage with her large-scale sculptural installations. In “Wave UFO,” three participants can enter a capsule where their brain waves are read, interpreted visually and projected in the same space. She draws on the Buddhist principle that all people are connected, and thus sets out to connect us all, just three people at a time.

Her work has been exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

by Molly Finnegan

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