Introduction to Art Making: Motion and Time Based:
A question of the body and its reflections as gesture.

VIS 2
Winter 2012
Thursday: 5:00 p.m. to 6:50 p.m.
ROOM: SOLIS 107

Professor: Ricardo Dominguez
Email: rrdominguez@ucsd.edu
Office Hour: Wed. 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Room: 2501 CALIT2/Atkinson Hall (2nd Fl. West Side of Building)


The body-as-gesture has a long history as a site of aesthetic experimentation and reflection. Art-as-gesture has almost always been anchored to the body, the body in time, the body in space and the leftovers of the body This class will focus on the history of these bodies-as-gestures in performance art. An additional objective for the course will be a focus on the question of documentation in order to understand its relationship to performance as an active frame/framing of reflection.

We will look at modernist, contemporary and post-contemporary, contemporary work by Chris Burden, Ulay and Abramovic, Allen Kaprow, Vito Acconci, Coco Fusco, Faith Wilding, Anne Hamilton, William Pope L., Tehching Hsieh, Revered Billy, Nao Bustamante, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Adrian Piper, Sophie Calle, Patty Chang, James Luna, and the work of many other body artists/performance artists.

Students will develop 1 performance action a week, for 5 weeks, for a total of 5 gestures/actions (during the first part of the class), individually or in collaboration with other students. The class will view and discuss each students performance documentation with the specific Teaching Assistant Block they are assigned to for the quarter. Students will also be expected to Write an 8 PAGE FINAL PAPER (*MLA - Manual of Style* - http://www.mla.org/style_faq1) on a performance artist, performance art, or the performance genre. The paper should compare and contrast the above with your own gestures.


 Course Requirements:

1) 5 performance gestures (10% each): You will be required to construct a performance gesture and document the gesture. All gestures will be done beyond UCSD and La Jolla, CA.

2) Final Paper (8 Pages) (30%): In the Final Paper students will frame the work they have made in class by comparing and contrasting it with the work of Performance Artist, theme or genre covered in class. (MLA).

FINAL PAPER DUE MARCH 19th, 2012

3) *Students who have to miss any classes due to an emergency (with documentation) will be able to take a cumulative make-up exam during the last week of classes (dead week). Note that social events such as weddings, anniversaries, quinceaneras or barmitzvahs, though important, are not considered emergencies.

4) Attendance and participation (20%): TA's will be taking attendance every time our class meets. Aside from counting toward your overall grade, attendance and participation will be crucial. Students who do not show up to class and are unaware of the material and discussions covered in lecture are not likely to obtain a passing grade.

Course Website:
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/performance8.html

This website is a crucial component of this course. The site will include the syllabus and links for review. I strongly urge you to review the Class Site on a weekly basis.

Grading Scale:
100-97 = A+
93-96 = A
90-92 = A-
89-87 = B+
86-93 = B
82-80 = B-
79-77 = C+
76-73 = C
72-70 = C-
69-67 = D+
66-63 = D
62-60 = D-
59 and below = F

ASSESSMENT CRITERIA

PERFORMANCES
Commitment and Risk
Creativity in Presentation
A General Understanding of Performance Art/Art History
Application of Critical Connections in Each of Your Performances and in your Class Essay

ALL REQUIRED TEXT WILL BE ON-LINE on this SITE

CATALOGUES AND BOOKS THAT ARE RECOMMENDED:

CATALOGUES:
Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present by Arthur Danto, Chrissie Iles, Klaus Biesenbach and Marina Abramovic
Performa - New Visual Art Performance by RoseLee Goldberg
Art and Performance: Live (TATE U.K)
Out of Actions (LA MoCA)
Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object (Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art)
Performance Art (edited by Roselee Goldberg)
Body and the East: Form the 60s to the Present, (Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia)

BOOKS:
Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Shannon Jackson
So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (Perverse Modernities), Patrick Anderson
Performance Art from Futurism to the Present, Roselee Goldberg
Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy by Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes
Ethno-Techno; Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy, G. Gomez-Pena
The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, eds. Michael Huley and Noel Witts
Performance, Marvin Carlson
Contract with the Skin, Kathy Odell
Performing the Body, Amelia Jones
The Explicit Body of Performance, Rebecca Schneider
Happenings and Other Arts, ed Mary Ellen Sandford
Unmarked, Peggy Phelan
Acting Act: Feminist Performances, eds. Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan
Let's Get it On: The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu
Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, ed. Coco Fusco
Greenwich Village 1963, Sally Banes
The Blurring of Art and Life, Alan Kaprow
Imaging Her Erotics, Carolee Schneeman
The Citizen Artist: An Anthology from High Performance Magazine
Liveness, Philip Auslander
Dada Performance, ed. Mel Gordon
Futurist Performance, eds. Michael Kirby,

CLASS ONE

Jan 12th - Introduction to the Class: The W(hole) Body and its Rituals

Opening discussion on the nature of the class, what will be expected from each of you and the grading process? Explanation of contexts for presentation and documentation of your 5 Gestures.

Carolee Schneemann on "Interior Scroll" gesture:


Carolee Schneemann
http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/

May 2011 - 120 Model Tableau Vivant - Skylight One Hanson from Sarah Small's Tableau Vivant on Vimeo.


Gesture One:

Choose a site where you can engage in a performance activity in a Public Space for at least 2 continuous hours. You can move for this exercise or be still. If you move, don't leave the site you have chosen. Choose and develop a means of recording your actions/inaction AND the events or non-eventfulness around you. Try to be as aware as possible of the smallest of changes in your own body, mind and immediate environment. Do not just wait for something really noticeable to happen. Do not use any cameras or electronic recording devices. Limit yourself to what you can commit to memory, write down or otherwise record with some part of your body. Once you have completed your action, chronicle the experience in writing if you have not already written it down. Keep in mind that while writing is PERMITTED, it is not the ONLY way to make a record of actions, so consider other means too!

BRING DOCUMENTATION TO CLASS. Each TA Block will review and discuss everyone's performance and non-traditional documentation.
CLASS TWO: Jan 19th - NO CLASS -

Gesture Two:
Using any type of camera, to record only segments of your body doing the same performance you did last week.
BRING DOCUMENTATION TO CLASS. Each TA Block will review and discuss everyone.

CLASS THREE: Jan 26th - Public Performance




Theory of the Derive
Guy Debord
http://www.ubu.com/papers/debord_derive.html

Teching Hsieh One Year Performance 1980 - 1981 (Time Piece)
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/one-year-performance/video/1/


"L'Hotel" by Sophie Calle
In 1981, Sophie Calle spent three weeks working as chambermaid in a hotel in Venice. This allowed her to spy on the guests.
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/hotel/

"He loves me not"
When a boyfriend dumped her by email, French artist Sophie Calle asked 100 women to read it
- and became the star of the Venice Biennale, reports Angelique Chrisafis
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/16/artnews.art

Notes on crawling piece - William Pope L.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_n4_v56/ai_20544728

Yesmen
http://www.theyesmen.org/



For the first Art in the Parking Space event, Anita Pace's work Dance Here, Here Dance, 2011 took place in two adjacent parking spaces in the back lot of LAXART. Based on the normative dimemsions of a delineated public parking space (130 square feet), a metronome set at 130 beats per minute created the rhythm for the dance performance. This was followed by a open dance session in the parking spaces with a DJ mix of boombox music themed around the utilitarian, dystopian and sentimental experiences of "parking."

Gesture Three:

Using any type of camera record a performance of your making something.
Many performances involve making, from concrete objects to ephemeral or immaterial things, to traces of actions, to records of actions, to waste products resulting from actions. Choose one of these approaches and develop a performance that is organized around the act of making.

BRING DOCUMENTATION TO CLASS. Each TA Block will review and discuss everyones work.
CLASS FOUR: Feb 2nd - Ephemeral Gestures:



Marcel Duchamp "Fountain" - 1917

FLUXUS Histories


Joseph Beuys

Charlotte Morman's "Answering Machine"




Lick and Lather


Loving Care
http://digitalconsciousness.com/artists/JanineAntoni/

Chiharu Shiota
http://archiv.hkw.de/deutsch/kultur/2001/translated_acts/shiota.html

A pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations, Jessica Stockholder's site-specific interventions
and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as "paintings in space.

Francis Alys - "When faith moves mountains"

Gesture Four: For this session use any type of camera to create a performance of your naked self. Use the camera as a confession machine or as a disciplinary machine. You could tell us secrets, show us your tattoos or sit naked eating lunch. Just be naked! Which does not mean that you have to be nude. One can be over dressed and still completely naked and raw

BRING DOCUMENTATION TO CLASS. Each TA Block will review and discuss everyones work.

CLASS Five

Feb. 16th - Naked/Nude Gestures


Spencer Tunic, the world renowned artist came to Sydney as part of the Mardi Gras 2010 festival and gathered together a few thousand people to be photographed nude on a very cold March morning at the iconic Sydney Opera House.
franko.b
http://www.franko-b.com/gallery/g_performance.htm



Liminal Spaces Within The Transgressive Body
by Colleen Walker, U.C. 2004
http://www.franko-b.com/text/cw_introduction.htm

Vanessa Beecroft
http://www.thing.net/~vanessa/screen.html

 http://www.vanessabeecroft.com/

Gesture Five: For this gesture use any type of camera/or docmentation to create a performance of you as another gender, create; a disguise-as-drag,become a *third or forth* gender, build an object that reflects your sense of gender in a public space, become a dream gender...become gender in public space.

BRING DOCUMENTATION TO CLASS. Each TA Block will review and discuss everyone's effort.
CLASS SIX: Feb 23rd - Becoming Gender(s), Performing Gender(s) - Guest Lecture by Micha Cardenas



Judy Chicago
http://www.judychicago.com/

Guerrilla Girls
http://www.guerrillagirls.com/


Digital Drag Kings
http://www.technodyke.com/drag/default.asp

Gender as Performance
http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm



CLASS SEVEN: March 1st- Queer Gestures


Tim Miller



Dyke Action Machine
http://www.dykeactionmachine.com/

Critical Regionalism: Mexico's Performative Range-of-Motion in Madre por un dia: the Rodriguez/Felipe Wedding. by Amy Sara Carroll
 http://hemi.nyu.edu/journal/2_2/carroll.html

CONTINUE TO READING, VIEWING LINKS and START THINKING ABOUT YOUR PAPER.

CLASS EIGHT: March 8th - Erotic Gestures

Valie Export
Tap and Touch cinema
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/tapp-und-tastkino/video/1/

Frank Moore
http://www.eroplay.com

 Annie Sprinkle




FINISH YOUR READINGS AND START YOUR WRITING 8 Page ESSAY

CLASS NINE: March 15th - The body and the question of pain

Subjective Made Object: Pain in Contemporary Art
Colin Fernandes, MD
http://www.ampainsoc.org/pub/bulletin/jul04/path1.htm

Bob Flanagan - includes a 1994 interview
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n8_v34/ai_18387597

Bob Flanagan
http://www.suspectthoughts.com/flanagan.html

Pain Journals
Bob Flanagan Pain Journal

Ron Athey
http://www.ronathey.com/

Ron Athey's Artful Crown of Thorns
by C. Carr

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/9850,carr,2061,4.html

 FINAL PAPER DUE MARCH 19th, 2012


MORE ON-LINE DOCUMENTATION OF PERFORMANCE ART

A History of Gestures

Reading and View:

Futurist Performance

http://www.unknown.nu/future

Dada Sound Poems

http://www.ubu.com/sound/dada.html

Surrealism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism

Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage


Linda Montano
http://www.bobsart.org/montano/

Translated Acts: Performance Art from East Asia
http://archiv.hkw.de/translated_acts.html

Media Art Net
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/mediaartnet/

The Practice of Everyday Life
Michel de Certeau
http://www.ubu.com/papers/de_certeau.html

Art and Advocacy
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/sl1.html

e-misferia (Latin American Performance and Politics)
http://hemi.nyu.edu/journal/2_2/splash.html


Art and Commitment
http://artandcommitment.umn.edu/webstream.html

New Visual Art Performance
http://performa-arts.org/not-for-sale/interviews