UNDERSTANDING PERFORMANCE

UNDERSTANDING PERFORMANCE

Gerhard Johann Lischka, Materials for the Conference on Performance Theater Out Off, Milan, 6 October 2014

The claim that THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE is true. This pithy statement echoed the preceding The Medium is the Message, which had already implied that the contents of the medium depended only on formal criteria. 1972

Actionism is not only a movement within the visual arts that features works in various media. It is also a binding declaration of cultural faith about to keel over into an everyday attitude. Actionism is the prerequisite and the first opportunity for a global style. 1974

Action art is not the captious formula art = life, but invokes the blending of art and life into each other. 1979

The faith in a world of images has been broken by the flood of images. Rediscovering the truth must rest on two key terms of operation: the performer’s body and its image. Together, body and image provide stability. 1979

In art, in the poetic act, performance is the fluctuating interplay between various bodies in a scene. This encounter is neither final nor determinate, but instead an accentuation of forces. 1987

Performance art, through the merging of the body with its meticulously arranged environment, is both an inter-media art and a re-medium, because the centre of all meaningful communication, and thus of liberated mass communication, is the subject. 1988

We have mutated into trajects, the dynamised marriage between subject and object, body and spirit.  2003

Through their global presence and miniaturisation, media devices have approached and entered our body to the extent that we have mutated into media, into ganglia of the giant information machine, whose smallest part we represent as messengers and messages. 2004

If artists manage to present the prevailing body image, its beauty, its vulnerability, its defeatendess, and its position in space and time, then we are dealing with performance art clips. 2007

What if thoughts, images, and sounds intersect countlessly in the Internet, if avatars and images mark virtual, immaterial presence, if vehicles transport us every which way, and if a mobile telephone is our only constant? If these conditions hold true, then we are energetically unstable and sensitive beings moved in time and space and living in the performative. 2010

As recipients and producers we are in constant motion: a medium in terms of mediatisation, through which we regulate our condition from “on” to “off,” and vice versa. 2012