cyh371@nyu.edu
The assigned materials this week have given me a general understanding of performance art and how performance art can be highly connected to politics. The Guatemalan artist Regina Galindo, whose work is focused on in this week’s materials, can be said to mainly develop her art pieces from the colonized history of Latin America. However, what she really presented in one of her works, Tierra, actually did not show direct association or clear implication of the key terms like “suppression”, “torture”, “dictatorship” and so on; instead, as Taylor quoted Aristotle in her chapter of Galindo, “Poetry is both more philosophical and more serious than history, since poetry speaks more of universals, history of particulars.” (p.109) The “poetry” in this case can be used to indicate art in general, medium of which including objects, environments, images, actions, or sounds, whose one essential feature is that it “expresses” more than it “clarifies”.
In my opinion, how Galindo chose to perform in a rather “ambiguous” context actually is correspondent to an essential feature of art– to leave space for subjective interpretation. There is, indeed, an obvious performance of a human (artist herself) standing in a field which was wrecked into an isolated “island” by an excavator; the underlined objects were built a relationship, the human as the “stranded”, while the excavator as the “perpetrator” which brought about the stranding, and the field as the “environment” where this action took place. What’s interesting is that on an abstract level of meaning, these objects can be substituted for any situation that shares a similar relationship. Therefore, in the artist’s own interpretation, this performance should be an epitome of history of the Guatemalan government suppressing the Mayans; in my interpretation, this can also be the former KMT government suppressing local Taiwanese (details in last reading response); as long as one can associate it with a violence conducted by one party having higher social status or discourse power compared with the other, Tierra always makes sense.
I tried to look for Taiwanese performance artists, and there are quite a few:
1. Tehching Hsieh 謝德慶 (1950~)– Was called “master” by his fellow performance artist Marina Abramović. Famous for his focus on everyday life and durational performance, like One Year Performance and Thirteen Year Plan. His inspiration came from personal life experiences and reflections, prompting him to question, “What is the meaning of life for me?” He expresses, “My personal stance is that life is a life sentence, life is spending time, life is free thought. Whether a wanderer or a king, the essence of time is the same for everyone.”
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2. Ming-Sheng, Lee 李銘盛 (1952~)–In the 1980s, he used his body as a tool on the streets of Taipei to engage in performance art that critically examined the system and reflected on the environment. The following are some of his most well-known works:
“Our Constitution Can Finally Be Used我們的憲法終於可以使用了” (1990): one work among the series “Taiwan Archive Room (臺灣檔案室)” by a group of Taiwanese artists. In this work, Lee put the book of Constitution of the Republic of China (R.O.C.) in the toilet, then the artists thus wipe their buttocks with it as tissue paper.
Taylor, Diana. 2020. "Making Presence" ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence. 105-126. New York University: Duke University Press,