Image, Body and the Other
The power of performance through the visual art filter has perforated the contemporary art world for several decades; it's appeal and power growing greater every year. The artist's body, process, biography and his or her audience are traits more inherently connected to performance than any other medium. A better understanding of these elements in the role of one's art-making can bear greater personal insight into one's practice and create a sharper perception of all that lies between traditional genres.Through an intensive series of discussions, exercises and presentations, our workshop seeks to further the praxis of visual and performing artists of any field via an examination of the central tool in all their works; their corporeal form.
Jamie McMurry
Jamie McMurry has been creating original works of performance art and presenting them all over the world for more than 10 years. He co-founded and directed the Rite! Performance Art Troupe (Seattle) and Powderkeg Contemporary Performance (Seattle and Los Angeles) from 1992-1997 and then continued with an already established yet stronger focus on solo works. McMurry has also organized and produced extensively in the field, staging major regional and international performance art exhibitions in Seattle, Los Angeles and Boston including the world-renowned Full Nelson Festival.
He was most recently working as a full time visiting faculty member in the Performance Area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and has also had visiting artist/guest lecturer positions at the University of Northern Iowa and the Turku Art Academy, Finland.
His works often include intensely visceral activities and a densely packed series of actions referencing the pacing and behaviour of young children at confused and often mischievous play. The materials as well as the actions come from what the artist considers to be a place of memory and nostalgia, but quintessentially suburban Americana. The messages behind the works often reveal a longing for the past and for one's youth, a remembrance of the people who had a role in that history as well as a need to connect with the viewer in a personal and emotionally empathetic way. These endeavours seem to call attention to the body as the archive of one's past and physical or emotional pain transcending traditional reaction and becoming a means of unification with an observer and in many cases, a circumstance of the action as it is a circumstance of everyday life.
The amount of actual work involved in the preparation and the performance itself also has a heavy bearing on the concept. As with the objects and the actions, the preparation and the shear quantity of materials and activity reflect a desire to align these personal historical references with a strong work ethic. In an attempt to make the works as auto-biographical as possible, McMurry often finds the preparation as much a part of the work as the actual execution.
The use of these autobiographical experiences, nostalgic imagery or objects of a personalized "Americana" and physically challenging or inherently visceral tasks is to evoke a time of conflict in the evolution from child to "contributory member of society". This framework exists in forms most clearly representational of a personal history, but more covertly as an exposure of the so-called "American Dream" and Nationalist Ideology as being a manufactured pursuit to propagate the wishes of the wealthy and politically powerful.
"I feel performance stands strong as the most exciting and direct form of contemporary art in the world today, with the potential for incredible range and power. As more young artists are drawn to the genre than ever before, it's becoming apparent that performance is a vehicle for as true an expression as is possible. A medium with such a short history gives room to explore and the possibility to use performance as a vehicle for honest and pure work is very attractive to younger artists who feel they are bombarded by the commercially viable. These aforementioned attributes are vital to all art historical movements and performance will be remembered as the true expression of our time."
Info On Teaching, Performing and Organizing
As an active organizer, I have produced large and small scale performance, video and installation themed exhibits in Seattle, Los Angeles and Boston, hosting more than 150 different regional, national and international artists and exposing their works and writings to more than 4000 patrons. Since 1999 I have presented lectures, workshops and papers on the medium and my own practice at the Turku Art Academy, Finland; University of Northern Iowa; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; Grunt Gallery, Vancouver; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Live Art Platform, Phoenix; Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires; and from September of 2003 to June of 2005 I served as a Full Time Visiting Artist Faculty member in the Performance Area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Alexander Del Re
My main interest in performance art is to explore the notion of the other in contemporary societies; others defined by race, gender, religion or any other human division, which creates the binary of us as opposed to them. The first level of my research has dealt with social and historical issues, in different contexts, mainly political as personal.
My work experienced a radical transformation since 9/11/2001. Besides considering the natural interaction between artist and audience in performance, I got involved in also using the existing surveillance technologies to amplify and dissect the relationship between myself and the performance other, as a metaphor of the understanding of the new world order since the so-called war on terror. In particular Im interested in exploring the post-9/11 use of surveillance as a means to have a validated way of distrusting the other. In other terms, if I have a surveillance camera I turn myself into a voyeur self, but also I become a one to be distrusted.
Since 2003, Ive been researching contemporary feminist writers, in an attempt to revise my traditional male perspective, to look for a different understanding of my natural other, i.e. women. Most of my work since then, has analyzed the patriarchal position of the male artist, questioning the ability to provide answers, the conflict of power implicit in the relationship between artist and audience, the narcissistic implications of being a male performance artist, among other issues.My recent works, have focused on the female audience, so they are the only ones to direct experience the performances, mostly on a one-to-one basis, leaving the male audience in a passive (or uncomfortable) role; therefore creating an artificial division, to explore a particular other.My teaching interests are around a similar idea: to explore how we perceive the others and how we create a conceptual map of our own image in relation to others and vice-versa, and by this, creating performances as a way to research ourselves. In some workshops, I ask my students to relate to the others in different areas of perception; a regular exercise includes one student leaving his/her clothes in the centre of a circle, surrounded by his/her fellow students, then other student leaves his/her clothes and takes the previous students clothes to wear on him/her, regardless of gender. After this is fully completed, I ask the students to analyze their perception of themselves and the others in their new clothes, how they walk, how their understand their own body, their gestures, etc.In another part of the workshop, the students have to use a technological means (video cameras, digital stills, surveillance cameras, audio recorders) to explore the world they perceive in some fellow student. After experiencing with each other, they can create a performance piece based on some other, but performed by themselves.
http://www.mcmurryperformance.com/
http://www.perfopuerto.net/