History of Art | The College of Arts and Social Sciences | The University of Aberdeen - 0 views
-
MiamiOH OARS on 29 Apr 14This project takes as its focus the documentation and dissemination of performance art from the former communist and socialist countries of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, from the period of c. 1960-1989. Performance art in the West emerged as a self-conscious genre, and a deliberate alternative to the production of painting and sculpture for display in the gallery space. However, in Eastern Europe, artists such as Jiří Kovanda (Czechoslovakia), Andris Grīnbergs (Latvia), and Ion Grigorescu (Romania) often created performance art for a select group of friends and colleagues, and even sometimes only for themselves. If in the West, documentation was often an essential component of performance art, and necessary to exhibit the work in the gallery, in the East, the recording of performances, by video or photography, was more haphazard. At times, artists were intent on documenting their work for posterity, in the hope that someday, somewhere (outside of the totalitarian regime) it would have an audience. At others, photographs were taken simply as a record, without any thought that they would ever be seen.