Performance Work

Package workers' delightful days ahead, days ahead, days ahead...

    The image series performance shown above shows the day by day life of a package delivery drive. During their first few days, the delivery is delighted and happy to give you your package. As the days roll on the packages get larger and harder to handle. The deliver begins to lose their demeanor as the demands on them increase. By the end, the delivery is fed up with the ever-increasing packages they must give and leave.

    The performance above is meant to showcase the demands that we as people have put on actual delivery drivers and at times society as a whole. In the last 20 years with the introduction of the internet, our need to consume and gather more things has increased exponentially. Those who facilitate this movement of goods are experiencing the brunt of it. On a more metaphorical level society as a whole is experiencing this ever-growing burden of wanting more and many people want to check out of this toxic circle of consumerism. A broader interpretation is that this rampant consumerism is on its way into the black icky void of irrelevance as people get fed up with this endless want of more and more.

Berger, Ways of Seeing Chapter 1

Quote 1 “Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked - and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people.”

Response: It is interesting how images were made to show something that wasn’t there. But then became a thing that outlasted what it portrayed. That an image is able to hold a moment of time for future people to see and try to understand. That being the understanding of how people used to think brought forth to the present.


Quote 2 “The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.

When we 'see' a landscape, we situate ourselves f in it. If we 'saw' the art of the past, we would situate | ourselves in history. When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us.

Who benefits from this deprivation? In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can | no longer make sense in modern terms. And so, inevitably, it mystifies.”

Response: The author’s thoughts regarding the past echo past sentiments people have had about being doomed to repeat our history if we lest forget it. It is true that the past is a place where we draw conclusions and imprint our views of the present onto it. That said past becomes “mystified” estranged from itself and turned into a tool to justify the current times. Those who control the past control the present and consequently the future.

Khan Academy Performance Art An Introduction webpages

Quote 1 “Modern artists used live events to promote extremist beliefs, often through deliberate provocation and attempts to offend bourgeois tastes or expectations. In Italy, the anarchist group of Futurist artists insulted and hurled profanity at their middle-class audiences in hopes of inciting political action.

Following World War II, performance emerged as a useful way for artists to explore philosophical and psychological questions about human existence. For this generation, who had witnessed the destruction caused by the Holocaust and atomic bomb, the body offered a powerful medium to communicate shared physical and emotional experiences. Whereas painting and sculpture relied on expressive form and content to convey meaning, performance art forced viewers to engage with a real person who could feel cold and hunger, fear and pain, excitement and embarrassment—just like them.”


Response: It is funny how performance art started as just a means of provoking the audience to do something. To think that the deeper meaning behind it was just to make people want to change things by purely shocking them with obscene things. Just to then have performance art change due to people being shocked by the events of WW2 and not the art itself. Hopefully, today’s performance art is made to not just purely shock someone into doing something but make them think about it and want to do it.


Quote 2 “Performance art’s acceptance into the mainstream over the past 30 years has led to new trends in its practice and understanding. Ironically, the need to position performance within art’s history has led museums and scholars to focus heavily on photographs and videos that were intended only as documents of live events. In this context, such archival materials assume the art status of the original performance. This practice runs counter to the goal of many artists, who first turned to performance as an alternative to object-based forms of art. Alternatively, some artists and institutions now stage re-enactments of earlier performances in order to recapture the experience of a live event.”


Response: For a whole field of art to be soundly rejected to now be embraced by the mainstream is quite an interesting development. Yet the need to preserve such art is important. In this instance, the “death of the author” should be invoked in that once a piece of art is finished it is out of the author’s hand. Ever photo, recording, description, and even reenactment of the artist’s work is wholly independent of the artist’s work. They can’t prevent someone from taking part in or recording such a performance. It is highly selfish, pretentious, and not fitting with the vibe of performance art. Such art should be able to be enjoyed by even one person in the far future and not the current patrons of today.

Widewalls | Yoko Ono - A Groundbreaking Artist, Activist and Fighter

Quote 1 "After getting married in 1969, the couple invited the press to their hotel room in Amsterdam, where they stayed in bed for a week. This was to become their first “Bed-in for Peace,” project which was part of the peace movement that gained much publicity. The Lennons campaign continued with speeches to the press; “War Is Over! If You Want It” billboards sprang up in 12 cities around the world. Throughout the Beatles’ break up and fall out between the members, Yoko Ono and John Lennon pursued their anti-war goals and dedicated their lives to the causem and released the, now legendary, single Imagine. The couple collaborated on art, film and musical projects, becoming famous for their series of conceptual shows which were dedicated to promoting peace."


Response: It's weird to think that a part of the anti-war movement was started by a couple staying in bed for a week to have cameras take photos of them. To have this also be the start of someone's marriage is even weirder. Yet, even so, Yoko and John's marriage was a success at least when it came to their artistic projects and collaborations among each other.



Quote 2 "As she explained, art represents a way of showing people how you can think, and even though some people think of it as a beautiful wallpaper that you can sell, Yoko Ono rather perceives it as a direct connection with activism. Her style often included “dematerialization of the art object,” which is a phrase that would only come to use when the art critic Lucy Lippard employed it to talk about the practice of turning away from objects and towards ideas. So, even before this phrasing, Ono created artworks that could exist in a variety of idea-oriented context."

Response: What I can surmise is that these performers seek to make their physical work into ideas that people think of. Though they are rooted in what we physically see they provoke the unseen in the minds of the viewers. The physical work is just one aspect of artist's intention and vision.

Hispanic Executive | Interview with Shaun Leonardo - Performance, Pedagogy, and Philosophy

Quote 1 "Yes. I offer that narrative with the recognition that, over my life and professional career, I have witnessed young people be easily derailed when they don’t see themselves in the representation of who is creating.

Especially as I grew into my path as an educator, I found it equally important to share the work of my colleagues and those artists of color that inspired me with both young folks that I identified with (meaning those that looked like me) and white kids. For a white student, particularly a young white student, seeing the mode of expression of an artist of color can shift as much of their worldview as it does for a student of color."

Response: I applauded this man for being able to provide people with representations of themselves in art. To be the person that people of certain groups can look at is inspiring. To then be able to spread this new form of art to others is also quite awe-inspiring in what it's attempting to do. That is the enhancement of minority voices so as to influence and hopefully change how the mainstream parts of society are.


Quote 2 "I think the larger challenge surrounding not only the pandemic but also the converging crises of racial justice, reproductive rights, and everything else is the immediacy with which we are being called upon to act. This is infiltrated and influenced by social media and the sort of commotion and chaos of the news cycle: we feel compelled to act, act, act—to respond, respond, respond—and artists don’t operate best in that rhythm. Artists need to take in, to process, to decipher, to separate from the noise and create things that are beautiful and impactful to the spirit. Artists have to offer a different type of slowness to work against the speed of today."

Response: He as an artist has really hit the general zeitgeist of the time. That everything is a now problem that we must act on. While for an artist they need time to work and process what they are doing. It is important to act now and do the things that require speed but we mustn't lose those slow things. Things we need to appreciate that make the more fast important things all the more important to solve so as to preserve and foster the slow artistic things.