Zhang Huan’s “Altered States” & Marina Abramovic
I ams REALLY sorry that this post is so late, but, in any case:
I actually have rather mixed feelings about the exhibit we saw on Wednesday, more so with Zhang Huan’s performance art than his visual. While I have some idea of what Zhang Huan was attempting to portray within his performances, and can appreciate both his subversion of common morale and his tests of his own endurance, I had to first place myself in the specific mindset that “this art is meant to be meaningful, I must glean some significant meaning from what I just saw”, before I could appreciate those aspects.
Like I said in class, I don’t think that Zhang Huan’s performances in the US had become any less purposeful than his performances in China, despite the stylistic differences and the fact that in the US he’s performing in front of an audience. It’s true that we are more able to relate to his art in China because of their direct relevance to traditional Chinese proverbs. From this point of view, one must note several things about Zhang Huan’s US performances. One, that, as the United States, at least ideally, has few limitations on free speech and expression, there is little point in quietly subverting Chinese governmental policies, especially since audiences in China are unlikely to ever see him. Two, that the United States doesn’t have a single culture that goes back over a millennium, and thusly wouldn’t be able to collectively relate to any single performance that is directly related to a particular cultural tidbit. The last point may actually have been subverted in Zhang Huan’s performance in a giant meat suit in Manhattan, but as I was unfortunately not able to see that performance as it was filmed, I can’t accurately comment on it.
That being said, the US performances that we did see seemed to me initially to have no overall purpose, except perhaps to test the artist’s physical endurance. However, I noted my own reaction to his performances, and how my thoughts ran from “What’s he doing that for?” to “Oh dear lord, all those people are naked,” to “There’s something tying everything together, but I can’t quite figure out what it is…”. After some thought, I truly think that this process is the point of his US performances, and to a lesses degree his Chinese performances as well. Discomfiting his audience and making them analyze what they’re thinking is the goal itself, and what’s so wonderful about this goal is that people can discuss and analyze what they saw as much as they want, and nobody will ever be able to say “here is the right interpretation” and end that discussion. It propagates a continuous cycle of thought and speech that encompasses the American Ideal.
From what I have seen so far in this class and outside, I personally feel that the role of the modern artist is drastically different from that of the more classical artist (and by classical I mean essentially all art before the late 19th century). Whereas the vast majority of art from before aims to either create an aesthetically pleasing depiction of a concrete event/thing, or transmit to the viewer a specific social or political message, much of modern art is more abstract, seeking to not so much create a sense of comfort in the viewer as to challenge their senses and their worldview. Modern art need not be attractive nor take any great physical ability to create, because the point of it isn’t to show off the skill of the artist’s craft–it’s to show off the artist’s vision of their world and of their subject, and let the audience make of it what they will. And if that audience comes up with an interpretation that has nothing to do with the original intent, well, that’s all the better.
I also did research on the woman who calls herself the “Grandmother of performance art”. Like Zhang Huan after he gained fame, pretty much all of her performance pieces are done in front of a captive audience, and many of her pieces have some aspect of dealing with her own physical limitations. For example, an early performance titled “Rhythm 2″ had her ingesting first a drug for catatonia, which caused her to have seizures and to be unable to control her body, and second a drug for depression and aggressiveness, which caused her to become completely immobile.
From the performances that I was able to see (on Youtube, admittedly not the most comprehensive source), I have to say that, unlike many other performance artists, Abramovic seems to do much of her art mainly for herself, despite the presence of a physical audience. For example, here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUz5rnxQmfI) is a video of one of her performances with her long-time partner Ulay, in which they explore their relationship by being bound together by their hair for a total of seventeen hours, not moving from their sitting positions. So essentially, the audience came in to watch two people, not moving, for the hour that the performance was open to them. I think this is a prime example of my point earlier that modern art doesn’t have to be attractive or even interesting (in the way most people would see interesting) for it to have some meaning or to be profound in some way. Work like Marina Abramovic’s may not induce the immediate sense of awe that, say, the Sistine Chapel ceiling or even the ash Buddha by Zhang Huan may, but it is still art, in the sense that it is a work that is meant to be appreciated for its conceptual value. It’s not aesthetically appealing, but it still contains a deliberate emotional weight that can be attributed to the final product that, to me at least, is what essentially separates what we can call “art” from everything else.