Incomprehensible Scattershots of Dubious Half-Explained Insight(?)

 Does anyone remember the blogs? You know, one of the only four assignments that were mentioned for this class? Well hopefully they don't because I have pretty much nothing to say. Case in point:

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Something I noticed after Ashlea Conway pointed it out, is that Maria Callas both looks and sounds quite a bit like Marina Abramovic. Here's an example.It's kind of interesting; that one article stated that Callas is a hero of Abramovic's of some kind, despite her apparent hatred for theatre (which opera ostensibly is). I would certainly call Callas not "only" an actor/singer but definitely a performance artist. She inserted a lot of depth and sincerity into the roles she took (which she often carefully chose). She put a gigantic amount of herself into her performances. That's a thing that I think connects all (great) art: it is invariably extremely personal. Whether with carefully tempered tones or sitting perefctly still, if it's some expression of self, that's good enough to call it "Art" as far as I can tell.
All that said, if I was putting on some kind of production of Shakespeare's Macbeth in New York I would hound at Abramovic to be Lady Macbeth. If she could do anything, she could definitely pull off Lady Macbeth beautifully and strikingly and with depth.

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I take back what I said about performance artists hating on actors/singers/dancers being like sculptors hating on painters-- it's more like watercolour painters hating on oil painters.

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As for film-acting-as-performance-art, a good example is Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond:

In the portrait of hollywood, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. Swanson's performance is rife with references to her own life, her downturn from fame with the invention of "talkies", her mannerisms and ways of working, and her strange relationship with her butler, the director who gave Norma Desmond her start-- who is played by Erich Von Stroheim, the director who gave Swanson her start. If the only thing that turns a random performance into performance art is direct connection to one's life, this all certainly fits as much as any of Abramovic+Ulay's relationship-referenced art pieces.

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Is what seems to offend performance-artists about acting/singing/dancing how abstract they are not? I mean, some basic trend with most performance art I've noticed is that there's a lot of really abstracted actions, metaphors within metaphors, whereas with acting, there's almost always a concrete reference. With an abstracted action (let's say with Vito Acconci burning off his chest hair and then pushing his shoulders together to make it vaguely appear he has breasts-- I can't remember the title), the action becomes much more transparent, the theory and ideas behind it easier to get at-- with something like John Cassavetes and Peter Falk in Mikey & Nicky, the personal and philosophical aspects are represented through reference to something fictional, and a little bit buried underneath, for lack of a better way to put it, something more lifelike. Sort of like with abstract painters saying that what they are doing is more "pure" than representational art. Then again, where does that leave the position that performance art came about as something like a battle against abstraction-- to bring human representation back into art in some new way? I guess that'd say that the old veils are harder to cast off than it looks.

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Is it just me or is that one artist's vehement desire to not have any documentation extremely pretentious? I can't remember his name but he is the one who did "Progress" and rolling-around-the-guggenheim-kissing pieces. Even if making actions-as-art like that (supposedly) kills the commerce of object-based-art-- it does nothing for the exclusivity of it. It feels like saying there should never be prints of Madame X or Starry Night. All it does is keep a wider audience from viewing the work for extremely arbitrary reasons-- and by being paid for these things, the whole anti-object-ness of it just becomes a moot point, so why not make them more accessible and let people not near major galleries and museums to see the work and experience it on some level (in text or photos or video)? It doesn't diminish the piece to allow it to be seen by people not in some kind of elite. It's better to have recordings of Maria Callas and have some semblance of her presence than to have just said "it is not the same just hearing a recording and it minimizes the power of live-performance" (which are both correct points) and let her voice just die with the ages. I should shut up though I can't think of how to better defend this point and have probably said something stupid by now.

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 “The language of the body is the key that can unlock the soul.”         
“What is important to me is not the truth outside myself, but the truth within myself.”
~Konstantin Stanislavski. Sounds like performance-art to me.