Davida’s ‘Failiure’ Lecture – 19/02/18

The lecture Davida brought us was about Failure Art; an art that can’t be made to fail, as that would defeat its purpose. This thus became popular in minority groups, such as the LGBT+ community, as they’re already failing society’s pressures of gender and sexuality. I found this extremely interesting, as I already deal with politics in my art, and found these artists Davida showed us intriguing, especially Vanessa Beecroft;

Vanessa Beecroft, vb45.9043.ali, 2001, performance at the Kunsthallie Wien, Vienna, image courtesy of Vanessa Beecroft.

The artist’s work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models (often nude). At her performances, video recordings and photographs are made, to be exhibited as documentation of the performances, but also as separate works of art. I find this interesting because the women often start off as sort of mannequins and must stand ‘exhibiting’ for hours, and when they begin to get tired, they start sitting down which is a sort of ‘failure’, and proves our mortality and could also be seen as a feminist piece, as women aren’t made to be these perfect doll-like figures.

The work and her conceptual approach is neither performance nor documentary, but something in between, and closer to Renaissance painting. She sets up a structure for the participants in her live events to create their own ephemeral composition. The performances are existential encounters between models and audience, their shame and their expectations. Each performance is made for a specific location and often references the political, historical, or social associations of the place where it is held. Beecroft’s work is deceptively simple in its execution, provoking questions around identity politics and voyeurism in the complex relationship between viewer, model and context.

Beecroft’s performances have been described as art, fashion, brilliant, terrible, evocative, provocative, disturbing, sexist, and empowering. The primary material in her work is the live female figure, which remains ephemeral, and separate. These women, mainly unclothed, similar, unified through details like hair colour, or identical shoes, stand motionless, unapproachable and regimented in the space while viewers watch them. Neither performance nor documentary, Beecroft’s live events are recorded through photography and film, but her conceptual approach is actually closer to painting: she makes contemporary versions of the complex figurative compositions that have challenged painters from the Renaissance onwards. Beecroft’s more recent work has a slightly more theatrical approach; the uniforms are period clothing, not nudity, and some of her performances include food, while others have featured men in military attire.

(information from http://www.itsliquid.com/featured-artist-vanessa-beecroft.html)

Another artist I found interesting was Bas Jan Ader, and his piece Fall III, 1970. This image interested me so much, that I researched further into him and found that I really enjoyed his melancholy and mysterious films he makes.

 

 

 

 

 

Still image from Fall 1. Photograph: Courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery

‘Chasm’

Ader’s work rebuffed the idea that art was there to communicate. Here we see Ader’s fall represented on film, yet we can never understand how it actually felt.

‘Melancholy’

Ader knew he was entering the slapstick world of Keaton or Chaplin here; like those comics, the abiding feeling raised by his film is melancholy.

‘Tragedy’

Shown alongside four other “falling” films, it’s hard not to view these as premonitions of Ader’s tragic death: in 1975 he disappeared while sailing across the Atlantic, almost making himself his last ‘failure’ art piece.

(Information from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/24/anatomy-of-an-artwork-bas-jan-aders-fall-1-los-angeles-1970)