- FERNANDO AGUIAR
- I´m working the visual poetry in a large sense, and with different
supports. One of these supports is the performance. My poetical performances are
characterized by a methodical semantic construction throught the movement, objects, sound,
lights, letters and words, where all linguistic and visual signs are aesthetically
potencialized for create a new poetical language.
- Master of body-poetry and the body of poetry, is also the most consequent
lettrist of the last 20 years. The aleatory of sign and of its organization appear through
appear making system: letter which fall, ascend, grapple to each other, go down way into
holes of canalization, are fishing on a well, in the deep high sea, keep in suspension
between the finger like a pack of cards of a prestidigitator, bloat, decrease, grow,
blush... and all this is a tremendous ENTROPY.
- Alberto Pimenta, in A Aphala - Um Século de Poesia ", ed. Assírio
& Alvim, 1988.
-
- FERNANDO AGUIAR
PERFORMANCE: THE LIVE INTERVENTION
-
- 1.
- The principal finality of art is to provoke in order to obtain a
reaction. And it does so through a communicative process, of which, information is an
essential part. Any object or artistic action only intervenes when it contains in itself
something new. This aspect is precisely the informative component of the whole which
communication representes.
- Information, in art, can be given at various levels. On a technical and
technological level, on an aesthetical level, on a level of the different significantes
and their meanings, and, principally, on the level of the methods of expression.
Containing but one informative load in one, or in all of these sectors an artistic object
can intervene in a critical form and be creatively actuating.
- Presently, and under the pressure of a series of conjunctural factors and
external experiences of life on the producer of images" (as Nicos Hadjinicolaou would
say), there exists a tendancy in which the arts complement and interration each other.
- In the same form, and beyond the individual capabilities of each means of
expression, the possibilities of exchange and of consequences see themselves infinitely
extended, when of associated or integrated use of those means (painting, photography,
slides, instalation, performance, video, or even the computer, for example), from which
result works full of allusions and deductions.
- In this perspective of complementarity and wholeness of perception, and
seeing that each means translates" a message according to its technical and
tecnological caracteristics (M. Mcluhan), a fixed artistic intention transmitted by a set
of means, will allow a more differentiated and diversified vision of itself
and may be more easily understood in its globalness.
- 2.
- In this way, the direct Intervention of the artist, or the so-called
performance, is probably the means that best adapts itself to this conjugation, because it
can contain and easily relate itself with all of the other expressive means of
transmission, and present itself with a maximum of elements for its comprehension.
- The performance contains a series of components that may be explored
aesthetically. Concepts such as time, space, movement/action, tridimensionality, colour,
sound, smell, light and principally, the physical presence of the artist as the displayer
and the factor of attainment of the intervention, interwoven with a limitless quantity of
objects, intention, tecniques and technologies, completely revolutionize the notion of
plastic arts", confering them another dimension, and offering the public in its
communicational and informational fullness, that which could be considered live art".
Two basic concepts are commonly connected to all of these performances: the space
where it happens, and the time in which it unfolds.
- Time and space, here, are eliminated as seperate concepts and make up the
screen" where everything can/will happen. These two concepts define the
space-temporal limit in which the action will be summarised, and are important for a
reading and a comprehension of the performance as an independent means of expression.
Taking up on Decio Pignatari's opinion about happenings, the performance can also be
considered the Art of action, versus the art of contemplation". The physical presence
of the aesthetical operator is one of the essential factcrs of live art". Live
because it conlains precisely the living form of its creator. Live because the
(propulsion)pulsation/ the movement/ the breathing of the body makes up a integrant part
of the artistic intervention as an investigator of the development and formulation of the
same.
- The performer is the transmitter of action, and all of his gestures, all
of his mimical expressivness sends forth informations, paraphrasing a 1anguage rich in
signs and meanings.
- The performer's circumstance, as an aesthatical agent, being in the
center of the action, bestows this action a Sensation of tangibility that represents, in a
certain way, a liason between him and the person who enjoys the performance. To this
tangible" facet of the performance, arrises imediately the tri-dimensionality. The
volume given by the multiplicity of objects and also by the presence, in motion, of the
aesthetical operator.
- Although movement is not always explicit in the different objects that
integrate the action, it exists in the animation given to the manipulated objects, in the
audible rhythm/balance, in the light/colour, or even through the particular movement of
other simultaneous usages such as the projection of diapositives, video, etc., etc.. The
exploitation of colour is a direct reference to the Integration of painting in the
performance, as well as tri-dimensionality is an inclusion in this concept of sculpture.
The different types of art converge, in the performance, so that in a group they result in
an expressive interaction, as well as on the technological level the different media that
were conjugated originate an inter-expression of communication means. ... the resources,
as extensions of our senses, establish new relational indices, not only between our
individual feelings, but also between themselves, as they gradually inter-relate to one
another.", writes M. Mcluhan.
- Sound, another element of reading of the performance, can present itself
through various forms. The rhythm, the melody, or simply the noise represent sound
structures that are not always but simple accessories, but could be a group of signs to be
decoded. In this area are englobed, apart from the voice, sounds produced by proper
instruments, and/or those considered improper", such as environmental sounds or those
resultant from industrial activities.
- Natural or artificial, we also have light as a transmitter of reading.
Artificial may be a source of effects, through the possibillity of chromatic
transformation and transmutation of different elements.
- 3.
- The performance, as an interventative process should give, against the
exploitation of the diverse communication fields, the perception of simultaneousness
which, in a practical sense, we already live.
- Edmund Carpentler and Marshall Mcluhan wrote in the introduction to their
book entitied Revolution in Communications", that The electronic communication
resources of post-learned man contract the world, reducing it to the proportions of a
village or a tribe where everything happens to everyone at the same time: everyone is
aware of - and, thefore, participate -in everything that is happening, the minute it
happens.
- "The performance furnishes and also reclaims a simultaneous reading
of all the aspects which compose it, the monent it happens. The person who enjoys the
representation should conduct an integral reading of the aesthetical intervention, as the
whole which in reality, he is, and should not be content just to simply catch the
significance of what he sees, as this is but one of the components of the artistic act.
For this there has to be a synchronism
- in the use of meanings, to result in a good deciphering and comprehension
of the performance and consequently, a critical participaion. The abridgement of a
performance resides precisely in the binomial action/reaction. And bere we apply the
thinking of Marcel Duchamp where he affirmed that the artist establishes alone the act of
creation, since the spectator establishes the contact between the work and the outer
world, decyphering and interpreting this profound qualifications, and, reacting in this
way, adds his personal contribution to the creative process". Between the aesthetical
operator and the public there exists a direct empathic relation, due to the participation
of one in the work of the other, where feed-back may, inclusively, modify the particular
course of action, always altering its meaning. As the reading of the performance is done
so simultaneously with its unfolding, and because the reaction is given in synchronously
with the reading, the feed-back is immediate, at times turning the consumer into producer
and viceversa.
- The fact that the action is unfolded in front of the spectator, is
directly relationed with the extraordinary development of the means of communication, that
is, we have the possibility of gaining knowledge of the different occurances in any part
of the world as simultaneously as they happen. The perfomance contains the aspect of the
simultaneousness of action/reaction which brings art to life. The people take part in the
birth and end of the action. They see who creates and how it is carried out (sometimes
they help create it), reacting the moment in which it takes form. The performance permits
the creating and the being there to see it. It allows integrated and instaneous
(in)formation. It implores for participation. This contains something umbilical. The
circumstance of the aesthetical intervention being collectively used and enjoyed,
represents an extraordinary advance in the social sense of art. In this mode, the
transmission of the message" results in a common experience. At a time when the
communiction methods suffered an astonishing evolution, but where, paradoxically, there
does not exist communication between people, the direct contact between the audience and
the work/artist gains another intensity, (re)establishing dialogue between beings
themselves and between beings and artistic objects/acts.
- The interraction in this type of art is done so not only bellween
different materials and technologies, as between the creator/action, action/spectator and
spectator/creator. It is precisely these relations that the performance comes to provoke:
the artist/public dialogue, divided by the unfolding of the work.
- And, if on one side there ceased to exist the individual possessor of a
single work (painting/sculpture), of which he is the only user and person who takes
enjoyment of this, to come into being an artistic creation that would benefit the
collective, on the other hand the unique character is, still, maintained, because on a
general basis these interventions are not repeated or at least they never are totally.
- Regarding the aspect of the performance being, in a certain way, the art
of the ephemerous", linkes itself to the fact of its rapid presentation and
assimilation. Which in a consumer society seems to be in my opinion perfectly natural and
integrated in the social context.
|