What kind of art is the live broadcast of "Dr. Kuan"?

It has been half a month since Pang Kuan began his performance art exhibition, and tomorrow will also be the day when the exhibition ends and "Dr. Kuan" is unsealed.

As one of the members of the New Pants Band, this offline exhibition + online live broadcast has gradually attracted a lot of attention. Some say he sensationalizes, some people see himself in his daily life of eating and drinking Lazarus, and all kinds of discussions point to a central question: Can this also be called art?

If you are involved in contemporary art, you will find that Pang Kuan's performance art is somewhat familiar. From 1978 to 1979, Xie Deqing, an artist from Taiwan, imprisoned himself in a wooden cage of about 3.5 × 27,×2 cubic meters for a whole year, during which all his actions were carried out. He doesn't talk to anyone, just reads, writes, watches TV, and occasionally exercises. It's one of his five One Year Performances, and it also has a more apt name: The Cage.

Since the birth of modern art, people have opened their eyes countless times. From Duchamp's Fountain to Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup Can, works of art that were once considered outliers have now become household fashion icons, and performance art is one of them, and this kind of art form still continues Duchamp's view that concepts are the precursors of art forms.

As a form of conceptual art, performance art arose in the 1950s and 1960s, referring to an art composed of individual or group actions at a specific time and place. Today, the word has taken on a bit of a banter, and whenever you don't understand someone's behavior, you joke that "that's performance art!" "Before Pang Kuan's exhibition ends, we can revisit the chapter on conceptual art in 150 Years of Modern Art and look back at several interesting performance art in art history.

"Only when the concept is excellent, the concept art will be excellent"

Excerpt from [English] Will Gompez, 150 Years of Modern Art

In the context of modern art, we tend to be skeptical of conceptual art. You'll probably hear about a large crowd of people gathering together to scream as loud as they can (Paula Pivi's 1000, which was shown at Tate Modern in 2009), or inviting us to walk gently around a room lit by only one candle and sprinkled with talcum powder (Brazilian artist Cheldó Merrellez's installation Volatiles). Such works are often interesting and even thought-provoking, but are they art?

Part I: Paula Pivi, "1000"

Bottom: Cherdo Merrellez's installation Volatiles

Yes, they are. Because art is their intention, their only purpose, they also use this identity to ask us to judge it. The difference is that they operate in a conceptually supreme field of modern art, not much about the creation of physical objects, and are therefore called conceptual art. But that doesn't mean artists have the right to present us with stale garbage. As the American artist Saul Levitte pointed out in a 1967 essay for Artforum magazine: "Conceptual art can only be excellent if ideas are good." ”

Marcel Duchamp was the father of conceptual art, and his "readymade" — most notably the urinal of 1917 — led to a break with tradition, giving rise to a reappraisal of what can be art and what should be considered art. Before Duchamp's strong intervention, art was man-made, often something of aesthetic, technical, and intellectual value, framed, hung on a wall, or mounted on a pedestal, looking glorious. Duchamp's view is that artists should not be confined to such a strict medium to express their ideas and emotions. In his view, concepts were the first, and only then should consideration be given to what was the best possible form of expression of a concept. He made his point through a urinal that art, which was originally thought to be only painting and sculpture, has now become almost anything determined by the artist.

Photo of The Fountain, taken by Alfred Stiglitz in 1917.

Art no longer has to do with beauty, it's more about ideas that can now be realized by artists in any medium of their choice: from 1,000 screaming people to rooms sprinkled with talcum powder. Or, in the branch known as performance art in conceptual art, there is another option, which is to use the artist's own body as a medium.

Marina Abramovich

The Artist is On The Scene, 2010

In the spring of 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a retrospective of Marina Abramovich (born 1946), covering more than four decades of the performance artist's artistic career. One might think that this is an interesting but niche exhibition. Large institutions like the Museum of Modern Art hold similar exhibitions of industry experts in order to balance those that are held to please the public and make money, such as "Picasso's Masterpieces" or "Monet's Masterpieces". The Museum of Modern Art has never held such an exhibition before, which is not surprising if you consider the nature of performance art.

This type of art is often suitable for holding small intimate venues, and some would argue that it is a perverse way of "intervening" in the world, where performance art cannot become a mainstream event in the world's largest museum of modern art. Performance art is the "guerrilla" in art, which often appears suddenly, making people notice its strange existence, and then hiding in unreliable records of rumors and legends. Until recently, the museum arranged it as part of an exhibition, but a full retrospective like Abramović's is still extremely rare. Partly because they're tricky. For example, how can an art form based on the artist's presence fill miles of white walls in an art museum with actual content? No matter how talented Abramovich was, she could only appear in one room at a certain moment. How do you put together a retrospective of a brief artwork that was originally just performed at one time and another place? The key thing about these kinds of events is that you have to be there – that's part of their charm.

But if artists and their supporters let mainstream logic dominate their actions, modern art as we know it will not exist. The Museum of Modern Art retained the spirit of its founder, challenged customs and hosted performances by Marina Abramovich. To solve the dilemma of being alone at one time, the artist hired a group of stuntmen to reenact her previous work, making it performed on time throughout the museum. At the same time, she focused her efforts on a new work, aptly called The Artist on the Spot (2010). The work is: Abramovich sits on a wooden chair in the center of the museum's wide atrium, with a small table in front of him, and at the other end of the table, an empty wooden chair.

She aspired to sit in a chair in the atrium for seven and a half hours as the museum opened its doors, not moving or resting (or even going to the bathroom). And she promised to endure such torture for the entire three-month show. If the viewer wishes, they can sit in a chair opposite Abramovich in the order in which they come, watch the artist's daily meditation, and in this way become part of the work. The audience can stay there as long as they want, but must remain silent and static from beginning to end. No one knows how many people will actually go – but not too many.

However, art often surprises people. Abramovich's Artist in the Field became the hottest show in town. It became a topic of conversation in New York, with long lines of spectators circling the blocks, only for their turn to sit in silence with the artists. Some spectators stayed there for a minute or two, and a few sat for a full seven and a half hours—much to the chagrin of those who waited patiently at the back of the line. Abramovich had been sitting there, dressed in a long flowing dress, like a statue in a museum, silent and unpredictable. There were reports that those who sat with her experienced a profound spiritual experience, some bursting into tears, and discovering a part of their existence that had never been perceived.

The results show that Marina Abramovich's retrospective is by no means niche, and it is one of the most successful exhibitions ever held in manhattan's Temple of Modern Art. Together with Picasso, Warhol and Van Gogh Retrospectives, it is on the list of the institution's historically successful exhibitions. The artist is not a household name, and performance art is often seen as a small circle event for modern art enthusiasts, and given these factors, the success of this exhibition is indeed remarkable. In fact, a decade ago, if you asked the curators of many modern museums about Marina Abramovich, most would have looked blankly. You know, her planet has only entered the mainstream orbit of the art world in the past few years.

Yoko Ono

Slices, 1964

The riptide artist Yoko Ono (born 1933) also elaborated on this in one of her early performance artworks. Slice (1964) is an astonishing, powerful work that shows with disturbing consequences how the viewer can be an intrinsic element in a work of art.

At the beginning of "Slices", Ono sat expressionlessly on the stage, his legs pressed under his body and stretched out to one side. She wore a simple long black dress. A few feet in front of her, also on the stage, there was a pair of scissors. One by one, after the audience is seated, they will be invited to the stage, picking up scissors and cutting her clothes. At first they were unresponsive and hesitant to cut it. But they gradually became more and more confident and brave, and one knife after another, the artist's clothes became fragments.

Watching a video of the incident from the internet now is like witnessing an incident with a sexual assault atmosphere. It reveals the truth about human nature and human relationships, between attacker and victim, between sadists and masochists, and few in any painting or sculpture I can think of have achieved such an effect. It's not in theater, there's no expected story, and therefore there's no specific ending or timing to ensure that these things will happen. But, as in some—not all—performance art, it shows that the outcome of a conversation that the artist provokes with an audience whose behavior is unpredictable is unpredictable. If art is meant to awaken our senses, to challenge our egos, to help us understand things, to re-examine things — then Ono's Slice is a great work.

Bruce Naumann

Failure to Float in the Studio, 1966

Dancing or Exercising Around the Square, 1967

Conceptual artists who do not tend to be presented live in front of the audience also use the performance and their bodies as a medium to convey information. Artists like Bruce Nauman (born 1941) built their careers by documenting their actions and exhibiting them in galleries and museums in the form of photos and videos. Shortly after returning home in 1966, Naumann graduated from school with a Master of Fine Arts degree and decided to use the above as a pathway to conceptual art. He sat down to think about what he should do and what kind of art he should create.

Later he recalled the scene. "If I'm an artist and in the studio, then everything I do in the studio should be art." He asked himself, why should art be a product and not an activity? As a result, Naumann became interested in the process of artistic creation as if it were the final product. Shortly after this idea arose, he created a photographic work called "Failing to Float in the Studio" (1966). The work documents the artist's failed attempts to float between two chairs in his studio that are a few feet apart. The picture shows Nauman in two states: one leaning against the support of a chair across the two chairs, and the other superimposed on it, and he is falling to the floor in frustration. It's his record of the process of trying to accomplish the impossible and failing: it's a reflection on his life, and perhaps about all of us. It was an absurd work, and somewhere between the overturned chair and his badly bruised hip, we seemed to see Duchamp's bad smile.

The following year, in 1967, he created the video Dancing or Exercising Around the Square (Square Dance), a film that played for 10 minutes. In the film, Nauman is barefoot, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. He made a one-meter square frame on the ground with a white shield. On each side of the box there is a small dot of tape marking the midpoint of the line. Naumann starts from a corner of the box and takes a step toward the midpoint of a line, half the distance of the box. He repeated the act, circling the box over and over again to the rhythm of the metronome. It's really lengthy.

Of course, that's the purpose. It's life. Naumann represents human objects: never learning, never moving forward, always repeating himself. That metronome marks the inexorability of time, which governs our lives. The studio is the space where time and this object inhabit. Naumann turned the idea of shooting a simple everyday action— stepping to the side— into an interesting work of art. Repetition is an important part of it — it's about the confusion that is difficult to get rid of, it's about the process, and most importantly, it's about the human condition. It's a story with no head and no end. Life goes on. Naumann hopes that this seemingly meaningless work will catch our attention, make us slow down, stop on the road, observe and ponder — until we understand its true meaning.

We spend too much time looking at the art gallery, glancing at Van Gogh's paintings on the way to a hurried cup of coffee or a postcard, tripping over a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth. Nauman didn't want that to happen. If we walk carefree through Dancing or Exercising Around the Square (Square Dance), we will get nothing from the work, but if we invest a little time, we will be rewarded. Naumann's art encompasses many things, but at the top of the list is consciousness. As the weight of conceptual art on the contemporary art stage became more and more important, this theme also began to appear in large numbers.

【Recommended Books】

150 Years of Modern Art | The Republic

by Will Gompez;

Translated by Wang Shuo / Wang Tongle

19 Faces of Contemporary Art | The Republic

[Switzerland] by Hans Ulrich Obrist;

Translated by Wang Naizhu

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