Being the Art
Feb 11 2010
Tania Bregura is an installation artist whose work comments heavily on socio-political actions both historic and on going. This lucky woman had the great fortune to be placed in extracurricular art school/programs since the age of 9 and is now monopolizing the majority of the Nuebergur Museum with a series of her Instillations named after cities and nations. Half these sites are manned by performance artists committed to varying repetitive tasks. In the Havana room, nude performers brush at their bare skin to create a haunting sound effect combined with the pungent raw cane on the floor. This brings to mind the threshing of cane fields and on further thought I think of the threshing of humans, because while the cane lay in shredded heaps at my feet, the sound is the friction of human skin on skin.
In an adjacent room is Kassel, as in Kassel, Germany. As people enter the large room, painted like a black box theater, blinding lights spring to life just above average head height. From the corners of the darkness booms the steady sound of booted feet and the violent cocking of guns. Many think they are alone in the room with a recording, but after a moment most realize that I am stomping a half story above them swathed in black and swinging a .35 caliber automatic pistol. Still fewer visitors realize there is a second performer on the ground floor hammering the lever of a rifle back and forth.
I have always had trouble with performance art, considering it to be more inclined to sensationalism than to sensual reaction. By participating in Kassel as a performance actor, it’s brought me a bit closer to excepting the impact such a genera provides, but it has also made me dislike docents. Tours come in and docents coach people on what to look at, tell them what is about to happen and why. If that is standard practice, why walk into the room at all? Why not read about it in the New York Times and save the trip?
I stomp back and forth hour after hour, regretting my 6 day a week commitment while cherishing the introspection it provides into how the art world is experienced. I contemplate the encumbrance of guides on artistic expression and cringe when parents drag children through a room with guns and flashing lights and try not to freak out when my fellow performers show up in miniskirts and play on their phones to help the time pass in the jarring timelessness that is Kassel.
In summation: Performance art is not for the faint of heart or skeptical of nature, whether you are walking through it or marching in it. Also, experience it first, then go through with a guide so they can ruin the after glow and keep your brain from working on its own power.
