The Performance Art in China's Contemporary Performance Art

The rise, spread and development of performance art in China in 1990s developed along a line from the very beginning, from the behavior of objectifying ideas to the behavior of living conditions. The behavior activities of Chen Shaoxiong, Sun Pinghe and Lanzhou Art Troupe are characterized by objectification, objectification or objectification of artists' attitudes and concepts towards social and cultural phenomena. Its appearance is the first step after the artist made a breakthrough in conveying static finite plane language and object language. It is magnified by artists as a dynamic and multifaceted social and natural factor, including people and other facilities, objects and various social relations, as well as other intangible and tangible things. This is the most convincing in the development practice of performance art from 1993 to 1994.

"Village Planning 1993"

The two artistic activities of "Village Plan. 1993" and "New History. 1993 Great Consumption" are representative artistic practices in this period. From 1992, 10, Song Yongping, Wang Yazhong, Liu Chun, Wang Chunsheng, etc. In Shanxi, I felt that the cultural circles were too self-concerned about the urban diseases in the early 1990s and too obsessed with the rules of foreigners' games, so I decided to find the starting point of artistic revival in a more essential sense, and I sprouted a strong desire to return to local life and artistic noumenon from my heart. So they made their own plans, raised their own funds, bid farewell to the city with blurred light and color, and came to Xijucha Village, Liulin County, Luliang District, Shanxi Province in the spring of 1993, and put the canvas directly on the kang of their fellow villagers' home to create, thus inspiring the most primitive creative impulse. Their creation in rural areas is different from ordinary rural sketches, because their works do not directly reproduce the scenes of rural life, but reflect the mentality of contemporary people in a specific cultural environment, so rural life has just become a good medicine for them to recover their conscious and natural feelings and mentality and a fertile soil for them to find spiritual support. They printed a collection of reportage and activity literature with a large number of documentary photos, made documentary feature films, and held their exhibition "Village Plan. 1993" in China Art Museum and China Daily Gallery from August 20 to 26 of that year. It is not difficult to see that the main structure of event behavior is the extension, evolution and variation of a series of plans adopted by artists for commercial culture, so it is an objective behavior.

disinfect

After China Modern Art Exhibition, with the profound social and political changes, China's current artistic situation began to have the characteristics of post-ideology. With the all-round development of market economy, China's society, economy and culture have undergone unprecedented transformation, and the social problems faced by art and its cultural responsibilities are also obviously shifting. At this time, the "New Historiography Group" was formally established in Wuhan in May 1992, and its members included Yu Hong, Zhang Sanxi, Zhou Xiping, Wang Yubei, Ye Shuanggui and Zhu. On June+10, 5438, in the exhibition hall of Guangzhou 90' s Art Biennale, members of the "New Historiography Group" used "Lai Su Er" as a cleaning agent to spray the floor and wipe the works, which filled the exhibition hall with the smell of the hospital. At about this time, they distributed the "disinfection" documents. This kind of "disinfection" behavior is not so much a mockery of the art of market operation, but rather a "new historical group" to dispel the post-ideological sequela of the art world and clean up the place where post-ideological art was born, because the biggest feature of post-ideological art is to advocate the combination of art and the flow of social life, and to oppose the mirror reflection theory model that regards art as a simple reflection or criticism of ideology and various post-colonial cultural mentality caused by it.

New history

After completing the "disinfection" behavior, the "new historiography school" conducted the second post-ideological art experiment, trying to construct a new humanistic art. "New historiography +0993 consumption" was the concrete implementation of this experiment. In their view, China society in the 1990s has entered an era of great consumption. If art wants to gain a place in this era, it is necessary to advocate that art should enter life, art should be commercialized, and everyone should consume art, and everyone in art consumption should do so. This concept of regarding works of art as products will inevitably adapt the whole process of artistic creation to the whole process of product production, that is, to the circulation process. In this process, works as products are produced, transformed and dissolved, that is, the relationships between artists, works, appreciators and producers, products and buyers are overlapping and intersecting. The artist is no longer a pure artist, because he has to play a variety of roles in the circulation process; The work is no longer unique, it can be mass-produced; Appreciators are no longer passive, but active users. Therefore, product art completely deconstructs aesthetic utilitarianism, no longer works for art's sake, but really returns to the thing itself, thus making art return to life and enter the civilian market. They "go to work and leave the factory", transforming their artistic concept from a plane to a three-dimensional industrialized product. Ren Jian produced a large number of "philatelic jeans" and "philatelic fabrics" products; Zhou Xiping produced 12 portraits of famous entrepreneurs, a series of large portraits. Liang Xiaochuan made a ceramic shell; Ye Shuanggui's "Great Pottery Series" takes the modeling of world-famous porcelain as its appearance style and contemporary cartoon symbols as its basic pattern, transforming three-dimensional pottery objects into flat large-scale paper-cuts and lifelike cartoon greeting cards. These works (products) are scheduled to be exhibited in Beijing Wangfujing McDonald's fast food restaurant on April 28th, 1993, and closed on the evening of 27th. According to Ren Jian, he said in a chronology afterwards: "During the 15 days before and after the exhibition, I encountered political, interpersonal, business and artistic problems. I was very tired, which was the most painful experience in my artistic career when my creativity was cut off." From June to September, the exhibition of "Ren Jian Philatelic Jeans" was frequently realized in major shopping malls and trade fairs in Wuhan, and pedestrians wearing this kind of clothes were often seen on local streets in Wuhan. From Beijing and Wuhan's completely different attitudes towards artists' art decentralization to their behaviors in life, it is not difficult to see that once artistic ideas and concepts leave the flat shelf recognized by traditional customs and enter the process of daily social life, they will often face a profound dilemma: either artists completely give up their artistic concepts and act according to the actual needs of social market and power will, or artists choose to observe and communicate with good friends in a small scope, but they cannot communicate with the public. It can be seen that if the process of social life is chosen as the channel for the productization and objectification of artistic works, then the activities of artists to control and grasp the productization of their works will inevitably be limited by social norms and legal effects. How to coordinate various social norms, legal effects and public acceptance, and apply and popularize them through their own practical activities is an objective behavior of ideas that must be deeply thought and prepared in real life, which determines that it is difficult for performance art to take a large-scale externalization form in this land of China.

Performance Art' 93'

Because of many obstacles and difficulties, "Zheng 93 Great Wall Performance Art" had to be held in the Simatai area of the Great Wall at the junction of Beijing and Hebei, which is 0/00 km away from Beijing/KLOC. With the participation of famous photographers, writers, poets, journalists, art lovers, college students, international friends and villagers in Simatai area, Zheng created performance installations with four themes: Big Bang, Black Coke, Door God and Lost Memory. Among them, the "Big Bang" was that with the cooperation of more than 50 villagers, he tied tens of thousands of damaged Great Wall bricks scattered at the foot of the Great Wall with more than 300 meters of red cloth for five days, covering three beacon towers and a 200-meter-long Great Wall passage. The duration is long, many people are used, the amount of labor is large, and the activity conditions are difficult. He is a contemporary leader. Zheng believes that "performance art can have a direct impact on the times and people's thoughts because it chooses people's body language and specific media to convey it, thus having a strong visual effect." I chose the Great Wall as the place and medium of performance art, not only because of its symbolic significance, but also because of its vast and open natural environment. Here I feel the continuation of tradition and future, and the' gas field' lacking in the process of urbanization is valuable for the freedom and liberation of the soul. " (Bundling the Lost Soul (A Conversation between Gao Ling and Zheng), published in Hong Kong's "Nineties Monthly" No.65438+April 0995) In such a large-scale artistic activity, Zheng has always controlled and maintained the overall meaning orientation of his works-reflecting the confused mentality of contemporary people and looking for a lost and numb spiritual soul-without losing the richness and visual impact of visual language (he wrote in "Lost Memory"

93 poster behavior "

During the period of 1993 ~ 1994, many behaviors similar to the above-mentioned artistic behaviors were objectified into external objective social activities, such as the behavioral works of Wang Jianwei, Huang Yan, Geng Jianyi and Ni. Wang Jianwei went to Yongquan Township 1 Group, Wenjiang County, a suburb of Chengdu, Sichuan in June, 5438+0993, and signed a contract with farmer Wang Yun to plant an acre of seasonal wheat. He observed and recorded the dynamic comprehensive system of planting, so as to confirm his view that all information in the world (including tangible material existence and unnatural intangible spiritual consciousness) is in the cycle of output and input, and so is the behavior of planting activities. It is said that with the joint efforts of two people, the output of this mu of land is 700 Jin. 1993 10, Geng Jianyi invited 20 interested audiences to fill in the knowledge table of marriage law in the classroom of Moganshan Middle School in Hangzhou, but none of them completed all the contents. Most people think that this activity is more like an exam, which has triggered a debate about law, marriage and family. Ni launched the' 93 poster activity in Shanghai from 65438 to 0993, which is the second series of continuous proliferation events. Based on the most popular street posters, he makes words with normal grammar and semantics automatically arrange in the wrong logical order. These "misplaced posters" were posted everywhere, tracked and recorded, and pedestrians' reactions to them were also recorded. Construction started on May 25th, 1993 in Huangyan/KLOC-0, Changchun, and it is planned to take ten years to carry out rubbings of various demolished buildings in different periods. He named this long-term behavior "Collection Series". Demolition of buildings. " On April 6th, 1994, in the gallery of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Song Dong held a unique exhibition "Another class, would you like to play with me?" The whole exhibition hall is arranged as a classroom, and the walls on the ground are covered with all kinds of middle school papers, as well as metaphorical knowledge flow, information pool, sink, faucet, printed notes and so on. The artist himself instructed a group of middle school students to read "wordless books" seriously, and his allegory of the current teaching methods was very obvious.

Di Naizhuang's "Popularization" Activities

A controversial example is Di Naizhuang's "popularity" activity. From 1992, the activity of spreading ten thousand red umbrellas created by Di Naizhuang lasted for three or four years, appeared in public places in dozens of cities in China, and the number of people who entered the scene of the red umbrella activity exceeded 5 million. The related news reports were even more continuous, reaching hundreds, and the number of people who spread it exceeded 400 million. Most people in the art and academic circles think that "pop" is a very successful social behavior art, which is effectively changing the situation that modern art in China cannot enter the society, and it is a successful case of avant-garde art influencing the society. There are also many people who think that The Red Umbrella misappropriates the landscape behavior of Crystal pholiota adiposa, and its works lack critical creation of cultural concepts. In this regard, Di Naizhuang believes that society is composed of several procedures, which dominate people's words and deeds. If artistic creation is not only used for the expression of visual language, but also for the design of social programs, then a set of program works created by artists that are completely symmetrical with the real social structure and have the same "standard" will be imported into the society and integrated with social programs, and the society will gradually appear the "picture" you expect. To this end, he put forward the concept of "post-vision", trying to put the visual image from an isolated appreciation state to a certain position in the comprehensive program, and create intangible beauty with tangible beauty. The controversy caused by "popularity" touches on the realistic experience and countermeasures of objectification behavior in China, and distinguishes two different cognitive attitudes, which will be verified on the basis of practice.