These are wooden cubes by the artist Rasheed Araeen. Now let's add a live element. Suddenly the structure becomes animated, producing unsettling and shifting interactions between the artwork, the space and the participant.
When this happens we say the work has 'a performative aspect. ' This is a film about the mercurial, unpredictable and unsettling world of performance and the performative, and how these terms have come to re-frame our understanding of art. We start in the 1960s at a time when some artists were breaking down the traditional boundaries between different media and raising questions about what art could, and should be.
These artists wanted to make life's unpredictable and changing nature the subject and material of the work. They believed that art which incorporated a live element reflected the modern condition better than a static painting or sculpture. They also wanted to make art that could not be easily bought or sold.
The term 'performance' came to define an artwork that had a live element and was witnessed by an audience. But as performance took root people began to see that paintings and sculptures could have performative aspects too. Like Jackson Pollock's action paintings and Rasheed Araeen's cubes.
In fact, it seemed that much of contemporary art had a performative aspect. Soon people were not asking 'what is performance? ' They were asking 'what isn't performance?
' But here's the thing. Performance is not a medium not like painting and sculpture. It's not about what it is made of.
It's a tool used by artists to raise questions about how art relates to us and the wider social world. And while it often involves an element of live action or an audience it doesn't necessarily have to. It can just as easily ask those questions through a photograph or a document that has performative aspects.
This photograph depicts the artist Mona Hatoum performing an action in which she walked barefoot through streets of Brixton, dragging behind her pair of Doc Martens boots attached to her ankles. The theme the artist was raising through performance, about the vulnerability of the marginalised to instruments of surveillance and state control, is conveyed with a static image. This document outlines a concept called the Flux Olympiad.
It was conceived by the artist George Maciunas He wanted to instill art into every part of life, even sport. But he was also subversive, so he invented games like football on stilts and a flipper race. He died in 1978 without ever realising the work.
But in 2008, thirty years after his death the Tate used the artist's instructions as a score to stage the Flux Olympiad. Sometimes it takes that long for life to catch up with art. Performance operates in the gap between art and life connecting us to both.
It is a living, shape-shifting, often hard to define entity that is there to make sense of our changing world and to include us into art's frame. It's why Robert Rauschenberg described it as: 'Art that refuses to settle.
