performance ;international art festival

Mezinárodní festival performance Bejing Live připravovaný významným kurátorem Joakim Stampem představoval problematiku performance art v globálním kontextu. Různé přístupy světových současných umělců se kříží. V rámci festivalu byly vykonány tři různé perforrmance.

?To those for which life is a spectacle art has no meaning?, wrote my good friend, the British writer and critic John Berger in his outstanding book The Success and Failure of Picasso in 1965, the same year I was born. It is a statement that has always followed me. In my actions as well as in my understanding of art. If the spectacle is contrary to performance art, it is also the opposite to life, to authenticity, to being, alienating us from ourselves and our existence. When art becomes a spectacle, it loses its capacity to give people hope, it loses its depth and becomes entertainment, an expression of escape and despair. Art is not decoration. It takes risks, human, emotional and formal. For a painter each brushstroke can be a journey into the unknown. Yet, it can also be a colourful darkness empty of humanity, meaning and emotions. Empty of hope. Performance art is not an exception. It can also be decorative, an empty gestre, a spectacle, expressing a vacuum of meanings and emotions. It can fail its human potential, expressing its own opposite. When performance art becomes this, it has not only betrayed its inherent existential qualities, it has lost its heart.