The artist’s body as

Mechanism

Art is a reflection of the state of the world and our existence in it. Art can be political in its subject matter. To make art is to make a statement on a particular issue or spectacle. The primary role of the artist is to be an observer of the world and see things as though through a magnified glass and then zoom in beneath the surface picking out the dust particles of life to put them on show. Art shifts with time. When humanity is threatened, the artist reflects. After such events as World War 2, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb, art changed its consciousness {or maybe the mind of the artist?} realizing the fragility of creation.

This change in consciousness moved artists to make actions that formed objects, actions speak louder than words. Art became concerned with process of creation rather than the production of objects. The artist put their body into their work adding another level to the subject. They were also then the subject. Their personality and expressiveness was imbedded in the material. These works often became performances in which the residue of the act was often the trace of the performance and documentation of the actions the artist pursues. Jiro Yoshihara comments on the Gutai art movement: ‘Let’s bid farewell to the hoaxes piled up on the alters and in the palaces, the drawing rooms and the antique shops. They are made of the matter called paint, of cloth, metals, earth and marble, which through the casting off spells of ‘raw material’, through a meaningless act of signification by a human, were made to assume deceptive appearance. Lock up these corpses in the graveyard. Gutai art does not alter the material, Gutai art imparts life to the material. In Gutai art spirit and material shake hands with each other, but keep their distance.’[i] This kind of art I believe is the kind that has the power to convey a real feeling of life because they are made from real life and spirit. The intention is not about aesthetic beauty or craftsmanship, it is about experience, life, that is what the materials become.

The critic Harold Rosenberg declared in 1952 that ‘The canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space to reproduce, re-design, analyze or ‘express’ an object actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event’ [ii] Art has become a channel for physical and emotional experience. ‘Between myself and the material with which I create, no tool intervenes. I select it with my hands. I shape it with my hands. My hands transmit my energy to it. In translating idea into form, they always pass on to it something that eludes conceptualization. They reveal the unconscious ‘[iii]

I am not consciously part of any particular movement or group I just do what I do and produce whatever is relevant to me at certain points in time. But from reflecting on how time has shaped the consciousness of the artist, I am aware of the changes which have cause and effect on the work that appears in galleries and books etc. Art is strongly connected to time and place. Immanuel Kant comments on the philosophy of this: ‘Space and time are conditions of the mind not the properties of objects. They form the essential conditions of experience.’[iv] The paradox of this is that we are surrounded by physical matter which is solid. We move through and around things but really it is our mind that is affected by space and time. We are only the state we are in; we are always sensing something, experiencing emotions, feelings in every movement of time. Within time we gather knowledge which precedes our experience of the world. The use of our memory constitutes to how we feel about certain times. Past and present are able to co-exist with future events radiating a shadow before them. The artist works with time shaping it into a reflective form to educate and illuminate. Artists have moved from standing in front of a canvas casting their visions onto it - to becoming one with the material. There is a striving to express more aggressively as the changing world falls apart so often. The modern artist is the recipient visualizing worlds of experience experienced. They present themselves as connected to the world and what society itself transmits in attempt to make visual more reality than we knew before their actions.

Merleau-Ponty - ‘For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions.’ [v] The artist that uses their body as a mechanism to produce and express there ideas, physically puts there body into their work, therefore the artist’s body also becomes a gesturing, expressive body and so the art also contains the direct expression of the artist’s unique personality within the foreground. Harold Rosenberg comments “A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence.” [vi]

During the 1950s, artists developed a more direct contact with the materiality of their chosen medium. The physical body of the artist became ever more self-evident in the work. The ‘action painting’ body of Jackson Pollock presented one of the most influential performative inspirations for artists who looked for a methodology to activate the body in relation to the work of art.

What I most admire about artists who use their body as a mechanism to making work is their direct contact with the idea. They impart their life into the material. It illustrates another layer to the work, the creator’s experience. Art and aesthetic experience is what gives fullest expression to the primary encounter between human subject and the world because ‘The essence of art is nothing less than the conservation of human experience itself’ [vii]’

Art made in this way manages to convey to us a feeling of life. The human spirit and the material become one. We are not only presented with the residue of the artists act, but also the process; the narrative in which the work was made. The characteristics of the work tell a story. The Gutai Artist Jiro Yosihara writes in his essay ‘Gutai Manifesto’, ‘When the individual’ quality and the selected material melt together in the furnace of automatism, we are surprised to see an emergence of space unknown, unseen and un-experienced. Automatism inevitably transcends the artist’s own image. We endeavour to achieve our own method of creating space rather than relying on our own image.’ [viii] In relation to my current practice and invention of ‘Ventography’ where my breathing body acts as the mechanism, I breathe directly onto the material creating a visual documentation of my act .  I create an unseen space where life is conveyed into the material and becomes the material. As it is I who is the artist in the act, my self-image, and space and time that surrounds me constitutes to the process. It is all experience and expression, all relevant. Each creation is different depending on my surroundings. My residue is an image containing a certain number of breaths made at/in a certain amount of time. It is a representation of my life. The material and I connect to each other finding a middle ground.

‘Artists have exploited and explored the capacity of new technologies to re- and de-form the embodied self’ ‘The technoilogized ‘bodies’ takes the place of the artist as maker o f the work’ [ix] With using the body as a mechanism, the body can be extended in extraordinary ways. My body is mechanicalized {I make something out of myself} I use the basic and earliest type of photography to make my process work merging my body with the elements of photography. The artist Lygia Clark uses the extension of the body as a means to communicate, opening different channels. My body is a vessel that transmits and receives, it is my tool or perhaps weapon submissively paralleled with the recording and projecting of life energy. Within the context of my practice, the body as a breathing camera captures and communicates the moments of life and energy as they are experienced.

The artist Lygia Clark comments on the life fore energy: I perceive the whole world as a single global rhythm that stretches from Mozart to the footwork of a soccer game on the beach. Fullness. I am overflowing with meaning. Each time I breathe, the rhythm is natural, fluid. It adheres to action. I have become aware of my ‘cosmic lungs’. I penetrate the world’s total rhythm. The world is my lung.’[x]  Of main importance in Clark’s work is the emphasis on a bodily, interior experience; through her interactive work she proposes a reintegration of the disjointed contemporary “body of parts” through sensory experience. Respire Omigo {Breathe with me} 1966 is a piece of rubber tubing which when manipulated with the hands of a participant, the sound of breathing can be created .

Ar e pedra {Air and Stone} 1966 consists of a sealed plastic bag containing air. A stone rests on its surface where the participant can manipulate it using their hands allowing it to rise and fall. These art works are designed to be interactive and imitate bodily functions such as breathing and movement. These are usually interior experience but Clark makes them exterior events with the intention to re-familiarize the audience with a sense of internal awareness of their bodily processes.

When an artist chooses to be the mechanism for the making of the work, the artist extends parts of the body and emphasizes them therefore ‘technologizes’ the body. When I become the process in my work I am extending or manipulating myself in some way. I form an aperture with my hands, I curl into shapes to control lights direction around me, I use my orifices as natural apertures, I use my body as a film plane; a breathing canvas. I use the very act of breathing to make images of my embodiment. These mechanisms become a strong part of the work produced. They are the work; they represent the body as process with metaphor from beginning to end.

Within the work of Helen Chadwick, she emphasizes the fundamentally technologized nature of her body, which is not merely ‘represented’ by technologies such as photography but she actually becomes one with them. Helen Chadwick comments on the body as apparatus and photography as skin: “My apparatus is a body x sensory systems with which to correlate experience. Not exactly solid and real, I am none the less conscious, via physicality, of duration, of passing through. The sense of motion is emphatic, positing flesh-hood not as matter or image, but as process, a sequence of quantities of actions.”  [xi]

The aim of Chadwick’s work is that she wants to catch the physical sensations passing across the body, sensations of gasping, yearning, breathing and fullness. The source of which animates the exterior form through these natural processes. To do this it makes sense to interact with and become the material. She goes on to comment: “Photography is my skin. As membrane separating this form from that, it fixes the point between, establishing my limit, the envelope in which I am. My skin is image, surface, medium of recognition. Existing out there, the photograph appears to duplicate the world, disclosing me within its virtual space.’  [xii]

My intention as an artist is not to generate a certain kind of object based on styles and forms, it is to actually live on the canvas as an individual and express directly. I work with my material, it is my idea’s vehicle and link for transformation and I physically mould it. The shaman and artist, Joseph Beuys once said:  “If a person is an artist he can use the most primitive of instruments – a broken knife is enough otherwise it remains a craft school.” [xiii]

Ritual

In Art

‘Art is nothing but a way of pursuing an action for a certain period of time’ [i]  When actions are put in order of rites, a narrative formulates. They become ritualistic.

Ritual in my art is a set structure of events to make/express the subject in question.  Ritual is process, my process’s are ritualistic, every action I make is for a reason. There are certain stages in which I go through when I make work. These stages form a cycle. The first stage is the birth of the idea which is encouraged through life experience. Like I said earlier, life experience feeds me until I overflow with creative energy. This feeling is the nucleus, the seed of the idea. It is still living inside of me and is searching for an outlet through my motivation.

The next stage is developing a physical means to impart my idea into. This is where I develop a process to support my method of inquiry. The process has a beginning where I arrange myself as part of the mechanism like binding my hand to form an aperture or taping unexposed film around my body.  Then l let the light travel through my bodily aperture to make what ever form this arrangement contributes to. These actions I perform are the process in the making; each action has its purpose. When the narrative of actions is complete, I process the light sensitive material which becomes the residue of the process.

In Joseph Beuys Energy plan for the western man, he has his own theory of process and creation. Joseph Beuy’s theory of social sculpture: The process of creation is based on three strategies – The passage from chaotic energy and uniformed mass through a process of harmony and molding to a determined and crystallized form.

                Thinking – Economic

                Feeling – Law

                Will – Culture [ii]

‘It would have nothing to do with art if it were not a new experiment for which I had no clear concept of solving the problem, I would then speak about the concept and it wouldn’t be necessary to make an action. Every action, every art work for me, every physical scene, performance, drawing, brings a new element in the whole, an unknown area in an unknown world’  [iii]

I share Beuy’s views on creating new experiments in art, this is why I invent my own processes because I know they have not been done before and the results will be a new discovery.

I consider the process to be just as important as the final art because the process is art in itself, like a dance, a sequence of happenings ritualistically flowing into one another. This is why I put just as much emphasis on my processes as I do on the images created by them. Like Tina Bruguera, ‘convinced that art must be an experience, that it must be lived if it is to achieve its full communicative powers. Even if my work is a private performance in the making.