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Explore the rich history of Renaissance performance art and its profound impact on artistic expression, human awareness, and the development of new communication channels. Discover the role of artists as creators of parallel realities and the diverse range of performance activities during this transformative era.
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Gregory Battcock: Before Man was aware of art he was aware of himself. Awareness of the person is, then, the first art. In performance art the figure of the artist is the tool for the art. It is the art.
Terry Fox [Performance] really is an attempt at synthesizing communication. It’s an attempt at a new communication. But the only people this art exists for are the people who are there. And it’s the only time the art exists.
Lucy Lippard: [performance is] the most immediate art form, which aspires to the immediacy of political action itself. Ideally performance means getting down to the bare bones of aesthetic commuication—artist/self confronting audience/society.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument; and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move an object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic, since it is ours and because through it we have direct access to space.
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. Even our most secret affective movements, those most deeply tied to the humoral infrastructure, help to shape our perception of things.
General Observations • Performance Art favors the selection of artists over the selection of works. • This creates a higher risk factor for artists and presenters. • Performance Art conveys a very broad area of activity ranging in subject, materials, media, venue, styles, methods and concerns.
This undefined quality liberated artists because there were no rules to break.
Renaissance Performance The guests now streamed into the Sala del giuoco alla pala, which had been arranged for the representation of the Paradiso, by Leonardo da Vinci, the Court mechanician. Then a train of powder exploded, and crystalline globes, like planets, were seen disposed in a circle, filled with water, and illumined by a myriad of living fires sparkling with rainbow colors—Bernardo Bellincioni
Performance Activities • Trionfi –triumphal processions often requiring the construction of elaborate temporary arches) • Cortei—Court pageants • Grottescherie—masquerades with bizarrely costumed participants • Carri Allegorici—allegorical vehicles often used in jousts
Ideal of the Renaissance Man • Syncretic breadth of vision • Multiplicity of talents • Exalted sense of personal creative force
Georgio Vasari He formed a paste of a certain kind of wax, and as he walked he shaped animals very thin and full of wind, and, by blowing into them, made them fly through the air, but when the wind ceased they fell to the ground. On the back of a most bizarre lizard, found by the vinedresser of the Belvedere, he fixed, with a mixture of quicksilver, wings composed of scales stripped from other lizards, which as it walked, quivered with the motion ; and having given it eyes, horns, and beard, taming it and keeping it in a box, he made all his friends to who he showed it, fly with fear.
He used often to have the guts of a ram completely freed of their fat and cleaned, and thus made so fine that they could have been held in the palm of the hand; and having placed a pair of blacksmith’s bellows in another room, he fixed to them one of these, and, blowing into them, filled the room, which was very large, so that whoever was in it was obliged to retreat into a corner; showing how, transparent and full of wind, from taking up little space at the beginning, they come to occupy much, and likening them to virtue. He made an infinite number of such follies, and gave his attention to mirrors.
Attansio de Felice …performance has been a key artistic activity from the very beginnings of our modern concept of the artistic role, correspondent with the emergence of what remains our guiding principle of individualism in society….performance serving frequently as the highly flexible testing ground for ideas then finding their way into painting and architecture.
Neoplatonism Aside from the specifically Neo-platonic content to be found in much of the earliest performance art, the idea that the Earth itself is but an imperfect representation of the perfect forms to be found only in the empyrean lent to Neoplatonically inspired rituals, the weight of being considered parallel realities, that is, creations at least as “real” as the world around them.
Thus, as the officially acknowledged erectors of parallel realities, most readily manifested in performance art, artists came to be regarded as creators rather than mere artisans.
Renaissance Multimedia “In Quattrocento Italy,” says Di Felice, “once the liberating factor of a philosophic framework was established, artists manifested work in every form possible to the technology of the day. From the design and execution of fountains to the production of spectacles for the courts, the artists of the Renaissance were encouraged in the pursuit of their pronounced mulitmedia concerns.
Impressive Actions Artists have always been know for their impressive actions: Alberti leaping, in a single bound, over a man’s head. Leonardo bending horseshoes easily in his hands. This need for and admiration of unusual and difficult feats found its fullest gratification in the frightful fires, powerful explosions, and actual floods of the spectacles….
Bernini’s Spectacles …Bernini’s spectacles stimulated the imagination to contemplate the profound questions of the cosmos—space and time—that occupied the Platonically spirited artists of the Renaissance.
