” Since the late 1980s, artists have begun to understand institutions as settings for enacted behaviour that can be challenged through re-imagining or re-playing.”
“The rules of specific disciplinary formats and institutional structures are more and more often invoked performatively by artists to test out different pattern for articulating social contact (bonds, agreements or simply ways of interacting).”
“In his work (Hammons), and in how he performance his role as an artist, Hammons refuses the given rules of arts’s game.”
In the early 1990s, philosopher Slavoj Žižek characterised their attitude as one of provocative overidenification with the repressed ‘obscene superego’ of the state, since the group performatively inhabited structures of power – be they gestures of military authority, canonical aesthetics or political propaganda.
Vocabulary and Keywords
anti- or extra-institutional
enacted behaviours – act or performance the behaviour
articulating social contact – expressing clearly social contact
communal activity– public, common/ not private activity
convivial – lively
co-operative – collaborative
choreographic – to describe the sequence of steps or movement in dance
relational antagonism – active hostility or opposition, deliberatively divisive or contradictory in nature
societal revolution – social revolution
institution (in the context of performance art after late 1980s)
institutional structure
quasi-scientific experiments
microtopia – micro utopia
assemblage – assembly
per se – itself, themselves, intrinsically
ready-made formats – existing formats
provocativeoveridentification – provocative over identification
obscene superego – of portrayal or description of sexual matters; a part of a person’s mind that acts as self-critical conscience.
canonical aesthetics – ‘authorised’/ standard aesthetics
THINKING AND DOINGS 