What is performance art?
IRMA OPTIMIST
A performance tunes in a situation into an organisation of chaos or chaos of an organisation.
Its dynamics can lie in the relationship between performer, audience and the elements
of the performance. Performance art has no narrative rules and no controlling formal
restrictions. In a performance a certain action or many different actions, which can
separate directly to distinct directions, are realised. A performance may occur also
indirectly in different, variable, both stable and unstable dimensions. Random
factors too effect the order or disorder of it. Time in a performance is sensed
through those velocities and speeds which manifest themselves within it.
From a performer's point of view a performance deals with certain dynamics
which do not exactly begin or end with the performance: performances
are instantly visible fixed points of a feedback process. A performer
uses the time available to plan performances and to observe new ways to
comment as an artist. The micro circuit of performances expands into
a macro net of retrospective dimensions.
As an peripheral and marginal way of working it is possible
for performance art to confuse the expectations which museums
and galleries rely on when exhibiting static art.
I have called my own performance art an opposite look, which
is based on the vibrations of chaotic order, "the politics of soft
curves". It is completely qualified in the chaos of mathematical sense,
although it also contains possible mythological chaos which cannot
neither be measured, sold or changed.
I think that a performer moves on a fractal boundary.
Performance space departs from the everyday environment
because of its greater complexity and non-linearity.
The figurative performer joins space and time together with
connections and contacts which appear in passing performative and
corporal statements. In a way, every performance is an extension
of a previous one - an expansion or a valley of sea horses
which spring from corporal mathematics, that invisible Pandora,
which can be closed and opened, accelerated and stopped.
The performance space gives birth to a form which is akin
to onion-shaped structures of multi-sensitive chaos. This
is an order of its own kind. It is a system which is concerned
with the vanishing of lag and depth, when, in a smooth world,
mass and energy explode into information. Performance art may
appear as physical friction, even though performance art means
catalysing the societies with artists being the catalysts.
see photos
