Wu Tsang. Still from ‘Wildness’. Image from hammer.ucla.edu
Provocateur, pioneer of performance art and media savant: Marina Abramovic has become a household name since her her MoMA retrospective “The Artist Is Present” in 2012. Her silently staged, durational exchanges with the public were enduring and emotional and earned her an entourage of celebrity disciples. While her influence is indisputable, the Abramovic furore can sometimes overshadow equally important performance artists. So we’ve taken a moment to reflect on five of her contemporaries, past and present who have contributed to evolution and legitimisation of this expansive and ever more popular practice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anCsBjyem1o
Ana Mendieta
Blood was integral to Ana Mendieta’s practice. It was a real representation of aggression and a material that she often used to symbolise violence, particularly against women. She was also interested in the Afro-Cuban religion, Santería and the sacrificial rituals they practice. A single thread connected everything in Mendieta’s work including nature and feminine agency. Her performances anchored her to the earth and were simultaneously radical and ancient.
Hannah Wilke
Hannah Wilke’s had a turbulent relationship with Second Wave feminists. Her peers deemed her glamorous and naked self-presentation as narcissistic, yet her acute puns demonstrated a serious commitment to subverting phallocentric stereotypes. For example, Wilkes reclaimed the term penis envy and transformed it into Venus Envy, satirised glamour models and stuck chewing gum to her body in order to deface and transform the eroticised female body.
Wu Tsang
Wu Tsang’s work merges activism and fiction. Her 2012 film entitled “Wildness” is a magical-realist ode to the Silver Platter, a bar that since 1963 has been an important totem of LA’s Latin LGBT communities. The film deals with notions of a “safe space” for marginalised groups of people and the role it plays in the intersectional trans community. Tsang also performs in the film as dancer and DJ of the incendiary weekly party “Wildness” which simmers with passion and confrontation.
Senga Nengudi
For decades, Senga Nengudi has been highly regarded in avant-garde circles. Due to the nature of her uncategorisable work however, she has existed under the radar. Influenced by assemblage and ritual that she discovered in Yoruba, Pop and Fluxus, Nengudi’s main media is panty hose. For her, it reflects the elasticity of the human body. By stretching them and intersecting walls, her installations are then “activated” by a performance collaborator using movement.
Leigh Bowery
Leigh Bowery is the Christian boy who became London’s iconic human sculpture in the eighties. He is best known for birthing his wife Nicola Bateman from a synthetic vagina and his legendary nightclub – Taboo. His overdrawn lips, DIY aesthetic and deliberately figure-distorting costumes were irreverent and remarkable, earning him a myriad admirers including Alexander McQueen, Michael Clarke and Lucien Freud.