Art as Performance. Art as Festival.

In the Klemm article about performance art, I especially appreciated the ending about art as a festival activity. I believe it is incredibly important to think of art as something to be shared and discussed with as many people as possible. One piece of art alone can be thought of as a “festival” if it brings people together communally, but the fact that we actually have true festivals that celebrate and showcase different types of art is essential to the true nature of art. To put both of these in perspective, a performance art piece could be a festival if it is put on for a community and brings people together to view the performance. This is not what one would normally consider a “festival,” but it has the same theme of gathering people to view and appreciate something enjoyable, groundbreaking, or something else entirely, together. On the other hand, we also have music and art festivals, which are what people normally think of as festivals, that showcase the art or music or other medium of many different people, and still bring a community of people together to appreciate it. The fact that art has this power in not only one, but multiple ways, is phenomenal.

On another note, something we don’t generally think of as a festival art are the ever evolving digital media. In Hershman’s article, she talks about interactive computer systems that allow the viewer to react to whatever is happening on a screen. The screen seems to have some kind of intelligence in that it is mimicking an alternative identity. But this is not real, and computers and code do not have the methods to create something truly individually intelligent. Likely, we would not want this, because if a computer can actually think for itself, it will make mistakes like humans, or it is not really thinking at all, but something else entirely. The article goes on to discuss how this software was inaccessible and has only a few copies, when something like this needs to be produced on a mass scale. This goes back to art as a festival. This computer program, called Lorna, is an art. It is a type of digital art. Art needs to be accessible for communities and be able to bring people together, which is what Lorna could have done, but was not expanded enough. So many phone applications and computer/video games are popular because there is a community of people who play and discuss them together.

I think this piece is an incredible work of performance art, and Marina Abramovic is fantastic at bringing people together: