Week 1

Futurist Manifesto
With fast-paced and exhilarating verbs and adjectives thrown at you left and right, this piece was anything but literary prose. Basically it’s about a couple of people who anticipate and experience the tide of something revolutionary, completely losing all inhibitions. They want to destroy artifacts of the old and focus on the present, bringing in the new. They want each generation to announce themselves with a violent up rise. They themselves eventually want to be trashed and put away. I do think that new movements are inevitable, but I also prefer to interpret the concept of this piece as something that should be practiced in mind and spirit—not in a literal and physical sense. Personally, I don’t think I would embrace the ideals of futurists. Technology and modern ways demand respect in its own right, but so does history. Its relationship with the future is undeniable.


Interview with Allan Kaprow
The interview is mostly about Kaprow’s hand and participation in education and the avant-garde movements of the past. He talks about the phenomenon of exhaustion and the fluctuation of traditional and modernist ideas being “in.” With that in mind, I think that one of the most interesting things that Kaprow brings up is how certain terms evolve, take on new meanings, and hold certain connotations.

Performance Art
Martha Wilson talks about the origins of performance art and how she believes that it began due to the movement of futurists. How it was a means of confronting and hopefully affecting a person in an aggressive and provoking way, versus the passive effects of a painting, for example. The whole idea of performance art focusing on the body and the way it interacts with time and space is a social experiment, especially when the element of a spectator is thrown in and undoubtedly the artist is seeking for reactions.

http://cotati.sjsu.edu/spoetry/folder6/ng631.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n6_v82/ai_15490850
http://revuewdephoto.com/Academic/Academicall/spring00/pformart.html
http://www.glbtq.com/arts/performance_art.html