Performance Art
4 Multimedia and Postmodernism
What separates more contemporary trends in multimedia and performance art from Cage and Fluxus is pluralism and an engagement with the vernacular that is more characteristic of what we can call postmodernism. In part this difference stems from a greater suspicion of the future than that held by the futurists, and is closer in some ways to Dada nihilism; it is an approach that shares certain aspects with pop art sensibilities while also drawing on the vocabulary developed in avant-garde art in the first half of the twentieth century.
Christian Marclay is an artist who takes up the Fluxus concern with instruments. He seeks out the visual echoes of music in the fabric of society and the fetishized musical object. These are intimately entwined with notions of technology as objects; from vinyl records, album covers, magnetic tape, photography, and video to instruments of his own making that are impossible to play, such as Accordion (1999), an accordion with a surrealistically extended bellows, and Lip Lock (2000), a witty conjoining of a tuba and a pocket trumpet at their mouth pieces, resembling a hydra budding its offspring, but with no space for breath. He also performs in groups and
The opposite of Marclay’s concern with the instruments of music is the British artist Sam Taylor-Wood’s concern with the performer of music. In her work Prelude in Air (2006), she presents a film of a casually dressed cellist who is totally engaged with the Bach prelude he is playing but is performing the work without his instrument. The music and the man are palpably present; the instrument that links the two is absent. This absence and the sense of loss thus engendered have been amplified in her most recent work, Sigh (2008), which marries a recording of the BBC Concert Orchestra playing a specially commissioned piece by Anne Dudley, with film of the musicians acting out everything it takes to play, minus their actual instruments. In most contemporary work the modernist idea of media exclusivity has been replaced by mixed media. Sound, vision, the performer, and audience are often blurred together.
Works: Accordion, Berlin Mix , Graffiti Composition , Lip Lock, Prelude in Air , Sigh
People: Johann Sebastian Bach, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Anne Dudley, Kurt Henry, Christian Marclay, Sam Taylor-Wood
Socialbodies: BBC Concert Orchestra , Dada, Fluxus, Futurism, Straßenbahndepot, The Bachelors, The Bachelors, even