Suggested Curricular Activities
1) Explore the Oral History of an Artist-Run Organization
Oral history offers an embodied, intimate way to engage with history of contemporary art and artist-run organizations. Take a deep breath and choose one oral history interview to listen to (each interview is about 30 minutes long). Listen with intention, curiosity, and care. Reflect on the following questions afterwards:
- Who is the artist?
- How was the artist involved in Mobius?
- How does this artist remember their time at Mobius?
- What do you remember after listening? What part moves you? What part surprises you?
- Choose another oral history interview to listen to and compare these two artists’ responses.
Suggested Use: An assignment on history of contemporary art (1970s-1990s), artist-run collective, oral history as a method, and arts and politics.
2) Teaching Embodied Archive
The exhibition is organized in four research threads: Siting Place, Deep Time, Horizontal Collectivity, and Residue / Document. These topics emerged out of both conversation with Marilyn Arsem as well as research about the Mobius, Inc. Records. On the one hand, Mobius artists have woven these themes into their experimental art making—exploring place-based new media, durational movement, collaborative sound art, and ephemeral performance art, etc. On the other hand, these themes also shape how Mobius Artists Group has operated over the years as an artist-run organization.
The following classroom activities, corresponding to each theme, are resources for teaching about experimental and performance art. A), B), D) are adapted from Marilyn Arsem’s essay (2020) “Some Thoughts on Teaching Performance Art in Five Parts.” C) is adapted from Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-actors.
Suggested Use: in-class activities for performance art, theatre, embodied archive, durational art, and place-based research.
A) Siting Place
The intention of this activity is to meditate on the relationship with the world around us.
Choose a route through an area that is less familiar to you. Pay attention to everything around you, including every detail and sensation, and try to remember them as much as you can. After returning from this excursion, free write “to what were you most attracted? What was most surprising? What did you ignore? What did you resist?” After writing, close your eyes and recall your walk: which places would you like to return to continue to explore?
Return to the route, the next day, the next class, or the next week, pay attention to what you have overlooked during the first time. Stay in the location and let the site enter and change you in some way. Do not anticipate or try to make something occur. Simply be open and wait till something somehow changes you. Upon returning, free write, “How did you know when something had happened to you? To what were you able to be open? To what did you remain closed? What did you overlook? What does that reveal to you about yourself?”
Return to the site once again in order to offer something back to it. Since you received something" , this time you are giving something back in return. It does not need to be the same thing, but somehow, they are of the equivalent. What might the place need? How do you manifest reciprocity? Again, upon returning, free write, “How did you feel about what you gave? Was it sufficient, and appropriate? How was it received? What does your choice reveal about yourself?”
B) Deep Time
The intention of this activity is to consider our relationship to time: how we work with, against, through time.
Bring in two materials that can be used repeatedly. One material should have a life shorter than your own and one should have a life longer than your own. Examine the materials. Write about each one: how does it smell, taste, feel, sound? Consider the life of the materials. What does each material come from? How was it born or created? Did it come from earth, air, fire, water? Assume it has agency. What makes it happy or sad? How does it get what it wants? What will be its demise or death?
Choose one material that you are most curious about to work with. Find a single physical action to do with that material. This action should not contain repetitive movements, nor can it destroy or transform the material. Now, do this action a number of times. With each repetition, double the amount of time you take to execute it. It will become a lot slower. If the action is to pick up a rock and then put it back down. If the first time takes 15 seconds, then the second time would take 30 secs, then 1 minute, 2 minutes, 4 minutes, 8 minutes, 16 minutes, 32 minutes, and so on.
What changes in your physical state? How does your awareness of yourself and what’s around you change? How does your perception of the action change? How does your perception of time change with each repetition? At which point do you experience boredom, fatigue, or exhaustion? How do you continue the action despite these struggles?
C) Horizontal Collectivity
This is an activity to practice deep attunement with one another’s bodies through movement.
In a group of 2, choose one person (A) as the Leader and the other person (B) as the Follower. Before the beginning of the activity, check in about each other’s accessibility needs. Are there specific movements that you or your partner are not comfortable doing?
Face each other as if there is a mirror in between. The Leader will start any movement while the Follower follows. Mirror each other’s movement in a way that we can’t tell who is leading and who is following. After a few minutes, you can switch roles within your group, so A now will be the Follower and B will be the Leader. You are welcome to explore a variety of height, pace, direction, and distance throughout the activity. Remember, this is a quiet activity with minimal speaking.
Variation #1: within the same group, now either A or B could be the leader or follower at any moment. Be very attentive to each other’s slight movement and intention. Mirror each other’s movement in a way that we still can’t tell who is leading and who is following.
Variation #2: in a bigger group, with 3 people, or the entire class, in a circle. Again, now anyone could be the leader or follower at any moment. The goal is to be in sync with each other and move in unison.
What does it feel like to be a follower, or a leader? Which role feels more difficult? What are some of the challenges of keeping each other in sync? When anyone can become a leader at any moment, is it easier for you to take on the lead, or is it easier for you to follow? As the group members grow, how do you strategize to keep your movements in unison?
D) Residue / Document
This is an activity to experience ephemerality.
- Choose a place nearby that you have always wanted to visit and see, but have not yet gone.
- Go there, taking as much time as you wish to explore and experience the place.
- Before you leave, choose one object to bring back as a souvenir. Only one.
- And finally, you must agree never to return to that place again.
Bring the souvenir to show it to the rest of the class and share your experience at the excursion. What do you still remember from your visit to the place? How does the souvenir serve as a memory device? What sensations does it bring up? Our time is not limitless. Nothing is forever. Everything has an end. How do we want to make the full use of our time?
Art History
Tufts Resources
Acting Out by
The first book-length introduction to and critical analysis of contemporary feminist performance, from Madonna to Karen Finley to Cherrie Moraga
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In Other Los Angeleses by
Performance art and Los Angeles, two subjects spectacularly resistant to definitions, illuminate each other in this searching study by Meiling Cheng. A marginal artistic pursuit by choice as well as necessity, performance art has flourished in and about "multicentric" Los Angeles for nearly four decades, finding its own centers of activity, moving and changing as the margins have reconstituted themselves. The notion of multicentricity serves, somewhat paradoxically, as the unifying motif in Cheng's imaginative views of center and periphery, self and other, and "mainstream" and "marginal" cultures. She analyzes individual artists and performances in detail, bringing her own "center" gracefully and unmistakably into contact with all those others. Without suggesting that her approach is definitive, she offers a way of thinking and talking coherently about particularly elusive, ephemeral artwork. Cheng describes performance art as "an intermedia visual art form that uses theatrical elements in presentation." Performance art, which uses the living body as its central medium, occurs only "here" and only "now." Because it is intentionally volatile, highly adaptable, and often site-specific, with emphasis on audience interaction, context is inseparable from the work itself. When Cheng writes about Suzanne Lacy or Tim Miller, Johanna Went or Oguri and Renzoku, Sacred Naked Nature Girls or osseus labyrint, she is conscious of her role in extending their creative expression. As members of the "virtual audience," readers and viewers of other documentation concerning performance art are arrayed outside the center represented by a given artist and the circle represented by the immediate witnesses to a performance, but all may entertain what Cheng calls a conceptual ownership of the work. A person who reads about a performance, she says, may feel more affected by this virtual encounter than a person who has seen it live, and may reimagine it as a "prosthetic performance." Cheng's writing draws us into the many centers where a vibrant contemporary art phenomenon and a fascinating urban environment interact. Published in association with the Southern California Studies Center at the University of Southern California
Call Number: SMFA and ebook: NX511.L67 C48 2002
On Edge by Call Number: SMFA and Tisch: NX504 .C37 1993Performance by
Call Number: Tisch Oversize : NX600.P47 G64 1979
Performance Art Third Edition by
"A clear and accurate history of . . . a continuousdevelopment of enormous consequence to the most adventuroustwentieth-century art."--Robert Rosenblum This pioneering book has now been expanded with a new chapter that brings it into the second decade of the twenty-first century, mapping the global rise of performance to the present day. RoseLee Goldberg explores contemporary artists' approaches to politics, tradition, social engagement, and the art world itself, while evaluating the changing status of performance and its ever-increasing relevance to artists and audiences. Featuring recent work by leading performance artists such as Marina Abramovic, Walid Raad, Francis Alys, Pierre Huyghe, Tino Sehgal, and Sharon Hayes, the book covers a century of the medium. This new edition also includes an updated foreword and an expanded reading list.
Call Number: SMFA and Tisch: NX456.5.P38 G66 2011
Performance in Contemporary Art by
In this important new survey, Catherine Wood proposes that performance is not a genre of art separate from object making but rather an attitude that has infiltrated the entire terrain of contemporary art. Examining in turn individual, social, and object-based approaches, Wood first examines the influential performance art of the 1960s to 1980s: the body art of the Viennese actionists, the raw performances of Yoko Ono and Chris Burden, and the experiments of the Japanese Gutai group, among others. She then explores how these sources have been revisited, reformed, or rejected by con- temporary artists in the 21st century. This impressive book includes international artists who fall outside the traditional European and North American focus, giving the reader the broadest and most up-to-date insight into the subject yet published.
Call Number: Tisch Oversize :NX460.5.P47 W66 2018
Sound Art by
Essays and images that map art's new sonic cosmos, illustrated in color throughout. This milestone volume maps fifty years of artists' engagement with sound. Since the beginning of the new millennium, numerous historical and critical works have established sound art as an artistic genre in its own right, with an accepted genealogy that begins with Futurism, Dada, and Fluxus, as well as disciplinary classifications that effectively restrict artistic practice to particular tools and venues. This book, companion volume to a massive exhibition at ZKM | Karlsruhe, goes beyond these established disciplinary divides to chart the evolution and the full potential of sound as a medium of art. The book begins with an extensive overview by volume editor Peter Weibel that considers the history of sound as media art, examining work by visual artists, composers, musicians, and architects alike. Subsequent essays examine sound experiments in antiquity, sonification of art and science, and internet-based sound art. Contributors then survey the global field of sound art research and practice, in essays that describe the past, present, and future of sound art in Germany, Japan, China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Canada, Turkey, Australia, and Scandinavia. The texts are accompanied by an extensive photographic documentation of the ZKM exhibition. Texts by Achille Bonito Oliva, Dmitry Bulatov, Germano Celant, Seth Cluett, Christoph Cox, Julia Gerlach, Ryo Ikeshiro und/and Atau Tanaka, Caleb Kelly, Brandon LaBelle, Christof Migone, Laszl Moholy-Nagy, Daniel Muzyczuk, Tony Myatt, Irene Noy, Giuliano Obici, Carsten Seiffarth und/and Bernd Schulz, Başak Şenova, Linnea Semmerling, Morten S ndergaard, Alexandra Supper, David Toop und/and Adam Parkinson, Peter Weibel, Dajuin Yao, Siegfried Zielinski
Call Number: SMFA and Tisch: NX650.S68 S67 2019
Performance Studies
Tufts Resources
Performance by
"Performance" has multiple and often overlapping meanings that signify a wide variety of social behaviors. In this invitation to reflect on the power of performance, Diana Taylor explores many of its uses and iterations: artistic, economic, sexual, political, and technological performance; the performance of everyday life; and the gendered, sexed, and racialized performance of bodies. This book performs its argument. Images and texts interact to show how performance is at once a creative act, a means to comprehend power, a method of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world.
Call Number: SMFA and ebook: NX456.5.P38 T3913 2016- Sound Art by
Essays and images that map art's new sonic cosmos, illustrated in color throughout. This milestone volume maps fifty years of artists' engagement with sound. Since the beginning of the new millennium, numerous historical and critical works have established sound art as an artistic genre in its own right, with an accepted genealogy that begins with Futurism, Dada, and Fluxus, as well as disciplinary classifications that effectively restrict artistic practice to particular tools and venues. This book, companion volume to a massive exhibition at ZKM | Karlsruhe, goes beyond these established disciplinary divides to chart the evolution and the full potential of sound as a medium of art. The book begins with an extensive overview by volume editor Peter Weibel that considers the history of sound as media art, examining work by visual artists, composers, musicians, and architects alike. Subsequent essays examine sound experiments in antiquity, sonification of art and science, and internet-based sound art. Contributors then survey the global field of sound art research and practice, in essays that describe the past, present, and future of sound art in Germany, Japan, China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Canada, Turkey, Australia, and Scandinavia. The texts are accompanied by an extensive photographic documentation of the ZKM exhibition. Texts by Achille Bonito Oliva, Dmitry Bulatov, Germano Celant, Seth Cluett, Christoph Cox, Julia Gerlach, Ryo Ikeshiro und/and Atau Tanaka, Caleb Kelly, Brandon LaBelle, Christof Migone, Laszl Moholy-Nagy, Daniel Muzyczuk, Tony Myatt, Irene Noy, Giuliano Obici, Carsten Seiffarth und/and Bernd Schulz, Başak Şenova, Linnea Semmerling, Morten S ndergaard, Alexandra Supper, David Toop und/and Adam Parkinson, Peter Weibel, Dajuin Yao, Siegfried Zielinski
Call Number: SMFA and Tisch: NX650.S68 S67 2019
Unmarked by
Examines the fraught relationship between political and representational visibility and invisibility within both mainstream and avant-garde art. The text takes as case studies photography, film, theatre, the iconography of anti-abortion demonstrations and performance art.
Call Number: Tisch Oversize : NX650.P6 P47 1993
Open Access
Archive and Ephemera
The Archive and the Repertoire by
In The Archive and the Repertoire preeminent performance studies scholar Diana Taylor provides a new understanding of the vital role of performance in the Americas. From plays to official events to grassroots protests, performance, she argues, must be taken seriously as a means of storing and transmitting knowledge. Taylor reveals how the repertoire of embodied memory--conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances--offers alternative perspectives to those derived from the written archive and is particularly useful to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact. The Archive and the Repertoire invites a remapping of the Americas based on traditions of embodied practice. Examining various genres of performance including demonstrations by the children of the disappeared in Argentina, the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani, and televised astrological readings by Univision personality Walter Mercado, Taylor explores how the archive and the repertoire work together to make political claims, transmit traumatic memory, and forge a new sense of cultural identity. Through her consideration of performances such as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña's show Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit . . . , Taylor illuminates how scenarios of discovery and conquest haunt the Americas, trapping even those who attempt to dismantle them. Meditating on events like those of September 11, 2001 and media representations of them, she examines both the crucial role of performance in contemporary culture and her own role as witness to and participant in hemispheric dramas. The Archive and the Repertoire is a compelling demonstration of the many ways that the study of performance enables a deeper understanding of the past and present, of ourselves and others.
Call Number: Tisch and ebook: E20 .T39 2003
