“What’s that?” he wondered out loud to his friend. Unintentionally within eavesdropping distance behind the two students walking before me, I followed their gaze and likewise directed my attention to a small tent situated on the lawn near the West Campus bus stop. Four people were sitting next to the tent, which prominently bore a sign that read in bold letters, “Hunger Strike.”
“I don’t know. It says ‘hunger strike’ and...something hashtag…,” she said as they continued to walk past, eyes fixated on the sign, but legs continuing to move forward, until eventually, they had left the area altogether. Highly reminiscent of the way people tend to walk past the painted pianos, rather than stopping to listen to the music, they made no effort to fulfill their curiosity or to gain a greater understanding of what it was they had just witnessed.
Why do people tend to shy away from art that is participatory—art that escapes the confines of a glass wall and wooden frame? Why do we not approach or engage with art that is right in front of us, the art that is pertinent to the here and now?
If one were to count the number of people who enter the Louvre every day in order to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, it would number in the thousands. The unexpectedly small painting always boasts a robust crowd filled with avid visitors whose sole purpose in seeing the painting seems to be to take a selfie with the Mona Lisa. There is no shyness. It would not be difficult to imagine a scene of extensive pushing and shoving, so great is the desire of those who have come to see the painting that patience is secondary.
Why do people behave so differently toward art, based on whether the art piece is physically in our shared environment or whether it is physically removed from our environment, behind a piece of glass?
There is no doubt that the Mona Lisa is a timeless, masterful painting, yet what I see beyond that enigmatic smile which has so captured the fascination of the world, is little if not anything more than a portrait of a woman who lived in the early 16th century. The viewer has no personal relationship with her, (aside from potential distant, unknown ancestors) yet this emotional and physical detachment which defines the relationship between her and the viewer conflicts with the viewer’s desire to create a relationship with her, and with the work of art.
Paradoxically, we attempt to give meaning to (through a kind of pilgrimage to Paris to see the Mona Lisa) works of art far removed from our lives and from the present, yet avoid those works which are most pertinent to our current situation.
The tent which screams “Hunger Strike” on the West Campus lawn, involves a group of students who stand in solidarity with those afflicted in Turkey, where assaults by the Islamic State and subsequent street violence has led to the death of at least 21 people. In this situation—the advancement of ISIS, the lack of Turkish government intervention on behalf of its people, the calls of the Kurds for aerial assistance and weaponry, the death of civilians—it cannot be ethically right to merely express curiosity without a desire to engage.
The performative nature of the piece lies in the dialogue it creates—not only between those actually immersed in the events unfolding in Turkey and the artist activists physically removed but emotionally immersed in the situation, but also between the artists and the onlookers. More so than any other form of art, performance art can exist fully only in the presence of witnesses and participants, because its intrinsic value lies in its creation of conversation and interaction, sometimes even action, on the part of its witnesses. Performance art is based on actions of the human body, and through its direct portrayal of human experiences and states, engages viewers to connect with the artist’s performance on both a personal and universal level.
But if performance art stimulates an immediacy of experience involving greater human engagement, then why do we persist in walking away?
This is a question of safety, of personal safety. Art behind a piece of glass cannot hurt us; it cannot prod us with a stick and activate our behavior or thinking in one way or another. But art in the real world can and does. When art escapes the confines of the wall, ignoring the physical limits historically imposed by a frame, it imposes itself onto our environment and onto us. Our environment becomes one that we share with art, and our environment no longer feels safe. Whereas we traditionally were able to maintain a distance between works of art and ourselves, this becomes no longer possible with performance art, as with the tent. It’s uncomfortable.
Art that calls for the active engagement of the “viewer” (perhaps, a more apt term would be “participant”) in taking on something more than just seeing and observing, knows no bounds. This kind of art, which has thrown off the chains that link it to the gallery wall, is exhilarating and enticing. Yet our fear of its encroachment into the physical world has limited its impact, and has prevented us from becoming fully aware of the power of performance art and its ability to question our ethics and beliefs. Our fear of actively engaging with art in an extremely human dimension is something that we must strive to overcome if we want to experience art in its fullness.
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