The tasks of contemporary art and psychotherapy intersect at many points. This is the ability to live emotions, and work with trauma, and the search for oneself. The body as a guide to the world of the unconscious is an important tool for both the artist and the psychotherapist. After all, how we express ourselves through the body can often tell more about us than words.
Performance is not new for a long time, but still the most ambiguous and not accepted by the general public art form. If we know from childhood how to look at pictures or listen to music, then we need to learn how to interact with a work of performance. Why do some viewers watch for hours, fascinated, as the artist is silent on stage, while others leave after a couple of minutes with exclamations of “This is not art”? How does performance art teach us to feel and transcend conventions?
A specialist in the field of Russian avant-garde and the art of new technologies, Olga Shishko, in her lecture “Performative Discoveries of the Russian Avant-Garde”, says that the first performers were avant-garde artists. The main aim of the avant-garde, which originated at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, is the search for innovations, the rejection of the familiar and canonical. Artistic discoveries concerned the expansion of time and space. Genres such as media painting, sound sculpture, noise performances appeared, the purpose of which was to ensure that the viewer experienced a new experience, not only visual, but also mental. The very sensibility that participation in performance gives the public has become a new way of interaction between the artist and the viewer.
The task of the author of the performance is to push the viewer out of his usual rut, to change the patterns of perception, and finally, to make him a part of the work of art.
The artist Marina Abramović came closest to realizing these tasks. In 1974, she held a performance called “Rhythm 0”. In the exhibition center in Naples, she stood in front of a long table on which 72 different items were stacked: feathers, matches, a knife, nails, chains, a spoon, wine, honey, sugar, soap, a piece of cake, salt, blades, a scalpel, alcohol … Marina Abramovich put a sign in front of her with the instruction:
“Instruction. There are 72 objects on the table that you can use however you want. Performance. I am an object. During this time, I take full responsibility. Duration: 6 hours.
At first, the participants hugged Marina, tried to please her. They stroked their hair, painted their lips. But when one of the spectators pushed the artist with force, outbursts of aggression followed one after another. Marina was stripped, her skin was cut with blades, the artist was repeatedly harassed. The climax was a loaded pistol, pointed at the girl’s neck by her own hand. The uncontrollability and impunity of the crowd revealed the true nature of human feelings.
In the 1950s, Harvard psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that people often accept the majority view, even if it is obviously wrong and even if they have to deny their own feelings in doing so. Kind of a crowd effect. Psychotherapist Irina Vinnik sees here a manifestation of repressed emotions:
“If there is a lot of suppressed aggression in a person, in a situation where it is safe to show it, it works on a click. That is why the audience mocked Abramovich so fiercely. Demonstrating your shadow qualities in a crowd is easier. Remember the famous scene at the Variety Theater from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. During a session of black magic, Woland exposes human vices: greed, greed, vanity, envy. Only in the situation with performance, the artist acts as a magician, and magic is the process of interaction between the artist and the audience.”
Here is how the artist herself writes about the end of the performance in her autobiography “To Pass Through the Walls”:
“The next day, the gallery received a lot of calls from people who took part in the performance. They asked for forgiveness, saying that they did not understand what happened to them then, what came over them. In Rhythm 0, I brought people’s fears onto the stage using their energy. In the process, I freed myself from those fears and became a mirror for the audience—if I could do it, so can they.”
In 2010, Chinese artist He Yongchang held a performance called “One Meter of Democracy”. To implement this work, he conducted a survey among 25 random people whether he should mutilate his body: 12 were in favor, 10 were against, and 3 abstained. After that, the artist invited the audience to the studio, who answered positively, and the surgeon, who, without the use of anesthesia, made an incision from his knee to his collarbone (1 meter long, 1 cm deep). Yongchang’s own manifesto was to question the very concept of elections and the value of democracy to the individual.
The body is often the main tool of the performance artist, but it is not necessary to injure it. Simply watching an artist sleep, eat, or take a shower can evoke emotions in the audience.
The psychotherapist calls this a kind of escapism: “In the late nineties and early 2s, there was a boom in television shows in which viewers could observe the private lives of others: Behind the Glass, Dom-XNUMX, The Real World, Big Brother. Together with the characters of these shows, the audience could live many different lives without leaving the screen. It is also a way to relieve anxiety by observing the weaknesses of others, a way to justify oneself, to join another with one’s shortcomings. The heroes of the show also smoke, swear, and take it out on others. And when the viewer watches the performance for days, in which the author silently does the usual things, he realizes that he is a part of the artist’s life. There is no more loneliness.”
The psychology of performance as an art form lies not only in the interaction between the artist and the audience. Natalya Agapova, an art mediator from St. Petersburg, talks about art mediation, where the audience becomes performers themselves:
“In any art mediation there are elements of psychoanalysis, but it is plastic mediation that is closest to performance. The participants, together with the mediator, move in the space of the exhibition and try to feel it in a new way through the plasticity of the body. A certain transformation happens every time. It is amazing how, without any preparation, under the strict guidance of a mediator, a person begins to react to art with his body – move smoothly or abruptly, sway rhythmically or freeze in place.
From the outside, it may look like a dance or chaotic movements and always attracts the attention of other visitors. When we launched the direction of plastic mediation in the St. Petersburg Manege, we were also worried about how free the participants would feel. They came to the exhibition as spectators, but became real performers. Judging by the reviews, this helped many to become bolder, to discover new facets of sensory perception in themselves.
One can relate to performance in different ways, but there is no doubt that contact with it has a therapeutic effect, blurring the boundaries of the familiar.