Body Parts April 24, 2005
Posted by Giles in : writing , add a commentThis article appeared originally at the SSA web site at http://www.s-s-a.org/
The recent Body Parts Festival held by the Society of Scottish Artists has its roots in the history of Western performance art which, in turn, can be traced at least as far back as the theatre of ancient Greece – that tremendous flourishing of theatrical art which began around the middle of the first millennium BC. As a modern phenomenon, its origins go back to the Italian Futurists such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) who unleashed his theatrical ‘incendiary violence’ as an attack on Bourgeois values with the publication of the Futurist Manifesto in Paris in 1909. Several years earlier, the German actor Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) had shocked and delighted audiences in Munich with sexually explicit performances in venues such as the city’s Café Simplicissimus. Over the years practitioners such as Pina Bausch, Hermann Nitsch, Yves Klein, Gilbert & George and Laurie Anderson have elevated performance to an art-form capable of holding its own amongst the best that twentieth century art, in all its manifestations, had to offer.
The SSA has, since its foundation in 1891, existed to promote “the more adventurous spirits in art†and it is therefore no surprise that this festival – the idea of the current SSA president, Kate Downie – should have included such an adventurous programme of experimental and challenging work. Downie comments that “although performance art was not entirely new to the Scottish and Edinburgh scene, the collective platform represented by the Body Parts festival was a unique and important event which required an immense amount of political and organisational will on behalf of the SSA – with the support of the National Galleries and the Royal Scottish Academy – to make happen.â€
In Scotland, the first sustained and radical exposure to performance art came in 1970 with Richard Demarco’s inspired exhibition Strategy: Get Arts which successfully attempted to present the vast array of contemporary art forms currently being practised in Düsseldorf and other important centres in Germany. Among the artists were Klaus Rinke, Daniel Spoerri and Joseph Beuys. Beuys’ seminal Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony combined, action, images, music and theatricality in a sustained performance which melded Beuys’ deeply held spiritual beliefs with a perceived Celtic rootedness.