emotion. Minimalist and constructivist strategies are natural in an age that
has grown suspicious of unambiguous pleasure.
Performance art manifests a similar awareness of social complexity and
seeks a similar distance from pleasurable experience but in a somewhat
different way. Instead of producing either a text (a novel, poem, or play; a
sonata, quartet, or symphony) or an object (a painting or sculpture), perform-
ance art brings the artist into immediate confrontation with an audience, in
the hope of commenting on and changing habits of social life and thought.
The English performance artists Gilbert & George, for example,“relinquish
familiar human behavior to attain the status of art.”^75 In their most famous
work,The Singing Sculpture(1969, repeated many times thereafter), they cover
themselves with bronze powder and stand on a pedestal in a gallery space, as
a piece of human sculpture.^76 In other works they have explored drunken-
ness, excretion, and sexual deviance. When they do produce a visual image,
the aim is the provocative criticism of self and society much more than it is
visual pleasure.Eight Shits(1994) shows Gilbert & George a bit larger than life-
size, with underwear below their knees, otherwise unclothed, and sur-
rounded by six large turds (the size of their human figures) protruding into
the image from its edges. They remark that“our reason for making pictures
is to change people and not to congratulate them on how they are.”^77 “We
want Our Art to speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to People
about their Life and not about their knowledge of art.”^78 A great deal of
performance art, including the self-mutilations of Chris Burden and Marina
Abramovic,^79 the social commentary performances of Karen Finley and Vito
Acconci (Following Piece, 1969), and the“shopping art”of Haim Steimbach,^80
seems inspired by similar aims. For example, Steimbach remarks that he is
trying to show that socially shaped desire can be refigured otherwise.
(^75) Linda Weintraub,Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary
Society, 1970s–1990s(Litchfield, CT: Art Insights, 1996), p. 73.
(^76) Ibid.
(^77) Gilbert & George,“What Our Art Means,”inGilbert & George. The Charcoal and Paper
Sculptures, 1970– 1974 (Bordeaux: Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, 1986); quoted
ibid., p. 76.
(^78) Gilbert & George,A Day in the Life of George & Gilbert, the Sculptors(Gilbert & George, 1971),
quoted in Weintraub,Art on the Edge and Over, p. 74.
(^79) On Abramovic, see Weintraub,Art on the Edge and Over, pp. 59–64.
(^80) On Steimbach, see Weintraub,Art on the Edge and Over, pp. 135–39.
Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 279