What is Live Art? Live Art Development
Agency, Definition
Live Art is now recognised as one of
the most vital and instrumental creative spaces in the UK. Live Art
is a research engine, driven by artists who are working across forms,
contexts and spaces to open up new artistic models, new languages for
the representation of ideas and identities, and new strategies for
intervening in the public sphere.
Influenced at one extreme by late 20th
century Performance Art methodologies (where fine artists, in a
rejection of objects and markets, turned to their body as the site
and material of their practice) and at the other by enquiries where
artists broke the traditions of the circumstance and expectations of
theatre, a diverse range of practitioners in the 21st century (from
those working in dance, film and video, to performance writing,
socio-political activism and the emerging languages of the digital
age) continue to be excited by the possibilities of the 'event' or
'experience' of art that is live.
The term Live Art is not a description
of an artform or discipline, but a cultural strategy to include
experimental processes and experiential practices that might
otherwise be excluded from established curatorial, cultural and
critical frameworks. Live Art is a framing device for a catalogue of
approaches to the possibilities of liveness by artists who chose to
work across, in between, and at the edges of more traditional
artistic forms.
Live Art has generated what Joshua
Sofaer has referred to as ‘an explosion of conventional
aesthetics’, as a gene pool of artists, whose work is rooted in a
broad church of disciplines, have crossed each others paths, blurred
each others edges and, in the process, opened up new creative forms.
To talk about Live Art is to talk about
art that invests in ideas of process, presence and experience as much
as the production of objects or things; art that wants to test the
limits of the possible and the permissible; and art that seeks to be
alert and responsive to its contexts, sites and audiences.
Live Art offers a space in which
artists can take formal and conceptual risks, create a context to
look at different mediums of expression, explore ideas of process,
presence and endurance, and investigate relationships with an
audience.
For many artists, Live Art is a
generative force: to destroy pretence, to create sensory immersion,
to shock, to break apart traditions of representation, to open
different kinds of engagement with meaning.
Live Art practices have constructed new
strategies for the expression of identities, and for many women, gay,
culturally diverse and disabled artists, Live Art has proved to be a
potent site, where the disenfranchised and disembodied become
visible, and where the politics of difference are contested.
Disrupting borders, breaking rules,
defying traditions, resisting definitions, asking awkward questions
and activating audiences, Live Art breaks the rules about who is
making art, how they are making it and who they are making it for.
Live Art practices have proved to be
especially equipped to meet the complexity and sophistication of
contemporary audiences’ values, identities and expectations. Live
Art questions assumptions and defies expectations about who an
audience can be, what they might be interested in, and the means by
which they can be addressed.
Live Art occupies a huge range of sites
and circumstances, from the institutional to artist-led
interventions; from actions in galleries and performances in
theatres, to artists working outside of the constraints of official
culture, within civic or social spheres, in challenging and
unexpected sites, or at the points where live and mediated cultures
converge. Some may experience Live Art in a gallery, others in a
theatre, and others still as an occurrence in some unusual location
or a process in which they are involved. Live Art can also span
extremities of scales – from intimate one-on-one encounters, to
civic spectacles, to the mass participation of virtual events.
Wherever they may take place or whatever shape they may be, Live Art
practices are concerned with all kinds of interventions in the public
sphere and all kinds of encounters with an audience.
Live Art offers immersive experiences,
often disrupting distinctions between spectator and participant. Live
Art asks us what it means to be here, now. In the simultaneity and
interactivity of a media saturated society, Live Art is about
immediacy and reality: creating spaces to explore the experience of
things, the ambiguities of meaning and the responsibilities of our
individual agency.
Live Art is on the frontline of
enquiries into what our culture is and where it is located, who our
artists are and where they come from, what an audience can be and how
they can be addressed.
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