Skip to content
Thesis Info
- LABS ID
- 00748
- Thesis Title
- Mediating Femininity in the Interactive Performance Art: VALIE EXPORT, Marina Abramovic and Sonia Cillari
- Author
- Natalia Fuchs
- E-mail
- nfuchs AT artypical.com
- 2nd Author
- 3rd Author
- Degree
- Master of Arts
- Year
- 2018
- Number of Pages
- 73
- University
- Danube University Krems
- Thesis Supervisor
- Prof. Irina Aristarkhova
- Supervisor e-mail
- airina AT umich.edu
- Other Supervisor(s)
- Language(s) of Thesis
- English
- Department / Discipline
- Department for Image Science / MediaArtHistories
- Copyright Ownership
- Natalia Fuchs
- Languages Familiar to Author
- Russian, German
- URL where full thesis can be found
- drive.google.com/open?id=1iU_5wXoRWn_UGWrWd0p3sQTUt93FXAJm
- Keywords
- femininity, interactive art, performance art, technology, feminism, cyberfeminism
- Abstract: 200-500 words
- My research aim is to explore interactive performance art through the study of the
artworks of three artists: VALIE EXPORT (TAP and TOUCH CINEMA, 1968), Marina
Abramovic (Rhythm 0, 1974) and Sonia Cillari (Sensitive to Pleasure, 2010). Specifically, I will focus on the way in which their works contribute to performance art and mediate a particular notion of femininity that is open to inter/action what I call mediating femininity. There is a similar narrative in all three performances. The artists, according to my hypothesis, adopt a seemingly traditional view of the feminine as passive, submissive and sensual. They use their body as a medium and technology to communicate with the audience. Thus, VALIE EXPORT uses “Expanded Cinema” concept and methodology; Marina Abramovic, Polaroid camera and a wire among the other attributes; and Sonia Cillari, - computer technologies and “sensor suit” . These works are diverse, historically, aesthetically, and culturally, but as I show, it is also important to study how femininity gets mediated, becoming a technology itself, and produced at the same time, through their performances and other works.
The significance of my research is two-fold: first, this would be the first time when the
works of all three of these artists are juxtaposed to each other in detail, and discussed together; second, my research project contributes to the still unexplored area of gender-centered research in media art history.
My main theoretical framework is currently based on feminist philosopher Judith Butler,
who argues that femininity is created through repeated performances of gender to reproduce and define the categories of sex and/or gender. I argue that interactive performance art when performed by women artists as a method to construct, modify and actualize the traditional but possibly, also queer view of the femininity in contemporary art and media art histories. I will make the explicit analysis of what is femininity in interactive performance art from 1960-70s to the beginning of the XXI century inscribing new media into the performance history and contemporary art. My questions are, but not limited to, the following: What are the limits of the interaction between performer and audience in the past and in the present? How do the artworks change in terms of intimacy mediation? How does the technology/new media influence it and how does it influence and/or change the expression of femininity it influences/changes?
Interactive performance art as a research of women artists contradicts the vox populi by
involving traditionally perceived as a masculine medium - technology - more and more intimately and frequently. My other questions include the processes behind this history; its absorption of masculinity and interaction with masculinity. Bordering on provocation, an understanding of these processes could challenge the perception of femininity in contemporary and media art, and therefore, in the modern society at large.
This research is the result of my work from 2013 until now while I am considering myself as international curator with an extended experience of collaborations, the creation of new joint art-works with women artists in the genre of interactive performance as well (Sonia Cillari, Anastasia Alekhina, Yulia Glukhova, Helena Nikonole and many others). So this experience was also a very important and indispensable background for my research of mediating femininity in the interactive performance art. I will review the relationship between women and technology in interactive performance art by approaching my theme not only from a traditional art historical, but also, from a feminist theoretical perspective.