Pembleton & Lajevic’s article, Living Sculptures: Performance Art in the Classroom, reminded me of technical arts-based schools and their training to scrutinize and exact anatomy of artists' models posed in the middle of a classroom. This formal voyeuristic training, based on the typical European gaze and “historical Western art canon” view of bodies continues to be used as a means of formal training as a way of seeing. This article made me reflect on the many k-12 classrooms to which I’ve had access and realizing not one of those classrooms has encouraged performance art and yet encourages viewing of other’s bodies as a means of arts training.
Being able to use one’s body within an art piece is an essential way for students to place their bodies in relation to the world and to others. It is a means of developing empathetic relationships with other peers who are using their bodies as a means of artistic expression. This makes me think of performance artist William Pope L and CRAWL. Watching his performance brings about the idiom “walking a mile in someone’s shoes”. The heavy drag of his body and his physical labor felt within each crawl forward is just as physically tangible as Wurm’s pieces where students may easily “understand” the feeling/ sensations of placement of body and object. Introducing performance art to k-12 aged students can encourage bodily autonomy, and can encourage conversation regarding awareness of physical abilities and of those who use their bodies with assistive walking and mobile devices. Performance art can lead to conversations of ableism, design justice, and structural inequalities within schools and other institutional spaces.
“Encouraging students to experiment with performance art can further their understandings of art and help them make meaning between art and their everyday life through their body—allowing them to dwell within a living curriculum.” (Pembleton & Lajevic, p4)
Performance art can be a community engagement methodology, enabling students to start figuring out how to answer questions about whom to work with and how to collaborate with others and various environments. In addition, performance art is ecologically sustainable and does not add to the already overloaded waste-filled land creating hazards to our pained environment “applicable to our greater economic reality–to (not) create more things in a world already groaning under the strain of material production.” (Some Thoughts on Performance and Materiality /by Nina Horisaki-Christens)
These are the topics and questioning that are imperative to continue to lead students into a kinder and more just society- one physical performance at a time.
