Freedom of art, how far can you allow it?
Tags: Morality, Performing Arts, Art

Painting, making images, acting, carving, combining unknown materials to install.

We freely express our thoughts and philosophies through these media.

While using our bodies to create other creations is the range of art that is best known to the general public, performing arts may still be a little unfamiliar to many.

The dictionary definition of performing arts is:

‘artistic acts that carry out the concept of art more specifically through the body itself.’

It is about creating art through the body itself, which began in the early 20th century. In a relatively recent MOMA retrospective in 2010, performance artist Marina Abramovic sat still for seven hours a day, for a total of three months.

The performance, called the “The artist is Present” is said to have aimed to heal itself the moment visitors face them.

There was a rather modest performing art such as The artist is Present, but there are many performing arts that surprised everyone who saw them as unconventional.

Tom Otterness — Shot Dog Film

Born in 1952, Tom adopted a dog in 1977 when he was 25. Then he tied the dog to a tree and shot the dog to death.

He recorded the whole process and made a movie under the title “Shot Dog Film.” The movie was screened in large-scale locations such as Times Square Theater and Manhattan cable TV, and a large number of people watched it.

Afterwards (obviously)the Animal Protection Association asked him to pay compensation or at least apologize.

But shortly after Short Dog Film was forgotten in people’s memories, Tom was reborn as a world-class sculptor.

His sculptures were installed in Toronto, New York and Los Angeles as well as Seoul Plaza.

Little has been mentioned about the Shot Dog Film that Tom has made 20 years ago.

Milo Moire — PlogEgg

This performance can be a bit shocking. The performance art, announced in 2014, features artist Milo putting eggs containing paint directly into her vagina to complete abstract painting like Jackson Pollock.

She intended for us to think about the power of creativity that a woman can do with the motif of birth.

In addition, there are a lot of people who have expressed as performing arts what they didn’t expect to see, such as Adrian Parson’s live circumcision performance, Deborah de Robertis’s “The Origin of the World” which contains her private parts, and Voina’s Orgy.

Chris Burden, who died in 2015 at the age of 69, gave his friend a gun and asked to shoot him. when he was in school, he tied himself inside a locker that was only 23 inches long and held himself for five days.(there is a documentary on Netflix. If you’re curious, I recommend you to take a look.)

Netflix documentary: Burden

As explained above, performing arts are art that uses the human body, so sometimes the artist’s ideas are expressed in sexually or in cruel ways, such as self-injury. Although there is no such provision as the law that states that one should not hurt oneself or masturbate, and not do sexual acts that are frowned upon by another person, there is no doubt from an observer’s point of view about how far one should accept acts that are not acceptable

in daily life within the framework of art.

Should there be a profound meaning in the act even if it is not understood? If you nod your head in sympathy with the meaning, are the actions convinced as art?

Should all murder, anti-humanitarian behavior that do not harm others be

respected as freedom of expression?

A Russian performing artist who showed anti-government sentiment through a performance that cut off his earlobes.

I have no objection to the overall content of the performing arts, but it is clear that some performing arts make me reconsider the concept of arts.

When we feel more than a certain level of aesthetics, we use the term

‘art’ regardless of its genre. This is true when one feels an aesthetic that meets one’s own standards, but the expression does not seem to be used very well when i see performing arts.

Whether my standards of personal aesthetics are too high or too low, I’m not sure that whether art or us who should be changed to feel art deep in our hearts.