Between objects and actions - various artists, Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona, Spain

Presenting works from more than 20 countries, a traveling exhibition organized by the agency of L.A. MOCA explores the postwar shift from gestural painting to body-oriented performance.

"Out of Actions: Between Performance and the fact 1949-1979" is a vast and decentralized exhibit Organized by Paul Schimmel for the looks Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and including above 100 objects from more than 20 nations, the exhibition (now upon view at Barcelona's Museu d'Art Contemporani) consciously downplays categorization in bourns of conventional art movements. The ensue is a dizzying array that brings together canonical art works, seldomseen throws known primarily by reputation and still other pieces virtually unknown in the U At MOCA, a certain quantity of sequences of galleries--such as those devot to international forms of gestural painting, Fluxus and Vienna Actionism--were arranged upon the basis of fairly sinewy formal or thematic affinities, on the other hand others, particularly those near the extreme point of the exhibition, were more heterogeneous. Here the juxtapositions oftentimes seemed arbitrary and did little to elucidate the works' meanings.

In general, Schimmel chooseed to emphasize breadth of coverage above historical context. This choice has its virtues to the amplitude that centers of fascinating performance activity in Japan, Brazil and Eastern Europe are refreshingly placed upon a par with American and West European art capitals. on the contrary it also leads to a problematic erasure of important distinctions between diverse art practices. upon the one hand, little effort is made to elaborate upon the particular regional conditions which gave rise to actionist art in nations and communities that are likely to be unfamiliar to American audiences. upon the other, an artist like as Joseph Beuys, whose prestige and influence among European action artists are enormous, is afforded a surprisingly minor place in the exhibition.

Despite its ambitious mark "Out of Actions" emerges from a strict and flat narrow understanding of the relationship between art actions and art existences This relationship structures the organizing narrative in "Out of Actions," which becomes visible if we consider the first and last works a visitor might have clashed while walking through the MOCA galleries. The originary reality was Jackson Pollock's abstraction No. 1 (1949) initially glimpsed end a proscenium established by a re-created version of the Gutai artist Saburo Murakami's torn-paper piece Entrance (1955/1998) No. 1 was hung nearest to a continuous projection (on a defence set into the wall like a painting) of Hans Namuth's famous film of Pollock at work in the studio. That Pollock is the fountainhead of "Out of Actions" was clear not single from the shrinelike ambiance of this first gallery on the contrary also from the initial illustrations of curator Paul Schimmel's catalogue introduction--a visual tribute compos of 12 Namuth photographs of Pollock dripping and pouring paint upon a large canvas on his studio floor.

single of the last works meetinged in "Out of Actions" was Hannah Wilke's videotape action s (1974-77). It could be accessed from a menu of film and video works at a monitor--one of many located from one extremity to the other of the exhibition--which was orphaned in an indeterminate space between the final gallery and the museum store. This topographic marginalization in the galleries is repeated in the catalogue, which furnishes no checklist ingress for Gestures, or for any of the other works of film and video art and documentation shown as part of the exhibition. still Wilke's Gestures can be regarded as a conceptual full tale to Pollock's No. 1. In the video, Wilke applies her hands to her face, massaging or kneading it in different ways in a series of distinct vignettes, suggesting by what mode by the mid-1970s, the gesturality of action painting had been transformed. Whereas in Pollock's art, performative action s took place in the privacy of the studio in order to bring forward publicly exhibited abstract canvases and a widely publicized myth of creative efficacy Wilke's ostensibly narcissistic gestures spectacularize an intimate exploration and distortion of her hold face. "Out of Actions" in consequence traces a historic trajectory in which artistic action is redirected from the realm of the canvas to the surface of a woman's body(1)

This story is a useful one. Although MOCA does not explicitly do with equal reason it might be roughly periodized in the following way:

Phase One: in the 19408 and '508 painting was produc that highlighted performative gestural practices of that kind as those of Pollock, the Japanese Gutai cluster or Lucio Fontana. Phase Two: In the late '508 and '608 what Harold Rosenberg called the "arena of the canvas" was literalized in environments which embraced the bodies of the artist and viewer. similar works included the Happenings pioneered by dint of Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg as well as Yve Klein's "Anthropometries" performances, and the photographs of Carolee Schneemann which display her situated within assemblage-style environments. During this period, too, the material substance was a stand-in for the canvas as a support for various painterly activities, particularly in the work of Viennese Actionists similar as Gunter Brus, Otto Muehl Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, where paint and other materials were smeared and splattered across the skin of human subdues Phase Three: In the 19708 performance art no longer required recourse to the metaphor of painting which had guided Happenings, Actionism and other strategies linking art and life in the 19608 Instead, performative works were derived from exaggerations of the lexicon of everyday gesticulation as in Wilke's video, or they emerg [i]or[/i] part of to the other critical explorations of socially generated stereotype as in Lynn Hershman's exhibition of artifacts belonging to the invented persona "Roberta Breitmore," or Adrian Piper's confrontational public way performances in New York.