if you leave it up to the audience,
they can kill you.”
Marina Abramović
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For more on the history of the terms art brut and outsider art, see these two links:
Art Brut Story (at the Art Brut Education Kit website)
Outsider Art (at the Tate Museum website)
Although there were earlier antecedents, "performance art" came into its own starting with artists like Yoko Ono and Allan Kaprow in the 1960s. To my mind, performance art is ill-served by any and all attempts at definition. But it lends itself to description: a group of people, their
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For more on performance art, check out Yayoi Kusama's website, or the article James Franco recently wrote for the Wall Street Journal on performance art.
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Enter Pastor Terry Jones. This crazy son of a bitch didn't just burn the Koran: first he put it on trial. He even managed to find a Sufi Imam from Texas, Mohamed Elhassan, who was willing to act as the "defense attorney" during the trial, although Elhassan later claimed that he had no idea that Jones planned to finally carry through on his earlier threats to burn the Koran.
But of course that is exactly what Terry Jones did.
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Marina Abramović described her 1974 performance, Rhythm 0 like this: "I was standing there in the middle of the space, with this table with objects. I put the objects on the table very carefully chosen, because the objects were for pleasure, and there was also the objects for pain ... and objects that can bring you to death .... In the beginning the public was really very much playing with me. Later on they became
Abramović also later said of Rhythm 0: “I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation .... What I learned was that... if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you." (A Daneri, et al., Marina Abramović, Charta, 2002.)
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