Hello Agnieszka! your post is really interesting, it gave me a lot to think of. I saw Francis Alÿs work, its poetic act creates meaning, it reminded me of performance art.
“Performance art can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer’s body and a relationship between performer and audience. It is opposed to painting or sculpture, for example, where an object constitutes the work.” It will be interesting to blend both, and make an object that constitutes the work but its also involved with the body provoking a relationship and reaction on the public; the reaction is the deciding factor of the art.
I was looking at artist Tanaka Atsuko (1932–2005) was a pioneering Japanese avant-garde artist.
“Her best-known work is “Electric Dress”, invented in 1956, a burqa-like costume consisting of electrical wires and lit-up coloured lightbulbs. Tanaka wore the dress to exhibitions. Her inspiration for her signature work “Electric Dress” was from a pharmaceutical advertisement illuminated by neon lights. The bulky garment expresses the body’s circuitry, and acts like a costume. Here, the work lights up sporadically, giving off the sensation of an alien-like creature. According to the Gutai artists, Tanaka’s work symbolized post war Japan’s rapid transformation and urbanization[2]. When Tanaka wore her dress for the first time, her face and hands were the only visible subject. She had noticed the trepidation when she had worn it and flipping the switch: “I had the fleeting thought: Is this how a death-row inmate would feel?”
She made this piece in reaction to the problems she was dealing at the time, what are our problems right now?
