WHAT IS LIVE ART?

What is Live Art?

I got into a recent conversation (which I think I lost on terminology- but not in belief) about what we can class Live Art as being.

If I say I am studying Live Art, going to see Live Art….what do you immediately think of?
Theatre? Dance? Live music? Installation? Some crazy woman half naked covered in body paint?

To me live art reflects the idea that it is a piece of work that will never be seen again, it is for one moment only, no matter how many times you view it, it will inevitably be changed during the course of time, and in effect this Live Art will die.

The definition says:
Live Art is a term used to describe acts of performance undertaken by an artist or a group of artists, as a work of art. It is an innovative and exploratory approach to contemporary performance practices. Live Art can also be referred to as time-based art, as the exploration of temporality tends to be a key theme of this sort of work.

Live Art is a varied and diverse practice. By its very nature live art "defies precise of easy definition beyond the simple definition that it is live art by artists". Below are a series of definitions of the term Live Art:

Tate Collection:

"Live Art mainly refers to Performance art and Action art and their immediate precursor Happenings, together with the developments of Performance since the 1960s”.

Live Art Archive:

"Live Art can be defined as "art work that broadly embraces ephemeral, time-based, visual and performing arts events that include a human presence and broaden, challenge or question traditional views of the arts".

The Live Art Development Agency:

"Live Art should not be understood as a description of an art form but as a strategy to ‘include' a diversity of practices and artists that might otherwise find themselves ‘excluded' from all kinds of policy and provision and all kinds of curatorial contexts and critical debates".

Live art = something that is live.

So if an artist were to use wood/ paper/ food in their work/installation- then that work would be classed as live work, then could architecture be live art? Even though there isn’t an immediate kinetic reaction/ movement; over time these materials will deteriorate and change- not instantly, but it will happen. So each time a visitor/ spectator views the work it will change and the visual result of the change will be apparent.

So can we class a photograph as live work?

Again we can say that over time the quality of the image will itself decompose, change and disintegrate, in some cases scarring the image itself so that it becomes invisible to the viewer. As expressed above “Live Art embraces…time-based, visual and performing arts events that included a human presence…” Then surely a photograph is the result of a moment of time captured/ recorded to be remembered of a live event- a live moment that happened (whether that be of a sitter- alive, a landscape/ nature- alive, an object- partially alive depending on the object material).

The human presence is the reality that the photographer… someone… had to be there in order for the picture to be taken. It wasn’t draw and replicated from a memory or another image in a book, or a description. A person, a live person had to be present for this image to be created.
Therefore is this live work; A recording of a live time which over a period will be erased and lost.



What is live work???




Photograph via The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art.

Look at reality through the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize

Went to go and see the last week of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery.

"The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010 presents the very best in contemporary portrait photography, showcasing the work of talented young photographers and gifted amateurs alongside that of established professionals and photography students.
Through editorial, advertising and fine art images, the entrants have explored a range of themes, styles and approaches to the contemporary photographic portrait, from formal commissioned portraits to more spontaneous and intimate moments capturing friends and family".

What I admired about this years exhibition is the concept of striving to find the 'real' in reality. Every image had an in depth story and truthfulness about it, nothing seemed compositioned in order to express an opinion. (All except Steven Barrittt's admitted self portrait of; Untitled from the series Analogous Mythography in which the arranged detail in this image was cleverly positioned, to form that of an obsessive Britney Spears fan - to put it frankly, though this image is not to be underestimated as simply as that).
Not wanting to take my time I found myself surprisingly encapsulated to stay at each frame longer than Trafalgar's traffic lights; what could be perceived as a simple 'headshot' became, to me, actually a door/window into not only the sitters life, but that of the photographer. By selecting just one image, caught a precise moment of innocent realism, the simple beauty in the photographers connection with the sitter. To me, that is what made the Taylor Wessing Awards the most contemporary and engaging of exhibitions I have seen.

Most of the images varied in content, tone and subject matter. What I was pleasantly surprised by was the amount of portraits that focused on the single female shots. I have to mention Abbie Trayler-Smith, with Untitled 2, (part of an ongoing series), Jeffrey Stockbridge, with Tic Tac and Tootsie (twin sisters Carroll and Shelly Mckean) from the series Nowhere but Here, Panayiotis Lamprou, with Portrait of My British Wife, from the series Human Presence and the first prize to; David Chancellor, with Huntress with Buck from the series Hunters. All of which gained places within this exhibition, all of which focused primarily on the female form/role.

Very interesting work from this years entrants!