Performance Art as a Tool for Trauma Relief

Tabarnac-Tutu, Andre-Marie Cristina

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Performance Art as a Tool for Trauma Relief

Tabarnac-Tutu, Andre-Marie Cristina

Abstract

As the feminist movement of the 1906’s and 70’s began to rise, female artists turned to the new and limitless field of performance. For this thesis, I have chosen artists with different sociopolitical and religious backgrounds to demonstrate the power of Performance art as trauma healer, the ability to use it as a weapon against unjust beauty standards, and how emphatic communication through performance women fight against gender inequality. Even though performance art is hard to define, I would like to point out three female artists working in this medium: Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic and Yōko Ono. This thesis will focus on the three central female figures of the Performance art movement, and how they used and shaped the new medium to make the audience emphatic, and thus raised awareness on different issues. Existing in real time and specific, differently from other art movements, performance can only be preserved through video recordings, or pictures, and similarly to theater can only be reconstructed from scripts, texts, photographs, and descriptions from the onlookers, and consequently be elaborated in one’s imagination. No more classical white canvases, no more wall hanging, no more strict art spaces. In Performance, artist use their bodies in acts that are spontaneous and visceral, but also aggressive and painful. By adapting the statement that the personal is political to the practice of art making, female artists used performance as a form of cultural intervention in which personal experiences, narratives and representations were drawn upon to question the prevailing social and political. Lastly, I have compared recent examples of artworks with older ones, and I aimed to highlight that women being treated unjustly is common and still a relevant issue nowadays.