Endurance art is a kind of performance art involving some form of hardship, such as pain, solitude or exhaustion.[2] Performances that focus on the passage of long periods of time are also known as durational art or durational performances.[3]
Human endurance contests were a fad of Depression-era America from the 1920s-1930s.[4] Writer Michael Fallon traces the genre of endurance art to the work of Chris Burden in California in the 1970s.[5] Burden spent five days in a locker in Five Day Locker Piece (1971), had himself shot in Shoot (1971), and lived for 22 days in a bed in an art gallery in Bed Piece (1972).[6]
Other examples of endurance art include Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece), in which for 12 months he punched a time clock every hour, and Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece), in which Hsieh and Linda Montano spent a year tied to each other by an eight-foot rope.[7]
In The House with the Ocean View (2003), Marina Abramović lived silently for 12 days without food or entertainment on a stage entirely open to the audience.[8] Such is the physical stamina required for some of her work that in 2012 she set up what she called a "boot camp" in Hudson, New York, for participants in her multiple-person performances.[9]
The Nine Confinements or The Deprivation of Liberty is a conceptual, endurance art and performative work of critical and biographical content by artist Abel Azcona. The artwork was a sequence of performances carried out between 2013 and 2016. All of the series had a theme of deprivation of liberty. The first in the series was performed by Azcona in 2013 and named Confinement in Search of Identity.[10] The artist was to remain for sixty days in a space built inside an art gallery of Madrid, with scarce food resources and in total darkness. The performance was stopped after forty-two days for health reasons and the artist hospitalised.[11] Azcona created these works as a reflection and also a discursive interruption of his own mental illness, mental illness being one of the recurring themes in Azcona's work.[12]
Examples
Marina Abramović[13] – Rhythm 0, 1974; Rhythm 5, 1974; Luminosity, 1997, 2010; Nude with Skeleton, 2002, 2005, 2010;[9]The House With the Ocean View (2003); Balkan Erotic Epic, 2005.[14]
Marina Abramović with Ulay[15] – Point of Contact, 1980;[9]Night Sea Crossing, 1981; The Lovers: Walk on the Great Wall, 1988.[16]
^For artists in endurance performances "[q]uestioning the limits of their bodies," Tatiana A. Koroleva, Subversive Body in Performance Art, ProQuest, 2008, pp. 29, 44–46.
^Paul Allain, Jen Harvie, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance, Routledge, 2014, p. 221. Other terms include duration art, live art or time-based art.
Beth Hoffmann, "The Time of Live Art," in Deirdre Heddon, Jennie Klein (eds.), Histories and Practices of Live Art, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 47.
^Michael Fallon, Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s, Counterpoint, 2014, p. 106: "Burden's performances were so widely observed that they took on a life beyond the artist, helping create a new art genre, 'endurance art' ..."
^Andrew Taylor, "Tehching Hsieh: The artist who took the punches as they came", Sydney Morning Herald, 30 April 2014: "Don't try this endurance art at home. That is Tehching Hsieh's advice to artists inspired to emulate the five year-long performances he began in the late 1970s."
^Thomas McEvilley, "Performing the Present Tense – A recent piece by Marina Abramovic blended endurance art and Buddhist meditation," Art in America, 91(4), April 2003.
^Knights, Karen (2000). "Sculpting The Deficient Flesh: Mainstreet, Body Culture And The Video Scapel". In Abbott, Jennifer (ed.). Making Video “In”: The Contested Ground Of Alternative Video On The West Coast. Vancouver: Video Inn Studios. p. 53. ISBN9781551520223.
Further reading
Brown, Sierra. "Discover Endurance Art," California State University, Long Beach, 2008 (report on an exhibition).