“Aktion artist Hermann Nitsch, for example, was arrested and imprisoned numerous times for breaking Austrian indecency laws by masturbating and enacting violent sexual scenes in his performances” … (“(Art) History, it’s reputable” – John Smith in Mr. & Mrs. Smith)
We are reminded again, even if very few noticed the first time, that Trump, because of his ignorance of the details of being POTUS, is simply about the profitability of role and status. He is all about the spectacle, unfortunately, Trump’s beauty pageants now signify however unintended, Judgments of Paris.
In July 1975, Idi Amin Dada staged a £2 Million wedding to 19 year old Sarah Kyolaba, a go-go dancer with the Revolutionary Suicide Mechanised Regiment Band, nicknamed “Suicide Sarah.” [61]
Much text has been expended on analyzing the state of Trump’s sanity often using the medium of tweeting, and often diagnosing a variety of psychological and pathological conditions.The reality is that it is all performative — he’s all about being that “star” as he self-described it in the bus recording about groping. Ratings and photo-ops are the relics of his rationality — the problem is deciding whether post-truth is always a lie.
We ignore the constant triggers and performative frames at our peril. That he has appropriated most major media industries makes the ideological apparatus of a major capitalist nation his (hair) brush. 60+ million voters could have been wrong, but we will never know because the Electoral College acted like so many elite art reviewers or auction bidders.
David Henry Nobody (1999)
“At the time I saw that Trump had all the attributes of performance art and conceptual art, albeit, morally skewed,” Nobody said. “He is a performance artist, there is no doubt. He is loaded. He is like action art. I just thought it was totally Dada, society turned inside out. You could see into the heart of America through Donald Trump.”
It is the reason why the GOP won the election, because the dramaturgy prevailed over reality. The end of performance art as a discipline occurred on 8 November 2016 because of the absolute victory of art over reality. Trump is not the Duchampian artist of the future going underground, however, that is left to The Resistance. Trump’s artistes are the bunker-preppers and we are perforce, the looters.
“I know people are worried about Donald Trump, but what you have to understand about Trump, first of all, is that he’s a performance artist,” Moore said. “There will come a point here, this year, where people go: OK, we’ve had enough of this performance art.”
Alas, consciousness-Fail. There are no new venues for performance art unless we consider the next four years as some massive Anti-Actionist art piece from which we need to move on to reconstruct reality.
The big-league question is whether we are witnessing the birth of a new surrealism even as we are confronted with new varieties of hyper-realism. Stephen Miller’s Inaugural text will be more interesting when Trump diverges from it — will it be historic or aberrant when he tweets from the dais during the Inaugural.
Brand as Commodity … both fetishized
The focus on the body in so much performance art of the 1960s has sometimes been seen as a consequence of the crisis in conventional media. Faith having collapsed in media such as painting, creativity ricocheted back on to the artist’s own body. Some saw this as a liberation, part of the period’s expansion of materials and media. Others wondered if it reflected a more fundamental crisis in the institution of art itself, a sign that art was exhausting its resources…
The most significant flourishing of performance art took place following the decline of modernism and Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s, and it found exponents across the world. Performance art of this period was particularly focused on the body, and is often referred to as Body art. This reflects the period’s so-called “dematerialization of the art object,” and the flight from traditional media. It also reflects the political ferment of the time: the rise of feminism, which encouraged thought about the division between the personal and political and anti-war activism, which supplied models for politicized art “actions.” Although the concerns of performance artists have changed since the 1960s, the genre has remained a constant presence, and has largely been welcomed into the conventional museums and galleries from which it was once excluded…
Other manifestations included the work of the Viennese Actionists, which characterized the movement as “not only a form of art, but above all an existential attitude.” The Actionists’ work borrowed some ideas from American action painting, but transformed them into a highly ritualistic theatre that sought to challenge the perceived historical amnesia and return to normalcy in a country that had so recently been an ally of Adolph Hitler. The Actionists also protested governmental surveillance and restrictions of movement and speech, and their extreme performances led to their arrest several times.
Hermann Nitsch
The term Viennese Actionism refers to a violent, radical, and explicit form of performance art that developed in the Austrian capital during the 1960s. Mainly consisting of four members, the group collaboratively staged, filmed, and photographed graphic performances – or aktions as they called them. They used their work to make taboo-breaking, often illegal, and sometimes repellent statements that expressed violent dissatisfaction with what they saw as the uptight, bourgeois government and society of post-World War II Austria. The Actionists thought Austrians were suppressing memories of the unspeakable atrocities committed by the Nazis in their country, and were trying to force people to face these traumas head-on through their art.
if we measure ratings by audience size the global scope of Trump’s performance piece is more devastating than any world war but fortunately up to now, rendered less lethal. Once Gazbag figures out that the mediated effect of deploying a theater tactical nuclear weapon can be made negligible because of the potential for disinformation, he will have monumentalized his presidency.
According to Ribemont-Dessaignes, “the situation [between Tristan Tzara and Andre Breton] became so strained that it was decided to liquidate. A meeting took place at the Closerie des Lilas, the old cafe on the Place de L’Observatoire. Breton was summoned to explain his ‘un-Dadalike’ conduct… Far from pacifying tempers, this effort merely brought about a final break, and officially marked the death of Dada.” (RD117-19) The funeral of Dada in France took place on November 30, 1924.
An announcement of the funeral appeared in Le Mouvement accéléré: “The friends and acquaintances of Dada, deceased in the prime of life from acute literaturitis, will assemble the 30th of November 1924 at 2:30 around the tomb of their brother in nothingness so as to observe a minute of silence. We will gather together at the entrance gate of the Montparnasse cemetery. – Attendees are asked not to wear any badge of a literary school.” (AI263) About a month before the funeral of Dada, Breton published a manifesto for a new movement – Surrealism. (The term “Surrealist” was first used in print in 1917 when the poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, subtitled his play Les Mamelles de Tiresias as a “Drame Surrealiste.” (MF))
The Greeks’ expedition to retrieve Helen from Paris in Troy is the mythological basis of the Trojan War.
Ivo Saliger (1939), Adolf Ziegler (1939) and Joseph Thorak (1941) also used the classic myth to propagate German renewal during the Nazi period… #MAGA
Not if, for Trump, but when … and on whom.
The U.S. use of nuclear weapons against Japan during World War II has long been a subject of emotional debate. Initially, few questioned President Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But, in 1965, historian Gar Alperovitz argued that, although the bombs did force an immediate end to the war, Japan’s leaders had wanted to surrender anyway and likely would have done so before the American invasion planned for Nov. 1. Their use was, therefore, unnecessary.
If the Japanese were not concerned with city bombing in general or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in particular, what were they concerned with? The answeris simple: the Soviet Union…If, on the other hand, the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years, and the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced. And once the Cold War was underway, asserting that the Soviet entry had been the decisive factor would have been tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Obviously, if the bombings weren’t necessary to win the war, then bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wrong. In the 48 years since, many others have joined the fray: some echoing Alperovitz and denouncing the bombings, others rejoining hotly that the bombings were moral, necessary, and life-saving.
Both schools of thought, however, assume that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with new, more powerful weapons did coerce Japan into surrendering on Aug. 9.
They fail to question the utility of the bombing in the first place — to ask, in essence, did it work?
The orthodox view is that, yes, of course, it worked. The United States bombed Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki on Aug. 9, when the Japanese finally succumbed to the threat of further nuclear bombardment and surrendered. The support for this narrative runs deep.
“Aktion artist Hermann Nitsch, for example, was arrested and imprisoned numerous times for breaking Austrian indecency laws by masturbating and enacting violent sexual scenes in his performances” … (“(Art) History, it’s reputable” – John Smith in Mr. & Mrs. Smith)
’s sanity often using the medium of tweeting, and often diagnosing a variety of psychological and pathological conditions.The reality is that it is all performative — he’s all about being that “star” as he self-described it in the bus recording about groping. Ratings and photo-ops are the relics of his rationality — the problem is deciding whether post-truth is always a lie.
from Paris in Troy is the mythological basis of the Trojan War.
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