1980 : chronologie performance
1980
- 2ème SYMPOSIUM D’ART-PERFORMANCE (HUBERT BESACIER & Orlan)
- ABRAMOVIC Marina & ULAY, Repos-Énergie, 1980.
- ACCONCI Vito, Instant House, 1980.
- ANDERSON Laurie, United States Part II, October. 1980 Orpheum Theatre & The Kitchen NYC.
- ANDERSSON Peter, Useless Räcka (row), 11 octobre 1980. (action dans deux lieux).
- APPELT Dieter, La Cuve à eau, 1980.
- AVALLI Hippolita, 1980. (Pistoia, Italie ?)
- BANANA Anna, The Banana Olympics, 1980.
presented by the Surrey Art Gallery, with funding from Canada Council and BC Arts Fund at Bear Creek Park, Surrey. BC. 1980.
- BANANA Anna, Toward the Future, Italian Futurist works at University of Cal, San Diego, Irvine and Long Beach,
the Inter-Dada Festival in Ukiah, anda t artist-run spaces in 14 canadian cities between September and December.
- BENITO Jordi. 1980.
- BOGOSIAN Eric as « Ricky Paul », août 1980, Snafu, NYC.
- BRAMBING Peter, Nullnegativ: Mensch 1, 1980.
- BRISLEY Stuart & ROBERTSON Ian, Approaches to Learning, 1980.
- BURDEN Chris, The Big Wheel, 1980.
- CARDINI Giancarlo, Haiku visivi e sonori, 1980, Saletta Gramsci, Pistoia, Italie.
- COLETTE, Lecture, 1980, Berlin, Art Academie.
- COLETTE, Mata-Hari, 1980.
- CONCIERTO ZAJ, Conservatoire national de Madrid. Performers Ferrer/Hildalgo/Marchetti.
- CONCIERTO ZAJ, Sala Borromini, Rome (Italie).
- DE LUCA Michelangelo, Kein Wahlrecht für Ausländer, 30 octobre 1980. Hambourg.
- DOLLA Noël, Restructuration spatiale n°5, 1980, Nice.
- DROZDIK Orshi, I Try to Be Transparent, 1980. Factory 77, Toronto.
Orshi Drozdik (1946, Hongrie, USA) has been working with normative representations of female body as a nude model and in nude drawings since she was an art student at the University of Fine Arts in Budapest in the 1970s. She analyses the patriarchal structures in the socialist system of art, which are contradictory to sociaslism’s promise of equality between the sexes. Drozdik left Hungary in 1978, working first in the Netherlands then in Canada. She later moved to New York.
In this video documenting a live performance, we see Drozdik’s naked body suspended from the ceiling above pages from art history books littering the floor. ‘The title of the show and the (…) props on the ground insist on the artist’s declarative struggle to be transparent to the history of art and the precepts of Western knowledge.
Orshi Drozdik performance titled: « I Try To Be Transparent (To Art History)
was performed at Factory 77, Toronto, 77 Mowat street. The performance was about 1 hour long in complete silence. The audience was awaiting for my body to became transparent. From the gallery sealing I had suspended about 250 x 140 cm plexiglass and a mirror above, in about 3 meter distance from the floor. I placed my naked body on the plexiglass platform and I did no moved at all. I was waiting to be transparent. My body was visible to the audience only from the mirror. Below my body, on the floor I had pages of art history books. I placed my body above the art history pages naked, as I (as a woman) was represented on its pages. On the floor was a video camera on tripod, connected to a screen and recording the performance. The audience could see the performance, not only from the mirror, but from the screen. I felt that time, as a woman artist, with woman body, the only possibility was for me to be visible, if I make an attempt to be transparent to art history. In other word, through transparency I projecting myself into the pages of art history.’
- DUNCAN John, Blind Date, 1980. Californie.
- ELTIT Diamela, Zona de dolor I-Maipu, 1980. Santiago. Chili.
Diamela Eltit (1949, Chili) is a writer and co-founder of the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA), an interdisciplinary Chilean activist collective which used performance strategies to oppose Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990) during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her politically charged works examine issues of power, oppression, violence, feminity, and corporeality in Chilean society by combining literature ans performance, action art and video documentation, urban intervention and poetry. Eltit was awarded a Guggenheim Fellow-ship in 1985 and became the Chilean cultural attaché to Mexico from 1990 to 1994.
In the performance Maipu, Eltit cut and burned her arms and legs inside a brothel while reading aloud part of her first novel Lumperica, which describes a female character experiencing what she is performing. After the reading, Eltit washed the pavement in front of the Brothel. This individual act of voluntary pain had a powerful in a country collectively marked by the horror of Pinochet’s violence.
- FALLET Geneviève, Tanzperformance, années 80. Suisse.
- FILLIOU Robert, Artist in Space Project, 1980 (fluxus)
- FOX Terry, A Candle for A. W., 1980, Kunstmuseum, Bern.
- FOX Terry, Blind Forces, 1980, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.
- FOX Terry, Cena, Kunsthalle, Basel.
- FOX Terry, Porte, 1980, Canibus, Lyon.
- FINN-KELCEY Rose, Mind the Gap, 1980. (vidéo-installation-performance) Londres et NYC.
- GARRARD Rose, Beyond Still Life, 1980 (vidéo-installation-performance) Londres et NYC.
- GAULKE Cheri, Broken Shoes, 1980.
- GAULKE Cheri et ANGELO Nancy, The Passion, 1980.
- GEIGER Anna Bella, Bu Ro Cra Cia, 1980.
Anna Bella Geiger (1933, Brésil) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Her influential oeuvre is characterised by the use of language and different media, rangin from painting, drawing, photography, photoengraving and montage to (performative) video. Since the 1960s she has explored the relationship between body, space and (national) territory often extending ‘the language of maps and cosmological charts… to the ‘geography’ of the human body. The artist has called that confluence ‘anthropo-morphic cartography.’ (Marek Bartelik). Anna Bella Geiger is part of a generation, who experienced Brazilian dictatorship and economic hardship, which influenced her artistic language, being poetic and decisively political at the same time.
BU RO CRA CIA deals with art and the role of artists in times of military dictatorship, as the first shot that slowly focuses on the words sobre a arte suggests. Another single words, spelled by four smiling women asking spectators to repeat it, says it all: BU RO CRA CIA. Performers: Teresa Corçao, Anna Bella Geiger, Noni Geiger, Paula Nogueira, Camera: Davi Geiger.
- GERZ Jochen, Purple Cross for Absent now, 1980.
- JENKINS Ulysses, Columbus Day. A Doggerel, 1980.
- JONES Joe, Concert for children in Asolo, 1980 (fluxus)
- JUD Anne, Sommerpause, 1980.
Anne Jud (1953, Switzerland, Germany, USA) is an object and action artist. Her hallmark is the one dollar ($1) bill, which she consistently uses in objects and design pieces since the 1970s. After founding the Galerie am Moritzplace in 1977 she took part in numerous exhibitions with the Jungen Wilden and staged several performances. Her last performances in Berlin before she moved to the USA was the column installation ‘‘Nature Morte’’ (1993), a performance about the timelessness of nature. Her roots as a set designer at the Schaubühne theatre in Berlin can be seen in her mise-en-scènes, and she often cooperates with other artists, such as Ulrike Ottinger and Rosa von Praunheim. She lives with her family on a farm with a vineyard close to Santa Barbara, USA, since 1994. Her artistic fascination for the dollar ($) continues to this day.
In the mid 1970s, Anne Jud lived in West Berlin in the Kreuzberg district, an area with a unique mix of immigrants, artists, ‘downshifters’ and students from West Berlin. In her performance Sommerpause (Summer Break) she spent 24 hours in a kind of ‘public living’ space on a white sofa on Naunynstrasse (she originally planned this performance to last one week, but it had to be cancelled prematurely after she was physically assaulted by people walking by. Sommerpause refers to one of her early performance from 1979, in which she spent a night locked up with a camera in the legendary music hall SO36. She staged a moving sequence in the hall, using a self-made design as a stage. During her wild years in Kreuzberg, the artist was interested in everyday actions as an aesthetic experience.
- JÜRGENSSEN Birgit, Gladiatorin, 1980.
- KIPPER KIDS, Food is the Medium, 1980. Lace Archive.
- KIPPER KIDS, Italian Tickled Onions, 1980, Saletta Gramsci, Pistoia.
- KLAUKE Jürgen, Absolute-Windstille, 1980-81.
- KLAUKE Jürgen, Formalisierung der Langeweile, 1980-81 (action-film).
- KLAUKE Jürgen, Formalisierung der Langeweile-Pistole, 1980-81.
- KOS Paul, Ramp, 1980. Berkeley University Art Museum.
- KUTSCHER Vollrad, Der weisse Traum, 1980.
- LADIK Katalin, Poemim (Poemask), 1980.
Katalin Ladik (1942, Serbia) performs her artistic work on the radio, in the theatre and, finally, in the world of visual art. A writer of poems, she transfers poetic language to other filds of expression, suc as visual poetry, performance, Mail art and sound art. Her work is bound to feminist matters in Eastern Europe and reflects the personal, social and existential difficulties that female artists must face. Recurrent dual structures and the use of sexually ambiguous figures (androgynes and angels) as well as gender-neutralising elements inhabit her work, which occasionally acquires Shamanic overtones and integrates therapeutic mechanisms of liberation.
This video comprises short actions carried out by the artist in front of the camera. The deformation of her face through a glass in the first sequence leads to a series of alterations and modifications of sounds which the artist produces in the following actions. The impossibility of expressing herself through language or in an unexpected way not appropriate to the body emitting the sounds and noises constitutes the fundamental duality of this work.
- MARIONI Tom, Trois dessins, Berlin. 1980.
- MEALLI Marzia, 1980, Pistoia.
- MOL Kees, Live to the Bottom (on the Ceiling), 1980. Hanovre.
- MOTI Mizrahi, Facing the town, 1980.
- NIESLONY Boris, Ein Herz schlagen, schlagen hören, 1980.
- NIESLONY Boris, Eine Flasche Wodka trinken, 1980.
- NIESLONY Boris & RIESS Carola, Traum, 1980.
- NITSCH Hermann, 80th Action, 1980. Prinzendorf. Autriche (actionnisme)
- O’GRADY Lorraine, Melle Bourgeoise Noire, 1980-83.
Lorraine O’Grady (1934, USA) is an artist and critic whose installations, performances and text address issues of Diaspora, hybridity and black female subjectivity. She came to art late, making her first artworks in 1980 after working as a literary translator and rock critic. Ultimately her broad background contributes to a distanced and critical view of the art world and to a broadly interdisciplinary approach to making art.
Melle Bourgeoise Noire is the persona of a raging beauty queen created by Lorraine O’Grady in 1980 to protest the still largely segregated New York art scene. Her race, class and gender critique not only deconstructs black bourgeois constructs of feminity and high art, but also lays bare the internalized repressions and external oppressions of blacks. Wearing a white gown and cape made of 360 white gloves, she beat herself with ‘‘whip-that-made-plantations-move’’ and shouted out protest poems written for the occasion, with punch lines such as ‘‘BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!’’ and ‘‘NOW IS THE TIME FOR AN INVASION!’’
– The first time Melle Bourgeoise Noire invaded an art opening was at Just Above Midtown Gallery, NYC, the black avant-garde gallery, in June 1980. The invasion was her response to the Afro-American abstract art that she perceived as tame and well-behaved: ‘‘art whith white gloves on’’. Her next invasion was at the opening of Persona, a 1981 exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. The exhition featured nine artists using personas in their work. Melle Bourgeoise Noire called it ‘‘The Nine White Personae Show.’’ When invited to give the outreach lectures to schoolkids for the show, she replied, ‘‘Let’s talk after the opening.’’ After the performance, she was dis-invited from doing outreach activities.
– Melle Bourgeoise Noire, O’Grady’s first public performance remains the artist’s best known work. The persona first appeared in 1980 under the Futurist dictum that art has the power to change the world and was in part created as a critique of the racial apartheid still prevailing in the mainstream art world. Wearing a costume made of 180 pairs of white gloves from Manhattan thrift shops and carrying a white cat-o-nine-tails made of sail rope from a seaport store and studded with white chrysanthemums, Melle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle-Class) 1955 was an equal-opportunity critic. She gave timid black artists and thoughtless white institutions each a ‘‘piece of her mind.’’ Her first invasion of an art opening unannounced was of Just Above Midtown, the black avanr-garde gallery. Her second was of the recently opened New Museum of Contemporary Art. But beyond her guerilla invasions of art spaces, Melle Bourgeoise Noire was a state of mind. Even when not in costume and when using her own name, the political aspect of O’Grady’s art would be under her inspiration for a four-year period. Melle Bourgeoise Noire ‘‘events’’ were surreptitiously indicated when O’Grady pinned white gloves to her clothing. Though the performances were a ‘‘failure’’ -– the art world would not become meaningful integrated until the Adrian Piper and David Hammons exhibit of 1988-1989 – Melle Bourgeoise Noire had a mythic aftermath. Two images, of her beating herself with the whip and of her shouting the poem, were widely reproduced without an explanatory context, becoming empty signifiers that added to the mystification and misunderstanding surrounding the work. But then in the mid-90s, the costume was purchased by Peter and Eileen Norton. And finally, in 2007, it was positioned as an entry point to Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first-ever museum exhibit of the originating period of feminist art.
– Melle Bourgeoise Noire, Performance Synopsis. (© Lorraine O’Grady)
O’Grady posted this brief synopsis of the performance and its background on the Wack! exhibit’s excellent website. Significantly, she also posted 13 largely unknown photos-with-captions documenting the performance, which historically had been victim to two iconic. Lacking a full context, they had become empty signifiers.
Melle Bourgeoise Noire first won her title in 1955. After 25 years of maintaining a lady-like silence, in 1980 she began invading art openings to give people a piece of her mind.
She wore a gown and cape made of 180 pairs of white gloves, 360 gloves in all. Here is a brief version of Melle Bourgeoise Noire’s ‘‘backstory,’’ taken from the signage for the Wadsworth Atheneum installation of the performance.
On the Silver Jubilee of her coronation in Cayenne, the capital of Guyane, Melle Bourgeoise Noire (internationale), who could still fit into her coronation gown and cape of 360 white gloves, celebrated by invading the New York art world. During her anniversary tournée, she attended several openings unannounced: white all eyes were on her, she smiled, distributed four dozen white chrysanthemums and removed her cape. With the whip-that-made-plantations-move, she applied 100 lashes to her bare back, then shouted out an occasional poem.
The first time Melle Bourgeoise Noire invaded an art opening was at Just Above Midtown/Downtown, the black avant-garde gallery, in June 1980. Just Above Midtown (JAM) had just inaugurated a new space in Tribeca. The invasion was her response to the tame, well-behaved abstract art that had recently appeared in the ‘‘Afro American Abstraction’’ show at PS1, an exhibit to which JAM has contributed a majority of artists.
The ‘‘occasional poem’’ she shouted at the JAM opening was:
THAT’S ENOUGH!
No more boot-licking…
No more ass-kissing…
No more buttering-up…
No more pos…turing
of super-ass…imilates
BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!!!
Her next invasion was the New Museum, at the opening ot the ‘‘Persona’’ show in September 1981. The exhibit included nine artists using personas in their work. Melle Bourgeoise Noire called it ‘‘The Nine White Personae Show.’’ When invited to give the outreach lectures to schoolkids for the show, she’d replied, ‘‘Let’s talf after the opening.’’
The poem shouted on the occasion of the New Museum’s Persona opening was:
WAIT
wait in your alternate/alternate spaces
spitted on fish hooks of hope
be polite wait to be discovered
be proud be independent
tongues cauterized at
openings no one attends
stay in your place
after all, art is
only for art’s sake
THAT’S ENOUGH don’t you know
sleeping beauty needs
more than a kiss to awake
now is the time for an INVASION
After opening, she was dis-invited from giving the outreach lectures to schoolkids.
– Lorraine O’Grady Melle Bourgeoise Noire 1955, Just Above Midtown/Downtown NYC, New York, June 5, 1980, Published in ‘‘Artists Chronicle,’’ High Performance #13, vol. 4, no.2, Summer 1981, p.56:
Her first submission to a performance art journal was a description of Melle Bourgeoise Noire’s earliest appearance, a guerilla action at Just Above Midtown, the country’s only black avant-garde gallery.
Twenty-Fifth of the international beauty pageant held in Cayenne, French Guyana, June 5, 1955. The crown of ‘‘Melle Bourgeoise Noire 1955’’ awarded to Miss Black Bourgeoise of Boston, MA.
Cast: LORRAINE O’GRADY – playing Melle Bourgeoise Noire 1955 on the 25th Anniversary of her coronation. Ms. O’Grady is wearing her crown, her coronation gown and cape (together made of 180 pairs of white gloves), and a white cat-o-nine-tails studded with white chrysanthemums as her bouquet.
DR. EDWARD B. ALLEN – playing the Master of Ceremonies. Dr. Allens, a dentist from Stamford, CT, and Ms. O’Grady’s brother-in-law, plays tennis with Bert Parks (‘‘He can’t play worth shit.’’) Dr. Allen has borrowed a tuxedo jacket from Bert Parks* especially for this occasion.’’ (* Bert Parks was best known as the legendary host (1955-1979) of the annual Miss American Pageant telecast)
PHOTOGRAPHERS, VIDEO CAMERAMEN, DISCO BAND, and GUESTS at the opening of the Just Above Midtown/Downtown gallery – playing the court and subjects attending Melle Bourgeoise Noire’s Silver Jubilee.
Melle Bourgeoise Noire and her Master of Ceremonies arrive for her 25th Anniversary celebration at precisely 9:00 p.m. They have difficulty entering (their names having been omitted from the guest list at the door). After a few peremptory commands by Melle Bourgeoise Noire, they are let in, passing through the tight pink maze especially designed by artist David Hammons and featuring three salt fish hanging from hooks.
At last they can greet the crowds awaiting them. Oohs and aahs on all sides for Melle Bourgeoise Noire’gown. After all these years, it still fits.
She smiles, shes smiles, she smiles. Melle Bourgeoise Noire has lost none of the charm that originally won her her crown.
Each of her nine tails has tree white chrysanthemums, which she gives to the subjects one at a time as she says, while smiling brightly, ‘‘Won’t you help me lighten my heavy bouquet?’’ She moves gradually around the room.
Photographers and videomen are having a field day. Melle Bourgeoise Noire, in her 180 pairs of white gloves, white cat-o-nine-tails, and rhinestone and seedpearl crown, is very photogenic. Unreluctantly, she obliges them.
But Melle Bourgeoise Noire has had a change of heart between 1955 and 1980. She had come to a conclusion. As the band goes on its break, she discreetly retires. All her flowers have been given away, and now she removes her cape, handing it to her Master of Ceremonies. She is wearing a backless, white glove gown. Her Master of Ceremonies, by prearranged signal, hands her a pair of above-the-elbow gloves, which she proceeds to put on.
Back and forth she paces, like a caged lion and trainer all in one. She beats herself with the whip.
All these years she has been waiting for this 25th Anniversary to give her subjects her final conclusion. And stalking back and forth in front of the art in this 50%-black gallery, beating herself with greater and greater frenzy, suddenly she stops.
Cayenne, where she was crowned so many years ago, is not just the other side of nowhere. It is the birthplace of the great mulatto poet Leon Damas, who knew so many things before she did. Tonight she will speak through him. Of course, she will make her own additions.
THAT’S ENOUGH!
No more boot-licking…
No more ass-kissing…
No more buttering-up…
No more pos…turing
of super-ass…imilates
BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!!!
Then she quickly exists, leaving the court to think what it will. © Lorraine O’Grady
– Melle Bourgeoise Noire and Feminism, statement recorded for the ‘‘WACK! Art and the feminim Revolution’’ cell phone tour, February 2007. Transcript later published in Artlies 54, summer 2007. © Lorraine O’Grady, 2007:
For WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first-ever museum exhibit of feminist art, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., O’Grady was asked to record an audio statement for the cell-phone tour to explain how her piece related to the show»s theme.
‘‘Question: How does the work Melle Bourgeoise Noire relate to art and the feminist revolution?
‘‘Answer: Melle Bourgeoise Noire is French for Miss Black Bourgeoise. The back story I created for her was that she’d won the title in a worldwide event held in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana. Cayenne may have been a backwater, but the black bourgeois condition was international! In 1955, the year she won her crown, all around the world, in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC, there were young women just like her.
Melle Bourgeoise Noire was a critical piece, located at the nexus of race, class, and gender. In 1980, when I created it, there were no role models in white feminist art for a tri-partite critique, or at least none that I was aware of. That era’s feminism seemed concerned exclusively with gender. Second-wave feminism was basically a white bourgeois construction that seemed to operate as though unconscious either that it was white or that it was middle-class. It was a time when white feminists could still believe that their definitions of sexual liberation and professional advancement applied identity to all women… and that they could speak for all women. In that era, even though black feminists may have admired the energy, even the delirium, of white feminist rhetoric, not to mention the bravery of many of its actions, they still felt alienated by and even a bit derisive toward it.
Still, the fact is, black feminism was itself a middle-class construction. But the middle-class it derived from was one in which women, however well-educated, did not have the luxury of a Betty Friedan-style feminine mystique. Even black Ivy League women married to doctors had to, or chose to, work. Since the end of slavery… given that blacks for the most part earned half of what whites did… middle-class lifestyles had been supported by families with two jobs. Black women were post-modernist avant la lettre.
It’s true that black bourgeois middle-class women worldwide were sexually repressed in this era. What else could they be when they were defined by their surrounding cultures as the universal prostitutes? They were desperate for respect. In 1980, black avant-garde art, another middle-class construction, was equally repressed. THAT’s why Melle Bourgeoise Noire covered herself in white gloves, a symbol of internal repression. THAT’s why she took up the whip-that-made-plantations-move, the sign of external oppression, and beat herself with it. Drop that lady-like mask! Forget that self-controlled abstract art! Stop trying to be acceptable so you’ll get an invitation to the party!
The key moment of Melle Bourgeoise Noire’s guerrilla invasions of art galleries was when she would throw down the whip and shout out her poems. They had punch lines, on the one hand, ‘‘BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!’’ And on the other, ‘‘NOW IS THE TIME FOR INVASION!’’
But Melle Bourgeoise Noire was a kamikaze performance, really. In 1980-81, noone was listening. It wouldn’t be until 1988-89 that black artists were finally invited to the party… when Adrian Piper and David Hammons received their first mainstream exhibits. And a few years that, second-wave feminism would start becoming third-wave. Oh, well.
- ORLAN, MesuRage d’institutions et des rues : Place Saint-Lambert, Liège, 1980.
One of her earlier works is the series Actions ORLAN-Corps: MesuRages d’institutions et des rues, in which she uses her body to measure numerous public spaces, streets and cultural institutions in Paris, such as the Centre Pompidou. In MesuRage de la Place Saint-Lambert, Liège (1980), she uses a section of the large Saint-Lambert Square in the historical centre of Liège which has just been cleared by construction as a stage for her performance. As in her previous actions, she wears a white garment of cloth from her trousseau, which she washes in front of the audience at the end of her performance. In this ritualistic act of measuring public space and incripbing the female body onto it, ORLAN’s body (an ‘ORLAN-corps’) becomes the standard unit of measurement. The dictum of man as the measure of all things, as found in the teaching of the ancient architect Vitruvius and illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci in his famous drawing of the Vitruvian man, is challenged by this radical, subjective and feminist interpretation.
- PACQUÉE Ria, Rückkehr Unerwünscht Jazz Bilzen, 1980.
- PACQUÉE Ria, The Corner, 1980, Paris;
- PARTUM Ewa, Self-Identification, 1980.
- PINDELL Howardena, Free, White and 21, 1980. (vidéo)
After studying painting in Boston and at Yale, Howardena Pindell mostly created abstract paintings and paper collages. Her radical formalism went against the expectations of the art world, where African-American artists were expected to produce primitivist art. In the late 1970s, social and political issues like racism and sexism began to take on a more central role in Pindell’s work. Initially, Pindell was involved with the feminist art movement in the US, but eventually became disillusioned and criticised the movement, as it, too, generally gave priority to white women. Howardena Pindell is a professor at Stony Brook in New York.
It is this conflict within the feminist movement that Howardena Pindell deals with in this video, in which she appears as bot as a black and a white woman. Pindell stages her experiences of the everyday racism she has to contend with as a black woman, even in seemingly liberal circles.
- SAPIEN Darryl, Hero, 1980-81. Videotape.
Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport, Ca. Victoria Theater, San Francisco, Ca., with Menno Meyjes, Saun Ellis, and J. E. Freeman. « Hero » explored aspects of the ‘hero myth’ in popular and archétypal forms. The performance explored the meanings of maleness and machismo as its two protagonists searched for a path to manhood encountering contemporary stereotypes and archetypal role models ; superheroes and culture heroes. Throughout the performance they were guided by a tutelary female goddess who directs, advises, and criticizes them alon the way.
- SKIPITARES Theodora, Skysaver, 8-11-1980, Galerie AK-Francfort, photo Christian Hanussek.
- SMITH Barbara T., Untitled. Hunger Strike, 1980.
- TEHCHING Hsieh, One Year Performance, 1980-81 (cf. 1978).
- VAL & ANTAL, In Deceptive Art Performance, 1980.
- VAUTIER Ben, Zen for Head, 1980 (reprise de l’action de Paik).
- WARPECHOWSKI Zbigniev, Die Hand durch einen Nagel gedrückt, 1980. Lodz.