May 23, 2019

Doutoramento em Arte Contemporânea

António Olaio

The first public demonstrations of Performance Art in Portugal, as we have confirmed, emerged in the context of the "Perspectiva 74", a display held in February 1974, in Oporto. These artistic interventions were for years at the base of heated debates and, by prompting questioning, they represented a powerful stimulus to bring closer the utopic intellectuals. Loved by ones and hated by many others, the performance art was considered by the art critic Egídio Álvaro, along with the Surrealism and the Neo-realism, one of the most important proposals of the portuguese art in the 20th century. It has since set up a political and social alternative protest movement of the counterculture opposed to the normative processes of the dominant culture. Our approach is not reassuring because the transformations taking place, which we call global screenization, are challenging and threaten to change so radically human life conditions as we know them and the social environment that they escape the artificious descriptions which hold valorization presumptions anticipating radiant futures. In an ecological thinking perspective, performance art takes on a responsability regarding aspects of life which do not yet exist. Such example in its whole and in the context of the every day life becomes an effective antidote against elitism. With regard to the art of performance, the most recent practices of presentation and preservation of contemporary art in the museological context have turned to the reconstitution of the art of performance, by definition a single event, and methods used by the repétition which call for the theatrelization (staging) of the performance art space, subverting the creative process of this action and body art. The replication strategies (reperformance) of this ephemeral art produce an affective answer for the programming of the performance art. In contemporary art, as in many other fields, in real time, the action art must intervene in order to propose to people the fulfilment of the utopic space of performance art.

KEYWORDS: Performance art, Re-performance, Action art, Live art, Egídio Álvaro