زن در فرهنگ و هنر (Dec 2019)
A study on Effective Factors in Body Use among the Works of Performance and Environment Artists: The Case of Three Woman Artists
Abstract
Contemporary era has witnessed the emergence of various thoughts which cause many styles and methods become popular based on artists’ viewpoints. In fact, it could be said that a distinct thinking and point of view has come to existence for each artist as one of the challenges of contemporary art era. Many male and female artists have applied their own bodies as the core medium in offering their works in majority of contemporary art movements such as environmental art, performance art, earth art and so on. Among these artists there are a handful of females who mainly focus on the use of their body. The present research proceeds to the works of three woman artists who are active in the fields of “performance art” and “environmental art”. Ana Mendieta, Karin Van der Molen, and Tara Goudarzi, the artists selected for this study, applied their feminine bodies as the main medium to create their artworks in nature. The general objective of this research is investigating effective factors (such as culture, religion, and geography) in appearing similarities and differences in the manner of environmental artists use and offer their body in installations and performances compared with the presence or the role of body in works of performance artists. These are the questions of present research: What similarities and differences are seen between the works of study case artists in respect of presenting the body in nature. How the element of body is used in the work of study case artists? The research is carried out to answer these questions in descriptive-analytic method and the data are also collected in library and field study methods (interview and questionnaire). To respond the research questions, descriptive and analytic research methods are applied and the data are collected through library and field study. Along with research objectives interviews and questionnaires are conducted as well. Interviews and questionnaires are also conducted in consistency with research objectives. Data analysis is done in qualitative and content analysis methods. Findings indicate that body is used in works of all three artists as an object and plays the role of the main medium, but cultural, geographic, and specifically religious beliefs had an essential effect in different symbolic offering ways of their art-works. Unlike Mendieta, Goudarzi and Van der Molen used their bodies in the works implicitly, while presence of clothing in Mendieta’s protesting works would definitely reduce the significance of the subjects she objected to, such as the use of feminine body, when her contemporary feministic concerns and movements in protesting against instrumentalizing woman body had made a lot of noise. In addition, unlike Van der Molen and Goudarzi, besides focusing on nudity, Mendieta used blood element in a lot of her works that had its roots in protesting against religious issues based on which the artist is grown up. The results also show that although these three artists emerged in different time, geographic, and religious conditions, common womanish thoughts and the concern of offering their art through body in the nature is clear in their works, but in totally different expression ways. The difference is that Mendieta unlike Goudarzi and Van der Molen, in her performances mostly try to avoid the presence of any distracting factor between her body and nature, even as clothing items that could have direct impact on the audience and prevent them from focusing on artist’s overt action in nature.
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