Eva Weaver

Eva Weaver is orginally from Germany and is now based in Brighton. She has been working in performance since 2000. Funny, dark and highly visual, her performances concern issues of cross-cultural identity and belonging, historical trauma and stereotyping. Her work has been shaped by her cultural heritage, experience as an Art Therapist, reasearch into theBurlesque, Grotesque and Shamanic and by mentoring and training support from Helen Paris, Rose English, Silke Mansholt, Lois Weaver, Stacy Makishi, Guillermo Gomez Pena and others.

Eva holds an MA in Performance from Queen Mary University.Artist Statement



Artist Statement

Born in Germany, I have been living and working in the UK since 1995. I have been involved in performance for the past eight years, creating challenging yet funny and poetic performances, which touch on a broad register of emotions.


My work is concerned with issues of cross-cultural identity, belonging, historical trauma and stereotyping and the resulting performances, both time-based and durational, are highly visual, richly layered and visceral with an emphasis on the body as site. Sometimes created for a particular site, my performances include elements of physical action, bilingual text, myth and autobiographical narrative, song, video, as well as sculpting of objects and costumes from materials such as bread, paper, bones and wool.





My work has been influenced and inspired by varies sources: Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body in exploring possibilities of transgression; research into the Burlesque; experimentation with ‘hybridisation’ as utilised by Guillermo Gomez-Pena; traditional myths and archetypes and the question of how they can be translated into a contemporary artistic language, as well as, importantly, my own shamanic practice.





I am interested in the traces left at the end of the performance, which contain a tangible essence of what has happened here - this ‘aftermess’, often visually striking and disturbing, invites the audience to further reflect on the piece in the absence of the performer.

Skeleton Woman- a Public Performance Ritual 2002‘SKELETON WOMAN’ is a solo-performance and installation concerning death, transformation and healing through the careful and compassionate attending to bones. It evokes questions about how we deal with the wounds of our personal, national and collective trauma and histories and whether it is possible to recover, reconcile, heal and create dialogue in the face of those wounds.


The performance touches on mythical, spiritual, shamanic, psychological and historical layers and the theme of death is considered in terms of corporeality and mortality, the cyclical nature of life and death, wounds left by historical trauma and the possibility for transformation. Resonance can be found in the Jewish Holocaust and the mass murder of women as witches during the European witch-hunts, as well as more recent atrocities.


Performed over five days at Fields Gallery,


Brick lane, London


Includes live action, sound, singing and poetry.









The five days resonate with themes of the tale 'Skeleton Woman', an Inuit story :


Day 1: EXCAVATION and CLEANSING


The bones of national and personal trauma are dug up from the earth. These scattered bones are fragments, which hold testimony and memories. They are cleaned and laid bare. Excavated their stories are remembered and grieved.





Day 2: REMEMBERING and RECREATING


Through the process of casting and recreating of the bones by taking plaster casts from the ‘original’ fibreglass bones, the process of remembering is deepened, the bones are attended to and are being re-created.





Day 3: DISENTANGLING, ASSEMBLING and RECOVERING


The bones are recovered, symbolically and literally by wrapping them with layers of words, ripped from my own writing. The bones give testimony of their stories. The bones are assembled , remembered and interwoven.





Day 4: SINGING BACK FLESH ONTO THE BONES


‘Flesh is sung back onto the bones’, as in the story of ‘Skeleton Woman’. The bones are further covered with several layers of clothing ripped from the dresses I am wearing, continuing the process of recovering.





Day 5: TRANSFORMATION


Roses carry the hope for healing and dialogue beyond the bones. Many roses are woven around the bones and fill the body of ‘Skeleton Woman’. The performance ends by myself resting with Skeleton Woman.

Eva Weaver 'Skeleton Woman - a public performance ritual'

What is Performance Art? Is this really how the general public see performance art?

Suffragettes "invented performance art!" A micro lecture by Leslie Hill which argues that suffragettes invented performance art. ...

What is the difference between ritual and performance?

What is the difference between ritual and performance, or is there no difference>
NOTES AND IDEAS ABOUT RITUAL AND PERFORMANCE,

Anthropologists and artists have always been interested in ritual and ceremony for what they reveal about societies and cultures. As symbolic action, rituals can be explored not only for their meanings but also for the effects they have on the lives of the participants.
Rituals and ceremonies are social events which have the power to effect meaningful transformations, coming of age ceremonies, weddings, and birthdays are just some of the examples; however are these actions the same as performance art and when does the notion of ritual which includes the patterned interactions of everyday life, such as etiquette and the performance of ordinary daily roles, have the same meanings as performance art. Do these cultural performances, have the same role as the performance connected with art and the theatre. It seems in conventional history of the theatre there is a dominance of text over performance, and even in performance art there have been certain barriers such as the passive audience
Performance art is where an active process is confined to an audience within a structured environment, where the artist is communicating theory, understanding, and to continually try and shape a conversation in a way that provides the audience and the artist with the opportunities to grow and learn. It seems that the performance is an essentially interpretive activity whose meaning is depended on the artist and how they perceive the world.
The distinction I see between performance and ritual is that often ritual suppress risk by wrapping up the cultural performance of a ritual within the expectation that the ritual will be meaningful and conform to the society and that the meaning is derived from the history of the ritual. Where performance art uses the meaning of the piece to form the basis of the performance of it. Performance art is about an action which is shown as an expression of an idea or a world view in an art, which is rooted in human culture. I have observed that performance art may be made of several acts which unlike theatre can have real consequences (wounds, or even death). Bakhtin suggests that the artist lives through his or her personal myths in front of the audience. He said that it is the artist’s experience which counts. He sugests, that “performance” appears to be the continuation of semiotics by other means.
Ritual is usually an interactive experience where participants are both active and know what is involved within the roles allotted them. Most rituals but not all of them, are a collection of residual sacramental enthusiasm which society follow as a complicated cultural script which do included rituals of betrothals and other special events. These cultural scripts highlight the need of society to perform to cultural expectations. Enacting this script allows the person to derive meaning from the ritual itself. While making each occasion simultaneously traditional and unique. In other words, people attempt to follow the core script while adjusting peripheral aspects to their own tastes. These rituals entail ritualized social practices that mobilize domains of material objects, visual images and written text. They reinforce and result in a series of attitudes and structural features, ingrained in our modern culture.
Performance art usually is intended to illustrate or refer to something beyond the artist’s immediate control. A grander ideal, for instance, a struggle, and often explosive, dramatic gestures may be used to intend their symbolic significance.
Public ritual has traditionally been the province of religion and this is the reason why ritual leans itself to performance art as rituals are usefully timed, scripted and specially staged for all involved. Using ritual in the performance gives the art a symbolic meaning using rituals you are engaging the viewer with codes or triggers which they can connect with, but these rituals are being used as tactics to make a point, challenging or mimicking what occurs during a social ritual rather than continuing to express or reinforce a cultural meaning and tradition which is imbedded with society and has rules and indications for how society structures the lives of its people.
Ritualized moments consist of people moving in accord with cultural scripts. The study of rituals often reveals that these actions be directly linked to the social and cultural values that people implicitly and explicitly place on their country, ancestry, religion, and ability to perform and teach performance. In our society, knowledge is passed from a teacher to a student, mother/father to child, a transcendental exchange of wisdom and talent occurs, expressly at the will of the informer. This is how social interactions can be viewed as performance.
Ritual is a performance that is representative of the social interactions common to culture and society. Reinforcing the ideal that ritual serves as forms of communication that endorse group cohesion Performance relies on the emotional connection of the audience to create the conditions for projecting cultural meaning from performance to audience, the goals of performance art remains the same as the ambient of a ritual it stands or falls on the ability to produce psychological identification and cultural extension

Elisabeth Jappe in Performance, Ritual, Prozess states that, “Action as the expression of an idea or a world view in an act, is rooted in human culture. This act may be sacral like ritual or profane like the social critique of Diogenes who searched for a reasonable man with a lantern in his hands in Athens in broad daylight. Well then, performance art and performance in a narrow sense is ready to draw from ritual (the most prominent example to this might be Joseph Beuys) yet we should always be aware of the difference; while the form of ritual is essentially defined (it must be produced the same way every time), performance is never carried out as it was before. The notion of process has made its way into art through action painting and happening intending to attack the traditional idea which defined the aim of art as the creation of a product. Thus process is a method of art, a technique, which has become central with Expanded Performance. Process and ritual form two different aspects of Performance Art. On gaining new content, they are, from time to time, integrated into performance and enrich it with fresh meanings.”

Think i have gone round in circles, not sure if i am making sense what do you think?

Happy to Meet You: An Introduction to Relational Art

This is an interesting web site which is looking at a growing number of contemporary artists who use performative and interactive techniques that rely on the responses of others: pedestrians, shoppers, browsers—the casual observer-turned-participants.

It has a number of links to other webs which i have not had time to explore yet.



http://place.unm.edu/relational_art.html

Sorry but you will have to copy and paste the link as it will not let me link it

to add videos or clips

Hi Chris and Donna
This information is for clips which are on youtube. You need to open your link on youtube. When u have done this you will find on the right hand side of the clip, will be a light blue box, which has two white boxes contained within in, one is url address and the other is the embed address, you need to highlight the embed address, copy and then go back to the blog and either in new post or comment paste the embed address. If you are in comment box you cannot write a comment and paste an embed address as well, you can only do one of these things. hope that this makes sense,
Good luck, Sharon

The art of acting out is one that is momentary is context, with new age media, such as Internet and video being vital to the documentation and legacy of the work and the artist. I have been interested in artists that push physical boundaries to the limit. So i thought that this was as good a place to start as any. Why do i like this type of work? Why do i like to see people possibly hurt themselves? 

Artists like Bas Jan Ader and Chris Burden took this to an extreme in the 70's and i will explore their work in later blogs. For this post i want to look at why i like this work. Now in today's society these actions are familiar with shows You've been Framed and the more extreme Jackass on MTV making these actions funny and in some cases banal.

YouTube - Chris Burden "Shoot"

YouTube - Jackass self defence

So what is the difference between Burdan's work and the pain that Johnny Knoxville puts himself through getting shot with a taser gun. They are both acts of putting the body under pain, so where is the difference between the two (and the performance artists of today). Burden earned no money from his work, where as Knoxville has earned good money off of his stunts. Burdens film has been seen by very few people where as Knoxville is repeated on MTV and seen by millions. So on both of these things knoxville is the more successful "artist". The difference i see between the two is the context that they are filmed and shown in. Burdens is shot in an art space, he is with two other people, the gunman and the camera operator. This adds to the isolation of the artist, his reaction is also one the puts it in stark contrast to Knoxville. Burden looks stunned, he shows little emotion  and immediately walks out of shot, presumably to seek medical attention, which cost him more than he actually earned from the piece. In stark contrast Knoxville and his friends are laughing about the pain caused to their friend and inflect more pain, he himself is laughing about the pain. The constant flow of the Jaskass show repeats many gags in slightly different ways becoming not about the pain that the person is going through but the reaction to the people watching the event, either friend to the show or non conforming passer by.

It is the context that these two pieces of film are shown and held in that keep them from crossing contextual paths. It is the history of the artists that holds them apart, the education within an art institution for burden, the paths they cross, networks, the way they considered their own work. All these things contribute to holding Burdens as art and Knoxvilles Jackass as pop culture.

Emma Kay

Emma Kay's work is provocative examining text-based works looking at the subjective nature of knowledge and memory. She reflects upon the systems we use to perceive, store and access bodies of knowledge. She states when producing her work, it is a performance and this is an important part of producing her art. Her performances are about the spontaneous demonstration of knowledge, she incorporates various feats of memorization into her art. She feels that having the viewer reading her text makes the viewer part of the performance as well.

'The Bible from Memory which was produced in 1997 is a text work in which Emma Kay rewrote the Bible from memory in her own words, without recourse to the original. Her text, consists of about 7,500 words, is set out in six columns resembling a page from an authorised version of the Bible. She designed the typeface to match the original text. The Bible as retold by Emma Kay is presented on a a single page only slightly bigger than A4. The text is printed in tiny 5.6-point type and requires effort by the viewer to read it. From a distance it looks like abstracted blocks of lined patterning. It was printed by offset lithography, which involves the transfer of an inked image onto an intermediary roller and then to the paper. This is the technique most commonly used in the commercial printing world. The Bible from Memory was crated in an edition of twenty-five of which this is number nine. It was printed by Archer Press, London and published by the artist.

The text begins with a compressed version of the original words of the book of Genesis. However, Emma convincingly authoritative tone quickly turns to satire as she switches to the voice and language someone might use telling a story to children and undermines the apparent authority of her text with wit and comedy. She describes Adam and Eve in blissful Eden 'discovering what was around them, eating fruit and stroking the other creatures who were their friends.' The text recounts and explains key Bible stories from a late 20th century perspective, providing a contemporary version of the moral logic behind the ancient tales of retribution and forgiveness. In this way Kay notes an 'unfortunate postscript' to the story of Noah and the ark: 'Noah abused one of his granddaughters, and was found out. He was confronted by the rest of the family and had to repent.' Similarly of Jesus, she wrote: 'what really got people excited and increased his following was his ability to achieve the impossible'. God, in Emma Kay's account, is an ambiguously cruel and vengeful, unforgiving and rather grumpy killjoy who is also occasionally merciful towards the faithful. She uses idiomatic terms and expressions in common usage, such as "the Fear of God", to subvert the traditional stories. She has said of this work: ' I didn't have a religious upbringing, so I'm sure some of my sources came from school plays, musicals; Jesus Christ Superstar was very helpful...What really shocked me when i was writing the stories was that they were so familiar. Everything has a moral dilemma and this was my morality. So i had a Christian morality. My Bible represents my knowledge of Christianity.' (Quoted in Alison Nichols, 'The Persistence of Memory', black &white, March 18, 1999). Although she recounts her Bible in a tone of innocent sincerity. Emma Kay manipulates her material deliberately and skillfully.

Emma Kay is showing that recalling facts and writing them down constitutes a performance, even though it takes place in private and is highly edited. Memory is specific to individuals, like a fingerprint. Although we may have memories of the same things, the detail will be personal. Emma Kay's memory of the Bible provides an impetus for the viewer to examine his or her own memoires of the same common cultural ground. Kay has used the framework of an established cultural entity to create a form of self-portrait.'

Taken from Tate Collection/The Bible from Memory by Emma KAY, retrieved on 25/03/2008 http;//www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=26768&tabview=text

Emma Kay's work conects with my project as i am interested how memory is used to help reinforce conceptions of the past. It seems that objects, words, sounds, rituals or traditions can be used as a tool to manipulated how we construct an idenity. It seems that memory can have a dual characteristic of fixity and changeablity which raises questions about the way people relate to things as well as about the nature of things themselves as creative or passive.

Emma Kay

Emma Kay, The Story of Art, 2003. Projected digital animation.
Commissioned by the Tate Modern, London. Installation view: Tate Modern.
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What is Performance Art?

These are some of the notes i have taken in exploring the idea of performance art.

It seems that artists have turned to performance as a way of breaking down categories and indicating new directions. It appears that performance was used as a way of bringing to life many of the conceptual ideas on which the making of art is based. Instead of concentrating on the physical act of producing art it seems that the artists wanted to and attempted to resolve problematic issues in performance.

It has been used as an expression of dissidents to try and explore other ways to evaluate art experience in everyday life.

Performance can appeal to a large public as well as shocking the viewer into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture.

Goldberg states that 'the work may be presented solo or with a group, with lighting, music or visuals made by the performance artist him or herself or in collaboration, and performed in places ranging from an art gallery or museum or an 'alternative space' a theatre, cafe bar, or street corner. Unlike theatre the performer is the artist seldom a character like an actor, and the content rarely follows a traditional plot or narrative. The performance might be a series of intimate gestures or large-scale visual theatre, lasting from a few minutes to many hours: it might be performed only once or repeated several times, with or without a prepared script, spontaneously improvised, or rehearsed over many months.'

Performance art appears to be an open ended medium which has endless variables, it is an art form which is directed straight to the viewer. It seems to be difficult to define as it can call on a number of disciplines and media for material, (poetry, film, dance, video, narrative, music, theatre etc can be used in any combination). It seems to have no boundaries as each performancer has their own view in the making, reflecting and showing of their ideas.

I'm not the girl who misses much (video downloaded of Pipilotti Rist)

The proposed themes to be discussed in our seminar group are:

Situations as conditions for artworks to come into being. Acting out. The Art of Performance. Deconstruction of Expression.

Artists to research were: Bruce Nawman, Paul MacCarthy, Tony Oursler, Marina Abramovich and Ulay, Pipilotti Rist, Joseph Beuys, Fischli & Weiss, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Francis Allys, Maurizio Cattelan, and Mathew Barney.