Contemporary Activist Visual Art Performance with Martha Wilson

About

CAMP is a residential arts facility in the French Pyrenees. It's a place where great art is made, new movements are formed, new ideas are explored and groundbreaking people are nurtured. CAMP is located in Aulus les Bains, the last village before the France/Spain Pyrenean frontier chain. The location is spectacular - we are nestled at 750m above sea level, surrounded by snowcapped peaks over 3000m high, ancient forests and cascading waterfalls. There are eagles, lammergeiers, vultures, ibex and bears. Walk out of the residency, and within ten minutes you are completely alone in one of the most beautiful mountain landscapes in Europe. Aulus les Bains is also a spa village - there are hot water springs, and a thermal spa in the village to take advantage of the healing and relaxing properties of the water.

Workshop dates: 07/11/2021 - 05/12/2021

Activist avant-garde artists have historically ignored national boundaries as well as aesthetic ones, taking regular people to be their audience and any subject or material under the sun to be appropriate to their means.  Contemporary activist visual art performance practitioners view this avant-garde legacy as their own, incorporating musical, theatrical, literary, dance, film and technological elements in their work in order to address the pressing issues of our time.  This course will focus on critical examples of performance art from the last century to today to analyze how artists have positioned themselves in relation to current standards of artistic production and developed techniques of provocation to activate the audience.  Course work includes readings of primary and critical texts, class discussion, and performance art presentations by each member of the class presented on Zoom followed by discussion of this individual work.

Martha Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past five decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and "invasions" of other people's personae. She began making these videos and photo/text works in the early 1970s while in Halifax in Nova Scotia, and further developed her performative and video-based practice after moving in 1974 to New York City, embarking on a long career that would see her gain attention across the U.S. for her provocative appearances as political personae. In 1976 she founded, and as Founding Director Emerita, continues to help direct Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion and preservation of artists’ books, installation art, video, online and performance art, further challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums.

Martha was described by New York Times critic Holland Cotter as one of "the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s" - she remains what curator Peter Dykhuis calls a "creative presence as an arts administrator and cultural operative." Martha's early work is now considered prescient - in addition to being regarded by many as prefiguring some of the ideas proposed in the 1980s by philosopher Judith Butler about gender performativity, many of her photo-text pieces point to territory later mined by Cindy Sherman, among many other contemporary artists.

As a performance artist she founded and collaborated with DISBAND, the all-girl punk conceptual band of women artists who can't play any instruments, and impersonated political figures such as Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Tipper Gore and Donald Trump.

The workshop is open to everyone, from any artistic or academic background, at any level of experience.