statement
Over the past six years, my work has been focused on investigating how commercialism has changed our engagement with Art, and the subsequent problematic position of the performance art genre. I am specifically concerned with mythologies of radicality and the values we codify. I appropriate familiar forms of social interaction (massage, awards ceremonies, dunk tanks) and subvert them in order to expose their systemic logic, and create a space where naturalized cultural assumptions may be reconsidered. I use video, sculpture, sound, photography, and texts from disparate sources in order to assert the conceptual agenda of a work.
My process is largely project-based, situated in research and my interdisciplinary background, informed by methodologies from Bourdieuian sociology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, social network theory, and Human Computer Interaction & Design. I frequently employ the devices of humor, hyperbole, and Erving Goffman’s concepts of “frame breaks” and “keying” in order to break down the alienating distance of artistic authority. This enables the work to challenge the position of the performing artist as object/fetish in service to the entertainment desires of the audience and larger art world.
Many of my live works develop out of the contexts for the performance (art fairs, public spaces), and I use site-specificity to engage a form of institutional critique within the performance. To this end, I manipulate the power and permission granted to the Artist in order to reveal the unwritten social contracts the audience brings to their expectations and experience of performance art.
I consider my practice a push and pull between research and experiment, a continuous negotiation of my role in aesthetic production and responsibility as an artist within the very institutions I critique. Ultimately I develop my work so that the exchange between artist and audience results in something somewhat unsettling: deriving pleasure or entertainment from the work becomes a kind of complicity in the problematized subject of critique. By considering the institution’s periphery – the audience – and their responsibility in reproducing the codified values of the art world, I hope to locate an alternate opportunity for eliciting institutional change.
- Kathryn Cornelius, 2010