The art project “YOU TUBE – Performance today” is dedicated to performance art. It first gives a history of the art of performance, beginning with Futurism, Bauhaus, then progressing via John Cage, Valie Export, Joseph Beuys and Dennis Oppenheim through to Paul McCarty, Guillermo Gomez, Ana Mendieta and William Kentridge. Videos by these and many other artists are projected in spectacular two-dimensional form onto the walls of the exhibition space. Audio fragments, similar to experimental music, can also be heard from the very different videos. It is all reminiscent of the video platform YouTube, which is also the fundamental star of the show. The audacity of the project lies in showing performances by some the most important artists of the 20th and early 21st century not in their original form, but rather uploaded from YouTube. The art-historical aspect of the exhibition asks the question of when performance came into being as an artistic form of expression, and how it has further developed over the years? Second, and this is by far the more exciting and contemporary part of the exhibition, it investigates what has now become of the performance in the collective world of imagination of the web. How does YouTube’s “cabinet of curiosities” handle videos and what does it do with them?
Hannes Egger
YOU TUBE – Performance today
video projections by Alex Rowbotham
2013
Photo: Alex Rowbotham
