In 2007, Stelarc had a cell-cultivated ear surgically attached to his left arm.
An Australian performer who has had an ear grafted onto his forearm in the name of art has sparked controversy.
Cyprus-born Stelios Arcadiou, known as Stelarc, says his extra ear, made of human cartilage, is an augmentation of the body's form. But surgeons questioned whether such an operation should have been carried out, given the absence of clinical need. A patient who had similar surgery to correct a birth defect said she found the artist's work offensive.
Stelarc, aged 61, said it had taken him years to find a surgeon prepared to perform the operation. The ear does not function, but he hopes to have a microphone implanted to allow others to listen to what his extra ear picks up. He presented his work to a UK audience at Newcastle's Centre for Life.
SUKA OFF "tranSfera" | VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK 2012
The goal of "tranSfera" is to search for non-verbal forms of communication between those in an intimate relationship. It is a hybrid work, live performance utilising real-time video and sonic components.
Between the senders and the receivers stands the human body, in which electronic systems and impulse transmitters are placed. The performers alter the perceived image of body, referring to the modern information chaos and the manipulation of reality performed by the media and their technologies.
"tranSfera" starts with a woman lying on a white mattress in the pose of sleeping Hermaphrodite.
When the man enters her space, it's like if he entered the stream of Salmakis - he begins the ritual
of self-alteration. The man and woman try to become one with use of physical and multimedia processes.
They replace natural senses with electronic devices to be able to look and sound the same.
But the "remixed" version of themselves remains abstracted from their bodies and is visible only
in the stream of electrical impulses and light from a projector.
The roles of male and female in "tranSfera" are based on Greek philosophers, who considered woman as the matter - wet, mutable and unbounded, while the man was dry, stable and bounded. In the process of creation man determines the form and woman contributes the matter. The artists are not interested in the sociological, cultural or political context of this theory. They are transferring it into the field of visual arts and replacing the traditional "material" and "tool" with the "female" and "male".
Action painting, Hermann Nisch
The paintings of the O.M.Theatre are based on informal art.
Action painting, the excessive splashing of paint on vertical and horizontal canvases – which Nitsch himself describes as visual grammar of the 'Aktionstheater' on a pictorial surface – is based on tachism as conditional on shaping and expressing the unconscious in a sensually stimulated production process. The elementary sensual stimulation of painting, effected by splashing, spraying and smearing paint, corresponds to the 'Aktionen' with meat, blood and intestines, and appears equally suitable for abreaction of repressed desires and urges. The painting 'Aktionen' (in front of an audience from 1960) with its temporal ecstatic processes are the predecessors of the actual theatrical 'Aktionen' in which the pictorial resources are replaced with real ones. The painting process increases in intensity to an 'Aktion'; the pictorial surface is replaced with reality. In 1962,for the first time in a painting 'Aktion', blood was splashed and a slaughtered lamb was crucified. In 1963, the first public 'Aktion' took place. By the mid-1960s, 'Aktionstheater' had completely replaced painting, which did not return until many years later, when it was newly established as an individual genre.
Since 1963, instead of painting, which apparently culminated in the O.M.Theatre, the RELICS of the 'Aktionen' are transformed into artistic objects. The fabrics and clothes, marked by the processes of the 'Aktion', stained and besmeared, are considered authentic documentation of the events; they preserve the actions and their traces and retain their relevance over time. The artist has been systematically collecting the action relics – sheets, shirts, stretchers – since 1968. A year later, Nitsch included Eucharistic vestments from the Christian church in the action painting. Later, he extended this idea to the smocks he himself wears for painting – as true proof of the (ritual) event. In 1983, after twenty years, Hermann Nitsch takes up painting again – more joyfully, intensively, spontaneously and insouciantly than ever – and recognises, completely contrary to his practise of the two previous decades, the mutual necessity of painting 'Aktion' and the O.M.Theatre. Since then he has been carrying out painting 'Aktionen' periodically.
The second phase of painting is characterised by the use of bright colours (since about 1989) – initially monochrome, and later in combination. For a long time, the artist exclusively used the colour red – the most intensive colour, which signifies life and death, symbol of fire, love, flesh, blood – followed by black. In the 1990s his work opened up to a larger spectrum employing – apart from yellow – the liturgical colours, violet, blue, green and white. Their effect and symbolic meaning is consciously used in the painting and Actionist work. The excessive, subjective and immediate painting process is subject to various pragmatic and contentual preconditions and devoted to various problems and accordingly produce different pictorial results. Central focus is the experiment with the consistency of the paint which varies from liquid to pastose. The paint is spilled, splattered, brushed or smeared with bare hands; the artist plunges his arms into it as he does with animal intestines. Here, art informel gesture is combined with Actionist reality.
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