You enter the gallery and see it hung elegantly, in the middle of the room. As you make your way towards it, slowly the lights start dimming and you are dragged magnetically to the painting which is hung so peacefully. Approaching it through what now feels like a tunnel, there is nothing but the artwork.

Although painted more than six decades ago, one can still smell the pungent turpentine and paint on the surface. You slide to peep at the corners of the canvas and get excited realising and picturing that this very day 60 years ago, the artist would have stretched the same canvas, prepared the surface, applied the paints. There is an intense feeling of the painter’s body in the gestures, in the virtuosity, feeling the dynamism in the strokes and heat in the friction on the canvas.

However, suddenly you see the pearl gray line on the floor. Indeed, realising the invisible wall that draws a line between our worlds, the world of art and the world of the viewer of art which leaves one disappointed, restless and still hungry for more.

Land Art, Dada or Body Art run parallel to postmodernism and allow us to challenge ourselves through medium and thought

One question, can art only be experienced from a distance? It is a realised observation, no matter how well the painting is crafted and how the line of the painter envelops the canvas, the person standing before it is still just a viewer. As one scans through voyeuristic eyes, glaring with the neck stretched forward, pupils dilated, undoubtedly enjoying the work of the master displayed before you, one is still a viewer standing outside of the work.

Body tracks, 1982, Ana Mendieta

Can art along with being aesthetically appreciated, lend a hand to be engaged with? The Cartesian self “I think therefore I am”, which is very much fueled by the modernist’s thought, holds back the need for the pedestrian to open the doors of a gallery and walk in.

Let us not get into the social hierarchy or class dynamics, but often the common man, feels hesitant to visit a gallery. Art gallery? Why do you want to go there? Or I don’t get this art stuff, is the usual exclamation that one hears from a non-art man (no pun intended). Will it be fair to say that this common person has been intentionally abandoned? Is this invisible wall just not between the artwork on the wall and the viewer; in fact, it is between the space inside the art gallery and the remaining world outside it? There remains a spacial and institutional divide.

The Western art history has given us the artists who have contributed to the onslaught of art constricted within the flat square. Marcel Duchamp instilled the idea of the “Ready-made” into art making. The ready-mades for Duchamp were objects and products part of daily life having no pre-disposed associations with art. The infamous sculpture “Fountain” (1963) is the monumental example of ready-mades, where he installed a urinal in the gallery calling it a sculpture. This can now be seen being exercised in the found object art sculptures and installations today. We also cannot ignore the contributions of phenomenological works of Robert Morris who went farther than ready-made objects. Influencing an art movement that later on became known as “Land Art”, Morris incorporated fragments and elements like gravel, shards of glass and mirrors in his work.

In ‘Spiral Jetty’, 1970, the artist displaced the gravel and rocks from the mountain and dumped it in the sea using bulldozers creating an installation using the gravel and rocks shaped of a spiral He incorporated materials from the nature and elements from daily life, stepping outside his studio and experimenting with these materials.

One thing inherent in Duchamp’s and Morris’s works is the reclamation of the viewer’s world and existence. It is the testimony that the viewer’s world is instrumental in the conception and execution of their works. Their works lend openness, instilling an embodied relation with the viewer, allowing the viewers to experience the work where both the work and the viewer share a mutual space.

‘Body Art’ infiltrated farther contributing in this dialogue and diminished the physical space between the art and the viewer. Bronx born Vito Acconci and Cuba-born Ana Mendieta are few examples. Conceptually we might not be able to bridge the works of these two artists but a thread that runs far and long is the inter-subjectivity of the artist and the viewer that they explored and challenged. In their works, they have not only surpassed the boundaries and questioned politics of the subject / object dichotomy, they also lend to us the liberty to cross the borders and physical limits set between the art and the viewer.

The performance piece by Mendieta “Body tracks” (1982) is a visceral gorging gesture as she slides down with her blooded sleeves on the paper pinned to the wall. It undoubtedly creates an ephemeral unexplainable impact. Suddenly the viewer is not a spectator stuck on the other side of the invisible wall; he, in fact, with Mendieta leaps into the viscerality inherent in this simplistic gesture. The signal may be crude in its conception but anthropomorphically invites the viewer into the world of the antagonised female self.

Following piece, 1969, Vito Acconci

The common denominator in Body Art that propagates an embodied and uninterrupted experience of the work is the proximity of the viewer to the artist. The physical distance between the viewer and the performance is minimal. The artist is physically present while creating the work and the viewer witnesses the processes of the art making. These qualities allow for the viewer to be part of the work and eliminate if any distance between the viewers and the arts worlds.

When we talk about body art or performance art, we cannot ignore Vito Acconci’s works. The “Following piece” (1969), a 30-days long performance piece where Acconci follows people on the streets of New York fearlessly as they walk out of their cars into a building, or as they walk out of the subway to their respective work places. Everyday he chooses one person and follows him till he enters a private space. He carefully logs the details, time of following, duration, place and location. Through this performance Acconci questions the ideas of voyeurism, the experience of being looked at, of acts of stalking that are transgressive in nature yet very close to human’s psychology. But most importantly the artist establishes and confirms the presence of the viewer, or the “other”. It is hard to say whether he is the viewer in the “Following Piece” or the stranger he is following, but he allows the engagement of the body of the viewer and the artist into the work. He surpasses the celebratory sacred artist image.

Land Art, Dada, or Body Art run parallel to Postmodernism and challenge the Cartesian self. It introduces us to the art that exists within us and between us. Art that is no longer a romanticised and idealistic act and is holistic in nature. It allows us to challenge ourselves through medium and thought and in finding ways to reach beyond what is the obvious art-making process. It allows for the pedestrian to enter into a space that speaks about him and to him, a way that perhaps artwork behind invisible security locks might not.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, January 18th, 2015

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