A majority of Westermann’s art is scaled to the human body — he never aspired to the massive gestures of his Mini­malist contem­po­raries. Whether vividly painted or decked out with brass or wood inlays, his houses pose dilemmas (Myste­ri­ously Aban­doned New Home) or exag­ger­atedly revisit personal dramas (Burning House). The totems are either memo­rable (Memorial to the Idea of a Man if He Was An Idea) or informed by Westermann’s promising interest in sci-fi and outer space life forms (The Evil New War God). One of Westermann’s chief inno­va­tions, along with Joseph Beuys, was the vitrine format. Whether they contain Death Ships (Death Ship Run Over by a “66 Lincoln Conti­nental), cartoon char­acters (The Rape of “Cracker Jack”), or crazy combi­na­tions (Wet Flower), many of his boxes and vitrines suggest cradles for the confinement of dreams, wishes, real menaces, and imagined suspicions.

 

Persona and personal history aside, many of his best sculp­tures, like Homage to American Art (Dedi­cated to Elie Nadelman), Big Leaguer, and Anti­mobile, do not acknowledge, and are not symbolic at all. Instead, they produce the usefulness of tool forms into a respect­fully absurd uselessness that Marcel Duchamp would have accepted. Donald Judd certainly did, stating in a review that “These are very much objects in their own right, direct though their meaning is recondite.”

 

As proud as he was of his wood­working abil­ities, West­ermann was an active but indif­ferent print­maker. In his hands, lith­o­g­raphy colors are always more loud, wood­block lines always more emotionless than his original. But See America First, the corre­sponding show at the Contem­porary Arts Museum, provides the drawings that are so noticeably absent from the Menil. The twenty or so creative studies for print images, executed in the 1960s and 1970s, are land­scapes inhabited with all manner of contem­porary exotica. An Affair in the Islands recasts West­ermann as a leading man who, having made land, invites a surprised native woman to tango while his color­fully lit ship lurks in the harbor (he met and married his first wife in Shanghai while on a USO acro­batic tour). So many eccentric narra­tives poured out of his hand with such wide-ranging asso­ciative freedom that compar­isons with Saul Steinberg seem expected. Mainly stunning are the studies for the seven lith­o­graphs that constitute The Connecticut Ballroom, which expands Westermann’s interest in marine and aero­nau­tical disasters to include alien menaces and eco-disasters.

    Formalist critics like Clement Greenberg denounced the messy intrusion of life into art as kitsch, and for much of his career West­ermann was neces­sarily (perhaps happily) an outsider, although one respected by artists and with a measure of prof­itable success. Throughout the 1960s, his work set a ener­gizing example in his native Chicago, where it helped birth the bizarre figu­ration of the Hairy Who artists. In northern Cali­fornia, artists as opposing as William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson adopted his example and began writing their life into their art, creating works critics called “funky.” They in turn referred their students (most promi­nently, Bruce Nauman) to the qual­ities of commu­ni­cation with their wild Chicago chum.

 

The funky combi­nation of life into ability that West­ermann preached found few addi­tional takers. Compare Westermann’s testament, stamped into brass and affixed to 30 Dust Pans (“I made each one of these by hand and by that I mean I did not sub-contract them to a factory or pay some guy to make them for me. Each handle was hand formed and not made on a lathe.”) with the designed to be fabri­cated approach of many contem­porary artists, and you comprehend the different route the art world took. As the Menil show makes clear, Westermann’s aesthetic remains insep­a­rable, his alone.

 

Perfor­mance art form pieces are for the most part performed once or in repe­tition. These pieces do not involve the inter­pre­tation or memo­rization of lines from the script, even though artisan may also use his/ her voice within the show. Perfor­mance art work compo­nents time and again include props that will or may possibly not have consid­erable social signif­i­cance. Shows could perhaps be made up easily by being executed on a stage. Perfor­mance art work activity just isn’t restricted to European Union or National Art form tradi­tions; notable prac­ti­tioners are to be found in Asian coun­tries and Latin America . Perfor­mance musi­cians and artists examine different ways of life and histories, ranging from ethnic to honorable and tradition or non worldly events. Our rates are out of control , our rates of use and routine treat­ments are increasing, the particular media loves to alarm us with stories of crisis situ­a­tions and similar-overlooks, and many folks have little subjection to industry and delivery until we get to the release space our-selves.

 

Maybe you have heard that Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, James Franco and Lady Gaga are perfor­mance art musi­cians and artists, that their careers them­selves are art work objects built up on the lifetime. You may also feel that irrel­evant visual promotion is perfor­mance art form. And perhaps it is! Actually, it’s up to you, there is no swift and easy chart to contribute to what is perfor­mance art work and what isn’t. With that said, there are many courses of action to follow when defining perfor­mance art and what are perfor­mance artists, negative credit the actual work’s history in addition to its present practice. Regardless of what you’ve heard, you’ll find excellent reasons that getting carried in around in a crystal bubble at a rock concert or winning the music Grammy awards within an egg shell isn’t seri­ously an act of perfor­mance art work, it is just first-rate endorsement of the perfor­mance art form.