Walk performance 2: Samo Gosarič

The lecture demonstration is part of a longer project, “Walk Performance”, which encompasses the exploration and reconstruction of walking performances of the neo-avantgarde period (1960s and 70s) from Southeast and Eastern Europe where this practice was relatively frequent due to various social factors. The research, which is part of the author’s MA studies, and the artistic reconstruction serve as sources to one another and are mutually intertwined.

The research is connected to the changed concept of an artwork that emerges in the neo-avantgarde, with the author withdrawing from the central point of an artwork. At the same time, art actually becomes the way we view artworks; it is the mode of observation itself that establishes something as artistic. Into this context, various performances of walks as staged situations are inscribed in which the “artisticness” is produced by the context of the action and not the technical realization itself. In examining particular walking performances, the author will consider especially the procedures that the particular actions used to deal with the context and various discourses of meaning.

In the lecture demonstration, the author will present and re-enact six walking performances by the Slovene neo-avantgarde group OHO, in chronological order (1965-70), explaining through them the conception of an artwork and the artistic procedures that the group developed in its various phases (reism, ludism, processual art, conceptual art). At the lecture demonstration, the audience will receive cards with instructions for enacting particular performances. These were created on the basis of documents referring to the original actions, as reconstructions of their probable score, in the desire that everyone could perform them and thus themselves experience the 1960s and 1970s performance art firsthand.