Event Recap: Paint the Living

This past weekend, the Unlikely Realist Forum put on a small event of unforeseeable beauty: Organic Canvas. The premise of this event was that a small number of people would be silent, stoic and emotionally fixated canvases for anyone to stop and paint on. While one could guess that the result would be a few very colorful individuals, this particular type of unscripted performance art leaves just enough room for the actors (and the audience) to make the performance their own.

All photos courtesy of Isabel Filkins.

View all photos on Flickr

With only five colors, a few dozen students stepped in to make their mark on four students. The marks started small and simple: a symbol here, a flower there, but almost like the evolution of art itself the types of creation changed into new and unexpected forms.

After the symbols came the abstract lines, the connections between two people as they momentarily held hands or stood near each other. These moments disappeared as soon as they changed position and the moment (and the context) was lost. Song lyrics and quotes sprouted up along with patterns and more expressive and complete paintings. The artists built up an investment in a limb or a neck and worked hard to make their piece right. Paint went from the obvious blank skin to the hair, fingernails and eventually the bottoms of feet.

The question in understanding this work that I pose is the following: Can the rudimentary roles of form and content be applied to Organic Canvas? The what and how of a painting is far more obvious than this, so I feel it merits discussion.

The first is what part of the performance is the content? The event creates several products that can be considered the ‘facts’ of the work: The people with the paint on them is first and foremost on this list, followed by the pictures and videos of the event, which include the audience and the painters as part of the art itself. This lends me to delineate performance art into a primary and secondary existence: The first is the performance, and the second is the memorabilia of the performance.

In the performance itself, the content is still the body and the paint, while the form is a combined effort of the actor and the artist. The positions of the actors range from thoughtful to anguished to submissively orgasmic, and the artists each respond appropriately to the space presented to them. In this case, while not traditionally an art form, the content of the performance itself and of the resulting artwork are immediately apparent. The form then becomes an extension of the emotions immediately seen between canvas and artist, which is so much more profound as the form and content extends to the action of painting itself.

On the other hand the recording of the event creates actual composed still images or clips that no longer focus on the active participation of the viewer and the work. The even is past and now all that happened is fixed. Not only that but the painters are now viewed as content in the digital media, with the form being relegated to the photographer. Certain instances of painting were done with knowledge of the recording, such as instances of fresh splattered paint and certain facial expressions and poses. We forget that the process was the artwork in the primary, yet now in the secondary it is gone, with only footprints on the beach. As time passes the event itself fades further and further into nonexistence in terms of the primary, but it is the secondary that gains permanence, even though the goal of the event was the experience itself.

It would be worth considering for future events what it means to perform an artistic work vs. viewing it as a recording. There certainly could be a world of analysis in the simultaneous screening of a film and the performance of it live in an experiential manner.