NOoSPHERE Arts, an artist-run, nonprofit exhibition and performance venue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is proud to present EAT,an ongoing interactive performance by Kurt Johannessen, a pioneer in the field of Norwegian performance art.
Audun Eckhoff, Director of The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, writes: “As symbolic action, performance art – already in its expressive form – carries clear associations with rites and cultic practices. For many performance artists, the shaman stands as a cultural prototype: he is the initiated figure who performs cultic acts, the chosen medium between a god and its followers. Marina Abramovic’s many physically challenging actions can easily be associated with this tradition, in which the artistic performance appropriates features from propitiatory sacrifices. Joseph Beuys’ performances have also been characterized as rites, but on a transformed plane permeated with symbols. (…)
As artistic form, Kurt Johannessen’s performances contain clear minimalist elements, for there is a repetition of forms, actions, and geometrical and symmetrical structures. As historical form, Minimalism appeared in American art in the early 1960s, as a reaction against expressive art, the sort that claimed for itself intense or uniquely meaningful content. Yet Minimalism proved to be a useful tool for subsequent generations, not only as a means for reducing meaning and symbolic content, but also as a carrier of meaning and a tool for constructing new meaning. Through subdued and repetitive forms, minimalist strategies could help to establish a new credibility, on account of their reduced presumptuousness.”