行為藝術轉向過程中身體、檔案與諸眾問題探討

Abstract

This essay examines Taiwanese performance art and its turn towards archival and documentary materials and the concept of the multitude. Taiwan’s history of performance art is not like that of the West. It does not follow from the experiments of the pioneers in Dadaism before and after World War I, nor is it strictly related to the art movements like Fluxus or the happenings of the 1960s. It has its own special background. If we assume that the West’s tradition of performance art is one of several processes of modernity that has entered Taiwan, we must still face the question of our own identity, even as we must explore other more fundamental issues: what conditions induced performance art to happen in Taiwan? Why have Taiwan’s modern art institutions exhibited a structural exclusion of "the body"? And at present, considering the move from "physicality" to "documentation," and as performance art is routinely conflated with the videos, texts and archival materials of contemporary art and its definition is broadened by multiple visual genres, what kinds of dialectical relationships and radical movements will be generated as performance art continues to generate more variable meanings, both in the context of the aforementioned modernist body, as well as in contemporary forms closely related to the multitude, like document-based and media art?