«Performance»: una aproximació personal

Abstract

Elisabeth Jappe was born in France, brought up in Holland and since her wedding she has lived in Germany. She objects both the frontiers between countries and the divisions in cultural fields. That explains her especial interest in the performance as a form of art which desecrates frontiers. Her first experience with «the complete work of art» has taken place during her visit to the prehistorical grottos in Lascaux, near her place of birth.

The dilemma she was in when having to chose between theatre and plastic arts was solved when, at the beginning of the seventies, the performance was considered to be a new form of art. Her participation in important performances-organisations at the Cologne and Düsseldorf art Foirs, and in other festivals, has offered her the oportunity of contacting artist from all over the world. It was not justa question of organising but of taking in a crea ti ve, intensive and joint work. This reciproca! effect would become the principle of the work at the Moltkerei workshop, a site for non-commercial shows characteristic of the art from Cologne, transgressor of frontiers, where the process of the artistic activities is always in vogue. In the eighties the frontiers between performance and installation would desappear more and more. For many artists the frontiers between artistic and daily activities would also dissolve. The experience of time and space became a constitutive element of the artist's work. Then, a new concept, including all those aspects, was little by little consolidated: the «expanded performance», specially emphasized by Elisabeth Jappe in her accurate programme «Documenta 8», partly a concentrated section of the programme and partly a «Féte permanente» which, during the whole exhibition, claimed to be a Forum for «mobile» activities.