Original scientific paper
Flâneurism as a Performing Method and Motif in Contemporary Art
Silva Kalčić
Abstract
Using the semiotics of the city and transforming the symbolic system of urban informatics are common methods and themes deployed by contemporary art. Clothing and architecture belong to the domain of public space and urban mise en scene, and are therefore subjected to the laws of communication encoding. Thus, they are suitable as motifs and materials for art in public space: art understood as the Beuysian “social sculpture” that unites actual space and its symbolic superstructure, and art understood “as life” and as behaviour (the so-called “behavioural art”). Flâneurism, as a philosophic and anthropological phenomenon, is essential for understanding modern and contemporary urbanity and social procedurality, and therefore this text brings it into a relationship with the art of performance and the performing elements in the artistic strategy of using one’s own body or those of other people, based on Lacan’s hypothesis on the significance of the image of the body in construing the subject’s identity in the context of contemporary art, primarily processual art, action art, body art, and video art. The figure of the flâneur, of inherent nihilism and necessarily related to the urban space of opulent societies, has been present in the performing arts in the recreation of everyday non-doings such as walking, standing, or strolling in real, linear, or non-chronological (cut-and-paste) time.
Keywords
flâneur; art in public space; simulation; mapping; intermediality
Hrčak ID:
185629
URI
Publication date:
1.7.2013.
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