The act and the object

Thirty years after some of the facts, this paradox no longer seems as chilling as it once did. Still photographic confirmation of pieces from Eastern Bloc countries lends evidence of a mystical clarity wrought through the audacious banality of actions and executed in the name of art. Rasa Todosijevic's Drinking of Water - Inversions, Imitations, and Contrasts (1974), Ion Grigorescu's Pole Vault - River Traisteni (1976), and other modest Promethean tests burn their mundane black-and-white austerity into memory, making us forget for a moment, the fantasy French rationalism in Klein's Leap into the Void (1960) or whether or not photography lies. In this regard, the exhibition takes its usual position as church sanctuary and laboratory, encouraging us to contemplate the phenomenological truth of gestures - some innocuous, others patently corrupt.

But performance art before 1980 is no stranger to boredom, nor to petty crime. In fact, what comes about after 1979 could be said to constitute a significant break from the Schimmel thesis, with artists turning to themes of social and psychological identity worked out through often funky and scandalous autobiographical confession, thereby rendering objects mere theatrical props (cf. Karen Finley's yams). Schimmel himself indicates the change with his inclusion of Rasheed Araeen's "Paki Bastard" (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person) (1979). This British artist's self-reflective photographic expose on migration, cultural isolation, and imaginary homelands precedes the eighties and nineties popularization of fake journalism and border identity.

The genealogical thread thus sews up an argument about the art historical validity and impact performance has made on world art since the bombing of Hiroshima. And nowhere is the speed and energy of world destruction better captured than in representations of Japan's own Gutai spectacle that played out post-Hiroshima rage and desolation full-tilt in the fifties. Unfortunately, given Butoh's relationship to Gutai, through its pioneer the outrageous Tatsumi Hijikata, it is a shame MOCA wheedled down this artist's object relations to a mere photograph.

However, in the history of firsts, "Out of Actions" will firmly establish what many in the art community have been discussing for years - namely, that Gutai put dehumanizing body art on the map by almost a decade before the group's Viermese counterparts. In keeping with its temple/laboratory theme, MOCA has installed the fresh remnants of Saburo Murakami's reenacted Breaking through Many Screens of Paper, first executed in 1955, as the official entrance to the exhibition. A photograph of Kazuo Shiraga's Challenging Mud (1955) remains a stunning Noh-like portrait of post-Hiroshima frustration. Akira Kanayama's high-frequency, painted strokes from 1957 look as if they are ready to fly off the canvas.

"Out of Actions," which fortunately travels to Europe and Japan and, unfortunately, to nowhere else in North America, is a high-rolling ethnography of ritual action and paraphernalia, a gargantuan gamble that writes otherwise ignored moments in world art history into deeper questions about the ambivalence of postwar economies toward globalism, about the decadence of sagging social hierarchies, about the primitive instincts of collective consciousness, and finally about the power to reassert magic in a lost world. If the objects in the exhibition are joined in rehashing what Nitsch called the politics of experience, they can do this because they have survived, not just as art but as artifacts of cultural metamorphosis and sewage - as nostalgic references to a time when innocence was expected to make scary artworks actually work. In years to come, "Out of Actions" may prove to have assembled the biggest collection of spiritual party favors from one of the most flagrant and fun-filled cultural revolutions enacted nearly world-wide.