THE PERFORMANCE OF EVERYDAY LIFE

PERFORMANCE OF EVERYDAY LIFE
With respect for my living art lineage and those who inspired me, I refrain from mentioning the 3878947982 artists' names because this always indicates exclusion and bad feelings. But please know that I participate, as a practicing performance artist, in a still lively and co-collaborated trend, journey, history and google-able phenomena which allows us to offer our personal lives as material/memoir for our art. Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 1: MONEY
Live artists often don't have to buy art materials because their post traumatic stresses, unrequited loves, daughters' first birthday parties, eating disorders, tango dancing and chronic illnesses are already there waiting, FREE; waiting for low budget transformation and voice. Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 2: TIME
Life/art artists love to mold time, endure in time, play with time, structure time, repeat time, eliminate time, silence time treating it as if it were steel, paint, wood, stone..... Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 3: PERMISSION
Living art gives permission for anything , everyone, everything and everybody to be used as art. This permission of inclusion, headily practiced without boundaries or ethical concerns until the 90's,allowed for a 30-year play land of intelligent limitlessness and ecstatic trance. Why we made/ make an art of everyday life.
Number 4:Permission
We, life/artists, antennenned ourselves and through atmospheric, vibrational frequencies, picked up ideas (1950-1990) already conversantly fertile. Ideas from India, Japan, Asia, from feminism, from the civil rights movement, from the drug culture, from musicians and we rocked our way into a brave new world, alongside these co-rocking practitioners. Why we made/ make an art of everyday life.
NUMBER 5: MYSTICISM
We, living artists, really believed that we were altering our consciousness by altering our bodies, our faces, our identities, our names, our personas, our genders, our beliefs and our everyday lives. And this felt sacred, non-commodifi-able, and verging on the mystical. Like early believers, freely we shared photo images, ideas, food, gig information, studios, money, and kudos...without thought of litigiousness, verification of copyright, plagiarism issues or bitter intellectual property battling. Our grandfathers walked to school 14 miles shoeless in the snow, as the story goes. We wax poetic as well about our holy and happy early living art years. Why we made/ make an art of everyday life.
NUMBER 6:TEACHING
Many of us became so conversant with the genre, with the history, with the technology of dissemination (documentation via video , audio), that we accepted the charter and invitation to teach by example, by writing but also in academia where we learned how to muzzle our instincts for wildness so we could ethically direct other artists in progress(students).Guided by experience and tenure denials, some of us were able to carefully monitor our artist friends' enthusiasms and we directed them toward a more guarded/boundaried living art expression. Why we made/ make an art of everyday life.
NUMBER 7:DEATH
Now, trained to be artists of all of life, some of us segue trembling toward our most dramatic performance, our death. Now, accustomed to recycling our every insult, every illness, every disappointment, every marriage, every divorce, every death of parents, every hot flash, every betrayal, every beauty, every truth. We have every credential needed to make artfully sacred our last, documented, youtubed eternal and soft final breath. LINDA MARY MONTANO