Performance in body and mind: the dissolution of binary thinking.

Abstract

The performance is one of the most significant and symbolic contemporary proposals in current art, mainly due to its ephemeral character, the concept of impermanence that sustains Buddhism and other oriental philosophies, has led me to a search for the conceptual relationship between the performative works of contemporary art and Buddhism. The recovery of the body and during an accelerated development of robotics and artificial intelligence, these art proposals are fundamental, which causes an intrinsic link between primitive rituality and the art of bodily practices, specifically performance. The reflections reached in this research focus on the possible link between the concepts of impermanence, insubstantiality and unsatisfactoriness that constitute the basis of Buddhist thought, compared to the notion of performance art that developed in the West during the second half of the 20th century. This study proposes to understand the relationship that these ephemeral art proposals have with their contexts: World War II, demolished reason, the disenchantment of Western rationalist thought, the search for other ways of looking, approaches and social and vital practices, the rooting of art in a commodification system that turns it into an object of consumption, losing its symbolic, historical, and aesthetic value. This study, although it does not provide solutions to these conflicts, proposes an alternative reflection on the traditionalist thinking of the arts that denies performative practices, to understand their importance and artistic value.