Contemporary Performance Art as a Hermeneutic Pathway to Transcendence and Healing.

Abstract

The Romanian historian and philosopher Mircea Eliade suggested that the medicine man or shaman is a sick man who has managed to cure himself. Maintaining a so called "˜balanced' identity has become the constant feature of our ever-changing contemporary environment. Some contemporary socio-political events, and technological advances have given rise to traumatic emotional feelings of "˜thrown-ness' and being in situations beyond one's control. By appropriating and traversing traditional boundaries between contemporary performance art, ancient rites, shamanic action and myths the contemporary performance artists, Yugoslavian Marina Abramović, American Matthew Barney and the South African Steven Cohen face and challenge converging idiosyncrasies. During harrowing mytho-poetic public interventions they often set themselves up as scapegoats and shamans. Such mediation through the body as a cultural tool or code, seeks the transmission of personal convictions in an attempt at mirroring society for the sake of stimulating the re-consideration of conventional ethics and hegemonic attitudes. This hermeneutic search for hidden meaning and an interpretation of human existence beyond the superficial has become a resourceful construction for the selected performance artist's millennial mythologies. The aim of this paper is to ascertain how these tactics facilitate performance artist's encounter with the world. The artist's resourcefulness is contextualised in terms of the Neuro-theological theories of Michael Winkelman, a behavioural scientist from Arizona State University. He has discovered that innate brain processes are directly affected by certain shamanic practices. It concerns the stimulation of neurotransmitters and their responses to spirit concepts and how they influence and manipulate individual and group psycho-dynamics, which confirms Eliade's statement above.