Conceptual, Performative, Pedagogical: How to Guide Individuals through Courses of Instructed Simple Action Here and Now as Sites for Framed Chance Interaction between Self and World towards a Truly Personal Body of Work of Art and Life

From the late 1950s to the early 70s, practitioners in different fields such as experimental music, postmodern dance, and conceptual art developed a similar method in which an idea is conceived by intuition, a set of simple instructions is derived from it, and the procedure is carried out blindly, just as instructed. Here, the idea refers to a possible course of action that needs no skill or talent, the instructions do not rule the result but only the process to allow for unpredictability, and the action is performed primarily for the curious performer, not requiring any spectators essentially.

While rooted in the shared interest in freeing the working process from ego and opening it up to chance, each of such ‘conceptual/performative’ actions has an amazing yet disregarded effect: by ruling out cerebral control and thus creating a frame for a compact and immediate interaction between self and world, it reveals and renews the performer’s most innate nature as a lived body in the here and now. If a great work of art celebrates not how special but how unique every person is, generating a record through such a procedure is surely the most instantaneous, liberating, and playful way to realize one.

How can we incorporate this method and activate its potential in today’s higher art education, where conception is still linked to intention and reason while performance is often mistaken as a theatrical showcase? Experimented through actual teaching practice, and partly assisted by the philosophical terminology of Kitaro Nishida, this research aims to develop a whole new curriculum as a guidance for any individual towards building up a lifelong body of work that constantly reinvents their personality as truly different from those of not only others but also their own past and future selves.