Mihaela Pop
Abstract: Our purpose is to prove that Aristotelian concepts are still actual, being deeply reevaluated by 20th-century philosophical thought. We are focused on two representative philosophers of this epoch: Gianni Vattimo, as an interpreter of Aristotle’s concepts, and A.N. Whitehead, for his process philosophy in which he admires Aristotle’s genesis theory and implements it in his new vision of the universe as a continuous process. We will apply these theories to a contemporary art known as performance art, body art or action. We will mainly use the following Aristotelian concepts: mimesis and poiesis (poiein). These concepts, used in aesthetics, have suffered significant change in their meanings due to the dramatic artistic revolution in the early 20th century, usually called the Avant-garde movement, which completely changed the way of thinking and the afterward artistic creation. Our question is if we can still speak about mimesis and poiein in performance art, which is an art of action, not of a finished artistic product. Vattimo demonstrates that technê (defined as art) supposes genesis (creativity) as process of poiein (production of the work of art), but the active principle is not in the produced object; it is in the producer himself – the author of a para physin creative process as it is in accordance with nature, initiated instead from the outside of the process itself. On the other hand, performance art implies action, not a finished artistic material product. The spectator participates in the creation of a work of art, which is not material as it was in the classical tradition. On the contrary, it is an on-going process. Alfred Whitehead’s philosophy of process revisits Aristotle’s theory of movement (kinesis), reevaluating the concept of genesis even if he already considers the concept of substance as obsolete from the point of view of the contemporary philosophical thought. In our opinion, Whitehead’s philosophy, especially concepts such as actual entity, concrescence, transition, extensive continuum, body withness and symbolic reference, are fundamental notions when trying to understand the performance art. We will refer to several such actions produced by John Cage and Marina Abramović together with her partner, Ulay.