![]() He strides in his freewheeling style across this page, in a selected catalogue of little performances.ĭiogenes’ actions always demonstrated the viability of behavioral options opposite to those of the citizens at large. DIOGENES ART SERIESLiving in the streets and plazas of Athens and Corinth, he exhibited his every action to public inspection, a lifestyle for which he was called simply “The Dog.” From that urban stage he devoted himself to the performance of a series of absurdist acts designed to subvert the habitual motivation systems of his viewers. 1 Diogenes designated his entire life as a performance of philosophy. The great hero of this tradition, and arguably the great prototype of much performance art, was Diogenes of Sinope, who lived mostly in the fourth century B.C. The classroom philosophers of ancient Greece were no happier to confront this radical expansion of their realm than the established academies in our time were to encounter performance artists who insisted that the artistic frame should not separate one experience from another, but should enclose every moment of life. “Performance philosophy” would be an appropriate term for this activity. Some ancient philosophers pursued this goal through enigmatic and challenging public behavior that was specifically designated as philosophy. Consciousness is violently retextured by the imposition of a new conceptual overlay on its experiences. The semantic boundaries of the category word are broken open and forced, step by step, to the limits of life. The process of expanding a limited category into a universal frame involves a willingness to manipulate language directly. What he meant is that life lived with a certain focus is philosophy, as in our time it has been claimed that life lived with a certain focus is art. “Philosophize more often than you breathe” was the advice of one of the ancient exponents of this view. CERTAIN ANCIENT GREEKS INSISTED THAT philosophy should be an activity coextensive with life-as certain artists in our time have said about art. ![]()
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