There will be no stage and no curtain as Charles Garoian presents "Esoteric Inventions, a Mixed Media Performance" at 8 p.m. Wednesday in the Zoller Gallery.

"Performance art is not like theatre...it's not like painting or sculpture...i t's not like anything," said Garoian, education director at the Palmer Museum of Art.

Performance art, unlike traditional art, does not separate the artist from his art or the viewer from the creation process.

"It's more dynamic than traditional art (because) the artist uses his own body and materials from his environment as mediums of expression in an attempt to find his place in time and society," he said.

While this may seem like a new or radical approach to self-expression, it began about 1895 in the Theatre of the Absurd, Garoian said.

Those performances were deliberately political and provocative. It was art that questioned the function of tradition in an era of great social, political and economic upheaval.

"(Then) it was a war in art against old assumptions of what art should be; now performance art is a reflection of our mechanized society - - of its dynamism," he said.

"Mechanization is the Goddess of the 20th century, and we've had to redefine our role in a new century where the focus is on this mechanization," Garoian said.

"With the availbility of new mobility and new materials there is the opportunity to explore the new possibilities in art. So performance art is now is like basic research," he said.

"This means that we are looking for the nature of some place or thing without knowing what we're going to find; we're searching for the minutest truths which can explan the cosmos," Garoian explained. "It is just as the discoveries of the atom and subatomic particles that become more and more abstract explain the physical universe.

"In this age of electronics, video, telecommunications and the media we try to use our body and real appropriated objects," he said.

It is a very self-conscious act -- the opposite of "acting" because you are not trying to lose yourself in becoming the character; you are becoming more aware of yourself through the focus of processes and ideas, he said.

"The performances are thought-provoking. They are contradictions, puns and paradoxes. Life is not linear; many different things are occurring at the some time and everything is interconnected," Garoian continued.

"An example is when Marcel Duchamp, the father of conceptual art, put a urinal in an art gallery. This shift from isolation to juxtaposition causes us to question the functions of the two objects, to think about how they are related and unrelated. In this way, performance art parodies traditional art," he said.

Always asking questions

For Garoian, who received his doctorate in education from Stanford University and his master's degree in art from the California State University at Fresno, art is a process of asking questions about himself, society, his role and relationship to the past and the future and the role of art.

"Things change so rapidly today as opposed to 100 years ago. We are just bombarded with images every minute. It is like a newspaper where you can read a story about the murder of a child, and right next to it is a coupon for french fries at Burger King," he explained.

"Performance art plays off these contradictions," he said.

"In society everything is constantly redefined. Traditional objects are timeless, but action is relevant to real time and real space. The moment something is said, it changes," Garoian continued. "What I do now is relevant to now, and performance art uses this immediacy," he added.

"My scream during a performance makes you undertand the anxiety I feel or the joy much more than a painting of me screaming could," Garioan continued. "I could paint it to express anguish, but you would not hear me scream right there in front of you. You would not feel it. You need to rephrase it; break it up."

In performance art, the artist uses himself as an instrument. The artist is not making an image to represent himself -- he himself is represented, constantly playing off old ideas, using himself and language as a reference point to answer the questions, "What is society? What is art's role? Who am I?"

"Because of this, performance art sometimes intimidates or angers (the audience); artists are called weird, outrageous or crazy...but art doesn't need to be beautiful to be effective,"he said.

"Creativity needs outrageousness, the mind must have the courage to break from tradition," he said.

Metaphors

Performance art is a vehicle to break away from the traditional interpretatio ns of metaphors. It borrows these metaphors and redefines them in terms of now, he explained.

One example of this is a performance titled "Breaking Bread".

"We took the traditional theme of breaking bread and 12 students, representing the 12 disciples and smashed 12 loaves of bread with sledgehammers. They then passed the broken bread out to the crowd of onlookers that had gathered," he said.

It (performance art) is a look at an old meaning in a new way that is appropriate to both. It was a pun, but a pun is not a put-down. Performance art is also taking conceptual and emotional risks, he said.

"In my performance of An Object for Detecting the Functions of the Tongue as it Attempts to Say Something Profound' -- last time it was hilarious, but each time it's different -- I take six to eight feet of string and attempt to say something profound while ingesting it. When I get to the end of it my mouth will be full of this string and I'll be sputtering nonsense. It's just absurd, and the methapor of absurdity is that humor can be found in everything."

Another theme that Garoian uses in his performance art is that "creativity and science are fundamental experiences that are interrelated," Garoian said, "In this age it is an insult to be called a Renaissance Man, but during the Renaissance artists were the scientists and the heroes."

"Now we seperate life into disciplines and the generalist's view is no longer accepted, but in order to be fully human one must have a world view as well as a personal view. Art and science both rely on each other," he said.

"Art is a human measure, although it is not precise in terms of mathematical measure, it is in terms of texture, materials, the visual experience and the appropriateness of it,"he said.