Performance Art

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Definition: Performance Art

• Art in which the medium is the artist's own body and the artwork takes the form of actions performed by the artist.

• Art that could not be bought, sold or traded as a commodity.

Performance artists see the movement as a means of taking their art directly to a public forum, thus completely eliminating the need for galleries, agents, brokers, tax accountants and any other aspect of capitalism.

A social commentary on the purity of art.

• Performance Art is a legitimate artistic movement.

• Performance Art is live.• Performance Art has no rules or

guidelines. It is art because the artist says it is art. It is experimental.

• Performance Art is not for sale. (It may, however, sell admission tickets and film rights.)

Characteristics

• Performance Art may be comprised of painting, sculpture, dialogue, poetry, music, dance, film footage, laser lights, animals, fire, etc.

• Performance Art may be entertaining, amusing, shocking or horrifying. It is meant to be memorable.

Origins

Cultural theorists often trace performance art activity back to the beginning of the 20th century, to the Russian constructivists, Futurists and Dada.

• Constructivist art is committed to complete abstraction with a devotion to modernity, where themes are often geometric, experimental and rarely emotional.

• Dada provided a significant progenitor with the unconventional performances of poetry by the likes of Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara.

• Futurist artists could be identified as precursors of performance, such as David Burliuk, who painted his face for his actions .

• Yves Klein had been a precursor of performance art with the conceptual pieces of Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility) 1959–62, and works like the photomontage, Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void).

Happening is a new art form at the beginning of the 1960s.

A Happening allows the artist to experiment with body motion, recorded sounds, written and spoken texts, and even smells. Sometimes, the audience members even become performers.

1960s

• One of the earliest Happenings artwork was Allan Kaprow’s Happenings in the New York Scene, written in 1961 as the form was developing.

• Other artists who created Happenings include Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman, and Wolf Vostell.

Robert Whitman

Allan Kaprow

“Happenings are events that, put simply, happen”

• The work of performance artists after 1968 often showed influences of the cultural and political events of that year.

• Barbara T. Smith with Ritual Meal (1969) was at the forefront of the feminist body art, among others including: Carolee Schneemann, and Joan Jonas.

Joan JonasBarbara T. Smith

Carolee Schneemann

1970sArtists whose work already before tended to be a performance art, as well as new artists, at the beginning of the 1970s began to present performance art in a stricter form.

• New artists with radical piece Shoot, in performances were Chris Burden, with the 1971 performance which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters, and Vito Acconci in the same year with Seedbed.

• To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Marina Abramovic developed one of her most challenging performances, Rhythm 0 (1974).

• She placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use in any way they chose. Some could give pleasure; others could inflict pain. For 6 hours she allowed the audience members to manipulate her body.

“What I learned was that... if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you [...] I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away [...] After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”

1980s

By the end of the 1980s, performance art had become so widely known; mass culture had come to supply both structure and subject matter for much performance art; and several performance artists, had indeed become crossover artists in mainstream entertainment.

• Among the performance art most discussed in the art-world of this decade were a performance by Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh between July 1983 and July 1984, Art/Life: One Year Performance (Rope Piece), and Karen Finley’s I’m an Ass Man (1987).

They spent a whole year in New York City tied to each other with a piece of rope

Linda Montano & Tehching Hsieh

"I'm an Ass Man" is a piece that imagines what is going through a rapist's mind

KarenFinley

• Hedwig Gorski before 1982 came up with the term performance poetry, a kind of text-based vocal performance. Performance poets relied more on the rhetorical and philosophical expression in their poetics than performance artists, who arose from the visual art genres of painting and sculpture.

Hedwig Gorski

1990sIn the 1990s, performance art as a complete artform gained admittance into art museums.

• When the Soviet bloc disintegrated, formerly repressed activities of performance artists like Gyorgy Galantai in Hungary, or the Collective Action Group in Russia, became better known.

Gyorgy Galantai

Collective Action Group

• Young artists from all over the former Eastern bloc, turned to performance. Performance art at about the same time appeared in Cuba, the Caribbean and China (Zhang Huan).

Zhang Huan

2000s

From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Marina Abramovic’s work, the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA’s history.

During the run of the exhibition, Marina Abramovic performed “The Artist is Present,” a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum’s atrium, while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her.

A support group for the “sitters,” “Sitting with Marina,” was established on Facebook.

2010s

Sources http://mashrabiyya.wordpress.com http://www.tate.org.uk http://www.groveart.com