Performance art is a slippery fish. It resists easy definition, often existing only in the moment of its creation, documented through photographs, videos, or secondhand accounts. Unlike a painting or sculpture, you can’t typically buy it and hang it on your wall (though relics and documentation are certainly collected). Its essence lies in the action, the presence of the artist, and the interaction with time and space, often using the artist’s own body as the primary medium. While actions, rituals, and spectacles have been part of human culture forever, performance art as a self-aware category within the visual arts really began to coalesce in the early to mid-20th century, emerging from a soup of avant-garde rebellion.
The Seeds of Revolt: Early 20th Century Precursors
To understand where performance art came from, we need to look back at the movements that shattered traditional artistic norms. The early 1900s were a hotbed of radical ideas, and artists were eager to break free from the constraints of the canvas and the pedestal.
Futurism’s Noise and Speed
Italian Futurists, led by the boisterous Filippo Marinetti, were obsessed with speed, technology, and dynamism. Around 1909, they began publishing manifestos calling for the destruction of museums and libraries. Their “synthetic theatre” involved short, illogical, provocative performances designed to shock and energize audiences. They organized evenings, called serate, which often included reciting manifestos, presenting music (using custom-built noise instruments called intonarumori), and performing short plays, frequently aiming to provoke riots or intense reactions from the bourgeois audience. This direct confrontation and use of live action as a primary tool were crucial groundwork.
Dada’s Absurdity and Anti-Art
Born in neutral Zurich during the chaos of World War I, Dadaism was a direct response to the perceived madness and irrationality of the conflict. Centered around the Cabaret Voltaire, artists like Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Emmy Hennings, and Richard Huelsenbeck staged bizarre, often nonsensical performances. Think Hugo Ball reciting sound poems while clad in a cardboard costume, or chaotic simultaneous readings. Dada performance was intentionally anti-art, rejecting logic, reason, and aesthetic beauty. It embraced chance, irrationality, and provocation, using live performance as a vehicle for social critique and a way to challenge the very definition of art. Their actions fundamentally questioned what art could be and where it could happen.
Surrealism’s Unconscious Explorations
While less focused on public performance nights than the Futurists or Dadaists, Surrealism’s fascination with the unconscious mind, dreams, and automatic processes also fed into the performative impulse. Their experiments with automatic writing and drawing, and their interest in unexpected juxtapositions, hinted at art forms driven by internal states and spontaneous actions, elements that would become central to later performance art.
The Post-War Explosion: Performance Finds Its Footing
After World War II, new energy surged through the art world. Traditional forms like painting and sculpture seemed inadequate to express the complexities and anxieties of the modern age for many artists. This period saw the emergence of distinct movements where performance was not just an element, but the main event.
Gutai: Material Action in Japan
In post-war Japan, the Gutai Art Association, founded in 1954 by Jiro Yoshihara, declared, “Do what has never been done before!” They emphasized the relationship between body, matter, and action. Their outdoor exhibitions and stage shows featured radical acts: Kazuo Shiraga wrestled with mud or painted enormous canvases with his feet, suspended from a rope; Atsuko Tanaka wore her dazzling “Electric Dress,” made of flashing colored light bulbs. Gutai artists explored the raw potential of materials through physical engagement, creating visceral experiences that highlighted the process of creation itself.
Happenings: Blurring Art and Life in America
Around the late 1950s and early 1960s in the United States, Allan Kaprow coined the term “Happenings” to describe his scripted but unpredictable performance events. Kaprow, along with artists like Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Red Grooms, staged events in unconventional spaces – lofts, streets, shops. Happenings aimed to break down the barrier between art and everyday life, often involving audience participation (sometimes planned, sometimes spontaneous). They were multi-layered, incorporating visual elements, sound, movement, and narrative fragments, but without the linear structure of traditional theatre. The emphasis was on the experience, the environment, and the immediacy of the action.
Fluxus: Intermedia Events and Anti-Commercialism
Fluxus, an international network of artists, composers, and designers active primarily in the 1960s and 70s, championed an even more radical anti-art, anti-commercial stance. Spearheaded conceptually by George Maciunas, Fluxus included figures like Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, and Joseph Beuys (though Beuys’s relationship with Fluxus was complex). They favoured “event scores” – simple, often text-based instructions for actions that could be performed by anyone, anywhere. Examples include Ono’s “Cut Piece,” where audience members were invited to cut away her clothing, or Paik’s early experiments with video and performance. Fluxus embraced humor, simplicity, intermedia (mixing different art forms), and the idea that art could be found in the mundane. They produced inexpensive multiples and valued the concept over the precious art object.
It’s crucial to remember that many early performance artists, particularly those involved in Body Art and endurance pieces, pushed their physical and psychological limits to extreme degrees. Works involving self-harm, intense pain, or dangerous situations were not uncommon. While groundbreaking, these actions often carried significant personal risk for the artists involved.
The Body as Canvas: Endurance and Identity
By the late 1960s and especially the 1970s, performance art took a distinct turn towards using the artist’s own body as the primary site and material for the artwork. This often overlapped with feminist art practices and involved intense explorations of physical limits, identity, pain, and social conditioning.
Pioneering Figures
Several artists became synonymous with this physically demanding and often confrontational form of performance:
- Chris Burden: His early works became notorious for their exploration of danger and endurance. In Shoot (1971), he had an assistant shoot him in the arm with a rifle. In Trans-fixed (1974), he was crucified onto the back of a Volkswagen Beetle. Burden tested the limits of his own body and the viewer’s complicity.
- Vito Acconci: Acconci’s performances often explored psychological boundaries, surveillance, and intimacy in public/private space. In Seedbed (1972), he lay hidden beneath a ramp in a gallery, masturbating while voicing fantasies about the visitors walking above him. Following Piece (1969) involved randomly choosing people on the street and following them until they entered a private space.
- Marina Abramović: Often called the “grandmother of performance art,” Abramović (initially working extensively with her partner Ulay, then solo) has dedicated her career to exploring endurance, pain, presence, and the relationship between performer and audience. Her Rhythm series (early 1970s) involved extreme acts like playing the knife game on her fingers (Rhythm 10), ingesting medications that induced catatonia and seizures (Rhythm 2), and lying inside a burning star until she lost consciousness (Rhythm 5). Her later work, like The Artist Is Present (2010), focused on durational presence and non-verbal communication with audience members.
- Carolee Schneemann: A key figure in feminist art, Schneemann used her body to challenge societal taboos and reclaim female sexuality. Meat Joy (1964) was a sensual, chaotic group performance involving raw fish, chickens, paint, and paper. Interior Scroll (1975) involved Schneemann slowly extracting a scroll from her vagina and reading from it, a powerful statement about female experience and artistic authority.
Feminist Performance Art
The rise of second-wave feminism provided fertile ground for performance art. Artists like Schneemann, VALIE EXPORT (whose Tap and Touch Cinema invited passersby to touch her breasts through a box she wore), Hannah Wilke (using her body often adorned with chewing gum vulva shapes), and Judy Chicago (whose monumental installation The Dinner Party had strong performative elements in its collaborative creation and its challenge to patriarchal history) used performance to critique gender roles, explore female subjectivity, challenge the male gaze, and politicize the personal experiences of women.
Later Developments and Enduring Legacy
From the 1980s onwards, performance art continued to evolve, often incorporating more elaborate theatrical elements, multimedia technology, and direct engagement with social and political issues. Artists like Laurie Anderson achieved mainstream recognition with her technologically sophisticated narrative performances. Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco used performance to explore cultural identity, colonialism, and border politics, famously exhibiting themselves in a cage as “undiscovered Amerindians” in The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992-93).
Performance art has also become more integrated into museum and gallery programming, with institutions acquiring documentation, staging reenactments (a controversial practice), and commissioning new works. While its ephemeral nature remains a defining characteristic, its influence is undeniable. It has consistently pushed the boundaries of what art can be, challenging viewers, questioning institutions, and providing a powerful, direct means for artists to engage with the world, using their own presence and actions as the ultimate medium. Its legacy lies in its insistence on the experiential, the immediate, and the profound connection between art and life.
