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What Is Performance Art and Why Does It Matter?

Performance art might be one of the most radical art forms in existence, ranging from extreme endurance tests to acts of political protest.

Of all the art forms that exist in the contemporary world, performance art must surely be one of the most daring, subversive and experimental. From covering naked bodies in paint and wrestling with a wild coyote, to hiding under the floorboards of the gallery or rolling in raw meat , performance artists have pushed the boundaries of acceptability, and tested the breadth of human endurance, challenging us to ask questions about the nature of art, and our bodily relationship with it. We look through some of the key ideas around performance art, and the reasons why it matters so much today.

1. Performance Art Focuses on Live Events

Performance art is undoubtedly a broad ranging and diverse style of art that involves some kind of acted out event. Some performance art is a live experience that can only happen in front of an active audience, such as Marina Abramovic ’s hugely controversial Rhythm 0, 1974, in which she laid out a series of objects and asked audience members to inflict harm on her body. Other artists record their performances, suspending them forever in time, such as Paul McCarthy ’s Painter, 1995, in which the artist acts out the exaggerated role of an expressionist painter in a mock-studio, while wearing prosthetic body parts. Both artists, in different ways, challenge us to think about the body’s relationship to the work of art.

2. Performance Art Is One of the Most Radical Art Forms

From its earliest days, performance art has been one of the most radical and boundary-pushing art forms. The history of performance art is often traced back to Dadaism and Futurism in early 20 th century Europe, when artists began staging anarchic, violent performances aimed at shocking audiences awake in the aftermath of war. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that performance art became recognized as an artform in its own right. 

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Black Mountain College in North Carolina is widely recognized as the birthplace of performance art. Led by the revolutionary musician John Cage , teachers and students collaborated on a series of multi-disciplinary events merging music, dance, painting, poetry and more into a singular whole, expanding their practices in new and unprecedented ways through acts of playful collaboration. They called these experimental events ‘Happenings’, and they gave rise to performance art throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

3. Performance Art Has Close Ties with Feminism

During the 1960s Performance art was a particularly popular artform amongst Feminist artists, including Carolee Schneemann , Yoko Ono , Hannah Wilke, Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh. For many Feminist artists, performance art was a chance to reclaim their bodies from centuries of male objectification, and to express their rage and frustration at systems of oppression. For example, in Gestures, 1974, Wilke pushes, pulls and stretches the skin on her face, reclaiming her skin as her own playground.

4. It Breaks Down Barriers Between Art Forms

Performance art is one of the more inclusive art forms, inviting multi-disciplinary ways of making art, and encouraging artists from different disciplines to collaborate. Acts of cross-pollination and sharing of ideas have opened up a whole new wealth of creative possibilities, as seen in Marvin Gaye Chetwynd ’s lavish and all-encompassing events that merge the spectacle of theatre and costume with sculpture and dance.

Some artists also invite the audience to play an active role in the performance, such as Dan Graham’s Performer, Audience, Mirror, 1975, in which he recorded himself performing in front of a mirror, while being watched by a captive crowd. 

5. It Tests Human Endurance

One of the most fascinating, yet disturbing aspects of performance art is when artists push their bodies into extreme life or death situations, testing the strength of human endurance. Joseph Beuys played with danger in his legendary 1974 performance I Like America and America Likes Me , by closing himself in a gallery for three days with a wild coyote. Here the coyote became a symbol for the wild, pre-colonial terrain of America, which Beuys argued is still an untamable force of nature. Beuys protected himself against the coyote by wrapping his body in a felt blanket and holding a hooked cane.

6. It Is Often a Form of Political Protest

Many artists have blurred the boundaries between performance art and political protest, staging controversial events that stir up uncomfortable truths about the climate in which they are living. One of the most high-profile, politicized acts of performance art was Pussy Riot ‘s Punk Prayer, 2012. Three members of the group performed a “Punk Prayer” in Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow, criticizing the oppressive nature of Russian authorities and their dubious links with the Catholic church, while wearing their trademark brightly colored clothes and balaclavas. Although Russian authorities arrested and imprisoned the artists, their influence on artist-activists has been profound, demonstrating how performance art can be a powerful tool of self-expression during the most challenging of times.

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By Rosie Lesso MA Contemporary Art Theory, BA Fine Art Rosie is a contributing writer and artist based in Scotland. She has produced writing for a wide range of arts organizations including Tate Modern, The National Galleries of Scotland, Art Monthly, and Scottish Art News, with a focus on modern and contemporary art. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from the University of Edinburgh and a BA in Fine Art from Edinburgh College of Art. Previously she has worked in both curatorial and educational roles, discovering how stories and history can really enrich our experience of art.

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What is Performance Art — Definition, Examples & History

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M ost art is made to be seen and experienced multiple times, sometimes at the pace of the viewer or appreciator. This means that, for most art, you can go somewhere and take it in for as long as you want. Performance art is not most art: it is something of the moment, something you can’t take with you, something that, at most, can be photographed and sometimes filmed. It exists as an often controversial form of art that, while avant garde in spirit, managed to reach the circles of fine art in its heyday. So what is performance art, what are some examples, and who are some of the notable names associated with it?  

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Performance Art Definition

Defining ‘performance art’.

Here we will provide a definition for performance art, though it should be said early that a basic definition will be broad. This is because performance art can be hard to pin down, as it can encompass many acts, events, or pieces.

PERFORMANCE ART DEFINITION

What is performance art.

Performance art is an art piece, exhibition, or installation that is created directly by the artist, collection of artists, or others. Performance art is often seen as what’s done when other more traditional art forms are not enough to get the artist’s point across. It can include any number of actions by the artist that will be witnessed by others, with fluidity between the real and the art being a major focal point. While performance art has varied in its style and depiction, much of it can be confrontational and shocking in order to elicit reactions from those viewing it. In many ways, performance art pushes the boundaries of art by asking so much of the artist and asking the audience to decide what counts as art, especially in a “fine art” context.

Performance art characteristics include:

• Direct input by the artist in the performance.
• Using unusual tools and doing unusual things in order to perform the art piece.
• Shocking and startling in practice, which elicits a more visceral reaction from those watching the performance.
• Like most art, often done with a strong personal and/or political message in mind.

Performance Art History

Origins of performance art.

Theatrical stylings can be seen as precursors to what we now call performance art, and we don’t mean plays or operas. In the early 20th century, taking inspiration from cabarets and detailing their manifestos in person, the art movements of Dadaism and Surrealism featured early versions of this style.

If not directly related, they surely inspired what would come afterward, especially since each of these art movements had a touch of the avant garde .

Much like how Pop Art rejected the then current art trend of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and ‘60s, performance art decided what was going on in the art world was not enough to fully express how the artists felt.

And while Pop Art intentionally looked outward for inspiration, performance art is all about the internal. Whether the canvas is a single person or within an art installation , performance art is all about expressing something through action (which is why this style is also known as “action art” or “artistic action”).

 What is Performance Art  •  TATE Modern 

During the height of the counterculture can be seen as performance art’s heyday, when some of the most famous performance artists (some of which we’ll cover in the next section) came out of.

These artists came from different places across the globe, and some were part of collectives (such as Fluxus ) or studied at the same institutions (such as Black Mountain College). And as you’ll see, some of them still perform or have a presence in the 21st century.

Related Posts

• What is Dadaism? →
• Avant Garde Explained →
• How Does Installation Art Work →

Performance Art Examples

Performance artists.

There are many different performance artists who can each give a different performance art example, though we can’t possibly list each and every one (but this writer recommends you look up as much as you can if you’re interested).

It should also be said that contemporary performance art is still happening, to the point where it would not seem out of place in a gallery or museum the way it maybe used to be. So without further ado, we shall cover a few of history’s most notable performance artists.

Joseph Beuys

This German born artist made a few physical pieces of art, such as Homogeneous Infiltration for Grand Piano (1966) and The Pack (1969), but some of his most famous works were performative. These include How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), I Like America and America Likes Me (aka Coyote ) (1974), and the collaborative 7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration (1982-1987).

 What is Performance Art  •  J. Beuys

These works are rooted in symbolism and protest, especially Coyote, which had the artist protesting the US intervention into the Vietnam War (a common theme in ‘60s and ‘70s performance art) by staying in a New York City art gallery for three days with a coyote and never once touching US soil.

Easily the most famous performance artist alive for a few different reasons, Japan born Yoko Ono was part of the Fluxus community and was big on participant performance art. This meant that many of her artworks needed the participation of others in order to work.

One of her most famous performances is Cut Piece (1964), where audience members were asked to take scissors and remove her clothing piece by piece, with the artwork representing the sedation of and potential for violence against women.

Performance art definition  •  Cut Piece

More controversially, there is Voice Piece for Soprano , which was composed in 1961 but more recently performed in the 2010s at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art). This performance — which was done by Ono and gallery visitors — involves screaming short lyrics into a microphone through a loudspeaker that could be heard all over the museum.

 What is Performance Art  •  Contemporary performance art

Chris burden.

When one thinks of performance art that threatens the livelihood of the artist, there are few examples better than American born Chris Burden.

There is his Master’s thesis at University of California, Irvine, Five Day Locker Piece (1971), where he remained stuffed in a student locker for five days; there is Shoot (1971), where a friend shot the artist with a .22 rifle in the arm (“I had an intuitive sense that being shot is as American as apple pie”).

There is arguably his most famous work, Trans-Fixed (1974), where the artist was crucified to a (running) VW Beetle; and then there is Doomed (1975), where the artist spent over 45 hours underneath a sheet of glass near a running clock before eventually getting up, smashing the clock, and ending the piece.

 What is Performance Art  •  performance art definition  •  Chris Burden

Oh, and in 2011, he made a kinetic sculpture (made of Lincoln Logs and Legos, among other toys) named Metropolis II , a direct reference to the classic Fritz Lang German Expressionist film.

 What is Performance Art  •  Metropolis II

Marina abramović.

An incredibly accomplished artist, Serbian born Abramović began her career in the 1970s, where (not unlike Chris Burden) several of her pieces put her in physical danger. Rhythm 10 (1973) involved her striking a knife in-between her fingers and Rhythm 0 (1974) involved participation from the audience to use seventy-two objects on her in any way they chose.

Performance art examples  •  Marina Ambramović

Not every one of her artworks put her in danger, but sometimes something innocuous was meant to raise awareness to something serious. Balkan Baroque (1997) is an example of this, wherein the artist washed bloody cow bones for days, which was meant to bring attention to the devastating effects of war, including the war of Bosnia.

 What is Performance Art  •  Types of performance art

In the 21st century, the artist performed The House with the Ocean View (2002), which had her stay inside an art installation for several days as she did daily tasks such as sleep and shower.

The artist more recently performed The Artist Is Present (2010) at MoMA; the piece consists of two chairs and a table, where Abramović sat silently in one chair and anyone could sit in the chair across from her.

 What is Performance Art  •  The Artist Is Present

Performance art can be seen as extreme by some, offensive by others, and outright dangerous by most. But it’s only by going to the limit that these artists were able to create conversations about art and society that others could sometimes only hint at. Performance art may not always be the most mainstream or accepted art form, but unlike some art movements, it has yet to disappear into the annals of art history.

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This was just one of many fascinating segments of art history. There are many eras, styles, artists, and movements to discover. Let's continue our study by choosing the next stop on your way to becoming an art aficionado. Below you can visit our  Art Styles Index , our  Art History Timeline , or choose an individual movement.

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Modernisms 1900-1980

Course: modernisms 1900-1980   >   unit 12, performance art: an introduction.

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• Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Cleaning the museum—maintenance art
• Bill Viola, The Crossing
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• Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting
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When Art Intersects With Life

Historical sources, action & contingency, the private made political, where is it, don't try this at home.

• RoseLee Goldberg. Performance: Live art since the 60s, New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998, page 20.

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Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Performance Art

Linda Yablonsky 1999

Published in the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts 1999 Grants Booklet

Is "performance art" the art of performance or the performance of art?

Up to us. If we decide for the art of performance, any discussion of the subject will have to consider the performing artist and not just the art being performed. It's impossible to separate one from the other. Art can perform without the artist as long as it has a viewer in its presence. A performer, on the other hand, is just a bystander unless there's something to perform - a text, a task, a score, a set of directions. That probably goes without saying.

But it's complicated. Take a painting or sculpture, which documents a private performance by an artist in his or her studio. All we see is the end result of a richly appointed process that may include shouting, sweating, the throwing of blunt instruments, note-taking, pacing and foot-tapping in addition to a good deal of maneuvering among various materials, some of which can be toxic or grotesque or otherwise unstable. What we see comes after the hair-pulling and false starts and hard choices have been made and the artist's attentions have been repaid by the finished piece. In other words, we miss all the fun.

Not so with performance art, which gives us a way in - many ways, in fact, for it takes many forms and can involve anywhere from one to a one hundred performers who may force any number of objects (including themselves) through a space; project words or images from a variety of angles onto a variety of surfaces; slice the air with alternating sounds and silences; arrange tableaux; mix media. It's something to  see , I'll tell you, though it's not always polished or pretty. This is a get-your-hands-dirty kind of art, a get-your-feet-wet thing, if you know what I mean. A hybrid. You never know what to expect from it, which is both the up and the downside of this kind of work.

From this we can conclude that the art of performance  is  the performance of art - an art predicated on the direct confrontation of an artist with an audience. It's a live act of esthetic investigation performed in a public place, a public art. In other words, performing artists are artists who realize their work in public.

Then are performance artists just actors playing a particular role? Or artists performing a particular art?

The latter – not that performance artists don't put on an act; there cannot be a performance without an action being taken by someone (usually the performing artist or someone at the artist's behest), which isn't to say that the performance artist is strictly an actor, in theatrical terms, especially if that artist is a musician or composer, a poet, a dancer or a painter or what have you. In fact, what the performance artist does is not necessarily theater, not that theater isn't an art or that performance has no artifice, but theater by itself is primarily a literary art. It's about language, even if, like performance art, it involves gesture (which is also a language), constructed sets, objects and light forms, and includes music or dance as well as video or film.

Some performance artists work with language, though they are likely to be drawing portraits with it. But essentially, theater is an art of argument, which involves emotion as well as thought. Actors, therefore, emote. Actors wear the mask of character and emote through it, whereas performance artists might just stand there in their naked selves and declaim while other things happen around them. In this way, performance art incorporates elements of theater while undermining its drama. In fact, it's just another form of presentation. Clear?

How did we get to this point?

Well, we could look back to the Dada cabarets, I suppose, but performance art as we think of it now seems to have evolved out of those colorful stagings we called "Happenings" in the 1960s, when, on any given occasion, one might find a whole assortment of slowly evolving, often raucous, activities taking place all at once, in clear opposition to each other. For example, in his introduction to  Silence , an anthology of his lectures, John Cage – a pioneer of this medium – recalled an event he organized at Black Mountain College way back in 1952. The evening, he wrote, "involved the paintings of Bob Rauschenberg, the dancing of Merce Cunningham, films, slides, phonograph records, the poetries of Charles Olson and M.C. Richards recited from the tops of ladders, and the pianism of David Tudor, together with my  Julliard  lecture, which ends: 'A piece of string, a sunset, each acts.'"

The point is that this and other works produced by succeeding generations of performance artists who have challenged the medium by adding or paring elements to or from the mix, took place in real time and didn't describe any other time, as does, say, a conventional drama. A performance piece was about the here and now, with artists carrying out preordained tasks while leaving themselves open to improvisation and accident, trial and error. This gave the live, or should I say lived, experience a certain tension and immediacy that set the form apart. The emphasis was on process, on the elaboration of ideas which took shape before our eyes, with discrete visual and aural elements equal to or greater than the representation of human behavior. In the course of events, this practice significantly altered, or broadened, our approach to all the arts: dance became "movement" and musical composition, "soundscape;" writing became "text" while visual art, once married to illusion and gesture, adopted "concept" and theater took up the mantle of, well, "performance."

The whole thing paralleled developments in the plastic arts, which at one point – Post-Pop, let us say – liberated itself from content to concentrate on a stripped-down, bare-bones formalism, with artists in some corners dispensing with object-making altogether in favor of the expression of pure ideas and the making of myth – that is, the public transport of culture itself. As a result, visual artists played a critical role in the proliferation of performance art by returning the human figure, the performer – themselves – to center stage. By collaborating with artists of other disciplines to expand the possibilities of their work, they not so coincidentally exposed it to greater numbers of people. In other words, they created a monster.

More recently, much that we call performance art has become the province of monologists who, sometimes supported by an armature of video and music, adhere to prepared, highly personalized, often politically or sexually charged texts driven more by character than concept. These performance artists don't seem to feel a need for the penetrable narrative of the theater artist in order to exhibit their affection for what we sweetly term reality, or the known. Instead, they choose a thematic trajectory and propel themselves through it, into the unknown, taking those of us in the audience along for the ride.

But who is the audience for this performance art?

The medium quite naturally lends itself to experimentation, tests the limits of perception, endurance, materials, and form and so it likes open, angry, critical minds. Which is why the initial audience for experimental art is generally made up of other artists – because the creative process is similar for all artists, no matter what they do. So performance art, the testing ground, finds its audience in the shared experience of artists.

Experimental work – not just the so-new-it-doesn't-have-a-name variety but also the strangely attractive notions likely to influence the course of things to come – defies understanding outside its own realm and has no commercial value. It tries the patience, even offends. Even when witty, it isn't popular. Nevertheless, it's necessary to the development of any form whether anyone gets it straightaway or not and, you know, someone has to do it. Certainly nothing new comes from working over the same old things the same ways simply with the substitution of new faces to fall on.

In performance, artists have welcomed not just the testimony but the participation of their audiences, seating them either within the performance area or at very close range to it, in the absence of a fourth wall or even any wall at all. In this way, performance art has become a collective bargain, a group experience of what happens in artists' studios, behind closed doors. Once you hear artists speak in their own voices or watch them in action with their chosen materials, it tends to stay in the mind. You can form a personal relationship to it. Thus can performance produce audiences that grow increasingly receptive to new ideas in art. It's a collaboration that defines a community. And you are there.

For 37 years, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art has been giving grants to visual artists, poets, dancers/choreographers, composers and theater/performance artists to support what it judges to be exemplary work of an experimental or innovative sort, assuming the artists involve themselves in the presentation of their work, by which I mean they exhibit it in public, though it might be that they simply invite the public into the studio (or gallery) to watch them think out loud. Artists are generally thought to be safe in their studios but when they work in front of an audience they not only put themselves at risk but also the audience, which takes a chance on them, even if the performers pretend to ignore the audience and the audience pretends the performers are independent of them. It's still a collaboration, art in the making, and you can't stop it. You just can't stop it. Try to stop it! You can't.

Linda Yablonsky is the author of  The Story of Junk , a novel, and the creator and host of NightLight Readings, a monthly writers-in-performance series that ran in New York from 1991-1998. She has also written extensively about arts and artists, and is currently at work on a new novel.

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10.14: Conceptual + Performance Art

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Conceptual and Performance Art

The Modernists proposed that art could be anything—so why couldn't it be an idea or an action?

c. 1960 - present

Conceptual Art

Conceptual art can include just about any material: text, photography, found objects, and even the physical space of the gallery.

A beginner's guide

Conceptual art: an introduction.

by DR. TOM FOLLAND and DR. LETA Y. MING

In 1972 the De Saisset Art Museum at Santa Clara University in the San Francisco Bay Area gave the artist Tom Marioni several hundred dollars to help cover expenses for mounting an exhibition of his work at the institution. Instead of using the money to purchase art materials, Marioni bought an older model used car, a Fiat 750, which he carefully maneuvered into the museum for the opening of his show. The vehicle, parked on top of an oriental rug, formed the centerpiece for this exhibition, titled My First Car . Was this really art, or was it a scam to get the museum to pay for a car the artist wanted? After learning about the show, the University President concluded that it was more of the latter and ordered the show closed. Presumably he was put off by how My First Car profited Marioni without involving any technical skill or hard work on the part of the artist.

Not just a prank

Marioni’s work was in many ways typical of the late 1960s and early 1970s art practices that came to be known as Conceptual art. As the term suggests, Conceptual art placed emphasis upon the concept or idea, and deemphasized the actual physical manifestation of the work. Thus an artist did not need manual skill to produce his work, and in fact could get away with not making anything at all. Rather than being a mere prank (as many dismissed it at the time), Marioni’s work was a proposal for a new kind of art that deliberately disavowed art’s traditional role as a showcase for the creative genius and technical abilities of the artist.

Marioni’s appropriation of a car is only one example of a number of very diverse art practices that are grouped under the term Conceptual art. Refusing to work in any one medium, and especially hostile to the painting and sculptural traditions in Western art, Conceptual artists would broaden their approach to art-making to include just about any material: text, photography, found objects, and even the physical space of the gallery, as long as there was a conceptual dimension that emphasized a set of principles or process involved in producing a given artwork, rather than a finished product.

Take the artist Mel Bochner’s Measurement Room , for example, a work that consisted of labeling gallery walls with numbers to indicate each wall’s dimensions. In the place of attractive objects and captivating imagery, Bochner presented emotionless, mechanical text overlaid onto a pre-existing space. Art’s new role, as proposed by Conceptual artists, was to convey information in the most straightforward, objective manner as possible and to engage the viewer within their immediate environment (instead of presenting a transcendent and imaginary world that accentuated the pleasures of looking).

Minimalism as precursor

Conceptual art constituted a dramatic departure from traditional art-making, but it did not come out of nowhere. Minimalism, the movement that directly preceded Conceptual art and the style that dominated the 1960s, conceived of art not as something internally complete and detached from the everyday world (a view that had been strongly held by the Abstract Expressionists throughout the 1950s), but rather as something that related to both its site of display as well as the viewer’s body. A Minimalist work like Carl Andre’s 144 Aluminum Square , for example, offered a spare, industrially-produced, geometric installation that was radical because it made spectators think of the floor on which it was placed and how their bodies related to it (by trampling on it!).

Emerging out of Minimalism, a Conceptual work like Bochner’s Measurement Room also made viewers aware of the proportions of the physical gallery space and encouraged them to compare how they measured up to the room’s dimensions. Minimalism, however, always maintained a reliance on a physical object, which was, in many cases, a highly finished and aestheticized form that lent itself to being traded on the art market and shown on gallery circuit. By contrast, Conceptual works like Measurement Room and My First Car not only departed from the conventional media of painting and sculpture, but moreover, their unusual forms prevented them from being easily sold or collected.

The art market

With the explosive expansion of the contemporary art market in the 1960s that included high auction prices for living artists (previously it was only dead European masters who fetched such prices), one of the main concerns of artists in the 1960s was that art had become increasingly commodified, and yet artists weren’t the ones benefiting from the growing market. At the mercy of dealers, collectors, and museum trustees, artists felt they had little control over their own work and careers. So it is not entirely surprising artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s began to reject technical artistic skill and material objects altogether. To make an object the essence of the artwork was to be in thrall to the concerns of the market and art institutions.

A radical era

The 1960s and early 1970s was tumultuous and divisive era defined by the Vietnam War, passionate social liberation movements (including the Black Power, Feminist, Chicano, and Gay Liberation Movements), as well as a massive countercultural youth rebellion. The emergence of such a radical practice as Conceptual art should be understood as part of this oppositional culture that envisioned a radically new world. To the new generation of Conceptual artists, the old rules of art making and the traditional art establishments could feel just as oppressive as the institutions of the state or police felt to the youthful protester on the streets.

The backdrop of immense social upheaval in the 1960s and early 1970s relates to another important aspect of Conceptual art: the sense that it was entangled with larger social and political realities. In a series of collages called House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home , Martha Rosler combined graphic images of the Vietnam War from the popular news journal Life with those of upscale interiors from the home decorating magazine House Beautiful to make direct reference to the Vietnam War.

In one collage, a middle-class housewife vacuums billowing drapes whose window reveals helmeted, rifle-wielding American soldiers in the trenches of war. This jarring juxtaposition not only commented on the war’s insidious effects on the home front, but also signaled a sense that art should engage with and could reshape the social world. Likewise, My First Car employed a similar technique of inserting a temporal, everyday object into a sacred space of high art in order to highlight the connectedness of the art sphere to the social, physical, and economic world. Not afraid to embrace the mundanity of the everyday world, Conceptual artists polluted the museum space with commerce, contemporary images of war, and even leaking motor oil.

Conceptual goes mainstream

Conceptual art had its precursors, notably early twentieth-century Dada artists like Marcel Duchamp , whose “readymades” (mass-produced objects like a urinal or bicycle wheel that he designated as artworks) also questioned the tenet that art be solely a demonstration of an artist’s creative and technical abilities. In the 1950s and early 1960s, movements such as Fluxus , Happenings, Neo-Dada, and Nouveau Réalisme also employed techniques we could categorize as Conceptual art from today’s vantage point. Embracing ephemeral and performative practices, and provoking viewers with sometimes aggressive assaults upon “good taste,” they, too, let go of the notion of art as refined object. In the decades following, Conceptual art strategies were taken up by feminist as well as postmodern artists, and today conceptualism has become a global phenomenon, with artists from around the world deploying video, photography, text, body art, performance, and installation, often interchangeably. Ironically, the strategies of Conceptual art, once a challenge to orthodox, mainstream modern art, have now become so fundamental that they are taken to be a given of contemporary art practice.

Additional resources:

Short essay on Conceptual art from Tate

Conceptual art at the Guggenheim

Conceptual art from MoMA Learning

The Case for Conceptual Art

by THE ART ASSIGNMENT

Video \(\PageIndex{1}\): Sometimes art is paintings, and sometimes it’s a chair. Why?

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs

by DR. TOM FOLLAND

You would not be wrong, standing in front of One and Three Chairs, to think, “there is not much to see here.” Joseph Kosuth, a conceptual artist, has placed a wooden folding chair against the wall and flanked it with two prints: a black and white photograph of the chair, and a photostat of its dictionary definition. Nevertheless, One and Three Chairs is a defining work of conceptual art, a movement that emerged in the mid-1960s and advocated a radically new form of artwork: one whose value, meaning and existence was rooted in its concept , rather than in the work’s physical or material properties.

In Minimalism’s wake

Questions of form (the visual elements of works of art) had been paramount for many modern artists during the twentieth century and especially post-World War II, when New York City replaced Paris as the center of the most advanced art of the time. Modernism’s focus on pure form (works of art that sought to contain no references or likenesses to the external world and focused instead on their own inherent visual and material aspects) reached a peak in the 1960s with Minimalism, the movement that directly preceded conceptual art.

Minimalism pushed abstraction to its limits and set out to strip art of its historical meaning. For instance, the Minimalist artist Donald Judd produced a series of geometric boxes using industrial materials. There was no evidence of skill or handicraft—the artist had in some cases not even constructed the object—and the viewer was left with no references to a subject or theme. The result was a work that was purely formal: that sought to insulate itself from external meaning beyond its material, color, and shape.

For the Minimalists, art’s role was no longer to render scenes of nature, spirituality, or humanity, as had been central to Western art since before the Renaissance, or even to celebrate the artist’s vision and hand as had been the case with Abstract Expressionism. The credo of Minimalist art was “what you see is what you see.” With these pure forms, art was emptied of all other meaning. It was as if the word “sculpture” needed quotation marks. It certainly strained credulity to imagine an industrially-fabricated object made from lacquered, galvanized iron as the equal to the historic sculptural processes such as carved marble or cast bronze produced by Donatello or Bernini.

“Art After Philosophy”

By the end of the 1960s, these Minimalist practices were being challenged. Minimalism’s value remained tied directly to the physical object—a visual form that invited viewers to see it, walk around it, and enjoy its aesthetic qualities. Conceptual artists like Kosuth wanted to downplay the pleasures associated with looking at art as part of a rejection of what they saw as outdated ideas about beauty. While retaining Minimalism’s critical stance toward traditional art forms, they wanted to engage with the unseen relationships that Minimalism had put aside: ideas, signification, and the construction of meaning. “Being an artist now means to question the nature of art,” Kosuth wrote in his 1969 essay “Art After Philosophy.” To this end, he created works that directed the viewer away from form and toward the ideas that generated them.

In the case of One and Three Chairs, the central idea was to explore the nature of representation itself. We know instinctively what a “chair” is, but how is it that we actually conceive of and communicate that concept? Kosuth presents us with a photograph of a chair, an actual chair, and its linguistic or language-based description. All three of these could be interpreted as representations of the same chair (the “one” chair of the title), and yet they are not the same. They each have distinct properties: in actuality, the viewer is confronted with “three” chairs, each represented and experienced— read —in different ways.

Kosuth was influenced by new theories of language and signification that had emerged in the early twentieth century, particularly semiotics—the study of the meaning of signs (words or symbols used to communicated information). Semiotics grew out of the science of linguistics, which looks at how language structures meaning. However, the field of semiotics had a broader set of goals: it sought to explore how both linguistic and image-based forms of communication shaped larger social and cultural structures.

Why photography and text, and not a painting or a sculpture? Kosuth’s avoidance of the traditional media was also a critique of the ways that art institutions had historically accepted and promoted only certain types of artworks. This criticality had roots in the radical Dada practices of Marcel Duchamp and other early twentieth-century artists who pushed for the acceptance of new forms of art. Artists from the 1960s onward were increasingly interested in building on this legacy, challenging the ways that museums, academies, and other art institutions adhered to traditional, nineteenth-century notions of what art was and should be.

The viewer’s role

When we look at One and Three Chairs, we are not drawn to admire its beauty, nor are we presented with a relatable story or a figure to be admired. Rather, we are invited to consider the concept of what a “chair” is, as well as the nature of visual and linguistic representation itself—fundamental questions that Plato asked more than two thousand years ago. And like the ancient Greek philosopher, Kosuth focuses on the idea of a “chair,” rather than simply its physical representation. But he also reveals the importance of the viewer’s role in the function of conceptual artwork. It is not until we approach pieces such as One and Three Chairs and begin to engage with them intellectually that the actual “artworks”—the concepts—emerge. In this sense, conceptual art can only exist in tandem with its audience, and is created anew each time we view it. This emphasis on the participation of the viewer was also important for the related movements of performance and participatory art , which gained momentum as well beginning in the 1960s.

One and Three Chairs stripped art of its outer casing and celebrated, instead, the importance of the conceptual for both the artist and the viewer. Importantly, it also stripped the artist of his or her role as a romantic and existential agent of personal expression (an aspect of art that was increasingly important from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century). The conceptual artist appears, instead, as a philosopher questioning the nature of reality and the social world in which art and audience reside.

This work at MoMA

Essay on Joseph Kosuth from the Guggenheim

Essay on conceptual art from Tate

The Case for Yoko Ono

Video \(\PageIndex{2}\): Speaker: Sarah Urist Green

Works by Yoko Ono at the Walker Art Center

Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece at MoMA

John Baldessari, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art

by DR. STEVEN ZUCKER and DR. BETH HARRIS

Video \(\PageIndex{3}\): John Baldessari, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art , 1971, lithograph, 22-7/16 x 30-1/16″ (MoMA), images © John Baldessari, courtesy of the artist

Serious Humor

“I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art,” repeated in a neat cursive script down the length of a sheet of lined paper is clearly reminiscent of an old-fashioned school-room punishment. But just who is it that the artist, John Baldessari, is punishing? The lines are stark and simple, and like so much of John Baldessari’s art, employs a wry humor that turns on the art world, only in this case, the blackboard is a canvas.

Only a year earlier, in 1970, Baldessari underlined a key rupture in his career and one that was taking place in the art world as well at that time. Since the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism had been the dominant avant-garde style in galleries and art schools. For example, Jackson Pollock’s huge canvases, dense with paint he applied directly, were understood (however inaccurately) to be a direct expression of his internal emotional state.

Cremation Project

As a young artist, Baldessari had also painted abstractions. But in 1970, a year before I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art , Baldessari, together with friends and students from University of California at San Diego, gathered paintings he had made as a young artist and drove them to a crematorium where they burned them. The artist then placed the ashes into an urn with a bronze plaque inscribed,

JOHN ANTHONY BALDESSARI

MAY 1953 MARCH 1966

The urn and plaque, together with documenting photographs of the cremation constitute Baldessari’s Cremation Project , 1970. The previous year, the artist had written of this project as an act to,

…rid my life of accumulated art….It is a reductive, recycling piece. I consider all these paintings a body of work in the real sense of the word. Will I save my life by losing it? Will a Phoenix arise from the ashes? Will the paintings having become dust become materials again? I don’t know, but I feel better. 1

In Cremation Project , Baldessari defined the clearest possible demarcation between his early and mature work. By sacrificing his early paintings, by burning them, he emphasized their physicality. They existed as a thing in the world that could be destroyed. But he shifts our frame of reference from the physical, the material, by creating a work of art that relied on the physical artifact, the ashes and urn, only as a way to draw the viewer to the larger conceptual issues—including the construction of a division in his career.

With the Cremation Project , John Baldessari staked his place in the highly intellectualized space of 1960s and 70s conceptual art practice. By 1970, Conceptual art had established a place for itself in the art world. The stark machined repetitions created by the artist Donald Judd and the grids painted by Agnes Martin laid the groundwork for artists like Sol Lewitt who created written instructions for lines drawn with mathematical precision onto a wall to create dazzling geometries. Lewitt had created conceptual works of art that asked the Platonic question, where is the art itself actually located? Does it exist as the completed drawing on the wall? Does it exist in the originary act of writing the instructions? Is the art embedded in the performance of the work when assistants do the drawing? What happens when the wall drawing is painted over and is remade somewhere else? This was the world of ideas into which Baldessari entered.

Word Paintings

In Baldessari’s art, words, photographs and paint offer visual statements that are so flat, so bald-faced in their directness and sincerity that they become ironic visual statements aimed at the very definition of what art is. And because these statements are on canvas or within a galley context, they challenge the most sacred theories of modern art, what the artist calls “received wisdom.”

Baldessari’s word paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s are a case in point. Many were hand-lettered onto stretched canvas by sign painters that Baldessari had hired to render statements that that he had not even written but had only read. These are often statements that naively set out define the most elusive of questions that confront artists. And they are rendered in the clearest most direct lettering possible, the lettering found on a sign, the most earnest typography that directs and informs in the most straightforward manner possible. We cannot help but trust what these sign paintings tell us, even when Baldessari’s word paintings offer audaciously innocent solutions to the complex theory-soaked issues that define modernism.

Works of art such as What is Painting , 1966-68, Everything is purged from this painting but art, no ideas have entered this work, 1966-68 and Composing on a Canvas , 1966-68 are brilliantly ambitious. They layer the false objectivity of didactic grammar and clear careful hand lettering over impossibly trite yet seductive solutions at the very core of art’s definition.

For example, What is Painting tries to define what painting is and does so in only three short sentences. But these sentences are written on a canvas and so inherit a fraught five hundred year history of art making. What makes these issues all the more pleasantly absurd is that Baldessari is at least as well known for his long career as a teacher as he is as an artist. So when he offers paintings with statements such as, “Everything is purged from this painting but art, no ideas have entered this work,” the allegedly instructive nature is given more weight and is ultimately more absurd.

Nova Scotia College of Art and Design

Soon after the Cremation Project , Baldessari was asked by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design to exhibit his work there. Instead of sending art, Baldessari sent instructions to the school in the form of a letter for the initial iteration of I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art , a work based on a sentence Baldessari had written to himself in a notebook he then kept. The letter reads in part,

…I have no idea what your gallery looks like of course, and I know that you do not have much money for shows so that conditions my ideas of course….I’ve got a punishment piece. It will require a surrogate or surrogates since I cannot be there to… impose punishment. But that’s ok, since the theory is that punishment should be instructive for others. And there is a precedent for it, Christ being punished for our sins, and many others. So some student scapegoats are necessary. If you can’t induce anybody to be sacrificial and take my sins upon their shoulders, then use whatever funds there are, fifty dollars, to pay someone as a mercenary.

The piece is this, from floor to ceiling should be written by one or more people, one sentence under another, the following statement: I will not make any more bad art.

At least one column of the sentence should be done floor to ceiling before the exhibit opens and the writing of the sentence should continue everyday, if possible, for the length of the exhibit. I would appreciate it if you could tell me how many times the sentence has been written after the exhibit closes. It should be hand written, clearly written with correct spelling…. 2

By the end of the exhibit the walls were covered with Baldessari’s statement of sacrificial punishment and he allowed the school to create a lithograph of the work for their fundraising based on his own handwriting.

A Strategist

Baldessari has called himself “purely a strategist” and in I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art he references the fundamental modernist tension between the word and image that Magritte had exposed in The Treachery of Images and the cool, spare, self-referential repetitions of the minimalists. John Baldessari has spent his career coaxing beauty and complexity from our prosaic visual culture.

Special thanks to Sandy Heller, The Heller Group, LLC

1. Excerpt from, John Baldessari, Cremation Piece , 1969 in Donald Kuspit, “ Semiotic Anti-Subject ,” Artnet , originally from three Getty lectures delivered at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, April 4, 6 and 10, 2000.

2. Excerpt transcribed from video, “ Curator Chrissie Iles on John Baldessari’s I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art ,” Whitney Museum of American Art, December 2010.

Additional Resources:

The artist’s website

Baldessari on Art 21

Whitney Museum recreation of I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art

Baldessari essay and podcast on NPR

Yale Books Blog on the Cremation Project

Hans Haacke, Seurat’s “Les Poseuses” (small version), 1884-1975

by SAL KHAN , DR. BETH HARRIS and DR. STEVEN ZUCKER

Video \(\PageIndex{4}\): Hans Haacke, Seurat’s “Les Poseuses” (small version), 1884-1975 , 1975

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii

by TINA RIVERS RYAN

Video \(\PageIndex{5}\)

Getting on the “Electronic Super Highway”

In 1974, artist Nam June Paik submitted a report to the Art Program of the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the first organizations to support artists working with new media, including television and video. Entitled “Media Planning for the Post Industrial Society—The 21st Century is now only 26 years away,” the report argued that media technologies would become increasingly prevalent in American society, and should be used to address pressing social problems, such as racial segregation, the modernization of the economy, and environmental pollution. Presciently, Paik’s report forecasted the emergence of what he called a “broadband communication network”—or “electronic super highway”—comprising not only television and video, but also “audio cassettes, telex, data pooling, continental satellites, micro-fiches, private microwaves and eventually, fiber optics on laser frequencies.” By the 1990s, Paik’s concept of an information “superhighway” had become associated with a new “world wide web” of electronic communication then emerging—just as he had predicted.

From Music to Fluxus

Paik was well-positioned to understand how media technologies were evolving: in the 1960s he was one of the very first people to use televisual technologies as an artistic medium, earning him the title of “father” of video art. Born in Seoul in 1932, Paik studied composition while attending college in Tokyo; he eventually travelled to Germany, where he hoped to encounter the leading composers of the day. He met John Cage in 1958, and soon became involved with the avant-garde Fluxus group, led by Cage’s student George Maciunas. Explain Fluxus.

Following the example of Cage’s oeuvre, many of Paik’s Fluxus works undermined accepted notions of musical composition or performance. This same irreverent spirit informed his use of television, to which he turned his attention in 1963 in his first one-man gallery show, “Exposition of Music—Electronic Television,” at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany. Here, Paik became the first artist to exhibit what would later become known as “video art” by scattering television sets across the floor of a room, thereby shifting our attention from the content on the screens to the sculptural forms of the sets.

The father of video art

Paik moved to New York in 1964, where he came into contact with the downtown art scene. In 1965, he began collaborating with cellist Charlotte Moorman, who would wear and perform Paik’s TV sculptures for many years; he also had a one-man show at the 57th Street Galeria Bonino, in which he exhibited modified or “prepared” television sets that upset the traditional TV-watching experience. One example is Magnet TV , in which an industrial magnet is placed on top of the TV set, distorting the broadcast image into abstract patterns of light.

According to an oft-cited story, on October 4th of that same year, Paik purchased the first commercially-available portable video system in America, the Sony Portapak, and immediately used it to record the arrival of Pope Paul VI at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Later that night, Paik showed the tape at the Café au Go Go in Greenwich Village, ushering in a new mode of video art based not on the subversion or distortion of television broadcasts, but on the possibilities of videotape. The evolution of these tendencies into a new movement was announced by a 1969 group show, “TV as a Creative Medium.” Held at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, the show included one of Paik’s interactive TVs, and also premiered another one of his collaborations with Moorman.

TV as a Creative Medium

For Paik and other early adopters of video, this new artistic medium was well-suited to the speed of our increasingly electronic modern lives. It allowed artists to create moving images more quickly than recording on film (which required time for negatives to be developed), and unlike film, video could be edited in “real-time,” using devices that altered the video’s electronic signals. (Ever the pioneer, Paik created his own video synthesizer with engineer Shuya Abe in 1969.) Furthermore, because the image recorded by the video camera could be transmitted to and viewed almost instantaneously on a monitor, people could see themselves “live” on a TV screen, and even interact with their own TV image, in a process known as “feedback.” In the years to come, the participatory nature of TV would be redefined by two-way cable networks, while the advent of global satellite broadcasts made TV a medium of instant global communication.

As television continued to evolve from the late 1960s onward, Paik explored ways to disrupt it from both inside and outside of the institutional frameworks of galleries, museums, and emerging experimental TV labs. His major works from this period include TV Garden (1974), a sculptural installation of TV sets scattered among live plants in a museum (image above), and Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), a broadcast program that coordinated live feeds from around the world via satellite. In these and other projects, Paik’s goal was to reflect upon how we interact with technology, and to imagine new ways of doing so. The many retrospectives of his work in recent decades, including one organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2012, speak to the increasing relevance of his ideas for contemporary art.

The nation electric

By the 1980s, Paik was building enormous, free-standing structures comprising dozens or even hundreds of TV screens, often organized into iconic shapes, as in the giant pyramid of V-yramid (1982). For the German Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, Paik produced a series of works about the relationship between Eastern and Western cultures, framed through the lens of Marco Polo; along with Hans Haacke, another artist representing Germany, Paik was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion. One of the works, Electronic Superhighway , was a towering bank of TVs that simultaneously screened multiple video clips (including one of John Cage) from a wide variety of sources. Two years later, Paik revisited this work in Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii , placing over 300 TV screens into the overall formation of a map of the United States outlined in colored neon lights (see image at the top of the page and the detail below). Roughly forty feet long and fifteen feet high, the work is a monumental record of the physical and also cultural contours of America: within each state, the screens display video clips that resonate with that state’s unique popular mythology. For example, Iowa (where each presidential election cycle begins) plays old news footage of various candidates, while Kansas presents the Wizard of Oz .

The states are firmly defined, but also linked, by the network of neon lights, which echoes the network of interstate “superhighways” that economically and culturally unified the continental U.S. in the 1950s. However, whereas the highways facilitated the transportation of people and goods from coast to coast, the neon lights suggest that what unifies us now is not so much transportation, but electronic communication. Thanks to the screens of televisions and of the home computers that became popular in the 1990s, as well as the cables of the internet (which transmit information as light), most of us can access the same information at anytime and from any place. Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii , which has been housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum since 2002, has therefore become an icon of America in the information age.

While Paik’s work is generally described as celebrating the fact that the “electronic superhighway” allows us to communicate with and understand each other across traditional boundaries, this particular work also can be read as posing some difficult questions about how that technology is impacting culture. For example, the physical scale of the work and number of simultaneous clips makes it difficult to absorb any details, resulting in what we now call “information overload,” and the visual tension between the static brightness of the neons and the dynamic brightness of the screens points to a similar tension between national and local frames of reference.

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Nam June Paik, bio and collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Nam June Paik, TV Garden at the Guggenheim

Nam June Paik from the National Endowment for the Arts

Nam June Paik archive at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Nam June Paik from the Asia Society

Electronic Superhighway – American Experience in the Classroom (The Smithsonian American Art Museum)

Melissa Chiu and Michelle Yun, eds., Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot (New York: Asia Society Museum, 2014).

John G. Hanhardt and Ken Hakuta, Nam June Paik: Global Visionary (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012).

John G. Hanhardt and Jon Ippolito, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2000).

Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi kusama, narcissus garden.

by DANIELLE SHANG

Today there are few female artists who are more visible to a wide range of international audiences than Yayoi Kusama, who was born in 1929 in Japan. Kusama is a self-taught artist who now chooses to live in a private Tokyo mental health facility, while prolifically producing art in various media in her studio nearby. Her highly constructed persona and self-proclaimed life-long history of insanity have been the subject of scrutiny and critiques for decades. Art historian Jody Cutler places Kusama’s oeuvre “in dialogue with the psychological state known as narcissism,” as “narcissism is both the subject and the cause of Kusama’s art, or in other words, a conscious artistic element related to content.”[1] It is within this context that we examine Kusama and her infamous Narcissus Garden (narcissism is, in part, the egotistic admiration of one’s self).

Kusama arrived in New York City from Japan in 1958 and immediately approached dealers and artists alike to promote her work. Within the first few years she began to exhibit and associate herself with seminal artists and critics, such as Donald Judd, Joseph Cornell, Yves Klein, and Lucio Fontana who later was instrumental in her realizing Narcissus Garden .

In 1965, she mounted her first mirror installation Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field at Castellane Gallery in New York (left). A mirrored room without a ceiling was filled with colorfully dotted, phallus-like stuffed objects on the floor. The repeated reflections in the mirrors conveyed the illusion of a continuous sea of multiplied phalli expanding to its infinity. This playful and erotic exhibition immediately attracted the media’s attention.

Narcissus Garden, 1966

The pinnacle of her succès de scandale culminated in the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966. Although Kusama was not officially invited to exhibit, according to her autobiography, she received the moral and financial support from Lucio Fontana and permission from the chairman of the Biennale Committee to stage 1,500 mass-produced plastic silver globes on the lawn outside the Italian Pavilion. The tightly arranged 1,500 shimmering balls constructed an infinite reflective field in which the images of the artist, the visitors, the architecture, and the landscape were repeated, distorted, and projected by the convex mirror surfaces that produced virtual images appearing closer and smaller than reality. The size of each sphere was similar to that of a fortune-teller’s crystal ball. When gazing into it, the viewer only saw his/her own reflection staring back, forcing a confrontation with one’s own vanity and ego.

During the opening week, Kusama placed two signs at the installation: “NARCISSUS GARDEN, KUSAMA” and “YOUR NARCISSIUM [sic] FOR SALE” on the lawn. Acting like a street peddler, she was selling the mirror balls to passers-by for two dollars each, while distributing flyers with Herbert Read’s complimentary remarks about her work on them. She consciously drew attention to the “otherness” of her exotic heritage by wearing a gold kimono with a silver sash. The monetary exchange between Kusama and her customers underscored the economic system embedded in art production, exhibition and circulation. The Biennale officials eventually stepped in and put an end to her “peddling.” But the installation remained.[2] Her interactive performance and eye-catching installation garnered international press coverage. This original installation of Narcissus Garden from 1966 has been frequently interpreted by many as both Kusama’s self-promotion and her protest of the commercialization of art. [3]

The life of Narcissus Garden after 1966

Since then, Kusama’s oeuvre has become integrated into the canon of art history, and popular with art institutions around the world. In 1993, Kusama was officially invited to represent Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale.

Her Narcissus Garden continues to live on. It has been commissioned and re-installed at various settings, including the Brazilian business tycoon Bernardo de Mello Paz’s Instituto Inhotim (left), Central Park in New York City, as well as retail booths at art fairs.

The re-creation of Narcissus Garden has erased the notion of political cynicism and social critique; instead, those shiny balls, now made of stainless steel and carrying hefty price tags, have become a trophy of prestige and self-importance. Originally intended as the media for an interactive performance between the artist and the viewer, the objects are now regarded as valuable commodities for display.

The profound narcissistic undertone however has been ironically amplified not only by the artist’s pervasive ostentation, but also by the viewership in the age of Internet. Seduced by his/her own reflective images on the convex surfaces, viewers snap photographs with a smart phone and instantly upload them to social media for the rest of the world to see. The urge to capture and disseminate the moment one’s own image coalesces onto a privileged object in a privileged institution seems to motivate the obsession with the self. To further accentuate the effect of gazing at one’s multiple selves, many installations now take place on the water where the original Narcissus from the Greek mythology fell in love with his own reflection and eventually drowned.

[1] Jody Cutler. 2011. “Narcissus, Narcosis, Neurosis: The Visions of Yayoi Kusama,” in Contemporary Art and Classical Myth , edited by Isabelle Loring Wallace, Jennie Hirsh, (London: Ashgate Publishing ltd), p. 89.

[2] There are a few discrepancies in the anecdote of this event between Kusama’s autobiography and art historians and critics. For example, 1) Kusama claims that the installation was not exactly a guerrilla act, because she received permission from the Biennale official, though she did not have an official invitation as a Biennale participant; 2) according to Kusama, the installation itself was NOT removed after she was asked to stop selling the balls; and 3) in her autobiography, the balls were made of plastic in 1966 not stainless steel.

[3] It is worth noting that the following Venice Biennale, in 1968, was marked by social and economic turmoil around the globe, and was struck by the student movement in Italy and a boycott by international artists. The Biennale was labeled as a fascist, capitalist, and commercial. In contrast to Kusama’s action, many artists who were officially invited to participate decided to close exhibition halls, withdraw their works, and join street demonstrations resulting in the closure of the Biennale sales office and the end of Biennale prizes until 1986.

Kusama and Experimentation (Tate blog)

Kusama and Self-obliteration (Tate blog)

TateShots: Kusama’s Obliteration Room

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama , translated by Ralph McCarthy (London: Tate Enterprises Ltd., 2013) (see the section, “On an endless Highway”).

Yayoi Kusama (Tate)

Video \(\PageIndex{6}\): The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama’s (草間彌生) life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Video from Tate

Bruce Nauman, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths

by JP MCMAHON

Bruce Nauman’s neon sign asks a multitude of questions with regard to the ways in which the 20th century conceived both avant-garde art and the role of the artist in society. If earlier European modernists, such as Mondrian, Malevich, and Kandinsky, sought to use art to reveal deep-seated truths about the human condition and the role of the artist in general, then Bruce Nauman’s The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths questions such transhistorical and universal statements. With regard to this work, Nauman said:

The most difficult thing about the whole piece for me was the statement. It was a kind of test—like when you say something out loud to see if you believe it. Once written down, I could see that the statement […] was on the one hand a totally silly idea and yet, on the other hand, I believed it. It’s true and not true at the same time. It depends on how you interpret it and how seriously you take yourself. For me it’s still a very strong thought.

The medium and the message

By using the mediums of mass culture (neon signs) and of display (he originally hung the sign in his storefront studio), Nauman sought to bring questions normally considered only by the high culture elite, such as the role and function of art and the artist in society, to a wider audience. While early European modernists, such as Picasso, had borrowed widely from popular culture, they rarely displayed their work in the sites of popular culture. For Nauman, both the medium and the message were equally important; thus, by using a form of communication readily understood by all (neon signs had been widespread in modern industrial society) and by placing this message in the public view, Nauman let everyone ask and answer the question.

While it is perhaps the words that stand out most, the symbolism of the spiral (think of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1969), also deserves attention having been used for centuries in European and other civilizations, such as megalithic and Chinese art, both as a symbol of time and of nature itself.

Transcendence?

Theosophy is interesting in this regard and was an important aspect of the early European Avant-garde. In particular, Theosophists believed that all religions are attempts to help humanity to evolve to greater perfection, and that each religion therefore holds a portion of the truth. Through their materials, artists had sought to transform the physical into the spiritual. In this sense, Malevich, Mondrian, and Kandinsky sought to use the material of their art to transcend it: Nauman, and other of his generation, did not.

Process over product

Instead, Nauman’s work transgresses many genres of art making in that his work explores the implications of minimalism, conceptual, performance, and process art. In this sense we could call Nauman’s art “Postminimalism,” a term coined by the art critic Robert Pincus-Witten, in his article “Eva Hesse: Post-Minimalism into Sublime” ( Artforum 10, number 3, November 1971). Artists such as Nauman, Acconci, and Hesse, favored process instead of product, or rather the investigation over the end result. However, this is not to say they did not produce objects, such as the neon-sign by Nauman, only that within the presentation of the object, they also retained an examination of the processes that made that specific object.

In this sense, Nauman’s neon sign isn’t only an object, it’s a process, something that continues to make us think about art, artist, and the role that language plays in our conception of both. The words continue to ask this of each beholder who encounters them. Does the artist, the “true artist” really “reveal mystical truths”? Or confined to the specific culture that it was made in? If we are to believe the statement (remember, it is not necessarily Nauman’s, he merely borrows it from our shared culture), then we might, for example, recognize Leonardo da Vinci as a Neo-Platonic artist who showed us ultimate and essential truths through painting. On the other hand, if we reject the statement, then we would probably recognize the artist as just another producer of a specific set of objects, that we call “art.”

This type of logic and analytical thinking was influenced by Nauman’s reading of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953). From Wittgenstein, Nauman took the idea that you put forth a proposition/idea in the form of language and then examine its findings, irrespective of its proof or conclusion. Nauman’s “language games,” his neon-words, his proposition about the nature of art and the artist continue to resonant in today’s art world, in particular with regard to the value we place on the artist’s actions and findings.

This work of art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Art:21 page about Nauman’s The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truth

Philadelphia Museum of Art biography of the artist

Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:

Performance art

Performance art differs from traditional theater in its rejection of a clear narrative, use of random or chance-based structures, and direct appeal to the audience.

Performance Art: An Introduction

by DR. VIRGINIA B. SPIVEY

When Art Intersects With Life

Many people associate performance art with highly publicized controversies over government funding of the arts, censorship, and standards of public decency. Indeed, at its worst, performance art can seem gratuitous, boring or just plain weird. But, at its best, it taps into our most basic shared instincts: our physical and psychological needs for food, shelter, sex, and human interaction; our individual fears and self-consciousness; our concerns about life, the future, and the world we live in. It often forces us to think about issues in a way that can be disturbing and uncomfortable, but it can also make us laugh by calling attention to the absurdities in life and the idiosyncrasies of human behavior.

Performance art differs from traditional theater in its rejection of a clear narrative, use of random or chance-based structures, and direct appeal to the audience. The art historian RoseLee Goldberg writes:

Historically, performance art has been a medium that challenges and violates borders between disciplines and genders, between private and public, and between everyday life and art, and that follows no rules.*

Although the term encompasses a broad range of artistic practices that involve bodily experience and live action, its radical connotations derive from this challenge to conventional social mores and artistic values of the past.

Historical Sources

While performance art is a relatively new area of art history, it has roots in experimental art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Echoing utopian ideas of the period’s avant-garde, these earliest examples found influences in theatrical and music performance, art, poetry, burlesque and other popular entertainment. Modern artists used live events to promote extremist beliefs, often through deliberate provocation and attempts to offend bourgeois tastes or expectations. In Italy, the anarchist group of Futurist artists insulted and hurled profanity at their middle-class audiences in hopes of inciting political action.

Following World War II, performance emerged as a useful way for artists to explore philosophical and psychological questions about human existence. For this generation, who had witnessed destruction caused by the Holocaust and atomic bomb, the body offered a powerful medium to communicate shared physical and emotional experience. Whereas painting and sculpture relied on expressive form and content to convey meaning, performance art forced viewers to engage with a real person who could feel cold and hunger, fear and pain, excitement and embarrassment—just like them.

Action & Contingency

Some artists, inspired largely by Abstract Expressionism, used performance to emphasize the body’s role in artistic production. Working before a live audience, Kazuo Shiraga of the Japanese Gutai Group made sculpture by crawling through a pile of mud. Georges Mathieu staged similar performances in Paris where he violently threw paint at his canvas. These performative approaches to making art built on philosophical interpretations of Abstract Expressionism, which held the gestural markings of action painters as visible evidence of the artist’s own existence. Bolstered by Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock in his studio, moving dance-like around a canvas on the floor, artists like Shiraga and Mathieu began to see the artist’s creative act as equally important, if not more so, to the artwork produced. In this light, Pollock’s distinctive drips, spills and splatters appeared as a mere remnant, a visible trace left over from the moment of creation.

Shifting attention from the art object to the artist’s action further suggested that art existed in real space and real time. In New York, visual artists combined their interest in action painting with ideas of the avant-garde composer John Cage to blur the line between art and life. Cage employed chance procedures to create musical compositions such as 4’33”. In this (in)famous piece, Cage used the time frame specified in the title to bracket ambient noises that occurred randomly during the performance. By effectively calling attention to the hum of fluorescent lights, people moving in their seats, coughs, whispers, and other ordinary sounds, Cage transformed them into a unique musical composition.

The Private Made Political

Drawing on these influences, new artistic formats emerged in the late 1950s. Environments and Happenings physically placed viewers in commonplace surroundings, often forcing them to participate in a series of loosely structured actions. Fluxus artists, poets, and musicians likewise challenged viewers by presenting the most mundane events—brushing teeth, making a salad, exiting the theater—as forms of art. A well-known example is the “bed-in” that Fluxus artist Yoko Ono staged in 1969 in Amsterdam with her husband John Lennon. Typical of much performance art, Ono and Lennon made ordinary human activity a public spectacle, which demanded personal interaction and raised popular awareness of their pacifist beliefs.

In the politicized environment of the 1960s, many artists employed performance to address emerging social concerns. For feminist artists in particular, using their body in live performance proved effective in challenging historical representations of women, made mostly by male artists for male patrons. In keeping with past tradition, artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke and Valie Export displayed their nude bodies for the viewer’s gaze; but, they resisted the idealized notion of women as passive objects of beauty and desire. Through their words and actions, they confronted their audiences and raised issues about the relationship of female experience to cultural beliefs and institutions, physical appearance, and bodily functions including menstruation and childbearing. Their ground-breaking work paved the way for male and female artists in the 1980s and 1990s, who similarly used body and performance art to explore issues of gender, race and sexual identity.

Where Is It?

Throughout the mid-twentieth century, performance has been closely tied to the search for alternatives to established art forms, which many artists felt had become fetishized as objects of economic and cultural value. Because performance art emphasized the artist’s action and the viewer’s experience in real space and time, it rarely yielded a final object to be sold, collected, or exhibited. Artists of the 1960 and 70s also experimented with other “dematerialized” formats including Earthworks and Conceptual Art that resisted commodification and traditional modes of museum display. The simultaneous rise of photography and video, however, offered artists a viable way to document and widely distribute this new work.

Performance art’s acceptance into the mainstream over the past 30 years has led to new trends in its practice and understanding. Ironically, the need to position performance within art’s history has led museums and scholars to focus heavily on photographs and videos that were intended only as documents of live events. In this context, such archival materials assume the art status of the original performance. This practice runs counter to the goal of many artists, who first turned to performance as an alternative to object-based forms of art. Alternatively, some artists and institutions now stage re-enactments of earlier performances in order to recapture the experience of a live event. In a 2010 retrospective exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, for example, performers in the galleries staged live reenactments of works by the pioneering performance artist Marina Abramovic, alongside photographs and video documentation of the original performances.

Don’t Try This At Home

New strategies, variously described as situations, relational aesthetics, and interventionist art, have recently begun to appear. Interested in the social role of the artist, Rirkrit Tiravanija stages performances that encourage interpersonal exchange and shared conversation among individuals who might not otherwise meet. His performances have included cooking traditional Thai dinners in museums for viewers to share, and relocating the entire contents of a gallery’s offices and storage rooms, including the director at his desk, into public areas used to exhibit art. Similar to performance art of the past, such approaches engage the viewer and encourage their active participation in artistic production; however, they also speak to a cultural shift toward interactive modes of communication and social exchange that characterize the 21st century.

* RoseLee Goldberg. Performance: Live art since the 60s , New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998, page 20.

Video of John Cage’s 4″33″ performed by the BBC Symphoney Orchestra at the Barbican Centre in 2004

Carolee Schneemann’s website

Marina Abramovic’s MoMA exhibition website

Performance art on The Art Story

The Case for Performance Art

Video \(\PageIndex{7}\): Speaker: Sarah Urist Green

Vito Acconci, Following Piece

Conceived by performance and conceptual artist Vito Acconci, Following Piece was an activity that took place everyday on the streets of New York, between October 3rd and 25th, 1969. It was part of other performance and conceptual events sponsored by the Architectural League of New York that occurred during those three weeks. The terms of the exhibition “Street Works IV” were to do a piece, sometime during the month, that used a street in New York City. So Acconci decided to follow people around the streets and document his following of them. But why would he do this? Why would Acconci follow random people around New York?

Acconci’s work is typical of performance and conceptual art made during this period in the way that he uses his body as the object of his art in order to explore some specific idea. In essence, Following Piece was concerned with the language of our bodies, not so much in a private manner, but in a deeply public manner. By selecting a passer-by at random until they entered a private space, Acconci submitted his own movements to the movements of others, showing how our bodies are themselves always subject to external forces that we may or may not be able to control. In his notes that the artist kept during the performance, Acconci wrote:

Following Piece , potentially, could use all the time allotted and all the space available: I might be following people, all day long, everyday, through all the streets in New York City. In actuality, following episodes ranged from two or three minutes when someone got into a car and I couldn’t grab a taxi, I couldn’t follow – to seven or eight hours – when a person went to a restaurant, a movie.

In terms of the art work, rather than being just another object that we look at in the gallery, Following Piece was part of the revolution that took place in the art world in the late 1960s that tried to bring art out of the gallery and into the street in order to explore real issues such as space, time, and the human body. Many artists, such as Acconci, used their bodies as their chosen medium. Look at some of Acconci’s notes of the period which he wrote before, during and after the event:

• I need a scheme (follow the scheme, follow a person)
• I add myself to another person (I give up control/I don’t have to control myself)
• Subjective relationship; subjunctive relationship
• A way to get around. (A way to get myself out of the house.) Get into the middle of things.
• Out of space. Out of time. (My time and space are taken up, out of myself, into a larger system).

All of these ideas were influenced by Acconci’s readings. As many other artists of the period, Acconci wanted to get away from specific art problems and engage with social problems. Acconci read books such as Edward Hall’s The Hidden Dimension (1969), Erving Goffmann’s The Presentation of the Self in Every Day Life (1959), and Kurt Lewin’s In Principles of Topological Psychological (1936/1966). All of these books explored the ways in which the individual and the social are interlinked in terms of complex codes that structure the way we act and live everyday.

With regard to the influence on these texts on Following Piece , Acconci’s use of diagrams specifically refers to Lewin’s notion of “field theory”: that is, a model that sought to explain human behaviour in terms of relations and in relation to its environment and surroundings. Lewin placed behaviour in a “field” in order to examine it in a theoretical manner. The diagrams drawn by Acconci are an imaginative engagement with this idea of human relations as engaging in a specific field or space. So by following someone around New York, Acconci could perhaps experience what it was like to relinquish self control to others and also explore the intersecting systems that grouped different people together in one field. As we can see from the diagrams, Acconci’s intentions were not subjective but much more systematic—they constituted an exploration of the private and public fields that occur in every social space.

Ironically, for all the effort to get out of the gallery, much of Acconci’s documentation of Following Piece , for example, the texts, photographs (which were taken after the event!), and diagrams, now constitutes a work of art in its own right. MoMA owns several of the photographs of Following Piece and other “versions” of this work are also in existence. So, even though Acconci’s Following Piece was a performance that occurred in a very specific period (3rd to 25th October, 1969), the reproduction and circulation of the work continues. This fact not only teaches us important things about the nature of performance art and its relationship to the art world, but also how the context of the art work is also never exactly fixed and each time it is presented something new occurs with the work itself.

Following Piece photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Willoughby Sharp video interview with Vito Acconci (1973) includes discussion of Following Piece

Following Piece documentation

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (July 23, 1973)

by PATRICIA HICKSON, WADSWORTH ATHENEUM MUSEUM OF ART and DR. BETH HARRIS

Video \(\PageIndex{8}\): Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (July 23, 1973) , Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art ©Mierle Laderman Ukeles

This work at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

Jillian Steinhauer “ How Mierle Laderman Ukeles Turned Maintenance Work into Art ” Hyperallergic

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting

Rather surprising things

“Over the past ten years,” the American art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1979, “rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture: narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert.” [1] To this list, we could add Gordan Matta-Clark’s Splitting, 1974, in which a suburban home in Englewood, New Jersey slated for demolition was sliced nearly in half.

Matta-Clark had taken a chainsaw to make two parallel, vertical cuts beginning at the roof’s center; the house was nearly cleaved in half, each half shifted outwards leaving a long narrow “V” shape allowing light to filter inside. It was a laborious process that involved the assistance of several friends and the resulting structure, demolished some three months later as part of an urban renewal project, was documented in photographs.

Splitting also served as the site for at least one “field trip” — the art dealer Holly Solomon (who had purportedly purchased the house as an investment), several artists, and gallery goers boarded a bus from downtown Manhattan to visit the house (a 16 mm film , now in the collection of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, documented the trip).

Post-medium

Beginning in the 1970s, contemporary art abandoned the traditional forms it had historically taken. Painting and sculpture became almost unrecognizable as such. Krauss would later characterize it as a “post-medium” condition, a condition, in other words, in which the familiar categories that defined Western art for centuries were overturned. The medium, that which constituted the material or form of a given artwork, became obsolete, or at least radically reformulated: an art work could now exist in any form.

If Gordan Matta-Clark could be said to be associated with any one particular medium, it would be architecture. The entirety of his work, of which Splitting stands as exemplary, consisted of alterations to the architecture of abandoned or condemned buildings. In his other work, sections of floors and walls were removed, and sometimes those removed sections themselves become the artwork; in other cases it was the void formed from the removal that is the focus.

Matta-Clark began his interventions into the urban environment at a time when New York, where the artist lived and worked, was a city in crisis as a result of economic downturns. President Gerald Ford gave a speech denying federal assistance that would have rescued New York from what seemed like certain bankruptcy in the same year the artist made Splitting . The Daily News reported on its front page the very next day: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

Matta-Clark had seen his own neighborhood in lower Manhattan negatively impacted by modernization ever since the influential city planner Robert Moses attempted to push a freeway through Washington Square Park in the 1950s. Trained as an architect, Matta-Clark likely saw through the glossy rhetoric of urban renewal projects — though they promised regeneration such plans destroyed existing neighborhoods.

Anarchitecture

In March 1974, Matta-Clark joined a collective of artists who mounted an exhibition entitled Anarchitecture at 112 Greene Street in New York City. The premise was embodied in the title which merged the term “anarchy” with “architecture;” the artists in the collective were all interested in exploring new ideas of form and space in the midst of urban decay. One year later, and out of his experience working with this community of like-minded artists, came Splitting . But Matta-Clark’s destroyed house was not just giving visual shape to the crisis of a neighborhood or even of a city on the verge of collapse, dire as those conditions surely were.

Modernism formed the larger horizon of Splitting ’s meaning; its philosophy of the new and of progress that had underwritten the utopianism of over 100 years of art and architecture was suddenly untenable. New York City had long defined industrial modernity — its soaring skyscrapers of the early twentieth century were second only to Chicago’s equally impressive skyline — and its seeming collapse was yet another symbol of a crisis of modernity. No wonder many people came to speak of post modernity. In architecture particularly there was already a sense that the great utopian project of modernism had failed.

It has become almost obligatory to describe Matta-Clark’s work as a critique of modernist architecture — and more generally modernist art — an intervention, interrogation, disruption, investigation (all words you will encounter in the study of any postmodern or contemporary art work). But as much as Splitting may be regarded as critical commentary on the idea of progress and a work that helps to lay the groundwork for a postmodern aesthetic (in which artists were seen to be social commentators, engaged participants in the larger realm of visual culture, or even political activism), another aspect of the artist’s work bears consideration.

There is a melancholy and nostalgia that pervades Matta-Clark’s fragments of walls, floors, cut-through spaces or domestic interiors opened to the outside. Much like the fascination with the ruins of antiquity that peppered the landscape of Europe during the eighteenth century when classical antiquity was discovered anew, Matta-Clark’ s works speak in poignant tones of the demise of the modern as both an aesthetic ideal and a utopia.

[1] Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), p. 30.

References:

Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), p. 30 – 44.

Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition , London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.

Field trip to Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Splitting” house, circa 1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Gordon Matta-Clark Collection.

Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present

by REBECCA TAYLOR

Transcendence

“Sit silently with the artist for a duration of your choosing”—so the instructions read on a small plaque in the second-floor atrium at The Museum of Modern Art. Behind the plaque, a queue of visitors forms, eager to enter a large square space—demarcated only by tape on the floor—to sit down at a wooden table across from a dark-haired woman in a navy-blue dress that conceals every part of her body save her face and her hands.

The woman is the pioneering artist Marina Abramović, but its likely that few of the people in line have any sense of this woman’s indelible impact on contemporary art. As I wait, an anthology of her performances scrolling through my head. Watching her from afar, I look to see the courage and fearlessness in a woman capable of incising a five-pointed star on her own stomach, screaming until she loses consciousness, and living in a gallery for 12 days without food. Strangely, she doesn’t seem reckless at all, but peaceful and wise. I then remember she trained with Tibetan Buddhists and has said she’s able to transcend the limits of her own body and mind through meditation. She’ll need these skills now more than ever as she attempts her longest performance-to-date, sitting at this table for every hour of every day that her retrospective is open at MoMA. No food. No water. No breaks.

So, I wait for my moment with the artist, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A young girl is sitting across from Marina and the two seem engaged in a staring contest, though from that distance it’s impossible to tell if they’re actually making eye contact or simply staring ahead in a daze. Seventy-five minutes later she finally stands up and exits the square, declaring she lost all sense of time and thought it had only been a few minutes. Marina leans forward and closes her eyes, while the next sojourner steps forward and takes the empty seat. Marina sits up and another staring contest commences—this one lasting sixty-seven minutes. This process repeats—ten minutes, fifty-five minutes, twenty minutes, forty-five minutes, etc. Finally, the man in front of me takes the seat and I’m next. More than three hours from when I entered the succession I’ve seen only six people participate in the performance and more than thirty leave the line in frustration. The nameless, faceless strangers I queued with hours ago are now friends—an artist from Poughkeepsie, an art history undergrad from Chicago, a nurse from outside Philly—and we share our excitement as our turn approaches. Finally, after nearly four hours, my time has come.

I enter the square and approach the table, immediately noting the heat of the lights and the watchful eyes of the crowds gathered to gawk at the spectacle. I put my purse on the floor and take a seat. While Marina leans forward, I settle into the chair and imagine I’ll last about ten minutes before I become either bored or totally uncomfortable. She begins to sit up and I try to prepare myself for the moment she opens her eyes. I have many skills, but sitting still and being silent are not traits I’m known for, so I was afraid: afraid of the judgment implicit in staring, afraid of the silence, afraid I wouldn’t have the transformative experience that had captivated those before me, afraid, afraid, afraid. Her lids opened and our eyes locked, not in a stare but in a friendly gaze. For the first few minutes, I thought only about who this woman was—a renegade, a feminist, an inspiration—but quickly realized that those things were more about her persona than the person. I discarded my preconceived notions and expectations and, as soon as I stopped thinking of her as an artist-celebrity, saw the woman behind the legend. We sat absolutely still in deafening silence, exchanging energy, and just being with each other. I’ve heard it said that couples married for decades can sit in silence and understand one another perfectly, but I’d never imagine that sort of intimacy could be possible between two total strangers. It is.

I could have stayed in that moment for hours but thought of my fellow line-mates, now friends, and decided it would be selfish to bask in this experience any longer. But, could I leave? It felt as rude as leaving a lecture in the middle. How would I leave? Abruptly just wouldn’t do, so I said good-bye and thanked her. More than thirty minutes had passed, thirty minutes of epic silence I’ll never forget.

MoMA exhibition website

“Performance Art Preserved, in the Flesh,” New York Times article, 2010

Performance Art

Summary of Performance Art

Performance is a genre in which art is presented "live," usually by the artist but sometimes with collaborators or performers. It has had a role in avant-garde art throughout the 20 th century, playing an important part in anarchic movements such as Futurism and Dada . Indeed, whenever artists have become discontented with conventional forms of art, such as painting and traditional modes of sculpture, they have often turned to performance as a means to rejuvenate their work. The most significant flourishing of performance art took place following the decline of modernism and Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s, and it found exponents across the world. Performance art of this period was particularly focused on the body, and is often referred to as Body art . This reflects the period's so-called "dematerialization of the art object," and the flight from traditional media. It also reflects the political ferment of the time: the rise of feminism , which encouraged thought about the division between the personal and political and anti-war activism, which supplied models for politicized art "actions." Although the concerns of performance artists have changed since the 1960s, the genre has remained a constant presence, and has largely been welcomed into the conventional museums and galleries from which it was once excluded.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• The foremost purpose of performance art has almost always been to challenge the conventions of traditional forms of visual art such as painting and sculpture. When these modes no longer seem to answer artists' needs - when they seem too conservative, or too enmeshed in the traditional art world and too distant from ordinary people - artists have often turned to performance in order to find new audiences and test new ideas.
• Performance art borrows styles and ideas from other forms of art, or sometimes from other forms of activity not associated with art, like ritual, or work-like tasks. If cabaret and vaudeville inspired aspects of Dada performance, this reflects Dada's desire to embrace popular art forms and mass cultural modes of address. More recently, performance artists have borrowed from dance, and even sport.
• Some varieties of performance from the post-war period are commonly described as "actions." German artists like Joseph Beuys preferred this term because it distinguished art performance from the more conventional kinds of entertainment found in theatre. But the term also reflects a strain of American performance art that could be said to have emerged out of a reinterpretation of " action painting ," in which the object of art is no longer paint on canvas, but something else - often the artist's own body.
• The focus on the body in so much Performance art of the 1960s has sometimes been seen as a consequence of the abandonment of conventional mediums. Some saw this as a liberation, part of the period's expansion of materials and media. Others wondered if it reflected a more fundamental crisis in the institution of art itself, a sign that art was exhausting its resources.
• The performance art of the 1960s can be seen as just one of the many disparate trends that developed in the wake of Minimalism . Seen in this way, it is an aspect of Post-Minimalism , and it could be seen to share qualities of Process art , another tendency central to that umbrella style. If Process art focused attention on the techniques and materials of art production. Process art was also often intrigued by the possibilities of mundane and repetitive actions; similarly, many performance artists were attracted to task-based activities that were very foreign to the highly choreographed and ritualized performances in traditional theatre or dance.

Key Artists

Overview of Performance Art

Yoko Ono said, “I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun,” and embodied the concept in her Cut Piece (1964) – pioneering Performance Art – where, holding a pair of scissors and kneeling on stage, she invited the audience to cut away pieces of her clothing.

Artworks and Artists of Performance Art

The Anthropometries of the Blue Period

Artist: Yves Klein

Although painting sat at the center of Yves Klein's practice, his approach to it was highly unconventional, and some critics have seen him as the paradigmatic neo-avant-garde artist of the post-war years. He initially became famous for monochromes - in particular for monochromes made with an intense shade of blue that Klein eventually patented. But he was also interested in Conceptual art and performance. For the Anthropometries , he painted actresses in blue paint and had them slather about on the floor to create body-shaped forms. In some cases, Klein made finished paintings from these actions; at other times he simply performed the stunt in front of finely dressed gallery audiences, and often with the accompaniment of chamber music. By removing all barriers between the human and the painting, Klein said, "[the models] became living brushes...at my direction the flesh itself applied the color to the surface and with perfect exactness." It has been suggested that the pictures were inspired by marks left on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki following the atomic explosions in 1945.

Performed at Robert Godet's, Paris 1958 and at Galerie Internationale d'Art Contemporain, Paris 1960

Artist: Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece , first performed in 1964, was a direct invitation to an audience to participate in an unveiling of the female body much as artists had been doing throughout history. By creating this piece as a live experience, Ono hoped to erase the neutrality and anonymity typically associated with society’s objectification of women in art. For the work, Ono sat silent upon a stage as viewers walked up to her and cut away her clothing with a pair of scissors. This forced people to take responsibility for their voyeurism and to reflect upon how even passive witnessing could potentially harm the subject of perception. It was not only a strong feminist statement about the dangers of objectification, but became an opportunity for both artist and audience members to fill roles as both creator and artwork.

Performed at Yamaichi Concert Hall, Kyoto, Japan 1964

Artist: Chris Burden

In many of his early 1970s performance pieces, Burden put himself in danger, thus placing the viewer in a difficult position, caught between a humanitarian instinct to intervene and the taboo against touching and interacting with art pieces. To perform Shoot , Burden stood in front of a wall while one friend shot him in the arm with a .22 long rifle, and another friend documented the event with a camera. It was performed in front of a small, private audience. One of Burden's most notorious and violent performances, it touches on the idea of martyrdom, and the notion that the artist may play a role in society as a kind of scapegoat. It might also speak to issues of gun control and, in the context of the period, the Vietnam War.

Performed at F Space, Santa Ana, California

Artist: Vito Acconci

In Seedbed , 1972 Vito Acconci laid underneath a custom made ramp that extended from two feet up one wall of the Sonnabend Gallery and sloped down to the middle of the floor. For eight hours a day during the course of the exhibition, Acconci laid underneath the ramp masturbating as guest’s walked above his hidden niche. As he performed this illicit act he would utter fantasies and obscenities toward the gallery guests into a microphone, which became audibly piped out through the room for all to hear. The piece placed Acconci in a position that was both public and private. It also created a provocative intimacy between artist and audience that produced multiple levels of feeling. Participants were prone to shock, discomfort, or perhaps even arousal. By positioning himself in two roles, both as giver and receiver of pleasure, Acconci furthered body art’s dictum of artist and artwork merging as one. He also used his sperm as a medium within the piece.

Performed at Sonnabend Gallery in New York City 1972

Artist: Marina Abramović

In Rhythm 10 , Abramović uses a series of 20 knives to quickly stab at the spaces between her outstretched fingers. Every time she pierces her skin, she selects another knife from those carefully laid out in front of her. Halfway through, she begins playing a recording of the first half of the hour-long performance, using the rhythmic beat of the knives striking the floor, and her hand, to repeat the same movements, cutting herself at the same time. This piece exemplifies Abramović's use of ritual in her work, and demonstrates what the artist describes as the synchronicity between the mistakes of the past and those of the present.

Performed at a festival in Edinburgh

Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me

Artist: Joseph Beuys

For three consecutive days in May, 1974, Beuys enclosed himself in a gallery with a wild coyote. Having previously announced that he would not enter the United States while the Vietnam War proceeded, this piece was his first and only action in America, and Beuys was ferried between the airport and the gallery in an ambulance to ensure that his feet did not have to touch American soil. Coyote centered on ideas of America wild and tamed. In an attempt to connect with an idea of wild, pre-colonial America, Beuys lived with a coyote for several days, attempting to communicate with it. He organized a sequence of interactions that would repeat for the duration of the piece, such as cloaking himself in felt and using a cane as a "lightening rod," and following the coyote around the room, bent at the waist and keeping the cane pointed at the coyote. Copies of The Wall Street Journal arrived daily, and were used as a toilet by the coyote, as if to say, "everything that claims to be a part of America is part of my territory."

Performed at Rene Block Gallery, New York NY

Interior Scroll

Artist: Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann, who defines herself as a multi-disciplinary artist, working across a variety of media, first made an impact in the context of feminist art. Interior Scroll is one of her most famous works. To stage it, she smeared her nude body with paint, mounted a table, and began adopting some of the typical poses that models strike for artists in life class. Then she proceeded to extract a long coil of paper from her vagina, and began to read the text written on it. It was once thought that the text derived from her response to a male filmmaker's critique of her films (some of her most notable films of the time included imagery of the Vietnam War, and documentation of a performance entitled Meat Joy , involving nude bodies writhing about in meat). The filmmaker had apparently commented on her penchant for "personal clutter...persistence of feelings...[and] primitive techniques" - in effect, qualities that were deemed "feminine." But Schneemann has since said that the text came from a letter sent to a female art critic who found her films hard to watch. By using her physical body as both a site of performance and as the source for a text, Schneemann refused the fetishization of the genitals.

Performed in East Hampton, NY and at the Telluride Film Festival, Colorado

Art/Life: One Year Performance (a.k.a. Rope Piece)

Artist: Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh

For the length of this year long endurance piece, Montano and Hsieh were bound to each other by an 8-foot piece of rope. They existed in the same space, but never touched. In Hsieh's original idea, the rope represented the struggle of humans with one another and their problems with social and physical connection. As the work evolved, the rope took on more meanings. It controlled, yet expanded the patterns of both of the artists' lives, becoming a visual symbol of the relationship between two people. The 365-day length of the work was critical, as it heightened the piece from performance to life. Life and art could not be separated within a work where living was the art. Hsieh explained that if the piece was only one or two weeks, it would be more like a performance, but a year, "has real experience of time and life."

Performed in New York City

Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Buenos Aires

Artist: Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena

Dressed in ridiculous costume, engaged in stereotypical "native" tasks and enclosed in a cage, Fusco and Gomez-Pena addressed the practice of human displays, and fetishization of the "other." Fusco wore several different looks, including hair braids, a grass skirt and a leopard skin bra, while Gomez-Pena sported an Aztec style breastplate. The two ate bananas, performed "native dances" and other "traditional rituals" and were led to the bathroom by museum guards on leashes. The piece was first performed at Columbus Plaza, Madrid, Spain, as a part of the Edge '92 Biennial, which was organized in commemoration of Columbus's voyage to the New World. It was intended as a satirical comedy, yet half of the viewers thought that the fictitious Amerindian specimens were real.

Performed at Columbus Plaza, Madrid, Spain, and performed in various international venues until 1994

Beginnings of Performance Art

Early avant-gardes utilize performance.

20 th century performance art has its roots in early avant-gardes such as Futurism , Dada and Surrealism . Before the Italian Futurists ever exhibited any paintings they held a series of evening performances during which they read their manifestoes. And, similarly, the Dada movement was ushered into existence by a series of events at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. These movements often orchestrated events in theatres that borrowed from the styles and conventions of vaudeville and political rallies. However, they generally did so in order to address themes that were current in the sphere of visual art; for instance, the very humorous performances of the Dada group served to express their distaste for rationalism, a current of thought that had recently surged from the Cubism movement.

Post-war Performance Art

The origins of the post-war performance art movement can be traced to several places. The presence of composer John Cage and dancer Merce Cunningham at North Carolina's Black Mountain College did much to foster performance at this most unconventional art institution. It also inspired Robert Rauschenberg , who would become heavily involved with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Cage's teaching in New York also shaped the work of artists such as George Brecht , Yoko Ono , and Allan Kaprow , who formed part of the impetus behind the Fluxus movement and the birth of " happenings ," both of which placed performance at the heart of their activities.

In the late 1950s, performance art in Europe began to develop alongside the work being done in the United States. Still affected by the fallout from World War II, many European artists were frustrated by the apolitical nature of Abstract Expressionism, the prevalent movement of the time. They looked for new styles of art that were bold and challenging. Fluxus provided one important focus for Performance art in Europe, attracting artists such as Joseph Beuys. In the next few years, major European cities such as Amsterdam, Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Paris were the sites of ambitious performance gatherings.

Actionism, Gutai, Art Corporel, and Auto-Destructive Art

Other manifestations included the work of collectives bound together by similar philosophes like the Viennese Actionists , who characterized the movement as "not only a form of art, but above all an existential attitude." The Actionists' work borrowed some ideas from American action painting, but transformed them into a highly ritualistic theatre that sought to challenge the perceived historical amnesia and return to normalcy in a country that had so recently been an ally of Adolph Hitler. The Actionists also protested governmental surveillance and restrictions of movement and speech, and their extreme performances led to their arrest several times.

In France, art corporel , or body art, compiled an avant-garde set of practices that brought body language to the center of artistic practice.

In Japan, the Gutai became the first post-war artistic group to reject traditional art styles and adopt performative immediacy as a rule. They staged large-scale multimedia environments and theatrical productions that focused on the relationship between body and matter.

In Britain, artists such as Gustav Metzger pioneered an approach described as "Auto-Destructive art," in which objects were violently destroyed in public performances that reflected on the Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction.

The Emergence of Feminist and Performance Art in the U.S.

American Performance art in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the rise of second-wave feminism. Women artists turned to performance as a confrontational new medium that encouraged the release of frustrations at social injustice and the ownership of discussion about women's sexuality. This permitted rage, lust, and self-expression in art by women, allowing them to speak and be heard as never before. Women performers seized an opportune moment to build performance art for themselves, rather than breaking into other already established, male-dominated forms. They frequently dealt with issues that had not yet been undertaken by their male counterparts, bringing fresh perspectives to art. For example, Hannah Wilke criticized Christianity's traditional suppression of women in Super-t-art (1974), where she represented herself as a female Christ. During and since the beginning of the movement, women have made up a large percentage of performance artists.

The Vietnam War also provided significant material for performance artists during this era. Artists such as Chris Burden and Joseph Beuys , both of whom made work in the early 1970s, rejected US imperialism and questioned political motivations. Performance art also developed a major presence in Latin America, where it played a role in the Neoconcretist movement.

Performance Art: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Instead of seeking entertainment, the audience for performance art often expects to be challenged and provoked. Viewers may be asked to question their own definitions of art, and not always in a comfortable or pleasant manner. As regards style, many performance artists do not easily fall into any identified stylistic category, and many more still refuse their work to be categorized into any specific sub-style. The movement produced a variety of common and overlapping approaches, which might be identified as actions, Body art, happenings, Endurance art, and ritual. Although all these can be described and generalized, their definitions, like the constituents of performance art as a movement, are continuously evolving. And some artists have made work that falls into different categories. Yves Klein , for instance, staged some performances that relate to the Fluxus movement, and have qualities of rituals and happenings, yet his Anthropometries (1958) also relate to Body art.

The term "action" constitutes one of the earliest styles within modern performance art. In part, it serves to distinguish the performance from traditional forms of entertainment, but it also highlights an aspect of the way performers viewed their activities. Some saw their performances as related to the kind of dramatic encounter between painter and painting that critic Harold Rosenberg talked of in his essay 'The American Action Painters' (1952). Others liked the word action for its open-endedness, its suggestion than any kind of activity could constitute a performance. For example, early conceptual actions by Yoko Ono consisted of a set of proposals that the participant could undertake, such as, "draw an imaginary map...go walking on an actual street according to the map..."

Body Art diffused the veil between artist and artwork by placing the body front and center as actor, medium, performance, and canvas amplifying the idea of authentic first person perspective. In the post-1960's atmosphere of changing social mores and thawed attitudes toward nudity, the body became a perfect tool to make the political personal. Feminist art burgeoned in this realm as artists such as Carolee Schneemann , VALIE EXPORT , and Hannah Wilke turned their bodies into tools for bashing the disconnect between historical portrayals of the female experience and a newly empowered reality. Some artists like Ana Mendieta and Rebecca Horn questioned the body’s relationship to the world at large, including its limitations. Other artists, like Marina Abramović, Chris Burden and Gina Pane, performed shocking acts of violence toward their own bodies, which provoked audiences to question their own participation, in all its permutations, as voyeurs.

Happenings were a popular mode of performance that arose in the 1960s, and which took place in all kinds of unconventional venues. Heavily influenced by Dada, they required a more active participation from viewers/spectators, and were often characterized by an improvisational attitude. While certain aspects of the performance were generally planned, the transitory and improvisational nature of the event attempted to stimulate a critical consciousness in the viewer and to challenge the notion that art must reside in a static object.

A number of prominent performance artists have made endurance an important part of their practice. They may involve themselves in rituals that border on torture or abuse, yet the purpose is less to test what the artist can survive than to explore such issues as human tenacity, determination, and patience. Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh has been one important exponent of this approach; Marina Abramović offers other examples. Allan Kaprow was perhaps the most influential figure in the happenings movement, though others who were involved include Claes Oldenburg , who would later be associated with Pop art .

Ritual has often been an important part of some performance artists' work. For example, Marina Abramović has used ritual in much of her work, making her performances seem quasi-religious. This demonstrates that while some aspects of the performance art movement have been aimed at demystifying art, bringing it closer to the realms of everyday life, some elements in the movement have sought to use it as a vehicle for re -mystifying art, returning to it some sense of the sacred that art has lost in modern times.

Later Developments - After Performance Art

After the success performance art experienced in the 1970s, it seemed that this new and exciting movement would continue in popularity. However, the market boom of the 1980s, and the return of painting, represented a significant challenge. Galleries and collectors now wanted something material that could be physically bought and sold. As a result, performance fell from favor, but it did not disappear entirely. Indeed, the American performer Laurie Anderson rose to considerable prominence in this period with dramatic stage shows that engaged new media and directly addressed the period's changing issues.

Women performance artists were particularly unwilling to give up their newfound forms of expression, and continued to be prolific. In 1980, there was enough material to produce the exhibition A Decade of Women's Performance Art , at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Organized by Mary Jane Jacob, Moira Roth, and Lucy R. Lippard, the exhibition was a broad survey of works done in the United States during the 1970s, and included documentations of performances in photographs and texts.

And in Eastern Europe throughout the 1980s, performance art was frequently used to express social dissent.

Moving into the 1990s, Western countries began to embrace multiculturalism, helping to propel Latin American performance artists to new fame. Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Tania Bruguera were two such artists who took advantage of the new possibilities afforded by large biennials with international reach, and they presented work about oppression, poverty, and immigration in Cuba and Mexico. In 1991 and 1992, Next Wave festivals at the Brooklyn Academy of Music reflected these trends with works from the American-Indian group Spider Woman Theater, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and Urban Bush Women dance company.

Performance art is a movement that thrives in moments of social strife and political unrest. At the beginning of the 1990s, performance art once again grew in popularity, this time fueled by new artists and audiences; issues of race, immigration, queer identities, and the AIDS crisis began to be addressed. However, this work often caused controversy, indeed it came to be at the center of the so-called Culture Wars of the 1990s, when artists Karen Finley , Tim Miller , John Fleck and Holly Hughes passed a peer review board to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, only to have it withdrawn by the NEA on the basis of its content, which related to sexuality.

Today's performance artists continue to employ a wide variety of mediums and styles, from installation to painting and sculpture. British artist Tris Vonna-Michell mixes narrative, performance and installation. Tino Sehgal blends ideas borrowed from dance and politics in performances that sometimes take the form of conversations engaged in by the audience themselves; no conventional staged performance takes place, and no documentation remains of the events. Sehgal's solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2010 is a sign of how close the genre has now come to being accepted by mainstream art institutions.

Useful Resources on Performance Art

• Performance Art: From Futurism to Present Our Pick By Roselee Goldberg
• Performance: Live Art Since the '60s Our Pick By Roselee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson
• Body Art/Performing the Subject By Amelia Jones
• The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970-1980 By Moira Roth
• Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas By Coco Fusco
• Performance Art in China By Thomas Berghuis
• Performa 11 - Visual Art Performance Biennial Information on previous 2011 exhibition, and future events
• In the Naked Museum: Talking, Thinking, Encountering By Holland Cotter / The New York Times / January 31, 2010
• Marina Abramović: An Interview By David Ebony / Art in America / May 5, 2009
• Performance Art Gets Its Biennial By Roberta Smith / The New York Times / November 4, 2005
• Preserve Performance Art? Can You Preserve the Wind? By John Rockwell / The New York Times / April 30, 2004
• Marina Abramović: Live at MoMA
• The Couple in the Cage by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena
• The Act: A Performance Art Journal (Archive)
• Live Action Goteborg: International Performance Art Festival
• Hemispheric Instutute of Performance and Politics
• UbuWeb: Film & Video Our Pick Extensive Database for Videos of Performance Art

Similar Art

Reciting the Sound Poem "Karawane" (1916)

Yard (1961)

Womanhouse (1972)

Related artists, related movements & topics.

Content compiled and written by Anne Marie Butler

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

Performance art

Performance art differs from traditional theater in its rejection of a clear narrative, use of random or chance-based structures, and direct appeal to the audience.

c. 1960 - present

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12 Performance Art

An art of action.

This chapter focuses on performance from the 1960s to today. Like their avant-garde predecessors, discussed in the Introduction to New Media Art chapter, the performance artists examined here create work that redefines traditional art-making practices. Frequently relying on direct audience interaction and participation, modern and contemporary performance artists explore the body, examine process, and further break down boundaries between art and life. Performance, as we’ll see, is also time-based and ephemeral, often captured and made “permanent” through photography, film, and video. After watching and reading some background information, the examples throughout this chapter are presented as thematic case studies.

Watch & Consider: The Case for Performance Art

For a brief historical overview discussing the significance of performance art, please watch the primer, embedded below, from PBS Studio’s The Art Assignment, “ The Case for Performance Art ” (9:09 minutes).

Read & Reflect: Performance Art

The reading from Smarthistory, linked to below, focuses on how performance artists seek to locate new forms of expression as alternatives to traditional media. It also discussed the importance of the viewer and places performance in historical context.

• “ Performance Art: An Introduction ” (Smarthistory)

The Basics: What is Performance Art?

As we’ve seen in previous chapters, non-traditional art-making materials and methods, like dance and music, have been used by artists since the early 20th century. In fact, performance art has its roots in early 20th century avant-garde movements such as Dada and Futurism . Dada performances, such as Hugo Ball’s (1866-1927) recitation of Karawane at the Cabaret-Voltaire, demonstrate an interest in incorporating non-traditional art-making materials and methods into performance art, as well as the enduring quality of ephemerality .

Italian Futurists also used performance to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo, staging disruptive performances called serata , which reconfigured the artist as a confrontational performer in the public sphere. These evenings incited audience participation and interaction, often even ending in brawls.

Despite their extreme ideological differences, both Dada and Futurist artists were concerned with making art that interacted, at times viscerally, with life, rather than in creating a lasting art object removed from the messiness of living, meant for veneration on a museum’s walls. We can still see the influence of these movements in performance today.

In the United States, performance art emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, against the backdrop of war (in Korea and Vietnam), developing social and racial justice movements for civil rights and equality, and technological advancements, such as the television.

Using their body as medium, performance artists question the definition of art, explore the role of art in society, and critique how art is valued. Through the often intermedia qualities of their works, performance artists also consider how traditional concepts of art (e.g., painting or sculpture) can be given renewed relevance through new technologies.

Perhaps because it confronts the viewer, takes place in real time, and uses the artist’s own body as medium, performance has, historically, occupied a less privileged place in art history than conventional media. As you review the works featured in this chapter, watch for instances of intermedia , a critical cross-disciplinary strategy of New Media artists that encourages mixing materials and embraces new technologies.

A Two-Way Exchange: Audience & Performance Art

As mentioned above, performance artists are interested in breaking down boundaries between art and life, creating a new context for a work of art. What barriers exist between art and life? First, think of where you would traditionally view a work of art. You might have thought about the museum or gallery space as a primary venue for seeing art. While performance can (and does) exist in the museum or gallery space, historically performance artists sought to present work outside of traditional art-viewing venues. They did this both to engage more directly with the viewer in the public space and to separate their work from the value systems imposed by the art world.

Performance artists also blur the boundaries between art and life by using everyday, or non-art, materials in their works. In this chapter, you’ll examine performances by artists who use meat, dirt, snow, and their own clothes, among other non-art materials, in their works.

We’ve already learned about Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) in the context of Dada. Duchamp argued that both the artist and the viewer are necessary to complete a work of art. In “ The Creative Act ” (1957), Duchamp said, “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

Let’s think about this quote for a minute. How do you interpret Duchamp’s statement? You might consider how Duchamp’s words attempt to dissolve the distance between artist and viewer, or spectator. If the viewer is responsible for bringing “the work in contact with the external world” then they are necessary to complete the work of art. This helps equalize the relationship between artist and audience and encourages a more active role for the viewer.

Questions to Consider: Performance Art

As we move through the examples presented in this chapter, let’s consider the following questions:

• How does performance continue to shift the relationship between artist and viewer? Can you think of ways performance helps reinvent this relationship?
• How does soliciting active involvement from the viewer challenge their historically more passive role? How does direct viewer participation break down traditional or conventional barriers between artists, the artwork, and the viewer?
• Finally, when artists engage and collaborate with audiences to create or complete a work of art, do you think it’s hard for them to relinquish some control over the work’s outcome? Why or why not?

Additionally, throughout the chapter, look for examples where artists:

• Perform and present work outside the traditional venues (e.g., museums or galleries),
• Engage the audience directly, or
• Use everyday (non-art) materials.

These terms are presented in  bold throughout the chapter. When you encounter one, be sure to note the definition. You may see these terms used elsewhere in the textbook; here they are discussed in the context of performance art, specifically.

• Behavior Art (associated with Tania Bruguera)
• Collaboration
• Conceptual Art
• Durational Performance
• Happenings (associated with Allan Kaprow)
• Kinetic Theater
• Participatory
• Performalist Self-Portraits (associated with Hannah Wilke)
• Social Body
• Street Action (associated with David Hammons)

Performance Artists & Artworks

As we’ll see through the example discussed in this chapter, performance art is diverse and often interdisciplinary. As you review each work, keep in mind that performance is defined by an individual work of art, rather than by an artist’s entire career. In other words, someone who sculpts or paints can also create a performance, and an artist who makes a performance can also be a sculptor. What these pieces have in common is that they are centered on an action carried out, or arranged, by an artist. They are also time-based and ephemeral, rather than permanent artistic gesture with a specific beginning and an end. Since we are viewing these works now as photographs or videos, you can see how documentation of the performance might live on forever, but the performance itself is a fleeting moment in time.

Focus: 1960s: The Impact of Fluxus

The early examples of performance discussed in this first section are connected to Fluxus . As you learned in the introduction , Fluxus is an international art movement led by George Maciunas (1931-1978) that emphasizes chance, the unity of art and life, and the ephemeral moment. Without a single defining style, Fluxus sought to democratize art and art-making by creating event scores to be enacted by anyone. An event refers to a Fluxus performance, while a score is the set of directions the Fluxus performer follows and interprets. Fluxus events were anti-commercial as they were not intended to result in an object that could be purchased or collected. Collaboration and intermedia methods were encouraged in order to create art that was directly participatory .

While all four artists discussed in this section, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Alison Knowles, and Benjamin Patterson, have a connection to Fluxus early in their careers, Ono and Schneemann distanced themselves from the movement (Schneemann after Meat Joy , specifically).

Elements of New Media Art

As you review the examples discussed below, think about how each illustrates specific qualities of a Fluxus art. Also, consider how performance in general connects to New Media art. You might reflect on how performance:

• Dismantles the boundaries between art and life.
• Employs chance .
• Engages the viewer as a participant .
• Focuses on the process or the act of creating, not the outcome.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece , 1964​

The Japanese artist Yoko Ono (born 1933) debuted Cut Piece in Kyoto, Japan, in 1964, and has since performed it in Tokyo, New York, London, and Paris. The performance is the realization of a score, or a set of participatory instructions that result in the creation of the Fluxus event. A member of the Fluxus movement, Yoko Ono’s work challenges the viewer to become an active participant in the performance by asking them to cut off pieces of her clothing, as she sits motionless on the stage.

Read Yoko Ono’s score for Cut Piece :

“Cut Piece First version for single performer: Performer sits on stage with a pair of scissors in front of him. It is announced that members of the audience may come on stage—one at a time—to cut a small piece of the performer’s clothing to take with them. Performer remains motionless throughout the piece. Piece ends at the performer’s option.”

In a second version, Ono amended the instructions slightly, indicating that, “members of the audience may cut each other’s clothing. The audience may cut as long as they wish.”

(The above score is excerpted from MoMA’s website , quoted from Kevin Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s CUT PIECE: From Text to Performance and Back Again,” Imagine Peace .)

Watch & Reflect: Cut Piece

Watch this excerpt from Yoko Ono’s performance of Cut Piece:

Questions to Consider:

• What do you notice about the performance? Where is the artist? Where is the audience? What role does the audience assume in this work? How is Yoko Ono’s score reflected in the actions of the performance?
• Read this excerpt from a MoMA audio guide where Ono reflects on her experience performing Cut Piece .
• How does Ono’s piece reflect Fluxus ideology?
• After learning more about Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece , how do you think you would have experienced her work as a viewer? Would you have participated in the event? Why or why not?

Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy , 1964 (re-edited 2010)

Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) was an American multidisciplinary artist and an incredibly important figure in performance and feminist art. She is known for her explorations of gender, sexuality, and sexism in art history, through work that encompasses painting, performance, film, installation, and video art.

In Meat Joy , a group of dancers (including Schneemann) wear feather-lined bikinis and briefs, as they move in both choreographed and spontaneous ways atop a plastic sheet. They rub raw fish, chicken, and sausages over their bodies, and cover themselves in wet paint and scraps of paper. The result is a tactile experience and an honoring of flesh in many forms. Though not directly participatory, the audience could see the movement and hear the sounds of the dancer’s bodies, and smell the mixing of meat, paper, and paint. Later, Schneemann pieced together bits of footage from various performances of Meat Joy and set it to music with a voice-over, adding yet another sensory layer.

In  More Than Meat Joy , Schneenmann writes of the performance:

The focus is never on the self, but on the materials, gestures & actions which involve us. Sense that we become what we see, what we touch. A certain tenderness (empathy) is pervasive – even to the most violent actions: say, cutting, chopping, throwing chickens. (Schneemann, 253).

Schneemann referred to her work as kinetic theater because it creates “an immediate, sensuous environment on which a shifting scale of tactile, plastic, physical encounters can be realized. The nature of these encounters exposes and frees us from a range of aesthetic and cultural conventions” (Youngblood, 366). As Schneemann describes, kinetic theater fosters an intermedia experience between dance and performance where touch and physicality are explored and celebrated in various forms. Kinetic theater relates to Fluxus because of the way the body is staged in a social space. Even though this performance is not directly participatory, we can consider the ways in which it embraces the use of everyday, non-art materials and creates a sense of immediacy and intimacy.

After viewing Meat Joy and reading Schneemann’s statement about her work, consider its historical context. First performed in Paris in 1964, and then later that same year in London and New York, we might think about Schneemann’s performance as an act of resistance. In 1964, the Vietnam War is raging and Black Americans, women, and people with disabilities are fighting for equal rights (the Civil Rights Act has only just been signed into law in 1964). By choreographing a piece that openly and publicly explores the body as a site for both sensuality and violence, Schneemann creates a performance that transgresses societal norms.

Stop & Reflect: Meat Joy

Watch Carolee Schneemann’s  Meat Joy , 1964 (re-edited 2010), filmed performance, 10:33 minutes, color, sound, 16 mm film on video (you will have to click through to view on YouTube). You can also listen to Carolee Schneemann discuss the sensuality of Meat Joy (2:00 minutes).

• What materials does  Meat Joy use? How is this work an example of an  intermedia  approach?
• Can you think of ways Schneemann’s performance rejects the traditional “dismissive” approach to female sexuality prevalent in western art history?

Alison Knowles, Make a Salad , 1962

Alison Knowles (born 1933) is an American artist and a founding member of Fluxus. She is known for her use of ordinary, non-art materials, and scores that celebrate the everyday. In Make a Salad the participants are instructed via a Fluxus score to….make a salad! The process of making the salad, from selecting the ingredients, to mixing in the dressing, to serving it, will vary. The salad you make will be your salad and will be entirely dependent on what you have on hand and how you interpret the score.

The piece also has a vital auditory component: close your eyes and imagine the noise made by the chopping of vegetables and the rustling of lettuce leaves. What sound does the bowl make as you mix your ingredients together? What about when you bite down on a piece of lettuce or a cucumber? This is considered music, as if one was listening to actual instruments performing a symphony. This idea of the “in-between” moments of everyday life being as important as a set of carefully composed notes has its roots in the scores of the American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1992), whose work inspired many Fluxus artists, though he was never a member of the group.

Stop & Reflect: Make a Salad

First, to see this work and the process in action, watch Alison Knowles – ‘I’m Making a Giant Salad’ | TateShots about Knowles’ 2008 event at the Tate in London (3:47 minutes):

Then, for additional context, watch this video of Knowles discussing Fluxus more broadly, Alison Knowles: Fluxus Event Scores (2:57 minutes):

• How does Knowles involve the viewer as participants in her event?
• In 2008, Knowles performed this piece in front of a large audience at the Tate; how would this work be different if you performed it at home? How would it remain the same?
• What other everyday moments could be celebrated through a score? What would you perform?

Benjamin Patterson,  Paper Piece , 1960

A founding member of Fluxus, Benjamin Patterson (1934-2016) was a classically trained double bassist who connected his experimental musical scores with audience participation to create what he called compositions for actions . Interested in the democratization of art and music, Patterson’s focus on indeterminacy was influenced by a meeting (and, later, a performance) with John Cage in 1960, while both composers were in Cologne, Germany. The first version of Patterson’s Paper Piece , was actually part of letter he mailed home to his parent a Christmas present to them, since he wouldn’t be home to celebrate.

A joyful celebration of everyday movements and sound, Paper Piece asked the audience to  “crumple,” “rumple,” and “bumple” sheets of paper. See the video below of the Ensemble for Experimental Music and Theatre performing Patterson’s score in 2013 (YouTube, 9:58 minutes):

Stop & Reflect: Fluxus

• What are some ways you would describe a Fluxus Event Score?
• What are some differences between attending a traditional play in a theater vs. participating in a Fluxus Event Score?
• In what ways do Fluxus Event Scores challenge traditional ways of viewing art in a gallery?
• How do Event Scores expand what it means to be an audience member or viewer?
• How do Event Scores pieces expand what it means to be an artist?
• In what ways does Fluxus blur the lines between art and life? Fluxus Event Scores are different than other approaches to Performance Art discussed below. Consider some of these differences as you continue to work through this chapter.  

Focus: 1970s: Body Art

Optional Video: Can My Body be Art? How Art Became Active (Tate, 4:05 minutes)

Body Art is a type of performance that developed in the 1960s and 1970s. As its name implies, Body Art uses the body, usually but not always the artist’s, as a basis for the artwork. Endurance is often central to Body Art, such in the examples by Chris Burden and Hannah Wilke discussed below. Body Art can also negotiate issues of identity, gender, and sexuality. Ana Mendieta’s work, for example, explores feelings of displacement related to her identity as an exiled Cuban artist living in the United States. It’s important to note that Carolee Schneemann’s work, discussed in the previous section, is also considered Body Art; remember that, especially in New Media, boundaries are fluid and artworks will belong to more than one category.

Chris Burden, Shoot , 1971

The American artist, Chris Burden (1946-2015), performed Shoot at a Santa Ana, CA gallery called F Spot in 1971; the artist was 25 years old. Standing in front of a small audience of mostly friends, Burden’s friend shot him with a .22 long rifle from a distance of 13 feet. The bullet, meant to graze Burden’s arm, actually hit him, causing the artist to be taken to the hospital. You can see still images from the performance at Media Art Net .

This work is an example of Body Art. As discussed above, Body Art is a type of performance that explicitly uses the body, often pushed to its extremes, to address the relationship of the body to society. Shoot , like many examples of Body Art is transgressive, meaning it pushes the boundaries of what’s comfortable or acceptable (this also applies to Meat Joy ). In Burden’s work, he engages in an acute action in order to shock the viewers, forcing them into an immediate, emotional response.

Staged when the United States was embroiled in the controversial Vietnam War (1955-1975), Burden’s performance can be interpreted as a way to process images of violence seen by many on the nightly news during this “televised” war.

Stop & Reflect: Shoot

Watch: “ Shot in the Name of Art ” (Op Docs, the New York Times via YouTube, 4:39 minutes) Content Warning: A person being shot with a gun.

• How does Shoot comment on the public’s growing desensitization to violence?
• Does the viewer of a violent act become complicit in the artist putting his body at risk?
• Can you compare and contrast Burden’s use of his body with one other artist discussed in this chapter?

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Blood Sign #2/Body Tracks) , 1974

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Blood Sign #2/Body Tracks) , 1974, performance on video (1:20 minutes); clip is 1:13. See a video still and read about Mendieta’s performance at the Reina Sophia Museum website .

Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) was a Cuban-born cross-disciplinary artist living in exile in the United States. Forced to leave Cuba when she was just 12 years old, due to her father’s involvement with a counterrevolutionary group, Mendieta and her sister were separated from her mother and younger brother, and sent to live in Iowa via Operation Pedro Pan . She would not reunite with her whole family for another 18 years.

In much of her practice, Mendieta used her body to address a sense of dislocation and express the trauma of violence against women. In Untitled (Blood Sign #2/Body Tracks) we watch as the artist, dressed in white and cream, approaches a white wall. She raises her arms, placing them against the wall. She then begins to kneel, slowly dragging her arms down the wall. Mendieta rises and walks out of the frame, leaving behind two red lines, marks made by her forearms, which were covered with animal blood.

The lines create a shape reminiscent of a tree trunk and serve as a reminder of the ephemerality of the artist’s body, which is no longer present. Untitled (Blood Sign #2/Body Tracks) also ties into Mendieta’s Silueta  series (1973-1978) in which the artist photographs and films her body, both its presence and absence, in nature.

Ana Mendieta, Silueta , 1973-1978

Mendieta began work on the Silueta series in 1973 while on a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, with her classmates in the Intermedia program at the University of Iowa and their instructor, Hans Breder. Mendieta was fascinated by Mexico, in part because the country reminded her of Cuba, and she continued the series when she returned to Iowa. The photographs and films she took serve to document her performances in the land and are a type of performance that Mendieta called earth-body works. These works align Mendieta with both performance, land, and feminist art.

In one Silueta , pictured above, we see a photograph of Mendieta laying naked in a Zapotec tomb. White flowers lay over her body, obscuring it. The flowers seem to grow from her, connecting her visually and symbolically with the land. We might think of the cycles of life and death when examining Mendieta’s work. Since she was uprooted from her home in Cuba as a child, many art historians interpret her Silueta series as seeking to re-root the body in place.

In The Tree of Life , pictured below, Mendieta covered herself completely with mud, fully incorporating her body into the landscape, her form making a raised impression against a tree. Making her body part of the earth, and allowing the  There is a sense of intimacy in the scale of Mendieta’s performances; highlighted by the relationship between the artist’s body, the land, and the viewer.

Mendieta went on to create more than one hundred Silueta  in Mexico, Iowa, and Cuba (where she returned to visit in 1981) covering her body with a wide range of substances, including rocks, blood, sticks, sand, and cloth. Or, she’d make an impression right in the earth, letting it fill up with water or sometimes red pigment. There is a relationship between Mendieta’s series and Santería , which is an African diasporas religion a commonly practiced in Cuba. Santería’s use of natural symbols, such as earth, blood, water, and fire, are echoed in Mendieta’s practice.

Through her performances, Mendieta is considered important to feminist art history. Like other women discussed in this chapter, Mendieta controls the presentation of her own body, taking an active role in how the viewer sees her (or doesn’t). She also takes a non-invasive approach to the land, rather than altering it, she becomes a part of it by gently and temporarily transforming it through her presence. Finally, Mendieta’s work mediates feelings of displacement and indeterminacy; this sense of ephemerality and vulnerability arguably helps her work transcend her individual identity and biography by questioning the physical experience of being a part of the world.

In Her Own Words: Ana Mendieta’s Artist Statement

Artists write statements to describe their work and their interests. Read Mendieta’s statements below to better understand her aims. (Excerpts are from Olga Viso, Unseen Mendieta: The Unpublished Works of Ana Mendieta , Munich, Berlin, London and New York 2008.)

“The first part of my life was spent in Cuba, where a mixture of Spanish and African culture makes up the heritage of the people. The Roman Catholic Church and “Santeria”—a cult of the African divinities represented with the Catholic saints and magical powers—are the prevalent religions of the nation. For the past five years, I have been working out in nature, exploring the relationship between myself, the earth, and art. Using my body as a reference in the creation of the works, I am able to transcend myself in a voluntary submersion and total identification with nature. Through my art, I want to express the immediacy of life and the eternity of nature.” (Ana Mendieta, 1978)

“I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth … I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really the reactivation of primeval beliefs … [in] an omnipresent female force, the after-image of being encompassed within the womb.” (Ana Mendieta, 1981)

“For the last twelve years, I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast out from the womb (Nature). My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source. These obsessive acts of reasserting my ties with the earth are really a manifestation of my thirst for being. In essence, my works are the reactivation of primeval beliefs at work within the human psyche.” (Ana Mendieta, 1983)

Stop & Reflect: Ana Mendieta

• How do you think Mendieta’s exile from Cuba influenced her artwork? How are feelings of displacement and dislocation explored in her works?
• What aspects of home resonate with you on a sensory level?
• What materials does Mendieta use to create her work?
• Can you describe the role of the body in her artwork?
• How are life and nature intertwined in Mendieta’s work?
• How do the works in the Silueta series suggest the fragility of the human being in relation to the forces of nature?

Hannah Wilke, Gestures , 1974

Hannah Wilke (1940-1993) was an American artist whose intermedia works combined performance, film, sculpture, painting, and photography. Gestures is a recorded, durational performance that shows the artist manipulating her face with her hands for the length of the video (about 35 minutes). She pushes, pinches, smooshes, and pulls at her face, stretching and contorting it like clay, a material she often worked with before creating her first video work. These gestures ask the viewer to question standards of conventional beauty. Referring to these explorations as performalist self-portraits , Wilke used her body to play with ideas of abstraction and representation, and to call attention to how women’s bodies are objectified.

Using her hands, her face transforms, interrupting the viewer’s gaze, and calling attention to the commodification of the female body. Wilke, like Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, and Ana Mendieta, uses her own body in an effort to reclaim it and define it herself, within a patriarchal society. She says, “I made myself into a work of art. That gave me back my control as well as dignity.” (Wilke, quoted in Montano, p. 139).(You can read more about Gestures in the Early Video Art chapter.)

Stop & Reflect: Hannah Wilke

Hannah Wilke,  Gestures,  1974, video (black and white, sound), 35:30 minutes. (Excerpt included below is just 0:58.)

• Wilke’s work addresses female objectification through the exploration and transformation of her own face and body. Why do you think self-representation is important to Wilke?
• How does  Gestures compare to Schneemann and Mendieta’s use of their bodies in examples examined earlier in this chapter?

Focus: 1980s: Ritual Space

The artists presented in this section create space for performance outside the traditional museum or gallery setting. Allan Kaprow and Tehching Hsieh explore patience and time through their durational performances , while David Hammons reclaims space for Black bodies through his ephemeral  performances.

Allan Kaprow, Trading Dirt , 1982/83-1985

An early practitioner of participatory art, Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) valued the performative possibilities of all forms of art. Known for developing the Happening in the late 1950s, Kaprow’s later work included meditative performances, such as Trading Dirt . This durational performance, dematerialized the art object, while at the same time, it ritualized the mundane process of moving dirt from one person and place to another. Trading Dirt began in 1982 or 1983 when the artist was studying at the Zen Center in San Diego, California and represents a shift from his earlier Happenings of the 1960s, to a more intimate and time-based work.

Trading Dirt is referred to as a durational performance because the passage of time is an essential element to the work. The work unfolds sporadically over a number of years, whenever Kaprow felt like initiating the process, ending in about 1985. Kaprow begins the performance by trading buckets filled with dirt from the Zen Center for dirt from his own backyard. He then trades soil with friends, farmers, and others. The act of trading dirt, especially with strangers, led to spontaneous actions and conversations that become a part of the work. You can watch Kaprow tell a story about the process and his motivations for Trading Dirt  in a video from Media Art Services linked here (14:36 minutes).

Influenced by composer John Cage’s emphasis on the sounds between the notes (See his 4’33” for example. You can also find a further discussion of Cage’s influence in the chapter on Social Practices.), Kaprow was interested in the human interactions and chance encounters between the act of trading dirt.

Of Trading Dirt , Kaprow writes, “The dirt trading and the stories went on for three years. It had no real beginning or end. The stories began to add up to a very long story, and with each retelling they changed. When I stopped being interested in the process (it coincided with my wife and I having to move after our rental property was sold), I put the last bucket of dirt back into the garden.” ( Trading Dirt , 1982/83-1985) (Kaprow, 1993)

Stop & Reflect: Allan Kaprow

• Kaprow wrote, “‘Life is much more interesting than art. The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible” (Kaprow,  Untitled , p. 709). How does work, like Trading Dirt , exemplify this quote?
• How does Kaprow’s work honor chance encounters and lend significance to everyday events?
• Can you relate Happenings back to what you’ve learned about Dada and Fluxus?
• As we’ve noted, many of the artists discussed in this text make work that is difficult to categorize and can be understood through multiple lenses. Read about Allan Kaprow’s Happenings in the Social Practice chapter , if you have not already done so. What are some differences between the way his work is contextualized in that chapter vs. the way his work is contextualized in the history of performance art?
• Why do you think Happenings fit into both categories?

Tehching Hsieh, Time Clock Piece (One Year Performance 1980-1981) , 1980-81

Another example of a durational performance is Tiwanese American artist, Tehching Hsieh’s (born 1950) Time Clock Piece (One Year Performance 1980-1981) . Durational performances can express an artist’s endurance because they happen over a long period of time. Hsieh’s performance everyday, for a full year, also explores our relationship to time by revealing it as a precondition for all life .

Scholar Ash Dilkes discusses Hsieh’s interest in collapsing boundaries between “art time” and “life time.” In a durational performance, lines between art and life are ultimately blurred as Hsieh must wake himself up every hour to punch a time clock, which he has installed inside his studio, for the duration of the yearlong performance. The process of documentation became so a part of Hsieh’s daily routine that he only missed 133 punches out of 8,760 (Dilkes). His life is the performance; art and life are experienced simultaneously, reflecting a culmination of a central goal of Performance Art as the boundaries between art and life are dissolved.

Stop & Reflect: Tehching Hsieh

Watch the following 2 videos on Tehching Hsieh and his performance practices (2:36 and 3:38 minutes):

Next, watch the artist and curator Nina Miall discuss Tehching Hsieh’s Time Clock Piece (the second of his one-year performances). (Das Platforms Multimedia Projects, 9:05 minutes):

• Watch the stop motion embedded above. How is the passage of time reflected in Hsieh’s self-portraits?
• Consider the role of process in Hsieh’s performance. Do you think the artist’s experience of creating the work is more important than any objects or records that are the outcome of the process? Why or why not?
• What do the installation views of the performance reveal to the viewer about Hsieh’s performance and process?
• Especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, can you describe a moment from your own life that helps you relate to the repetitive quality of Hsieh’s work?

David Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball Sale , 1983

David Hammons (born 1943) is a sculptor, printmaker, performance, and installation artist known for his ephemeral public performances and installations. Remaining intentionally elusive to the museum and gallery systems, Hammons’ work explores and critiques systemic racism in the United States. In David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale , author Elena Filipovic writes:

“You cannot think of these works or of Hammons’ street actions in general without reckoning with what blackness meant (and means still) in public space. Or without acknowledging that by putting himself out on a street corner with his wares, Hammons may well have been playing with racist stereotypes associated with blacks (homeless vagrant, street hustler, drug pusher) and at the same time undercutting them through his calm, serious stance and willfully elegant style. The adage “the white man’s ice is colder” speaks for the sort of internalized racism that causes black Americans to believe that businesses, products and services offered by whites are better, more reliable. Turning the expression on its head, Hammons’ act implicitly suggested that although you could easily make your own snowball, this black man’s ice was worthy of purchase; it was perhaps colder, even.”

Documented through photographs, Hammons performed Bliz-aard Ball Sale on a New York City street near Cooper Square in 1983. He laid out a woven rug and set out his snowballs, carefully arranging them in descending order, according to size. Each snowball was crafted using spherical molds, so they have a perfectly round shape, something you couldn’t as easily achieve if you formed each snowball by hand.

In addition to evaluating Hammons’ street actions as a reflection on his experience as a Black American, another way to interpret Bliz-aard Ball Sale is as a critique of the art market and the value attributed to artworks by galleries and auction houses. The snowballs Hammons hawked were, by their very nature, ephemeral objects that he seemingly sought to profit from. They are also commonplace (especially in New York in December), so by assigning value to them,  Hammons draws attention to the arbitrary nature of the art market, presenting a contrast between the art world and the more tenuous financial position of the street vendor.

Stop & Reflect: David Hammons

• In an interview, when asked whether or not he thought is work is political, Hammons replied, “I don’t know. I don’t know what my work is. I have to wait and hear that from someone.” So, what do you think? What is an argument for Hammons’ work as political? If not, what do you think his work is about?
• In what ways would being presented in a museum or gallery space change the meaning of  Blizz-ard Ball Sale ? Why is site important to Hammons’ performance?

Focus: 1990s: The Social Body

In this next section, we’ll turn to three artists whose performances address politics and identity.  For our case studies, we’ll review a performance by the Chinese artist Zhang Huan whose work about the human condition pushes his own body to extremes, often under the watchful and suspicious eye of the Chinese authorities. We’ll also study work by Tania Bruguera, a Cuban artist who conceptualizes performances critical of the Cuban government and of authoritarianism more broadly. She has had her passport confiscated and her works banned in her home country. Finally, we’ll look at Mona Hatoum, a Palestinian performance, multimedia, and installation artist whose piece, Roadworks (Performance Stills) , investigates how individuals struggle under authoritarian control.

Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters, 1994

Zhang Huan (born 1965) is a Chinese artist who lives and works in both Shanghai and New York. In 12 Square Meters we see, through photographic documentation, the artist seated, naked, on a toilet in a public restroom. The title refers to the size of the room, which is 12 meters, or about 130 square feet. His body appears to shine, a result of being smeared with fish oil and honey, and we can see that flies and other insects have landed on him.

As the artist sits in this small, enclosed lavatory, during the summer, covered in oil, honey, and bugs, how would you describe his expression? What other senses does this work engage? Can you imagine the smell of the public restroom? Can you feel the air and sense the temperature of the space? Is it warm? Humid?

Zhang Huan sat in this restroom for hours at a time. The restroom is in an economically disadvantaged town outside of Beijing called Dashancun Village. Zhang and other artists called this area, where they also had art studios, Beijing East Village, after the New York neighborhood, Greenwich Village, known for its many artists. This was a subversive dig at contemporary Chinese artists who were living and working in more affluent areas of Beijing. The work Zhang and his contemporaries were creating in Dashancun called attention to the area’s squalid living conditions, and remained both physically and conceptually outside the Chinese government’s institutionally sanctioned art.

Let’s consider the role meditation and endurance play in Zhang’s performance. He sat, perfectly still, seemingly unbothered by his surroundings. In his essay, “Revising Performance Art of the 1990s and the Politics of Meditation,” Hentyle Yapp, Assistant Professor of Art and Public Policy at New York University, writes,

“Meditation structures Zhang’s performance in 12 Square Meters . He does not merely endure through discomfort; he allows it to become a form of practice and self-cultivation. Zhang’s sitting, along with his acute sense of focus, is located within his present moment, not within the past or future.”

Think about this quote in the context of Zhang’s performance. What do you think it implies? Did Zhang accept his surroundings? How does enduring something become an avenue for self-actualization?

Stop & Reflect: Zhang Huan

• If you could create a durational performance piece critical of an aspect of where you live, what would it be?
• Can you think of nine adjectives to describe Zhang’s performance? How are these adjectives supported by your understanding of his work?

Tania Bruguera, El Peso de la Culpa (The Burden of Guilt) , 1997-1999

Tania Bruguera (born 1958) is a Cuban visual, performance, and social practice artist. Her work is often political in nature criticizing, for example, the lack of free speech under Fidel Casto’s rule in Cuba.

In El Peso de la Culpa (The Burden of Guilt) Bruguera revisits Cuban history. Her work responds to a story of indigenous people who vowed to eat nothing but dirt, rather than become prisoners of the Spanish conquistadors. In the performance, Bruguera stands in front of a Cuban flag that’s made of human hair, and wears a butchered lamb around her neck. She takes her time mixing dirt (earth) and salt (tears), which she then eats. This performance acknowledges indigenous Cubans who took their own lives by starving themselves as an affront to the abuse of the colonizing Spanish.

Bruguera uses non-traditional art-making materials in her work: dirt, salt, her own body, hair, and animal flesh to make connections between life for Cubans during colonization and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By eating dirt, Bruguera connects these two moments in Cuban history, reflecting on both the strength and poverty of the Cuban people. This connection also reinforces Burguera’s notion of the social body , meaning that she sees her body not only as her own, but as representing Cuban people and Cuban history, collectively. Her body takes on the burden of this history, collapsing time and space and revealing the lack of freedom afforded to the Cuban people, across centuries.

Finally, Bruguera prefers the term Behavior Art to describe her work, which she describes as moving beyond performance and more readily connecting art to a sociopolitical agenda. She writes in “Arte de Conducta” on her website   that Behavior Art retains the utilitarian potential of art. Rather than art rendered “ineffective” by its placement in an institution, like a museum with its focus on formal qualities, art can live outside the walls and on the streets with people.

Stop & Reflect: Tania Bruguera

• How does the term Behavior Art compare to Fluxus? Do you think it offers a continuation, or modernization, of Fluxus ideals?
• What are sociopolitical realities expressed in Bruguera’s work?
• Can you point to specific ways history manifests in Bruguera’s performance? Why do you think it is important for the artist to reflect on this history?
• Keep her concepts of Behavior Art and the social body in mind when we examine two more of her artworks in the section Performance Art Now, below. Then, compare and contrast her performance strategies.

Mona Hatoum,  Roadworks (Performance Stills) , 1985-1995

Mona Hatoum (born 1952) is a Palestinian performance and multimedia installation artist who lives in London. She was born in Beirut, Lebanon to Palestinian parents, and traveled to London for a visit in 1975; she became stranded there due to war breaking out in Lebanon. Like Ana Mendieta, discussed earlier in this chapter, Hatoum’s work often addresses feelings of displacement and explores her identity as a person living in exile.

In 1985, she created three pieces for an exhibition called Roadworks , which she performed around the district of Brixton, in southern London. The exhibition, organized by the Brixton Art Gallery, sought to move art from beyond the gallery walls through a series of unannounced performances that took place around the city, in order to reach new audiences. The image pictured above is a record of one of those performances. In it, we see the artist’s legs, photographed in mid-stride from about the knees down, as she walked barefoot through the city streets for about an hour. Tied around her ankles by their laces is a pair of black Doc Marten combat boots. Photographic evidence of this series of performances was published a decade after they took place.

In the early 1980s, intense protests for racial justice occurred in Brixton due to its racist policing and housing policies, which disproportionately targeted Black Londoners (Brixton has a large African and Caribbean population). In 1985, the same year as the Roadworks  exhibition, a Black woman was shot by the police in Brixton during a raid on her home , leaving her paralyzed from the waist down. More protests followed. In this context, Hatoum’s performance can be interpreted as a response to the city’s trauma. Are the black boots following her, or holding her down, or is she marching in solidarity with the community?

Hatoum shared stories of this work in a 1991 interview saying, “‘One comment I really liked was when a group of builders, standing having their lunch break, said ‘What the hell is happening here? What is she up to? And this black woman, passing by with her shopping, said to them, ‘Well it’s obvious. She’s being followed by the police.'” (Diamond, 131). Hatoum’s performance, taking place unannounced and outside of the traditional art space, allowed viewer’s to form their own interpretations of the work, connecting it to their community’s current events. Like Tania Bruguera and Zhang Huan, Hatoum’s body becomes the social body, the big black boots following her symbols of both individual and societal oppression.

Stop & Reflect: Mona Hatoum

• Hatoum stipulates that the photograph of her performance, which is printed on reflective aluminum, be exhibited directly on the floor, leaning against the museum or gallery walls. How does this means of display reflect the intermedia qualities of New Media? Do you think placing the photograph on the floor creates more or less of an interactive space for the viewer to experience the work?

Focus: Performance Art Now

This final section showcases examples of performance art from the last two decades. As you’re reviewing the case studies presented below, think back to the previous examples we’ve examined in this chapter and see if you can make connections between earlier and later performance art.

You’ll learn more about Theaster Gates in the Social Practice chapter of this text, so keep in mind how artists who work in contemporary performance art continue to work across media and genres. We’ll also take another look at Tania Bruguera’s work in this section and it is useful to compare and contrast the examples presented below and El Peso de la Culpa (The Burden of Guilt), discussed above. Finally, consider how Dread Scott’s work, which is the first case study you’ll encounter in in this section, connects to the sociopolitical performances examined throughout this chapter.

Dread Scott, I Am Not a Man , 2009

Dread Scott (born 1965) is an American artist whose practice in performance, installation, video, printmaking, and painting critically examines race and racism in the United States. Of his multimedia approach, Scott writes in his artist statement on his website , “two threads that connect them are: an engagement with significant social questions and a desire to push formal and conceptual boundaries as part of contributing to artistic development.” What connective threads can you identify in Scott’s statement? How do these threads fit in with the goals of performance more broadly? As you learn more about his performance, I Am Not a Man , keep Scott’s intentions as an artist in mind.

In I Am Not a Man , Scott walked the streets of Harlem, New York for an hour. He’s dressed in a tan suit jacket with black pants, a black tie, and a white shirt. He wears black-rimmed glasses and a tan and brown hat. He’s also wearing a large signboard with the words, “I AM NOT A MAN.” The sign references the 1968 Memphis Sanitation workers strike and the artist Glenn Ligon’s 1988 painting (Untitled) I Am Man (which also refers back to the sanitation strike).

As you can see from the still images of the performance, Scott’s work attracts attention from people on the street. At one point, he’s surrounded by a group of police officers (you can hear Scott talk about this encounter on The Modern Art Notes podcast). In the last image on his website, he is shown with his pants down. Here, Scott’s performance recalls a specific moment when he witnessed police officers searching a Black man on the street by pulling his pants down. In other parts of the performance, Scott puts his hands up against the wall, lays down on the ground, and pulls the pockets of his pants inside out.

Stop & Reflect: Dread Scott

• Listen to an interview with Dread Scott that aired on June 3, 2020 on The Modern Art Notes podcast (50:09 minutes; I Am Not a Man is discussed at 26:47 to 32:52)
• Look at still images from I Am Not a Man from Scott’s website . Be sure to also scroll down below the images to read his statement about the work.
• As you look through images of I Am Not a Man and listen to the artist speak about his work, think of specific ways Scott’s work critiques the way Black Americans are treated in the United States.
• What is the effect of the use of text in Scott’s performance? Would this piece be different if the artist had walked the streets of New York declaring, “I am not a man,” aloud? Why or why not? Would the effect of this performance be different if it were performed in a museum or gallery space?
• How does Scott’s work reflect directly on history? You can read more about the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision on the PBS website and more about the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968 on the Civil Right Museum website .

Tania Bruguera, Tatlin’s Whisper #5 , 2008 and Tatlin’s Whisper #6 , 2009, collaborative performances

As discussed in the pervious section, Politics and Identity, Tania Bruguera is an artist whose work defies easy categorization. Her work is often explicitly political and based on viewer participation and interaction, and participation from the institution, such as the museum. In addition to using the terms Behavior Art and the social body to describe her practice, she also refers to what she does as initiating (rather than creating) a work of art, preferring to work collaboratively with others to decentralize the role of the artist. Her work fits in with both performance and social practice .

Watch  Tatlin’s Whisper #5  performed at the Tate Modern museum, above. (Tate Shots, 4:00 minutes) and read about Tatlin’s Whisper #5 on the artist’s website .

Tatlin’s Whisper #5 shows two mounted police officers directing the crowd inside the great Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern museum in London, England. The people encounter the mounted police as they perform their typical job, but they’ve been taken out of their usual context and placed inside the museum space; Bruguera describes this as the “decontextualization of an action.” People don’t have to obey them, but they do. The authority of the mounted police extends to this new context. In the video from the Tate Modern, Bruguera says that she prefers when the audience can experience the work as a live event, rather than a representation of a live event.

Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version)  also addresses power and authority. In this case, Bruguera presents the viewer with the symbols of a political speech: a microphone and podium, flanked by two guards (who are actors), in front of a curtained backdrop. Audience members are invited up to the microphone and allowed 1 minute to say whatever they want; they have one minute of totally free speech before they are pulled from the podium by the guards. As you can see in the Art21 video clip linked to above, people scream, cry, and yell into the microphone.

• Read about Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version) on the artist’s website
•   Watch an excerpt from the performance from the Art21 interview with Bruguera (the discussion of the artwork starts at 23:35).
• How does Bruguera’s work expand the definition of performance art?
• How do the works presented in this section compare to El Peso de la Culpa (The Burden of Guilt) discussed earlier?
• What role does absence place in Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version) ?
• What political message do her works convey? How does she communicate these messages?
• How does Bruguera’s approach to performance differ from the other artists examined so far in this chapter? Does she use a different approach to engage the audience?
• Do you think the outcome of the performance changes when the artist’s body is not present?

Theaster Gates, See, Sit, Sup, Sip, Sing: Holding Court , 2012 and Processions , 2016-2019, series of collaborative performances

You learned about the American artist Theaster Gates (born 1973) in the Social Practices chapter . Below, you’ll study two of his collaborative performances, which are an extension of his social practice work.

Watch a few minutes of Gates’ performance of See, Sit, Sup, Sing: Holding Court from the Studio Museum in Harlem (22:50 minutes)

In See, Sit, Sup, Sip, Sing: Holding Court , Gates initiates another type of space for conversation. This collaborative project is part performance and part installation. It also plays with ideas of presence and absence, similar to Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version) .

See, Sit, Sup, Sip, Sing: Holding Court consists of salvaged materials (like The Dorchester Projects ) from a closed public school in Chicago’s South Side. The chairs, desks, tables, and chalkboards are arranged to encourage learning and listening.

When the space is activated, people fill the chairs, the chalkboard is covered in questions and ideas, and voices rise and fall in conversation and community. Gates occasionally “holds court,” but the space can be used freely by others. When the space is empty, it sits as a silent reminder of the importance of learning from one another, and the institution’s role in listening to its community.

Read about Processions on the Hirshhorn Museum website , where you can also view still images of the different performances and watch a video of The Runners (4:48 minutes.), embedded above.

His project, Processions at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. was a series of four collaborative performances that the artist created with local and national Black community arts leaders.

A true intermedia project, Processions combined dance, music, theater, visual art, and African American culture. Several of the performances were part improvisational as Gates collaborated with choral singers, experimental music ensembles, and even student athletes.

Stop & Reflect: Theaster Gates

• Community collaboration and creating opportunities for exchange and dialogue are at the heart of Gates’ practice. Can you compare Gates’ process for Processions with his work on The Dorchester Projects , reviewed in the Social Practice chapter?
• How do these works each reflect Gates’ focus on fostering community? How do they also relate to supporting and celebrating Black identity?

This chapter introduced you to a broad range of artistic practices encompassing performance art. As we’ve seen, performance art challenges the hierarchy of the institution by pushing out of the museum or gallery walls, and bringing art out into the public sphere. Performance also de-centers the importance of the art object, valuing instead the ephemeral actions of the artist. This shift to action over object reveals performance artists’ interest in demonstrating that art exists in real life and in real time, rather than as a commodity available to only a privileged few.

As we saw in other chapters discussing Institutional Critique and Social Practice , New Media artists seek out new modes of expression that are less and less tied to historic, Western notions of how we view and experience works of art. Performance artists also recognize this shift and seek to create work that engages the viewer and encourages their active participation in the creative process.

Key Takeaways

At the end of this chapter you will begin to:

• Explain the context and history of Performance Art.
• Describe and compare significant pieces of Performance Art.
• Recognize developments in Performance Art and consider how this approach to art is connected to the broader history of visual culture.
• Explain how Performance Art relates to the elements of New Media Art.

Optional: Lesson Extensions

Below are some lesson extension activities to encourage learners to engage more deeply with the material presented in this chapter.

Further Reflection:

• How would you define performance art? How does performance push back against conventional ways of viewing and experiencing an artwork?
• How does performance art differ from the theater?
• Can an original piece of performance art be performed again? Should it be?
• Is performance art designed to make you uncomfortable?
• What are some of the historical precedents for performance?
• How does performance art draw attention to the intersection of art and life?
• How does performance anticipate other forms of new media?
• Why do you think the body becomes so central to Performance Art?

Creative Interpretation Idea

Create a Fluxus Event Score

We’ve learned that Fluxus artists desired to merge art and life and often called attention to the ordinariness or mundane aspects of our day-to-day experiences. Their work relies on audience participation and chance.

For this assignment, you will compose an original Fluxus event score inspired by your immediate surroundings.

Your work will be evaluated according to the following criteria:

• Your score is inspired by the Fluxus movement but is not derivative of another artist’s work.
• Your score is about 4-6 lines long (it can be a bit shorter than this, but should not be much longer).
• Your score is based on a specific site or feeling inspired by your immediate surroundings.
• Feel free to be creative with your presentation. You can play with fonts, layout, color, and graphics to create a score that reflects your inspiration.

Discussion Assignment Idea

As you learned in this week’s module on performance art, artists can break down the barriers between art and life by:

• performing and presenting work outside the traditional venues (e.g., museums or galleries)
• engaging the audience in the public sphere
• using everyday (non-art) materials

Select one of the artists presented as case studies in this chapter and discuss how their work breaks down barriers between art and life. You can base your response on the criteria above, but you may also share other ideas about how artists can blur the lines between art and life inspired by the artist and artwork you’ve chosen.

Further Reading

Read the interview, “ Tehching Hsieh and Marina Abramović in Conversation ” from the Tate Museum’s website.

Based on your understanding of the reading, respond to the following questions:

• How are Tehching Hsieh’s and Marina Abramović’s artistic practices the same? How do they differ?
• Can you explain, from the reading, how each artist prepares for a performance?
• Pick a quote from the reading by either artist. Why did this quote resonate with you? What do you think it reveals about Hsieh’s or Abramović’s artistic philosophy?

Selected Bibliography

Cummings, Andrew. “Art Time, Life Time: Tehching Hsieh.” Tate Research Centre: Asia Event Report , July 2018. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/tate-research-centre-asia/event-report-tehching-hsieh . Accessed September 12, 2020.

Diamond, Sara. “Performance: And interview with Mona Hatoum.” Fuse Magazine , 10 (5). pp. 46-52. http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/1792/.

Frederickson, Kristen, and Sarah E. Webb.  Singular Women: Writing the Artist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt5b69q3pk/.

Goldberg, RoseLee, and Margaret Barlow. “Performance art.” Grove Art Online . 2003; https://www-oxfordartonline-com.libproxy.pcc.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000066355 . Accessed September 13, 2020.

Kaprow, Allan. “Just Doing.” TDR (1988-) 41, no. 3 (1997): 101-06.  Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1146610 . Accessed September 10, 2020.

Kaprow, Allan. “The Education of the Un-Artist,” Part 2. In Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Katz, M. Barry. “The Women of Futurism.” Woman’s Art Journal . Vol. 7, No. 2 (Autumn, 1986 – Winter, 1987). 3-13.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extension of Man . Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

Montano, Linda. “Hannah Wilke Interview,” in  Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2006.

Museum of Modern Art Learning. “Media and Performance Art.” New York: Museum of Modern Art.  https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/media-and-performance-art/ . Accessed August 1, 2020.

Museum of Modern Art Learning. “Yoko Ono, Cut Piece.” New York: Museum of Modern Art. https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/yoko-ono-cut-piece-1964/ . Accessed August 1, 2020.

Perrot, Capucine. “Mona Hatoum, Performance Still 1985–95.” In Performance At Tate: Into the Space of Art . Tate Research Publication: London, 2016. Accessed September 17, 2020. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/perspectives/mona-hatoum .

Poggi, Christine. “’Folla/Follia’: Futurism and the Crowd.” Critical Inquiry . Vol. 28, No. 3 (Spring 2002). 709-748.

Rainey, Lawrence, et al., editors. Futurism: An Anthology . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq4q3 .

Savin, Ada. “Tania Bruguera’s ‘Travelling Performances’: Challenging Private and Public Spaces /Voices.” e-cadernos CES . Online since June 15, 2017. http://journals.openedition.org/eces/2240 . Accessed September 16, 2020.

Schneemann, Carolee. More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings. Ed. Bruce McPherson. New Paltz, N.Y.: Documentexte, 1979.

Taylor, Rebecca. “Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 5, 2021, https://smarthistory.org/marina-abramovic-the-artist-is-present/ .

Wilson, Martha. “Performance Art.” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997).

Yapp, Hentyle. “Revisiting Performance Art of the 1990s and the Politics of Meditation.” LEAP 21. August 8, 2013. http://www.leapleapleap.com/2013/08/revisiting-performance-art-of-the-1990s-and-the-politics-of-meditation/ . Accessed September 13, 2020.

Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema . New York: Fordham University Press. 1970.

Understanding New Media Art Copyright © 2022 by Elizabeth Bilyeu; Kelsey Ferreira; Luke Peterson; and Christine M. Weber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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TateShots 22 September 2017

An Introduction to Performance Art

Can an object or a photograph be performance art? Yes, it can

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind

Delve into the powerful, participatory work of artist and activist Yoko Ono

In the 1960s performance was seen as fundamentally different from the art that could be collected or shown by art museums. It was live and its ephemerality challenged traditional notions of art. But today performance has come to be seen as more a set of strategies available to contemporary artists, one that is not inherently different from other art forms and not at all beyond what a museum can and should show.

Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art explores how concepts of art have changed in relation to recent shifts in artistic production and how artists have responded to the possibilities offered by museums. The project offers essays and case studies, and publishes audio, films and videos, photographs, museum documents and reviews drawn from Tate's Archive, showing the richness and depth of the gallery's engagement with performance over half a century.

Funded by The Arts and Humanities Research Council , this film reflects the ideas of the online publication Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art (Tate Research 2016).

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Why dance in a museum how art became active ep 1 of 5.

Five episodes introducing the art of performance

Can My Body be Art? How Art Became Active Ep 2 of 5

Find out more, rasheed araeen, jackson pollock, charles atlas, niki de saint phalle, joseph beuys, rebecca horn, bruce mclean, charlotte posenenske, mary martin, lygia clark, mona hatoum, minoru hirata, robert rauschenberg.

Fluxus is an international avant-garde collective or network of artists and composers founded in the1960s and still continuing today

Performance art

Artworks that are created through actions performed by the artist or other participants, which may be live or recorded, spontaneous or scripted

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What Is_? Performance Art

The What Is_? Programme provides an introduction to some of the key concepts and themes in modern and contemporary art for all audiences.

• About What Is_?
• Series 1: 1970–Now
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• Series 3: Materials & Methodologies
• Glossary of Art Terms
• Modern and Contemporary Art
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Performance Art

• --> Pintrest

This introductory text provides a brief overview of Performance Art. Art terms are indicated with an underline and their definition can be viewed  by hovering the cursor over the term. They can also be found in the glossary. 

Performance Art  is a form of arts practice that involves a person or persons undertaking an action or actions within a particular timeframe in a particular space or location for an audience. Central to the process and execution of Performance Art is the live presence of the artist and the real actions of his/her body, to create and present an ephemeral art experience to an audience. A defining characteristic of Performance Art is the body, considered the primary  Medium  and conceptual material on which Performance Art is based. Other key components are time, space and the relationship between performer and audience.

Primarily an  Interdisciplinary  practice, Performance Art can employ any material or medium across any discipline, including  Music ,  Dance ,  Literature ,  Poetry ,  Architecture ,  Fashion ,  Design  and  Film . While Performance Art employs strategies such as  Recitation  and  Improvisation  associated with  Theatre  and  Drama , it rarely employs plot or  Narrative . Performance Art can be spontaneous, one-off, durational, improvised or rehearsed and performed with or without scripts. Performances can range from a series of small-scale intimate gestures to public rallies, spectacles or parades presented in solo or collaborative form. In contrast to conventional methods of theatre production, the visual artist is the performer, creator and director of the performance. Performance Art can be situated anywhere: in  Art Museums ,  Galleries  and alternative art spaces or in impromptu sites, such as cafés, bars or the street, where the site and often unknowing audience become an integral part of the work’s meaning.

Performance Art can trace its early influences to medieval performances by poets, minstrels, troubadours, bards and court jesters and also to the spectacles and masquerades of the  Renaissance . However, the origins of Performance Art are more commonly associated with the activities of early twentieth century  Avant-Garde  artists, in particular those associated with  Futurism ,  Constructivism ,  Agitprop ,  Dada ,  Surrealism  and the  Bauhaus .

Celebrating all things modern, Futurist artists devised new forms of art and artist-led events, such as repetitive actions, lectures, manifestos, mass demonstrations, and live street tableau x, to express the dynamism of modern urban life. Artists drew inspiration from all forms of performance, including popular entertainment formats, such as the variety show, circus, cabaret and opera. Live public engagement was paramount and performances involved improvised, unpredictable and often chaotic programmes delivered by artists, poets, actors, architects, critics and painters, frequently accompanied by discussions and debates to spread and initiate new cultural ideas.

Other formative influences on the development of Performance Art include the socially-orientated, utilitarian ethos of Constructivism with its emphasis on audience participation; the underground theatre of Agitprop; the nihilistic, antiart agenda of Dada with their anarchic collaborations, cabarets and performances; the experimental performances, films and theatre productions of the Surrealists and the innovations of the Bauhaus school and its influence on interdisciplinary arts education. These experimental and innovative art movements contributed to the displacement of the art object as the locus of artistic engagement and the establishment of performance as a legitimate form of artistic expression. They also set a new precedent for interdisciplinary  Collaboration , where artists employed a range of art forms to create new modes of performance and artist-led events.

The influx of European artists into America in the 1930s and ’40s, in particular those associated with Surrealism and the Bauhaus, contributed to the emergence of  Abstract Expressionism  and  Action Painting  as the dominant modes of artistic expression during the 1940s and ’50s. The development of Performance Art is associated with the photographic and film documentation of action painters. Artists perceived the action of creating the art object as a potential for performance in itself, and reinterpreted this through live painting performances using the human body as a paint brush.

The  Multidisciplinary  events and performances known as  Happenings  in the late 1950s and early ’60s had a significant influence on the development of Performance Art. Happenings emphasised the importance of chance in artistic creation, audience participation and the blurring of the boundary between the audience and the artwork. Similarly, the interdisciplinary approach employed by  Fluxus  artists sought to blur the distinction between art and the everyday.

Prompted by the social, cultural and political changes during the 1960s, artists became concerned with the increasing  Commodification  of art and the relationship of the art institution to broader socio-economic and political processes. Informed by new developments across a range of theoretical and practical disciplines, such as  Feminism ,  Postcolonialism  and  Critical Theory , and drawing on earlier strategies of disruption, artists devised new forms of practice, such as temporary,  Text-Based ,  Didactic  and performative work, to complicate the perception of the art object as commodity.

By the 1970s the term Performance Art had come into general usage and was closely associated with  Conceptual Art , which emphasised the production of ideas over art objects. The ephemeral, corporeal and radical potential of Performance Art appealed to artists committed to destabilising the material status of the art object. The potential for Performance Art to bypass the museum or gallery and mediate directly with the public instigated a surge of  Artist-Led Initiatives  and alternative spaces in which experimentations in performance could be devised. Performance Art employed many of the tendencies of  Site-Specific Art  and  Institutional Critique  in its consideration of space, context, site and intervention.

The proliferation of Performance Art in the 1970s resulted in the emergence of new forms and categories of Performance Art. Prompted by the political and social upheaval of the 1960s, activist-based performances, such as  Activist Art ,  Street Art  and  Guerrilla Theatre , sought to draw attention to political and social issues through satire,  Dialogical  and protest techniques. Body-based performances were influenced by the emergence of feminist theory and critique in the 1960s and ’70s which re-evaluated traditional representations of the female body. Artists used their bodies to challenge restrictive definitions of sexuality, actively exhibiting their own naked bodies to undermine conventional notions of female nudity. Similarly, artists used their bodies to test the limits of the performing body, pursuing themes of endurance, self-control, transformation, risk and pain. The body was interpreted as a universal  Readymade  which gave rise to offshoots of Performance Art, such as  Body Art ,  Feminist Art  and  Living Sculpture .

Photography ,  Film  and  Video  played a central role in the  Documentation  of Performance Art and these mediums became the primary means by which Performance Art reached a wider public. By the 1980s, performance artists were increasingly incorporating technological media into their practice, such as  Slide Projection ,  Sound ,  Digital Media  and  Computer-Generate Imaginery  to create associated art forms such as  Video Art ,  Sound Art  and  Installation Art .

Having circumvented the museum and gallery for decades, more and more Performance Art is situated and performed within museum and gallery spaces. The ephemeral and transient nature of Performance Art presents challenges with regard to its conservation, archiving and re-presentation. However, many contemporary museums and galleries are restaging early works, presenting new work, adopting interdisciplinary programming and acquiring live performances into their collections. There are numerous organisations, training programmes and festivals dedicated to Performance Art and an increasing body of professional practitioners continue to address its boundaries, relevance and significance as a form of  Contemporary Art .

Reading List

Essay .

We invited Amanda Coogan, artist and researcher, to write an essay on Performance Art entitled What is Performance Art?, which makes reference to artists and artworks in IMMA’s Collection as a means of describing and contextualising this area of contemporary arts practice. We hope to draw attention to the body of artworks in IMMA’s Collection by artists associated with Performance Art, such as Marina Abramović, Nigel Rolfe, Dennis Oppenheim and Gilbert & George. We also hope to draw attention to the potential of IMMA and its Collection as a growing resource for further exploration and consideration of this subject.

Booklet 

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'Not Just Pushing Papers': How Nicole Stevenson Redefines Acquisition at NRC

May 29, 2024

By Performance.gov Team

The Biden-Harris President’s Management Agenda (PMA) Vision lays the foundation for an effective, equitable, and accountable government that delivers results for all. Periodically, we share stories that highlight real-world examples of one of the three PMA priorities.

Across the Federal Government, acquisition professionals help manage the business of government . Performance.gov recently sat down with Deputy Director of the Acquisition Management Division, Office of Administration, for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Nicole Stevenson and some members of her team to hear about her unique leadership approach that’s driving a new era of collaboration, risk-taking, and visionary thinking at NRC.

Founded in 1974, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulates commercial nuclear power plants and other uses of nuclear materials, such as nuclear medicine. This includes licensing, inspection, and enforcement of its requirements. The NRC Acquisition Management Division helps fulfill this mission by ensuring NRC has the latest technology and services.

That’s where Nicole comes in. As the Deputy Director of the Acquisition Management Division, Office of Administration, she oversees the day-to-day operations of the division and management of the branch chiefs. Nicole has a wealth of experience in federal contracting and knows what it’s like to be on both sides of procurement, having worked with small businesses prior to her transition to the Federal Government. This experience helps her and the division oversee many areas, including commercial and other procurements, interagency agreements with other federal agencies, and grants to qualified institutions to support nuclear research and education.

‘Not Just Pushing Papers’

Both Nicole and her team emphasize the important role an acquisition professional plays in the mission of the government.

“The work of acquisition is complex. This is not just a paper pushing job. As business advisors, we have to understand what we’re buying, the market and weigh risks so that we can deliver for the government, so the government can deliver on mission.”

Jill Daly, Acquisition Policy, Planning and Support Branch Chief, echoes Nicole:

“There are a lot of regulations surrounding government procurement. Nicole encourages us to find ways within those regulations to support the mission of the agency at a better price in the most efficient way possible.”

One way Nicole encourages her staff to be innovative is by organizing panels of both experienced and more junior contract specialists who present on flexible procurement techniques that they have executed, such as price affordability and phased negotiation. Following these panels, this acquisition team participates in an open discussion on the effectiveness, efficiency, and legality of these flexible techniques.

Working in Acquisitions at the NRC Youtube Video by the NRC.

An ‘Unorthodox’ Leadership Style that Empowers

Empowering her staff to take risks and try out new approaches is a core component of Nicole’s approach to leadership and something she believes is essential to developing a competitive supplier base for the Federal Government.

“Not only for the NRC, but across the Federal Government, it’s important we have an innovative and competitive supplier base so that we can achieve the most cutting-edge results in the most cost-effective way possible.”

Nicole’s experience and passion for this work pushes her to be hands-on and incorporate what she calls an ‘unorthodox’ leadership style.

Nicole shares with us, “Because I love the work so much, I like to stay close to what I call the ‘real work’ of acquisition. My staff is very important to me. It is always my highest priority to spend time with my managers and our staff so that we can continuously learn from each other. I’ve been in many spaces, from Fortune 500 companies to Congress, and I draw the best from each of those experiences. I’ve learned there are times to be hierarchical and there are times to be very flat.”

One example of Nicole’s unorthodox leadership style? Her role as the DJ for their team meetings where she chooses thematic songs to start and end her meetings, which help her staff not just see her as their boss, but as a person, and has created an environment where staff are excited to participate in meetings, share their ideas, and collaborate with each other.

Nicole on a recent trip to South Africa.

Her focus on approachable leadership has had a significant impact on Nicole’s staff, personally and professionally. Domonique Malone, a Branch Chief in the Acquisition Management Division, tells us more about the type of leader Nicole is.

“When I think of Nicole’s leadership style, I think of an innovative style, because I think she’s an excellent communicator. She has a vision, and she’s clear about communicating what that vision is…I think the most groundbreaking things she’s implemented here come from her experience leading teams in private industry and federal contracting. She understands what it’s like to be in this field, in what she didn’t get or what she did get, and she’s bringing it to us. And then she’s allowing us as leaders to try innovative techniques.”

A New Approach to Acquisition

In 2023, Nicole took her breadth of experience and vision of achieving cutting edge results and launched the Innovation Incubator (I²) for NRC’s acquisition professionals. I² functions as an advisory forum that aids the agency’s contracting officers in identifying and assessing emerging technologies and business models. It also fosters innovation by advocating for creative approaches and mindful risk-taking.

Nicole intentionally designed I² to include representatives from not only the acquisition team, including program partners and end users, but also the Office of General Counsel and Office of Small Business and Civil Rights. This streamlined approach aims to provide an open and supportive space to discuss procurement approaches, gain stakeholder buy-in, and retrospectively review the approaches taken and identify lessons learned.

“We use this as an opportunity to build people up. If someone has a procurement and wants to use an innovative technique, then they can talk through their ideas and be supported. You get the benefit of a brain trust, whether you’re planning on doing something new in procurement or you want to take a look back and analyze your lessons learned.”

In just over a year, I² has had many successes, including reduced close-out contract backlogs and increased contracts with small businesses in new areas like research and development. Anthony ‘Tony’ Briggs, the Small Business Program Manager in the Office of Small Business and Civil Rights, tells us about the impact I² has had on the small businesses they work with.

“When you make a contract award to a small business, it is more than just a contract. An award is a life changing experience that helps an entrepreneur realize a dream they’ve been striving for since they started their business. I know countless small businesses that started with one to two people. They got their first contract at the NRC, and now they’re over 200 people.”

As they look to the future, Nicole and her team are optimistic about the Innovation Incubator (I²) and the culture it has fostered at NRC, in addition to the impact it will have on small businesses. The next phase? Collaborating with federal partners and their procurement data scientists and analysts to identify metrics and measures that can be used governmentwide to quantify the success in the adaptation and adoption of implementing innovative acquisition techniques.

The Innovation Incubator (I²) is just one example of the numerous contributions Nicole has made during her time at the NRC. Nicole has not only improved the approach NRC takes with acquisition, but she has also clearly left a significant impact on the staff and culture at NRC, something that will continue to yield results for years to come.

If you’re curious about the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission , you can head to their homepage to learn more. We invite you to explore the President’s Management Agenda to learn more about the role of acquisition and procurement in managing the business of government.

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Ready to explore Austin performing arts? Here are next season's best concerts and shows

UPDATE: This story has been updated to correct the name of the nonprofit Impact Arts.

As soon as one season sets, another rises, if hazily, on the horizon.

The next season of major performing arts events, which will start well before our Texas weather cools off again, is already in the works.

To prepare for the season, I've divided the major announced offerings into "must see," "should see" and "might see" categories.

More season announcements are on the way. I've included some summertime arts here as well.

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'Funny Girl' tops my Broadway bill in Austin

Texas Performing Arts at the University of Texas is by far the largest arts group in town. Its "Broadway in Austin" series is, in turn, by far this outfit's biggest draw, with 10 touring shows on tap this upcoming season that could attract an audience of almost 250,000. texasperformingarts.org

• Must see: "Funny Girl" — Buzzy hit revival of classic 1960s musical about Fanny Brice.
• Should see: "Moulin Rouge," "Shucked," "Hamilton," "Les Miserables," "Come From Away" — The first two are worthy newcomers, while the last three are returning shows with sterling records and major fan bases.
• Might see: "MJ: The Musical," "Annie," "Peter Pan," "Clue" — Depends on the quality of the touring editions, don't you think?

Texas Performing Arts brings the world to Austin

While Texas Performing Arts is best known for its Broadway series, many of us over the past 40 years have agreed that its non-Broadway content can be even more powerful. These are shows that should teach and please. texasperformingarts.org

• Must see : Conspirare's "Considering Matthew Shepard" — This oratorio is one of the most profound and moving shows ever created in Austin. Twyla Tharp's "Diamond Jubilee" — A great American choreographer celebrates 60 years of creativity.
• Should see: Branford Marsalis, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Andrew Schneider — The first two starring acts return to welcome arms in Austin, the third has created an immersive light show that sounds like an active version of the recent, magical "Luminations" at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. I'd add to this category: Carrie Rodriguez, Oscar Cásares and Joel Salcido's "Postcards from the Border," which will grow out of a campus residency, and a dance club act from Steven Hoggett, Christine Jones and David Byrne.
• Might see: Spanish Harlem Orchestra's "Salsa Navidad," Huang Yi's dance "Ink," Les Arts Florissants & Théotime Langlois' "Vivaldi's Four Seasons at 300," plus five fabulous cutting-edge premieres that partner Austin-based Fusebox with TPA.

Zach Theatre

Austin's largest resident theater company recently staged a preview of the upcoming season that included two summertime shows of note from the tail end of the current season. Always expect creative angles from this team with a growing national profile. www.zachtheatre.org

• Must see: "The Lehman Trilogy," "Jersey Boys," "What the Constitution Means to Me" — Out of the ballpark! The first is a multi-generational drama about wealth; the second is among the first stagings anywhere of the award-winning juke-box musical by a resident troupe; the third is a hit personal show about — what else? — the U.S. Constitution.
• Should see: "The Wizard of Oz," "Bob & Jean: A Love Story," "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical" — Quite frankly, any of these three shows could have landed in the "must see" category. The first is a Dave Steakley twist on the movie musical classic, the second a family story from Austin-bred playwright Robert Schenkkan; the third a surprisingly effective bio-musical, seen here in its first local staging.
• Might see: "A Christmas Carol," "Luna," "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! The Musical!" — The first is Zach's supremely entertaining take on the Charles Dickens seasonal story, which moved into this division because it returns almost every year; the other two are plays for youths.

Ballet Austin

Some Austinites know this dance company primarily through its seasonal staging of "The Nutcracker." Well beyond that treat, it has built an international reputation as one of America's best ballet troupes . balletaustin.org

• Must see: "Belle: A Tale of Beauty and the Beast" — This is among dance-maker Stephen Mills' most sophisticated treatments of familiar yarns (other recent winners: " Grimm Tales " and " Stephen Mills' Poe: A Tale of Madness ").
• Should see: — It's been a couple of years since I've luxuriated in the cultural richness that is " The Nutcracker ." Also, I love shorter dances, such as the promised groupings of "Heart's Desire" and "Love's Gentle Spring." Love and ballet go together well, I find.
• Might see: " Romeo & Juliet " — I've got a soft spot for traditional story ballets. This one wisely employs a dramatic score by Sergei Prokofiev.

Austin Symphony Orchestra

Austin's oldest performing arts company is not through innovating. Along with its beloved masterworks and pops series, it regularly stages incredibly ambitious clusters of concerts. austinsymphony.org

• Must see: All five Beethoven piano concertos played over the course of one weekend by Austin-based international concert star Anton Nel teamed with conductor Peter Bay's adept ensemble .
• Should see: The rest of the symphony's Masterworks Series, which includes music by Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Prokofiev, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Barber, Orff, Brahms, Strauss (Johann and Richard) and Gershwin.
• Might see: The symphony's Butler Pops Series, which ranges from "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" and "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas" to Steve Hackman's "Beethoven X Coldplay" and "The Music of John Williams."

Austin Opera

This magnificent company shifts gears with three very different offerings next season , as well as short runs for two of the three shows.

• Must see: "The Manchurian Candidate" — If you missed this political thriller in 2016, don't pass it up this time. Composer Kevin Puts ("Silent Night") comes with deep Austin roots.
• Should see: Music director Timothy Myers, along with Chorus Austin, reaches beyond the strictly operatic repertoire with Verdi's "Requiem," which, let's face it, is pretty operatic in itself.
• Might see: Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," one of the world's 10 most produced operas, needs no explanation. This staging involves a partnership with Opera San Antonio, a logical pairing.

Before the fall, try these summertime treats

Summer Stock Austin — In a town packed with youth arts training programs, Impact Arts stands out, especially when it comes to musicals. Evidence: One of its students, Langston Lee from Rouse High School, won the national Jimmy Award in the first year that Austin-area students were made eligible. The group's Summer Stock Austin offerings further prove the point. impactarts.org

• Must see: "Guys and Dolls" — One of the all-time classic Broadway musicals, this show works for artists and audiences of almost all ages.
• Should see: "Disney's The Little Mermaid" — Recently, Impact Arts has devoted one of its Summer Stock shows to younger audiences. While some adults consider this one a classic, I've got a confession to make: Never seen it. It's probably time to rectify that.

Zilker Summer Musical — One way to conceptualize this annual outdoor event, which traces its roots back to the Zilker hillside hootnannies of the 1930s, is to think of it as the biggest free community show in town. zilker.org

• Should see: "Legally Blonde: The Musical" — Loved the original movie. Haven't seen the Broadway musical take. Should be a crowd pleaser. Be aware: It gets hot on that hill in Zilker Park. Come prepared.

Paramount Summer Movies — If you prefer air-conditioning during the hot months, consider this big-screen series that turns 50 years old this summer. In celebration, the Queen of Congress Avenue is showing some 120 movies! Season already in progress. austintheatre.org

• Must see: "Jaws," "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," "Star Wars: New Hope," "The Godfather Part II," "The Sound of Music," "The Wizard of Oz" — I'm thinking of shows you absolutely must see on the big screen alongside a crowd of like-minded folks.
• Should see: "Pulp Fiction," "The Color Purple," "Paris Is Burning," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "The Graduate," "Like Water for Chocolate" and "What's Up Doc?" — The big screen is not as crucial here as the storytelling.
• Might see: — "Dawn of the Dead," "Point Break," "I Am Not Your Negro," "Lolita," "American Psycho," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Muriel's Wedding," "The Lunch Box" — Shows you might not see at other venues, in part because some are made from banned books.

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About Ford Motor Company

Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) is a global company based in Dearborn, Michigan, committed to helping build a better world, where every person is free to move and pursue their dreams.  The company’s Ford+ plan for growth and value creation combines existing strengths, new capabilities and always-on relationships with customers to enrich experiences for customers and deepen their loyalty.  Ford develops and delivers innovative, must-have Ford trucks, sport utility vehicles, commercial vans and cars and Lincoln luxury vehicles, along with connected services.  The company does that through three customer-centered business segments:  Ford Blue, engineering iconic gas-powered and hybrid vehicles; Ford Model e, inventing breakthrough EVs along with embedded software that defines exceptional digital experiences for all customers; and Ford Pro, helping commercial customers transform and expand their businesses with vehicles and services tailored to their needs.  Additionally, Ford provides financial services through Ford Motor Credit Company.  Ford employs about 176,000 people worldwide.  More information about the company and its products and services is available at corporate.ford.com.

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Jessica Lange on playing ‘wildly emotional characters’ and finding roles that still fit

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Jessica Lange began her Broadway career playing Blanche DuBois in a 1992 revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” It was a challenge the two-time Oscar winner admits she wasn’t ready for.

“I was very naïve,” she said via Zoom from New York, where she’s starring in Paula Vogel’s “Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions.” “It was my first Broadway play and I stepped into this colossal play and character. I don’t want to shift anything, but I needed help and I didn’t get it. I wish I had more guidance. Someone to explain to me what it’s like to be on stage — and then the first thing you tackle is Blanche DuBois. I mean, Jesus.”

Lange didn’t let the “Streetcar” experience stand in the way of her theatrical ambitions. Since Blanche, she has stepped into the historic roles of two larger-than-life mothers on Broadway and in the West End: Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” and Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” (For her portrayal of Mary in O’Neill’s lacerating family drama, she won a Tony Award.)

In “Mother Play,” a Second Stage world premiere at Broadway’s Hayes Theater, Lange is taking on another maternal quagmire: Phyllis, an alcoholic mother raising on her own two children, whose queer identities she would like to squelch. Like “The Glass Menagerie” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Vogel’s drama is a deeply personal play, the work of an artist unpacking those sealed boxes from the past that contain the most forbidding family secrets.

Lange’s Tony-nominated performance is one of the most memorable of Broadway’s busy spring season. Notably, it’s the first time she’s originated a role in the theater since she began venturing onto the stage in the early 1990s after establishing herself as one of the finest actors of her generation.

“The plays I’ve done before this one have all been classics of the American canon,” she said. “And since doing ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ eight years ago, I’ve been approached by people asking what I would like to do next. I never came up with something that I felt really passionate about and that I was still age appropriate for. Because at a certain point, all the parts you wanted to play, you’re now 20 years too old to do.”

But then “Mother Play” came along. “And I thought, ‘Well, yes, I would love to do a brand-new play,’” she said. “Something that’s never been seen. There are no other performances to compare it to. It’s just like a clean slate. You just walk out there, and people are going to see and hear it for the first time. They’re going to learn about a character that nobody has ever played before. So that was the reason that I signed on, other than thinking that the play was really saying something and well written.”

Lange is accustomed to working on new material on screen, but committing to an untested theatrical role carried extra risk. “The reality is you’re opening a brand-new play cold on Broadway after only three weeks of rehearsal,” she said. “And then you start to think, ‘What was I nuts?’ But we were lucky. It all came together.”

The play, directed by Tina Landau, features two other cast members, both of whom also received Tony nominations: Jim Parsons, who plays Carl, Phyllis’ precocious gay son who dies of AIDS, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, who plays Martha, Phyllis’ lesbian daughter, who is the custodian of the play’s difficult family memories.

The culmination of a lifetime of playwriting craft and inner work, Vogel’s Tony-nominated play is composed of vintage snapshots of an economically precarious childhood, dominated by a mother whose life fell cruelly short of her own expectations. Phyllis never lets her children forget that it’s their deadbeat, two-timing father who is to blame for their troubles. The close, supportive relationship of the siblings provides a bulwark that enables them to survive the fallout of her bitter disappointment.

Swiftly spanning decades (from 1964 to the 21st century), “Mother Play” avails itself of a spry theatrical freedom (not unlike Vogel’s “The Baltimore Waltz,” her beautiful play inspired by her late brother Carl). The cockroaches in the cheap apartments Phyllis is forced to rent for her family dance during scene changes, but a powerful emotional realism runs through the work.

Lange, who turned 75 in April, said that she was excited by the challenge of “moving a character through 40 years without the use of makeup, prosthetics and wigs.” Time on stage is seemingly under her command. “We’ve all done that on film, where we’ve aged or un-aged or whatever it is,” she said. “But this had to be through the physical life, the voice, the energy level, and that was a great exercise for me.”

The production keeps evolving. “This is why people do off-Broadway runs for eight weeks or whatever before moving to Broadway,” she said. “Because it continues to grow and to develop and to deepen. We’re doing it in front of our audiences, but it’s been an amazing experience.”

To call Phyllis a problematic mother would be like calling the Statue of Liberty tallish. She swills gin after returning home from her job at the post office, swoons moodily to “Moon River” on the radio and wonders how it all went wrong. One day she shows up in a new Chanel suit, bought at a thrift shop. As she models the outfit for her children, her hopes for the future are momentarily revived, even as she’s alarmed that Carl has too much interest in fashion and Martha has none at all.

The product of a bygone era, Phyllis is a prisoner of her prejudices. She reinforces a strict code of gender conformity on her children, who openly flout her edicts. Homosexuality in a son is something she might be able to overlook if the matter were discreetly handled, but lesbianism is a bridge too far for a woman whose sense of self-worth is tied to conventional standards of femininity.

Phyllis admits herself that she wasn’t equipped to be a mother, that she became one accidentally because of her fatally charming, utterly untrustworthy and ultimately abusive former husband. But her own selfishness crosses a line when she throws Carl out when he needs her most.

“A mistake that could have been made was trying to make this woman likable,” Lange said. “Which I think is always a trap actors fall into. She was so precisely written that it was just a question of accepting that this is a woman who has made terrible mistakes. Who has made the worst decisions a mother or a human being could make. There’s any number of reasons to not like her. But the challenge is to explain her as best you can.”

Lange took note of Phyllis’ background: “We have to remember that she’s a child of the Depression, growing up in the South. When her son comes out, it’s 1968. It’s not accepted as easily as it is now. I’ve talked to a lot of people, even younger people, who have said that was their experience with their mother or family or whatever. So at a certain point you have to forget about the likability factor and just say, ‘OK, this is who this woman is for all her faults.’ Maybe there were good things. She clearly loved that boy so much, but maybe she just made an unforgivable decision in the universe.”

Carl never gives up on his mother. As frustrated and hurt by her as he is, he remains dazzled by her. With Lange in the role, it’s easy to see why. While emanating from Martha’s conflicted memory, the play understands Phyllis partly through his sympathetic eyes.

“Paula said she was writing this to come to terms with her mother, almost like an exorcism of all that old anger,” Lange said. “I don’t mean to speak for Paula, but part of the desire and impetus to write this play is to somehow throw that anger into the sea. To let it go, finally. Which I think is one of the great life lessons — to learn how to forgive.

In “The Great Lillian Hall,” an HBO film directed by Michael Cristofer that premieres May 31 and will stream on Max, Lange plays another ill-equipped mother, a renowned stage actress forced to reckon with insuperable realities. While struggling with her memory in rehearsals for Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” Lillian is diagnosed with a form of dementia. Having lived for art — and the romance around it — she must come to terms with her encroaching dependence.

Margaret, Lillian’s daughter (a superb Lily Rabe), is accustomed to her mother’s self-preoccupied ways. When the two finally have their hospital room confrontation, Rabe and Lange wring every sorry, angry truth from the scene.

“I love playing wildly emotional characters,” Lange said. “That’s always been the most interesting to me — characters teetering on the edge and falling off every once in a while, like Frances Farmer or the character in ‘Blue Sky.’ Characters whose emotional upheavals are extreme. This is Phyllis more than Lillian Hall, but Lillian has them too.”

Lange said that she has long wanted to work with Cristofer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“The Shadow Box”), who happens to be an old friend. She felt secure knowing that the director of this backstage drama (written by Elisabeth Seldes Annacone and also starring Kathy Bates) had extensive theater experience of his own.

“I’ve always loved ‘All About Eve’ and the brilliant John Cassavetes film ‘Opening Night,’ ” Lange said. “And this was an opportunity to delve into that world on film, but also to play Chekhov, which is something I’m never going to do in my life.”

Not play Chekhov? But “The Cherry Orchard” is perfect for her.

“I think I’m too old,” she said. “ I’m too old for everything now.”

Her schedule belies this remark. Lange may be looking forward to taking a long break after “Mother Play” ends on June 16, but retirement isn’t in the cards. Her upcoming projects include the release of the film version of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in which she reprises her acclaimed performance of Mary Tyrone, a role she speaks of with almost religious reverence.

“The Great Lillian Hall” offered a taste of “The Cherry Orchard” outside of the rigors of a Broadway schedule. “We rehearsed the play with a great cast of actors,” she said. “And that was so exciting. And those scenes were weaved into the film because there were parallels between what Lillian Hall is losing and what her character in ‘The Cherry Orchard’ is losing. The film is about loss and memory, and all those things just felt wonderfully connective.”

Are there any classic plays that still call out to her to do?

“I kind of aged out of the ones that I had thought about doing,” Lange said. “Like ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ or ‘The Night of the Iguana.’ I always thought the character of Hannah was a beautiful role but at this point in my life I can’t have a grandfather unless he’s like 150 years old. So there are certain ones that are no longer feasible.”

When asked about her acting influences, she named two Method standard-bearers, Kim Stanley and Geraldine Page . She worked with the emotionally volcanic Stanley in “Frances” and on a TV production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at a formative point in her career.

“I had a tape of Kim in ‘The Goddess,’ ” Lange said. “It’s probably worn out by now. But years ago, before I’d start a project, I would watch it to remind myself of what great acting — what dangerous acting — is. Kim has always been for me the gold standard.”

When I mentioned that Page was in a play by Sam Shepard , with whom Lange had two children, she immediately supplied the title: “A Lie of the Mind.” Is it true that “Fool for Love,” one of Shepard’s masterpieces, was sparked by the intensity of their love affair? “Yeah, I think Sam wrote it at the beginning of our relationship,” she said.

Lange worked with Shepard , who died in 2017, on several occasions on screen. Did she ever consider doing one of his plays?

“Yes, but for one reason or another, it just wasn’t the right time or place,” she said. “At one point, we were talking about something, but I was pregnant. And another time life just somehow didn’t allow it. But there’s maybe one or two parts I could still play in a Sam Shepard play. His dialogue is so musical — it’s one of the most beautiful things about his work.”

Sensitive to the rhythms of dramatic poetry, Lange seems custom built for the high-wire lyricism of Tennessee Williams. Her voice on screen has a poetic quality (listen to her cello-inspired intonations in the 1989 Costa-Gavras film “Music Box”). It’s taken her time to develop as potent a stage instrument, though her Southern lilt in “Mother Play” subtly contours her character.

Lange is a major Hollywood star, with all the layers of protection that come with such status. But she lives her life like an artist, which is to say a person of heightened sensibility and discipline.

Her career arc has had its ups and downs. She made her film debut in the 1976 remake of “King Kong,” but the freshness of her Oscar-winning performance in “Tootsie” and the harrowing nature of her portrayal of Frances Farmer in “Frances” quickly proved that she was more than a beauteous scream queen. After her movie star heights in the 1980s and early 1990s, when she worked with some of the finest film directors (Sydney Pollack in “Tootsie,” Martin Scorsese in “Cape Fear,” Tony Richardson in “Blue Sky,” for which she won her second Oscar), she said there was a falling away of things that interested her.

“I also think I got distracted,” she said. “I lost interest in the films I was doing. And I wanted to be home more with my family. And then there was a fallow period, where I didn’t feel like I was doing good work. There was maybe a 10-year or more period of time when it was just not that interesting to me anymore.”

It was “Grey Gardens,” the highly acclaimed 2009 TV movie, that turned things around for her. “Suddenly,” Lange said, sounding like a Williams heroine in the throes of resurrection, “it all came alive again.”

While returning to the stage every decade since the 1990s, she’s been building an impressive body of TV work. Ryan Murphy extended her fame to a new generation and cultural era by casting her in two of his signature franchises, “American Horror Story” and “Feud.”

“There was a time when if you were a TV actor, you were a TV actor,” the three-time Emmy-winner said. “And if you were a film actor, you were a film actor. But now everybody’s doing everything, and thank God. I remember when I was working on stage in London and actors would be on stage at night and doing a radio play or filming in the day. There wasn’t that kind of pigeonholing that there was in the States.”

Photography is a major passion of Lange’s. What started off as a hobby became a second career with exhibitions and books.

“I didn’t pick up a camera probably until the mid 1990s, but I had been around a lot of photographers when I first lived in New York,” she said. “I knew Robert Frank, Danny Lyon, Larry Clark. It was always something that I was thrilled and fascinated by. And then, when I was able to, I started collecting photography, so I’m surrounded by the work of the great black-and-white photographers.”

Does she see a connection between photography and acting?

“There is a similar discipline,” she said. “In stage or film acting, you have to remain present. You have to absolutely stay inside the moment to find the depth of it. And with photography, it is also an exercise in being present. Because especially if you’re doing street photography, which is the only way I do it, just walking around with a camera, you have to be absolutely present to capture one specific moment.”

There’s a scene in Vogel’s play that’s called “Phyllis’ Ballet.” Lange’s character, older and alone, has returned home from work to the emptiness of her apartment. We see her attempting to fill up the time between drinks. Lange, present for every second of this solitary 12-minute stretch, doesn’t need dialogue to communicate what her character is thinking and feeling. Acting for her is an inside job, and there’s no better example on the New York stage right now than this capstone performance of her glorious career.

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Charles McNulty is the theater critic of the Los Angeles Times. He received his doctorate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the Yale School of Drama.

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Guest Essay

America’s Military Is Not Prepared for War — or Peace

By Roger Wicker

Mr. Wicker, a Republican, is the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

“To be prepared for war,” George Washington said, “is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” President Ronald Reagan agreed with his forebear’s words, and peace through strength became a theme of his administration. In the past four decades, the American arsenal helped secure that peace, but political neglect has led to its atrophy as other nations’ war machines have kicked into high gear. Most Americans do not realize the specter of great power conflict has risen again.

It is far past time to rebuild America’s military. We can avoid war by preparing for it.

When America’s senior military leaders testify before my colleagues and me on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee behind closed doors, they have said that we face some of the most dangerous global threat environments since World War II. Then, they darken that already unsettling picture by explaining that our armed forces are at risk of being underequipped and outgunned. We struggle to build and maintain ships, our fighter jet fleet is dangerously small, and our military infrastructure is outdated. Meanwhile, America’s adversaries are growing their militaries and getting more aggressive.

In China, the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has orchestrated a historic military modernization intended to exploit the U.S. military’s weaknesses. He has overtaken the U.S. Navy in fleet size, built one of the world’s largest missile stockpiles and made big advances in space. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has thrown Europe into war and mobilized his society for long-term conflict. Iran and its proxy groups have escalated their shadow war against Israel and increased attacks on U.S. ships and soldiers. And North Korea has disregarded efforts toward arms control negotiations and moved toward wartime readiness.

Worse yet, these governments are materially helping one another, cooperating in new ways to prevent an American-led 21st century. Iran has provided Russia with battlefield drones, and China is sending technical and logistical help to aid Mr. Putin’s war. They are also helping one another prepare for future fights by increasing weapons transfers and to evade sanctions. Their unprecedented coordination makes new global conflict increasingly possible.

That theoretical future could come faster than most Americans think. We may find ourselves in a state of extreme vulnerability in a matter of a few years, according to a growing consensus of experts. Our military readiness could be at its lowest point in decades just as China’s military in particular hits its stride. The U.S. Indo-Pacific commander released what I believe to be the largest list of unfunded items ever for services and combatant commands for next year’s budget, amounting to $11 billion. It requested funding for a raft of infrastructure, missile defense and targeting programs that would prove vital in a Pacific fight. China, on the other hand, has no such problems, as it accumulates the world’s leading hypersonic arsenal with a mix of other lethal cruise and attack missiles.

Our military leaders are being forced to make impossible choices. The Navy is struggling to adequately fund new ships, routine maintenance and munition procurement; it is unable to effectively address all three. We recently signed a deal to sell submarines to Australia, but we’ve failed to sufficiently fund our own submarine industrial base, leaving an aging fleet unprepared to respond to threats. Two of the three most important nuclear modernization programs are underfunded and are at risk of delays. The military faces a backlog of at least $180 billion for basic maintenance, from barracks to training ranges. This projects weakness to our adversaries as we send service members abroad with diminished ability to respond to crises.

Fortunately, we can change course. We can avoid that extreme vulnerability and resurrect American military might.

On Wednesday I am publishing a plan that includes a series of detailed proposals to address this reality head-on. We have been living off the Reagan military buildup for too long; it is time for updates and upgrades. My plan outlines why and how the United States should aim to spend an additional $55 billion on the military in the 2025 fiscal year and grow military spending from a projected 2.9 percent of our national gross domestic product this year to 5 percent over the next five to seven years.

It would be a significant investment that would start a reckoning over our nation’s spending priorities. There will be conversations ahead about all manner of budget questions. We do not need to spend this much indefinitely — but we do need a short-term generational investment to help us prevent another world war.

My blueprint would grow the Navy to 357 ships by 2035 and halt our shrinking Air Force fleet by producing at least 340 additional fighters in five years. This will help patch near-term holes and put each fleet on a sustainable trajectory. The plan would also replenish the Air Force tanker and training fleets, accelerate the modernization of the Army and Marine Corps, and invest in joint capabilities that are all too often forgotten, including logistics and munitions.

The proposal would build on the $3.3 billion in submarine industrial base funding included in the national security supplemental passed in April, so we can bolster our defense and that of our allies. It would also rapidly equip service members all over the world with innovative technologies at scale, from the seabed to the stars.

We should pair increased investment with wiser spending. Combining this crucial investment with fiscal responsibility would funnel resources to the most strategic ends. Emerging technology must play an essential role, and we can build and deploy much of it in less than five years. My road map would also help make improvements to the military procurement system and increase accountability for bureaucrats and companies that fail to perform on vital national security projects.

This whole endeavor would shake our status quo but be far less disruptive and expensive than the alternative. Should China decide to wage war with the United States, the global economy could immediately fall into a depression. Americans have grown far too comfortable under the decades-old presumption of overwhelming military superiority. And that false sense of security has led us to ignore necessary maintenance and made us vulnerable.

Our ability to deter our adversaries can be regained because we have done it before. At the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, in the twilight of the Soviet Union, George H.W. Bush reflected on the lessons of Pearl Harbor. Though the conflict was long gone, it taught him an enduring lesson: “When it comes to national defense,” he said, “finishing second means finishing last.”

Regaining American strength will be expensive. But fighting a war — and worse, losing one — is far more costly. We need to begin a national conversation today on how we achieve a peaceful, prosperous and American-led 21st century. The first step is a generational investment in the U.S. military.

Roger Wicker is the senior U.S. senator from Mississippi and the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

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