Performance Art (1992)
Excerpt fr. John A. Walker’s Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design since 1945, 3rd. ed.
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 18 August 2011
This text is an excerpt from Walker’s 1992 glossary previously published by Library Association Publishing, London.
Performance Art
Performance Art is an extremely broad category of contemporary art encompassing a variety of activities and behaviours, different styles and aesthetic intentions, having as a common denominator the execution of prescribed courses of action before live audiences. Performance Art is an international phenomenon but tends to be called by different names in different countries. Also. it overlaps with several other kinds of art, i.e. actions, body art, community art, happenings, process art, street art and video art, and with popular forms of entertainment, e.g. busking, stunts, children’s games (e.g. dressing up), rock music, and with ancient or “primitive” culture, e. g. shamanism, tribal rituals.
Because of its diversity, transience and geographic dispersal, no single critic is in a position to give a complete account of Performance Art. For the same reasons it is hard to define. Definitions tend to specify the ways in which it differs from performing arts such as dance and theatre. Performance Art is normally created by people with a fine art training; consequently it relates to the history of painting and sculpture not the history of the theatre, and it takes place in art galleries rather than in theatres. For the most part, it ignores the conventions of the performing arts. Some artists object to the idea of a genre called “Performance Art”. Stuart Brisley, for instance, once declared his work to be “anti-Performance Art”.
Public performances or demonstrations were a feature of several early modern art movements—dada, futurism, surrealism— but the post-1960 vogue for Performance tended to derive more from the emphasis on the painter’s creative act in action painting: Jackson Pollock’s behaviour in the studio was made public via photographs and films; Georges Mathieu painted canvases before live audiences according to a time schedule; Yves Klein used live naked models as paintbrushes to generate a series of canvases he called “anthropometrics”— these too were made in front of an invited audience.
Fine artists were attracted to Performance because it provided an alternative to the isolation of the studio: there was a live situation, an immediate public response. Furthermore, it enabled them to collaborate with other artists. In New York three American artists— John Perreault, Majorie Strider and Scott Burton— formed the “Association for Performance” to promote, present and preserve new forms of “artists’ theatre”. Other American artists noted for Performance included: Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Chris Burden (who organized situations in which his life was put at risk), John Cage, Richard Foreman (founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre), Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Alison Knowles, Robert Longo, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Wilson.
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