Performance art

• 1. Introduction

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  Performance art is artwork in which the artist is physically present in the work itself. It may be witnessed live or only through documentation, and it can be spontaneous or carefully written. There are five basic elements that hold it together: time, space, body, the presence of the artist, and the relation between the artist and the public. The actions usually unfold in galleries and museums, yet they can happen in any setting and last any length of time. The goal is to generate a reaction. Sometimes that reaction is sought through improvisation, sometimes through a sense of aesthetics. Why would an artist leave the canvas behind to use their own body as the medium? How did a genre that prizes the ephemeral and the unrepeatable end up hanging in the world's largest museums? And how did the same practice that began with provocation and scandal become a tool for political prisoners and protesters? These are the questions the chapters ahead set out to answer.

• 2. An Antithesis To Theatre

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  The term "performance" is polysemic, and one of its meanings belongs to the scenic arts, which is exactly the confusion that dogs any clean definition. Performance art emerged with a critical and antagonistic position toward scenic arts. It only adjoins them in certain aspects, such as the audience and the present body, and not every piece even contains those. In the narrower sense, the term ties to postmodernist traditions in Western culture. From about the mid-1960s into the 1970s it drew on Antonin Artaud, Dada, the Situationists, Fluxus, installation art and conceptual art. It tended to be defined as an antithesis to theatre, challenging orthodox art-forms and cultural norms. The ideal was an ephemeral and authentic experience for performer and audience alike, an event that could not be repeated, captured or purchased. The work does not seek a conventional play or a formal linear narrative. It does not depict fictitious characters in scripted interactions. Instead it can be action or spoken word passing between artist and audience, or it can ignore the audience's expectations entirely. Some artists reject even the word "performance." The Viennese Actionists and neo-Dadaists prefer terms like "live art," "action art," "actions," "intervention" or "manoeuvre" to describe what they do.

• 3. Born In Zurich

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  The discipline emerged in 1916, parallel to dadaism and under the umbrella of conceptual art, led by Tristan Tzara, one of the pioneers of Dada. Theorists place its origins at the beginning of the 20th century, alongside constructivism, Futurism and Dadaism. The crucible was the Cabaret Voltaire, founded in Zurich, Switzerland by the couple Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings for artistic and political purposes. Located on the upper floor of a theater whose exhibitions they mocked, the cabaret hosted work that was avant garde and experimental. The Dada movement is thought to have been founded in that ten-meter-square locale. The Cabaret existed barely six months, closing in the summer of 1916, yet in that brief window the Dadaist Manifesto was read aloud. It held the first Dada actions, performances and hybrid presentations of poetry, plastic art, music and repetitive action. Founders such as Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp staged provocative and scandalous events. Dadaism was an anti-art movement, anti-literary and anti-poetry, which questioned the very existence of art. It stood against eternal beauty and the laws of logic, and it promoted change, spontaneity, contradiction, randomness and the defense of chaos against order. Cabaret Voltaire closed in 1916, but it was revived in the 21st century.

• 4. The Many Roots

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  Futurism appeared in 1909, first as a literary movement, even though most participants were painters. The futurists spread their theories through encounters, meetings and conferences in public spaces, with poetry and music-halls that anticipated performance art. Russia was one of the countries where Futurism had the most impact. In 1913 came the Manifesto of Futurist Lust by Valentine de Saint-Point, a dancer, writer and French artist. The Bauhaus, an art school founded in Weimar in 1919, ran experimental performing arts workshops to explore the relationship between body, space, sound and light. Instructors exiled by the Nazi Party carried that approach to the United States, where the Black Mountain College continued it twenty years before the events of the 1960s. The name Bauhaus comes from the German words Bau, construction, and Haus, house, though ironically the school had no architecture department in its early years. In the 1940s and 1950s, action painting let artists treat the canvas as an area to act in, leaving paintings as traces of the artist's performance in the studio. The art critic Harold Rosenberg called it one of the initiating processes of performance art. Jackson Pollock is the action painter par excellence, who carried out many of his actions live. In Japan, the Gutai movement emerged in 1955 in the Kansai region of Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe. Its participants, including Jiro Yoshihara and Shozo Shimamoto, carried out ironic actions with latent aggressiveness, breaking objects and working with smoke, and they influenced Fluxus, Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell.

• 5. The Body In Danger

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  In Shoot, a 1971 work by Chris Burden, an assistant shot him in the arm with a small-caliber rifle from a five-meter distance. Burden became known in the 1970s for performances in which personal danger was the artistic expression. His first significant work, Five Day Locker Piece, was created in 1971 for his master's thesis at the University of California, Irvine, and involved being locked inside a locker for five days. In Bed Piece, in 1972, he stayed in bed in an art gallery for twenty two days straight. Endurance performance art explores trance, pain, solitude, the deprivation of freedom, isolation and exhaustion. Tehching Hsieh is one of its central figures. In his Time Clock Piece of 1980 to 1981 he photographed himself next to a time clock every hour for an entire year. Hsieh also spent an entire year confined, exploring the deprivation of freedom. Gina Pane, a French artist of Italian origins, studied at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1960 until 1965 and belonged to the French movement called Art Corporel. In The Conditioning, in 1973, she lay on a metal bed spring over an area of lit candles. Much of her work centers on self-inflicted pain, cutting her skin with razors or extinguishing fires with her bare hands and feet, in order to incite a real experience in the visitor. Vito Acconci crossed boundaries of public and private, consensual and nonconsensual. In Following Piece, in 1969, he chose random passersby on New York City streets and followed them for as long as he could.

• 6. Shamans And Sculptures

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  In How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, a 1965 work by Joseph Beuys, the artist covered his face with honey and gold leaf and explained his work to a dead hare lying in his arms. Beuys was a German Fluxus, happening and performance artist who began his actions alongside the Fluxus neodadaist movement in 1962 and became its most important member. He acted as a shaman with healing and saving powers toward a society he considered dead. In 1974 he carried out I Like America and America Likes Me, living for three days with a coyote, paper, felt and thatch, and piling up United States newspapers as a symbol of capitalism. Over time the tolerance between Beuys and the coyote grew, and he ended up hugging the animal. Many of his objects carry an autobiographical meaning, like the honey or the grease used by the Tartars who saved him in the Second World War. Carolee Schneemann described herself as a "painter who has left the canvas to activate the real space and the lived time." She made Meat Joy in 1964 and Interior Scroll in 1975, considering her body a surface for work. Gilbert and George, the Italian artist Gilbert Proesch and the English artist George Passmore, became best known for their live-sculpture acts. In The Singing Sculpture they sang and danced to "Underneath the Arches," a song from the 1930s, dressed in suits and ties and holding their postures without moving. In 1986 they won the Turner Prize.

• 7. Two Bodies As One

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  In Relation in Movement, in 1976, Ulay and Marina Abramovic drove their car inside a museum and did 365 spins, a black liquid dripping out to form a sculpture where each round represented a year. In the mid-1970s the two artists founded the collective The Other in Amsterdam, beginning a decade of collaborative work. They dressed and behaved as one and created a relation of absolute confidence. The main concepts they explored were the ego and artistic identity, along with their cultural heritage and the individual's desire for rituals. In Relation in Space they ran around the room, two bodies like two planets, meshing masculine and feminine energies into a third component they called "that self." In Breathing In/Breathing Out they united their lips, each one breathing the air the other exhaled, until they used up all the oxygen. Exactly 17 minutes after the start, both fell unconscious as their lungs filled with carbon dioxide. The piece explored a person's ability to absorb the life out of another. In 1988, after years of a tense relationship, the two decided on a spiritual journey to end the collective. They walked the Great Wall of China from opposite ends, Ulay starting in the Gobi desert and Abramovic at the Yellow Sea. Each walked 2,500 kilometres, met in the middle, and said goodbye.

• 8. Art On Trial

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  On the 21st of February 2012, women of the collective Pussy Riot entered the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow as part of their protest against the re-election of Vladimir Putin. They made the sign of the cross, bowed before the shrine, and performed a song and dance under the motto "Virgin Mary, put Putin Away." On the 3rd of March Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were arrested and accused of vandalism. On the 16th of March Yekaterina Samutsevitch, previously questioned as a witness, was arrested as well. Formal charges arrived on the 5th of July with a 2,800-page indictment. Amnesty International considers the members prisoners of conscience for "the severity of the response of the Russian authorities." Petr Pavlensky was arrested in November 2015 and October 2017 for radical pieces in which he set fire to the entrance of the Lubyanka Building, headquarters of the Federal Security Service of Russia, and a branch office of the Bank of France. Tania Bruguera, a Cuban artist, was detained in La Habana in December 2014 to prevent new works. During El Susurro de Tatlin #6 she set up microphones in the Plaza de la Revolucion so Cubans could express their feelings about the new political climate. The institutions caught up too. The Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective of Marina Abramovic's work from the 14th to the 31st of March 2010, the biggest exhibition of performance art in its history, where she performed The Artist is Present, a 726-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, sitting immobile while spectators took turns sitting opposite her.