ART APPRECIATION

Document: Module 4/ Week 5

Level: College BS3-1
Teacher: Mr. Michael AS. Enaje

Module 4 Contents/ Lessons

1. Performance Art

PERFORMANCE ART

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.

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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
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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 1960s and 1970s 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.

Activities:

PART 1: How visual art differ from performance art?

PART 2: Is abstract considered as a performance art? Do you agree? Why?
PART 3: Learning Bank: (Summary of learning) Please write down about what you have learned
in these topics/ lessons.

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