Andy Warhol during the early 1960s beginning to create films and video, in the mid-60s sponsored the Velvet Underground and staged events and performances in New York, like the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966) that featured live Rock music, exploding lights, and film.
Indirectly influential for art-world performance, particularly in the United States, were new forms of theatre, embodied by the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Living Theatre and showcased in Off-Off Broadway theaters in SoHO and at La MaMa in New York City. The Living Theatre chiefly toured in Europe between 1963 and 1968, and in the U.S. in 1968. A work of this period, Paradise Now was notorious for its audience participation and a scene in which actors recited a list of social taboos that included nudity, while disrobing.
The work of performance artists after 1968 often showed influences of the cultural and political events of that year. Barbara T. Smith with Ritual Meal (1969) was at the forefront of the feminist body-, and performance art of the 1970s; among others including: Carolee Schneemann, and Joan Jonas. Schneemann and Jonas along with Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Allan Kaprow, Vito Acconci, and Chris Burden pioneered the relationship between Body art and performance art.
1970s
Chris Burden during the performance of his 1974 piece
Trans-fixed where he was nailed to the back of a
Volkswagen
Artists whose work already before tended to be a performance art, as well as new artists, at the beginning of the 1970s began to present performance art in a stricter form.
New artists with radical performances were Chris Burden, with the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters, and Vito Acconci in the same year with Seedbed.
The book Expanded Cinema, by Gene Youngblood, marked a shift in the use of media by performance artists. The first book considering video art as an art form, mentions Jud Yalkut as a pioneering video artist. Since 1965 he had collaborated in dozens of intermedia performances throughout the United States, also with Nam June Paik, who beginning of the 1960s already had been a fluxus performer on the way to become a media artist. As to the art of Paik, Youngblood refers to works of Carolee Schneemann and Robert Whitman from the 1960s, which had been pioneering for performance art, becoming an independent artform at the beginning of the 1970s.[7]
The British-based pair Joan Jonas began to include video in her experimental performances in 1972.
In 1973 Laurie Anderson performed Duets on Ice, on the streets of New York City. Marina Abramović, in the performance "Rhythm 10", conceptually included the violation of her body.[8] Thirty years later, the theme of violation, shame, and sexual exploitation would be re-imagined in the contemporary performance works of artists such as Clifford Owens,[9] Gillian Walsh, Pat Oleszko and Rebecca Patek, among others.[10]
Since 1973 the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles had a formative impact on the wave of performances with feminist background.
Carolee Schneemann work in 1963, Eye Body, already had been a prototype of performance art. Schneemann in 1975 drew on with innovative solo performances, like Interior Scroll, showing the female body as an artistic medium.
In the mid seventies, behind the iron curtain, in the Eastern European capitals: Budapest, Kraków, Belgrade, Zagreb, Novi Sad and other cities, the performing art was flourishing. Against the political and social control, emerged Orshi Drozdik performance series, titled "Individual Mythology" 1975/77 and the "NudeModel" 1976/77. Critical of the patriarchal discourse of art and the equally patriarchal state forced "emancipation program", pioneering feminist point of view on both, made her forerunner in the 70s political and artistic environment.
In 1976, HA Schult filled St. Mark's Square in Venice with old newspapers in an overnight action he called Venezia vive.[11][12] In his 1977 performance, "Crash", the same artist let a Cessna crash into the garbage dump on Staten Island, New York.[13]
Performance art, because of its relative transience, by the 1970s, had a fairly robust presence in the avant-garde of Eastern Bloc countries, especially Poland and Yugoslavia.
1980s
Until the 1980s, performance art had been demystifying virtuosity. Now it began to embrace technical brilliance.[14] In reference to Presence and Resistance[15] by Philip Auslander, dance critic Sally Banes writes "… by the end of the 1980s, performance art had become so widely known that it no longer needed to be defined; mass culture, especially television, had come to supply both structure and subject matter for much performance art; and several performance artists, including Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Willem Dafoe, and Ann Magnuson, had indeed become crossover artists in mainstream entertainment."[16]
Despite the fact that many performances are held within the circle of a small art-world group, RoseLee Goldberg notes in Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present that "performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. Conversely, public interest in the medium, especially in the 1980s, stems from an apparent desire of that public to gain access to the art world, to be a spectator of its ritual and its distinct community, and to be surprised by the unexpected, always unorthodox presentations that the artists devise."[17]
Among the performance art most discussed in the art-world of this decade were a performance by Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh between July 1983 and July 1984, Art/Life: One Year Performance (Rope Piece), and Karen Finley’s I'm an Ass Man 1987.
Until the decline of the European eastern block during the late 1980s, performance art had actively been rejected by most communist governments. With the exception of Poland and Yugoslavia, performance art was more or less banned in countries where any independent public event was feared. In the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Latvia it happened in apartments, at seemingly spontaneous gatherings in artist studios, in church-controlled settings, or covered as another activity, like a photo-shooting. Isolated of the western conceptual context, in different settings it could be like a playful protest or like a bitter comment, using subversive metaphors to express dissent with the political situation.[18]
Prior to 1982, Hedwig Gorski designated the term performance poetry, to distinguish her text-based vocal performances from performance art, especially the work of performance artists, such as Laurie Anderson, who worked with music at that time. Performance poets relied more on the rhetorical and philosophical expression in their poetics than performance artists, who arose from the visual art genres of painting and sculpture.
From 1981 to 1994, the Dutch visual artist PINK de Thierry created what she came to call meta-performances: a conceptual mix of intervention art in public space, performance art — interacting with an audience, installation art — utilizing large structures to perform in or with, and media art — photography and film to register and exhibit.
1990s
While the Soviet bloc disintegrated, formerly repressed activities of performance artists like György Galántai in Hungary, or the Collective Action Group in Russia, became better known. Young artists from all over the former Eastern bloc, including Russia, turned to performance. Performance art at about the same time appeared in Cuba, the Caribbean and China. Chinese performance artists like Zhang Huan had been performing underground since the late 1980s. In the early 1990s Chinese performance art already was acclaimed in the international art scene.[19]
"In these contexts performance art became a critical new voice with a social force similar to that found in Western Europe, the United States and South America in the 1960s and early 1970s. It should be emphasized that the eruption of performance art in the 1990s in Eastern Europe, China, South Africa, Cuba, and elsewhere should never be considered either secondary to or imitative of the West."[20]
Since 1996, HA Schult has installed one thousand life sized "Trash People" made from garbage as "silent witnesses to a consumer age that has created an ecological imbalance worldwide". They travelled to Moscow's Red Square (1999), the Pyramids of Giza (2002) and the Great Wall of China (2001).[21][22][23]
In the western world in the 1990s, even sophisticated performance art became part of the cultural mainstream: performance art as a complete artform gained admittance into art museums and became a museal topic.[24]
2000s
In the second half of the decade, computer-aided forms of performance art began to take place.[25]
Since January 2003 Tate Modern in London has had a curated programme of live art and performance and in 2012 The Tanks at Tate Modern were opened: the first dedicated spaces for performance, film and installation in a major modern and contemporary art museum.
From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Marina Abramović's work, the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA's history.[26] During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed "The Artist is Present," a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium, while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her.[27] A support group for the "sitters," "Sitting with Marina," was established on Facebook.[28] The performance attracted celebrities such as Björk and James Franco and received coverage on the internet.[29]
During Marina's performance other artists performed for her. For example,[30] Amir Baradaran replicated her manner of dress. He approached Abramović and proposed marriage to her body and to her body of work: “I love you, Marina,” he said.
Gallery
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Performance artist Joseph Beuys in 1978: Jeder Mensch ein Künstler — Auf dem Weg zur Freiheitsgestalt des sozialen Organismus - Every person an artist — On the way to the libertarian form of the social organism
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Minujín: Reading the news (1965)
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Minujín: Reading the news (1965)
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Minujín: Reading the news (1965)
See also
References
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^
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^
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^
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^ [2]
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^ Wolf Vostell Happening YOU 1964 in New York
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^ Montfort, Nick, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. The New Media Reader. Cambridge, Mass. [u.a.: MIT, 2003. Print.
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^
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^
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^
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^
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^ Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas, The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology (Boston, MA: E.P. Dutton, 1984), pp. 330-31.
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^ James Wines, De-Architecture (New York: Rizzoli International, 1987), p. 184.
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^ Edward Lucie-Smith, Art in the Seventies (Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 88.
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^
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^
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^
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^ Performance Art from Futurism to the Present by RoseLee Goldberg accessed online August 31, 2007
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^
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^
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^
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^ The Great Wall: A Cultural HistoryCarlos Rojas, (Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 163-64.
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^ Ina-Maria Greverus and Ute Ritschel, eds., Aesthetics and Anthropology: Performing Life, Performed Lives (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2009), p. 110.
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^ Kim Levin, ARTnews, volume=6, 2011, pp. 92-93.
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^
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^ Anderson, Nate (2009), Horrifically bad software demo becomes performance art"
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^ Kino, Carol (March 10, 2010). "A Rebel Form Gains Favor. Fights Ensue.", The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-04-16.
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^
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^ https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=122578407758954"
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^ thoughtcatalog.com/2010/marina-abramovic
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^
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^
Bibliography
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Carlson, Marvin (1996) Performance: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-13702-0, ISBN 0-415-13703-9
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Carr, C. (1993) On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-5267-4, ISBN 0-8195-6269-6
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Thomas Dreher: Performance Art nach 1945. Aktionstheater und Intermedia. München: Wilhelm Fink 2001. ISBN 3-7705-3452-2 (in German)
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Erika Fischer-Lichte: Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt: edition suhrkamp 2004. ISBN 3-518-12373-4 (in German)
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Goldberg, Roselee (1998) Performance: Live Art Since 1960. Harry N. Abrams, NY NY. ISBN 978-0-8109-4360-5
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Goldberg, Roselee (2001) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (World of Art). Thames & Hudson
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Gómez-Peña, Guillermo (2005) Ethno-techno: Writings on performance, activism and pedagogy. Routledge, London. ISBN 0-415-36248-2
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Jones, Amelia and Heathfield, Adrian (eds.) (2012), Perform, Repeat, Record. Live Art in History. Intellect, Bristol. ISBN 978-1-84150-489-6
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Rockwell, John (2004) Preserve Performance Art? New York Times, April 30.
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Schimmel, Paul (ed.) (1998) Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979. Thames and Hudson, Los Angeles. Library of the Congress NX456.5.P38 S35 1998
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Smith, Roberta (2005) Performance Art Gets Its Biennial. New York Times, November 2.
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ArtSpeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, 1945 to the Present, by Robert Atkins, Abbeville Press, ISBN 978-0789211514 (basic definition and basic overview provided)
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Art in the Modern Era: A Guide to Styles, Schools, & Movements, by Amy Dempsey, Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, ISBN 978-0810941724 (basic definition and basic overview provided)
External links
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Live Art Archives at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection
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Thomas Dreher: Intermedia Art: Performance Art (most articles in German)