What Is Performance Art? The Work Is the Artist Doing Something

The form is defined less by what happens than by a set of conditions, and it overlaps with theatre while differing from it in specific ways:

• •The artist is present and usually performs their own work rather than being represented by an actor
• •There is no fictional character, so the person doing the thing is the person, not a role
• •Duration is often extreme, from minutes to months, and is frequently part of the point rather than a container for it
• •The audience is not reliably separated from the work, and may be required to participate, obstruct or decide what happens
• •Risk, discomfort and endurance appear far more often than in theatre, since the body is the material and its limits are the subject
• •The work is usually unrepeatable, so what remains is documentation, which is a different thing from the work itself

The lineage runs through the early twentieth-century avant-gardes. Futurist evenings from 1910 deliberately provoked riots, and Dada performances at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich from 1916 used nonsense poetry and noise to attack the culture that had produced the war. The postwar development came through several channels at once: John Cage's teaching at Black Mountain College, which treated any organised duration as a composition and produced the first happenings; Allan Kaprow, who coined that term around 1959 for loosely scored events involving the audience; the Gutai group in Japan from 1954, whose members painted with their feet and tore through paper screens; Fluxus, an international network from the early 1960s producing event scores that were often a single instruction on a card; and the Viennese Actionists, whose work with blood, bodies and animal carcasses was prosecuted repeatedly. The common thread is dissatisfaction with the art object as a commodity, and an attempt to make work that could be experienced and not bought.

A handful of pieces have become reference points. Yoko Ono's Cut Piece, first performed in 1964, had her sit still while the audience was invited to cut away her clothing with scissors, and it reads differently every time it is described because everything depends on what the audience does. Marina Abramovic's Rhythm 0 in 1974 placed seventy-two objects on a table, including a rose, honey, a scalpel and a loaded gun, with a note saying she would take full responsibility for six hours and that the audience could use any of them on her; the piece ended with her clothes cut off, her skin cut, and someone putting the gun in her hand and against her neck before others intervened. Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm in 1971. Tehching Hsieh spent a year in a cage, a year punching a time clock every hour, and a year tied to another artist by a rope without touching. Joseph Beuys spent three days in a room with a coyote. Abramovic's museum piece of 2010, The Artist Is Present, brought the form to an audience of hundreds of thousands and made it, briefly, mainstream.

A work that exists only while it happens creates difficulties that the art world has resolved awkwardly. Almost everything now known about the classic pieces is known through photographs, film and written accounts, and those materials are themselves bought, sold and exhibited, which means the market found a way to commodify a form invented to escape it. Photographs are not neutral: an image chosen from a six-hour performance frames it, and several famous pieces are known through a single striking picture that may not represent what the experience was like. Re-performance raises the same question from the other direction, since Abramovic's 2005 series re-performing seven historic works by other artists, with permission, forced a debate about whether a performance is a score that others can execute, like a piece of music, or a unique event that cannot be repeated. Museums now collect performance works by acquiring the instructions and the right to stage them, which treats the form as a script and is the practical answer the institutions have settled on.

The form has outlasted several predictions of its exhaustion, and it keeps being used for the same reasons. It is unusually direct about the body, which makes it the natural medium for work about gender, race, illness, labour and violence, and a great deal of feminist art from the 1970s onward used it precisely because the body was the subject under dispute. It cannot be owned in the ordinary way, which keeps a persistent critical edge even as institutions absorb it. It creates a genuine social situation rather than depicting one, which is why it has fed into participatory and socially engaged practice, where the material is a relationship or an event rather than an object. And it transfers easily into other media, so that the conventions of durational endurance, audience participation and the artist's presence now appear in film, installation, dance and online work, often without the label.

Performance art makes the artist's body and actions the material, with no fictional character, frequently extreme duration, an audience that may participate, and a work that usually cannot be repeated. It grew from Futurist and Dada provocation through Cage, happenings, Gutai, Fluxus and the Viennese Actionists, as a reaction against art as a purchasable object. Because the work vanishes, it survives as documentation that the market then sells, and museums now collect performances as instructions and the right to re-stage them.