Performance Art, Political

The term performance art is applied to various practices of live performance, conceptual art, and street theater since the early 20th century in Western Europe and the United States and has since proliferated around the world. The practice of performance art typically emphasizes the conceptual and ideological aspects of an artist's work, rather than focusing on form, techniques, or audience expectations. Performance artists have historically worked to surpass established artistic and performance norms by either inventing their own or by intentionally disrupting established aesthetic practices. The artist's live body is generally present in performance art and often serves as both stage and subject of the performance art event.

Performance art is often presented in unconventional spaces such as private apartments and lofts, abandoned buildings, national borders, the tops of national monuments, rubbish piles, and beaches, to name just a few. While performance art can involve hundreds of people and elaborate props and costumes, much performance art is performed by solo artists with little or no support on shoestring budgets. The [Page 1106]ability to produce oneself has been central to the practice, development, and proliferation of performance art since its beginnings in the early 20th century. Performance art contributes to political expression through the negotiation and deconstruction of genre boundaries and the practice of subversive and sometimes confrontational aesthetic styles. The desire to push the norm of performance and art has led to confrontations between performance artists, the police, and governments.

The term performance was applied to the practices of conceptual artists in the 1970s; live performance, however, has been at the center of 20th-century innovations in art, politics, and theater. Some performance scholars suggest roots of performance art can be seen in the Futurist and Dada art movement at the opening of the 20th century. Futurists wrote manifestos that laid out an artistic practice designed to disrupt the complacent, elitist institutions of bourgeois theater and art. At the 1896 opening of the play Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry's central character takes stage and opens with the line “Merdre,” which prompted a near riot in the audience. Tommaso Marinetti, a contemporary of the Dadaist crafted a futurist manifesto that sought to refute changes to intellectual life, the world of art, and literature by advocating a sort of neonationalism that pitted Italy against industrialized Europe, particularly Austria. Dadaists in Zurich and Berlin connected a refutation of expressionist art with the struggles of a proletariat.

The early practices of Dadaists, many of whom set out to denounce the determinisms and taboos of industrialized Europe, exemplify the notoriety that performance art has often inspired.

In the 1920 through the 1950s, performance remained part of various artistic movements, including the socialist-inspired Bauhaus movement, extending to the innovative dance and musical collaborations of Merce Cunningham and John Cage. The emphasis in this time period was on experimentation with cross-genre collaborations and included investigations into the nature of creative expression and the relationship of expression to culturally authenticated frames of reference. Allan Kaprow, Wolf Vostell, and Robert Rauschenberg created artistic “happenings” in which participants in the hundreds became living, interacting parts of live performance events. Extending the ideal of art to the everyday continued the goal of destabilizing the notion of commodifiable, stable “art” categories.

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