Performance Art: Blurring the lines between Art and Life
- cherrydodd
- Jun 25
- 5 min read
Multi-dimensional, evocative and in many ways transcendent performance art has become commonplace in our contemporary art world. I'd argue that in many ways it is the most mis-understood of the contemporary art forms. people are quick to decry performance as an art, partly because they are reluctant to view their own actions and experiences as any kind of performance (rather than just intuition) and, even more prevalent, they are reluctant to view any kind of action they could complete as art. The everyday person tends to have a strange re-action if you in any way call them an artist. They become almost offended by the idea - they could not possibly be an artist if they are also a business professional that gives weekly pitches to the board. However, is the pitch giver not the performer and the board the audience. Would you not adjust your manner, tone, actions to appease them ? to evoke certain reaction ?
This blur between real and fake, art and life, natural and unnatural is the intersect in which performance art positions itself. It challenges our experience of time, space and bodily experience confronting us with the brutal reality the everyday life can be everyday art. Now I'm not insinuating that every performance artist does everyday things - if anything they find a way to accentuate the everyday - but their performance is usually inspired by day to day living, the politics of our time and their own lived experience. Early forms of performance emerged within the infamous Black Mountain College (BMC), North Carolina where happenings were born. Happenings (termed by Allan Kaprow) referred events heavily reliant on elements of theatre, surrealism, and dada. Happenings often utilised a constructed environment consisting of installation, 2d works and video/ audio alongside audience participation in 1952 BMC teacher John Cage staged Theatre Piece no.1 this is described as the first happening. For this piece Cage lectured whilst a piano was played by David Tudor and Charles Olson and M.C. Richards performed poetry. Alongside Merce Cunningham danced (with a dog !) to the backdrop of Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings, projected slides and films and the sound of a phonograph. The end of the performance was marked by the serving of coffee to the audience.
Now I don't know about you but to me Theatre Piece no.1 all sounds quite overwhelming, and I can't say that if I'd seen it, I would enjoy it. I'm used to structured, narrative performance, things with linear action and clear narrative. However, we must pay Cage and his associates their dues as without them Yoko Ono would have never allowed her clothing to be cut from her in Cut Piece (1964), Richard Long would have never made A Line Made by Walking (1967), Carolee Schneemann would never have never un-rolled a scroll from her vagina and lamented her conversations with structuralist Anthony McCall in Interior Scroll (1975). It is these Happenings that we have to thank for providing a groundwork that displayed bodily action's potential as an artistic medium.
One of the most famed performance artists is Serbian artist Marina Abramović. Abramović is most known for her Rhythm series of performances staged between 1973-74. In this series she places some kind of immediate danger or harm in proximity to her body to test bodily and mental limitations. For Abramović the body is her material and the way she carries, damages, or controls it is the action producing art. This is most notably captured in Rhythm 0, 1974. The last and most famed performance of the Rhythm series, this iteration took place in Galleria Studio Mora, Naples and saw her challenge the line between audience and performer by inviting the audience to use her body as an object for six hours . In a similar vein to Ono's Cut Piece for those six hours Abramović absolved the audience of any responsibility placing the responsibility for their actions upon herself. Next to Abramović a table of seventy-two items was presented including perfume, sugar, grapes, nails, a gun, and a singular bullet. The audience could do as they pleased with these objects to Abramović. In the first half of the performance Abramović had her clothes torn off of her, her skin marked with lipstick, and she was given objects to hold. In the second half the audience became increasingly aggressive with one member cutting Abramović's neck with a razor blade, another placing a thorned rose into her skin and finally somebody loading the singular bullet into the gun and pointing it directly at her chest. At this point, the performance was stopped out of concern for Abramović's life.
What Rhythm 0 highlights is the way in which performance art provides a platform for human interaction, behaviour, and experience to be manipulated, studied, and revealed. A story can be told, re-constructed and made all within the same time and space. Performance, however, does not have to be confided to the time and space in which it is carried out. Performances are ninety-nine percent of the time documented in some form. Whether this is photographs, video, discarded materials from the performance a trace of its existence always remains. This is often how these historic performances survive the test of time as museums and galleries acquire these various photographic, film and object displays to re-stage the original work. This poses an interesting dilemma for performance artists of the contemporary age. Do they want to exist only in the performance moment, or do they want to transcend the limits of time and space by extending in a multi-form dialogue ? Kyle Chyka poses some insight into this in his article.
WTF is... Performance Art ? which proposes that sometimes not even an audience is necessary for performance it just simply must happen - an interesting all-be-it controversial thought.
I will not pretend I have the answers to these questions because in many ways I believe them un-answerable. I will also not pretend that having presented you with what performance art was that I can now tell you objectively what performance art is in the contemporary era. So, in absence of objectivity, I will conclude with my subjective view. Contemporary performance is everything and nothing all at once. It disseminates through every corner of our contemporary experience so much so that (at extreme, please do not be insulted or insult me my performance friends) both the beautiful staging of myth and the buttering of bread could hold equal stance. For me that is where the fun and beauty of performance lies. I like the to play a fun game in my head when I'm walking through towns and cities sometimes. The aim to spot the potential performance artist. Is it the busker singing outside Boots ? Is it the gaggle of teens in the shopping centre ? Is it the security guards by Sainsbury's ? The unhoused person on the bank's step ? Some might say this game of mine is ignorant. That it ignores blatant issues in our town centres by reducing them to something as trivial as art. To that I would like to get on my soap box and say is our societal makeup not a theatre of our own making ? that art and life are one and the same and that the refusal of that is ignorance of itself. are we not all destined to perform ? Alas, I myself would then be the town-centre performance artist and just as discredited as the rest.
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