The most frequently asked question about Performance Art has got to be What is it? And that, admittedly, is a tough question to answer. Generally, Performance Art is a category that many artists find themselves in if they are unhappy with the idea of working in only one traditional medium. Performance Artists are often interested in exploring several artistic disciplines and producing work that may cross traditional media boundaries such as works that include aspects of theater, music and the visual arts including video. Many performance artists are also interested in crossing the perceived boundary between art and life such as thinking of everyday activities in an artistic manner.
The history of Performance Art is just as hard to pin down as the definition. If you are interested in its history, a good book to start with would be Roselee Goldberg's Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. It provides a good overview of the relationship between Performance and European Art in the 20 Century. However, it is a bit limited if you are interested in interdisciplinary work that was made earlier in history or work that was made in non-western cultures.
Women have always played an important role in Performance Art. Many women turned to this new form because they felt that more traditional media such as painting and sculpture had long been dominated by male artists and wanted to explore fresh territory. There are, of course, many important male Performance Artists such as John Cage (http://newalbion.com/artists/cagej/) and Allan Kaprow. Both Cage and Kaprow were innovative artists and influential teachers and many of the women listed below studied with them. But women have proven to be true pioneers in Performance Art, making work that is brave, innovative, risky and just plain good!
Probably the most well-known Performance Artist is Laurie Anderson. She emerged during the 70s and her work explores the relationships between people and technology. Her works usually involve spoken text, music, projected slides and videos. She is known for using an array of synthesizers to create sonic soundscape and a vocoder to alter the sound of her voice as she tells stories about life in the late 20th Century where lap top computers and ghosts exist side by side. Anderson is a real tinkerer. She has created a neck tie that can play music, a talking violin and a pair of sunglasses equipped with a microphone that can turn her head into a percussion orchestra! She has produced a number of CDs of music from her performances and also has a couple of videos and an interactive CD-ROM called Puppet Motel all dealing with the idea of how machines and people live and work together and how the spiritual can interact with the mechanical.
Another artist who is known for creating interdisciplinary theater pieces is Meredith Monk (http://www.lovely.com/bios/monk.html and http://www.otherminds.org/Monk.html). Monk is a composer who deals with innovative vocal techniques. She also makes videos and is a choreographer and dancer. Her work is very poetic and abstract in nature. She often creates pieces that freely mix elements and images that donUt seem to logically relate to one another. Yet it is the combination of these seemingly unrelated elements that creates unique content. A recent piece, Volcano Songs, deals with memories of childhood and the experience of growing older. A video piece, Book of Days, is about a young girl in Middle Ages who has visions of the future and sees people flying in planes and using cameras. Another video, Ellis Island, is about the experience of immigrants entering America in the 19th Century.
Another artist who who focuses on extended vocal techniques is Diamanda Galas (http://www.brainwashed.com/diamanda/). Galas was so angered when her brother died of AIDS, that she has decided to use her art as a political forum to explore ideas related to the disease and how it is perceived in our culture. Her works are filled with visceral emotion and can sometimes be incredibly frightening. She has an unbelievable vocal range that can produce animal like growls and blood curdling screams and shrieks.
Political statement is also an aspect of the work of Rachel Rosenthal (http://www.rachelrosenthal.org/). Rosenthal's work explores environmental issues and animal rights. She recently turned 72 years old and often compares the overpopulated and overworked planet to her own aging body. She has called herself a "warrior" and to further solidify the identity, she shaves her head and has been known to wear fatigues. A strict vegan, she has had significant relationships with many animals and this had led her to believe that we humans are making a big mistake when we think of ourselves as being at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Her belief is that we are one species among many and that we should work to recreate our lost connection to the planet and other species around us. Recently she has formed a company and works collaboratively to create beautifully improvised performances.
Another Performance Artist who is concerned with collaboration is Yoko Ono (http://www.cam.org/~rjoly/yoko/onoweb.html AND http://math.furman.edu/~dsmead/yoko.html AND http://www.yoko.com/) . While most people know her as the wife of Beatle John Lennon, she was an artist before they met. In fact, they met at a show of her paintings. Ono was associated with a movement in the sixties called Fluxus. This was one of the first truly international art movements with participants all over the globe. While the work produced by Fluxus artists varied greatly in form, the common idea was that life itself could be experienced as Art. The key was to pay attention to the minuscule aspects of living.
Ono made pieces that had to be completed by the viewer. In a sense, all of her work is collaborative. One example is called Mend a Cup. It consists of a table and several broken tea cups. The instructions to the viewer are to glue a cup back together and think of a problem in life that also needs mending. Many of her works are written instructions that anyone may perform and there really is no right or wrong interpretation. The variation personalizes Ono's work for each viewer and the key is that you pay strict attention to an object or activity that you might normally ignore.
Another Fluxus artist is Alison Knowles. Her most famous piece is called Identical Lunch and it consists of a specific menu that the viewer is to eat. It is a tuna sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo and a large glass of buttermilk or cup of soup. The piece itself is rarely realized exactly as written but again, it is the variation that makes the piece a unique experience for each person. For a while, Knowles collected the accounts from people who performed the piece that included variations on the menu (some people didn't eat meat, some forgot the soup) as well as details of the situation in which they ate.
Another artist that explores that relationship between art and life is Linda Montano (http://www.io.com/~bazooka/). She is interested in the ways that rituals can alter one's perception of life. She has done many works in which she performs intricate life altering ceremonies sometimes for many years. Her most widely known piece is one in which she spent an entire year tied to another artist, Teching Hsieh. They were joined by a 7 foot length of rope and did not touch one another for the entire year. This piece can be read on many levels. For the artists, it had different meanings. Montano thought it was about negotiation whereas Hsieh thought it was about endurance. It can also be read as a metaphor for the human condition; we are all tied together, the rope is simply harder to see. Montano's work is also focused on the idea of counseling and healing. She has chosen this aspect of her work to develop on the internet.
Another artist who focuses on the Art/Life issue is Eleanor Antin (http://visarts.ucsd.edu/faculty/eantin.htm). She works with the question of what elements form an individual personality. She does this by assuming different identities and then "living" the life of another person. Her personas include The Nurse, The King and Eleanora Antinova, an aging ballerina who worked with Diaghalev in 1920s Paris. All these people are fictitious but they come complete with memories, histories and some even make art of their own. The ballerina, Antinova, does scene designs and ink drawings of her old friends like Picasso. In the early 80s, Antin borrowed a New York apartment and lived for almost a month as the elegant and again dancer.
These few examples demonstrate what a varied thing Performance Art can be. Now you know why it is so hard to define! For most of us, that is really part of the appeal: Performance Art is always growning and changing and being re-invented by artists. There really are no limits!
Here are some other sites on the web devoted to performance:
http://www.sirius.com/~jenny/PAF/Performanceartfront.html
http://riceinfo.rice.edu/projects/CyberVato/
http://www.booksatoz.com/artatoz/perf.htm
http://www.asu.edu/cfa/art/events/deepcreek/performanceURLs.html
Here are some books if you want more information on the artists discussed above:
Anderson, Laurie. Stories From the Nerve Bible. HaperPerrenial.
Anderson, Simon et. al. In the Spirit of Fluxus. Walker Arts Center.
Antin, Eleanor. Eleanora Antinova Plays. Sun and Moon Press.
Carr, C. On Edge.
Galas, Diamanda. The Shit of God. High Risk Books.
Golberg, Roselee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. Abrams.
Huxley, Michael and Witts, Noel. The Twentieth Century Performance Reader. Routledge Press.
Kaprow, Allan. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life.
McAdams, Dona Ann. Caught in the Act. Aperture
Montano, Linda. Art in Everyday Life. AstroArtz.
Ono, Yoko. Arias and Objects. Gibbs-Smith Publishers.
Roth, Moira, ed. Rachel Rosenthal. Johns Hopkins Press.
Sayre, Henry M. The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970, University of Chicago Press
Questions? Contact me:
Jeff Byrd,
Jeffery.Byrd@uni.edu
University of Northen Iowa
April 4, 1998