CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Performance Art
Art made through live actions by the artist or others, before an audience or for the camera, often with the body as its material.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Performance Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Performance art places the work in an action rather than an object. Its roots lie in Futurist evenings and Dada cabaret: at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, Hugo Ball recited sound poetry in a cardboard costume. In 1952 John Cage staged a simultaneous event of dance, painting, music and film at Black Mountain College, and by the late 1950s Allan Kaprow's Happenings and the Gutai group in Japan were treating art as action.
The 1960s and 1970s made the body central. Carolee Schneemann's Meat Joy (1964) turned flesh and meat into group ritual; Yoko Ono's Cut Piece (1964) invited the audience to cut away her clothes. Tehching Hsieh's one-year performances from 1978 made endurance the medium, and in Beijing Zhang Huan sat covered in honey and fish oil in a public latrine for 12 Square Meters (1994). Much of this survives only as photographs, video, scores or props.
Related artists
More in Medium and Techniques
Photogram
Photograph as Material
Photographic Source
Photographs of Surfaces
Photography
Photojournalism
Photomontage
Photorealistic
Picassoesque
Polychrome Sculpture
Poster
Poured
Printed Matter
Prints
Process-Oriented
Projection
Pulled, Scraped, and Scratched
Recycled
Reduced-Scale Architecture
Relief
Rembrandtesque
Repetition
