A Brief History of Performance Art.

The history of performance art tends to be written in very Eurocentric terms. Performance art (as we know it) exists throughout the world, changing both the content and even context for the artists. In this brief history of performance art, we will look at the European birth of the form and regional influences. Historic and contemporary forms influencing performance art will be examine the complexity of work from around the world.

1900 – 1920s.

The general timeline of performance art influences tends to start in the 20th century with the Futurists and Dada. While influential, these forms are not the beginning we seek. (ArtNews has a timeline of performance art from the 1700s). These forms went out of their way to shock, rejecting the past and embracing a more ‘modern’ approach. In the case of the Futurists this included embracing speed, youth ,and misogyny and Fascism (oops). Dada rejected the logic and reason of the modern capitalist society, instead embracing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest. At this point in philosophical thought there was a tendency towards logic and reason from Immanuel Kant to Bertrand Russell so this rejection ran both against capitalist and philosophical trends. The shock performative aspects of the Futurists and Dada was revisited in performance art. Urination, deification, and other bodily acts onstage all appeared in performance 50 years before body art became a named art genre. Besides shock value, the benefits of challenging the assumptions of music (music Concrete), poetry (Hugo Balls ‘Karawane’ for example), and theater/ opera opened up new explorations beyond Futurism and DADA.

1920s – 1940s

The Surrealist movement was heavily influenced by Dada. The Surrealists produced visual arts and literature, but also film and music. Less a performance art, Surrealism merged dream and reality into one reality, a super-reality, Surreality. This offered new space (much like DADA and the futurists) for thinking about the arts and performance.

At roughly the same time, Bauhaus, started by Walter Gropius was started in Germany. While the surrealists brought together dreams and reality, Bauhaus sought to bring all the arts together to make Gesamtkunstwerk, or a more comprehensive artwork. The form working in architecture and design, fonts and involved stage performances. The influence of Bauhaus extends, still, through design, architecture, and typography. In the US the influence was compounded after the movement ended by many of the lead artists moving to the US to escape Nazi Germany. John Cage, Anna Halprin, Merce Cunningham and many others were directly influenced in their work by the Bauhaus artists.

Living Art. Living Art spanned roughly from 1933 (with the advent of refugees from WW2 as we saw with Bauhaus) to the 1970s. Black Mountain College in North Carolina started in 1933 with 22 students and 9 faculty. Joseph and Anni Albers (Bauhaus artists) were invited to be on faculty. Joseph Albers’ idea that, “art is concerned with the HOW not the WHAT; not the literal content, but with the performance of factual content. The performance – how it is done – that is the concept of art”, can be seen as a basis of performance or live art as we see it today.

Beginning in the 1940s, Arte Informale / Tachisme incorporated gesture, spontaneous execution, time based work, and audience dependent performance. Originally a French form, it spread around the world. It is similar to Abstract Expressionism but not entirely the same. Abstract expressionism (1940s) tended to be a bit more aggressive, with Arte Informale more drips and dabs, and Abstract Expressionism – well think Jackson Pollack. Action art.

1950s

By the early 1950s, influenced by Bauhaus artists, Black Mountain College professor and composer John Cage along with choreographer Merce Cunningham added notions of chance and indeterminacy to their art work. Cage and Cunningham influenced heavily not only legions of composers, but the post modern dance scene, Fluxus, and the performance art scene. News of what they, Robert Rauschenberg, and others were doing reached New York City where The New School for Social Research was started in 1956. The New School included Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, and slightly peripherally, Jim Dine, Larry Poons and George Segal.

Around the same time in 1954, the Gutai group formed in Japan. The first radical, post-war artistic group in Japan, they staged multimedia events, interactive environments and stressed physically engaging with their materials. They interacted with Kaprow, Arte Informale, Tachisme, and the Dutch Nul collective.

–side note– Japan had significant influence from Europe, specifically Germany in and around World War II. Artists like Mary Wigman taught and influenced artists in Japan (and vice versa). Japanese artists were then connected to and through their European counterparts. —

Live Art. Kaprow started a series of ‘Happenings’ in which the audience was to become part of the happenings. The artwork that interested him most was work that ‘enclosed the observer…that overlapped and interpenetrated different art forms’. These happenings were defined as an event that can only be performed once.

On the West Coast around the mid 1950s, Anna Halprin was staging a series of live art works of her own. Halprin was influenced by Bauhaus before moving to the West Coast. As a pioneer in post modern dance, she influenced a huge percentage of dance artists and artists. By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Anna’s workshops, studio, and dance deck had become multimedia/ cross-pollinating laboratories that drew into collaboration many of the great innovators, psychologists, poets, dancers, musicians and designers of the day. Among them were Lamont Young, Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and Trisha Brown, Kei Takei, John Cage, Terry Riley, and Morton Subotonik; the sculptor Charles Ross; visual artist Bruce Connor; the great beat-generation poet Michael McClure; Alan Kaprow of the Environmental Happenings movement; Merce Cunningham; Butoh dancer, Min Tanaka; and singer, Odetta.

The late 1950s also saw the rise of Butoh in Japan, a response to the horrors of the war, by the choreographers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Ankoku butō” (暗黒舞踏) (“dance of darkness”), was built on a vocabulary of “crude physical gestures and uncouth habits… a direct assault on the refinement (miyabi) and understatement (shibui) so valued in Japanese aesthetics.” [Sanders, Vicki 1988]. The earthbound orientation of the weight and movement styles changed and challenged movement assumptions in dance as well as performance and performance art ( I don’t have a direct causal link here besides Kei Takei who studied Butoh and was part of the NY post modern dance experimentation scene.I am looking for more).

The Zero Group started in 1957 and lasted to about 1966. Formed in Dusseldorf (Germany) by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, this informal group grew and connected to artists and movements around the world including Gutai, Yayoi Kusama, Nouveaux Réalistes, Nul, and others. Zero Group emphasized light, space and movement (materials) over the role of the artist in creating. Uecker wrote, “Immediate experience comes only when we ourselves participate. To obtain widest participation, the production of art must cease to be limited to the individual, as it has been until now.” Collaboration among the German and world wide artists was key. Art merged installation and performance with visual arts as in the case of Yves Klein.

1960s

The Fluxus movement of the 1960s and 1970s was interdisciplinary, experimental and produced “events”. Artists created art (often time based art) without already knowing the end goal. A key component of the events was the interaction between the artists and audience. Process over product. Many of the artists were against commercializing art, some just anti-art. Composers designers, poets… were creating ‘intermedia’ artworks (coined by Dick Higgins), or inter-disciplinary work. The movement had roots in Dada, but apparently never coalesced around George Maciunas’ manifesto. As befits a group of artists who are actively experimenting, the meaning or focus could change. Yoko One, Nam June Paik, John Cage, Joseph Beuys and many more were creating ‘events’ and body artworks that overlapped and informed the performance art world.

Post modern dance. This genre traces through Black Mountain College, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Anna Halprin, Robert Dunn, and Fluxus. There are, of course, many other influences, but most of the original artists worked with some or all of these groups at one point or another. Post modern dance incorporated happenings and minimalism in dance (Yvonne Rainer’s manifesto “No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic…” encompassed thoughts of Halprin, but back to Joseph Alpers from Black Mountain (‘The performance – how it is done – that is the concept of art’). The post modernists changed the trajectory of compositional and choreographic dance especially in the Modern tradition. They also incorporated multimedia (Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer), Different spaces and sites (Trisha Brown, Kei Takei, and many more), and develop new forms (Steve Paxton’s Contact Improvisation). This was period of great experimentation in what constitutes dance.and included collaborations between the Fluxus artists, happenings, experimental music and even the scientists at Bell Labs.

Nouveax Realistes, 1960 through 1966, took reality as their primary medium and argued against the preciousness of art. Artists revived the readymade as seen in Duchamp’s work, wrapped things (Christo), and monocramatic performance of body art (Klein). The artists questioned the idea that art had to elevate, politicize, or idealize any subject and argued that there should be little or no gap between art and life, art and public. Some of the artists dovetail into performance art, also in the way some used violent means to create – including machines, fire and guns. This, along with the inclusion of audience in art is directly part of the performance art scene.

In Peru, Grupo Arte Nuevo, a Peruvian avant-garde movement that lasted from 1966–68, Theresa Burgo, Jaime Dávila, Gloria Gómez-Sánchez, Luis Arias Vera, and others founded Grupo Arte Nuevo, a collective that brought new artistic movements—such as Op, Pop, Minimalism, and happenings—to the Peruvian scene. In 1968, General Juan Velasco Alvarado overthrew the democratically elected President Fernando Belaúnde and the acceptance of avant-garde art changed.

Other groups:

Azimuth – italian zero group
Nul – dutch
Arte Povera – late 60s

1970s

Performance Art! While this is the first use of the term, we can see it has been going on since the beginning of the century. Pioneers in performance art include Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramović, Ana Mendieta, Chris Burden, Hermann Nitsch, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Yves Klein and Vito Acconci. More recently Tania Bruguera, Abel Azcona, Regina José Galindo, Tehching Hsieh, Marta Minujín, and Petr Pavlensky. This list does not include the breadth of performance art around the world – or even in the European diaspora, but that is what this site is for.

Is performance art site specific? Not necessarily. ‘Site Specific’ (the term is credited to Robert Irwin in the 1970s) denotes artwork created only for one space or site. For example, Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc was created for a site in New York City. Complaints were raised about the work and it was removed but never installed in a new location. Serra insisted it was created for that space alone and could not be moved. Many performance art works can be done in alternate spaces and still be the same work of art, therefore we can conclude that Performance Art CAN be site specific, but is not always so.