Art : Introduction to Performance Art

Marina Abramovič, “Balkan Baroque”, 1997 Biennale di Venezia

Performance art is a genre of art where the body is used as a medium between the artist and audience instead of the Canvas and paint. It came as a reaction to Abstract Art, as well as the cruelty of the politics in the 20th century. Performance artists tend to provoke the minds of their audience, to positively engage them in the making of art to produce a shared experience, they want to create a collective therapy kind of the thing, but their art is no way therapeutic in first sight, it usually takes the audience to the extremes of physical and mental pain, it makes the audience question social norms in a jarring and provocative way. Performance art has been extremely attacked, the pretty consistent argument used against it functionality and form, that it lacks meaning, and it is not art since it doesn’t include traditional art material. Performance art goes hand in hand with the evolution of all cultures,  it was the art of the common people, lower class dedicated, people used it to express solidarity, union, and their mundane life, the form it took differed from story telling, Agora circles, dances, and folksongs, as well as signs tattooed in their bodies.

Performance art came to challenge the conventional forms of art. In a world of cruelty, concentration camps, and ideology driven wars I believe that painting can not fulfill the needs of the modern individual, paintings could not ignite a satisfactory reaction in the minds of the audience, it is so passive, but performance art’s main purpose if it had a define purpose would be to test the audience’s mental strength, because while you’re in a conventional art gallery art is separate both from the audience as a whole, and the artists themselves, it is very formalist, while in the performance you are witnessing the creation of something out of nothing, the audience collectively with the artist conquer the limits of reality, of physical endurance as well as the audience conquer hidden parts of their psyche, they reclaim control over their bodies.

One of the challenges of the modern world is being in the present moment, always wanting to be somewhere else, doing something else, talking to someone else people find themselves doing none of this, they feel disconnected from everyone the easier it gets to reach out others. If you check on goodreads more and more people are struggling with productivity and concentration, and that only shows the extent of how we no longer trust our bodies and our minds and we became depend on digital tools outside of our bodies to do this for us, the performance artist wants to transport you to a mental level, and a spiritual level that can only be reached when you are disconnected from everything, when you start looking inward first, when you test your mind and body, when you trust yourself and your surroundings. Being present is the focus of several performance artists, it makes you focus on things you esteem as trivial and see their beauty, it puts you face to face with things you normally don’t want to see.  The audience usually has no idea about what they will witness when going to a performance art show, so when they are physically there you experience a new unexpected thing that has the capacity to transform, for instance Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is present”, where the audience was invited to have a one to one experience with the artist through the eyes, this seems banal, but in a modern world it is the one thing we lacked, this connected, they say the eyes are the mirror to the soul, and in this performance the audience wept, cried, and sobbed while sharing a certain unique connection with Marina, not as an Artist, but as a human being.

For instance, Shoot by Chris Burden. One of the most violent performance art shows, in a small audience Chris Burden was shot in the arm with a 22 long rifle, the audience was taken by surprise and shock; this shows the extremes artists took to evoke emotion in the audience. The shot was later on interpreted by the people who witnessed it as a representation of war, the consequence of brutal colonial politics, specially that it was performed in the context of Vietnam war, and some saw it as a representation of the artist as a martyr in the sake of freedom.

Poetry of the era was also influenced by the rise of Performance art, for example Beat Generation poetry and the playfulness of it, the link between the poet and the audience, and it was mostly performed in wide audiences in public spaces, for the common people, it was followed by debates, or conversations, and the audience felt the impact of the poem. We can also compare performance art with Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) where the audience was invited to include their experience and individuality in the making of the play.

My favorite performance art is Rhythm 0, by Marina Abramovic, where she put 72 objects in a table, ranging from the most peaceful to the most terminal of things, from a flower, a cup of water, to a gun, a knife, and the audience was allowed to do whatever they wanted with the object, which was the artist’s own body. Marina wanted to test the extent human can reach in terms of violence and cruelty if they had the chance to express them, and the result was horrific, she was all bruises after standing six hours, she was exposed and vulnerable.