What is Performance Art, Anyway?-----

Performance art is a broad term used to describe a variety of multisensory, multimedia events created by contemporary artists. The "performance" aspect of performance art takes many forms and incorporates a variety of media and genres: text (script, poetry), sound (music, noise, silence, recitation, recorded speech), movement (dance, gesture, ritual), technology (lighting effects, video, digital media).

Performance art is the opposite of the "well-made play"-a dramatic formula codified in the early nineteenth-century and still used to structure conventional theater pieces, films and television shows. The well-made play is based on a closed, logically unfolding formula: a withheld secret, a battle of wits, a reversal of fortune that makes it seem for a time that the hero will lose, a revelation that turns the tide in the hero's favor, a happy ending. The "audience" observes the unfolding events via an absent "fourth wall" (covered by a curtain until the play begins). The actors play "characters" and mine their own history and emotions to interpret the words of the script and to give these "characters" reality.

Unlike the well-made play, performance art is more interested in opening a subject than in closing it. There is little assumption that a conflict, if raised, can or even should be resolved The actor is no longer playing a character but enacting an action, not interpreting a script but exploring what happens to her/him and to observers when the action occurs. The distinction between audience and participant shrinks; often the performance-space encompasses and even wholly subsumes the observation-space.

One important distinction between theatrical performance and performance art is its venue or site. Since no theater with an artificial fourth wall is needed, performance can happen anywhere. It can be site-specific (designed for presentation in and interaction with a specific place) or site-independent (to be performed wherever and whenever).The site can be indoors or outdoors, an "art" space (theater, gallery) or a site in the community (shopping mall, department store window, street corner, public park). In some cases the "site" may be a recording medium: paper, film, video or audiotape, or even the Internet.

Another central aspect of performance art is its use of the body as material for performance. If the performer is no longer portraying a character, then the performer's body is more than just a machine to be activated by memory to be able to project an interpretation of some fictional "someone else."

The body's particulars-its maleness or femaleness (or, in the case of someone like Kate Bornstein, its gender ambiguities and resistances), its size and shape, its clothing or nakedness, its whiteness or brownness or blackness, its exoticism or familiarity-is no longer something to be subsumed into a character but something that becomes (often problematically) visible.

Sometimes even the body of the observer is the material for the performance: in a "musical" performance piece created by John Cage, for example, the on-stage "performer" merely opened and closed a piano's keyboard cover several times, while the confused murmurings and shufflings of the "audience" became key elements of the "performance."

According to art historian RoseLee Goldberg, performance art had in roots in the Futurist, Constructivist and Dada art movements in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and shares these movements' iconoclastic approach. In the 1960s and 1970s, artists rediscovered Dada and began to experiment with various forms of improvisational street performance and with performance-based "environments" and "happenings." Such art was, in part, a confrontation with the art world and with institutional art-a challenge to the traditional, established art forms accessible only to people who went to galleries and part of a well-organized art market in which artworks were given value by their price tags.

In addition, performance art took on issues beyond those traditionally associated with art: issues of power and privilege, of social and sexual taboos. Feminists used performance art to challenge women's roles in society; antiwar activists used street theater to confront Americans with the contradictions of war; African Americans invented and re-invented performance genres to take voice and to resist invisibility.

Despite its tendency toward social engagement and nontraditional sites of presentation, performance art often is challenged as elitist and criticized as self-indulgent, silly, and insignificant. Performance artists counter that performance art continues to challenge its audience/participants on three levels:

• Cognitive/perceptual: Performance art is out of place, not what we expect from the environment we are in, not pre-packaged into something we already know how to look at and make sense of. Performance art uses sound, color, movement, light, text, and the tremendous resources of the body to disconcert and to make our everyday perceptions, usually taken for granted, difficult. Like someone looking at a grain of rice through an electron microscope, the familiar becomes strange: What are we hearing, seeing, making sense of kinetically?
• Subjective: Performance art is designed to provoke our emotions. It may make us angry, hyperstimulate our senses, break social rules. Also, it frequently puts so-called "observers" into a space in which they become part of the experience and can observe and respond to other "audience" members' responses. The work isn't outside us-it's within, demanding our attention.
• Conceptual: Performance art often exposes the contradictions hidden in the day-to-day character of our lives. A street performer making music on trash cans, oil drums and curbs challenges our sense that music and noise are unrelated and opposite. Seeing a break dancer or a painted human cyborg in a park on your lunch break can challenge you to ask questions: What is work? Why don't these performers get jobs? Why would anyone do this instead of going to work? Perhaps even, Am I a corporate robot watching a robot-performer? Performance art that occurs in an art gallery and focuses our attention on the body breaks the age-old sense that art is refined, cerebral, appreciative, static and, ultimately, not a confrontation with life

Performance art certainly has been among the most controversial art forms of the last 30 years. All four of the NEA Four were performance artists. But performance art is also highly entertaining. The very shock of it can be tremendous fun, in part because of its challenges-not unlike extreme sports or riding rollercoasters. It intrigues the intellect, because it disrupts our expectations and may even make little rational sense in any terms that we already know how to apply. And it often uses classic techniques of physical humor, made all the more funny by the unusual environment, the performers' costume (or lack of it), and the audiences' ability to see each others' reactions to the art.

It is not surprising, then, that performance artists like the Blue Man Group now do TV commercials for IBM (i.e., Big Blue) and had a spectacular stage show built around them in Las Vegas just a few doors down from two other performance art ensembles: De La Guarda and Cirque de Soleil. Will depoliticization, domestication, commodification and mass circulation of performance art in this way be its undoing as a serious "art" genre? Or will it provide new ways and new audience/participants for exploring the possibilities of site, of body, of seeing/doing and of looking/participating?

John Gassner and Edward Quinn, eds., The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama (New York: Crowell, 1969), 911-912.

RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 11-74.

The NEA Four are Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck and Tim Miller, all defunded in 1990 by the National Endowment for the Arts because their work was deemed by certain politicians to be obscene. For a good account of this conflict and its relation to performance, see Steven C. Dubin, Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions (New York: Routledge, 1992), 149-158.

© Lynne M. Constantine and Suzanne Scott 2002