Some more research

Performance art.
Descriptive term applied to ‘live’ presentations by artists. It was first used very loosely by artists in the early 1960s in the USA to refer to the many live events taking place at that time, such as Happenings, Fluxus concerts, Events, body art or (in Germany) Aktionen and Demonstrationen. In 1969 performance was more specifically incorporated into titles of work in the USA and UK and was interchangeable with ‘performance piece’ or simply ‘piece’, as in Vito Acconci’s Performance Test or Following Piece (both 1969), and by many other artists such as Dennis Oppenheim, Yoko Ono (b 1933), Dan Graham, Rebecca Horn, Joan Jonas, Laurie Anderson and Bruce Nauman. It was closely linked to the ideological tenets and philosophy of CONCEPTUAL ART, which insisted on ‘an art of which the material is concepts’ and on ‘an art that could not be bought and sold’; those who made performance pieces did so as a statement against the gallery system and the art establishment.

The term ‘performance’ was originally adopted in the early 1970s to emphasize the fact that the work was made by artists and to distinguish such events from theatre; the early pieces were esoteric and paradoxical and far from entertaining. The frequent use in the following decade of the term ‘live art’ was an attempt to explain its connections with the art world. It had connotations of theatre or entertainment, frankly admitting a new tendency towards vaudeville or cabaret, and avowing the fact that in New York, in particular, performances increasingly took place in East Village cabaret settings or, on a few occasions, on television shows.

1. Origins of performance art.

The history of performance art in the 20th century is one of a permissive, open-ended medium with endless variables, executed by artists impatient with the limitations of more established art forms and determined to take their art directly to the public. Because the crossbreeding of the arts is fundamental to performance, artists draw on many disciplines and media including literature, poetry, theatre, music, dance, architecture or painting, as well as video, film, slides or narrative for their material. Performance art defies precise or easy definition. In its broadest sense it is any form of ‘live art’ in a public setting closely related to the fine-art modes of the time. It has been used by artists as a means of confronting the prevailing art establishment or as a way of bringing to life the many formal and conceptual ideas on which the making of art is based.

Such a radical stance against the conventions of art has made performance a catalyst in the history of 20th-century art; whenever a certain school, be it Cubism, Minimalism or conceptual art, reached an impasse, artists turned to performance as a way of breaking down categories and indicating new directions. Most of what is written about earlier art movements (e.g. Constructivism, Dada or Surrealism) continues to concentrate on the art objects produced, but these movements often found their sources and attempted to resolve problematic issues in performance. Most of the original Zurich Dadaists, for example, were poets, cabaret artistes and performers who, before creating Dada objects, exhibited works from immediately preceding movements such as Expressionism. Similarly, most of the Parisian Dadaists and Surrealists were poets, writers and agitators before they began producing objects and paintings.

Performance manifestos, beginning with Futurism, have been the expression of dissidents who have attempted to find other means to evaluate art experience in everyday life. Performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. Conversely, public interest in the medium, especially from the 1980s, stems from an apparent desire to be a spectator to the distinct community of the art world and to be surprised by the unexpected, unorthodox presentations that the artists devise. The work may be presented solo or with a group, with lighting, music or visuals made either by the performance artist or in collaboration, and performed in venues ranging from the art gallery or museum to ‘alternative spaces’, such as the theatre, café, bar or street. The performer is the artist, seldom a ‘character’ like an actor in the theatre, and the content rarely follows a traditional plot or narrative. The performance might be a series of intimate gestures or large-scale visual theatre, lasting any time from a few minutes to many hours; it might be performed once or repeated, with or without a prepared script, spontaneously improvised or rehearsed over many months.

(i) Renaissance forerunners.

Performances, like tribal dances, medieval Passion plays, Renaissance spectacles or the soirées arranged by artists in the 1920s in their studios in Paris, provide a presence for the artist in society. This presence can be esoteric, shamanistic, instructive, provocative or entertaining, depending on the nature of the performance. Renaissance examples show the artist in the role of creator and director of spectacles, fantastic triumphal parades that often required the construction of elaborate temporary architecture or performances of allegorical spectacles. Leonardo da Vinci was well known for his ‘follies’; Vasari described his demonstration of the flexibility of the intestines of a bullock, inflated by a pair of blacksmith’s bellows to fill an entire room. Leonardo also designed the Festa del paradiso (1490), in which performers dressed as planets revolved on specially built platforms while reciting verses about the return of the Golden Age. A triumphal procession was designed in 1535 by Polidoro da Caravaggio for Emperor Charles V at Messina; in 1589 Bernardo Buontalenti organized elaborate festivities for the marriage of Christine de Lorraine and Ferdinando I de’ Medici in Florence, which included a mock naval battle in the flooded courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti. Gianlorenzo Bernini staged spectacles, for which he wrote scripts, designed scenes and costumes, built architectural elements and achieved daring engineering feats, such as the Inundation of the Tiber (1638), in which realistic flood scenes apparently caused the collapse of near by buildings.

(ii) Futurism.

The history of 20th-century performance art began on 20 February 1909 with the publication of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘Manifeste de fondation du Futurisme’ in Paris in Le Figaro. This was followed by the first ‘Futurist Evening’ in January 1910, at the Teatro Rossetti in Trieste, a combination of political rally, poetry, variety theatre and loud readings or declamations by members of the Futurist group. The manifestos celebrated the machine and war and rejected such things as museums, critics and feminism. A successful evening provoked the audience to the point of rioting. The Futurists performed in theatres and piazzas throughout Italy. Their words were shouted or distributed in pamphlet form and reached a broad and extensive audience, making Futurism the first art movement to be publicized by the new techniques of mass communication.

Some extracts from Marinetti’s manifesto were published in March 1909 in a Russian newspaper. Young Russian poets and painters, such as Velimir Khlebnikov, Nikolay Kulbin, David Burlyuk and Vladimir Mayakovsky, began publishing their Futurist poetry c. 1912, as a break with Russian Symbolism. They were given the name Futurists by the press although they disputed the Italian connection, insisting instead on their essentially Russian heritage and damning ‘Paris and Munich decadence’. (In 1914 Marinetti lectured in Moscow and St Petersburg and emphasized the rift between the Italian and Russian Futurists.) During 1913–14 the Russian Futurists arranged recitals, confrontations and exhibitions and walked the streets in trademark outfits; Mayakovsky wore a yellow blouse, and Burlyuk wore a frock coat with collar trimmed with multicoloured rags, his face painted with a picture of a little dog. They organized a Futurist tour of Russia visiting 17 cities and produced a Futurist theatre festival. This included Alekséy Kruchonykh’s opera Pobeda nad solntsem (‘Victory over the sun’, 1913) with sets and costumes by Kazimir Malevich and Mayakovsky’s tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky (1913), thus setting the scene for two decades of collaboration between artists of many disciplines in the highly charged social and political atmosphere of the time. Committed to making a revolutionary art for large and often illiterate audiences, based on the current political situation, they took as models the circus, music-hall, variety theatre, eurhythmics, Japanese theatre and the puppet-show. Constructivist and Suprematist artists, architects, dramatists, film makers and composers were involved in the creation of revolutionary theatre. Agit-trains and agit-ships travelled across the country, stopping at remote villages and quaysides to perform. The overtly political Blue Blouse group used ‘living newspapers’, theatre, film and dance to relate its message and eventually involved more than 100,000 members who joined clubs all over the country. Momentous events such as the Storming of the Winter Palace (1920) directed by Nikolay Yevreinov and involving 8000 citizens re-created that occasion three years later. The announcement of a policy of Socialist Realism as the official and enforceable cultural code at the Writers Congress in Moscow in 1934 ended this freedom of performance.

(iii) Dada.

In Zurich, where many artists sought a neutral refuge from World War I, performance took the form of ‘literary cabaret’ as conceived by former cabaret artiste Emmy Hennings (1885–1948) and her poet lover Hugo Ball. Inspired by cabaret life in Munich and by Marinetti, particularly his ‘words in liberty’ poetry, they opened Cabaret Voltaire on 5 February 1916 in a small bar on the Spiegelgasse as a ‘centre for artistic entertainment’. Ball invited all artists ‘whatever their orientation’, and on the opening night Marcel Janco and George Janco, his brother, and Tristan Tzara, among others, brought portfolios and pictures, which were immediately hung on the walls. Hennings sang in French and Danish, Tzara read Romanian poetry, and a balalaika orchestra played popular tunes and Russian dance. Cabaret Voltaire was the hub of new poetry, music and dance; according to Ball, they pushed ‘the plasticity of the word to the point where it can scarcely be equalled’. Ball invented sound poems with an ‘African rhythm’, which he recited in costume. Simultaneous poems read by several performers at once were interspersed with lectures, dance and song. Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and other dancers from Rudolph Laban’s school read and performed their own and others’ verse, amid décor painted by the artists. According to Arp, on some nights there was ‘total pandemonium’. After five months, the owner of the bar stopped the cabaret, by which time Ball was ‘ready to close shop’, and Tzara was preparing to turn Dada into a ‘tendency in art’. Dada recitals were given at the Weighhouse (Waag) hall in Zurich (1916), an anthology Collection Dada (Zurich, 1916) was issued, and a Dada gallery opened in January 1917, lasting for 11 weeks, by which time Ball had left Zurich, Huelsenbeck had returned to Berlin and Arp to Cologne, where new and very different Dada groups were emerging. At the end of 1919 Tzara transferred Dada’s base from Zurich to Paris.

Berlin Dada was overtly political and anti-Expressionist. Participants, such as Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, Gerhard Preis, Johannes Baader (1875–1955), Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, called for a ‘large-scale Dadaist propaganda campaign with 150 circuses for the enlightenment of the proletariat’ and the requisition of churches for their performances. They went on a Dada tour of what was then Czechoslovakia and organized the First International Dada Fair (Berlin, 1920). In Cologne, Max Ernst and Johannes Theodor Baargeld were responsible for the Dada exhibition of April 1920, which had to be entered through the pissoir of a beer-hall. Francis Picabia took the Dada message from Zurich to Barcelona and New York, as did Marcel Duchamp who exhibited his Fountain (a urinal) in 1917 at the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in the Grand Central Palace, New York (for illustration see READY-MADE).

Paris Dada was launched by Tzara, who along with the Littérature group (writers Paul Eluard, André Breton, André Salmon, Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau and Paul Fraenkel) arranged the first of the Littérature Friday meetings on 23 January 1920; there masked figures recited a disjointed poem by Breton, Picabia executed large drawings on a blackboard, and Tzara read an obscene newspaper article, calling it a poem, to the accompaniment of bells and rattles. Simultaneous poems were typical fare, sometimes with as many as 40 people chanting manifestos ‘like psalms’. Audiences responded by throwing all sorts of rubbish at the performers, just as Marinetti had encouraged the audiences to do at Futurist performances a decade earlier. The press and public responded enthusiastically. Parade (1917), a ballet with text by Cocteau, music by Erik Satie, costumes by Pablo Picasso and choreography by Léonide Massine, and Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias of the same year had established a precedent for outraging the critics and the public. Dada festivals and concerts became frequent, and scandals were a regular outcome of events such as the Dada excursion to a church and the trial in absentia of an eminent established writer Auguste-Maurice Barrès.

Enmity between Tzara and Breton soon led to the formation of a breakaway group, the Surrealists (1924), led by Breton and comprising most of the Dada group. They published the Manifeste du Surréalisme (Paris, 1924), formed a Bureau of Surrealist Research and published the first issue of the magazine La Révolution surréaliste (1924). Focusing on automatism, simultaneity, chance, the importance of the subconscious and of the dream, their writings gave some indication of the motives behind the seemingly nonsensical Dada performances. Works such as Aragon’s Armoire à glace (Paris, 1923) or Roger Gilbert Lecomte’s Odyssey of Ulysses the Palimped (Paris, 1924) were considered typical Surrealist plays, despite their somewhat realistic acting and direction. It was Picabia and Satie’s ballet Relâche, which opened on 3 December 1924 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, that fused Dada experiment and Surrealist principles. A brief cinematic prologue was followed by a first act consisting of a series of simultaneous events: downstage a figure (Man Ray) paced up and down, occasionally measuring the dimension of the stage floor; a fireman, chain-smoking, poured water endlessly from one bucket into another, and in the background the Ballet Suédois dancers revolved in darkness, an occasional spotlight revealing a tableau vivant of a naked couple representing the Adam and Eve of Lucas Cranach (i). These events were set against an enormous backdrop comprising metal discs, each reflecting a powerful light bulb, that virtually blinded the audience. During the interval Picabia’s film Entr’acte, shot by René Clair, was shown, ending with the cast breaking through the paper screen to begin the second act. Surrealist performance, with its concentration on language, had the greatest effect on theatre, influencing, for example, Antonin Artaud’s Théâtre de la cruauté.

(iv) The Bauhaus.

At the Bauhaus, founded in 1919, a theatre workshop was included in the curriculum from the start. Lothar Schreyer (b 1886), a former member of the group associated with Der Sturm in Berlin, led the workshop in exploring the limits of Expressionist theatre, which resembled religious play acting. Language was reduced to emotionally charged stammering and movement to pantomimic gestures. Sound, colour and light reinforced the melodramatic content of the work. This was in conflict with the Bauhaus’s direction, which was clearly stated by the exhibition Art and Technology—A New Unity, shown during Bauhaus Week (1923). Oskar Schlemmer took over the Bauhaus theatre workshop in time to give a performance on the fourth day of Bauhaus Week, 17 August 1923, entitled the Figural Cabinet 1, which had been performed a year earlier at a Bauhaus party. Many performances began as theme events for the Bauhaus’s notorious parties; some were an exploration in ‘real space’ of Schlemmer’s drawing course ‘Mensch und Kunstfigur’; others explored the idea of the dancer as a puppet or as a mechanical figure (inspired by Heinrich von Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater of 1810). Some performances were presented as lecture demonstrations at Bauhaus exhibitions, and a repertory toured numerous northern European cities in 1929, including the Slat Dance (1927), Gesture Dance (1926), Metal Dance (1929), Dance of Hoops, Chorus of Masks, Dance of Forms, Dance in Space or Game with Building Blocks (1926; first performed Bauhaus, Dessau). Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett of 1922 and 1926 (for illustration see SCHLEMMER, OSKAR) was performed for the last time at the International Dance Congress in Paris in 1932, shortly before Schlemmer left the Bauhaus. Other artists who created works for the Bauhaus theatre workshop included Vasily Kandinsky, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Kurt Schmidt and Toni Hergt (with their marionette play Die Abenteuer des kleinen Buckligen, 1924), Xanti Schawinsky (1904–79) and Andreas Weininger. The Bauhaus theatre workshop emphasized performance as a means to create equivalents in real painting or sculpture, investigating the relationship between sound, movement, space and light. It held a pivotal position as a meeting-place within the school for all the arts.

(v) Black Mountain College and Happenings.

When the Bauhaus was closed in 1933 by the Nazis, many artists who taught there moved to the USA. Josef Albers, who taught at a new experimental school, BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE in North Carolina, from 1933 to 1949, invited his former Bauhaus colleague Xanti Schawinsky to create a stage studies programme there in 1936. Works from the Bauhaus (e.g. Spectodrama: Play, Life, Illusion, 1936) were performed. From 1944 Black Mountain College was known for its summer schools, which attracted significant artists from different disciplines, including R. Buckminster Fuller, John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Cage’s manifesto, The Future of Music: Credo (1937; published New York, 1958), was influenced by the Futurist Luigi Russolo’s D’arte dei rumori (Milan, 1913). He suggested that ‘everyday sounds’, such as static between radio stations, should be considered material for experimental music. Merce Cunningham followed a similar principle with dance in using everyday movements such as walking. Cage and Cunningham collaborated with Black Mountain College artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Olsen (1910–70) and David Tudor on a special ‘untitled event’ in the summer of 1952, which influenced performance art for the next 20 years and was the forerunner to Happenings. Cage taught a composition course at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1956. His students were painters, film makers, musicians and poets such as Al Hansen (b 1927), Dick Higgins (b 1938), Jackson Mac Low (b 1922), George Brecht and Allan Kaprow, all of whom later created Happenings and Fluxus concerts. Allan Kaprow first defined the term as ‘Something to take place; a happening’ (Anthologist, spring 1959). The first public presentation of a Happening was Intermission Piece (June 1959) at the Reuben Gallery on Fourth Avenue in New York. For Kaprow, Happenings were ‘spatial representations of a multileveled attitude to painting’; for Hansen, ‘a form of theater in which one puts parts together in the manner of making a collage’. In spirit they were influenced by photographs and written accounts of Jackson Pollock at work on his action paintings.

The term ‘Happening’ soon came to be used by numerous artists with different meanings. The painter and sculptor Red Grooms (b 1937), citing the circus as his inspiration, created sets that he likened to ‘an acrobat’s apparatus’; Claes Oldenburg stated his interest in ‘objects in motion’ (typewriters, hamburgers, ice-cream cones and people) as the basis for his staged performances in The Store (1961), a small storefront in downtown New York, where he exhibited work and performed. For Jim Dine, Happenings were an extension of ‘acting out everything in everyday life’, and for Robert Whitman (b 1935) they were a means of exploring time ‘in the same way as paint or plaster’. Happenings were also made by Carolee Schneeman (b 1939), who termed them kinetic theatre; in France by Robert Filliou and Ben; and in West Germany by Wolf Vostell.

2. Developments from the 1960s.

From the early 1960s, events taking place around the world had as participants not only visual artists but also composers, musicians, poets and film makers, such as Henry Flynt (b 1940), La Monte Young (b 1935), John Latham, Joseph Beuys, Philip Corner, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas (b 1931), Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles (b 1933) and Dick Higgins. Many came together in a series of ‘newest music’ concerts in New York in March 1961 at the AG Gallery, Madison Avenue. These concerts included a lecture demonstration on concrete music and a festival of electronic music, with works by Maciunas, Mac Low and Higgins, a concert of new sounds and noises, with works by Toshi Tchiyanagi, Mac Low and J. Byrd, and four evenings of film. Soon the term FLUXUS (suggesting art and music in a state of ‘flux’) came to be used to describe this loosely connected and very large international group of artists experimenting on the edges of numerous disciplines. The International Fluxus Festival of the Newest Music, organized by Maciunas and presented at the Wiesbaden Museum in September 1962, established their ideas in a formal art setting. Other major Fluxus artists who arranged and performed at many festivals in the 1960s in the USA, Europe and Japan were Paik, Giuseppe Chiari (b 1926), Beuys, Ben, Schneeman, Knowles, Ono, La Monte Young, Brecht and the Gutai group.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s the art world became a haven for the most provocative and far-reaching experiments in dance, music, film and theatre. Taking Cunningham’s earlier proposals for a more ‘natural’ dance choreography, as well as the pioneering expressionistic dance concerts of Anna Halprin in San Francisco, a new generation of important figures began to emerge. Simone Forti (b 1935), Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer (b 1934), Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk and Laura Dean, among others, performed at the Judson Church in New York, as part of a group called Grand Union or individually and in collaboration with such visual artists as Rauschenberg or Robert Morris (ii). Brown developed her signature repetitions, Forti her movements that were based on closely watched animals, Rainer her special brand of sculptural or minimal dances and Dean her spinning dances, reminiscent of whirling dervishes. Musicians such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley used the art world as the context for their most innovative work.

Highly sophisticated artists such as Yves Klein in Paris and Piero Manzoni in Milan created sensual and charged conceptual art works and performances; Klein’s Anthropometries of the Blue Period (1960) was an unforgettable evening at the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contemporain in Paris, when nude models, their bodies dripping in blue paint, writhed on canvas. Manzoni eliminated the canvas altogether, making ‘living masterpieces’ by signing a person or by presenting them with a document that declared them a work of art. ‘Body art’ could be said to have emerged from these early 1960s presentations. It was based on the notion that the artist’s body was indeed an artist’s prime material. Greatly varied works were created, emphasizing social and political polemics, violence or aggression, presenting the artist as shaman or the idea of the artist’s body as an ‘aesthetic object’. In England, Stuart Brisley from 1966 created disturbing socially critical tableaux centred on his own actions, for example ZL 65 63 95C , performed at Gallery House, London, in 1972. Chris Burden in Los Angeles was often the willing victim of orchestrated acts of violence, such as being shot at with a gun and live ammunition in Venice, CA, in Shooting Piece (1971), as though to reinforce our immunity through frequent exposure to television’s endless killings. English artists Gilbert and George presented themselves as ‘living sculptures’ in tableaux vivants such as Underneath the Arches (1969). Urs Lüthi created a series of performances that investigated sexuality and gender, as did Katarina Sieverding (b 1944). Luigi Ontani dressed himself as different figures from well-known historical paintings. Pair Behaviour Tableaux (1976) by Scott Burton (b 1939) illuminated body language between two men in highly stylized, almost motionless performances, while Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Arnulf Rainer and Otto Muehl in Austria used body art to explore the body language of the mentally disturbed. Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, John Baldessari, Dan Graham and Bruce Nauman were responsible for extraordinary experiments ranging from humour and self-analysis to analysis of the body in space. The exploration of the relationships between artist and spectator that characterized performance art of the 1970s was an essential corollary to conceptual art.

Throughout the 1970s performance art was an essential forum for experiments in sculpture, dance, music, video and film, allowing for the creation of some of the most original cross-overs and multidisciplinary work. It provided the most direct access to artists and their ideas for a public largely baffled by conceptual art’s ‘non-materialistic’ stance. The fact that it could not be bought or sold gave it an added importance within the terms of conceptual art, and it became the ideal vehicle for a generation intent on developing an entirely new aesthetic in art as well as a method of ‘exhibiting’ that was independent of the commercial-gallery system. A plethora of ‘alternative spaces’ (usually artist-run exhibition and performance spaces) characterized the 1970s. Eventually museums, art schools and establishment institutions were obliged to respond to the energy and excitement emanating from the alternative spaces, and by the mid-1970s performance events were being organized at the Venice Biennale, at the Hayward Gallery in London and at MOMA in New York.

From the beginning of the 1970s performance took on many forms and styles. ‘Body art’ and Aktionen described actions, usually by individual artists, that were demonstrations of formal ideas of space as well as more lyrical explorations of cultural metaphors; the term Aktionen was usually preferred by German artists who disliked the implication of performance as entertainment in the English language. Joseph Beuys’s Aktionen described mythological and metaphorical states of German culture in the 1970s; Klaus Rinke, with Monika Baumgartl, illustrated formal ideas of sculpture and space. In Italy, Jannis Kounellis elaborated on imagery culled from art history, and in Paris and Turin, Gina Pane inflicted wounds on herself in a series of masochistic works in which she physically identified with the suffering experienced in society at large. In Vienna, Hermann Nitsch staged ritualistic slaughtering of animals in bloody pageants that recalled Dionysian excess in Greek tragedy. Marina Abramovičj (b 1946) created marathon endurance works investigating psychic states. Autobiography emerged as a general reference in the early 1970s and indicated a new direction with its confessional story-telling, which for the first time made performance far more accessible and entertaining. Laurie Anderson, Julia Heyward (b 1949), Michael Smith (b 1942), Stuart Sherman, Adrian Piper (b 1948), Mitchell Kriegman, Bruce McLean and many others made work that attracted attention outside the art world. Other artists used the solo performance for cultural commentary and as an appropriate platform for such issues as feminism. In this area Rebecca Horn, Hannah Wilkie (b 1941), Ulrike Rosenbach (b 1943), Susan Hiller, Rose English, Arleen P. Schloss (b 1943), Suzanne Lacy (b 1945), Martha Storey Wilson (b 1947), Jacki Apple and Eleanor Antin created powerful and seminal works. Costume performance emerged as a popular theme by the late 1970s with Mr Peanut and General Idea in Toronto and Pat Oleszko with works such as Coat of Arms (1976) in New York.

By the late 1970s, with the emergence of punk music and the coming of age of the first fully fledged ‘media generation’, artists looked to the media for their inspiration. Robert Longo’s first performances of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Empire (1981), combined actual film footage with heroic imagery and scenes that could have been the setting for a Hollywood spectacle. Laurie Anderson’s song O Superman enjoyed popular success in Britain in 1981, leading to a record contract, concerts to overflowing audiences and a film and television show by means of which she became a media star. The emergence of performance ‘cabaret’ took place in the mid-1980s, particularly influenced by Eric Bogosian (b 1953) with his searing monologues such as Men in the Cities (1982), which consisted of Bogosian, without props or scenery, performing a series of male portraits that described a particular mood of American life in the 1980s. In New York, East Village clubs were the venues for hundreds of performance cabaret artists including John Kelly, the Alien Comic, Karen Finley, Ethyl Eichelberger and John Jesurun, many of whom would move on to make media-related performances, and a few of whom, such as Ann Magnuson, would actually make the cross-over into film, television and theatre.

The 1980s generally were characterized by media-orientated work, which often which often appeared more theatrical and fitted more easily on a proscenium stage than the work of the previous decade. Such artists as Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray (b 1941) came to theatre on their own terms. They wrote, acted and often directed their own work—stages were bare, narratives infrequent—and they still referred to art world concerns rather than those of theatre. The autobiographical monologues by Spalding Gray, from the Performing Garage, typified the ambiguity of definition at this time between theatre and performance art. The wide variety of scale and format of performance allowed for the inclusion of new and vastly different work, such as Butoh, which since the 1960s had been a highly charged and disturbing form of theatrical dance in Japan. Troupes such as Sankai Juko toured Europe and the USA with their Zen-influenced, stylized work, as did German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, who created mesmerizing large-scale visual dramas, combining dance, text, sound and extraordinary architecture to tell her eerie tales. In the early 1970s Robert Wilson had created an astonishing ‘Theater of Images’ with works such as Einstein on the Beach (first performed in July 1976 at the Festival d’Avignon), in which he collaborated with many of the most important performance artists from New York, including Philip Glass, Lucinda Childs and others; in the 1980s he continued to make works that played on the edges of many disciplines. The Ontological Hysteric Theatre of Richard Foreman (b 1937), with its focus on language that was as concrete as the changing visual collage of his highly controlled performances, became increasingly popular in the 1980s with the tendency towards more theatrical work. In England ‘living painting’ emerged as a reaction to this theatrical and media-orientated performance; Miranda Payne, Stephen Taylor Woodrow and Raymond O’Daly each created work that shared an emphasis on the ‘art’ context of performance, with works comprised of live figures actually suspended on a wall as living painting.

The apparent co-option of performance by the popular media in the 1980s led many to question whether performance could retain its anarchic ways and still function as a catalyst shaping new ideas in fine arts. A first history of the medium appeared in 1979 and performance reached a peak of acceptance with major annual festivals, specialist magazines and art-school curricula that charted its course. In 1986 a Hollywood film even featured a ‘performance artist’ and her Hollywood-style performances (lighting small fires in a large loft while moaning and writhing) as the underlying theme of an art-world thriller. For the first time there was a generation of artists who worked exclusively in performance, whereas before this an artist was more likely to use performance as an experimental stepping-stone to mature work in painting or sculpture. Many performance artists were building up a body of work over 25 years or more and making new productions that showed the evolution of their thinking over that period. It also became possible for performance artists to show retrospectives for serious art-historical review, and, correspondingly, new work could now be considered in terms of performance history. Despite the acceptance of the form as a valid genre with its own history, practitioners and critics, performance remains an open-ended medium, without rules and guidelines. The extraordinary range of material encompassed continues to defy easy definition and performance continues to be an important means to break through the limits or conventions imposed on art activity. In addition, the lively invention of performance of the 1970s and 1980s greatly influenced new movements in theatre, dance and opera of the 1990s.

Bibliography

H. Carter: The New Spirit in the Russian Theatre, 1917–1928 (London, 1929)

W. Gropius, ed.: The Theater of the Bauhaus (Middletown, CT, 1960)

C. Tomkins: The Bride and the Bachelors (London, 1965)

M. Kirby: Happenings (New York, 1966)

G. Brecht and R. Filliou: Games at the Cedilla (New York, 1967)

M. Kirby: The Art of Time (New York, 1968)

R. Kostelanetz: The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York, 1968)

M. Kirby: Futurist Performance (New York, 1971)

Avalanche Mag., 1–6 (1972–4)

H. Ball: Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (New York, 1974)

J. E. Bowlt: Russian Art, 1875–1975 (Austin, 1976)

J. E. Bowlt: Russian Art of the Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934 (New York, 1976)

V. Acconci: Headlines and Image (exh. cat., Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus., 1978)

A. A. Bronson and P. Gale, eds: Performance by Artists (Toronto, 1979)

R. Goldberg: Performance; Live Art, 1909 to the Present (London, 1979)

G. Battock and R. Nicklas, eds: The Art of Performance (New York, 1984)

For further bibliography see BAUHAUS, DADA, FLUXUS, FUTURISM.