Step Into The World of Performance Art

How Performance Art began, how it developed and India’s contribution

Performance art is an enigmatic discipline of the current art world. Many performance art works tend to divide people, and the very nature and purpose of performance art brings to mind questions on what even is art. The term “performance art” (not to be confused with performing arts) started being used in the 60s and 70s when the medium gained prominence, however, similar mediums of art expression had been used long back. It is only fitting to take a look at this eclectic art form, and how it developed.

“I could say the performance is the moment when the performer with his own idea step in his own mental physical construction in the front of the audience in particular time.”

~Marina Abramović

Performance art is an avant-garde, interdisciplinary form of art, meant to be experienced live, and something which can never be replicated exactly again. There are 5 key elements: time, space, body, presence of the artist and the relation between the artist and the public. It differs from theatre in the way that it doesn’t usually involve a linear, narrative script. It conveys a particular meaning or addresses philosophical or social issues through more abstract means. “This is not a theatre. A theatre will repeat. Theatre replace somebody else.” The known performance artist Marina Abramović explains. “Theatre is like box. Performance is real. In a theatre you can cut with a knife and there is blood. The knife is not real and blood is not real. In performance the blood and the knife and the body of the performer is real.” Performance art frequently employs satire, and although sometimes it can utilise mediums from the performing arts, such as theatre, music and dance, the overall execution is different. Today, performance art can involve installation, film, the performing arts and technology. Performance art questions and challenges notions of “what art is.” Precursors of Performance Art began taking shape at the turn of the 20th century, influenced by the art movements at the time. However, performance art became a full-fledged form by the 50s and 60s, and further developed into the 70s and 80s.

Origins

In 1916 in Zürich, Switzerland, Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire, which was intended to explore new artistic and political mediums and thought. This would be the birthplace of the Dada movement. The founding members like Tristan Tzara created avant-garde and experimental works, such as mocking the traditional theatre shows on the second floor of the theatre itself. The dada movement was intended to be anti-art, anti-literary, anti-poetry, which questioned the nature and existence of art, literature and poetry itself, and was against principles like eternal beauty, and really any “universal” principles, and instead valued chaos over order, and spontaneity, randomness and change. The surrealists were formed from the Dadaists, and many surrealists frequently visited the Cabaret. Going back further still, in 1909 the futurist movement was born in Italy, which valued youth, speed, technology, dynamism, violence, objects, particularly objects such as airplanes and cars. The futurist movement focused on literature, art, music, cinema, sculpture and photography.

In Russia, Futurism was further developed into the constructivist art movement, which had the intention of reflecting on modern, industrial life and urban space. The constructivists were against excessive decorative styling, favouring an “industrial assemblage of materials.” As such, they supported art for social purposes and propaganda, and were socialist, associated with the Bolsheviks. Constructivism significantly influenced the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements. In 1919, Bauhaus art school was founded in Germany, which focused on fine arts and crafts. It is well known for its impact on design, however, the school also had an experimental performing arts workshops, exploring body, space, sound and light. Some of the original Bauhaus teachers were exiled by the Nazis and founded the Black Mountain College in the US, where they continued their experimentations in the performing and scenic arts.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp exhibited his work Fountain, in which he placed a urinal basin with a signed pseudonym of “R.Mutt.” He aimed to propose a concept of “readymade art”, which would provide one of the foundations on which Conceptual Art would be built. Conceptual art is a movement which holds the idea of the artist as equally important as the aesthetic value, if not more-so. It was against the commodification of art. Prominent American artist Sol LeWitt explained, “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” Isidore Isou, founder of The Lettrist movement expanded on this further, through the notion of a work of art which couldn’t be enjoyed in reality, but “provide aesthetic rewards by being contemplated intellectually.” Conversely, In 1960, the Nouveau Réalisme movement advocated for a “return to reality”, in opposition to abstract painting. They believed that art didn’t need to have a “hidden meaning” and that any object could be presented as itself and still be considered art, similar to Fountain by Duchamp. The Nouveau Réalists sought to bring art and life closer. The Marxist movement of Lettrism then divulged into many offshoot schools of thought, including The Situationists.

The Situationists, like the Conceptualists and Lettrists criticised the commodification of art, however, they rejected the idea of a singular owner of an artwork altogether. According to creator Shannon Kim, “the situationists put a very very huge emphasis on the idea of collaboration within art and really reflects this view that art in itself belongs to everyday life and any individual could produce art because it was the process of making it that was important to emphasize as opposed to this singular individualised conception of the artist which really departs from Duchamp.” The Situationists combined Marxist, Dadaist and Surrealist theories, and is an art movement that paradoxically doesn’t have many “original” works of art, except for posters and collages created anonymously. This is because, they valued art as a collective effort rather than as a brainchild of a singular artistic “visionary,” critiquing the idea of “authorship” by a single person, which, as revolutionary as Duchamp’s work was, to them it was still confined to traditional ideas of a “singular artistic genius” and “authorship.” This situationist idea of the collective being the creator would play a significant role in the development of performance art, and specifically the kind of performance art which is “participatory”; in which the audience is as much a participant and creator as the artist.

Development

By the 60s and 70s, the separate art form of performance art began to solidify into shape. In 1962, George Maciunas informally organised the Fluxus movement, (fluxus being the latin word for flow), which, inspired by John Cage’s experimental electro-acoustic music, focused on experimental, interdisciplinary arts in which the chance-based process held more importance than the finished product. John Cage believed that artists should embark on their artistic creations without a conception of the finished product. Dick Higgins, one of the founders of the Fluxus movement stated, “Fluxus started with the work, and then came together, applying the name Fluxus to work which already existed. It was as if it started in the middle of the situation, rather than at the beginning.” French artist Robert Filliou placed Fluxus as an opposite of Duchamp’s “readymades” and found object art, as Duchamp “introduced the daily into art, whereas Fluxus dissolved art into the daily.” John Cage frequently collaborated with choreographer Merce Cunningham, as they were romantic partners for most of their lives. Merce Cunningham pioneered a kind of dance which existed outside the theatre, and used everyday movements like walking, leaping and jumping, hence being one of the founding figures of modern dance. John Cage described the music and dance in their collaborative projects as “simply being together in the same place at the same time and leaving- leading space around each art.”

“John had already talked about the idea of having music which was not dependent upon the dance and other dance dependent upon the music but which were separate identities which could in a sense coexist.”

~Merce Cunningham

In the 50s and 60s, Allan Kaprow, a student of John Cage at Black Mountain College, organised spontaneous performances with significant participation from the audience, which he termed “happenings.” In one of these pieces, called 18 Happenings in 6 parts, Cage and Charles Olson read separately standing on two different ladders, Robert Rauschenberg showed his paintings and “played wax cylinders of Édith Piaf on an Edison horn recorder,” Merce Cunningham danced and David Tudor played a prepared piano, all at the same time and among the audience. Shannon Kim describes a “happening” as “a very loosely structured often spontaneous artist-led performance or event that encourages audience participation and intentionally is meant to blur the lines between art and everyday life.”

“In these while there is some elements of strategic planning happenings always require a minimum element of spontaneity because the unexpected events and outcomes of the process are what make them happen naturally and unintentionally. These happenings are often meant to take place in everyday environments using everyday materials and actions and the whole point of it like I said is to make the distinction between art and life less clear and as a contemporary art form it has a huge emphasis on like all contemporary art forms process over product and the focus is on experience and the interactions that occur during the event rather than the completed artwork.”

~Shannon Kim in her video “The Politics of Performance Art And TikTok Street Interviews“

The role of the body in art or viewing the body as art is important in the field of performance art. The modern artist Jackson Pollock too used his body when he created his paintings live in front of an audience, and Lucio Fontana created paintings by slashing his canvases in front of the audiences as part of his “spatial concepts.” This kind of action painting can be regarded as a kind of performance art or live art. Eventually, this kind of live art evolved to involve solely the body, as instead of material, the artists simply embodied their ideas. In Tate Shots, a series by Tate Museum, Nigerian artist Otobang Nkanga says, “The little things are the little movements that you do to understand what is the power of that movement understand what your body’s saying understand what your voice is saying understand the energy you’re giving out.” Marina Abramović is perhaps the most well known artist when it comes to pushing the limits of one’s body for art. “Performance, it’s such a huge preparation people don’t understand how actually long it takes. Just being present as an artist in the space with full consciousness and and your attitude with your body and telling the minimum, the meaning, that’s the most difficult” she explains. In episode 7 of NDTV’s Art Insider called “Introduction To Performance Art” the founder of Khoj Studios, Pooja Sood adds, “I think it came after three years of doing small residencies around performance where we began with understanding that performance art was really about the body, somehow that you know the body spoke and that was the site of art and then went on to understand that the audience was as much a performer within a milieu, a certain setting.”

In Vienna, there was Viennese Actionism, which was recognisable due to its violence and grotesque use of body art. It combined body art with fluxus and happenings, and the artists were often at odds with the law, sometimes serving brief prison sentences for their shocking performances. Hermann Nitsch was one of the pioneers, and he collaborated with Abramović in one of his works in 1975. Otto Mühl, wrote a Material Action Manifesto in 1964, which he revised in 1967. “Material action is painting that has spread beyond the picture surface. The human body, a laid table or a room becomes the picture surface. Time is added to the dimension of the body and space.” The 1967 revision of the manifesto adds, “material action promises the direct pleasures of the table. Material action satiates. Far more important than baking bread is the urge to take dough-beating to the extreme.” Politics and opposition to Capitalism was central in Viennese Actionism, like in all the movements preceding it. In an event Art And Revolution, Mühl and Günter Brus issued a proclamation, “our assimilatory democracy maintains art as a safety valve for enemies of the state … the consumer state drives a wave of “art” before itself; it attempts to bribe the “artist” and thus to rehabilitate his revolutionising “art” as an art that supports the state. But “art” is not art. “Art” is politics that has created new styles of communication.”

Performance Art is used for political and social reasons a lot of the time. One of the primary reasons performance art exists is due to an opposition to the commodification of art, and capitalism. A lot of performance art works are feminist, such as Cut Piece by Yoko Ono, which utilised audience participation to comment upon objectification. In 2015, Anish Kapoor and Ai Weiwei embarked on a walk across London in support of refugees, which they didn’t intend to be looked at as a demonstration. The central idea to performance art is that it cannot be bought or sold, and it can only be witnessed live, and is ephemeral. Conceptual artists held the idea of the art to be central, Lettrists regarded the idea AS art itself, and the Situationists were against a singular, “genius” artist altogether, and advocated for collective, decentralised art, with no single author. This can be reflected in a lot of performance art where the participation of the audience is just as much as the work of the artist themself. Even though participatory art is mostly anti-Capitalist in nature, Shannon Kim speaks of participatory art which took place in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, which wasn’t necessarily anti-capitalist, but more-so existentialist and comparatively apolitical. This kind of participatory art existed specifically to reflect and cope as a society with the fall of an authoritarian regime and the relatively new ideology and society still in its early stages. Kim also touches on Argentine artist Oscar Masotta who interpreted Allan Kaprow’s works in a way which, rather than critiquing capitalism, it critiqued the US backed authoritarian regime in Argentina at the time.

“Now while Western participatory art engaged with capitalism and Argentine participatory art resisted dictatorship, in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union art tended to focus on existentialism, absurdity and personal experience rather than direct political confrontation in the post Soviet era engagement in art. A lot of artists turned away from direct political messaging and instead explored subjectivity and bodily experience and were felt very compelled and drawn to surrealism and absurdity as ways to process a disorientation in their way of life.”

~Shannon Kim

Even though performance art began with the idea of only being witnessed live, and not being able to be recorded, with the invention of cameras, new horizons opened in performance art of incorporating film and photography. Merce Cunningham and John Cage collaborated with filmmaker Charles Atlas to capture their work. “I worked with Merce Cunningham for over a period of 40 years. We worked on pieces together. The pieces were made first for the camera because we were making films and so we wanted the film’s to have their own integrity”, he explains. Bruce Nauman set up cameras in his studio for he believed that anything in his studio was art. Jack Smith turned his film screenings into events wherein he performed in front of the audience during the screening. British artist Liz Rhodes turned the idea of a film to something that can be experienced by enabling the audience to walk through the projection. Aldo Tambellini merged performance, film, poetry and political protest to create an entirely new experience. He says, “You want the audience to be part of as much as you can even even with the seating in the place.” Here too, attention is placed upon having the audience be as much a part of the piece as possible. Marina Abramović notes “Without the audience the world doesn’t exist. It doesn’t make any meaning.”

Performance Art in India and Japan

India has had a rich history in theatre and performing arts, although the term “performance art” has only recently gained traction. I, however think that India does in fact have a rich history in performance art, even in our theatre and dance traditions. This is particularly visible in our poetry and storytelling traditions. For instance, a significant aspect of a shayari is the element of audience interaction. Then, the art of Dastangoi involves the storyteller being engaged in drama, dance, mime and performance art, in which the audience sits around the storyteller, completely immersed in the performance. Moreover, in Maha Raas in 2023, 37,000 Indian women in Gujarat danced in circles, to commemorate Lord Krishna, but also for world peace. This adds a new layer to the conversation of participatory art and the situationist notion of decentralised art with no singular artist, as this shows a work of collective performance art which does exist for a social message of world peace, but it was born of a spiritual tradition rather than from a rebellion against Capitalism. This event and Indian dance traditions in general such as garba involve participation and there being no fixed line between artist and audience.

In the NDTV episode of Art Insider hosted by the founders of Nature Morte Aprajita Jain and Peter Nagy, Khoj Studios founder Pooja Sood defines live art as “work that artists do live sometimes with their body, sometimes not.” “Sometimes they orchestrate others to do work.” She also says that performance art “sits very uneasily at the edge of something that is the performing arts and sometimes the visual arts and somewhere in between.” “In a country like ours where material is expensive. I would imagine that more artists would use their body. To explain stuff.” She believes that in India, a lot of performance art began for the camera in fact, pointing out that the photographic and video work that emerges from a lot of performance art sells well. Hence, according to Sood, performers in India are often very conscious of the residue when they perform, and the documentation itself is an artwork.

Moving further east, the Japanese movement of Gutai was centred around happenings, combining visual, conceptual, theatrical, site-specific, installation and interactive arts. They frequently collaborated with Western artists like John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg. Jīro Yoshihara, the founder of Gutai stated that Gutai aimed “to go beyond abstraction.” “Gutai Art imparts life to matter. Gutai Art does not distort matter. In Gutai Art, the human spirit and matter shake hands with each other while keeping their distance.” Shannon Kim mentioned a play by the Japanese art group Jikken Kōbō called Pierrot Lunnaire. Jikken Kōbō was also an avant-garde art group in Japan, whose aim was “to combine the various art forms, reaching an organic combination that could not be realized within the combinations of a gallery exhibition, and to create a new style of art with social relevance closely related to everyday life.” The play is said to have “beautiful, dreamlike productions” with a “seamless blurred boundary between reality and abstraction.” Kim read an account of the play as “something which wasn’t being performed but was unfolding in real time.” “It really brought me to think about and realise from that young age that art is not fixed and that it exists in somewhat of a Flux. It is very much shaped by its viewers and participants and context as it is by its creators”, Shannon Kim reflected.

Performance art is a rich, complex and ever-evolving field of art. And the added medium of social media brings with it new avenues. Kim speaks about how with the creation of live-streaming, a lot of audience participation is being done in creative output, with real-time reactions. With the new form of street interviews on social media, the creator and audience are collaborators, and the reactions dictate the popularity of said content. It will be interesting to note how performance artists further develop the field through social media, and how performance art changes, which it inevitably will, as Robert Rauschenberg describes it as “art that refuses to settle.”

“Soon people were not asking ‘what is performance?’ They were asking ‘what isn’t performance?'”

~Tate

In this episode of Tuesday Talks, Abir Pothi spoke to Satadru Sovan who offered more insight on Performance Art.

References

• https://www.britannica.com/art/performance-art
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_art
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(art)
• https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/performance-art
• https://smarthistory.org/performance-art-an-introduction/
• https://www.contemporaryartissue.com/top-30-most-important-performance-artists/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDBP_Rq7evs
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGy9yJN12lo
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ObKMT27_0
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFvlaVaOmug
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDBP_Rq7evs
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xRKRGuPmK8
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BluWOjovJHk
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGMVqbEl-Y0
• https://www.ndtv.com/video/an-introduction-to-performance-art-432241
• https://www.thoughtco.com/performance-art-history-basics-182390
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54M3zZKHFRw
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z-YZ3A4mdk
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettrism
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_art
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happening
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viennese_Actionism
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dastangoi
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jikken_K%C5%8Db%C5%8D
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutai_Art_Association
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_r%C3%A9alisme