Performance Art Guide: 7 Notable Performance Artists

Performance art draws on aspects of acting, poetry, music, dance, or visual arts like painting to create time-based art, culminating in a live presentation for onlookers. The art form is ephemeral by nature, created to be experienced as a live event, even though many works are and can be recorded.

Some performance art may be practiced as it will be eventually performed or it may be more random or improvised. This art form is usually performed by the artist, though it can also include collaborators. Performance art differs from the performing arts in that the latter uses performers to convey a message through a medium to an audience (as in acting, dance, and music), whereas performance art conveys its message through audience engagement with the art and artist.

While the term “performance art” came about in the 1970s, the genre draws influences from throughout the art world in the early twentieth century.

• Birth of a term: The general term performance art came to prominence to encompass a wide variety of styles and activities, including body art, actions, events, guerrilla theater, and happenings. “Happenings,” a term coined by artist Allan Kaprow in the 1950s, also combined elements of painting, poetry, music, dance, and theater. This is because happenings and performance art draw from similar influences dating back to the early twentieth century.
• Early influences: The origins of performance art as a form date back to the early 1900s and the nightclub Cabaret Voltaire, which interpreted avant-garde and experimental art on the upper floor of a Switzerland theater. It is also closely tied to the progress of the avant-garde movement—including futurism, an art movement centered in Italy; and Fluxus, a movement that emerged in the late 1950s and included artists like Marcel Duchamp and John Cage.
• Refinement: In an attempt to revolutionize culture, the futurists created performative evenings of poetry, music, and distilled dramatic presentations. Elements of this movement would go on to be refined by artists in the Dada movement, a nihilistic and anti-aesthetic arts movement that took place in Switzerland, New York City, Berlin, Cologne, and Paris. Both movements capitalized on the value of shock and outrage. By 1970, performance art had become a global term to encompass art that was live and not theater.
• Rise in popularity: Performance art grew in popularity in the early 1970s and ’80s, following the decline of modernism and abstract expressionism in the early 1960s. This period is defined by its focus on the body as well as the distancing from traditional media. The work also followed the rise of feminist art and anti-war activism. Over the years, artists working with more conventional forms of art—like painting or sculpture—have used performance art to rejuvenate their work. Additionally, the work has since found its place in a fine arts context, alongside contemporary art within conventional museums and galleries.

The broad definition of performance art gives artists plenty of room to experiment within the realm of live performance. Whether you’re experiencing the form for the very first time or the hundredth, here are six notable characteristics of the genre worth noting:

1. 1. Live: The specifics of performance art are hard to define, as artists have a lot of flexibility under the umbrella term, but the key aspect is that it is meant to be performed in front of a live audience. While a finished sculpture wouldn’t be considered performance art, a visual artist actively working on the sculpture in front of an audience might be.
2. 2. Memorable: Performance art is meant to be memorable. It can be entertaining, shocking, or horrifying, depending on the artist’s intent.
3. 3. Experimental: By its nature, performance art has no guidelines or rules—it’s experimental, and as long as the artist says it’s art, it’s art.
4. 4. Invaluable: While admission may be sold to performance art, the presentation or work itself is not for sale.
5. 5. Inspired by many sources: Inspiration for performance art can be drawn from many different art history elements, including the Dadaists, futurism, the Bauhaus, and the Black Mountain College (an experimental, ideological liberal arts institution), which all paved the way for present-day performance art.
6. 6. Varied: A performance art piece may include painting, sculpture, dialogue, poetry, music, dance, opera, film footage, laser lights, fire, television sets, live animals, or any other variable the artist may want to include. The piece may also be spontaneous or rehearsed, performed on a small scale or as a large spectacle.

Many performance artists push boundaries with their work. Here are a few examples of performance art:

1. 1. I Like America and America Likes Me (1974): German artist Joseph Beuys locked himself in a room with a live coyote for three days.
2. 2. Following Piece (1969): In this piece by Vito Acconci, also behind the notorious Seedbed, the artist followed a passerby on the streets of New York City until they entered a private space.
3. 3. VB67 (2011): Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft’s 2011 work placed nude models alongside marble and plaster sculptures to emphasize the difference between the living women and the sculptures.

Through this deeply personal art form, these renowned contemporary artists showcase the depth and breadth of performance art.

1. 1. Marina Abramović: An American artist originally from Serbia, Abramović is known for her work exploring the interaction between artist and performer. She is well-known for Rhythm 0, a six-hour work that provided audience members with 72 objects and an invitation to use them however they’d like on her while she stood still, and the 736-hour retrospective The Artist Is Present (2010), during which Abramovic sat at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), allowing patrons to sit across from her and engage in a silent conversation. The latter performance is vividly remembered in the art world for when her former partner, Ulay, who lived with her for 12 years before the artistic duo went their separate ways, attended the MoMA performance and sat across from her. The two hadn’t spoken in 20 years prior to the moment.
2. 2. Yoko Ono: A Japanese artist and musician, Ono’s work is considered to be key to the development of feminist, performance, video, and installation practices. Her best-known performance pieces include 1969’s Bed-In, a collaborative performance and act of protest taking place during her and John Lennon’s honeymoon, and 1964’s Cut Piece, during which Ono sat motionless as the audience was invited to come on stage, one at a time, and cut a small piece of her clothing off to take with them. Cut Piece gave audience members agency in the art while also implicating them for the act of exposing the female body.
3. 3. Allan Kaprow: Alongside friends John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, Kaprow coined the term “happenings” in the late 1950s. An abstract-expressionist who turned to installation art, Kaprow is known for the way his works engaged the audience. In 1961’s Yard, Kaprow crafted rooms that required audience members to jump over rubber tires and crawl through forms covered in tar paper. A retrospective of Kaprow’s work took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2008, two years after his death.
4. 4. Bruce Nauman: Nauman’s work is not easily defined, as it blends conceptual art, minimalism, performance art, and video art. His 1968 work, Wall/Floor Positions, features Nauman contorting his body in various positions in relation to his studio, exploring space and his body within it.
5. 5. Carolee Schneemann: Schneemann, a painter turned performance artist, centered many of her works around her own body, exploring whether a nude woman could be both the image and the artist. Her approach to making art was developed in conversation with action painting—the technique pioneered by Jackson Pollock—and fed by feminist thinking from the ’60s and ’70s. One notable example of her work is Fuses (1964-1967), in which she took film footage of her and her partner, James Tenney, having sex and then exposed it to paint, fire, and acid, and cut and layered it into a celluloid collage. Her other notable piece is 1975’s Interior Scroll.
6. 6. Chris Burden: Burden is known for what became called “danger pieces,” like his 1971 work Shoot, during which he had an assistant shoot him with a rifle. Perhaps even more well-known is his 1974 work Trans-fixed, which saw Burden with nails through his palms, (briefly) crucified to the back of a Volkswagen Beetle. The performance was brief—two minutes—allowing for a photo.
7. 7. Joan Jonas: Jonas is known for experimental work combining her training as a sculptor with video, performance, drawing, and the internet. She experimented with viewer perception through the creation of an idiosyncratic visual language. In her 1972 work Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, Jonas performed as her alter ego while wearing a plastic mask, sequined jacket, and pink feathered headdress while interacting with the video camera that was taping her performance. Meanwhile, a television monitor projected multicultural images of women, such as a Bengali goddess and a Japanese woman.

Others revered for their work in the art form include multimedia artist and musician Laurie Anderson, Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Latin American artist Tunga, Colombia’s María Evelia Marmolejo, and the Russian collective Pussy Riot.

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