THE POWER OF PERFORMANCE ART lies in its immediacy. As RoseLee Goldberg, founder of New York’s performance art festival Performa said: ‘What better way to make people pay attention than to say “Look at me, I’m standing in front of you”?’ And because the body takes centre stage as the medium, performance art has proved a useful tool for exploring how we relate to ourselves and others, as well as issues of gender and race.
Between 1968 and 1971, Joan Jonas used mirrors in a series of performances to examine the objectification of the female body and women’s fixation with self-image. In one performance, she stood naked before an audience inspecting her own body with a small round mirror, as if she were encountering herself for the very first time. This moving work brought to the fore the potency of another’s gaze: it demonstrated the powerful position of the viewer, who could see the artist in one steady, unbroken view as opposed to the fragments accessible to Jonas herself. It is this physicality, this heightened consciousness of the artist’s body and, by extension, our own bodies, that often comes through most strongly in performance art.
The Taiwan-born artist Tehching Hsieh is best known for his five One Year Performances. Between 1978 and 1986, the artist spent one year locked inside a cage, one year punching a timeclock every single hour, one year completely outdoors, one year tied to another person and, lastly, one year without making, viewing, discussing, reading about, or in any other way participating in art. The 365-day length of the works was paramount, as it intensified the piece from a single performance into real life, with the experience of living becoming his art and vice versa. Through these feats of endurance, Hsieh prompted us to reflect on the circumstances of our being and existence, in other words, what it means to live.
Performance art’s immediacy and its power to closely reflect our personal experiences has encouraged artists to use it to step into the lives of different communities. For When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), artist Francis Alÿs assembled five hundred volunteers in single file at a sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, and together they shovelled it forward by a tiny distance over the course of a day. This futile action, which expended enormous amounts of energy and time, questioned the notion of progress as Peru painfully transitioned from dictatorship to democracy. Other works are premised upon a more direct exchange with the audience. In Roman Ondak’s Swap (2011), a performer sits at a table in an exhibition space with an object and tries to swap it with anything the visitor might be carrying. This sets in motion a chain of bartering that questions people’s relationships to their possessions and prompts us to think about value and exchange.
It is this physicality, this heightened consciousness of the artist’s body and, by extension, our own bodies, that comes through most strongly in performance art.
As this handful of examples shows, performance art is a varied field and each new work of art has the potential to expand the scope of its definition. It refuses to be trapped in one guise or methodology – after all, there isn’t just one way of creating performance art – and that is why it produces some of the most challenging and impactful works out there.
MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ is the undisputed queen of performance art. With her intensely powerful, harrowing and frequently life-risking performances that push her to the edge of her physical and mental limits, she has made an indelible mark on the medium.
For Rhythm 0 (1974), one of her earliest and best-known works, she declared ‘I am the object’ and gave up all control over her body to gallery visitors. She placed seventy-two items on a table and invited people to use any of these objects on her body in whatever way they wanted. The objects on offer ranged from a rose, a feather, a pen and honey to a saw, scissors, a whip and even a gun with bullets. Acting as collaborators in the performance, not merely passive spectators, some visitors cut and attacked her, stripping the clothes from her body and holding a loaded gun to her head; others sought to protect her, wiping away her tears. Yet Abramović did not falter. In the end – after six hours – it was the audience members who insisted the performance be stopped over fears for her safety. With the work she offered a stark portrait of the aggressions lurking beneath the surface of society, but also demonstrated the triumph of the mind over such violence.
It is this strength of purpose, running through all her works, that transforms them from a series of repeated actions into exercises in trust, endurance and transcendence. Between 1976 and 1988, she worked with her partner and collaborator Ulay in a series of extreme exchanges: they screamed at each other, inhaled and exhaled into each other’s mouths for over an hour, and Ulay held a bow taut with an arrow pointing at Abramović’s heart. When they eventually chose to end their partnership, they did so movingly, by each walking from the opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and meeting in the middle to say goodbye.
More recently, Abramović has assumed the role of a spiritual teacher to performance artists and performers alike → see P. She has been developing the ‘Abramović Method’, a series of mind and body cleansing exercises, and is due to open the Marina Abramović Institute in Hudson, New York. Even after more than forty years of performing, she shows no signs of slowing down.