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Performance Art can be confusing at the best of times. Often designed to be uncomfortable, provocative, and overwhelming, it can stop us in our tracks. When witnessing performance art, we can’t help but feel uneasy as it triggers emotions and thought processes in us that we’d rather not be confronted with. A good piece of performance art is like a mirror showing us the deepest corners of our psyche.
But there are different levels of intensity when it comes to this art form. The more prevalent performance art will be thought-provoking yet relatively easy to digest. Whereas other, more extreme pieces of performance art, can shake us to the core.
Some great performance artists like Marina Abramovic, Oskar Schlemmer, John Cage, Stuart Sherman, etc. blurred the lines between theater, dance, music, poetry, activism, and contemporary art since the early and mid-1900s.
The genre hit a peak of popularity in the 1970s. It was then, some of the first truly shocking creations were presented. For example, when Abramovic stunned viewers with self-mutilation, or when Acconci intimidated audiences with public masturbation.
The following decades saw artists Laurie Anderson, Matthew Barney and Yoko Ono continuing the trend. Also, Eva & Adele, Gilbert & George, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. All of them were individuals who essentially lived and breathed performance art.
In modern times, we find performance artists like, for example, Christian Marclay, Ryan Trecartin, Abraham Poincheval, and Spartacus Chetwynd.
As performance art remains a baffling fixture in the art world, many art afficionados, professional as well as amateur, are wondering, “Is all this really art? And if it is, why?”
Maybe one of my professors at the Art Institute in Zurich had the best answer to this. He used to tell me, “Don’t create something nice. Nice doesn’t mean anything. Nice is irrelevant. Nice is dead. You want people to have strong emotions when they are confronted with your art. They may hate it or love it. But if anyone tells you they liked your art because it is nice, then you have failed as an artist.”
The words of German artist Joseph Beuys come to mind as well, “Art alone makes life possible – this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms… I would say man does not consist only of chemical processes, but also of metaphysical occurrences. The provocateur of the chemical processes is located outside the world. Man is only truly alive when he realizes he is a creative, artistic being… Even the act of peeling a potato can be a work of art if it is a conscious act.”
With these thoughts in mind, selected for you, here is a small collection of six performance art pieces my professor would definitely not have considered a failure.
These were pieces of art which stopped people in their tracks, made them shake their heads in either wonder or disgust. Spectators were excited or bored by these performances. Loved them or hated them. Laughed about them or left them in anger.
In 1972, Vito Acconci shocked audiences at New York’s Sonnabend Gallery when he lay underneath a ramp in the museum and masturbated, using the sound of visitors walking above him to spark his “sexual fantasies.” He used a microphone to project his ongoing monologue – basically, a series of very dirty thoughts – to the entire room above him.
In 2010, NYU professor and Iraq-born artist Wafaa Bilal surgically implanted a camera into the back of his head for a year-long surveillance project. Inspired by his experiences as a refugee, “3rdi” took a photo every 60 seconds. He then published his images on the web.
In an interview with CNN, he said, “I see myself as a mirror reflecting some of the social conditions that we ignore. This will expose the unspoken conditions we face. And, hopefully, establish a dialogue about surveillance.”
In 2014, French artist Abraham Poincheval slept in a dead bear for two weeks. Equipped with a small amount of food and water (plus a light, cushion, reading material, kettle, and toilet of some kind), he hibernated inside the remains of a hollowed-out bear stomach at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature while fans watched him on a live feed.
Ron Athey began his Incorruptible Flesh project in 1996. In the video you see what it had evolved to in 2014: The artist was naked and strapped to a metal examination table. He was transformed into a frightening corpse-like figure. The skin of his eyes was pinned back. A baseball bat impaled him from behind. Additionally, he invited viewers to “anoint” him with a white, foamy substance.
According to Grace Exhibition Space, Athey and his collaborators “studied the lives of saints, the relics and in particular, the display of the ‘incorruptible’ bodies, most of which are wax sculptures with a corpse inside.”
Athey then adopted the ‘incorruptible’ status as a representation of his HIV positive diagnosis, with added references to his childhood experiences within the Pentecostal church.
In 2013, Tilda Swinton napped at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She showed up unannounced several times to sleep in a glass box somewhere in the famous art institute.
Called The Maybe, the work was a reprisal of an earlier Swinton nap fest in 1995.
In her endurance spectacle The Artist is Present, in 2010, the Serbian artist spent 736 hours staring at Museum of Modern Art visitors across a table.
New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz wrote, “It’s narcissistic, exhibitionistic work, and it has brought out the crowds’ own narcissism and exhibitionism, in a self-fulfilling feedback loop. As such the work is also very compelling.”
Le Temple du Present – Solo for an Octopus
Bewegtes Land, an Art Project For Train Passengers
Liam Klenk was born in Central Europe and has since lived on four continents. Liam has always been engaged in creative pursuits, ranging from photography and graphic design, to writing short stories and poetry, to working in theatre and shows. In 2016, Liam published his first book and memoir, 'Paralian'.
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