Special Topics in the Arts

A genre of art-making in which the artwork is the artist performing—usually live but often in a film or video. Performances started occurring in art contexts—galleries, artists studios, museums—in the 1960s, with the rise of Happenings and Fluxus. In the '60s and '70s, artists such as Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden, and Yoko Ono explored the possibilities of performance particularly in works which focused on the body (and often the abuse of it). The rise of performance was directly linked to the rise of Conceptual Art and Process Art in the late 1960s: Conceptual Art privileged an object-less art, while Process Art foregrounded the act of making a work over the final piece.

Performance art is sometimes carefully planned and scripted but can also be spontaneous and random. Although it often takes place in front of an audience and may involve audience participation – or the orchestration of other participants by the artist – it can also be an action performed privately by the artist.

Limiting one's critical focus to a particular group of performance artists or their performances has always seemed inappropriate, since that project would appear to perpetrate the very act of defining and categorizing that anything called performance art actively resists. Nevertheless, the overtly political nature of much women's performance art since the 1960s has invited just such a critical distinction, treating feminist performance as a recognizable sub-genre within the field.