Fifties to the Current – ARTnews.com

Summary Expressionism, Nouveau Réalisme, and Gutai

Arguably, efficiency artwork after World Conflict II started with performative approaches to portray—most conspicuously in Jackson Pollock’s “drip” compositions, which grew to become almost inseparable from images of Pollock making them. These photographs would come to affect artists related to French Nouveau Réalisme and the Japanese Gutai group throughout the mid- to late Fifties.

In France, Yves Klein’s “Anthropometries” (1960), a collection of performance-cum-painting works, changed Pollock’s paintbrush with nude feminine fashions who’d roll throughout a canvas in public whereas slathered within the artist’s patented Worldwide Klein Blue pigment. Klein’s best-known work, Leap Into the Void (1960), was {a photograph} by which he seems to dive off the roof of a constructing with the empty pavement beneath. A gaggle of fellow artists who have been there to catch him with a tarp have been elided out of the picture by combining two views—one with Klein, one with out—into the long-lasting picture we all know in the present day.

In Japan, the artists of the Gutai Artwork Affiliation (based in 1954) made physicality central to their artwork, as evinced by the motion’s title, a contraction of the Japanese phrases for “instrument” and “physique.” Two notable Gutai figures labored with canvases on the ground: Kazuo Shiraga, who swung from a rope to use thick swirls of pigment together with his ft; and Shimamoto Shozo, who fired paintballs with a home made cannon and threw pigment-filled bottles to create explosive splatter patterns. One other member of the group, Atsuko Tanaka, common one in all Gutai’s best-known works: Electrical Gown (1956), a wearable amalgam of sunshine bulbs and fluorescent tubes painted in major colours that resembled an Atomic Age kimono.

Happenings and Fluxus

In the course of the late Fifties and early Nineteen Sixties, one other department of efficiency that includes nonnarrative actions emerged out of Happenings occasions and the Fluxus group.

Happenings typically concerned non permanent environments, cobbled out of discovered supplies and objects, that invited viewer participation—most famously Allan Kaprow’s Yard (1961), which comprised a junkyard-scale pile of discarded tires that have been meant to be clambered over, moved round, and sat upon by gallery goers. In Jim Dine’s Automobile Crash (1960), the artist, costumed in a silver spray-painted raincoat and bathe cap, barreled via a small viewers whereas making engine sounds.

Fluxus furthered this merger of artwork and life. Interdisciplinary and worldwide in scope, it centered on course of over product, turning into foundational to the event of efficiency, conceptual, and video artwork that adopted. Based by George Maciunas in 1961, Fluxus counted Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Yoko Ono amongst its members. As this eclectic roster suggests, Fluxus follow was extraordinarily diversified, however its individuals shared an anti-elitist, antiauthoritarian angle and a utopian view that anybody might turn out to be an artist.

Efficiency and Dance: Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and the Judson Dance Theater

The early Nineteen Sixties additionally witnessed a revival of dance-based efficiency artwork, an thought courting again to Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet from 1922 (a form of pean to the Machine Age, by which performers resembled mechanized varieties), because of dancer Merce Cunningham and artist Robert Rauschenberg. They steadily collaborated, with Rauschenberg designing units and costumes for Cunningham.

However Rauschenberg additionally choreographed performances like Pelican (1963), which featured the artist and two different performers carrying giant, parasol-shaped sails on their backs whereas curler skating. Rauschenberg was likewise concerned with the Judson Dance Theater, a gaggle of dancers, composers, and artists impressed by Cunningham, who carried out on the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Sq. Park in decrease Manhattan. JDT produced such stalwarts of latest dance as Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, and Trisha Brown.

Postminimalism, Physique Artwork, and Feminism

Because the late Nineteen Sixties segued into the Seventies, Modernism entered a radical endgame by which artists rejected the gallery system and the normal artworks meant to go inside them. What ensued was a decentered, dematerialized aesthetic emphasizing thought over type, resulting in new genres comparable to earthworks, set up/course of artwork, video artwork, and quite a few variants of efficiency, together with a kind of solo effort by which artists served because the medium for the work.

Physique artwork, because it was generally referred to as, might entail transgressive acts, as exemplified by Vito Acconci and Chris Burden. Acconci adopted a random stranger on the road till she or he went inside someplace; in one other piece, he hid below a ramp in gallery, masturbating whereas fantasizing out loud to the sounds of tourists strolling above him. Burden endured acts of self-harm, comparable to being shot within the arm, say, or being crucified on the again of a Volkswagen. Burden’s 5 Day Locker Piece (1971)—which entailed closeting himself in a fitness center locker for 5 days—grew to become the template for efficiency as a feat of endurance.

In Europe, the performances of German artist Beuys rested on a self-mythologized chapter from his life as a Luftwaffe pilot shot down throughout winter over the Jap Entrance. Beuys claimed to have been rescued by Tartar tribesmen who stored him heat by wrapping him in fats and felt, which grew to become his signature supplies. For his best-known efficiency, I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), Beuys traveled to New York, the place he was lined on arrival in a heavy felt blanket. Bundled into an ambulance, he was sped to a Soho gallery to spend the following three days communing with a wild coyote for eight hours every day. Beuys then left town the best way he had come.

In Austria, a gaggle of artists mixed violence, specific nudity, and bodily fluids for performances of unmatched abjection. Generally known as the Viennese Actionists, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler have been viscerally reacting in opposition to the nation’s postwar denial of its keen absorption into the Third Reich. In 1968 Brus was arrested for singing the Austrian Nationwide Anthem in public whereas masturbating, vomiting, consuming his personal urine, and smearing himself together with his personal feces. Schwarzkogler’s demise, in 1969, which rumor attributed to his having sliced off his penis as artwork, a narrative that was purely apocryphal. However his “Aktions”—which exist solely as black-and-white images—have been ugly sufficient with their depictions of eviscerated fish and fashions mummified in hospital gauze. Nitsch’s “Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries” have been drenched with blood from animal sacrifices. Outrageous as these artists have been, they’d show to be influential.

This stew of self-flagellation, cruelty, and male bravado spoke to the male privilege pervading the artwork world. Nonetheless, ladies artists have been turning into more and more seen, and this growth, coupled with second-wave feminism, sparked a really completely different method to efficiency artwork. Girls’s our bodies have at all times been contested websites for private, political, and financial autonomy, and for Carolee Schneemann, no slouch at transgression, this meant an unapologetic embrace of feminine sexuality in such items as Meat Pleasure (1964) and Inside Scroll (1975). The previous entailed a troupe of women and men dancing, rolling on the ground, and pouring paint throughout each other whereas fondling items of sausage, fish, and uncooked rooster. Within the latter, Schneemann jumped bare onto a desk and pulled from her vagina a protracted strip of paper bearing a textual content that she learn out loud.

Yoko Ono’s Lower Piece (1964) was an allegory of sexual violence. In it, the artist sat on stage and invited viewers members to chop away her garments till she was right down to her underwear. Equally, Faucet and Contact Cinema (1968) featured the Austrian artist Valie Export strolling round topless beneath a field strapped to her chest, which was accessible via an open entrance behind a bit of material meant to resemble a film display screen. Male passersby have been inspired to succeed in in and fondle the artist’s breasts to critique the best way ladies have been objectified in movie.

What we’d name social justice points in the present day have been explored by African American artist Adrian Piper. She carried out such public provocations as donning an Afro wig and mustache to pose because the form of younger Black male that was thought-about threatening by white individuals.

Expressly feminist or political themes weren’t at all times obvious. Ono’s performances included pranks like unofficially mounting a one-person exhibit for herself at New York’s Museum of Fashionable Artwork, which consisted principally of notices for the present tacked to the museum’s entrance. Ana Mendieta’s site-specific land artwork items associated the feminine type to nature. She would cowl her bare physique in grass, flowers, and dust, utilizing the latter in a single case to camouflage herself in opposition to a tree.

Laurie Anderson engaged in music-based performances like Duets on Ice (1972), by which she performed a violin whereas carrying ice skates whose blades have been frozen into blocks of ice; Anderson had additionally tailored the instrument right into a playback machine by substituting a magnetic tape head for its bridge and restringing a bow with magnetic tape.

Joan Jonas blended video and efficiency, bringing collectively music, dance, drawing, sculpture, costume design, and set up to discover id via mythic tales.

Efficiency as Spectacle

Philip Glass’s and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Seashore (1976) elevated efficiency artwork to a theatrical spectacle sublimating narrative to Wilson’s set design, which located performers in a Hollywood Squares–like association of bins. Its 1976 debut on the opera home in Avignon, France, and its subsequent remounting on the Brooklyn Academy of Music 1984, additionally signaled the unfold of efficiency artwork from different areas to institutional levels.

Efficiency Artwork in South America

Though New York was the middle of efficiency artwork throughout the Nineteen Sixties, South America was additionally a hotbed of exercise, particularly Brazil. Like Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and different international locations within the area, Brazil noticed a crackdown on creative expression when its democratically elected authorities was overthrown by a army junta in 1964. Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica—three artists related Brazil’s Neo-Concrete Motion—responded to the reactionary local weather by abandoning portray for interactive sculptures and installations that appeared purely summary at first=[0-.

Clark’s series “Bichos” (Critters), for instance, comprised groupings of flat geometric shapes cut out of aluminum and hinged together so that viewers could alter their configurations. Another piece—one of a series Clark dubbed “Propositions”—consisted of binding two people at the wrist with a Möbius strip made from an elastic bandage.

Pape’s best-known performance was Divisor (Divider), in which scores of participants poked their heads through slits in a gigantic sheet and then marched down the street in unison, which figuratively and literally cloaked a protest against the regime.

Oiticica imbued color and tactile materials with antigovernment sentiments. His “Parangolés,” cloaklike garments meant to be worn while dancing the samba, were made of painted fabrics that sometimes bore political messages. His immersive installation Tropicália (1967)—a partitioned environment made up of shacklike structures and sectioned areas of flooring variously covered with sand, straw, and shallow pools of water—evoked Brazil’s impoverished favelas, undermining the clichéd view of the country as a lush tropical paradise.

The 1980s: From the Margins to the Mainstream

By the 1980s, performance art had become thoroughly established as a worldwide phenomenon, though New York remained its center. A generation of baby boomer artists whose worldview had been shaped by television and film came to the fore during a period when Wall Street ruled, a former actor occupied the White House, and the notion that artists were the new rock stars took hold. Performance began to merge with popular culture, its creators becoming more interested in bridging the gap between art and entertainment than the one separating art and life.

Thanks to a roaring art market, many visual artists discarded conceptualism for painting, leaving performance open to people from non-art backgrounds. The line between the art world and show business became porous: Andy Kaufman’s avant-garde comedy, for example, was influenced by his acquaintance with Laurie Anderson, and Anderson herself scored a hit record in 1981 with O Superman. Eric Bogosian and Ann Magnuson took their cues from stand-up and rock music before eventually moving to television and film.

Concurrently, alternative spaces that were once artist-run became professionalized, taking some of the spontaneity out of performance. Budget cuts under Ronald Reagan also pinched government grants to nonprofits. A new venue for performance art—nightclubs—appeared as a workaround. Places like Club 57, Danceteria, Arena, and the Pyramid Club staged raucous performances that essentially took the genre back to its early-20th-century roots at the Café Voltaire.

Building on the conventions established over the previous decade, 1980s performance art continued to inform visual art. In her “Untitled Film Stills” series, Cindy Sherman cosplayed as cinematic female stereotypes, while her Pictures Generation coeval, Robert Longo, produced tableaux/spectacles influenced by Robert Wilson, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Endurance as a theme resurfaced in the work of Tehching Hsieh, whose time-based rituals included punching in and out of a time clock every day for a year; he also created a time-lapse video showing his hair sprouting out of his shaved head until reaching shoulder length. Viennese Actionism’s scatological sensibility was reprised by Karen Finley shoving a yam up her rectum at Danceteria.

Dance performance reached new heights, with collaborations such as the ones between Keith

Haring and Bill T. Jones in which Haring used Jones’s naked body as a canvas or painted a mural behind him as he danced. In Drastic Classicism (1980), at club called TR 3, “no-wave” composer Rhys Chatham dissonantly thrashed a guitar while choreographer Karole Armitage moved frenetically across the stage.

The 1980s also witnessed the AIDS crisis and with it, artist activists who addressed the issue through performance. One was Hunter Reynolds, who, upon learning he was HIV positive, adopted the drag persona Patina du Prey and performed in gowns like a black satin number printed with the names of 25,000 AIDS victims taken from the AIDS Quilt catalog.

The Fin de Siècle

The early 1990s continued to see the proliferation of performance and performative tactics within contemporary art, ranging from simple to baroque. Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija resuscitated Fluxus by cooking up large quantities of pad thai to feed gallery goers. Matthew Barney’s florid videos and installations incorporated dense performative allegories that referenced, among other things, athletics, the Masonic Order, and General Douglas MacArthur to relay the travails of masculinity in a postfeminist world.

Performance Art in China

As the 1990s wore on, New York’s role as the world’s art capital began to wane. Indeed, the decade’s most consequential development was China’s ascension as the world’s second-largest economy. The country became an art superpower and a fertile ground for performance—much of which emanated from the aftershocks of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Though the Communist Party banned political protest in Tiananmen’s aftermath, thinly veiled critiques by artists were initially tolerated as something of a safety valve. Zhang Peili, for instance, recorded a popular TV anchorwoman and official mouthpiece for state-run news reciting a list of Mandarin words for water. This same person had reported on the Tiananmen demonstrations without mentioning the carnage that followed.

Ai Weiwei, who used allusions to China’s past to critique its present, famously dropped an ancient Han dynasty vase, capturing the action a trio of photographs. (Ai eventually ran afoul of the authorities and was exiled after a term in prison). Qiu Zhijie repeatedly overwrote the lines of a 4th-century calligraphic text until the paper turned black.

The New Millennium

From 2000 to the present, the number of artists creating performances or performative-adjacent artworks has grown to such a degree that any attempt to list examples is bound to be incomplete. Among the names that could be considered, however, one might cite Tino Sehgal, a Berlin-based artists known for site-specific “constructed situations,” wherein performers mix among viewers, singing, dancing, or engaging in dialogs—actions that Sehgal refuses to document in any form so that they exist only in memory. One might also mention Korakrit Arunanondchai , a Thai multimedia artist who echoes Klein and Beuys by evoking a personal mythology through performance-based videos. These often feature performers in paint-soaked denim outfits rubbing up against canvases to create “body paintings” that, along with the clothing, are subsequently incorporated into installations. And Anne Imhof, based in Berlin and New York, combines music and dance in hypnotic ensemble performances coupled with architectural structures, including a piece staged above and below an elevated glass-floored platform.

One name, though, has become synonymous with performance art: Serbian artist Marina Abramović, whose career stretches back to the body art of the 1970s. Working with life partner Frank Uwe Laysiepen (aka Ulay), Abramović probed the fraught nature of interpersonal relationships and the boundary between public and private. In one piece, the two knotted their hair together; in another, they faced each other naked across a narrow doorway while viewers squeezed past. In 1988 they ended their collaboration by meeting in the middle of the Great Wall of China after trekking 1,250 miles from opposite ends.

Sheer chutzpah became a defining aspect of Abramović’s practice. In 2005 she mounted “Seven Easy Pieces” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, a reenactment of seminal performances by Acconci, Beuys, Export, Bruce Nauman, and Gina Pane. While all of them had been intended as one-shot affairs, Abramović appropriated them all the same, appointing herself the arbiter of performance history. During her 2010 MoMA retrospective, “The Artist Is Present,” she spent the show seated across from an empty chair at a table in the museum’s atrium. Viewers were invited to sit opposite her for as long as they wished, creating queues lasting hours. The piece became a media sensation. With these two exhibits (and a short-lived attempt to establish an academy teaching the “Abramović Method”), Abramović, in essence, transformed herself into a kind of embodiment of performance itself—which one might call the ultimate performative act.

Still, “The Artist Is Present” chimed with the Fluxus notion that anyone could be an artist—or rather a performance artist—a proposition truer with each passing year. Performance artist as a phrase has entered the language as a catchall that could be either pejorative or complimentary. Late capitalism has shifted its focus from the consumption of goods to the consumption of experiences, while flash mobs and events like Burning Man transform crowds into performative collectives.

Most crucially, social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram have insinuated performance into the everyday, marking its transcendence from a genre to the 21st century’s modus vivendi.