It was in the late 1950s that Allan Kaprow of America formulated the term happenings to define a kind of feeling of performance-artistic. It saw the audience participating in the events commonly known as happenings. The process-oriented events focused on the concept that the process of construction was equally important as the construction itself.
Kaprow’s "18 Happenings in 6 Parts" (1959) is one of the earliest samples of this kind of performance, including texting and stage directions for performers, the audience, and other media means.
History of Performance Art
Early 20th Century: Avant-Garde Beginnings
Happenings
It was in the early decades of the twentieth century that performance art began to be singled out as an artistic discipline within the avant-garde activities of European nations. Dada, which was a movement of art that originated in Zurich immediately after World War I, was quite instrumental in this.
Challenging the conventional traditions of art, performers such as Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara produced live performances. These breaches, frequently presented in cabarets and cafes, were free and full of jokes, paradoxes, and reflections on the political situation.
Body Art and Feminism
The concept popular in the 1970s was one of body art, with the human body as the canvas of choice. This period became significant for the questions of social justice and the appearance of the most important movement of the 20th century, feminism.
Female artists such as Carolee Schneemann and Ana Mendieta employed performance art to express situations concerning gender, sexual desire, and self. It includes Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975), in which the artist comes out of a box and pulls a pornographic scripture out of her vagina as part of her performance art.
The Silueta Series (1973 - 1980) by Mendieta, where the performer made several outlines of her nude body in natural settings and then obliterated them.
A prime example of performance art is manifestation, whose history can be traced back to the early twentieth-century movement with great development throughout the decades.
Mid-20th Century: Expansion and Diversification
In the post-World War II period and the context of the global world, performance art was evolving and expanding more obviously in the United States of America and Western Europe. The concept of contextual information came into existence in the 1950s and 1960s because artists were in search of new forms of art that would allow them to escape the confinement of media forms.
Viennese Actionism
Viennese Actionism is a world art movement associated with expressive installations. Artists used live people, white gauze, bandages, and paint, imitating blood in their works. By evoking fear and horror in the audience, the artist achieved a depth of soul that not every passerby could discover for himself.
Late 20th Century: Institutional Recognition and Global Expansion
Since the 1980s and up until the 1990s, performance art has been considered acceptable in art circles, with some major museums and galleries taking the art into their galleries and art collections. This period also saw the development of significant performance artists whose productions focused on social and political issues relevant to society.
Marina Abramović
The entirety and energy of performance art can be seen through Marina Abramović’s work, often considered the ‘grandmother of performance art’. Her works "
Rhythm 0" (1974), where she staged herself as an object for the interaction of the spectators, and “The Artist is Present” (2010) – the silent performance in the Museum of Modern Art in New York lasted 736 hours. These are examples of how she investigated physical and metaphysical endurance.
Global Perspectives
Performance art also developed globally during the same time, with many artists from other cultures practicing the art form. The contemporary performance art of China can also be visualized through the works of artist Zhang Huan, who enacted "
12 Square Meters" in 1994. During the show, he sat immobile, naked, with honey and fish oil smeared over his body inside a public toilet. The performance art of South Africa can also be visualized through the ID work of the artist Steven Cohen.
21st Century: Digital Age and New Frontiers
This is why the culture of performance art is persistently thriving by assimilating the global issues of the twenty-first century and technological advances. The use of the internet and social networks made it possible to create, record, and share performance art in different forms and implement real-life interaction with the audience.
Cassils
Today,
Cassils has conquered the culture in which artists allow their bodies to become the tools for addressing the issues of transformation, strength, and identity.
Other performances are, for example, "Becoming an Image" (2012), in which Cassils performs the physical labor of kneading and shaping clay in complete darkness except in intervals of bulbs being flashed. This makes the performance extreme in various senses.
Digital and Virtual Performances
New trends in technology have also led to concepts such as virtual and augmented reality performances. Street artists are changing the art, influencing societal culture, and taking advantage of the use of the Internet and technology to achieve a combined physical and digital perception.
Such new forms of gestural and physical performativity can thus be growing as a critical response to traditional discourses of presence as performance and corporeal subjectivity, thereby defining new possibilities for performance art.