Performance art has its roots in the cabaret performances of dada and the spectacles of the Surrealists, and grew up around the heyday of high Modernism. But as World War II destroyed material existence for many who lived through it, Performance... [more]

Performance art has its roots in the cabaret performances of dada and the spectacles of the Surrealists, and grew up around the heyday of high Modernism. But as World War II destroyed material existence for many who lived through it, Performance began more urgently to assert the primacy of the action over the object. It became obvious that the object, heretofore worshiped as the divine relic of art with a capital "A", was only temporary. The credo of Performance art is: time is of the essence and action is the only thing that matters -- in art as well as in life and war. If anything is destructible, why create anything that can be destroyed? Further, can't destruction itself be an artistic act? As in war, documented destruction has always played a huge role in Performance art. If the production of objects is involved at all, it serves mainly as the detritus of the all-important process, or as proof that this process has taken place. The first Performance art predates 1960s radicalism by nearly a decade. The Gutai Art Association, founded in Japan in 1954, epitomized the spirit of art as action, creating time-based works out of the void left by World War II. Kazuo Shiraga's "Challenging Mud" (1955) and Saburo Murakami's "Breaking Through Many Screens of Paper" (1956) took Jackson Pollock's physical studio process as a point of departure and set the stage for Happenings. After its first exhibition, the Gutai's participating artists built a bonfire of their work. In their later years, however, they learned to play the media with savvy documentation, a facet of Performance art that would become all-encompassing in the years ahead. John Cage's "4'33''" (four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, 1952) set the standard for the constant challenges to time and content that were to become elemental to Performance art. The 1960s and '70s saw the advent of Happenings, which brought action even more to the fore. Body art, which resonated strongly with feminism, made the body the site, subject, and relic of the work. Performance art showed reckless cynicism in artists like Paul McCarthy and Hermann Nitsch, delirious joy in artists like Carolee Schneeman and Anna Halprin, and at its best, awe-inspiring examinations of trust and risk in Chris Burden and Abramovic and Ulay. Abramovic's "Rhythm O" (1974), in which the artist sat passively for six hours while her audience had free reign over herself and various instruments of pain and pleasure, blatantly and brilliantly dramatized feminist issues. Burden's "Shoot" (1971), in which the artist had himself shot in the arm, calls to mind the helplessness of a country seeing its youth so efficiently wasted in the Vietnam war. Perhaps a young and healthy man shooting himself in the name of art is an act of the utmost frivolity, perhaps of the utmost desperation, but it questions some of the culture's most dearly held values. How could the NEA not know that Karen Finley was hardly an aberration, but part of the logical continuation of a grand tradition? [show less]