Performance art: artists and characteristics

The performance artit's a contemporary art movement that emerged at the end of the sixties as an avant-garde art that, specifically, unites the work of art to the artist. Thus, the work of art is a live action of the artist, an eminently theatrical presentation, carrying out the theatrical to extremes in terms of expression. Its origins go back to early 20th century Y to the Dada movement and surrealism.

The taste for exhibitionism was very common among Dada artists and the Surrealists, something that led them to paint or perform other works in public. A freer way of expressing oneself, considering that the performance art was born in 1916 from the hand of Dadaism and with the name of conceptual art.

In this lesson from unPROFESOR.com we offer you a review of the artists and basic characteristics of the performance art.

Index

1. Characteristics of performance art or performance art
2. Performance art artists
3. Marina Abramovic (1946-)
4. Allan Kaprow (1927-2006)
5. Rebecca Horn (1944-)
6. Matthew Barney (1967-)

We start by discovering the main features of the performance art so that you better know what this movement is influenced by the artistic vanguards. They are as follows:

• The artist performs his play before a live audience, that is, the public attends the assembly of the work and even interacts if it is invited to do so. Often this interaction is an active part of the work as its objective is to provoke, to scandalize.
• The artists they employ all kinds of disciplines and resources to their work, from dance to cinema, fashion, theater, body art, computing, etc., in addition to painting, sculpture and drawing.
• Another feature of the performance art is looking for the spontaneity and that each performance or representation is unique and unrepeatable.
• The interventions can be done anywhere, both on the street and in cultural spaces such as museums and galleries.
• The works of performance art they are ephemeral and therefore many are recorded in films and videos to be able to disseminate them a posteriori.

Among the best known artists of the performance art the names of Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Allan Kaprow, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Rebecca Horn, Dennis Oppenheim, pioneers of the relationship between body art and performance, or Matthew Barney. In Spain we find the Zaj collective with artists such as Esther Ferrer or Juan Hidalgo.

Next, we are going to discover the most outstanding ones one by one so that you can get to know them better and you can also know her works.

Marina Abramovic is one of the pioneering artists of the performance art, describing herself as "Godmother of performance art".

One of her early works, the one that made her most popular, was the Rhythm 0. A performance from the 70s in which she was still before the audience letting them do with her whatever they wanted, seeing how they cut her clothes with scissors, stabbed thorns or pointed a gun.

Another of his works was a staging a farewell of his ex-partner in the middle of the Great Wall of China or sat quietly for eight hours straight in the atrium of MoMA.

Marina Abramovic values ​​to the maximum the emotional experience of being in direct contact with the public.

Allan Kaprow was another of the pioneers of performance art, establishing the basic concepts of this type of movement. Kaprow developed artistic installations and happenings between the 50s and 60s. His happenings were developing into pieces for several players, investigating ordinary and everyday behaviors.

Kaprow's works sought integrate art and life through the happening, keeping the line between both realities flowing. In 1958 he used the term happening for the first time to refer to those artistic activities in which perishable materials were also used for art. Thus, the happenings were planned, being games and activities in which the participants participated as in a game.

The event took place without distinctions or hierarchies between the spectator and the artist. A participatory and interactive art form in which it is about tear down the so-called fourth wall between the artists and the spectators.

Among his works are the work "Eighteen happenings in six parts", Words or Trading Dirt.

Rebecca Horn is a visual artist and film director who is known for his thematic works around the body, manipulating body shapes to show all their possibilities through video, sculpture, film and performances.

Always sick, Rebecca began to make her first body sculptures with wood and fabric. Once she left her isolation, Rebecca began to perform as Unicorn, a play in which a young woman is getting married and wears a horn on her head and walks through a wheat field. Nails performaces that she began to perform in the late 1960s.

Among the films directed by Rebecca stand out Der Eintänzer (1978), La ferdinanda: Sonate für eine Medici-Villa (1982) and Buster's Bedroom (1990).

And we finish this review of the artists of performance art highlights to talk about Barney who was interested in art and museums from a very young age, especially the sculpture and video making.

In the first exhibitions he presented sculptural installations in which he included videos of himself interacting with objects and doing physical activities such as climbing. His works also include sculptures, photographs, drawings and videos.

Among his works stands out the Cremaster cycle, a project divided into five parts in no particular order. Some films in which mix history, autobiography, mythology and a whole own universe of symbols and images. Barney is a highly controversial and controversial artist who has exhibited his work at the Guggenheim in New York or the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

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• Goldberg, R (2002) Performance Art, Destiny
• Fernández Consuegra, C (2016) Contemplating performance art, Ediciones Cumbres