It’s an oft-repeated trope, familiar even before Cheeto Benito hijacked the electoral process. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter described as “Performance Artists,” I’d have enough to treat every commenter on this diary to a deluxe coffee drink.
Now it’s being used to categorize Donald Trump, too — and it’s just as incorrect when it’s applied to Twitler as when applied to Right-wing shock merchants.
Although I understand where the definition is coming from, it’s insulting to actual performance artists. I ought to know — I am one. I’ve done my share of outrageous things on stage in the name of interrelated media, and learned a lot from it.
My own personal experience in performance art began with a remarkable work by Karl Boyle, one of my composition teachers, who’d been composing prolifically for dance companies and choreographers. In the course of his work, he’d become fascinated by the idea of a shared vocabulary between musicians and dancers that would let them all follow the same instructions. This turned into “Three Sound/Movement Murals,” a set of compositions which extracted key elements common to both movement and music — gestural shape, intensity, duration, the relationship between improvisation and composition, etc. — and organized them for three musicians and three dancers. Rehearsals were incredibly demanding, lasting for hours and alternating between intensive discussions and working out the application of large formal structures; it was a far cry from sight-reading the bass parts for a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical (been there, done that). All of us who worked on the Murals were transformed by the experience; deeply affected in ways that have continued to resonate (decades later, in my case).
Performance art emerges from an artist’s need to engage with a question, an exploration of an aspect of culture or the human experience which is “larger” than the forum offered by any one idiom.
Thus the work of performance art is intersectional; it has its roots in an individual’s fascination about the world and people’s place in it, and in the use of creativity as a way to explore, to investigate, and sometimes to provoke.
A performance artist needs to be curious — insatiably so.
Laurie Anderson is perhaps the most famous contemporary performance artist, though Karen Finley (primus inter pares of the NEA Four) arguably did the most to establish the stereotype of a performance artist as a naked woman covered with sticky liquid, provoking conservatives into an inchoate rage — although this caricature does Finley no justice; her work is complex, nuanced, and powered by a strong activist conscience.
Marina Abramovic’s work explores the boundaries of human interaction and bodily autonomy, most famously in a six-hour piece called “Rhythm 0” (1974):
“The idea, loosely explained, was to test the limits binding the performer and the audience to their furthest degree. She did this by assigning herself a horrifically passive role, where she would stand, for six hours, in an open space, behind a table with carefully chosen objects laid upon it, and a sign explaining what she was doing, and that she would take full responsibility for what was to happen to her.
“On the table, the objects she used consisted of things that could be used for pleasure, and objects that could be used for pain, as far as death:
“A rose. A feather. Grapes. Honey. A condom. A whip. A scalpel. A gun. And a single bullet.
“Apparently, as she explains in the interview, beginning the performance, her audience was quite playful. They were hesitant and reserved and did not think to push the boundaries.
“Later, they became more aggressive. She explains it as “6 hours of real horror.” Where people tore at her clothes. Pierced her skin with a rose’s stem. Cut her with a knife and drank her blood. They carried her around, half naked, laid her down on the table and stabbed the knife in between her legs, driving it into and through the table’s surface.
“It got to the stage where somebody put the bullet into the gun, and held it at her head with a finger on the trigger. Another member of the audience brushed this person aside, and diffused the situation. Another person tried to have sex with her, until (assumedly “he”) he was deterred by someone else. The tension was thick, real.
“After the six hours had lapsed, after she had been caressed, pricked, cut, scalded, almost raped, and almost shot in the head, the gallery’s supervisor came and said that the act was now over. She walked forward toward the audience, naked, with blood dripping from her skin, tears in her eyes. The result?
“Everybody ran away. Not one person was willing to confront her active state.”
In 1973, exploring the relationships between media imagery and violence, Chris Burden conceived the piece “Through The Night Softly,” in which, nearly naked, and with his hands tied behind his back, he crawled several hundred yards across an open space strewn with broken glass. He used the footage of this event to create short video spots which he paid to air on regional television, between commercials for standard products.
Tehching Hsieh’s work explored the relationship between individuality and collectivity, community and solitude, art and industry. In “Time Clock Piece” he clocked in, every hour on the hour, on a time clock installed in his studio — rearranging his entire life around the demands of the piece in a trenchant commentary on life in the wage-earning economy.
A performance artist everybody loved to hate was a woman who’d done superlative work in the field, exploring the boundaries of body integrity, privacy, and autonomy, for many years — before she married a pop music celebrity and found herself publicly reviled. Her work still holds meaning today, and as this video demonstrates, she was perhaps just as prepared as Abramovic to accept the responses of the audience.
Sometimes the work is not inherently confrontational. Barbara Bash is a calligrapher who does live brush work in collaboration with musicians and dancers, exploring the relationships between gesture in different dimensions.
The video artist Nam June Paik created installations and interactive video works which explored the boundaries between different forms of mass media. His work is sometimes prescient, sometimes terrifying.
Charlotte Moorman was a ‘cellist whose collaborative work with Nam Jun Paik explored issues of sexuality, gender, and media.
The two components of the phrase can be unpacked.
Performances take place in front of an audience, either in a venue specifically dedicated to performance activity, or a public space. They require planning and preparation; sometimes they need rehearsals, sometimes a great deal of thought and speculation. Some performance pieces demand considerable technological infrastructure (Nam June Paik’s got a lot of equipment to move around); others demand human infrastructure (there are usually a lot of people involved in making something intricate happen, even if it’s only one person facing the public). When they happen in a “dedicated” space, the audience generally knows more or less what it’s getting into. People are free to leave; sometimes they are invited to participate. The event is “bounded,” either in time (“This piece lasts fifteen minutes”), in space (“this piece takes place in room X of W____ Gallery”). When performance art happens in a public space, it’s sometimes confrontational, and often illegal.
Performances have consequences.
Sometimes these are positive, as in the expansion of my artistic imagination after working on Karl Boyle’s remarkable piece. Sometimes they are simply physical — a production I was part of in the late 70s left my face lightly covered with sticky pine rosin every night for a week — the result of stroking a huge sheet of steel with a heavily-rosined contrabass bow for four hours nonstop. And sometimes they’re not just “simply” physical, but permanently so, as in the case of Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist whose piece “…and Counting” required him to get his back permanently tattooed with red dots — 5,000 of them — representing American casualties of the Iraq war...and 100,000 invisible green dots for “unidentified and forgotten Iraqi victims,” that only show up under UV.
When Chris Burden crawled across a field of broken glass, he had consequences embedded in his skin; when Abramovic faced a crowd of onlookers in 1974, she dealt with profound violations of her own autonomy and security, which continued to resonate years later.
Illegal/confrontational performances can be (and often are) punished harshly. Just ask the members of Pussy Riot, who invaded a cathedral, staged a very political performance, and spent two years in a Russian jail for it.
To be a successful performance, the act must be driven by a core of generosity; the overwhelming need to share insights, experiences, beauty, epiphany.
Art is driven by curiosity, by the need to investigate possibilities and relationships. Did you notice that in every little description over each of the videos attached above, I used the word “explore”?
Artistic success has a complex relationship with truth — many great artists are inveterate re-inventors of their own histories (example) — but the artwork itself fails if it’s not at some level an honest statement. Artistic quality has a similarly complex relationship with the demands of the marketplace; performance artists who are successful in economic terms are few and far between. Nobody is doing it for the money (except J.S.G. Boggs, and you really ought to read about him).
So...a performance artist is someone driven by deep curiosity and an urge to explore. Someone who can and will prepare for an event with enormous care and a great deal of introspection. Someone so consumed by a question, by the potentials of an un-examined relationship between disparate phenomena, that they are prepared to risk their safety, their security, their reputation (ask Karen Finley about that sometime), or their freedom, in order to find out what’s really going on. Someone utterly uninterested in money, with the discipline, focus, and grit to face potential incomprehension, ridicule, inconvenience, pain — in the service of a question or perspective they may well share with...no one.
That describes a few people I’ve met and worked with, but it doesn't describe right-wing shock merchants like Coulter and Limbaugh, and it sure as hell doesn’t describe our current president.
Call him anything. Call him an Orange Turd, a Dumpster Fire, a Con Man, a Sociopath, a Malignant Narcissist. But don’t call him a Performance Artist.
To be fair, there is an intersectionality at work here.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, politics has increasingly come to overlap with performance. How someone looks and sounds on television is as or more important than the policies they espouse. The arcane crafts of the advertising expert are now integral to our government, and it’s bad for us all.
I was growing into awareness when the first “performance art” came to prominence; I remember reading about Charlotte Moorman, Nam Jun Paik, and Chris Burden when I was in high school, and watching the ordinary-life-as-pathography explored in PBS’ voyeuristic documentation of the Loud family.
These early performance artists (Lance Loud and his kinfolk perhaps excepted) thought pretty deeply about what they were doing. It was a lot more than just the desire to “épater les bourgeois,” though that had a place in the mix (it was a lot of fun watching Jesse Helms’ ludicrous overreaction to Karen Finley’s feminist body-image-and-nudity provocations). Performance Art can trigger hours of fruitful reflection on the burdens and beauties of our shared human experience.
The so-called “performance art” of provocateurs like Limbaugh, Coulter, and Trump, in contrast to that of the genre’s genuine exponents, is only incidentally a commentary on our society and ourselves. Theirs is entirely ungenerous Performance, offering no insights, no sense of struggle or genuine response to their audiences, and no Art at all.
If it’s not performance art, then what is it? It is mental aberration manifested at the head of our civic and media institutions; we’re on a plane with a hallucinating pilot. It’s epistemic disintegration; it is a dismemberment of the body politic; it is bourgeois surrealism. Just ask Andre Breton.
Breton, one of the leading voices of Dada and an early progenitor of performance art in Dadaist poetry readings and staged events, defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism,” a way-too-close-for-comfort description of what we see on the news every day. “Automatic” governance.
Two quotes:
“The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly.”
— Andre Breton —
and
"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, okay, and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay?"
— Donald Trump —
He’s a walking, talking, tweeting, embodiment of evil’s banality and banality’s evil, but if there’s one thing Donald Trump is not, it’s a Performance Artist.