Glossary: Performance Art
Performance Art
Artworks that are created through actions performed by the artist or other participants, which may be live or recorded, spontaneous or scripted.
Throughout the twentieth century performance was often seen as a non-traditional way of making art. Live-ness, physical movement and impermanence offered artists alternatives to the static permanence of painting and sculpture.
More recently, performance has been understood as a way of engaging directly with social reality, the specifics of space and the politics of identity. In 2016, theorist Jonah Westerman remarked ‘performance is not (and never was) a medium, not something that an artwork can be but rather a set of questions and concerns about how art relates to people and the wider social world’. (source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/performance-art )
“..from the 1970s to the present artists like Coco Fusco, Maren Hassinger, Guillermo Gomez Pena, Dred Scott, James Luna, Senga Nengudi, Maria Marmolejo, Carrie Mae Weems, Ana Mendieta, and David Hammons, among countless others, have used performance art to unpack the violence of colonialism, imagine the possibilities of liberation, womanism, feminism, or to stage revisionist histories. Their performances, a diverse collection of culturally and geographically specific staging’s, have laid the foundation for a new generation of brave performance artists to continue the work of decolonizing performance art…”
(source: https://www.blackartinamerica.com/index.php/2019/10/23/decolonizing-performance-art-phylicia-ghee-uses-ritual-performance-to-heal-the-generational-trauma-of-black-women/ )
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