Performance art

[7] The main pioneers of performance art include Carolee Schneemann,[8] Marina Abramović,[9] Ana Mendieta,[10] Chris Burden,[11] Hermann Nitsch, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Tehching Hsieh, Yves Klein and Vito Acconci.

Dada was an important inspiration because of their poetry actions, which drifted apart from conventionalisms, and futurist artists, specially some members of Russian futurism, could also be identified as part of the starting process of performance art.

Founders such as Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp participated in provocative and scandalous events that were fundamental and the basis of the foundation for the anarchist movement called Dada.

The futurists spread their theories through encounters, meetings and conferences in public spaces, that got close to the idea of a political concentration, with poetry and music-halls, which anticipated performance art.

He was a clear pioneer of performance art, with his conceptual pieces like Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (1959–62), Anthropométries (1960), and the photomontage Saut dans le vide.

The main participants were Jirō Yoshihara, Sadamasa Motonaga, Shozo Shimamoto, Saburō Murakami, Katsuō Shiraga, Seichi Sato, Akira Ganayama and Atsuko Tanaka.

[83][84][85] Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort in The New Media Reader, "The term 'Happening' has been used to describe many performances and events, organized by Allan Kaprow and others during the 1950s and 1960s, including a number of theatrical productions that were traditionally scripted and invited only limited audience interaction.

Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Village Voice and The Nation.

While studying in Germany, Paik met the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and the conceptual artists Sharon Grace as well as George Maciunas, Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell and was from 1962 on, a member of the experimental art movement Fluxus.

[120] Wolf Vostell was a German artist, one of the most representative of the second half of the 20th century, who worked with various mediums and techniques such as painting, sculpture, installation, decollage, video art, happening and fluxus.

His foundational performance and video art[124] was characterized by "existential unease," exhibitionism, discomfort, transgression and provocation, as well as wit and audacity,[123] and often involved crossing boundaries such as public–private, consensual–nonconsensual, and real world–art world.

As well as an aesthetic agenda, the work progressed from perceptions of the physical properties of the gallery to the social and political context, largely taking the form of permanent public sculpture in the last two decades of a highly prolific career, whose diversity could exasperate his critics.

[132] Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who, throughout her career, has worked with a great variety of media including:sculpture, installation, painting, performance, film, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts; the majority of them exhibited her interest in psychedelia, repetition and patterns.

[143] Apart from their sculptures, Gilbert and George have also made pictorial works, collages and photomontages, where they pictured themselves next to diverse objects from their immediate surroundings, with references to urban culture and a strong content; they addressed topics such as sex, race, death and HIV, religion or politics,[144] critiquing many times the British government and the established power.

[153] In the 1970s, performance art, due to its fugacity,[clarification needed] had a solid presence in the Eastern European avant-garde, specially in Poland and Yugoslavia, where dozens of artists who explored the body conceptually and critically emerged.

[160] Thirty years later, the topic of rape, shame and sex exploitation would be reimagined in the works of contemporary artists such as Clifford Owens,[161] Gillian Walsh, Pat Oleszko and Rebecca Patek, amongst others.

[162] New artists with radical acts consolidated themselves as the main precursors of performance, like Chris Burden, with the 1971 work Shoot, where an assistant shot him in the arm from a five-meter distance, and Vito Acconci the same year with Seedbed.

Through the violence of cutting her skin with razors or extinguishing fires with her bare hands and feet, Pane has the intention of inciting a real experience in the visitor, who would feel moved for its discomfort.

Some of the women whose innovative input in representations and shows was the most relevant were Pina Bausch and the Guerrilla Girls who emerged in 1985 in New York City,[172] anonymous feminist and anti-racist art collective.

[187] With her work, Galindo denounces violence, sexism (one of her the main topics is femicide), the western beauty standards, the repression of the estates and the abuse of power, especially in the context of her country, even though her language transgresses borders.

Since her beginnings she only used her body as media, which she occasionally takes to extreme situations (like in Himenoplasty (2004) where she goes through a hymen reconstruction, a work that won the Golden Lyon in the Venice Biennale), to later have volunteers or hired people to interact with her, so that she loses control over the action.

[207] Artists such as Coco Fusco, Shu Lea Cheang, and Prema Murthy produced performance art that drew attention to the role of gender, race, colonialism, and the body in relation to the Internet.

[208] Other artists, such as Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, and Yes Men, used digital technologies associated with hacktivism and interventionism to raise political issues concerning new forms of capitalism and consumerism.

[214] On February 21, 2012, as a part of their protest against the re-election of Vladímir Putin, various women of the artistic collective Pussy Riot entered the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour of Moscow of the Russian Orthodox Church.

She was detained along with other Cuban artists, activists and reporters who took part in the campaign Yo También Exijo, which was created after the declarations of Raúl Castro and Barack Obama in favor of restoring their diplomatic relationship.

[234][235][236][237][238] In November 2015 and October 2017 Petr Pavlensky was arrested for carrying out a radical performance art piece in which he set on fire the entry of the Lubyanka Building, headquarters of the Federal Security Service of Russia, and a branch office of the Bank of France.

[245] In parallel to the exhibition, Abramovic performed The Artist is Present, a 726-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium, while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her.

With The Non-fungible Body?, the Austrian museum and culture centre OÖLKG/OK reflects upon recent developments in institutionalizing performance through a discursive festival format that was presented for the first time in June 2022.

The piece generated great controversy, but was supported by a bunch of her companions and activists who joined Sulkowicz multiple times when carrying the mattress, making the work an international revindication.

[253] In 2019 the collective performance art piece A Rapist in Your Path was created by a feminist group from Valparaíso, Chile named Lastesis, which consisted of a demonstration against the women's rights violations in the context of the 2019–2020 Chilean protests.